Geoffrey Wheatcroft on Tony Blair

He doubtless justifies to himself his work for Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbayev, whose regime has been strongly condemned by human rights organizations, in the same strange antinomian way he justified the manner in which he took us into the Iraq war: whatever he does must be virtuous because he does it.

Max Hastings on 1914

Grand Admiral Tirpitz employed and English governess for his daughters, who completed their education at Cheltenham Ladies College.

Russia boomed in the last years before Armageddon. After 1917, its new Bolshevik rulers had become the fourth largest in the world, growing at almost ten percent annually. 

Max Hastings on Kaiser Wilhelm

He had no real thirst for blood but a taste for panolpy and posturing, a craving for martial success; he displayed many of the characteristics of a uniformed version of Mr Toad....Most of his contemporaries, including the statesman of Europe, thought him mildly unhinged, and this was probably clinically the case. 

Hugh Roberts asks Who Said Gadaffi Had To Go?

It is tendentious and dishonest to say simply that Gadaffi was "killing his own people"; he was killing those of his own people who were rebelling. He was doing in his respect what every government in history has done when faced with a rebellion. We are all free to prefer the rebels to the government in any given case. But the relative merits of the two sides aren't the issue in such situations: the issue is the right of a state to defend itself against violent subversion. That right, once taken for granted as the corollary of sovereignty, is now compromised. Theoretically, it is qualified by certain rules. But as we have seen, the invocation of rules (e.g. no genocide) can go together with cynical exaggeration and distortion of the facts by other states. There are in fact no reliable rules. A state may repress a revolt if the permanent veto-holding powers on the Security Council allow it to (e.g. Bahrain, but also Sri Lanka) and not otherwise. And if a state thinks it can take this informal authorisation to defend itself as read because it is on good terms with London, Paris and Washington and is honouring all its agreements with them, as Libya was, it had better beware. Terms can change without warning from one day to the next. The matter is now arbitrary, and arbitrariness is the opposite of law.

Garton-Ash on US and European reactions to the GWOT

“To return from the US to Europe is to travel from a country that thinks it is on the front line of the struggle against jihadist terrorism, but is not, to a continent which is on the front line but still has not woken up to the fact."

Rory Stewart on Afghanistan

We armed militias in 2001, disarmed them through a demobilization program in 2003, and rearmed them again in 2006 as community defense forces. We allowed local autonomy in 2001, pushed for a strong central government in 2003, and returned to decentralization in 2006. First we tolerated opium crops; then we proposed to eradicate them through aerial spraying; now we expect to live with opium production for decades.

Hilary Mantel on Keith Thomas' The Ends of Life

Warfare was an aristocratic business, and young men trained for nothing else: then along came firearms, which made any low-class fool into a killing machine.

NYRB on John le Carre

If you feel that good novels are the lie that reveals the truth, then it will always be thrilling, in any given period, to come across works that manage to be much more revealing than the evening news. John le Carré made that kind of thrill into a genre, capturing the dowdy, fatal, realistic weather of European espionage at a time when the subject was covered on the BBC as if it were merely a parlor game beloved of donnish existentialists.

Even today, with his most groundbreaking novels behind him, le Carré continues to be the world's most reliable witness to the vicissitudes of international paranoia: his books conceive of a Western world that has a costly obsession with its possible enemies; he shows you this world's secret missions, its botched jobs, its manifold attempts to thwart the corrupting and sometimes terrifying idealism of others, while keeping the reader close to the exact lineaments of the way we live now.

Max Hastings on the RIMH Potstdam's Germany and The Second World War

"The authors perceive a reality which still escapes many Germans: most of those who joined the July 1944 bomb plot against Hitler did so not because they recognised that he was evil, but because they were dismayed that he was losing the war: "Not all the conspirators were equally quick to see that the whole of the war conducted by the Wehrmacht was serving criminal ends."

"The Allies were delighted by the July plot, as clear evidence of fissures inside the German war machine. But they were also relieved by its failure. The prospect of having to negotiate with an army clique willing to make peace would open up all manner of ghastly difficulties with Stalin, while raising the American and British publics who would surely be tempted by a chance of ending the carnage.

Provocative statements from Michael Burleigh's Blood and Rage

The readiness of the British government to treat with individuals (Sinn Fein) it had recently dismissed as murderers was noteworthy, with the lengthy talks themselves generating all manner of human sympathies among the negotiating parties. Just in case they failed, Lloyd George threatened to wage all-out war with the entire resources of the British Empire within three days....Ironically, the provisional government resorted to measures indistinguishable from the British to win what had become a civil war - although unlike the British it had the support of the Catholic Church, which eagerly excommunicated the IRA.

It was Alexander's tragedy that, having failed to institute thoroughgoing liberal reforms, he proved incapable of re-establishing his father's austere police regime too....The intelligentsia were a sub-set of the educated classes, encompassing those who talked about books they hadn't read....They were kept afloat like some speculative fraud, on a bubble of liberal good taste, for among an older generation corrupted by liberalism it was not done to challenge youth or its progressive causes until the example of renegade Dostoyevsky gave birth to a right-wing intelligentsia late in the day....Middle-aged and elderly dupes saw in Nechaev the wayward idealism of youth rather than a psychopathic conman.....Many people with liberal views irresponsibly sympathised with the terrorists up to the point of aiding and abetting them....

The British Labour Party and the German Social Democrats acting as ignorant cheerleaders....Indeed, fear of foreign liberal opinion inhibited a tsarist regime sensitive to the charge of being Asiatic from adopting effective measures to repress terrorism.

This was the first in a spate of assassinations that made the years 1894-1901 more lethal for rulers than at any other time in history.....The multfarious acts of anarchist violence achieved nothing beyond the individual tragedies of the people killed and maimed. [US] immigrants who "converted" to anarchism in their first three years in the country could be deported, an interesting example of conditional citizenship....the British persisted in maintaining liberal asylum law that anarchists were manifestly abusing.

Mrs Thatcher on the Fenian hunger strikers: "There is no such thing as political murder, political bombing or political violence. There is only criminal murder, criminal bombing and criminal violence. We shall not compromise on this. There will be no political status." The fact that special category status had been conceded in 1972 rather militated against that degree of certainty, as did the wording of The Prevention of Terrorism Act itself, under which these men had been imprisoned, since it spoke of "the use of violence for political ends".

Books on German left-wing terrorism never include chapters on the working class, a revealing omission that distinguishes Germany from Italy. There was no significant radicalism in working-class Germany unless you count young neo-Nazis., chiefly because workers were generally represented, as of right, on the managing boards of most companies.... But, as in Italy, the West German higher education system had been massified...."The Vietnam War is not what interests me, but difficulties with my orgasm do," as one Communard put it.

The group's preference was for powerful BMWs, so much so hat colloquially they were known as Baader Meinhof Wagen.

Insofar as the RAF prisoners had a strategy, it was to dramatise their predicament, making it seem as if the German state had finally let slip its mask to receal a Fascist inner heart...The detainees claimed they were being held in conditions resembling Auschwitz...The remand prisoners were permitted radios and record players...They received any reading matter they wished, which enable Baader to study theories he had spouted as slogans for years. In this fashion they built up extensive libraries (Baader some 974 books, Raspe a further 550)....Left-liberal defence lawyers, whose cynical occuupation of the high ground spared them from close press scrutiny, played a major role in facilitating communication between their imprisoned clients and the next generation of RAF terrorists.


There is something narcissistic about this assumption that the West is obsessed with Islam and seeks to destroy it. It is not. It is obsessed with itself, followed by China, India, and Russia, which jostle for Westerners' short attention span. It is drawn, wearily, into so many Middle Eastern crises because this region, with a manufacturing capacity only equal to that of...Nokia...is the primary source of instability in the modern world and sits on top of two thirds of the world's known oil reserves. If huge oil deposits were discovered beneath Canada, the West would disengage from the Middle East tomorrow, leaving it to implode amid its multiple conflicts.

Multiculturism means that each diverse group adopted a story of victimhood so as to put itself beyond close scrutiny, enveloping itself in the myth of moral purity that comes with being the historically oppressed. These diverse communities spoke to the government through their so-called community leaders, a liberal version of an imperial power dealking through nabobs and tribes with the natives....

Multiculturalism is likewise negligent of the shared moral values that make civilised living possible.

By sharing a common password, it was possible to access messages left in the Draft box, which technically, therefore, were read but never sent, thereby preventing the NSA from intercepting them.

Within weeks of 9/11 Bush became the first US President to ackowledge the desirability of the two state solution in Israel-Palestine, in an attempt to cauterise the issue that so antagonises the Muslim world. He then spent six years doing nothing about it.

Can rights be subject to a trade-off?

The background hum of stress as inalienable human rights are eroded. Today, in the New York Review of Books, Jeremy Waldron:

"The stakes are much higher in the trade-off between liberty and security. For what is traded off is something that was previously regarded as a right, and the loss of that right may simply be imposed on the people affected. This is troubling because rights are supposed to be guarantees given to individuals and minorities about the outer limits of the sacrifices that might reasonably be required of them. Rights are supposed to restrict trade-offs, not to be traded off themselves."

It seems to me self-evident that we are naive to trade rights for security, because we then have no course for redress when those keeping us secure abuse their power. Apparently, no-one else gives a shit. I look at my friends. All Ivy League educated. All successful. All bright. None of them care about anything more profound than whether they made the Lufthansa Hons programme. But let me not appear judgmental. My concern about terror is a low background hum. I worry about it as I sit in the BA executive lounge working out whether I can make Gold this year. Bad things happen when good people are out spending their Amex reward points.

On Bob Woodward's "Bush At War"

The bare recitation of facts in an out-moded style of journalism. It was ended in the 1950s by the experience of dealing with Senator Joe McCarthy, when journalists realised how misleading it would be simply to report waht he said without informing the reader about his past falsehoods.

Joseph Roth in What I Saw

The great gain to German literature from Jewish writers is the theme of the city. The have discovered the cafe and the factory and the bar and the hotel. Berlin's bourgeoisie and its banks, the watering holes of the rich and the slums of the poor. Sin and vice, the day of the city and the city by night.

The dull sergeant came to represent Germany under Bismarck. Behind the sergeant stood the engineer who supplied him with weapons, the chemist who brewed poison gas to destroy the human brain, and at the same time formulated the drug to relieve his migraine, the German professor who is in fact the most dangerous (and dogmatic) enemy of European civilisation, the inventor of the philological equivalent of poison gas.

Mohammad Ali on Vietnam, 1967

Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No., I am not going ten thousand miles away from home to help murder and burn another poor national simply to continue the domination of white slavemasters of the darker people the world over/ This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would put my prestige in jeopardy and could cause me to lose millions of dollars which should accrue to me as champion. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of the people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting their own justice, freedom and equality.

If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn't have to draft me: I'd join tomorrow. But I either have to obey the laws of the land or the laws of Allah. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I'll go to jail. We've been in jail for four hundred years.

Field Marshall Montgomery on Vietnam

The US has broken the second rule of war. That is, don't go fighting with your land army on the mainland of Asia. Rule One is don't march on Moscow. I developed these two rules myself.

Avishai Margalit on Suicide Bombers

Vengeance through suicide bombing has, as I understand it, an additional value: that of making yourself a victim of your own act and thereby putting your tormentors to moral shame. The idea of the suicide bombing, unlike that of an ordinary attack, is perversely a moral idea in which the killers, in acting out the drama of the ultimate victim, claim for their own cause the moral high ground.