Facing Impossible Odds

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“It is hard to pin down,” notes Halik Kochanski toward the end of her enormous, but eminently readable, history of resistance to German occupation during World War II, “why certain people chose the path of resistance . . . . [T]he resisters themselves often give unsatisfactory responses: ‘one had to do something’ or ‘one just did what one could.’ ”

Perhaps that is because the experience was, in retrospect, so strange, so out of time and place. Ms. Kochanski, a British historian, quotes Jean Cassou, a resistance leader in Toulouse who remembered this “as a unique period . . . impossible to relate to or explain, almost a dream. We see . . . an unknown and unknowable version of ourselves, the kind of people no one can ever find again, who existed only in relation to unique and terrible conditions, to things that have since disappeared, to ghosts, or to the dead.”

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Berlin as the Unreal City

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Berlin has too much [history].” Sinclair McKay cites this rueful observation in the preface to his new book about the city. Given that he is not simply discussing Berlin between the wars, or during the second of those wars, or in the Cold War that followed, but all of it, this may come off as a cry for help. History may — in those words attributed to, well, take your pick — be “one damned thing after another,” but when it came to Berlin, those things hurtled through time in a horde, colliding, overlapping and refusing to form an orderly line. And, in Berlin’s case, they had a way of mattering. Not for nothing does this book’s subtitle refer to Berlin as “the city at the center of the world.” Bad news for a writer aiming, presumably, at a degree of concision.

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Putin's Genocide in Ukraine

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When, during the Second World War, Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer who had made it to the U.S., coined the word “genocide,” he intended that it should cover more than the Holocaust, which had consumed 49 members of his own family. Nazi-style annihilation was the ne plus ultra, but Lemkin argued that genocide could also be somewhat subtler. Genocidaires might want to destroy a national group as a distinct entity while being content to see many of those who had been a part of it survive, so long as they accepted the identity imposed upon them by their oppressors. Time would take care of the rest as the next generation grew up in a new order it did not know was new. 

This, not extermination, is what Vladimir Putin has in mind for Ukrainians.

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The Costs of the Energy ‘Transition’ Won’t Be ‘Transitory’

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The appointment of Christine Lagarde as president of the European Central Bank was never going to bode very well for the way that the ECB is run. Lagarde is a politician, not a banker, and, as to her attitudes to rules, well, many of those who followed the euro zone crisis (a time when Lagarde was France’s finance minister) will remember her comments after those in charge approved the first Greek bailout.

Reuters (December 2010):

“We violated all the rules because we wanted to close ranks and really rescue the euro zone,” Lagarde was quoted as saying.

“The Treaty of Lisbon was very straight-forward. No bailout.”

Oh well.

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Watching the Skies: Prudence, not Paranoia

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Sure, sure, there was last year’s intelligence report and this year’s congressional hearing. But you really know that UFOs/UAPs are having a moment when they turn up in the Financial Times’ storied Lex column — albeit in a piece that has a faint but unmissable “crazy American” subtext and is a touch disapproving….

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Adam (Smith) and EVs: Going in Different Directions

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Central planning is not exactly the best way of organizing an economy (#understatement). That’s true, whether we look at the colossal failures of communism or, for that matter, many less ambitious attempts to manage an economy by decree.

Central planning lite (or relatively lite) has been a feature of the energy “transition” now underway in much of the West for some time. As this transition proceeds, the difficulties flowing from its reliance on aggressive, unrealistic and arrogant directives from above are becoming all too apparent, from the woes associated with wind energy — a technology clearly not ready to fulfill the role assigned to it by the climate technocracy — to growing evidence that forcing people away from conventional autos into electric vehicles is going to lead to immense problems that appear not to have been anticipated. (This may a charitable explanation. Perhaps those in charge were well aware of the problems but were determined to press on regardless. Omelets, eggs, we know that script.)

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A Heretic in the Climate Church

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Scientists have traditionally tended to appreciate the usefulness of disagreement or, where necessary, to take it in stride and move on. (A flat Earth, you say? Oookay.) But in many faiths, dissent is heresy. The offender must be cast out, or worse.

Moral Money is, as its name implies, a particularly sanctimonious corner of the Financial Times. It is focused on the likes of ESG (a variant of “socially responsible” investing that measures actual or potential portfolio companies against environmental, social, and governance standards), “stakeholder capitalism,” and other facets of a kumbaya capitalism superior to the Gekko-hearted incumbent, or so the cleverly marketed corporatist story goes.

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Demolishing a Distorted Past

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Conquerors like to remind the conquered of who is in charge. One way of doing so is by the construction of monuments, symbols of the new order — and by their permanence, of its permanence. The Soviets were no exception to this rule, distinguishing themselves only by the ugliness and, not infrequently, the gigantism of the works they fashioned. Not far enough from the center of the Latvian capital, Riga, there’s an archetypal example of this genre: overbearing, grandiloquent, and brutal. It dates from the later years of the Soviet occupation, a time when the Kremlin was using memories of the “Great Patriotic War” to bolster a regime struggling to deal with ideological failure, economic stagnation, and growing disaster in Afghanistan.

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On the Baltic Frontier

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Toomas Hendrik Ilves. Estonia’s president between 2006 and 2016, is not known for mincing his words about Russia. Nevertheless, as we drove towards a restaurant amid the refurbished industrial buildings and new waterfront apartments in a neighborhood that is a monument of sorts to Estonia’s astonishingly successful tech sector, it was evident that, had circumstances allowed, he would rather have been talking about the future that this small, determined nation is making for itself than about the latest poisonous eruption from the past.

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The imperfect spy

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On one level, Lis Wiehl’s enthralling and grimly astonishing A Spy in Plain Sight is simply the story of Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent whose espionage activities were described by the Department of Justice as “possibly the worst intelligence disaster in US history,” a crowded field even at the time of his arrest in February 2001. “Over twenty-two years,” explained the DOJ in a 2002 report, Hanssen had “given the Soviet Union and Russia vast quantities of documents and computer diskettes filled with national security information of incalculable value.” And his betrayals had cost lives. Wiehl cites three (although there will have been more): each had been fingered as American agents by both Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, Hanssen’s predecessor as, in Wiehl’s description, “the most notorious spy in modern US history,” which gave the Soviets the corroboration they appear to have required.

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