Everybody Hates Nazis! At the height of its influence in the late 1930s, the German-American Bund summoned 20,000 people to jeer Franklin Delano Roosevelt and salute Adolf Hitler at Madison Square Garden. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Fritz Kuhn’s pro-Nazi organization boasted 25,000 dues-paying members and 8,000 Sturmabteilungen (Stormtroopers)—numbers which may well underestimate the group’s support. While World War II...
The Normalization of Jeremy Corbyn Donald Trump isn’t the only leader in the West seemingly incapable of calling out political violence. Less than a week before the president conspicuously neglected to denounce neo-Nazis and spoke of “violence on many sides” in Charlottesville, Virginia, British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn was asked if he condemned the violence perpetrated by the left-wing...
Why it’s hard to take Democrats seriously on Russia Democrats are exasperated that Republicans don’t share their outrage over the ever-widening scandal surrounding Donald Trump and Russia. The president’s personal solicitousness toward Vladimir Putin, the alacrity of his son in welcoming potential assistance from Russians during the 2016 campaign, and mounting questions as to whether Trump associates colluded with Russia as part of its...
Who Killed the Liberal World Order? Memo to Obama partisans: look at your own legacy before you cast that first stone. At last September’s G-20 summit in Hangzhou, China, Barack Obama put the fear of God into Vladimir Putin. Or at least he tried. Two months earlier, American intelligence officials informed the President they had “high confidence” it was Russian hackers...
The Plot Against Europe May 9, 2022 — Standing on the viewing platform in Red Square, President Vladimir Putin observed the military parade commemorating the 77th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany. This Victory Day, he had reason to be especially proud of his country. Earlier that week, a group of 150 Russian special forces — bearing...
Growing Up at Yale In 2003, I was a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed freshman at Yale when the Afro-American Cultural Center invited the late Amiri Baraka to speak under its auspices. Baraka (né LeRoi Jones) had been a founder of the Black Arts Movement, Black Power’s artistic arm, but had more recently gained notoriety for his Sept. 11 themed poem “Somebody...
Finlandization is Not a Solution for Ukraine The Ukrainian crisis bears many similarities to the Cold War. Once again, Russian tanks have rolled across an international border. Central and Eastern European countries openly fear Moscow’s revanchist and imperial foreign policy. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, long ago prophesied to go “out of area or out of business”, has found new purpose deterring...
The Curious Case of Countries Where Being Gay is a Crime While the cause of gay rights has made remarkable progress in the United States over the past year—with recent court rulings in New Mexico and Utah mandating recognition of same-sex unions—the situation has been bleak in other corners of the world. Two weeks ago, the Ugandan parliament passed a long-debated bill imposing lifetime sentences for...