ISTANBUL As officials at the European Capital of Culture Agency here know all too well, once you’ve been named a Capital of Culture, it’s only a matter of time before the “Capital of Corruption” jokes start. It makes things no easier if your country is already notorious for corruption, and as Turkish economist Osman Altu? puts it, “If there were a corruption Olympics, Turkey would get the gold medal.” Things are harder still if your country is one with a tendency to grind all good intentions into fine bureaucratic dust.
In Beyo?lu, north of the Golden Horn on the European side of Istanbul, it is almost impossible to walk down the crowded streets without passing a film crew. But this is not a world of ripped abs and bronzed silicon starlets. These Turkish filmmakers are wan and drawn, desperately earnest, deeply preoccupied with Turkey’s rapid social transformation. The one thing they have in common with their Hollywood confreres is a sense that the film industry is a good place to make money. About that, they are right.
If you get your news from the sources most Americans do, you will not know that India recently test-fired the Agni II, an intermediate-range, nuclear-capable ballistic missile. Nor will you know the test’s results, which were reported all over the subcontinent but not in America. You will probably be unaware of Sergei Magnitsky’s death in a Moscow prison, or of who he was; the news was barely reported in the United States.
Communism’s Defeat, 20 Years Later
Have we learned the right lessons?
6 November 2009
CITY JOURNAL
Several weeks ago, the British press, led by the Times of London, reported “explosive” evidence from Soviet archives indicating that Margaret Thatcher—of all people!—had tried to keep the Berlin Wall from falling. Indeed, said the paper, she secretly urged Mikhail Gorbachev to “do what he could to stop it.” The Times based this revelation on Kremlin notes, still officially classified, of a Moscow meeting between Thatcher and Gorbachev in September 1989. These and many other documents were spirited out of Russia in 2003 by Pavel Stroilov, a researcher at the Gorbachev Foundation.
In 1997, I moved to Laos to work for the United Nations Development Programme. Laos was desperately impoverished. The country’s infrastructure was primitive. A fifth of the nation’s children died in infancy. Adult life expectancy barely exceeded 50 years. Less than half the population was literate. The UNDP spent most of its time endeavoring to raise funds from international donors to rectify this situation, and what time it did not spend this way, it spent holding elaborate conferences on the theme of how better to raise funds to rectify this situation.
Despite government reassurances, Britons feel under siege—with good reason.
CITY JOURNAL
Spring 2009
Just before midnight on January 12, 2006, Tom ap Rhys Pryce, a 31-year-old lawyer, left a London party and telephoned his fiancée to say that he was on his way home. He emerged from the tube station at Kensal Green about 20 minutes later and began walking toward their apartment. That was when two teenage gang members attacked him. Donnel Carty kicked Pryce in the back, sending him flying to the ground, and Delano Brown kicked him in the face. When Pryce tried to defend himself, the attackers stabbed him in the legs, hands, face, and heart. Then they took his cell phone and public-transportation pass, the only valuables in his possession, and ran off, leaving him dying on the ground. The paramedics who strove unsuccessfully to revive him found his wedding vows strewn on the pavement.
AMERICANS WITH A friendly disposition toward France have many reasons to hope for Nicolas Sarkozy’s victory in the presidential elections in April. The interior minister and leader of the Union for a Popular Movement is the most dynamic and exciting politician France has produced in years. He is a loyal admirer of America, which he calls “the greatest democracy in the world.” He has promised to overhaul the sclerotic French social welfare state and reform France’s second-rate educational system. Unlike his chief rival, the pretty airhead Ségolène Royal, he is not a tired socialist who declares money the “lifelong enemy.”
THERE HAS OF late been a tendency to interpret the opinions of Ayaan Hirsi Ali — known, like the Bengal Tiger, for being fantastic to look at, exotic in a frightening way, and highly endangered — by appealing to what one might call her Torquemada Complex. This was most famously evoked by Timothy Garton Ash, who remarked in the pages of the New York Review of Booksthat “[h]aving in her youth been tempted by Islamist fundamentalism … Ms. Hirsi Ali is now a brave, outspoken, slightly simplistic Enlightenment fundamentalist.” While this comment is silly — What, after all, does an “Enlightenment fundamentalist” believe? That the oeuvre of Thomas Paine is entirely literal and infallible? — I should in fairness note that the rest of Mr. Garton Ash’s essay on Europe and Islam is sensible, thoughtful, and lucid. But somehow his least felicitous remarks came in conjunction with similar observations made by Ian Buruma in “Murder in Amsterdam” (2006) to represent the received European wisdom about Ms. Hirsi Ali.
According to the dust jacket, church historian Philip Jenkins intends God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis ( Oxford University Press, 289 pages, $28) to function as a calming salve, a reassuring counterpoint to “overheated rhetoric” about Christian Europe’s imminent collapse under the weight of secularization and Muslim immigration. This may have been his intention, but it is not his achievement. His achievement — and it is considerable — is to have compiled one of the most patient and comprehensive cases extant for utter pessimism about Europe’s future. To see this, one need only change the dust jacket and cross out his repeated reassurances that what he notes is not really so alarming as it seems. There is no need even to change the title.
A review of: A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today.
In the wake of the First World War, leaders of the Western powers — Britain, France, Italy, and America — assembled in Paris to redraw the maps of the world. From the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, they meatballed together Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia; they invented Iraq and Jordan ex nihilo.
