Enjoying free speech since 1984. Your daily dose of anti-propaganda!
“How could our government have been so stupid?” one Russian acquaintance of mine wondered, after the West imposed sweeping sanctions that froze around $300 billion of the Russian government’s foreign exchange reserves held in Western banks.
Over the past few …
“Long live France anyway.” Even in front of a 12-man firing squad, Robert Brasillach was never lost for words. The author and journalist turned his dying phrase (“Vive la France quand même”) into a sort of “whatever…” quip on 6 …
Last week, Philip Bump of the Washington Post wrote a column about Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and referred, in passing and without elaboration, to “Right-wing pundit Glenn Greenwald”. The results were predictable. …
Was Lord Byron the first “dog dad”? At Newstead Abbey, the Romantic poet’s former home, there is a stone monument topped with an urn: perhaps the most famous pet memorial in the world. It was erected in honour of Byron’s …
Every war has a photograph that captures its horrors. Vietnam had Napalm Girl; Spain had The Falling Soldier. How will the war in Ukraine be remembered? Thanks to Vladimir Putin’s ruthlessness, an image of a heavily pregnant woman being stretchered …
I was a teenager when my father was posted to Munich, on secondment from British Aerospace to work on the Eurofighter Typhoon. None of us really understood what he did there — all I knew is that he was an …
Boris Johnson was not universally admired in the Foreign Office, when he headed it. In late 2017, his allies there suggested he would benefit from having a chief of staff. “This suggestion seemed to fall on deaf ears”, writes Michael …
Just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine consumed the media, New York Times columnist Jay Caspian Kang and Substacker Matthew Yglesias published near-simultaneous critiques of the notions of “disinformation” and “misinformation”. This convergence among prominent liberals was significant. These and …
Why would a leader decide to drop a nuclear bomb? Almost three weeks into Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, with still no end in sight, it’s a question that hasn’t felt so urgent since the outbreak of the Cold War. When …
Yvan Colonna, a Corsican terrorist and shepherd, was once regarded by the French state as its Public Enemy Number One. Paris is now praying that he will stay alive.
Colonna, 61, has been in a coma for a fortnight after …
The West has been struggling for the past three weeks to understand the motivation behind Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Was it a rational move or the reaction of a madman? Some insist he has been inspired by some sort of …
For more than a decade, Vladimir Putin has sought to sow division and undermine American democracy. Now that he’s distracted by the conflict unfolding in Ukraine, his successor has stepped into the spotlight: America’s political class.
Once wars united people, …
Like any war, but perhaps more than most, the war in Ukraine has seen a bewildering barrage of claims and counter-claims made by the online supporters of each side. Truth, partial truths and outright lies compete for dominance in the …
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is only the most recent and violent violation of its sovereignty. The deeper roots of the crisis lie in Ukrainian elites’ failure to represent their whole nation and to uphold its sovereignty, aided and abetted …
Does Sir Keir Starmer know there’s a war on? Last week the Labour leader visited a country literally on the doorstep of Russia. Speaking to a Times journalist at the biggest military base in Estonia, a Baltic state with every …