Enjoying free speech since 1984. Your daily dose of anti-propaganda!
Budapest
In the 12 years of rule that have followed three landslide electoral victories, Viktor Orbán, now Europe’s longest-serving leader, has successfully reshaped Hungary in his own image: too successfully, in the eyes of both the weak and fractured opposition …
The readout from the Politburo meeting published by the Xinhua news agency on 28 March 2022 was the shortest in decades: just 100 characters or so. Apart from a statement of condolence for the tragic China Eastern plane crash a …
Toby Cook was a 19-year-old with a history of mental health problems, a growing recreational drink and drug habit, and a mounting sheet of criminal charges when he decided to leave his native Australia and travel to Ukraine in 2018. …
The Nineties were a time of American hegemony and British cockiness. The internet was a utopian idea as opposed to a collective psychological disorder. Climate change, terrorism, autocracy and gross inequality were either not-on-the-radar or assumed to be moving in …
Biden has warned that there is going to be a New World Order. Putin and Xi are writing joint statements about the creation of a New World Order. In fact, all of the globalists are interested in a New World …
War is the domain of paradox, contradiction, and boundless surprise. It is not merely because of ignorance or stupidity that military history is a record of crimes, follies, defeats, and very few victories worth their cost. Even so, the Ukraine …
The Bayraktar Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) TB2 looks like the malformed lovechild of a small plane and a large, angry wasp. But if the armed drone looks weird, there’s nothing strange about its performance. Over the past few weeks, the …
The first month of President Putin’s most recent invasion of Ukraine has not gone according to plan: the initial drive to Kyiv has stalled; his forces have sustained heavy losses; support from his inner circle has been tentative or lacking.…
“One hundred and forty-six million [people] for such a vast territory is insufficient,” said Vladimir Putin at the end of last year. Russians haven’t been having enough children to replace themselves since the early Sixties. Birth rates are also stagnant …
In Israel, one of the most-shared videos in recent weeks shows a Ukrainian soldier named Alex revealing the contents of his military backpack. After waving his night-vision goggles at the camera, he pulls out a Ukrainian-language translation of Golda, a …
Francis Fukuyama helped define how we understand contemporary history in his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man. His new book, Liberalism and its Discontents, is a trenchant defence of an ideology under attack. Freddie Sayers spoke …
I honestly can’t remember the number of times I’ve written about Russian peace talks. I could try to look it up, but I suspect it would only depress me. Ukraine and Syria; tangentially Georgia and, I guess, Chechnya. None of …
The 11th anniversary of the war in Syria passed earlier this month with little notice, eclipsed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But the two wars are intimately connected. It was Russia’s entry into the Syrian war in 2013, at the …
If you are impatient with the calibre of potential partners in your city, Tinder has a feature for you. For £18 a month, you can “passport” to another place; that is, you can set your location to anywhere in the …
The West, following the lead of the United States, has reacted to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by introducing a “crippling” regime of sanctions. It is a “total economic and financial war” aimed at “caus[ing] the collapse of the Russian economy”, …