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'Already an Exception': Merkel's Legacy Is Shaped by Migration and Austerity - The New ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...merkel-legacy-germany.html Germany merkel history liberalism conservative conservatism
shared by Javier E on 06 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • Those contradictions rest at the core of the Merkel legacy
  • As German chancellor, Ms. Merkel oversaw a golden decade for Europe’s largest economy, which expanded by more than a fifth, pushing unemployment to the lowest levels since the early 1980s.
  • As the United States was distracted by multiple wars, Britain gambled its future on a referendum to leave the European Union and France failed to reform itself, Ms. Merkel’s Germany was mostly a haven of stability.
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  • But her decision to embrace more than a million asylum seekers unsettled that cozy status quo. Outside Germany, the austerity she and her longtime finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble imposed on debtor countries like Italy, Spain, Portugal and, especially, Greece sowed misery and resentment that fester to this day.
  • Some, like the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, compare Ms. Merkel’s austerity politics to the Treaty of Versailles, which imposed punitive economic measures on Germany after World War I, humiliated the country and fanned the flames of populism.“This is now what is feeding the political beasts,”
  • Her modest and moderate governance style, absent ideology and vanity, is the polar opposite of that of the strongmen now strutting the world stage. Her Germany — that “vulnerable hegemon,” as the intellectual Herfried Münkler calls it — became a beacon of liberalism.
  • Merkel knows a different form of social and societal equality,” Mr. Gysi said, adding of her former center-left rivals: “That made her so much more open to adopting ideas from the Social Democrats.”
  • “Angela Merkel personifies the best Germany we’ve ever known,” said Timothy Garton Ash, a professor of European Studies at Oxford University. “She managed Germany’s rise to once again become Europe’s leading power. But she failed to prepare Germans sufficiently for what that means.”
  • Ms. Merkel has never been one for rousing speeches. (“We had those kinds of speeches 70 years ago,” Ms. Roll said. “Her lack of talent and interest in this department was a good thing.”)
  • She never boasted that Germany got what it wanted after summit meetings (though it mostly did). But as exports and domestic demand boomed, Germany prospered and so did Ms. Merkel’s popularity ratings.
  • But like her friend and ally President Barack Obama — America’s first black president, who was succeeded by President Trump — Ms. Merkel will be judged by what comes next
  • Gregor Gysi, a fellow Easterner and political opponent from the Left party, said that spending half her life under Communism gave her a visceral thirst for freedom — but also made her more socially conscious than other Western conservatives.
  • now in the third so-called grand coalition with the Social Democrats, Ms. Merkel’s habit of taking inspiration from (and credit for) their ideas has left the party a shadow of itself.
  • It has also opened her own party to challenges on its right flank, leaving room for the emergence of the nationalist Alternative for Germany, which capitalized on her decision on asylum seekers.
  • Even before the migration crisis arrived, the debt crisis provided a pivotal test for a chancellor at the helm of a newly dominant Germany.And it led to criticism that Ms. Merkel, while leading humbly, was no less the hegemon — prioritizing German interests; manipulating European Union institutions to Germany’s abiding benefit; turning southern countries into captive export markets; tightening the hold of German banks
  • “It won Germany incredible respect — this image of a friendly humanitarian Germany, a Germany that protects,” Ms. Roth said. “She marked that image.”
  • “German populism is perhaps not her child,” said Henrik Enderlein, the dean of the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. “But it is a child of the Merkel era.”
  • “An Adenauer or a Kohl would have done it,” Mr. Fischer said. But Merkel, who had grown up behind the Iron Curtain and without the Western pro-European mind-set, “wasn’t there yet,” he said. “Her European conscience was not fully formed yet.
  • Was hers a European Germany, one that saw Europe’s interests as its own? Or a Germany that ultimately wanted a German Europe?
  • The real missed opportunity, observers say, was to use the crisis to propel a more far-reaching build-out of European Union institutions, which remain unprepared for the next financial meltdown.
  • If there was ever a time to make a bold push to complete the institutions of the eurozone, this was it, said Joschka Fischer, a former German foreign minister.
  • The French president François Mitterrand and his British counterpart Margaret Thatcher had both worried about a resurgence of “bad Germans.” Ms. Merkel’s greatest achievement, Ms. Roll said, was that “she came to represent the good Germans.”
  • “But she always made clear: ‘I don’t build deadly walls,’ ” he recalled her saying. “She grew up behind one.”
  • In Germany, too, politics has become noisier and nastier. Open sexism has entered the chamber with Alternative for Germany, said Ms. Roth, the vice president of the parliament.“Merkel has been the target of countless attacks, gendered attacks, sexualized dirt,” Ms. Roth said.
  • Some have begun to referring to Merkelism, a modest but steadfast liberalism built on consensus rather than confrontation, as a recipe for democratic governance in the 21st century. Others fear that Merkelism will disappear with her.
  • “She is so unvain that she does not overly care about leaving behind a blueprint for the West 4.0,” said Mr. Kornelius, her biographer. “She primarily wants to preserve what she can.”
  • She has prevented crises rather than carried out visions, Mr. Kornelius said, and has been reactive rather than proactive. “But that is incredibly valuable at a time when we are dealing with questions of our liberal order in an unraveling world — and with leaders like Donald Trump.”
  • Today, Ms. Merkel’s Germany can feel like a liberal island in a growing sea of illiberal forces. She has not changed — the world around her has.“She is already an exception today,” Mr. Knaus said. “I hope she is not a relic of an era that is coming to an end.”
  • “She was a catastrophe,” said Mr. Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister, “and she will be missed, because who comes next will certainly be worse.”
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Andrew Sullivan: America's New Religions - 0 views

nymag.com/...an-americas-new-religions.html religion ideology American idea
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  • Everyone has a religion. It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being. It’s in our genes and has expressed itself in every culture, in every age, including our own secularized husk of a society.
  • By religion, I mean something quite specific: a practice not a theory; a way of life that gives meaning, a meaning that cannot really be defended without recourse to some transcendent value, undying “Truth” or God (or gods).
  • Which is to say, even today’s atheists are expressing an attenuated form of religion. Their denial of any God is as absolute as others’ faith in God, and entails just as much a set of values to live by — including, for some, daily rituals like meditation, a form of prayer.
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  • “Religion is an attempt to find meaning in events, not a theory that tries to explain the universe.” It exists because we humans are the only species, so far as we can know, who have evolved to know explicitly that, one day in the future, we will die. And this existential fact requires some way of reconciling us to it while we are alive.
  • This is why science cannot replace it. Science does not tell you how to live, or what life is about; it can provide hypotheses and tentative explanations, but no ultimate meaning
  • appreciating great art or music is ultimately an act of wonder and contemplation, and has almost nothing to say about morality and life.
  • Here’s Mill describing the nature of what he called “A Crisis in My Mental History”:
  • It is perfectly possible to see and record the absurdities and abuses of man-made institutions and rituals, especially religious ones, while embracing a way of life that these evil or deluded people preached but didn’t practice
  • Seduced by scientism, distracted by materialism, insulated, like no humans before us, from the vicissitudes of sickness and the ubiquity of early death, the post-Christian West believes instead in something we have called progress — a gradual ascent of mankind toward reason, peace, and prosperity — as a substitute in many ways for our previous monotheism
  • We have constructed a capitalist system that turns individual selfishness into a collective asset and showers us with earthly goods; we have leveraged science for our own health and comfort. Our ability to extend this material bonanza to more and more people is how we define progress; and progress is what we call meaning
  • But none of this material progress beckons humans to a way of life beyond mere satisfaction of our wants and needs. And this matters. We are a meaning-seeking species
  • Ditto history
  • So what happens when this religious rampart of the entire system is removed? I think what happens is illiberal politics. The need for meaning hasn’t gone away, but without Christianity, this yearning looks to politics for satisfaction.
  • Russell, for his part, abandoned Christianity at the age of 18, for the usual modern reasons, but the question of ultimate meaning still nagged at him. One day, while visiting the sick wife of a colleague, he described what happened: “Suddenly the ground seemed to give away beneath me, and I found myself in quite another region. Within five minutes I went through some such reflections as the following: the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable; nothing can penetrate it except the highest intensity of the sort of love that religious teachers have preached; whatever does not spring from this motive is harmful, or at best useless.”
  • Our modern world tries extremely hard to protect us from the sort of existential moments experienced by Mill and Russell
  • Netflix, air-conditioning, sex apps, Alexa, kale, Pilates, Spotify, Twitter … they’re all designed to create a world in which we rarely get a second to confront ultimate meaning — until a tragedy occurs, a death happens, or a diagnosis strikes
  • Liberalism is a set of procedures, with an empty center, not a manifestation of truth, let alone a reconciliation to mortality. But, critically, it has long been complemented and supported in America by a religion distinctly separate from politics, a tamed Christianity
  • religious impulses, once anchored in and tamed by Christianity, find expression in various political cults. These political manifestations of religion are new and crud
  • Will the house still stand when its ramparts are taken away? I’m beginning to suspect it can’t.  And won’t.
  • like almost all new cultish impulses, they demand a total and immediate commitment to save the world.
  • We have the cult of Trump on the right, a demigod who, among his worshippers, can do no wrong. And we have the cult of social justice on the left, a religion whose followers show the same zeal as any born-again Evangelical
  • They are filling the void that Christianity once owned, without any of the wisdom and culture and restraint that Christianity once provided.
  • social-justice ideology does everything a religion should. It offers an account of the whole: that human life and society and any kind of truth must be seen entirely as a function of social power structures, in which various groups have spent all of human existence oppressing other groups
  • it provides a set of practices to resist and reverse this interlocking web of oppression — from regulating the workplace and policing the classroom to checking your own sin and even seeking to control language itself.
  • “Social justice” theory requires the admission of white privilege in ways that are strikingly like the admission of original sin
  • To the belief in human progress unfolding through history — itself a remnant of Christian eschatology — it adds the Leninist twist of a cadre of heroes who jump-start the revolution.
  • many Evangelicals are among the holiest and most quietly devoted people out there. Some have bravely resisted the cult. But their leaders have turned Christianity into a political and social identity, not a lived faith, and much of their flock — a staggering 81 percent voted for Trump — has signed on. They have tribalized a religion explicitly built by Jesus as anti-tribal.
  • The terrible truth of the last three years is that the fresh appeal of a leader-cult has overwhelmed the fading truths of Christianity.
  • This is why they are so hard to reach or to persuade and why nothing that Trump does or could do changes their minds. You cannot argue logically with a religion
  • — which is why you cannot really argue with social-justice activists either
  • so we’re mistaken if we believe that the collapse of Christianity in America has led to a decline in religion. It has merely led to religious impulses being expressed by political cults.
  • both cults really do minimize the importance of the individual in favor of either the oppressed group or the leader
  • They demonstrate, to my mind, how profoundly liberal democracy has actually depended on the complement of a tolerant Christianity to sustain itself — as many earlier liberals (Tocqueville, for example) understood.
  • It is Christianity that came to champion the individual conscience against the collective, which paved the way for individual rights. It is in Christianity that the seeds of Western religious toleration were first sown. Christianity is the only monotheism that seeks no sway over Caesar, that is content with the ultimate truth over the immediate satisfaction of power. It was Christianity that gave us successive social movements, which enabled more people to be included in the liberal project, thus renewing i
  • The question we face in contemporary times is whether a political system built upon such a religion can endure when belief in that religion has become a shadow of its future self.
  • it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: ‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions that you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant; would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’ And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered: ‘No!’”
  • I think it was mainly about how the people of Britain shook off the moral decadence of the foreign policy of the 1930s, how, beneath the surface, there were depths of feeling and determination that we never saw until an existential crisis hit, and an extraordinary figure seized the moment.
  • how profoundly I yearn for something like that to reappear in America. The toll of Trump is so deep. In so many ways, he has come close to delegitimizing this country and entire West, aroused the worst instincts within us, fed fear rather than confronting it, and has been rewarded for his depravity in the most depressing way by everything that is foul on the right and nothing that is noble.
  • I want to believe in America again, its decency and freedom, its hostility, bred in its bones, toward tyranny of any kind, its kindness and generosity. I need what someone once called the audacity of hope.
  • I’ve witnessed this America ever since I arrived — especially its embrace of immigrants — which is why it is hard to see Trump tearing migrant children from their parents
  • But who, one wonders, is our Churchill? And when will he or she emerge?
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Israelis Aren't Happy With Trump's Syria Withdrawal - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...579103 trump israel
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  • . Something about the Trump style appeals to an Israeli sense of machismo, an appreciation for direct, gut-level expressions of toughness, such a contrast from the more analytical Obama.
  • The problem for Israel today, though, goes beyond the surprise. If Obama was too cautious for many Israelis, Trump has now shown them how his approach to foreign policy—impulsive, isolationist, transactional, turning on a dime with no alternative in place—can work against their interests. And Netanyahu—who praised Trump in almost messianic terms and who knows how poorly he responds to criticism—now has few tools at his disposal to object to this policy. Israelis can only shake their heads at the absence of any strategy as they survey the regional fallout.
  • The first victims of Erdogan’s empowerment, of course, will not be Israelis. They will be Kurds. Kurdish fighters—who make up the Syrian Democratic Forces (including, it must be acknowledged, some affiliated with the anti-Turkish terrorist group the PKK)—have led the battle on the ground against ISIS, liberating city after city in northeastern Syria. With no U.S. troops to coordinate with and protect them, they will be left to Erdogan’s tender mercies.
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  • Israelis see the Kurds—a moderate, pro-Western, Muslim community that eschews anti-Israel sentiment, and with whom Israel has worked quietly—as exactly the kind of element that the Middle East needs more of. They constantly press for more American support for the Kurds. Israel, against American wishes, encouraged the Kurds of northern Iraq in their ill-advised independence referendum of 2017. For Israel, the U.S. abandonment of the Kurds represents both a strategic and an emotional blow.
  • Obama, too, was criticized by Israelis for withdrawing troops from Iraq, for failing to strike Syria in response to chemical-weapons use, and for his perceived reluctance to use force against Iran’s nuclear program. But Trump, the gever-gever, Israelis hoped, would reverse the trend. Instead, Trump is doubling down on reducing U.S. involvement in the Middle East in an even more brutal fashion: bashing regional allies as freeloaders, demanding payment for U.S. protection, and loudly declaiming against any plausible logic for a U.S. military presence in the region. America’s friends, including Israel, feel a chill wind at such talk.
  • A more dominant Russia in Syria means a reinforced Assad regime. That process was happening anyway, much to the chagrin of Israeli strategists and anyone with a moral conscience. But the folding of the U.S. tent cements the outcome. Where Turkey does not wipe out the Kurds, Russian-backed Syrian forces will mop them up. The Tehran-Damascus-Hezbollah weapons highway will be disrupted only by Israeli action
  • Other Arab states, long funders of anti-Assad opposition groups, have given up and are welcoming Syria back to the fold. Syria’s prospective invitation to the Arab League summit, the visit of Assad’s security chief to Cairo, and the reopening of the UAE embassy in Damascus mark Syria’s best week diplomatically since the war began in 2011.
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How the American left is rediscovering morality | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...a-ocasio-cortez-bernie-sanders morality leftist
shared by Javier E on 05 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • Like Ocasio-Cortez, I am a pro-choice woman who was raised in the Catholic church. Now happily non-religious, I’m used to holding simultaneous truths that are often painted as contradictory – like, say, revering hard facts while feeling motivated by something deeper than our minds can comprehend.
  • today the movement mobilizes people of all – or no – faiths across the country to fight inequality.
  • Leaders draw on scripture alongside statistics to call out the immorality of corporate, government and social structures in the US. Among their fans is Bernie Sanders, who was raised Jewish but isn’t actively involved in organized religion.
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  • Sanders is not one to quote scripture, but he believes ethical imperative is the foundation of serious politics. “It’s hard to imagine why anyone would be involved in politics if one didn’t have a moral sense of right and wrong, of justice and injustice,” Sanders told me by phone
  • “A moral imperative is absolutely part of how I approach public policy. Because if it’s not there, then what does?” Ocasio-Cortez said, noting that the tattered books that most shaped her politics were written by moral leaders such as King and Howard Thurman. “Everyone’s going crazy about socialism and democratic socialism. For me, that’s not my seat. My seat is a moral seat.”
  • “In a society that is materially and logistically and in every way capable of ensuring people are paid a dignified wage, have healthcare, have access to an education and opportunity – if that is materially possible,” she said, “I feel like we are morally compelled to make it so.
  • In her 1997 book Healing the Soul of America, re-released in revised form last month, spiritual leader Marianne Williamson described our country’s political dysfunction as symptom of a greedy society that has not yet atoned for its crimes against native and enslaved peoples, exploited laborers, women and children. She called for politicians to work for good rather than for special interests or the status quo: “A conscience-based politics cares less for political expediency than for moral truth.”
  • But dealing with political bullies can be a complicated matter. Sanders said that, when forced to weigh political or financial capital with his own ideals, the decision invariably involves compromise
  • In recent decades, according to Pew Research Center, the portion of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has risen from one in 10 to nearly one in four. Meanwhile, Pew found in a 2014 survey of 35,000 people that just 18% of those “nones” identify as politically conservative. It makes sense, then, that – in a culture whose framework for morality has relied on religion for centuries – many liberals would struggle to find the words to talk about what moves them at the deepest level.
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Petitions and jokes will not halt this march into Brexit calamity | John Harris | Opini... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...brexit-calamity-brexit-english culture politics uk
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  • social anthropologist Kate Fox. In her classic book Watching the English, she writes about the deep layers of performance and self-mockery that smother even heartfelt misery and anger: “Even if you are feeling desperate, you must pretend to be only pretending to feel desperate.”
  • More generally, she talks about “perverse obliqueness”, “emotional constipation” and a “general inability to engage in a direct and straightforward fashion with other human beings”
  • Brexit demands to be debated in the most fundamental terms – but England being England, it is too often reduced to the political equivalent of small talk.
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  • Thirty years on, we face the final completion of a Tory project started back then, and the recasting of Britain – or, rather England – as a crabby, racist, inward-looking hole, and to what response? Jokes, mutterings, clicks, sporadic Twitterstorms, but nothing remotely comparable
  • two missing actors in this drama: the Labour leadership – and, with one or two exceptions, big voices in what is left of the trade union movemen
  • Forty years of post-Thatcher individualism have done their work, so that protest is now not a matter of collective agency (in other words, “we can stop this”), but the kind of atomised conscience-salving I first glimpsed at the time of the Iraq war, with the appearance of that deathly slogan “Not in my name”
  • in a world as over-mediated as ours, each day brings a different spectacle – a march, a parliamentary vote, some or other drama at the top – so simultaneously ubiquitous and short-lived that joining everything together and having any sense of clear meaning becomes all but impossible.
  • the same basic point applies: claims of treason and betrayal – let alone their ludicrous readings of history – must be contested.
  • there might be something in the example set by Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League, and a bold, popular, singularly un-English approach memorably summed up by one of its activists: “For a while we managed to create, in our noisy, messy, unconventional way, an emotional alternative to nationalism and patriotism, a celebration of a different kind of pride and solidarity.
  • one key mystery: that as the country drifts and the government falls apart, even the people involved in anti-Brexit protest and dissent seem confused, and far too quiet – and by the time our passions finally start stirring, it is likely to be far, far too late.
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The Myth of the Kindly General Lee - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...529038 slavery history Lee confederacy racism civil war race
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  • To describe this man as an American hero requires ignoring the immense suffering for which he was personally responsible, both on and off the battlefield. It requires ignoring his participation in the industry of human bondage, his betrayal of his country in defense of that institution, the battlefields scattered with the lifeless bodies of men who followed his orders and those they killed, his hostility toward the rights of the freedmen and his indifference to his own students waging a campaign of terror against the newly emancipated
  • It requires reducing the sum of human virtue to a sense of decorum and the ability to convey gravitas in a gray uniform.
  • The white supremacists who have protested on Lee’s behalf are not betraying his legacy. In fact, they have every reason to admire him. Lee, whose devotion to white supremacy outshone his loyalty to his country, is the embodiment of everything they stand for. Tribe and race over country is the core of white nationalism, and racists can embrace Lee in good conscience.
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  • The question is why anyone else would
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Jeff Flake, a Fierce Trump Critic, Will Not Seek Re-election for Senate - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...jeff-flake-arizona.html US Trump politics
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  • WASHINGTON — Senator Jeff Flake, the Arizona Republican who has tangled with President Trump for months, announced on Tuesday that he would not seek re-election in 2018, declaring on the Senate floor that he “will no longer be complicit or silent” in the face of the president’s “reckless, outrageous and undignified” behavior.Mr. Flake made his announcement in an extraordinary 17-minute speech in which he challenged not only the president but also his party’s leadership. He deplored the “casual undermining of our democratic ideals” and “the personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedoms and institutions, the flagrant disregard for truth and decency” that he said had become prevalent in American politics in the era of Mr. Trump.
  • Without mentioning Mr. Trump by name, Mr. Flake, 54, took direct aim at the president’s policies, notably his isolationist tendencies, but also his behavior and that of his aides. In his time in Washington, Mr. Flake embodied an old-line conservatism. He avidly pitched smaller government, spending cuts and an end to home-district pork-barrel projects, but also supported free trade, engagement with the world and an openness to immigration.
  • “We must stop pretending that the degradation of our politics and the conduct of some in our executive branch are normal,” Mr. Flake said. “They are not normal. Reckless, outrageous and undignified behavior has become excused and countenanced as telling it like it is when it is actually just reckless, outrageous and undignified. And when such behavior emanates from the top of our government, it is something else. It is dangerous to a democracy.”
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  • Mr. Flake’s private polling had steadily become worse this year as he intensified his criticism of Mr. Trump. His firm stand against the president had alienated Republican voters, but his long, conservative track record dissuaded Democratic voters in the state from coming to his side. One poll showed he had just an 18 percent approval rating among Arizona residents, and a survey that the senator conducted last month led some of his own allies to conclude that he could not win a Republican primary, according to multiple officials directly familiar with the situation in the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s speech.
  • To many conservatives who support Mr. Trump, Mr. Flake was an especially desirable target. Few in the Senate had spoken more candidly about their misgivings with Mr. Trump, first as a candidate and then as president. He had particularly elicited conservatives’ ire with his book, in which he equated Republicans’ acceptance of Mr. Trump as their nominee to a Faustian bargain.
  • “We’re not here to simply mark time,” the senator said. “Sustained incumbency is certainly not the point of seeking office, and there are times when we must risk our careers in favor of our principles. Now is such a time.”
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'This is about saving capitalism': the Dutch historian who savaged Davos elite | Busine... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ch-tax-billionaires-capitalism capitalism historian elite tax history
shared by Javier E on 01 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • he was surprised and maddened by the pushback when he mentioned tax. “One American looked at me as if I was from another planet,” he said.
  • Bregman decided to change his plan for a panel on inequality
  • It was mainly to ease my own conscience: someone has to say what needs to be said.”
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  • What Bregman said, put simply, was the Davos emperors have no clothes. They talk a lot about how something must be done about inequality and the need to address social unrest, but cavil at the idea they might be a big part of the problem.
  • He told his audience that people in Davos talked about participation, justice, equality and transparency, but “nobody raises the issue of tax avoidance and the rich not paying their share. It is like going to a firefighters’ conference and not talking about water.”
  • He said he is part of a generation not traumatised by the cold war and radicalised by the financial crisis of a decade ago. “When we say what’s needed are higher taxes and the response is ‘that’s communism’, we say ‘whatever’,” he said.
  • “I am part of a broad social movement. Ten years ago, it would have unimaginable for some random Dutch historian to go viral when talking about taxes. Yet here we are.”
  • As a historian, Bregman noted the most successful period for capitalism occurred in the years after the second world war, when the top rate of tax in the US was above 90%.
  • “This is about saving capitalism,” he said. “Most innovation has come about through government spending. During the golden age period [after the second world war], there were way higher taxes on wealth, property, inheritance and top incomes. That’s what we need today if we are going to tame this beast called capitalism.”
  • “I thought that we needed historians to take the stage and explain what’s going on. When I watched the crisis on TV, the only people being interviewed were economists, and these were the guys that didn’t see it coming. I thought that we needed some historians there, so I left academia,”
  • He spent a year working on a left-of-centre Dutch paper before joining a new journalism platform that paid him a basic income and provided the freedom to write about anything he chose. Utopia for Realists was the result.
  • Bregman bridles at being called an optimist. “I prefer the word possibilist,” he said. Optimists are the sort of chief executives found at Davos, who think globalisation is working, neoliberalism is a good idea and inequality is on the decline, he added.
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Laura Ingraham's advertisers aren't really staging a boycott. It's a capital strike. - ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-acd5-35eac230e514_story.html capital strike corporate activism
shared by Javier E on 05 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • it’s unlikely that these companies suddenly grew a collective conscience and decided to bring their expenditures into accord with their morals. It’s more likely that Ingraham is the victim of a capital strike, when investors withdraw or withhold investments en masse because they’ve determined that potential hazards outweigh potential gains.
  • Capital is capital; it is not your friend.
  • “Corporate activism on social issues isn’t in tension with corporate self-interest on tax policy and corporate stinginess in paychecks. Rather, the activism increasingly exists to protect the self-interest and the stinginess — to justify the ways of C.E.O.s to cultural power brokers, so that those same power brokers will leave them alone.”
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  • It also foregrounds a key imbalance in our politics: While capital can strike on a whim and effectively shut down a political program or initiative, labor’s ability to similarly assert itself in the public sphere is comparatively limited.
  • There are no regulations or laws preventing or even restricting capital strikes. This means that the social and political aspirations of capital always have an effective instrument on hand. But the same can’t be said for labor
  • All over the United States, euphemistically titled right-to-work laws strangle organized labor, preventing the kind of coordination among workers that allows for effective striking. Then there are anti-strike laws, some of which fine public-sector unions huge amounts for going on strike, while others criminalize striking for individual workers. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is in the midst of deciding a conservative-backed case against public-sector unions that, if successful, could weaken American labor even further
  • Normally, this capital-financed onslaught against labor is interpreted as capital just doing what it does: trying to squeeze maximal profits out of business transactions, workers be damned. And it is that
  • But in light of the power of capital strikes in public life, it should also be understood as something else: an effort to limit the ability of labor to exert the same kind of control over politics and discourse as capital itself does
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Huge crowds attend Invasion Day marches across Australia's capital cities | Australia n... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ross-australias-capital-cities australia invasion celebration history
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  • Two people, a man draped in an Australian flag and a woman holding a sign that said “To defend my country was once called patriotism; now it’s called racism” remained at the Flinders Street station steps.
  • Scott Morrison has said 26 January 1788 was “pretty miserable” for his ancestor, in a speech defending the celebration of Australia Day, while tens of thousands of people joined Invasion Day marches around the country calling for the public holiday to be abolished.
  • in Melbourne, his comments were echoed to a crowd of more than 40,000 people who congregated on Spring Street outside Parliament House before the Invasion Day march. “Those poor people were in chains, they were suffering we pitied them,” a speaker said. “What are you defending?”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “If this country has any conscience, it will start a healing process that starts with truth-telling,” the former Greens MP Lidia Thorpe, a Gunnai-Gunditjmara woman, told the rally.
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Trump's Brazen, Effective Lie - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...559433 objectivity neutrality press news trump lies politics culture
shared by Javier E on 03 May 18 - No Cached
  • Traditionally, magazines have given informed staffers the leeway to share considered judgments of that sort with readers in service of helping them to understand the world. In contrast, newspapers, TV networks, and NPR have shied away from rendering such judgments in deference to longstanding aspirations to “objectivity.”
  • In the case of the physician’s letter, the norms of some major news organizations caused journalists confronted with obvious bullshit to publish under headlines like these:
  • Some outlets signaled in the body of their stories that readers should be skeptical. “The full letter is written in true Trumpian fashion, full of hyperbole and boasting of greatness,” NPR noted.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Others, like ABC, published credulous items.
  • What matters most are the actions of Trump, now the most powerful person in the world. If he indeed dictated this letter—and this is well supported even by a glancing linguistic analysis—then it is his ethics that should be called to question … Billions more people are implicated if this letter is evidence of Trump’s willingness to lie to circumvent and subvert a critical vetting process, to baldly misrepresent himself by using people like Bornstein for his own gain.
  • all of this sort of data pales compared to what such an act of forgery would say about his morality; his sense of honesty, transparency, decency, and accountability; his actual fitness to serve as president of the United States.
  • During his rise, Trump put the press and the public in an impossible position by lying in a manner that was both flagrantly obvious to anyone paying close attention and often impossible for news organizations to prove as a settled matter of fact.
  • That his lie is now exposed, like so many before it, is the latest opportunity for Republican elites to level with their base: The president and many of his allies are liars—and while they are hardly the first political elites to ever tell lies in national politics, it is partly their unusually flagrant and shameless mendacity that cause the press to treat them with more skepticism and hostility than bygone GOP presidents.
  • In politics, the skeptical approach that Hamblin took to Trump’s mendacious claims of yore are preferable, I’d argue, to the credulous headlines and articles that some others wrote
  • Still, on other occasions, different journalists have made regrettable errors by going beyond what they could prove empirically and offering analysis
  • there is no perfect journalistic approach to deploy in all cases—and something to be said for a diversity of approaches
  • Trump had flagrantly told so many decades of untruths to the public by December of 2015 that he should long before have ceded the benefit of the doubt that allowed any unverified, advantageous claim about him to make headlines, even atop stories that went on to hint at their dubiousness.
  • Most people, even in politics, are too decent to lie as he did. They possess normal consciences and senses of shame. Trump was willing to exploit the fact that humans extend some general presumptions of trust to function in this world. Like a con man, he benefitted by betraying that trust more shamelessly than others.
  • Trump is the root of the problem. And his minor enablers, like Bornstein, and his major enablers, like Vice President Mike Pence, harm America with their complicity in the lies that the president tells the citizens he is meant to serve
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António Guterres to be next UN secretary general | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...rres-next-un-secretary-general antónio guterres world news the guardian UN Secretary General politics Policy
shared by katyshannon on 06 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • António Guterres, the former Portuguese prime minister, will be the next UN secretary general, after the security council agreed he should replace Ban Ki-moon at the beginning of next year.
  • In a rare show of unity, all 15 ambassadors from the security council emerged from the sixth in a series of straw polls to announce that they had agreed on Guterres, who was UN high commissioner for refugees for a decade, and that they would confirm the choice in a formal vote on Thursday.
  • The abrupt end to the UN leadership race came as a surprise. Many observers had expected the selection process to go on late into October as the major powers struggled to promote their favourite candidates.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • some thought that Russia, currently holding the presidency of the security council, would block Guterres, as Moscow had said it wanted an eastern European in the top UN job.
  • Guterres’s margin of victory was decisive. He won 13 votes in his support and two abstentions, with no one voting against him. The second-place candidate, the Slovak Miroslav Lajčák, had seven votes in support and six against him – two of them vetoes from permanent council members.
  • The security council on Thursday will decide whether to have a formal vote or, if the two abstentions change their mind, to simply pass a resolution nominating Guterres by acclamation. That nomination would go to the UN general assembly which would either vote or, more likely, confirm the candidacy by acclamation.
  • As the UN’s refugee chief, Guterres persistently appealed to the conscience of the international community over the worst refugee crisis since the second world war, and he vowed to carry on being a spokesman for the downtrodden if he became UN secretary general.
  • The fact that he was promising to be an activist on humanitarian causes also makes Guterres victory surprising, as both Russia and China in particular have been resistant to outspoken activists in top UN posts
  • Also there was widespread sentiment this year that it was time for a woman to run the organisation for the first time in its 71-year history and there were several strong female candidates in the contest.
  • In the final ballot, the highest-placed woman candidate, the head of Unesco, Irina Bokova, finished fourth. Another female candidate for the job, Costa Rican diplomat Christiana Figueres described the result as “bittersweet”.
  • The contest to replace Ban as secretary general began in April with public hearings in the UN general assembly, the first time candidates for the job had had to make their pitch in public. The new transparency was a result of a groundswell of pressure from civil society activists, in the 1 For 7 Billion movement.
5More

A C-SPAN caller asked a black guest how to stop being prejudiced. Here's how she respon... - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...udiced-heres-how-she-responded white racism empathy history culture denial
shared by Javier E on 24 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • when I grew up we were in a denial phase of the persistence of racism in our society and bias in ourselves. Donald Trump has ripped the mask off of that entirely. The killing of black men has ripped the mask off of that entirely. Social scientists know that bias against people with darker skins is widespread, and yet we haven’t had a conversation about what to do about that. People of good conscience haven’t led a good conversation about that. Meanwhile, there’s been an entire conversation that’s been deeply mean-spirited and trafficking in stereotypes that Donald Trump is a bully pulpit expression of … and not to politicize this, we have seen the mainstreaming of stereotypes justifying racial inequality. White people want to choose a side; they want to be on the right side of history. But we’ve lost the muscle to work through the reality of our distance from one another and the pervasiveness of unconscious bias. So when he made that admission, I think it resonated because a lot of white people knew where he was coming from and were impressed that he was brave or that I was compassionate.
  • How were you so empathetic and compassionate? I recognize that the mythology we have in which racism is something that happens to bad people is destructive and false, and it allows us to think racism is gone because bad people from history are gone. If I recognize that you can be a good person and that racism is in the oxygen we breathe, it allows me to have a lot of compassion to let them metabolize that racism differently
  • There’s a false mythology that in the days of segregation, the majority of white people were bad, evil people and no one today could hold that position if they were fed the same images and stories of why black people deserved it. … Where did Southerners get the belief that there was something so wrong with black children that they shouldn’t drink from the same water fountain? It wasn’t inner malevolence; it was images and messages that justified black people’s lower position in society.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • I think it’s important we let individuals who are brave enough to say they want to be a better American understand that our entire society sets them up to accept a lot of negative stereotypes of people of color.
  • If our entire society sets this up, then how do we change it? The first thing to do is exit the denial phase as the brave caller did and then take it as a national imperative for us to create a shared sense of history, to acknowledge the sins of our past that still structure economic policy … enroll people of all races in this project out of a sense of patriotism that America’s greatness comes from our diversity.
2More

A groundswell for sanity - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-9570-29c9830535e5_story.html decency trump
shared by Javier E on 15 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • a third key constituency that is underanalyzed because its ranks are not exceptionally partisan or ideological. They are citizens who ask for a basic minimum from those in charge of their government: some dignity and decorum, a focus on problem-solving, and orderliness rather than chaos. Trump and the conservatives sustaining him are completely out of line with this behavioral conservatism built on self-restraint and temperamental evenness.
  • here is a bet that there is also a quiet revolution of conscience in the country among those who are sick to death of the chaos they see every day on the news, a White House whose energy is devoted to stabbing internal foes in the back and a president who can’t stop thinking about himself. In the face of this, demanding simple decency is a radical and subversive act.
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I wrote The Art of the Deal with Trump. He's still a scared child | Tony Schwartz | Opi... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...p-us-president-art-of-the-deal trump child fear assessment
shared by Javier E on 19 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Fear is the hidden through-line in Trump’s life – fear of weakness, of inadequacy, of failure, of criticism and of insignificance. He has spent his life trying to outrun these fears by “winning” – as he puts it – and by redefining reality whenever the facts don’t serve the narrative he seeks to create.
  • We fear Trump because he is impulsive, irrational and self-serving, but above all because he seems unconstrained by even the faintest hint of conscience. Trump feels no more shame over his most destructive behaviours than a male lion does killing the cubs of his predecessor when he takes over a pride.
  • The fearful divide Trump has exacerbated is not simply between his supporters and his detractors, the rich and the poor, or Democrats and Republicans, but between the best and the worst in each of us
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • I have never observed any of these qualities in Trump. Over the past year I have frequently been asked whether he has any redeeming qualities. I’ve thought about this as objectively as I can, and the only one I’ve come up with is his relentless drive
  • Think for a moment about the immense difference between how you feel and behave at your best and your worst. It is when we feel safest and most secure that we think most clearly and expansively. It’s also when we are most inclined to look beyond our self-interest, and to act with compassion, generosity, consideration and forgiveness.
  • In the face of fear, it is a physiological fact that our most primitive and selfish instincts emerge. Control of our behaviour shifts from the prefrontal cortex to the emotionally driven amygdala – sometimes referred to as “fear central”. As we move into fight-or-flight mode, we become more self-centred, and our vision narrows to the perceived threat, which in the modern world is less to our survival than to our sense of value and worthiness. We lose the capacity for empathy, rationality, proportionality and attention to the longer-term consequences of our actions.
  • Trump represents an extreme version of a sickness from which most men suffer, to some extent. The most powerful stand we can take in opposition to Trump’s values and behaviour is to pursue a higher purpose every day, seek more common ground amid our differences, and find better ways to take care of others and add value wherever we can
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The Regency of Philip of Orleans | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...regency-philip-orleans Philip of Orleans Louis XV France Bourbon Spanish Throne
shared by manhefnawi on 20 May 18 - No Cached
  • The ambitions of Louis XIV dissipated French resources in a series of wasting wars against the combined powers of Europe
  • The King had succeeded in placing his second grandson upon the throne of Spain as Philip V
  • Frankish aristocracy had been distorted by the rise of monarchical despotism
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Since Philip V was barred from the succession by the treaties confirming his Spanish throne, and since the third grandson of Louis XIV, the Due de Berry, died in 1714, only one sickly five-year-old child, the second son of the Due de Bourgogne, would separate Philip of Orleans from the crown at the old King’s death
  • The powers bestowed upon Orleans as Regent deflated the pride of the over-confident Du Maine and frustrated the plans of his ambitious wife
  • Apart from the defeated faction, which had the backing of the ultramontane party, and in particular of Madame de Maintenon (the former governess of the royal bastards and keeper of the late King’s conscience), the triumph of Orleans was greeted with enthusiasm
  • The personality of Philip of Orleans lives in the correspondence of his mother, Elizabeth Charlotte of Bavaria
  • the Regent acted as his own Beau Brummell, and directed with whimsical inconsequence the adoption of Turkish, Polish and English fashions
  • Nevertheless, it continued the persecution of the Huguenots instituted by the late King, and ran counter to the intentions of the tolerant and free-thinking Regent
  • The reaction was so strong that in January 1718 the Regent yielded to the pressure of the old order and suppressed the dixième, a minor tax levied by Louis XIV and borne in part by the nobility
  • Since their bargain with Philip of Orleans in the repudiation of Louis XIV’s will, the magistrates had made use of their right of remonstrance to win a permanent share of the power of the monarchy
  • The Due de Bourbon, encouraged by his profits, began to challenge the political power of the Regent and Dubois
  • In October, at the time when a similar wave of speculation in England was in the process of collapse, the Regent withdrew his support
  • Both the regency and the Hanoverian Whig regime in England were subject to external threats—the Regent from the designs of Philip V, abetted by the Du Maine faction, and the government of George I from the plots of the Pretender
  • Austria, too, was threatened in Italy by the ambitions of Philip V’s Queen, Elizabeth Famese and of his chief minister, the adventurer Alberoni. The Hapsburg Emperor, Charles VI, knew that he might count on English support
  • the Triple Alliance of 1717, and then with Austria in the Quadruple Alliance late in the same year
  • His pupil, the Regent, himself occupied the post of First Minister in the few months that were left to him
  • Louis XV displayed affection for no one save his former governess, the Duchesse de Ventadour; but the kindly Regent won his respect
  • The crises of later years were in part due to the failure of the Regent to exorcise the ghost of Louis XIV during the minority of his great-grandson.
  • He liked to be compared with Henry IV, that first and most humane of Bourbon Kings
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The Holocaust Museum's Lesson for America Today - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...560495 isolationism nativism America First
shared by Javier E on 21 May 18 - No Cached
  • visitors from anywhere in the United States can discover what their hometown newspapers were saying during the rise of Hitler. The answer is: a lot. Discrimination against, and then persecution of, Germany’s Jews was widely covered. Kristallnacht, the officially sanctioned pogrom of November 9–10, 1938, received particular attention, and was roundly condemned across the country. The sympathy with the Jews of Germany and later Europe was impressive, and is documented by contemporary Gallup polls.
  • But were Americans willing to take in refugees, even children? The answer is no: By a three-to-one margin, including on the eve of the war and indeed after it, Americans did not want such immigrants.
  • Grimmer yet: Did America admit at least those refugees provided for in the skimpy quotas allowed under law in the years leading up to 1941 and American entry? The answer again is no: not by a large margin. In 1936, for example, barely a quarter of the visas that could have been issued to refugees from Germany—most of them Jews—were in fact issued.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Roosevelt was a master calculator who was leading a country that wanted nothing to do with immigrants, nothing to do with European squabbles, and not a whole lot to do with Jews.
  • The isolationist organization America First gets its share of attention here, and deservedly so. Launched in September 1940, it soon built up a membership of over 800,000. Led by the retired general and business executive Robert Wood, its most charismatic spokesman was the heroic aviator Charles Lindbergh, a strange but inflammatory hero for the isolationists, who was not beyond the occasional Jew-baiting himself.
  • The mood is more that of the early 1930s, when the horrors of Auschwitz lay in the unimagined and unimaginable future. Then, Americans, angry that the war of 1914–18, the war to end all wars, had not in fact done so, were suspicious of foreigners and susceptible to the demagoguery of politicians like Huey Long or Gerald Nye. They tried to close themselves off from the world. If building a wall would have done it, many would have favored it.
  • the America of the 1930s was not all that great. There were—as we have been reminded by the opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice—the pitiless murders of African Americans by lynch mobs. There were scores of such killings in the 1930s. There was casual and open bigotry and discrimination against Jews and other religious and ethnic groups.
  • There were, thank goodness, other voices and other movements.
  • There was Freedom House, established by Wendell Willkie—FDR’s failed opponent in 1940—and Eleanor Roosevelt, to counteract America First. It remains today one of the great voices of conscience in chronicling the abuses of freedom wherever they occur, true to the legacy of those who founded it almost eight decades ago. It, not America First, is the true voice of a generation that at last made a difficult choice and the right choice.
  • America First opposed the Atlantic Charter issued by Roosevelt and Churchill in August 1941 after their meeting off Newfoundland, presumably including clauses like the pledge to respect the right to self-government. It captured the imaginations of some privileged young men, to include a couple of future presidents and assorted intellectual luminaries. It vanished into thin air after Pearl Harbor
  • Roosevelt turned all of his extraordinary political skills to averting the disaster that would have meant—and even so, it was only through a series of extraordinary miscalculations by America’s enemies that the United States fully stepped up to the challenges awaiting it
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Francis the First of France: Le Roi Chevalier | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...-first-france-le-roi-chevalier Political France Francis I 1547
shared by manhefnawi on 16 May 18 - No Cached
  • This was the reputation acquired by Francis the First in his own time and reverently preserved by subsequent generations. His mother, Louise of Savoy, laid its foundation even before it was certain that he would inherit the throne of his second cousin, Louis XII. In 1504 she had a medallion engraved in honour of the ten-year-old Duke of Valois
  • While Francis I has been remembered as the chivalrous leader who sustained a long and unequal struggle against the Hapsburg Emperor, Charles V, he has also been described as the King of the Renaissance
  • There are, however, other aspects of Francis I that are less consistent with the popular impression. He was the autocrat who built upon the work of Louis XI in creating the despotism of the new monarchy.
  • ...41 more annotations...
  • He was the “most Christian King” who entered into an alliance with the enemy of Christendom. He was the destroyer of the integrity and tradition of the Gallican Church. He was the voluptuary who allowed his court to be divided into factions
  • His father, Charles of Angouleme, resembled his namesake and uncle, the graceful lyric poet, Charles of Orleans
  • The group accepted the easy guardianship at Amboise of Louis, Duke of Orléans, who two years later became King as Louis XII.
  • The adulation of his mother and sister shielded him from the hatred of Anne of Brittany. The Queen had borne Louise XII an only child, the Princess Claude, who was heiress of Brittany in her mother’s right
  • Francis was heir-presumptive to the French Crown. A marriage between Francis and Claude seemed a natural arrangement, which would prevent the alienation of the Duchy of Brittany from the French royal house. But the Queen was firmly opposed to it, and the marriage took place only after her death in 1514
  • the future of the heir-presumptive remained in doubt. In October 1514, Louis XII
  • married Mary of England, the sister of Henry VIII. Francis was less distressed than his mother
  • Bonnivet was made Admiral of France, and the long-vacant title of Constable was bestowed upon his cousin, Charles of Bourbon
  • Political responsibilities were not neglected in the flush of military success.
  • In February 1516, the grandson of the Emperor, Charles of Austria, inherited the thrones of Aragon and Castile. Six months later, he recognized the French conquest of Milan. At this time there was no hostility between him and Francis I.
  • The election of Charles V marked the beginning of a two-hundred-year conflict between the French monarchy and the Hapsburgs
  • opposed to a rival whose encircling dominions included Spain, the Netherlands, Germany and southern Italy, and whose strength was augmented by the wealth of the New World
  • The contrast between the ebullient King of the Renaissance and the melancholic Emperor has always attracted the attention of historians
  • The one reliving the ancient myths of the universal monarchy and the crusade against the infidel: the other replacing the symbolic attitudes of the past with the realistic values of the nation state
  • The two Kings were too much alike in age and temperament to allow common interests to still the spirit of mutual competition
  • Henry VIII, reading through the terms of a declaration, obligingly omitted his title of King of France
  • When hostilities began in the following year, the Tudor King, after making some show of mediation, aligned himself with the Emperor. The war went badly
  • For a year Francis I remained the captive of the Emperor in Madrid, while Louise of Savoy rallied national sentiment for the continuation of the war
  • The great-grandfather of the Emperor was Charles the Bold of Burgundy. It was as a Burgundian that Charles V claimed the lands that had been seized by Louis XI. The release of the King was not secured until a pledge had been given for the cession of Burgundy
  • The King had never intended to observe the terms of the Treaty of Madrid. Fresh allies were found in Italy, notably Pope Clement VII
  • In the course of the war, Bourbon was killed during the ferocious assault of his mutinous forces on Rome in May 1527
  • In the sack of Rome Henry VIII saw an opportunity to win the favour of Clement VII and obtain the annulment of his marriage with Catherine of Aragon. For several years he remained the ally of France
  • Even after the revelation of the marriage with Anne Boleyn, Francis pleaded the English case during his meeting with the Pope at Marseilles in October 1533
  • The subsequent death of Catherine of Aragon removed the cause of English disagreement with the Emperor. In the last two wars of the reign Henry VIII reverted to the imperial alliance
  • Turkish armies were threatening the eastern imperial marches. In his league with the Sultan Sulaiman he inaugurated one of the most enduring of French policies
  • a vast Turkish army had erupted into Hungary and overwhelmed the Emperor’s Hungarian allies
  • The infidel was regarded with mingled curiosity and horror
  • The Ottoman alliance appalled the conscience of Europe; but the King found it difficult to resist the temptation offered by the expeditions of Charles V to North Africa and the campaigns of his brother, Ferdinand, upon the Bohemian border
  • Although the King’s diplomacy with the Papacy, the Turk, England and the Princes of the Empire, contained many failures and much duplicity, it was pursued with a realism and a flexibility that offset his lack of strategic ability in war
  • By June 1538, when Paul III personally negotiated the truce of Nice, it appeared possible to achieve a genuine reconciliation
  • The significant campaigns of the future were not to be fought in Italy, but on the frontiers of France
  • The altered texture of French society in the first half of the sixteenth century was, in part, a response to the demands of the monarchy
  • Francis I never summoned a full Estates-General
  • In July 1527, in the presence of the King, the Parlement heard from the lips of secretary Robertet a statement so imperious and unequivocal that it represented an unprecedented declaration of monarchical absolutism. The King, like Louis XII before him, was called the father of his people; but, whereas Louis earned his patriarchal status through his benevolence, Francis claimed it as his right
  • His sister, Marguerite, now Queen of Navarre, was scarcely less influential
  • Factions long concealed within the court became more apparent after the death of the Dauphin in 1536
  • The plain and modest Queen Eleonore, sister of Charles V, whom the King had married five years after the death of Claude in 1525, became the centre of the pro-Hapsburg party at the court
  • He held the office once occupied by de Boisy and, finally, that which the traitor Bourbon had forfeited
  • the King’s death in 1547
  • In the last years of the reign the glories of the new monarchy seemed tarnished and outworn
  • bowed to the zealots of the Sorbonne and aped the gallant ways of his youth
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Religion in Russia - Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism - 0 views

www.advantour.com/...religion.htm religion russia
shared by krystalxu on 31 May 18 - No Cached
  • Russia is a secular state, where no religion can be established as dominant state or compulsory. The freedom of conscience and religion is guaranteed by the Constitution.
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