The media about this is sobering to read. Wagenknecht is criticised for the scandalous statement „Putin nicht so sei, wie er im Westen dargestellt werde: ‚ein durchgeknallter Nationalist‘.“ Here Wagenknecht very much agrees with what I’ve read over the years from Charles Clover, former Moscow bureau chief for the Financial Times, or Timothy Frye, PoliSci Russian expert at Columbia. I think she handles Lanz’s baiting well. Kevin Kühnert’s silent fidgeting is the Olaf Scholz SPD posture exactly: „Damn! Why did a war have to happen on our watch?“

Andrew Cockburn, Harper’s:

Every year on the first of December, the Committee to Protect Journalists publishes its global prison census, documenting the number of journalists behind bars around the world. The 2022 edition set a grim record: 363 jailed journalists. Scanning the list—organized alphabetically by first name—and scrolling down to the J’s, we see that Juan Lorenzo Holmann Chamorro, publisher of the Nicaraguan newspaper La Prensa, has been locked up since 2021 on charges of money laundering, part of the Ortega dictatorship’s crackdown on independent media. Next is Juret Haji, the director of the Xinjiang Daily, detained since 2018 after a colleague was accused of being “two-faced,” a common Chinese government accusation. Julian Assange would fit neatly between these two names, but he fails to appear, as has been the case since the founder of WikiLeaks was dragged from London’s Ecuadorian Embassy in 2019 and locked in solitary confinement at Belmarsh Prison, dubbed “Britain’s Guantánamo.”

The omission is striking for anyone who recalls the thunderous impact made by Assange’s revelations of U.S. government secrets. But the significance has faded for many, if it ever took hold in the first place. There are few high-profile public demands for an accounting of or prosecution for the crimes exposed through his reporting. In toto, WikiLeaks took away the filters through which we are normally directed to view the world. Without it, we would have little idea of the number of civilians killed in Iraq and Afghanistan during the American invasion, or of the United States’ war crimes, such as the execution of eleven handcuffed people, including five children, in a 2006 raid on a house in Iraq. We would not know that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was fully aware that Saudi Arabia was a source of “critical financial support” for the Taliban and Al Qaeda; or that the British government was misleading the public about its intentions for the former inhabitants of Diego Garcia, many of whom were displaced in the Sixties and Seventies to make way for an American base. How does the CIA approach the business of so-called targeted assassination? WikiLeaks gave us the agency’s inside view, as well as the methods it developed to bug our TVs and take control of our cars. Did the Democratic National Committee maneuver to rig the 2016 primary campaigns? WikiLeaks showed that indeed it did. “It’s an archive of American diplomacy for those years,” said John Goetz, a former reporter for Der Spiegel who worked with Assange to publish documents. “Without WikiLeaks, we wouldn’t know any of that.”

These achievements have cost Assange more than ten years of confinement and imprisonment.

Pretty happy to have this.

Die Zeit:

Pre-Covid discussions of European autonomy, including that of a Macron-advocated independent European defense force, seem very far away indeed, as does any public recognition of the pre-invasion state of corruption in Ukraine.

Ray McGovern describes Olaf Scholz’s relation to Biden as that of a battered spouse. The visit of Biden, a man openly suffering from dementia, to a khaki clad television comedian serves here, in Die Zeit’s eyes, to demonstrate Europe’s shortcomings. There are endless pious accolades for those brave Ukrainian freedom fighters protecting otherwise defenseless German democracy from the cruel ravages of lawless totalitarianism. This constant spew would have just a few short years ago appeared slapstick humor, as would have the vision of Annalena Baerbock leading a chorus of Die Grünen calls for tanks, jets — you name it — to Ukraine. We daily have both these comedy acts, however mainstream media shows no signs of laughter at what seems so obviously farcical.

SZ:

To fix citizenship in a future Polish state to the category of „Polishness“ alone was highly irrational anyhow, and not only because of the impossibility of clearly defining it, but also because this would have meant to either disenfranchise or expatriate a third of the people living within the new state borders—a terrifying vision, if one thinks about it. Only a few years later, the Greek—Turkish War (1919—22) resulted in a human catastrophe of hitherto unknown dimension. About 1.6 million Greeks and Turks were forced to leave their homes and to cross the new border, as agreed upon in the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. The immediate consequences were disastrous: diseases, horrible living conditions, and high mortality rates amongst the refugees (or better: expellees). Philipp Ther has made it clear that this was not what such events are often called—a breach of civilization. On the contrary, this kind of engineered ethnic cleansing was „clearly a feature of European modernity“ and the dreadful, but logical consequence of ethnic nation-state building.

—Jochen Böhler, Civil War in Central Europe, 1918-1921, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 30.

The last two sentences here really struck a chord with me for several reasons: mass expulsions as a feature of modernity echoes both Zygmunt Bauman on modernity and Tadeusz Borowski’s sense of humankind. I read this in the present context of continual exposure to Western pronouncements about the rule of law being broken/upheld, democracy being threatened/defended, when little of the claimed nature is occurring.

Christoph Ruf, nd:

Borniertheit, die Unfähigkeit, wirklich zu diskutieren, sind aber leider ebenso im Trend wie die panische Abwehr des Gedankens, dass manche Themen sehr komplex sind, um sie in richtig/falsch- oder dämlich/clever-Kategorien einzusortieren.

Ω Ω Ω

Was ich von der Außenministerin vernehme, ist mir jedoch zu einfach. Es gehe um »Gerechtigkeit oder Ungerechtigkeit«, »Freiheit oder Unterdrückung« und darum, ob man »auf der Seite des Aggressors oder des Opfers« stehe. Je mehr ich darüber nachdenke, umso mehr beschleicht mich ein schlimmer Verdacht: Vielleicht spricht die Frau auf Englisch einfach nur so simpel, wie sie auf Deutsch denkt.