RUTHFULLY YOURS

One of the most beautiful towns in England, Lewes is relatively unspoiled by the twentieth-century British architectural incompetence that has proved so destructive of urban grace, spreading the most hideous ugliness almost everywhere as a kind of metonym for social equality. From Lewes’s streets can be seen the lovely, rolling downs of Sussex, and it is curious how the sight of green hills from the center of a town or city (still possible in Dublin, for example) soothes the mind. Among Lewes’s most famous residents were Thomas Paine, author of The Rights of Man, and Charles Dawson, the man most likely to have forged Piltdown Man, the hoax human fossil whose inauthenticity was not exposed until 40 years after its “discovery” in 1912. To my great delight, Lewes’s High Street has three excellent secondhand or antiquarian bookshops.

I had been invited down to a literary event, the Lewes Speakers Festival, to talk about my recently published memoir of life as a prison doctor, The Knife Went In. I was to be the penultimate speaker, followed by a controversial conservative journalist, Katie Hopkins, who was to talk about her own recently published memoir, Rude.

The event ended in violence.

The festival organizer, Marc Rattray, had informed me in advance that there might be trouble from demonstrators who would want to prevent Hopkins from speaking. No doubt it is a measure of how detached I am from the ordinary life of my country that I had until then scarcely heard of her, for she is either loved or abominated by millions of my fellow countrymen. (I would have guessed, if put to it, that she was an actress or a pop singer.) Some love her because she says things that many think but dare not say, while others abominate her, accusing her of bigotry and spreading hatred—hatred directed at the wrong people, that is.

Turkish propagandists also have been twisting facts to try to portray Greece as the aggressor.

Although Turkey knows that the islands are legally and historically Greek, Turkish authorities want to occupy and Turkify them, presumably to further the campaign of annihilating the Greeks, as they did in Anatolia from 1914 to 1923 and after.

Any attack against Greece should be treated as an attack against the West.

There is one issue on which Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its main opposition, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), are in complete agreement: The conviction that the Greek islands are occupied Turkish territory and must be reconquered. So strong is this determination that the leaders of both parties have openly threatened to invade the Aegean.

The only conflict on this issue between the two parties is in competing to prove which is more powerful and patriotic, and which possesses the courage to carry out the threat against Greece. While the CHP is accusing President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s AKP party of enabling Greece to occupy Turkish lands, the AKP is attacking the CHP, Turkey’s founding party, for allowing Greece to take the islands through the 1924 Treaty of Lausanne, the 1932 Turkish-Italian Agreements, and the 1947 Paris Treaty, which recognized the islands of the Aegean as Greek territory.

In 2016, Erdoğan said that Turkey “gave away” the islands that “used to be ours” and are “within shouting distance.” “There are still our mosques, our shrines there,” he said, referring to the Ottoman occupation of the islands.

Given Western Europe’s open aversion to the rise of right-wing parties in Eastern Europe, the EU’s silence in the face of Poland’s behavior politically makes no sense.

Ever since Poland’s far-right Law and Justice Party (PiS) took control of both the presidency and the parliament in November 2015, and quickly changed the rules for public media, the secret service, education, and the military, the European Parliament has been claiming that Warsaw is putting the “rule of law and democracy” at risk.

When it comes to the issue of Polish anti-Semitism, Europe is suddenly at a loss for words. This suggests that it is not merely ineptitude at work.

Implementation of the controversial Holocaust bill, passed by the Polish Senate on February 1, was “frozen” temporarily, due to the toxic rift it caused in Warsaw-Jerusalem relations. The bill, proposed by the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS), makes illegal any suggestion that Poland was complicit in the Holocaust, particularly the Nazi death camps, which were German, but located on Polish soil.

Criticism of the bill in Israel and among diaspora Jews has been loud and forceful across the political spectrum. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the bill an attempt to “rewrite history,” and a Polish diplomatic delegation is arriving in Israel on February 28 to discuss the diplomatic crisis.

Although Jewish outrage over such a law — which would fine and even jail anyone who dared to implicate Poland in the Nazi genocide — is probably no surprise, the crashing silence from the rest of Europe is shocking.

To his credit, European Council President Donald Tusk, a former prime minister of Poland, made two public statements against the bill — one on Twitter and the other during a press conference in Brussels. His sentiments were echoed by members of the world media and intelligentsia, who have protested Poland’s move.

Former Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice and others who say the U.S. can live with a nuclear-armed North Korea cite deterrence and the North’s certain destruction if it attacks Americans. This is a convenient faith, but alas it ignores the threat of proliferation to other regimes or actors that might also use weapons of mass destruction against Americans.

This proliferation threat was in sharp relief Tuesday with leaks from a confidential United Nations report alleging that Pyongyang is circumventing trade and financial sanctions and plying its military wares and knowhow to dozens of nasty foreign customers, including Bashar Assad’s Syria.

The Journal’s Ian Talley reports that the North has shipped 50 tons of supplies to Syria, including “high-heat, acid-resistant tiles, stainless-steel pipes and valves,” likely for use in a chemical weapons plant. The report, written by the Panel of Experts that oversees North Korea’s compliance with U.N. resolutions, reveals more than 40 shipments between 2012 and 2017. It also claims Pyongyang sent weapons experts to Syria multiple times as recently as the past two years.

This would solve the mystery of how Assad obtained the sarin gas he used against his people in 2013 and again in 2017. The U.S. believes he is still using chlorine gas against civilians. In 2007 North Korea worked with Syria to build a nuclear-weapons facility at Al Kibar—until Israel destroyed it in a military raid, against the advice of George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice.

The chemical-weapons news also underscores the porousness of U.N. sanctions as the North sells whatever it can for cash to keep its dictatorship afloat. If sanctions are going to stop North Korea, the U.S. and its allies will have to start boarding ships and commandeering aircraft believed to be carrying WMD material. North Korea will sell anything to any bad actor for a price.

The Tri-Border Area of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, also referred to as the Triple Frontier, is host to significant activity by various terrorist groups and criminal organizations. One of them is the Shia jihadist group Hezb’allah, which has used the region for fundraising and training, and as a means by which to carry out attacks in South America.

The Tri-Border Area forms at the convergence of the Iguazú and Paraná rivers. It covers an area of roughly 965 square miles and is surrounded by jungle. In includes the Brazilian city of Foz do Iguaçu, the Paraguayan city of Ciudad del Este, and the Argentine city of Puerto Iguazú.

The Tri-Border Area is attractive to terrorist groups and criminal organizations for a number of reasons. In the period between 1971 and 2001, the population of the Tri-Border Area grew from 60,000 to 700,000. The construction of the Itaipú hydroelectric plant was an important driver of this growth. Such rapid population growth in the region contributed to a lack of infrastructure needed to regulate the high degree of increased commercial activity and border crossings, which has made the area significantly more difficult for law enforcement to police.

Popular protests against the policies of the Iranian regime and in some cases against the regime itself affected 70 Iranian cities between Dec. 28, 2017 and Jan. 4, 2018. Nearly 4,000 protesters were arrested and 23 killed before the demonstrations stopped as suddenly as they had begun. Although the Iranian government tried to cast blame on foreign actors, the protests surprised Western observers, as well as the various Iranian exile movements, who struggled to understand what had happened after the fact. The leadership of the 2009 “Green Revolution” protests against vote fraud in the re-election of then President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears to have played no role. The events of the last days of December and the first days of January appear to have been a spontaneous outburst of popular frustration with deteriorating conditions of life. Lacking structure, organization and a political program, the eruption stopped as quickly as it began.

Because the protests had no organization or centralized leadership, they represent no threat to the Iranian regime in the near term. There is another side to this coin: spontaneous expressions of popular anger on a national scale reflects a deep malaise in Iran’s economy that cannot easily be fixed, if indeed it can be fixed at all. Since the Iranian revolution of 1979, the revolutionary regime has borrowed massively from Iran’s future, in economics, finance, the environment and demographics. It has allowed corruption to determine the allocation of financial resources on the scale of an African kleptocracy. And it has channeled resources into expensive foreign adventures at the expense of desperately-needed spending at home. It cannot employ its present generation of young people, who suffer an official unemployment rate of 20% and an effective unemployment rate of perhaps 35%. The next generation of young people will be much smaller due to an unprecedented decline in Iran’s birth rate.

Although genuine feminists have made strides for women’s rights in Western countries, they have helped set back the rights of young Muslim women to break free from the oppressive codes of an Islam defined and controlled by Muslim men.

It is one of the ironies of modern politics that the same word can be susceptible to more than one meaning, creating confusion for everyone.

One of the reasons for the confusion is that liberal values are generally shared by moderates on both the left and right of politics. Not by the far left — Marxists, Leninists, Trotskyites, and Stalinists or Britain’s Labour Party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn – or by the far right – Germany’s Alternativ für Deutschland, Hungary’s Jobbik, Austria’s Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, or Greece’s Golden Dawn.

Leftist values underpinned both the American and French revolutions, helping to create the liberal democracies that remain our chief defence against Communism at one end of the political spectrum and Fascism on the other. Most of those values are taken for granted by mainstream populations in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and much of Europe. Writing in American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, Ralph Raico describes classical liberalism as

“the term used to designate the ideology advocating private property, an unhampered market economy, the rule of law, constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and of the press, and international peace based on free trade. Up until around 1900, this ideology was generally known simply as liberalism.”

One might also include civil rights; democratic institutions; equal justice under the law; separation of religion, state, judiciary and education, and international co-operation. Although there is, of course, more to liberal values than these, they are all enshrined in articles of the US Constitution and implied or stated in the constitutions and laws of other democracies.

The role of liberalism in the reformation of Europe following World War II is made clear by Oxford historian Professor Martin Conway:

Liberalism, liberal values and liberal institutions formed an integral part of that process of European consolidation. Fifteen years after the end of the Second World War, the liberal and democratic identity of Western Europe had been reinforced on almost all sides by the definition of the West as a place of freedom. Set against the oppression in the Communist East, by the slow development of a greater understanding of the moral horror of Nazism, and by the engagement of intellectuals and others with the new states (and social and political systems) emerging in the non-European world to the south.