06 Sep
News and Analyses, A Foreign Perspective
News and Analyses, A Foreign Perspective
English Online International Newspapers
Nearly all of these are English-edition daily newspapers. These sites have interesting editorials and essays, and many have links to other good news sources. We try to limit this list to those sites which are regularly updated, reliable, with a high percentage of “up” time.
Recommended:
Irish Examiner>>
France 24>>
Spiegel>>
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I’m 93, and, as extremism sweeps across Europe, I fear we are doomed to repeat the mistakes which created the Holocaust
‘The battle to draw the right lessons from that time is in danger of being lost.’ The Warsaw uprising, 1944. Photograph: Universal History Archive/Getty Images
Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel stated this summer that “when the generation that survived the war is no longer here, we’ll find out whether we have learned from history”. As a Polish Jew born in 1925, who survived the Warsaw ghetto, lost my family in the Holocaust, served in a special operations unit of the Polish underground, the Home Army, and fought in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, I know what it means to be at the sharp end of European history – and I fear that the battle to draw the right lessons from that time is in danger of being lost.
Now 93 years old and living in Tel Aviv, I have watched from afar in recent years as armchair patriots in my native Poland have sought to exploit and manipulate the memories and experiences of my generation. They may think they are promoting “national dignity” or instilling “pride” in today’s young people, but in reality they are threatening to raise future generations in darkness, ignorant of the war’s complexity and doomed to repeat the mistakes for which we paid such a high price.
Stanis?aw Aronson as an officer in the Second Carpathian Rifles, under British command in Italy, in 1946
But this is not just a Polish phenomenon: it is happening in many parts of Europe, and our experiences hold lessons for the whole continent.
Given what I’ve learned over my lifetime I would, first, urge future generations of Europeans to remember my generation as we really were, not as they may wish us to have been. We had all the same vices and weaknesses as today’s young people do: most of us were neither heroes nor monsters.
Of course, many people did extraordinary things, but in most cases only because they were forced to by extreme circumstances, and even then, true heroes were very few and far between: I do not count myself among them.
The same applies to those who failed in their moral obligations during that time. Of course, there were many who committed unspeakable, unforgivable crimes. But it is nonetheless important to understand that we were a generation living in fear, and fear makes people do terrible things. Unless you have felt it, you cannot truly understand it.
‘I ended up moving to what was then the British mandate of Palestine, fighting for a Jewish homeland.’ Photograph: Stanis?aw Aronson papers
Second, just as there is no such thing as a “heroic generation”, there is no such thing as a “heroic nation” – or indeed an inherently malign or evil nation either. I must confess that for much of my life, I maintained the view that it was important for Poles to feel pride in their wartime record – leading me, when recounting my experiences serving in the Home Army in Warsaw under Nazi occupation, to omit certain examples of indifference and uncooperativeness on behalf of my fellow Poles. It is only in recent years, as I have seen that pride turn into self-righteousness, and that self-righteousness into self-pity and aggression, that I have realised just how wrong it was not to be completely open about the failings I witnessed.
The truth is that, as a Pole and as a Jew, as a soldier and as a refugee, I experienced a wide spectrum of behaviour at the hands of Poles – from those who sheltered me at risk to their own lives, to those who sought to take advantage of my vulnerability, and all possible shades of concern and indifference in between.
And although the Third Reich destroyed my world, it was a German woman who saved my life by introducing me to the men who would recruit me into the Polish underground. No nation has a monopoly on virtue – something that many people, including many of my fellow Israeli citizens, still struggle to understand.
Third, do not underestimate the destructive power of lies. When the war broke out in 1939, my family fled east and settled for a couple of years in Soviet-occupied Lwów (now Lviv in western Ukraine). The city was full of refugees, and rumours were swirling about mass deportations to gulags in Siberia and Kazakhstan. To calm the situation, a Soviet official gave a speech declaring that the rumours were false – nowadays they would be called “fake news” – and that anyone spreading them would be arrested. Two days later, the deportations to the gulags began, with thousands sent to their deaths.
Those people and millions of others, including my immediate family, were killed by lies. My country and much of the continent was destroyed by lies. And now lies threaten not only the memory of those times, but also the achievements that have been made since. Today’s generation doesn’t have the luxury of being able to argue that it was never warned or did not understand the consequences of where lies will take you.
Confronting lies sometimes means confronting difficult truths about one’s self and one’s own country. It is much easier to forgive yourself and condemn another, than the other way round; but this is something that everyone must do. I have made my peace with modern Germany, and hope that all Europeans can do the same.
Finally, do not ever imagine that your world cannot collapse, as ours did. This may seem the most obvious lesson to be passed down, but only because it is the most important. One moment I was enjoying an idyllic adolescence in my home city of Lodz, and the next we were on the run. I would only return to my empty home five years later, no longer a carefree boy but a Holocaust survivor and Home Army veteran living in fear of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD. I ended up moving to what was then the British mandate of Palestine, fighting in a war of independence for a Jewish homeland I didn’t even know I had.
Perhaps it is because I was only a child that I did not notice the storm clouds that were gathering, but I believe that many who were older and wiser than me at that time also shared my childlike state.
If disaster comes, you will find that all the myths you once cherished are of no use to you. You will see what it is like to live in a society where morality has collapsed, causing all your assumptions and prejudices to crumble before your eyes. And after it’s all over, you will watch as, slowly but surely, these harshest of lessons are forgotten as the witnesses pass on and new myths take their place.
• Stanis?aw Aronson took part in the Polish resistance under Nazi occupation. He lives in Israel
World Politics
United States
Unidentified official claims ‘resistance’ within administration is working in opposition to president’s impulses
Donald Trump has reacted with fury to an anonymous account written by a current Trump administration official claiming an internal White House resistance is working to “frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations” until he leaves – or can be removed from – office.
The op-ed, published in the New York Times on Wednesday, represents a shocking critique of Trump and is without precedent in modern American history. The anonymous author describes Trump as amoral, “anti-trade and anti-democratic” and prone to making “half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions”.
The writer claims aides had explored the possibility of removing Trump from office via the 25th amendment, a complex constitutional mechanism to allow for the replacement of a president who is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office”, but had decided against it.
“So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until – one way or another – it’s over,” the author writes.
Trump responded to the article at the White House late on Wednesday, deriding it as “anonymous, meaning gutless” and describing the author as “some anonymous source within the administration probably who is failing and probably here for all the wrong reasons”.
He went on to call the New York Times “failing” and insisted “they don’t like Donald Trump and I don’t like them because they’re very dishonest people”.
In a tweet on Wednesday evening, Trump went further and simply asked “TREASON?” In a follow up tweet, he insisted: “If the GUTLESS anonymous person does indeed exist, the Times must, for National Security purposes, turn him/her over to government at once!”
Writing an op-ed for the New York Times does not violate any statute in the United States legal code.
In contrast to Trump’s Democratic critics, the author makes clear that “ours is not the popular ‘resistance’ of the left”, but a coalition that wants the administration to flourish.
“We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous,” the author writes. However, they describe a cabal of “Trump appointees [who] have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office”.
The author praises their efforts as “heroic” as they attempt to “keep bad decisions contained to the West Wing” and thwart Trump’s “erratic behavior”. They also claimed the administration’s achievements had included some “bright spots” such as “effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more”.
An official statement from the White House press secretary, Sarah Sanders, said: “Nearly 62 million people voted for president Donald J Trump in 2016, earning him 306 Electoral College votes – versus 232 for his opponent. None of them voted for a gutless, anonymous source to the failing New York Times. We are disappointed, but not surprised, that the paper chose to publish this pathetic, reckless, and selfish op-ed … This is just another example of the liberal media’s concerted effort to discredit the president.”
Sanders went on to add: “The individual behind this piece has chosen to deceive, rather than support, the duly elected president of the United States. He is not putting country first, but putting himself and his ego ahead of the will of the American people. This coward should do the right thing and resign.”
One former White House official said they were flabbergasted by the op-ed. “I used to laugh when certain Trump supporters would fret about anti-Trump ‘sleeper cells’ within the government,” said the former White House aide. “But I can’t come up with a better term than that to describe the author of the NYT op-ed.”
Sebastian Gorka, the controversial former White House aide, told the Guardian: “If this were 1917 or 1944 this would count as treason of the highest order.”
In an interview on CNN, John Kasich, governor of Ohio, said of Trump and his administration: “It’s just chaos all the time. And he’s the commander of the chaos … I’m concerned that things aren’t getting done.”
The op-ed comes only a day after excerpts from the veteran journalist Bob Woodward’s book Fear were published in the Washington Post, detailing stinging criticisms from a number of current and former senior administration officials against Trump.
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