The Man and Brussels

 

Who dares defy the might of Rome? The question would have faced different answers, at least in analysis, if asked in the third century before or after year 1 or on it, and with . With the might, or so we might say proverbially, of Brussels - a project founded as if an experiment pushing the substance of soft power to its extreme - being a purported heir to Ancient Rome, mighty yet peaceful and democratic (and in practice, as the great Arouet would have put it, neither of those things) 

The great rebel against this cause, and emblematically so against a "European" foreign policy over all else, has for a decade and a half been Viktor Orbán, the all but self-professed devil of the new European order. Among his acolytes, or rather followers, we can count . Should this man fall, will the union stand strong? 

Autocratic yet popular, but now apparently failing in both regards... will the man in black hold the crowd firm in defiance of "Europe" he, and they, both claim to be and rally against? 

With the emergence of Tisza, a party named from a river emblematic in the aphorism that "the Tisza is overflowing", heralding a bountiful harvest and bright future, typically under the banner of a former Orbán scion Peter Magyar (an emblematic name as well), 

Europe is decidedly grander than Brussels, or the common American trope of "You-rope-eons", and it will be incumbent on those in charge to justify their own ostensibly democratic credentials against such rising populist-but-undemocratic waves, rather than ignore and suppress them successfully, in what is more and more apparently a game of whack-a-mole and simultaneously doing deals with the Devil just stoned by your hand, as the managers await the impending tsunami. "It" needs reform, but reform where it is most needed will not be born from the successful toppling of Orbán, but if anything obviated by it. The maintenance of the system, beyond national boundaries and with active putting of lips and fingers against the scale against anomalies of the Orbán kind, including dropping the erstwhile credible result in the Romanian election in favour of a better one, or numerous other interventions of a salient kind often, and often credibly, denounced when Russians are at the helm of them (mirroring, say, physical and military interventions in formally-formerly colonies)   

The Scourge of War

 

Writing a post like this forces one to confront the question; have I really not used this heading before? If so, where? And if not now, when? WHile I was both superficially anguished and quite pleased with a recent post of a friend proclaiming his new-found and still-kindled fealty to the organisation previously known by its acronym IMT, or International Marxist Tendency (perhaps better summed up, as so many of these organisations, by its longterm figurehead, Alan Woods) 

Rebel of what cause?

 

The too-prevalent excuse, or attempt at an argument, for the behaviour of others by highlighting their ostensible connections, or even wires, to other, "higher" beings capable of independent ideological statements is boorish, in addition to  

Ecclesia Sueciae, De Quo Ecclesia?

The proposition that the Church of Sweden would have been "left-wing" would have struck most of its historical critics as a cathedral flying in the face of reason. 

In the land of Fox, Milton and the Barons of 1215

 

The issue of free speech in the land that spelled, if not the very first mention of democracy, the advent of modern, representative democracy (and its oft-claimed corollary parliamentary system) but also crucial - and perhaps crucially precognizant to the developed notion of free speech, 

Last to scrap first past

 

It would seem the most sublime, if not the strongest, argument for maintaining so-called "first past the post" is the power of tradition, and that the blood shed by de Montfort and his forces at Evesham and Lewes must not be insulted by pulling the connective tissue between voters (now far removed, and in the millions) and representatives up. But would reform, in effect accomplished, to the elections of the Commons in effect be a more sordid affair than of French, Prussian or New Zealand political institutions and would it diminish democracy, as so many - unspokenly - seem to think? 

The strange death of Swedish Liberalism

 The election, with hours to go before this year's presumed premier political event on the Liberals' part (and perhaps their penultimate) the questionable milestone, as well as decision, to select a leader younger than yours truly to succeed the miracle of mediocrity, the man behind the grill, and hopefully to reenact his historic (well) achievement of not being the second (or third) party leader to lose its Riksdag seats, with the (also questionable) ominous sign they may well not recover. In the case of Swedish Liberalism, once hegemonic (as so many heroes have been) in fighting for their goal, of universal suffrage,