Timothy Garton Ash writing in the Financial Times

Brace for disorder as the great power shifts begin

As we pass the 80th anniversary of the end of the second world war in Europe, every day brings further evidence that a remarkably long-lived US-led international order is over. Everyone is now scrambling to work out what might succeed it. A new multi-polar order? Spheres of influence? A worldwide version of the 19th-century Concert of Europe? By far the most plausible answer, however, is a prolonged and dangerous period of global disorder.

James Butler writing in the LRB of the late pope, Francis

I watched the ailing Francis insist on visiting prisoners, gaspingout greetings, being present for his Easter message, speaking against the madness of rearmament and war,squeezing every last opportunity to speak to the world as it continues to erect new prisons and walls, and new oligarchic idols. ‘Today’s builders of Babel tell us that there is no room for losers, and that those who fall along the way are losers,’ Francis wrote in his last meditations on Good Friday. ‘Theirs is the construction site of Hell.’

Fill the gaps, as you think. We live within it.

Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich

What sort of people drove the Third Reich, Richard Evans asks. There is — there always is — a message for the present day.

For, since shortly after the beginning of the twenty-first century, democratic institutions have been under threat in many countries across the world. Strongmen and would-be dictators are emerging, often with considerable popular support, to undermine democracy, muzzle the media, control the judiciary, stifle opposition, and undermine basic human rights. Political corruption, lies, dishonesty and deceit are becoming the new currency of politics, with fatal results for our fundamental freedoms. Hatred and persecution of minorities are on the increase, stoked by unscrupulous politicians. The future is bleak, the prospects for freedom and democracy uncertain.

‘A new reality began to dawn’: the fall of Saigon, 50 years on

Chris Mullin writing in the Guardian.

Why, I asked Vietnam’s foreign minister, Mr Thach, didn’t you appeal to the UN when you were attacked by the Khmer Rouge, instead of invading? “We do not have such a high regard for the UN as you do,” he said.

“How so?”

His reply was devastating. “Because during the last 40 years we have been invaded by four of the five permanent members of the security council.”

Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’ – The Atlantic

“When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, near Paris, in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.

Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.” [emphasis added]

A spade, a spade. Am in Italy. It matters.

Unbridled capitalism is the ‘dung of the devil’, says Pope Francis

“The new colonialism takes on different faces. At times it appears as the anonymous influence of mammon: corporations, loan agencies, certain ‘free trade’ treaties, and the imposition of measures of ‘austerity’ which always tighten the belt of workers and the poor,” he said.

The Guardian

In the last months of his reign, Francis lashed out at the Trump administration’s plans for “mass deportations” of migrants. In a letter to American bishops that some commentators saw as containing implicit criticisms of JD Vance, Trump’s Catholic vice-president, the pope denounced measures that link “the illegal status of some migrants with criminality”. The pope received Vance for a brief personal audience on the eve of his death on Easter Monday. The US vice-president also met senior Church officials who conveyed the Vatican’s dismay about Washington’s immigration policies.

FT

Ed Kiely · Unfair Judgments: Lethal Cuts at the DWP

Pring’s account reveals something of the character of austerity: it isn’t so much that the state withdraws from an involvement in people’s lives, but that its contact with them is degraded. Many of the people Pring writes about were in touch with an array of government agencies until they died. But these encounters were characterised by indifference, hostility and suspicion. [emphasis added]

The quote comes from a review of a book by John Pring on the crimes perpetrated against the sick by the UK government in the name of hunting out those malingerers who sponge off the state. But the language and sentiment seems apposite to describe much of the NHS.

MD, one of medicine’s sharpest observers writing in Private Eye 1646 (April 4-17th).

Today’s NHS is full of angry consultants whose extra shifts attract punitive pension contributions, and even angrier resident medics who are already exhausted and can’t get onto training schemes. The chances of hitting the 2029 target [getting the waiting lists down to <18 weeks!] looks slim. Perhaps physician associates have been fast tracked to get waiting times down?

Of course, physician associates do not have a qualification that is recognised outwith the UK: they can’t leave for sunnier climes, hence the government’s infatuation. Some of us think they do not have a meaningful clinical qualification at all.

With regards to waiting times, they are now the worst I have ever seen. Choose your specialty here and see what medial care looks like in Edinburgh Scotland’s capital city. (The link was forwarded to patients by my GP’s practice.) And to think this was once a genuinely famous centre of medical excellence.

For an urgent skin cancer referral the wait is close to 20 weeks. My second publication, a single author paper in the BMJ published over 40 years ago, documented how misleading NHS statistics were. Then, it was incompetence, now it is— pardon the metaphor — malignant intent. Going forward, I expect the skin figures to be gross underestimates.

Betty Webb never spoke about her work, until she had to.

Another wonderful obituary from The Economist

She herself had no idea what her work added up to. When she had dropped out of her very ladylike domestic-science course, where she was learning how to run a house and bake sausage rolls, she had not envisaged this. She wanted to help win the war, looking glamorous in uniform and perhaps driving a truck. Instead she was sent to the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), where the uniform featured khaki knickers so vast that they either showed below her skirt or had to be yanked up to her armpits. Meanwhile, her job at Bletchley was to index, by date and call sign, intercepted messages from the German police, and to file them in shoeboxes on her desk…

As a very old woman, watching birds through her cottage window in the quiet West Midlands countryside, she roundly objected to the fascist salutes given by some of Donald Trump’s supporters. How dare they? This was not just dangerous. It was an insult to everything she and her colleagues at Bletchley Park had achieved. For she knew, now, just how much they had done. The secret was indeed out.

Didn’t drive a Tesla either, I suspect.

Is there anything left to learn about The Beatles?

From a review of John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie in The Economist

In 1967 Bryan Magee, a British philosopher and author, noted that 40-year-old songs by the likes of George Gershwin, Cole Porter and Jerome Kern still had wide currency. Given an “indifference to melody in favour of rhythm and intriguing new sound mixtures”, he doubted that the songs of the 1960s would fare so well. “Does anyone seriously believe that Beatles music will be an unthinkingly accepted part of daily life all over the world in the 2000s?” he dared to ask…The question now seems daft.

BTW: Magee was a wonderful and generous student of philosophy and wrote well on Popper