The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is perhaps best understood as the culmination of the Enlightenment tradition of constitutionalism, hedged in legalistic language of proportionality and balance. It asserts that people have a right – or at the very least the right to have rights – to rely on the Convention when a domestic … Read more
As events in Ukraine demonstrate, ineluctably, war diminishes our humanity, possessing men – and mostly men – of a callous disregard for life, and a capacity for often inexplicable cruelty. As such, the invasion of one state by another without a casus belli – as we have witnessed in Russia’s essentially unprovoked invasion of Ukraine … Read more
A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1966) It is, perhaps, notable that as a … Read more
I have previously warned that austerity economics and moral relativism are giving rise to a new fascism, last seen between the World Wars. First published in English in 1926, perhaps the most influential text of that period was Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of The West, which blamed Slavic and other ‘degenerate’ races for Europe’s impoverishment. … Read more