For most people, to defend a blood-stained tyrant is perverse and shocking; to defend two seems like recklessness. Yet the causes of both Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic are what occupy Ramsey Clark, 78, as he crowns a political career that started with his appointment to the US government on the first day of the
A charming retired lady doctor of my acquaintance buttonholes me whenever I run into her in London. She knows I write for The Spectator and she is convinced that this Diary page is an irritating spoof. ‘It’s just not possible that those people, like Joan Collins, could ever actually write such rubbish,’ she tells me
In his magnificent funeral oration for Charles I’s queen, Henriette-Marie of France, the 17th-century French cleric Bossuet contrasted the stately continuity of French history with the turbulence and violence of English. France — of whose crown Pope St Gregory the Great had proclaimed, already by the end of the sixth century, that it outshone all
John Laughland on how the US and Britain are intervening in Ukraine’s elections A few years ago, a friend of mine was sent to Kiev by the British government to teach Ukrainians about the Western democratic system. His pupils were young reformers from western Ukraine, affiliated to the Conservative party. When they produced a manifesto
Under communism, the ‘open letter’ was a device by which political hacks publicly advocated certain policies. The party hierarchy was then usually only too happy to comply, as happened when the 1968 ‘Letter to Brezhnev’ from a group of Czechoslovak commies begged Soviet tanks to crush the counter-revolution in Prague. The historical resonance was therefore
A brutal-looking 17-year-old girl takes a long swig from a bottle of sake and thumps it down on the bar, as an ugly- looking man next to her asks her if she likes Ferraris. ‘Do you want to screw me?’ she replies. ‘Yes,’ he says, his goofy and surprised smile revealing bad teeth. She immediately
John Laughland talks to the Czech President, V
It is a measure of the hypermnesia of the Nazi period — and of the concomitant amnesia of the history of communism — that Willi M
It was those trips to the Balkans that started it. As we hard-core Europhobes know, one of the main joys of leaving EU Europe is that the food tastes incomparably better wherever the writ of Brussels does not extend. Although the hard-skinned, white-membraned Dutch tomato has already started to colonise the humble Skopje salad in
A trip to Northern Cyprus is a trip to the 1970s. While the Greek South of the island – home to the Russian Mafia and to the ecstasy-induced raves of Ayia Napa -seethes in corrupt prosperity, the Turkish North indulges in the gentler delights of crazy paving, the New Seekers and Ford Capris. Neither the
Mikhail Khodorkovsky tells John Laughland that American control of Iraq will be good for Cadillacs but bad for Russia Opponents of the impending Anglo-American war against Iraq say that it will push up the oil price and thereby damage the world economy. This is the least of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s worries. Aged 39, Mr Khodorkovsky, is
John Laughland reports from Iraq on the determination of ordinary people to fight any attempt by the British and Americans to impose regime change Mosul, northern Iraq The ancient city of Mosul straddles the Tigris near the Turkish and Syrian borders, and just beneath the hills of Kurdistan. Churches and mosques jostle for space in