Watching recent events in Minneapolis from the comfortable distance of several thousand miles and a large ocean, my mind turned to an influential paper by Everett Hughes, based on an extended visit to West Germany in 1948. ‘Good People and Dirty Work’ began as a public lecture… Hughes asks two questions: How did ‘good Germans’… Read More »
…Trump’s plan to take over the territory is merely the latest American failure to understand that others also have nationalist sentiments and national pride. It was a mistake that dogged US policy in Central America for a generation and led to the disaster in Vietnam. Trump’s plans for Palestine take the USA down the same… Read More »
It is widely reported that one of the first acts of the incoming Trump administration will be to withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO). Predictably, responses are divided. US nationalists dislike the growing efforts to turn WHO into some form of world government with authority to dictate health policies to individual states. Against this,… Read More »