The Red Line: Nagorno-Karabakh (Armenia vs Azerbaijan)

In the South Caucasus between Armenia and Azerbaijan lies an island of Armenians in the middle of Azerbaijan, two countries now firmly at war with each other. The Armenians have invaded and now occupy a quarter of the Azeris territory, but they assert are only doing to protect their people from the government who threatens to "cleanse" the pocket of Armenians.

A complicated conflict with Russia selling to both sides and Turkey (and therefore NATO) obligated to defend the other, this war is a classic situation of "the tail wagging the dog". Will we see another 1914 with a small mountain nation dragging the great powers into war, well for that we turn to our experts?

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BBC4 Analysis: The Smack of Firm Leadership

What does the way in which rival political systems around the world have managed the Covid-19 pandemic tell us about the global political future?

Writer and broadcaster, John Kampfner, considers what has made a "good leader" during the months of the outbreak and how that is likely to affect the vitality and long-term future of individual regimes. Are today's authoritarians - often savvier and subtler than their twentieth century counterparts - becoming more confident and optimistic? Is this a good time for the world's populist leaders from the Americas to Europe to East Asia? And has democracy, already tainted by its response to the global financial crisis and enduring questions over its popular legitimacy, continued with its woes or might there be a glimmer of light after the years of darkness?

Among those taking part: Francis Fukuyama (author of "The End of History and the Last Man"); Anne Applebaum (soon to publish "The Twilight of Democracy"); Singaporean former top diplomat and President of the UN Security Council, Kishore Mahbubani; writer and broadcaster, Misha Glenny; eminent international affairs analyst, Constanze Stelzenmüller; Bulgarian political thinker, Ivan Krastev (joint author of "The Light that Failed") and Lionel Barber, former editor of the "Financial Times".

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UnHerd: Why the rich are revolting

The rich have always paradoxically been radical, something G.K. Chesterton observed over a hundred years ago when he wrote “You’ve got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists: they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists.” [...]

Likewise, the Russian Communist movement. While Karl Marx made endless references to the proletariat, he made very little effort to actually deal with them in the flesh, and when he did, he was disappointed by their moderation; when Marx’s comrades formed the First International they made sure that working-class socialists weren’t allowed anywhere near the important positions. [...]

This indicates a significant radicalisation of the rich, a process that began in the 1960s when the heavily class-based politics of the 20th century began to shift. That social revolution, referred to in Britain as the permissive society, was entirely led by from above, a conflict epitomised in Britain by Midlands housewife Mary Whitehouse and her hopeless crusade against the public school liberal Hugh Greene. [...]

So while around half of 18-year-olds are going onto college, only a far smaller number of jobs actually require a degree. Many of those graduates, under the impression they were joining the higher tier in society, will not even reach managerial level and will be left disappointed and hugely indebted. Many will have studied various activist-based subjects collectively referred to as ‘grievance studies’, so-called because they rest on a priori assumptions about power and oppression. Whether these disciplines push students towards the Left, or if it is just attending university that has this effect, people are coming out of university far more politically agitated.

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The Atlantic: A Solution to the Confederate-Monument Problem

Once they are down, must they go straight to the smelter? Certain charmless totalitarian ideologues have enjoyed obliterating evidence of their predecessors—think of Wahhabi grave-leveling, the denuding of churches by Protestant zealots, the erasure of enemies of Stalin. Not wanting to be like Stalin is good. Certain hemming-and-hawing, bien-pensant types have proposed that we “put them in a museum.” The problem is that museums are also sometimes sites of veneration, and in a museum Lee could retain his dignity, unless he is perhaps used as a coat rack, or put on a mechanically rocking pedestal so children can ride him if they insert a quarter (U.S. currency only, please). [...]

Or, if Virginia must honor its heritage with museum treatment, it could emulate another eerie European site—this one untainted by genocidal associations. In Copenhagen, Denmark, one of my favorite landmarks is a bronze statue, Agnete and the Merman, which is installed permanently at the bottom of one of the city’s canals. Passersby can see it under the surface if they stop to look, but most of the time no one is looking at all—and because it is submerged, it remains present but locked away in another world. The water is usually clear. [...]

Ridding ourselves of history is a fantasy—in this case a fantasy of absolution, as if any place could be washed free of its sins by a single act of iconoclasm. But history can be managed in more and less graceful ways. Either of these would create a public space without consecrating one—and make the statues’ final home redolent of history without stinking of it.

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