Anne Applebaum's Blog, page 40

“A decade of war is now ending,” President Obama declared Monday. Maybe that’s true in America, but it isn’t true anywhere else. Extremists are still plotting acts of terror. Authoritarian and autocratic regimes are still using violence to preserve their power. The United States can step back from international conflicts, but that won’t make them disappear.

I've just watched the inaugural oath and speech in London -- not too far, as the crow flies, from Buckingham Palace. A French friend was sitting next to me; some Brits were wandering in and out of the room, hanging around to see if anyone famous had started singing yet. All of us marveled at the seamless way in which U.S. pop culture, high culture, history, politics and national symbolism were so effortlessly melded together into a single event.

PARIS — For a brief moment before Christmas, self-doubt gripped France. The beloved French actor Gerard Depardieu — who recently played Obelix, an even more beloved French comic book character — announced he was moving to Belgium because President Francois Hollande had threatened to tax millionaires at 75 percent of their income. The nation plunged into depression. Opponents of the wealth tax geared up to attack the president. Pictures of Depardieu in his new “home” in Nechin, a Belgian town...

A mushy white sandwich roll, melted cheese and a squeeze of ketchup: When I first moved to Warsaw to work as a journalist, in the autumn of 1988, a zapiekanka was the most common form of street food. The zapiekanka (za-pyeh-KAN-kah) predated the hamburger, and it certainly wasn’t pizza — not even bad pizza. It was, rather, a pizzalike substance, a poor relative of its distant Italian cousin. The luxury versions had a few overcooked mushrooms beneath the cheese and ketchup.

WARSAW

I ran into my friend Dorota at “The Nutcracker” a few days ago. As the orchestra began to play the familiar bars of Tchaikovsky’s overture, she sighed. “I’ve seen it every year for the past 10 years,” she confessed. “Finally I thought I could skip it this year. But then my daughter got a part in the children’s chorus ... .” I nodded in sympathy. Then the curtain rose, revealing a spectacular piece of scenery: the Vistula River and the snow-covered skyline of 19th-century Warsaw in the...

LONDON

Riots across Tunisia, December 2010. Demonstrations in Moscow, December 2011. Fasts and street marches in New Delhi, March 2012 — plus street movements in Slovenia; Quebec; Iraq; Azerbaijan; and Wukan, southern China, among others, throughout the past two years. What do they all have in common? The answer is corruption, or, rather, the desire to end corruption, which is now the primary motivating factor in dozens of political movements around the world.

A Texan friend of mine heard Karl Rove a couple of days ago talking angrily about President Obama winning by “suppressing the vote.” Not long after that, she read that Sean Hannity wants to create a “pathway to citizenship” for illegal immigrants. She wrote to me that she was compiling a list: “ways in which the Republicans are now stealing Democrats’ language.”

LONDON

All over London tonight, homesick Americans are gamely holding election parties — serving beer and what the British call “crisps” — in rooms dominated by large television screens with the volume turned way up. There will be lots of talk about exit polls, swing states and key counties. Unfortunately, there will be no actual news whatsoever here until well after midnight, when East Coast polling stations finally begin to close. Doesn’t seem as if there will be anything meaningful until w...

LONDON

A junior producer from the “Today” program — the BBC’s most-listened-to morning radio talk show — called me a few hours ago to find out, in the most delicate, tasteful and elegant way possible, whether I was sufficiently “right wing” to be interviewed on tomorrow’s post-election program. Since the other person on this particular segment of the program is supposed to be the British historian Simon Schama, and since, as the producer put it, "we know where HE stands," it seems that she an...

LONDON

“Is this presidential election really the most important in our lifetime?” That was the question asked, in so many words, by a concerned Brit at a discussion here a few days ago. His words were directed at the political analyst Larry Sabato, whose countenance had been beamed onto a conference-room screen like some giant electronic guru. Sabato didn’t blink. “This presidential election,” he replied, “is definitely the most important since 2008.”