Anne Applebaum's Blog, page 39

Polish orphans provide unlikely lessons in thriving

WELLINGTON, New Zealand

A fish restaurant in New Zealand seemed an odd place to discuss a war that took place several thousand miles away and several decades ago, but there we were: Sea bream was served, sauvignon blanc was poured, the rain drummed down outside and I listened while three septuagenarians smiled, laughed and told me of the unimaginable tragedy they had lived through as children.

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Australia, America’s test case in the Pacific

SYDNEY

Odd things keep catching my eye here, simply because they look familiar. The small fortress island in the center of Sydney Harbour makes me think of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay; the Harbour Bridge reminds me of Golden Gate. That San Francisco impression is reinforced by the city’s Victorian houses, though the billboard-lined airport road reminded me for an instant of Houston. There is an echo of Chicago in some of the 1930s apartment buildings, as well as something very San Diego abo...

The connection between Boston and Europe’s train bombers

There is much that we don’t yet know about Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings. But we do know that their family is ethnically Chechen, that they come from the Russian republic of Chechnya, where war broke out in 1994. Although that war began as a movement for Chechen sovereignty and independence, it escalated into two extraordinarily bloody, messy, vicious armed conflicts during which hundreds of thousands of people were killed. The Chechen capital, G...

Anne Applebaum: Calm replaces the controversy of Margaret Thatcher

"After the storm of a life lived in the heat of political controversy, there is a great calm." The Bishop of London's sermon at Margaret Thatcher's funeral Wednesday morning . But what was really remarkable about the sermon was its measured tone. Somehow one felt that the bishop might not have been a fervent Thatcherite himself, and yet he found something kind to say to those close to the former prime minister -- "it must be diff...

Margaret Thatcher recognized the big issues

Margaret Thatcher had no small talk. At a private lunch which I can’t quite date — her husband, Denis, was there, drinking whiskey out of a large tumbler, so it must have been well over a decade ago — I was seated across from her, and at one point I became the object of a tirade about the Russian president. “What are we going to do about Mr. Yeltsin?” she demanded, as if either she or I could do anything at all. She’d been out of power for several years at that point and was already forgettin...

China must act on North Korea if it wants respect

Xi Jinping, China’s new president, , made his first foreign trip, reintroduced his (well-dressed) wife to the public. And now, in the reverse and sometimes obtuse way these things happen in China, he has launched his political campaign. An editorial in the People’s Daily this week explained how, under his leadership, the Communist Party will pursue “the China Dream” in order to “achieve national prosperity, revitalization of the nation and its people’s happiness.” The phrase “C...

South Africa’s unfinished revolution

JOHANNESBURG

Twenty years ago, I visited South Africa and got lost. I set out from my hotel in Durban in search of a small black college, where some leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) party were meeting before the country’s first post-apartheid elections. I drove around Durban’s white suburbs for hours, looking for a building that was not on my map because, technically, it was not in Durban. It was in KwaZulu, one of the black “homelands” that existed alongside but legally separat...

The enduring legacy of despots

Sixty years ago this week, Joseph Stalin died. His daughter, Svetlana, remembered the Soviet dictator’s final moments:

“The lack of oxygen became acute ... the death agony was terrible,” she wrote in her memoirs. “He literally choked to death as we watched. At what seemed like the very last moment, he opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance, insane or perhaps angry, and full of the fear of death.”

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Can India shake its bad corruption habits?

NEW DELHI

Anna Hazare dresses like Mahatma Gandhi (white homespun cloth, round spectacles) and uses Gandhian tactics (nonviolent protest, hunger strikes) to fight the corruption he believes is damaging India. In 2011 and 2012, he mobilized hundreds of thousands of Indians, many of them members of the new middle class, to support his “fasts unto death.” Following a 12-day hunger strike in August 2011, he forced a panicked Indian government to agree to a series of demands for anti-corruption l...

Preparing for freedom before it comes

Egypt “celebrated” the second anniversary of its revolution last week with riots, tear gas and angry demonstrations against an increasingly authoritarian regime. A few days earlier, the Tunisian army deployed to the southern part of that country to fight demonstrators who were demanding, on the second anniversary of their own revolution, to know why their lives had not improved. In anticipation of the Libyan revolution’s anniversary on Feb. 17, authorities are calling for vigilance and high-s...