Anne Applebaum (Continuación)

Yesterday the Iranian Foreign Ministry held an international conference. Nothing unusual in that: Foreign ministries hold conferences, mostly dull ones, all the time. But this one was different. For one, "Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision" dealt with history, not current politics. Instead of the usual suspects -- deputy ministers and the like -- the invitees seem to have included David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader; Georges Theil, a Frenchman who has called the Holocaust "an enormous lie"; and Fredrick Toeben, a German-born Australian whose specialty is the denial of Nazi gas chambers.

The guest list was selective: No one with any academic eminence, or indeed any scholarly credentials, was invited.…  Seguir leyendo »

In the 10 days that have passed since Alexander Litvinenko, an ex-KGB agent, died of radiation poisoning in London, we have learned a lot about his death -- haven't we?

Well, we have learned that Litvinenko died after somehow ingesting polonium-210, a relatively rare radioactive substance. We have learned that a mysterious Italian, Mario Scaramella-- a self-employed "security expert" who last year claimed that he'd found ex-KGB men selling nuclear material in the postage-stamp republic of San Marino -- has been poisoned too. We have learned that various other ex-KGB agents floating around London also have tested positive for polonium-210, as have a Piccadilly sushi restaurant, a London hotel room and a few airplanes.…  Seguir leyendo »

There was a photograph: a weeping Sudanese woman, standing before a freshly dug grave. There were statistics: 400,000 people dead, 2.5 million driven from their homes, "untold thousands" raped. There was an appeal: "Innocent civilians are being slaughtered in Darfur. You can end it," and a Web address, http://www.dayfordarfur.org.

This advertisement -- which appeared on a full page of the International Herald Tribune last week, and previously in Le Monde, the Guardian, and many other newspapers in Europe and the United States -- was truly arresting. But what really made me look twice was the slogan across the top: "When all the bodies have been buried in Darfur, how will history judge us?"…  Seguir leyendo »

" I did of course know of many of the terrible crimes of the Stalin era even while they were under way; anyone who says he knew nothing is a liar."

-- "Memoirs of a Spymaster,"

Markus Wolf, 1998

He tried hard, but when he died in his sleep last week, at 83, Markus Wolf had still not attained the elder statesman status to which he had long aspired. As chief of East Germany's foreign intelligence service, he had for three decades cultivated an aura of mystery, rejoicing in the nickname "Man Without a Face" (because Western intelligence long had no photograph of him) and in having allegedly been the model for Karla, John le Carre's fictional spymaster (though le Carre repeatedly denied it).…  Seguir leyendo »

Over the coming days and weeks -- throughout the appeals process, up to and including the day of the execution itself -- you are going to hear a lot about what went wrong with the trial of Saddam Hussein. You will be told, as an Amnesty International director put it , that the trial "has been a shabby affair, marred by serious flaws. . . . Every accused has a right to a fair trial, whatever the magnitude of the charge against him."

You will hear many denunciations of the verdict itself: The British Guardian newspaper called on Iraq to maintain a "principled opposition to the death penalty, to which there can be no exceptions.…  Seguir leyendo »

With a clutch of new books , a multitude of speeches and a score of conferences already underway, no one can claim that the 50th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution has gone unmarked. The Hungarians themselves commemorated their tragic revolt against Soviet communism with a street riot: Just as post-revolutionary France remained divided for decades between royalists and Bonapartists, so, too, is much of post-communist Europe still divided between former communists and former anti-communists, and nowhere more so than in Budapest.

But as the anniversary moves into its second week, I'd like to celebrate in a different way -- by asking what, if anything, we in the West have learned since 1956.…  Seguir leyendo »

Quite a long time ago, having briefly joined the herd of 20-something backpackers that eternally roams Southeast Asia, I found myself in Bali. Like all of the other 20-somethings, I carefully read the Lonely Planet backpacker's guide to Indonesia and learned, among other things, that it was considered improper for women to wear shorts or trousers when entering Balinese temples. I dutifully purchased a Balinese sarong and, looking awkward and foreign, wore it while visiting temples. I didn't want to cause offense.

I thought of that long-ago incident during a visit last week to London, where a full-fledged shouting match has broken out over Muslim women who choose to wear the veil.…  Seguir leyendo »

Conventional wisdom says that if U.N. sanctions don't work, there is nothing to be done about North Korea's nuclear weapons -- short of firebombing Pyongyang, thereby ensuring the obliteration of Seoul. Yet the problem of a nuclear North Korea is not actually insoluble, provided a certain very large superpower wants to solve it. There is one significant country, after all, that has the military, economic and political power not only to pressure North Korea to discard its bomb but also to topple its regime altogether.

That very large superpower is, of course, China. Despite its recent expressions of shock and horror -- the Chinese government claimed last week to be "totally opposed" to the North Korean bomb -- China still has more ways to influence North Korea than any other member of the U.N.…  Seguir leyendo »

She wasn't charismatic, she didn't fill lecture halls and she wasn't much good at talk shows either. Nevertheless, at the time of her murder in Moscow Saturday, Anna Politkovskaya was at the pinnacle of her influence. One of the best-known journalists in Russia and one of the best-known Russian journalists in the world, she was proof -- and more is always needed -- that there is still nothing quite so powerful as the written word.

The subject of Politkovskaya's writing was Russia itself, and in particular what she called Russia's " dirty war " in Chechnya. Long after the rest of the international press corps had abandoned Chechnya -- it was too dangerous for most of us, too complicated, too obscure -- she kept telling heartbreaking Chechen stories: The Russian army colonel who pulled 89 elderly people from the ruins of Grozny but received no medals, or the Chechen schoolboy who was ill from the aftereffects of torture but could get no compensation.…  Seguir leyendo »

"Self-censorship out of fear" is how the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, described the decision. One of her allies accused a great cultural institution of "falling on its knees." The word "kowtow" was thrown around, along with "appeasement" and "cowardice" -- and all because the Deutsche Oper in Berlin canceled its production of Mozart's "Idomeneo" for fear that the avant-garde remake's final, unscripted scene (in which the king of Crete lugs onstage the severed heads of Jesus, Buddha, Poseidon and Muhammad) might offend Muslim sensibilities and create a security risk.

At some level, this overdue display of unity by Germany's cultural and political elite was heartwarming.…  Seguir leyendo »

"We have screwed up. Not a little, but a lot. . . . If we have to give an account to the country of what we have done in four years, what are we going to say?"

I wish I could gleefully report that the words quoted above had been spoken by an American politician, preferably at a large public gathering with lots of media. But, alas, they were pronounced by a foreign politician with an unpronounceable surname: Ferenc Gyurcsany, the prime minister of Hungary. For those readers who don't follow Hungarian politics on a daily basis, he also said that "we lied, morning, noon and night" and conceded that his country had stayed afloat during his government's first term thanks to "divine providence, the abundance of cash in the world economy and hundreds of tricks."…  Seguir leyendo »

Already, angry Palestinian militants have assaulted seven West Bank and Gaza churches, destroying two of them. In Somalia, gunmen shot dead an elderly Italian nun. Radical clerics from Qatar to Qom have called, variously, for a "day of anger" or for worshipers to "hunt down" the pope and his followers. From Turkey to Malaysia, Muslim politicians have condemned the pope and called his apology "insufficient." And all of this because Benedict XVI, speaking at the University of Regensburg, quoted a Byzantine emperor who, more than 600 years ago, called Islam a faith "spread by the sword." We've been here before, of course.…  Seguir leyendo »