Oliver Kamm

Este archivo solo abarca los artículos del autor incorporados a este sitio a partir del 1 de noviembre de 2006. Para fechas anteriores realice una búsqueda entrecomillando su nombre.

Europa

The regime of Vladimir Putin murders journalists, represses homosexuals, imprisons critics, assassinates dissidents, flattens cities, attacks aid convoys, shoots down civilian aircraft, foments xenophobia and alters national boundaries by force. Yesterday its state-run propaganda outlet complained of an assault on its liberty because a British bank asked it to take its custom elsewhere. As Oscar Wilde reputedly said on reading of the death of Little Nell in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, you’d need a heart of stone not to laugh.

The broadcaster RT was known till 2009 as Russia Today. The cunning plan to change its name has not succeeded in obscuring the station’s devotion to Putin and his every caprice.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica

"History will absolve me,” declared Fidel Castro from the dock in 1953. At four hours' duration, his famous speech gave an ominous augury of later loquacity. But the voice is now diminished. Last month, in a statement read out on state television, an ailing Castro conceded that the transfer of power to his brother Raúl might not be temporary.

With half a century's hindsight, we can predict that history will withhold the absolution he expected. Cuba's revolution has deformed international relations and subjugated the people in whose name it is implausibly proclaimed. Castro's legacy is a stagnating, dysfunctional one-party state.

The failure is overwhelmingly Castro's.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

Last December the Iraq Study Group, led by James Baker, recommended direct talks with Iran and Syria. Tony Blair responded that there was little purpose unless those parties were "prepared to be constructive". He termed Iran "a major strategic threat to the cohesion of the entire region". The activities since then of Iran's proxies and its client state, Syria, amply confirm Blair's diagnosis.Hamas expresses outrage at Arab participation in the Annapolis peace summit and threatens more rocket attacks on Israel. Hizbullah continues to destabilise Lebanese democracy and defy UN security council demands to disarm. On its own admission, it has received large amounts of weaponry from Iran via Syria.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión EuropeaDefensa y Seguridad,

Earlier this month one of the most significant figures in human history, Paul Tibbets, died aged 92. Tibbets flew the plane that dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima. Ever since, political leaders have faced the immanent risk of the destruction of civilisation through design or miscalculation. In response, every British government has supported the development and maintenance of an independent nuclear deterrent. What were the reasons, how far were they were justified and are they applicable to policymaking now?

A book published last week, Cabinets and the Bomb, by the historian Peter Hennessy, provides a remarkable documentary record of these deliberations. The story is told through declassified Cabinet and Cabinet committee papers, and is supplemented by expert annotations and references to other contemporary sources.…  Seguir leyendo »

InternacionalOrden Mundial,

Today is Hiroshima day, the anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb. As the wartime generation passes on, our sense of gratitude is increasingly mixed with unease regarding one theatre of the second world war. There is a widespread conviction that, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, America committed acts that were not only terrible but also wrong.Disarmament campaigners are not slow to advance further charges. Greenpeace maintains that a different American approach might have prevented the cold war, and argues that new research on the Hiroshima decision "should give us pause for thought about the wisdom of current US and UK nuclear weapons developments, strategies, operational policies and deployments".…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión Europea, ,

The former mayor of Jerusalem Teddy Kollek, who died this week, was the quintessential municipal leader. He cleared slums, built houses and made the city greener. So far as I know, he never gave unsolicited advice to the British Government on the constitutional status of Northern Ireland. But if he had done something so presumptuous and futile, he would have been anticipating his present-day London counterpart, Ken Livingstone.

Mr Livingstone is the host of a conference this month entitled “A World Civilisation or a Clash of Civilisations”. His website states: “The view has been put forward that the world is going into an era of conflict and war driven by a clash of civilisations.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente PróximoEuropaUnión Europea, , ,

Justifying the forced closure of the Serious Fraud Office’s inquiry into corruption in a Saudi arms deal to buy 72 Eurofighter jets from BAE Systems, Tony Blair spoke as an old-fashioned realist. Nations have interests; those strategic interests are paramount. “Our relationship with Saudi Arabia is vitally important for our country.”

So what price now for foreign policy with an ethical dimension? I wrote a short book last year in which I argued for the PM’s interventionist foreign policies. The principal flaw in them seemed to me not the challenge to autocratic states, but the absence of a sense of priorities in making that challenge.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión EuropeaDefensa y Seguridad,

“Cock your ear to how tentative and apologetic the argument for a new generation of British nuclear missiles is becoming,” wrote Matthew Parris on Saturday. Not so. The tentativeness comes from opponents of a British nuclear deterrent.

Anti-nuclear campaigners were once driven by apocalyptic foreboding. (The Tories, wrote E.P. Thompson in 1983, are “not a party which can be returned to government without risk to our lives”.) These days the rhetoric is tamer. Opponents of replacing Trident even implicitly concede the Cold War argument for an independent deterrent by complaining that there is now no obvious state against whom our weapons would be targeted.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia

Thomas Aquinas 's proofs of the existence of God “don’t prove anything, and are easily . . . exposed as vacuous”, wrote Richard Dawkins in The Times this week. Aquinas also offered, inadvertently, one of the strongest cases against Christian orthodoxy. In order that the happiness of the saints in heaven be made more delightful, he argued, they will be “allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned”. I would go to some trouble to avoid the company of those who take pleasure in others’ torment. I would do almost anything to eliminate the risk of eternal fellowship with those who believe such a spectacle is their reward for righteousness.…  Seguir leyendo »