The moral universalism enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights obliges us to recognize the humanity of others and the reality of their suffering. If that doctrine sounds naive in today’s world, it is because we have allowed malignant spoilers to smother this foundational intuition.
If Israel adheres to the Geneva rules, that will help it attain its long-term political goals. Not just the crushing of Hamas but the conduct of the war itself will determine what kind of peace is possible.
Perhaps the case really is closed in France. But now that Europe is at war again, the question of collaboration remains before us all.
Berlin would have warned us against hubris and intolerance, but also against fatalism. In the battle to come, history is on no one’s side. The outcome of this struggle over who owns the meaning of freedom will come down, as it always does, to the eternal question that decides history’s shape: who is prepared to fight hardest for what they believe.
“How to end the war” is more than the wrong question. Right now, it’s a malign diversion. Instead of sticking with the Ukrainians, instead of asking them what they need, we’re asking them what they’ll settle for. […] The end of the war will not be decided in Washington or London but in Bakhmut, Zaporizhia and Kherson, in the places where courage, firepower, strategy and tactics will make the difference.
Thinking for yourself has never been easy, but the question of whether it is still possible at all is of some moment. The key ideals of liberal democracy—moral independence and intellectual autonomy—depend on it, and my students will not have much experience of either if they end up living in a culture where all of their political and cultural opinions must express tribal allegiance to one of two partisan alternatives; where they live in communities so segregated by education, class, and race that they never encounter a challenge to their tribe’s received ideas, or in a society where the wells of information are so polluted that pretty well everything they read is “fake news”.
