Ian Buruma
Ian Buruma is Professor of Democracy and Human Rights at Bard College, and the author of Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents.
-
2012-02-07
| Many American fearmongers would have us believe that the US is now in a dangerous state of funk – a loss of self-belief that signals the end of its world leadership. But they are wrong to claim that the decline of US military dominance will lead to the collapse of world order.... read |
-
2012-01-04
| Images of North Koreans howling with grief over Kim Jong-il's death suggest mass hysteria. Can a whole country go mad, or is life in a totalitarian dictatorship such a daily misery that its people end up crying for their oppressors?... read |
-
2011-12-08
| On the surface, Europe’s current crisis, which some people predict will tear apart the EU, is financial. But the deeper crisis is political: there is no “European people” to express the solidarity needed to see the EU through hard times.... read |
-
2011-11-07
| The problem with revenge is that it provokes further revenge, setting in motion of cycle of violence and counter-violence – the culture of vendetta. That is why the summarily violent death of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi is a dangerous omen for Libya.... read |
-
2011-10-07
| Standing up to Israel’s uncompromising policies, and its new fanatical friends, will not be easy for Barack Obama in an election year. But to do so is to uphold the liberal tradition in which many Jews continue to believe.... read |
-
2011-09-07
| The two things that get people most excited in cultural conflicts are religion and sex, specifically the way that men treat women. Both the US response to 9/11 and the recent criminal case brought against Dominique Strauss-Kahn seem to prove the point – except that neither involved a cultural conflict.... read |
-
2011-08-04
| Anti-Muslim populists have denounced Anders Breivik's murderous rampage in Norway last month, but their words have been sufficiently hysterical to incite a mentally unbalanced person. Indeed, Breivik’s interpretation of their survivalist rhetoric is, in an odd way, more rational than the idea that an existential war can be fought with words alone.... read |
-
2011-07-08
| Most European citizens (for example, more than 60% in France and Germany) believe that Turkey should not become part of the EU, and to insist on it would smack of precisely the kind of undemocratic paternalism that has turned many Europeans against the EU already. But, on this question, the majority is not right.... read |
-
2011-05-30
| There is no doubt that Ratko Mladić is guilty of serious war crimes. But trying him for genocide, even though it will be hard to prove that he ever intended to exterminate Bosnian Muslims as a group, just because they were Muslims, will further muddy the term’s already vague definition.... read |
|
All the Queen’s Children
|
Ian Buruma 
|
|
Monarchy has an infantilizing effect – witness how otherwise sensible adults are reduced to nervously grinning sycophants when they are granted the privilege of touching an extended royal hand. But at a time of rising cultural pluralism in European countries, monarchs might have an important role to play.... read
|
-
2010-12-08
| For more than a year, hundreds of Israeli Jews have protested every Friday in solidarity with Palestinians in East Jerusalem facing eviction to make way for Israeli settlers. However ineffectual in the short run, the demonstrations are essential, for they make Israel a more civilized place.... read |
-
2009-12-02
| To attribute the Swiss vote to ban minarets to “Islamophobia” is perhaps to miss the point. If the Swiss and other Europeans – many of whom would vote for a similar ban if given the chance – were self-assured about their own identities, their Muslim fellow-citizens would not strike such fear in their hearts.... read |
-
2009-06-01
| NEW YORK – It is a chilling thought that exactly twenty years after the “Tiananmen Massacre” few young citizens of the People’s Republic of China have much idea of what happened on that occasion. Many unarmed Chinese citizens were killed by People’s Liberation Army troops on June 4, 1989, not only in the vicinity of Tiananmen Square, but in cities all over China. Most were not students, who started the peaceful demonstrations against corruption and autocracy, but ordinary workers, the sort of people a Communist Party ought to be standing up for. ... read |
-
2009-03-06
| Bishop Richard Williamson says that no Jews were murdered in gas chambers during World War II; that the Twin Towers were brought down by American explosives on September 11, 2001; and that Jews want to dominate the world “to prepare the anti-Christ’s throne in Jerusalem.” Should he, and other hate-mongers of his ilk, be punished for their words?... read |
-
2008-11-05
| Europeans – and others – may regard China’s rise with awe, and hope to find a modus vivendi with Russia, but without the hopes inspired by America, which represents the worst and the best of our battered Western world, we would all be much worse off. That is why they are going crazy over Barack Obama’s election.... read |
-
2008-06-30
| AMSTERDAM -- The late Arthur Koestler, born in Budapest, resident of many countries, and writer in several languages, once said that there is nationalism, and there is football nationalism. The feelings inspired by the latter are by far the stronger. Koestler himself, a proud and loyal British citizen, remained a lifelong Hungarian soccer nationalist. ... read |
-
2008-01-07
| To recover from near destitution and bloody tyranny in one generation is a great feat, and China should be saluted for it. But China’s success story is also the most serious challenge that liberal democracy has faced since fascism in the 1930’s.... read |
-
2008-09-08
| Seventy years ago this month, Neville Chamberlain signed a document that allowed Nazi Germany to grab a large chunk of Czechoslovakia, an act of "appeasement" that is widely blamed for Hitler's subsequent campaign to conquer the rest of Europe. Would today's Europeans behave any differently?... read |
-
2008-06-06
| For many Asians, the West's insistence on human rights and democracy smacks of the kind of unwelcome interference that Western imperialists – and the Christian missionaries who followed them – practiced in the East for too long. But supposedly "Western" values have Asian analogs, while supposedly "Asian" values have often failed Asia's people.... read |
2011-07-08