Yanis Varoufakis, UnHerd:

The broader tragedy, however, is that this war-as-wealth-transfer mechanism only works so well because the rest of the Western world has lost its capacity to resist. And nowhere is this more painfully evident than in Europe, which suffers the most from the Iran war and understands the least; its leaders stumble about in a daze, mouthing platitudes about “European sovereignty” while doing nothing to achieve it.

Europe’s industries, already reeling from shifting their dependence from cheap Russian gas to prohibitively expensive Texan and New Mexican liquefied natural gas, are being bled dry. They export manufactured goods that require stable supply chains and predictable commodity prices. Alas, the Iran war has sent shipping insurance costs through the roof and rerouted tankers around the Horn of Africa. As oil and gas price volatility cascades directly into European manufacturing costs, the disruption to Gulf energy infrastructure is rippling through every petrochemical-dependent supply chain in Europe.

2026

Also, for the Kazakhs in the novel, China looms as a more menacing and extremist alternative to Soviet power; that is the land of mind control.

—Katerina Clark, Foreword to Chingiz Aitmatov, The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), xi.

Perestroika wasn’t created by the people, it was created by a single person: Gorbachev. Gorbachev and a handful of intellectuals . . .

—Speaker in Svetlanta Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, (New York: Random House, 2017), 21.

Nancy Fraser, New Left Review:

Here, I want to examine a different aspect of Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza: its significance as a ‘world event’, an epochal turning point that also serves to reveal, and so to signify, the nature of the times. I aim to do so in a register that will range between the political, the social, the philosophical and the personal. I argue that ‘Gaza’ signifies a crisis for the moral order that has held sway across much of the West for the past half century. Installed in the United States from the 1970s onward, and serving to justify its global hegemony along with Israeli expansionism, that order was centred on the Nazi Judeocide as the ultimate emblem of ‘radical evil’, delimiting the horizon within which wrong and its rectification could be thought. Today, however, Auschwitz itself is invoked as justification for a new genocide. The effect is to leave the Holocaust-centred Western moral order in tatters, no longer able to conceal or contain the glaring crimes committed by the Israeli state and its American backer. In the current period, ‘Gaza’ bids to replace ‘Auschwitz’ as symbol for the worst human atrocities of our time.