Free Republic

Alexey Navalny, the dissident and political nemesis of Russian President Vladimir Putin, spent the last few years of his life behind bars but still managed to stay connected to the outside world. Letters from the final months of his life, obtained by The New York Times, showed Navalny, who had been imprisoned since January 2021, managed to stay on top of current events — including in the US. In a letter sent to a friend, photographer Evgeny Feldman, Navalny called former President Donald Trump's agenda for a second term "really scary," according to the Times. If President Joe Biden has...

In view of the events in Ukraine, the government and many media have switched from level-headed to agitated. The spectrum of opinions has been narrowed to the width of a sniper scope. The politics of escalation does not have a realistic goal – and harms German interests. ___ Düsseldorf. Every war is accompanied by a kind of mental mobilization: war fever. Even smart people are not immune to controlled bouts of this fever. “This war in all its atrociousness is still a great and wonderful thing. It is an experience worth having“ rejoiced Max Weber in 1914 when the lights...

Yesterday, a reader told me about a must-read article in the German financial newspaper Handelsblatt. Having no details other than it was a"must read" I failed to locate the article after attempting translations of the Handelsblatt home page. Zero Hedge did find the article, entitled "West on the Wrong Path". It turns out, there is a version of the editorial in German, English, and Russian. Citing parallels to WWI, author Gabor Steingart, publisher of Handelsblatt, Germany’s leading financial newspaper, blasts the Western response (especially US and German) response to the situation in Ukraine. "Small Price to Pay" vs. "West on...