The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Nothing Will Come Of Nothing. Actually, it’s worse than that. Aurelien Towards the end of the 1970s, there was a movement in Britain called Punk, mostly expressed in music, but in some other forms of art as well. I never much cared for it, although it’s true that it was a useful corrective to the inane pomposities of Progressive Rock music earlier in the decade. But most commentators at the time correctly recognised that the quality of the music—often indifferent, at best—was less important than the power and authenticity of the anger and frustration that it articulated. Yet it must be hard today to understand where these emotions were coming from, in a society where unemployment, in modern terms, scarcely existed, where public services generally worked and where the country was still a major industrial power. Yet even before the reign of Thatcher began, the mood was one of sour anger and frustration. People demonstrated for the Right to Work, and Punk itself was often described ...

  The Sweden Syndrome A case study in euphoric national suicide John Carter In 2008,  Sweden castrated the heraldic lion of its Nordic Battle Group . While riding a municipal bus in Uppsala, I had the opportunity to observe a group of high school students. In one seat were a few Swedish boys, of the bespectacled, well-behaved, and soft-spoken variety typical of Sweden’s intermediate professional classes. In the seat next to them was a small group of Swedish girls. Behind the girls were some Arab boys, who were engaged in pulling the girls’ hair and otherwise tormenting and teasing them, much to the girls’ displeasure. In other circumstances this might have been an innocent, even light-hearted scene, and there was a part of me that was amused by the Arab boys’ antics and the girls’ protests, but the rigid posture of the Swedish lads, the way they carefully looked anywhere but at the Arab boys, gave the scene a tense, dark aura. Here in microcosm was a holographic fragment of Sw...