The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary

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Wednesday’s Child: Letter from Brussels

“Let us not argue,” I said to the neighbor on my left, who had just boasted to me of “meeting Putin. You know it’s his birthday today?” The dinner was a seated affair – forty tables of eight – in lavishness roughly at midpoint between a royal gala and a bar mitzvah in the Hamptons. The host addressed the buzzing swarm in Flemish, as all but a handful were compatriots, but as bad luck would have it one of the English speakers was the neighbor to my left.

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Sober Wisdom on the Middle East from Sacha Vliegen

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I visited war-torn Syria in 2016. A country where in some regions there are no longer 3/4 young men between the ages of 18-45 thanks to the conflict. What makes it even worse is that this conflict was planned in advance. The opposition has been armed and trained by the US and its allies since 2006. “Democratic freedom fighters” who would bring Syria into the Western liberal world, so was the propaganda that was fueled here at the beginning of the Arab Spring. For me, this was also a far from my bed show at the beginning. Until those democratic...

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The Meaning of Speaker McCarthy’s Ouster

A lot of reasons have been given for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s ouster from the speaker’s post. Correctly, some are saying part of it has to do with Ukraine War funding. Writing in the influential Financial Times, Edward Luce brands it “The return of American isolationism.” I could cite many more.

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It’s OK to Laugh at Bernie Sanders’ Book

To get ready for a third Bernie presidential bid, I checked out his recent campaign book, “It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism.” I didn’t want to help “capitalism,” in this case mega-publisher Crown/Penguin Random House. So I checked it out of my socialist public library.