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1 month ago | 
quillette.com | Andy Owen
Editor’s Note: This article was first published in Areo Magazine in May 2023. Patriotism corrupts history.—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1817)Long before the latest iteration of cancel culture, there was a punishment known as damnatio memoriae (the condemnation of a person’s memory).
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2 months ago | 
theneweuropean.co.uk | Andy Owen
“Can we rely on the law, or does just brutal force matter?” While European leaders met at a hastily organised summit in Paris, and American and Russian diplomats made their way to Saudi Arabia for controversial peace talks, that was the question posed by Ukrainian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk in a speech in central London.
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2 months ago | 
theneweuropean.co.uk | Andy Owen
A bright pink sign contrasts with the dull grey of north London in January. It sits outside a converted Grade II-listed Georgian house, home of the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, and announces the exhibition Breaking Lines: Futurism and the Origins of Experimental Poetry. On their honeymoon in 1947, the American collector Eric Estorick and his wife, Salome, visited the modernist Mario Sironi in Milan and bought hundreds of his drawings and pictures.
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2 months ago | 
theneweuropean.co.uk | Andy Owen
Back in September I asked a question in these ages: after the 42m tonnes of rubble in Gaza has been shifted and the rebuilding begins, what society will emerge from the ruins? President Trump now thinks he has an answer. In a press conference with Israeli PM Netanyahu, Trump stated that he wants the US to take a “long-term ownership position” of Gaza and turn the strip into the “Riveria of the Middle East”, “an international unbelievable place” where people “from all over the world” could live.
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Jan 2, 2025 | 
thecritic.co.uk | Andy Owen
The old order is breaking apart and bad actors are taking advantage With the ending of the Long Peace, and the waning of American hegemony, we are currently witnessing wars of transition. The extent of these wars, in both duration and scale remains unknown, but in 2025, we may start to see glimpses of the new world order that will emerge in their wake. Forecasting what will happen in the coming year is a quixotic task.
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Dec 7, 2024 | 
theneweuropean.co.uk | Andy Owen
The advance of the Syrian opposition rebels led by the Islamist group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), over the last week explosively reawakened the dormant Syrian civil war. Their success inspired ordinary Syrians living across the country to take the streets and proclaim the end of the brutal dictatorship that began in 1971 when Hafez al-Assad took over the presidency of Syria and ended sometime over the weekend when his son, Bashir al-Assad, fled the country.
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Nov 19, 2024 | 
thecritic.co.uk | Andy Owen
Our technological and institutional sophistication will not eliminate conflict The war in Ukraine, the escalating crisis in the Middle East and increasing geopolitical competition between the US and China are undermining the idea that “The Long Peace” — the period from the end of the Second World War to the present day, marked by the absence of major wars between the great powers and an overall trend of declining violence — is an irreversible trend.
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Nov 9, 2024 | 
theneweuropean.co.uk | Andy Owen
President Zelensky was one of the first international leaders to congratulate Donald Trump on his election victory, adding he appreciated his “commitment to the ‘peace through strength’ approach in global affairs”. At a security conference in Budapest on Thursday, Zelensky said that he has spoken to president-elect Trump, and that their conversation had been productive.
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Oct 26, 2024 | 
theneweuropean.co.uk | Andy Owen
How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying is the biography of Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko of the Ukrainian army, who commands a drone platoon on the frontline in the Ukraine. It is based on interviews Lt. Mykytenko gave via Zoom with journalist and author, Lara Marlowe. Marlowe has written it in the first person, so we get an intimate telling of Mykytenko’s remarkable story. Sitting down to speak with Marlowe and Mykytenko, I ask them what their motivations were to tell this story.
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Oct 8, 2024 | 
theneweuropean.co.uk | Andy Owen
The centre of gravity in the Middle East crisis is the failure over the best part of a century to resolve the question of Palestinian statehood, and that persistent issue is pulling an increasing number of actors towards its dark centre. After the assassination of Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah and the “limited, targeted” Israeli ground raids into southern Lebanon that began on September 30 and which are gathering momentum, it is clear that Israel and Hezbollah are now at war.
