It’s turning out to be a Bosnia-focused weekend here. Marko Hoare has an excellent and sober assessment of Angelina Jolie’s Bosnia “imbroglio” up here. For those who don’t know, the British left often has an odd — to say the least — way of viewing the Balkan Wars. Mainly it consists of lionizing Milosevic as …
Category Archives: the right in europe
Quick Roundup
ENEL is getting pretty interesting. Check out their Green Power. Back when in 2008 I was impressed by their solar generation, tracked by the minute, at their headquarters near Largo Cairoli in Milan. As was predicted in the Italian press years ago — and in these pages a few weeks back when people were naive …
Of Chetniks and Padanians
Beppe Grillo hilariously sums up the commonalities between Southern Europe’s most toxic nationalist-separatist groups. Wow, takes me back to the early nineties when deeply mistaken writers were comparing Serb separatists to those sane, cozy Northern Italian separatists. Sorry kids, it’s in Italian — it’s been a long week.
“Football”
FINAL UPDATE: I can’t really say it any better than the Guardian does here. Belgrade’s Vreme ran this story today. There was a rather choice photo of masked Ivan Bogdanov burning an Albanian flag; it’s since been replaced so I leave you with this video that tells the story even better. Clearly burning the Albanian …
Genoa
Why is Genoa always a place for spectacular violence? There is much to be said about the violence of Serbian football fans in Genoa yesterday, but alas, I have to be away from the computer all day today. Mainly what I want to say is that Vuk Jeremic can apologize in the media all he …
The Importance of Being Serbian
Belgrade’s Gay Pride parade has been an opportunity for the its nationalistic and regressive right-wing youth to rebel against European values for as long as Serbia has been trying to rehabilitate itself after the Milosevic regime, i.e., the last decade. Although the mobs of the right succeeding in actually stopping it last year, this …
Swiss Intolerance
If you thought Lega Nord images stereotyping Southern Italians and immigrants were bad, check out this new poster against the opening of Swiss borders to Italian (and other European – presumably Romanian) workers. Given that hordes of Milanese commute to Ticino and vice versa and that, uh, Italian is one of Switzerland’s official languages, this …
Svezia, inferno e paradiso
One expects political upheaval in Italy. After all, the country has had as many governments as Boliva since World War Two, and my primer on Italian politics had a photo of parliamentarians fist-fighting on the cover. But — Sweden? As Stephen Castle wrote in yesterday’s New York Times, Swedish politics are usually “worthy, high-minded and …
More on the Roma Debate
Berlusconi comes out with Sarkozy against criticism on France’s treatment of Roma. Quoted in Le Figaro yesterday, “[EU Citizen’s Rights Commissioner] Reding would have done better to treat the subject in private with French leaders before speaking publicly as she did.” Some of the right-leaning Italian press is calling it a new French-Italian “axis” against …
Bossi: Today’s News (?)
Well, Rachel Donadio has been a busy woman lately, and she’s hitting all the right places. Observing Bossi’s Lega Nord has been one of my preoccupations since a wealthy Amerophile in Parma told me in late 2004 that Italy should ship all its Communists off to North Korea and Cuba. But that’s neither here nor …