NEWS
Between two Autocrats
18-02-2025In my inaugural adress in 1985 at Leiden University, my theme was: Between Two or Against One ? At the time the answer was still clear. It is different today in Donald Trump's second term as U.S. President. What he announced to do, is clearly being done. Not in foreign policy only but much more dangerously in turning the American democracy into a new U.S autocracy.For us Europeans indeed a new and most dangerous change.The answer to my own question today is: between two autocracies. What the two autocrats Putin and Trump are up to is expansion of power and territory: Ukraine, Moldavia, Poland and the Baltic democracies on Putin's side and the Gulf of Mexico, Canada, Greenland and the Panama canal on the other,, Trumps side. The two autoccrats understand each other, but with little or no interest in peace and world order. Europe is in serious danger.
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Footprints of the 20th Century
Footprints of the 20th Century - Third EditionDescription
The peaceful collapse of the Soviet totalitarian, communist system has been a watershed of historic proportions in Europe and the world. In 1989, unexpectedly, Communism and the Cold War were behind us, they were bad and should be forgotten. The immediate post-1989 world presented itself as a new era of organised forgetting, as neither East nor West were interested in examining the prolonged period of acquiescence in absurdities.