It may be premature to hoist the white flag. But with top Democrats calling for the abolition of ICE, the US immigration enforcement agency, and a long-engrained policy of using our military for nearly everything other than defense of the US, the option of disbanding our military apparatus is worth considering. There was a time... Read More

“Watergate” Carl Bernstein pleasantly surprised me last May by agreeing that widespread use of the “anti-immigrant” mantra often reflected careless journalism. Since our brief exchange at Vienna’s Concordia Press Club coffee bar, news organizations have been applying the term promiscuously to characterize Austria’s newly elected coalition government, sworn in on December 18th. Bernstein, whose talk... Read More

A demonstrator singing Bob Dylan’s “times they are a changing” was warming up the crowd when I arrived at Vienna’s Stadtpark with an invitation from Democrats Abroad to protest against the new US president. One of the few reminders that I was not back on campus in the late 60s was the Johann Strauss statue... Read More

Media folk tend to love Nazi stories. The affinity first struck me when I tried peddling a novel draft in the 1970s about an escape from East Germany. An American editor reading through my synopsis at the Frankfurt Book Fair yanked the cigar from his mouth to ask: Nazis are still selling! Austria is expected... Read More

Some countries had little choice but to live with the diverse languages they inherited. Americans long had one less issue to brawl over because our ancestors accepted a common language rather than cling to the cacophony of tongues imported by their immigrant ancestors. When I took up temporary residence in Canada in 1980, the locals... Read More

“What'll we do to Holy Cross”? “Crucify them!” It was only a rallying cry in a football match against Holy Cross High School. No one took it literally, of course. And none of the players wound up dead after the game. Nevertheless, our Franciscan educators were not amused. On the eve of his visit last... Read More

In its recent obituary on Ambassador Al Adams, my former boss, the New York Times mentions his getting Haitian dictator Prosper Avril out of bed in the middle of the night and convincing him to pack his bags and leave the country by daybreak. Adams’ success in getting Avril to fly off to US exile... Read More

A little over a decade after East German writer Bertolt Brecht suggested his government dissolve the people and elect another, US politicians followed his advice, contributing to the ethnic cleansing of my old Brooklyn neighborhood. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, raised in the same “workers’ paradise” that Brecht once championed, seems to be following along similar... Read More

It was inevitable that Europe’s refugee crisis would get tied up in Holocaust symbols. This time the policies of eastern Europeans, not Germans, evoke analogies. Since World War II ended, Germany’s liberal media has competed with US counterparts like the New York Times in the contest of who is more against the Holocaust. The German... Read More

Uncle Sam faces some formidable obstacles in trying to improve America’s image abroad. Sponsoring lectures on such topics as how Malcolm X and hip-hop might unite diverse Muslim immigrant communities in Europe was considered one way of doing it. But competition in the popularity contest from unfriendly foreign media as well as some of our... Read More

“The merry month of May, so frolic, so gay, and so green,” a verse written hundreds of years ago, might have been penned to describe Europe last month, Ireland and Austria in particular. Vienna’s Green Party had gotten the green light from its “red” Social Democratic coalition partner to install gay-themed traffic signals in time... Read More