John Lloyd

Around the time Vladimir Putin started his first term as Russia’s president in 2000, a man named Gleb Pavlovsky appeared on the Moscow scene. Pavlovsky was a former dissident in Soviet times who called himself a “political technologist”, a highfalutin term for spin doctor. That isn’t to diminish him: Spin doctors in different administrations all over the world are among the most interesting political figures of contemporary times, because their job is to give a narrative about the government and the leaders they serve.

In doing so, they help give the narrative to the leaders themselves, who may not have worked out quite what they were going to do with power, since they were too busy getting and keeping it. They are the necessary middlemen between political power and the media. The media need a big story, and the spin doctors, or political technologists, are there to provide it.

Vladimir Putin, the man chosen by former President Boris Yeltsin to succeed him, didn’t know what to do when he arrived. At the time Pavlovsky moved into the Kremlin as his aide, the new president was – as Pavlovsky later said – consumed with anxiety that he would not succeed in imposing his will on a Kremlin still full of aides who were not his choice. Putin, remember, was still less than a decade away from being a middle-ranking, surplus-to-requirements KGB officer.

I spoke to Pavlovsky several times early in his tenure, and the narrative he gave was a persuasive one. It was that Putin, after the roller coaster that was Yeltsin’s Russia, would give security, stability and a chance for the society to recover both from Yeltsin and from Communism, to develop a middle class, to discover the joys of consumption. “It was,” he told the charismatic Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev last May, “about stability as a social construct, as a way of organizing society”. He was valuable enough to be kept on after Putin’s two terms, as an aide to Dmitry Medvedev in his one-term presidency. But then he went too far, saying openly that it would be “absurd” for Putin to return – and he was out.

Being out may account for the sharpness of a recent remark, reported by the New York Times. Pavlovsky believes that the third Putin presidency is now “selecting the harshest” choices in dealing with dissent, and in doing so, “the system is informing us that it is changing the rules”.

Changing to what? In his new book, Strategic Vision, Zbigniew Brzezinski called on the West, especially Europe, to develop a closer relationship with the vast neighbor to the east – but recognized that Vladimir Putin’s vision “is a backward looking combination of assertive nationalism, thinly veiled hostility towards America for its victory in the Cold war and nostalgia for …superpower status”. He likened it to Mussolini’s Italy: not a Nazi (or Stalinist) dictatorship, but relentlessly, determinedly authoritarian. If indeed he does make the “harshest choices”, Putin will be writing a new narrative, very much his own, and it will be a disturbing one.

Two of these choices will concern figures who are iconic to our present times – a blogger and a feminist punk rock band. The blogger, Alexei Navalny, has emerged in the past year as a leader of the mainly youthful rebellion against Putin that erupted when his third presidential term was confirmed. He has been accused of theft of timber worth $500,000 from the Kirov region, whose government he was advising, and the penalty could be 10 years in prison. At the same time, the band Pussy Riot is charged with various counts of hooliganism, after storming into the huge Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow, close to the Kremlin, shouting “Mary! Get rid of Putin!” and dancing in front of the altar before being removed. That prank could earn them seven years. As the writer Andrei Nekrasov commented, “the trial’s message is simple: an insult to the leader is an insult to God”.

These choices are nominally for the judges on the cases, but no one believes they are anything but Putin’s. Indeed, Putin has already pronounced on the Pussy Riot case, saying while on a visit to London that, “I don’t think they should be judged too severely for this … I hope the court will deliver a correct, well-founded verdict.” In so saying, he shows himself in favor of some kind of punishment – but not an excessive one, which might reflect badly on his regime. Most important, he is underlining that the choice is his to make. It would be a bold judge who didn’t take note. Navalny’s case is more serious, both in the nature of the charge and the challenge he poses. If the harsh choice ends up being made in his case, then the direction of the Kremlin becomes clearer.

Yet the direction of Russia isn’t. I was at a gathering last week of some 150 mainly young men and women at an institute outside of Moscow, held under the auspices of the Moscow School of Political Studies, a civil society NGO. (I’m a member of its advisory board, with Russians and a few other foreigners.) I’ve been attending these conferences every year since I was a correspondent in Moscow in the first half of the 1990s. When they began in the early nineties, our talks on democracy, civic behavior and free speech were received, mostly, with acclamation. That’s long gone: The participants argue, challenge and dissent. Mostly well educated with jobs in government, companies and the media, many prize order as much as democracy, and they certainly don’t see the West as benign. Presently, they tend to agree with their government that the West is fomenting rebellion in Syria and that Russia strives for peace.

But they were not all, or even mainly, Putinites. They were mixed. Some liked Navalny, some not. Some thought Pussy Riot was cool, some disapproved. All seemed to speak freely. When Krastev told them that they had lost a country – the Soviet Union – they agreed. They did the same when he told them that the lesson of the 1990s was insecurity, lack of money and no state support: Stability, now, was all. When, by contrast, I gave what I thought was a ringing endorsement of a free press, the questions were cooler, skeptical.

They were, in short, rather more “Western” than they were when they thought that all blessings flowed from the West. They were thinking for themselves. Putin expresses what some of them want. But my sense was that if he constantly makes the harshest choices, he will lose the grip he presently still has on his country. The members of this new generation of Russians are not Western liberals, but they’re not Soviet sheep, either.

PHOTO: Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (L), Yekaterina Samutsevich and Maria Alyokhina (R), members of female punk band Pussy Riot, attend their trial inside the defendents’ cell in a court in Moscow, August 3, 2012. President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that three women on trial for a protest performance in Russia’s main cathedral should not be judged too harshly, signaling he did not favor lengthy prison terms for the Pussy Riot band members, Russian news agencies reported. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov

It was rude of Mitt Romney to cast doubt on Britain’s ability to successfully host the London Olympics, but it wasn’t stupid. His briefers on the London trip will have had files full of stories from the British papers, whose front pages had little else on them for days but forebodings over security lapses because of a screwup by G4S, the company hired to keep the Games safe. Britain hasn’t, in the past few years, been distinguished for excellence: Why assume the Games would be an exception?

For any foreigner, especially any American, alert to British events over the past year or two, these stories play against a backdrop of the perception of the British capital as “Londonistan,” a place whose tolerance of radical Islamism spills over into fatally dangerous carelessness. A city where, almost exactly a year ago, gangs of young men and women roamed the streets for several days, smashing shops, looting their contents, burning buildings, beating up passersby and isolated policemen. To voice doubts on U.S. television about London’s safety is not stupid, because doubts are in order.

Three institutions central to the world’s opinion of the United Kingdom have been and remain very badly shaken. These are the armed forces, the press and the banking system – three systems that, for two centuries or more, evoked real pride for the British people. The damage done – in two cases self-administered – has projected images of Britain that sharply contradict the sturdy, trusty, intelligently skeptical stereotype that the British like to think is a mirror of themselves.

The military is the outlier: It has not been the author of its own fall from grace, and is still thought of as efficient, well-equipped and well led. The wounds to its pride and efficacy have come from political considerations, of which the most important was to pull out of Iraq with an unconvincing rationale that the job it was doing, around the southern city of Basra, was done. In fact, its exit meant a U.S. brigade had to be deployed to cover the gap in security, despite the U.S. military itself being hard-pressed. In Afghanistan, a British withdrawal – this time in step with a similar U.S. exercise – is scheduled to begin next year. Several senior officers warn that the Afghan forces cannot provide security. Colonel Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Helmand, was quoted as saying in May that the local military “are not close to being able to take over from Western forces unaided, and I don’t believe that they would be able to contain the insurgency unaided by 2014, which is the date we are due to leave.”

Back home, the numbers of military personnel and bases and the ability to project force have been slashed so deeply that a slew of senior commanders have resigned, some remaining tactfully silent, others loud in their protest that the British armed forces now lack the capacity to fight even one, let alone multiple, large actions. Britain, with France, had been an at least partial exception to the somewhat dubious decline of Europe’s ability to pull its weight in military engagements (a cause of increasing concern to a vastly indebted U.S.) From having been a partial solution, Britain joins the problem. It will, said a report last autumn from the Royal United Services Institute, “never again be among the global [military] superpowers.”

The mess of the press has no politicians to blame, even if politicians were too eager to bow to its power. The Leveson Inquiry – set up to investigate the ethics, behavior and political heft of British newspapers after the News of the World scandal – has revealed, over the past nine months, a much greater underworld of tabloid phone hacking, bribery, blackmail and radical distortion. British journalists thought their press had some of the most robust, fearless, revelatory, pomposity-pricking newspapers at the popular end of the trade, and that it had the best analytical journalism in the world at the other end. Where the latter can still be defended, the former can’t, or at best only with major qualification. The low opinion many American journalists had of British popular papers – and in the view of some, not just popular papers – has received a long, embarrassing confirmation.

Most recent, and in the long run most potentially damaging, has been the revelations that Barclays Bank indulged in various forms of fixing the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor, the most important money market rate in the financial world. It was an American, Bob Diamond, Barclays’ chief executive, who took the rap after Westminster legislators had a cathartic explosion of contempt at a committee hearing. But it was London, with its light-touch regulation and the apparently threadbare tradition of gentlemanly conduct, that provided the context. Diamond and his colleagues would have been less likely to be as free to get away with fixing the rate to benefit themselves in New York: investigations continue, and worse may follow. London kept the job of setting the rate because of its centrality to global financial transactions. Reputation is all in such a case, and London’s trembles on the brink, a much more troublesome danger than the loss of the already doubtful reputation of the tabloids.

As this is written, Mitt Romney’s fears of an Olympic disaster are unfounded. The games started well (if not, yet, for the host nation in the medals tally); security has not been breached; the opening ceremony, a skillfully orchestrated post-modern mélange heavily dusted with that famous British humor, was a nice counterpoint to Chinese triumphalism last time. Britain is a considerable country yet, with large reserves. But in the long last act of the second Elizabethan Age, it becomes clear that much that distinguished the country needs new scripts and better acting. Not, or not mainly, by the overburdened politicians but by citizens, who have to live up to that proud name. When the Olympic circus leaves town, it may, if all continues to go as well as its opening, help restore some lost reputation. Pride can come after a fall – so long as the fall is understood, and the causes repaired.

PHOTO: U.S. Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney is recognized by pedestrians at Grosvenor Place in London, July 27, 2012. REUTERS/Jason Reed

The economic logic of European integration is now directly confronting nationalistic sentiments in the hearts and souls of Europeans. It’s becoming clear that nationalism resonates more deeply. That is the stuff of our patriotic life, fragments from our history that we use to shore up our present and point to our future. To discard them is to discard part of our mental and moral makeup.

For much of the last 60 years the Union has been Good, scattering tangible and intangible blessings upon its growing group of member states. It brought investment to the poorer countries that joined. It broke down physical and psychological barriers between states, so that their citizens now pass casually into and through countries that once required major preparation. It gave the former Communist states of Central Europe an ideal to which to aspire and templates by which aspirations could become routine. And it made inter-European war so unthinkable that its possibility ceased to be thought about at all.

The dream of the founders was an ever-closer union transforming itself into something like a federal state. They thought it could exist in idealistic form while the practical changes were put – with much labor, compromise and argument – into place. One of these founders, French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman, called up the ideal in a speech in 1948:

We are carrying out a great experiment, the fulfillment of the same recurrent dream that for ten centuries has revisited the peoples of Europe: creating between them an organization putting an end to war and guaranteeing an eternal peace.

Two years later, in another speech, he filled in the nuts and bolts:

Europe will not be made all at once or according to a single plan. It will be built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity.

But solidarity is easier in easy times: It is in the hard moments that it is tested. Real solidarity is built up through deeply shared experience and common response in the midst of despair. It is strongest in those who feel part of one community – through place, work, or the result of misfortune or oppression. That kind of solidarity, we Europeans do not have.

We do have, more or less, another kind of solidarity, which we have been taught to respect. We see it in our national days:  France’s July 14, Bastille Day, a commemoration of the storming by the Parisian mob of a grim prison in which enemies of the monarchical state languished and often died, marking the transformation of the absolute monarchy into an absolute republic. Italy celebrates national unity, in 1861; Germany, national reunification, in 1990; Poland, independent statehood, in 1918; the Slovaks, independence from the Czechs, in 1993. The Irish, in celebrating St. Patrick on March 17, conflate the fifth-century saint with the violent struggle for independence from the British, and have created a pageant global in its reach, the largest of its kind. The British, whose national day (if such it is) is the Queen’s birthday, will belt out Land of Hope and Glory again at the Last Night of the Proms in September: Woe to the progressive bureaucrat or politician who cavils that the song’s injunction for the British to rule the waves is jingoistic, or “inappropriate.”

On these days we celebrate independence, freedom and the creation of a nation previously suppressed, fragmented or denied separate existence. Like our anthems they tell us we owe our freedom to our nation, and our nation guards that freedom against the rest. The enemy defied in the song may have long ceased to threaten (the Star Spangled Banner’s invocation of a land of the free was a land to be freed from the British. But the rousing of valor and its identification with national and personal independence, to which most anthems speak, still stirs.

It is this complex of emotions, loyalties and prejudices that politicians have honored and furthered – and which, in Europe, are now being trashed. The cold logic of the economists, that only a central administration can offer the financial, fiscal and political power to draw the Union out of its crisis, is now commonly held. Even those like the British government, which wishes no part of it but gasp for the 17 members of the euro zone to set the zone to rights so that the UK’s biggest market can again show growth, agree. But economic logic, now stands more opposed than ever before against the real solidarity that remains: the solidarity of the national community.

European politicians must now attempt something for which they are wholly unprepared – and thus have never prepared their electorates. They must tell peoples who wave tricolors symbolizing freedom and sing anthems glorying the national spirit that this is all very well, but it is to be brought out with an indulgent wink, signifying very little if anything at all. They must propose solidarity among nations that will approximate that which we muster for our compatriots. They must advocate seeing part of our tax go to support other countries’ citizens in their age, their sickness and their enforced idleness.

When that logic and that emotion are forced to face each other – as if on a dusty main street in an old Western – one must win. The fat years of the past six decades have served both our politicians and us, the populace, badly. They have diverted our gaze from the huge choice built into the foundation of the Union. But the choice is here now, everywhere in Europe. Once the summer is over, it will demand to be made.

PHOTO: People stop to look at a map of Europe, which is part of a marble world planisphere, in Lisbon August 14, 2011. REUTERS/Jose Manuel Ribeiro

The scenes of wild British rejoicing in July 2005, when it was announced London would host the 2012 Olympics, have faded and been replaced by visions of doom. Once the games begin, the sheer beauty of the sports will take over, but for now, most media attention is given over to threats, to chaos, to failure.

The day London celebrated in 2005, four British Islamist terrorists killed 52 people in four different bombs attacks, three on the metro system, one on a bus. Seven years later, the shadow still hangs heavy. The security arrangements include sharpshooters, missiles and, most recently, 3,500 soldiers called in because the security provider, G4S, was found last week to have failed to deliver the necessary number of trained guards.

Britain does grumbling as well as any country: It’s hard to find any Londoner who does not use the word “chaos” to encapsulate what he or she thinks will happen to London’s traffic and public transport from late July through August. Residents have been encouraged in that view by signs everywhere on the metro warning that “this station will be very busy during the Olympics.”

There is also a class-war dimension – which is never far from British debates. Special traffic lanes are being created down which VIPs will be whisked to and from the stadiums, in limousines lent by BMW. “What about the rest of us?” is the response of choice to that piece of obliging the noblesse.

In polls, most non-Londoners think the Olympics won’t benefit them, with the Scots and the Welsh especially sure of that (though they’re looking forward to the games themselves). In a survey done last week by Reuters, most economists agreed that the UK economy might get a temporary boost but no lasting benefits and would run the Olympics at a loss, as Athens did in 2004. Even in London, there’s a dispute about how far the vast works undertaken in East London to build the stadiums and the Olympic village will benefit the poor borough where they’ve been sited, one third of whose inhabitants are immigrants, many recent arrivals and many quite poor.

Nothing the Olympics touches seems to be an unambiguous triumph. The clothing company Ralph Lauren has been criticized left and right for having the Olympic uniforms it made for the U.S. team produced in China. Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, opined over the weekend that they should all be burned and American-made garments put in their place. And the Olympic curse doesn’t just apply to the current iteration. The Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City in 2002 were said to have been salvaged by Mitt Romney, who took charge of its organizing committee when it was mired in a bribery scandal. Now, the alliances he made in that project – and some of those associates are contributing heavily to his presidential campaign – are alleged to be of a doubtful ethical standard.

The Olympics are drawn into every possible national controversy because they’ve become such a huge national event – socially, politically and economically. They’re now tied to national prestige and status, a means by which nations can prove themselves and show off their ability to compete on the world stage. As a result, they’ve become as much a possible terrorist target as was the World Trade Center. The WTC epitomized Western capitalism; the Olympics epitomize Western pride and corporate boosterism.

The original Olympic Games lasted well over a thousand years, from about 800 BC to the mid-third century AD (and perhaps longer). They were part of a four-year cycle of religious festivals in honor of the God of Gods, Zeus, which took place in Delphi, Nemea, and Corinth with the climax in Olympia, on the Peloponnese peninsula in western Greece.

“Olympick” games – so spelled and so-called in homage to the classical games, descriptions of which had been preserved in Greek and Roman texts – were resurrected in England in the early 17th century, first of all in the Cotswolds, near Oxford. These were crude affairs, with bear baiting, pole-tossing and shin-kicking as central events. There was even a competition as to which contestant could make the ugliest grimace. Still held, they were popular and lively, if not chaotic – often promoted by publicans to increase trade.

Two centuries later, they were enfolded into the 19th-century passion for self- and national improvement, and were seen as serving manly and martial virtues. The French Baron Pierre de Coubertin founded the International Olympic Committee in 1894. The Olympics then bit by bit became part of both a nationalistic brand and a network of corporate interests.

They are now events prepared by armies of organizers (and, in London, protected by a real army) and paid for by billions in corporate and taxpayer’s funds. The Olympics have become so central because they are fused with nationalism and global corporations, and have severed any connection to religion, or to popular participation.

Is London 2012 poised for disaster or for triumph? Whichever, it will be massive. The Olympic Games, to be watched by billions, have now ascended to a very modern Olympus, far above us.

PHOTO: A soldier patrols by a gate at the beach volleyball venue ahead of the 2012 Olympic Games in London, July 16, 2012. The London 2012 Olympic Games start in 11 days’ time. REUTERS/Luke MacGregor. // Vehicles are driven in lanes next to an Olympic lane on the A4 road in west London, July 17, 2012. REUTERS/Toby Melville

Liberals and leftists all over the democratic world have often called themselves progressives, because it seems, in a word, to put you on the tide of a better future. (Also because in some countries, the United States most of all, to call yourself any kind of socialist was a route to permanent marginalization.) Progress doesn’t just mean going forward: It means going forward to a better place.

But a better place isn’t currently available, not for the right, and not for the left.

In the past two decades, progressives hitched their wagons to several charismatic individuals who were generally successful, both in gaining and retaining power. Luiz da Silva (Lula) in Brazil; Gerhard Schroeder in Germany; Tony Blair in the UK; and Bill Clinton in the U.S. They improved the lot of the poor somewhat, and, social liberals all, worked to bring in women, gays and ethnic minorities from the cold of discrimination and inequality.

Their personal popularity buoyed them, but success came at a cost. All of them betrayed progressivism in some way, adopting or adapting ideas and programs of their competitors on the right.

Tony Blair’s alliance with George W. Bush in the invasion of Iraq saw him branded as a warmonger by much of his own party – though he won his third victory after it. Lula’s adoption of a moderate economic policy caused the left wing of his Workers’ Party to split in several directions (but it still won after him, and still rules Brazil). Gerhard Schroeder, who developed a program of radical modernization called Agenda 2010, was excoriated by his party for adopting what many of the social democrats thought were right-wing, neo-liberal policies – such as making it easier for employers to fire workers. He called a snap election to show who was boss – and lost, to the center-right coalition led by current German Chancellor Angela Merkel (who must now sometimes wish Schroeder had won).

At gloomy meetings of UK and U.S. progressives in Oxford and London earlier this month, the former Blair adviser Roger Liddle admitted that British Labourites hadn’t anticipated the huge growth of inequality and the rising popular anger that now attends it. The left could not now promise a growth in living standards. Instead, the strategy should be to propose a “social investment” model, one in which consumption was foregone in favor of state investment in infrastructure, both physical and human.

The Harvard economist Jeff Frieden (co-author of a 2011 book, with Menzie Chinn, called Lost Decades) said that the first decade of the new millennium was already “lost,” and the second was in danger of following. The vast imbalances between the indebted countries – with the U.S. in the lead and the UK and the southern European states close behind – and their creditor countries has to be addressed now, or disaster awaits. His cure: inflation of some 5 percent a year, to inflate away the debt. That is tough on savers and pensioners, but someone has to suffer. Government’s main task, he said, was to choose who suffered most, and attempt to equalize it, making the rich pay a proportionate share.

But how is that going to happen? In Europe there is a growing disenchantment with the market and a greater faith in the state to address problems, but there is no centralized European body of sufficient power to tackle an issue with ramifications for all of Europe, and maybe the world. In the U.S. there are competent, centralized, federal institutions, but a large part of the electorate (we will see how large come Nov. 6) think, like Ronald Reagan, that the state is not the solution, but the problem. Even if the right doesn’t win in November, its lock on the House and Senate stymies initiatives that involve state spending and threatens others like wider health coverage – even after the Obama health insurance plan narrowly won a judgment that it was constitutional from the Supreme Court last month.

It’s not all terrible for progressives, on either side of the Atlantic. Obama is ahead in the swing states, if narrowly; and in the European Union, President Hollande has formed a new axis with (technocratic) Prime Minister Mario Monti of Italy and (center-right) Mariano Rajoy of Spain to produce some softening from the Iron Chancellor Merkel earlier this month, at least in the matter of financing troubled banks and spending a bit more on growth. David Cameron trails the Labour opposition in the British polls, and the German social democrats are on a roll, with Hannelore Kraft taking her Social Democrats to a clear victory in the biggest state, North Rhine-Westphalia, in May.

But the question hangs heavy over the Western center-left. When and if power is won, in what way can it make progress? And if, as the growing consensus suggests, progress won’t be made in living standards, how is some equality to be obtained in retreat?

Democratic politics in the second decade of the millennium will mean – if it is not to be wasted – shaping up a citizenry used to growth and relative ease to accept stagnant, if not falling, incomes, longer and more productive work, and higher taxes. To shape a narrative of progress round these policies will task a center-left whose demand has always been, boiled down to a word: more. How do you fire up the sinews of a movement by calling for less? Tough, but that’s the current job description for progressives.

PHOTO: French President François Hollande (R) and German Chancellor Angela Merkel smile after kissing each other during the 50th anniversary ceremony of the reconciliation meeting between former French President Charles de Gaulle and German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer after World War Two, in Reims, July 8, 2012. REUTERS/Jacky Naegelen

For most of the world, the memory of the slaughter of the Jews, pursued with such disciplined ferocity to the bitter end, demands respect. It gets it, not just in the thousands of records of the event, but in art, too. Primo Levi, the Milanese Jew who survived Auschwitz itself, wrote memoirs (If This Is a Man; The Truce) and novels (The Wrench; If Not Now, When?) that have the power of understated horror and serve as a kind of standard for all others. Films – Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002) and Stephen Daldry’s The Reader (2008) – two of the better known of the past decade – are somber, tragic affairs, the subject matter with which they work precluding anything approaching a happy ending.

There are exceptions, and, oddly, they are very funny ones. The earliest is the Ernst Lubitsch comedy To Be or Not to Be, released in 1942 and starring Jack Benny as a Polish actor who, through a series of comic turns, plays an SS Officer, Colonel Erhardt, in an ultimately successful escape bid. At one point, the real Erhardt, speaking of the concentration camps, snaps – “we do the concentrating, the Poles do the camping” – a line that still gives a start, though written and spoken when what the camping meant was still genuinely unknown by most. There are more, of course: Mel Brooks’s The Producers and Roberto Benigni’s 1997 La Vita e Bella, most memorably. Neither was uncontroversial, but what controversy there was has largely died, and they’re mostly seen as classics.

Now the Holocaust has a new creative frontier. In a ceremony that seemed as if it were made for another Mel Brooks movie, Hava Hershkovits won the Miss Holocaust Survivor contest in Haifa, Israel, last Friday. The organizer, Shimon Sabag, director of Yad Ezer l’Haver (Helping Hand), an institution that aids poor Holocaust survivors, said that the contestants “feel good together. They are having a good time and laughing at the rehearsals.” In the published pictures, Hershkovits, at 78, looks radiant and is wearing the victor’s tiara.

The coverage, however, was – though cautious – on the negative side. The Huffington Post put it under the rubric of “Weird Tales,” together with a taxidermist who dressed his products up in outlandish costumes. Reports mentioned controversy in the introduction or the second paragraph, and quoted Colette Avital, the chairwoman of an umbrella group for Holocaust survivors, as saying that: “It sounds totally macabre to me … I am in favour of enriching lives, but a one-time pageant masquerading [survivors] with beautiful clothes is not what is going to make their lives more meaningful.”

Avital knows more about Holocaust survivors than I do, but I’d like to ask her how she knows that. Most people get a kick out of appearing elegant, and even if, in their seventies, there are some sighs over time passing, I can’t see why Holocaust survivors should be different, or shouldn’t enjoy attention, or shouldn’t want to win (they decided to enter the competition, after all). Does a night of enjoyment make one’s life more meaningful? Who knows, except the person doing it? Why shouldn’t it?

That last isn’t a rhetorical question, and the obvious answer is: because it doesn’t show respect and it doesn’t matter even if those who take part are themselves survivors. There are enough ill winds who wish to cast doubt on, or deny, or even exult over, the Holocaust for everyone who is concerned with it to be careful not to give them more power. Victims can mar their own memorials, however inadvertently.

But the larger matter is this: The Holocaust still has the power to shock, but the shock is now familiar, and the subject leaves room for irony and humor. It’s a good idea to read and re-read Primo Levi (and other memoirs and descriptions of the camps) to renew some part of one’s initial shocked revulsion, but most of us, Jew and Gentile, have the ability to separate laughter over absurdity from awe that humankind is capable of such barbarity. Lubitsch’s “Concentration Camp Erhardt”, Benigni’s Fascist knee, Brooks’s Springtime for Hitler are the products of artists – most of them Jewish – culling the exercise of wit from the most desperate of contexts. In doing so, they deprive the authors of the Holocaust of the posthumous satisfaction that they have exterminated, as well as many human beings, the springs of laughter.

Miss Holocaust Survivor may or may not continue. By its nature, it cannot last for very many years, since surviving death in the Holocaust cannot confer the ability to survive life. But even if this was the one bright flash, even if it was a publicity stunt, it has been more an exercise of high spirits than of bad taste, more an act of defiance than a lapse into vulgarity. It is not a self-inflicted wound on the Jewish people but a tribute to a sense of humor that, even after Auschwitz, can still light up the world.

PHOTO: Hava Hershkovitz, 79, (2nd R), a Holocaust survivor and winner of a beauty contest for survivors of the Nazi genocide, stands with other contestants during a contest in the northern Israeli city of Haifa, June 28, 2012. REUTERS/Avishag Shar-Yashuv

Julian Assange, a fallen angel, remains, as of this writing, a guest of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. There he has sought asylum to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he faces rape charges that he denies, and, he believes, possible extradition to the U.S., where he fears he may be tried and found guilty of espionage and sedition, for which death is still the extreme penalty.

When we talk of fallen angels, we invoke the original fallen angel, Satan or Lucifer, once beloved of God, the highest in his closest council, whose pride impelled him to challenge for heaven’s rule – and came before his fall to Hell. Assange was an angel of a sort, at least to many. They saw his role as founder of WikiLeaks and leaker of thousands of pages of cables on Iraq and Afghanistan, and then from U.S. embassies all over the world, as the act of a liberator, a rebel with a cause, one who could poke the U.S. in the eye in a new way, with only a laptop at his disposal.

He did set himself up very high. He challenged the deities and sacred texts of journalism, contemptuous of a trade that he saw as largely a handmaiden to power. In one comment, he said that the problem with the late News of the World’s hacking into people’s phones was largely non-existent. They had “actually done original investigative work about people in this society that its readers were genuinely interested in.” In another, according to Guardian journalists who worked with him on the WikiLeaks material it published, he observed that if any of the informants who provided U.S. diplomats with the material in the leaked cables were to suffer retribution, they have “got it coming.” Now, he fears he does.

He saw political power as a conspiracy against the people. Mainstream journalism, describing governments’ activities in often respectful or at least neutral ways, was not exposing the conspiracy. Assange said he could.

He was, surprisingly often, taken at his own estimation. The common and confident forecast among media watchers was something to the effect of: “Journalism will never be the same again.” But for now, it doesn’t seem that way.

That’s partly because leakers have been deterred. The true angel, or devil (as you will), of the WikiLeaks’ leaks is U.S. Private First Class Bradley Manning, who passed on a huge cache of secret cables to WikiLeaks while undergoing something of a breakdown at the time. He has been in jail for nearly two years, the first nine months of which were in solitary confinement at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia. He was transferred to less severe conditions at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in April 2011, and appears for a pretrial hearing before a military court at Fort Meade, Maryland, on Monday. Manning could face life imprisonment; he’s unlikely to be pardoned. The relative harshness of his punishment was meant to be, and probably has been, a sharp deterrent for others thinking of following his lead.

Those trying to emulate WikiLeaks have also come up short. Some of the most powerful criticism of Assange came from Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a collaborator on WikiLeaks, who broke bitterly with his boss. In 2010 Domscheit-Berg announced that he would found his own leak site, Open Leaks, with a more transparent and ethically grounded basis than WikiLeaks. As of now, it hasn’t appeared.

The news media are changing and will, indeed, never be the same again. But that’s nothing new. The change now is driven by technology, markets and popular empowerment. WikiLeaks played a part in all of these, but it now seems a minor one.

Throughout the past year Assange has behaved as his enemies would have wished him to. He has accused his critics of being involved with the CIA, and allegedly – this on the testimony of Ian Hislop, editor of the satirical magazine Private Eye, though Assange denies it – he blamed “Jews” at the Guardian for defaming him. He contracted with the publisher Canongate to do a memoir, changed his mind when it was largely done, then sought to have its publication stopped.

He took a job on Russia Today, Russia’s world-service TV channel, as an interviewer. Russia, on any count, does not have free media. It was on one of his shows that he interviewed President Rafael Correa of Ecuador – a hugely friendly discussion, in which the president expressed his esteem for Assange and was complimented in turn. President Correa, who expelled the U.S. ambassador when WikiLeaks cables revealed that she had told her government that the president knew of the extensive corruption in the Ecuadorian police force, is not a man known for his toleration of adverse comment in the media.

Correa has launched lawsuits against journalists and newspapers, his government has expropriated opposition media and has strongly promoted state-owned publications and channels loyal to the president. In a press release earlier this month, democracy advocate Freedom House noted “the closure of another independent media outlet and numerous public comments made by Correa attacking private media,” and calls the moves “an alarming illustration of Correa’s growing attempts to silence media critics.”

Assange is in the not-unfamiliar position of one who has concluded that his enemies’ enemies are his friends. It’s a posture often taken by states, both democratic and authoritarian. It doesn’t reflect well on someone whose pitch was that his movement would transcend such grubby, often secret, deals in the name of transparency.

Journalism of any but the most anodyne sort is in the world of compromise, of grubby deals, and sometimes of frank criminality. The only justification for these is large public interest, and the only procedure is to accept punishment under the law for breaking it. Leaks are among the tools of the trade, and for all the enlightenment they bring, they are usually the fruit of someone breaking the terms of a work contract – sometimes for morally good reasons, sometimes not. However they are obtained, they are nearly always only a beginning: They have to be explained, set in context, abridged and opened for debate.

In a democracy, the revelations are often worth getting, but rarely entirely surprising. It is in authoritarian states that leaks can be really valuable, because it’s there that governments really do keep very large secrets, about which the population often knows absolutely nothing. Indeed, they are sometimes told the opposite is the case.

Assange, at the beginning of his career, said that opening the secrets of tyrannies was his mission. But the mission turned into mere anti-Americanism. The presiding genius saw himself as a global liberator. And so he fell. Journalism, as ever in constant transformation, remained the same.

PHOTO: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange holds a document containing leaked information at a news conference in London, February 27, 2012. REUTERS/Finbarr O’Reilly

Everything in Europe has a ‘but’ attached to it these days. Spain got a bank bailout last week, but it hasn’t convinced the markets. Mario Monti is a great economist and wise man, but he’s losing support for his premiership of Italy. Angela Merkel is listening to the voices that try to persuade her that Germany should bankroll growth, but she hasn’t done anything yet.

The New Democracy party, a grouping that, broadly, wants Greece to stick with the euro and bear more austerity (though it will bargain hard for less) has won… but what its leader, Antonis Samaras, has just got for himself is the worst political job on the continent, and may not be able to deliver. If, in democracy’s cradle, he can forge a coalition, keep to the terms of the bailout his country has received, enact rapid and deep reforms, and preserve democratic rule, he will deserve a place in the pantheon – a Greek word, after all, meaning a temple for the gods.

And so far, he’s been no god. A fellow countryman, the Yale political scientist Stathis Kalyvas, wrote in Foreign Affairs in June that Samaras “is widely seen as representing the corrupt and ineffective Athens political establishment that led the country to ruin”. Yet it’s this man, with all of his history, faults and frailties, on whom the future of Greece – and by many measures, the future of the European Union – depends.

That the fate of the vast enterprise of a Greater Europe should come down to the calculations of one Greek politician is terrifying. But it’s the way great projects go. At many turning or tipping points, one event, move or person is – consciously or unconsciously – critical.

The European Union has always been a high-wire act, a fragile thing, rooted less in history than in hope, idealism and an envious desire to be a great power.

Idealism was its first expression. After World War Two, the Union’s founders wanted to make European war again unthinkable. Since nation states had created war, their nationalism needed to be suppressed in favor of a greater, more peaceful, order.

But idealism faded. The sheer success of European rebuilding, the rise of postwar generations, official and unofficial links between the states strengthening, the political unity formed by opposition to the Soviet bloc – it all meant that the founders’ dreams were rewarded… and progressively forgotten. There was union, but it grew comfortable, it grew to be taken for granted.

Another bond was needed. It came from an earthier source, from money.

The best expression of the leverage money can have came ironically from a very idealistic philosopher, the 18th century German Immanuel Kant, in his “Guarantee for Perpetual Peace” (1795):

The spirit of commerce sooner or later takes hold of every people and it cannot exist side by side with war … for among all those powers that belong to a nation, financial power may be the most reliable in forcing nations to pursue the noble cause of peace.

Well, commerce is surely a powerful spirit. In Europe it has certainly seemed to help peace. In buying and selling, acquiring and consuming, we express the secular, practical, everyday manifestation of peace, as we contentedly graze. For some Europeans, notably the British, this was enough. So long as the market fundamentals were free and respected, and a spirit of cooperation prevailed, what need of more?

But political ambition to build a great state, the richest in the world, remained strong. Kant’s commerce was the lever for a larger goal: political union, come to be seen as a necessary accompaniment to the union of finance and the market. And it is that lever that now bends with the strain, and is like to break.

The reckoning is now.

For those who press for a closer, more united Europe, the crisis, though dangerous, is also a large opportunity. If the only way to avoid making cynicism into reality is to convincingly mutualize the debt, then a credible banking and fiscal unity must be quickly achieved. For that to be acceptable, political mechanisms must be developed – and a European government with real power will begin to take shape.

But those who would turn disaster into triumph are cursed with a paradox – well expressed in a recent speech in Sweden by the Economist writer David Rennie:

On the one hand, Europe’s single market represents Europe’s best chance of pursuing rational strategies in the face of globalization. On the other, it is an affront to democracy … in country after country, voters would rise up against it.

The voters of Greece did not, on Sunday, rise up against it. That would have meant giving the radical left-wing Syriza party a mandate, and they narrowly avoided doing so. But they may yet, for their choice carried the large but – but Samaras spends a season in a circle of hell constructing a coalition, and a longer season in a lower circle trying to govern a country under largely German-imposed conditions on largely German-organized assistance. The exercise of democracy is a Pyrrhic victory for New Democracy, and no kind of victory at all – at least not for years – for the Greek electorate. For people used to instant gratification from their politicians, that will be hard to bear quietly.

As citizens, we are now obliged to understand that the assumption of good and peaceful times may no longer hold. In Europe; in the Middle East, where Egypt now stands on the brink of more – and more bitter – protests against the military’s reassumption of power; in a Russia locked in a struggle between civil society groups and the presidency over human rights; in a China whose outgoing prime minister, Wen Jiabao, has warned of a return to dictatorship if democracy is not developed – in all these and more, the dangers and the crises spread and grow, and every improvement has a “but.”

This is not yet a global disaster movie. Africa now grows, quite strongly in places. Latin America remains largely democratic, having convincingly shaken off the military “saviors” that plagued its 20th century. Even in Europe, not all is dark: The decisive victory of French President François Hollande’s Socialist Party in the weekend’s parliamentary elections will put more, and more convincing, pressure on Germany to go for growth. Above all, the U.S. and Canada remain strong and free, and – as the dean of “Soft Power,” Harvard’s Joseph Nye, asserts – the former remains the world’s hegemon and is likely to remain so for some decades.

But how much more of a pounding can democracy take without an eruption, perhaps one greater than we have seen since the war? How much longer must we put “but” behind every event?

PHOTO: Conservative New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras is greeted by supporters in Athens’ Syntagma square June 17, 2012. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis

Italy, one of the founders of the European Union, is now in the most critical of situations. If many different things do not go well for the bel paese in the next year, it may attract the use of the word “founder” in its other, more sinister meaning: to sink.

As the euro zone crisis – which has traumatized Greece, put painful squeezes on Ireland and Portugal, and now engulfs the banks and the economy of Spain – laps around the beaches of Italy’s peninsula, the mood has soured.

In the past week, interviewing some of Italy’s leading journalists for a book on journalism in Berlusconi’s Italy, the country I found was one of profound doubt. Italian journalists are not the least cynical of their profession and often greet new events with a we’ve-seen-it-all-before shrug. Not now. Now they follow and record and comment on the news with journalism’s customary hyperactivity. But they admit they have no notion of what will come – or even how their country will be governed. What might come is, by large consent, possibly, even probably, bad.

Mario Calabresi is the editor of La Stampa, the liberal daily published in the northern city of Turin and owned by the Agnelli clan, who control Fiat. He’s young for an Italian editor, at 42, and is seen as one of the profession’s brightest stars. He’s also the son of Luigi Calabresi, an officer in the Carabinieri who was murdered in Milan in 1972 at the age of 34 by far-left terrorists. Calabresi says, “I must be an optimist,” but he doesn’t sound like it:

This is a temporary government, and the true issue is what comes after. Unfortunately there aren’t many people with whom to have a debate about the future because there aren’t many real political players. There’s a large risk that next year there will be a trend towards populism, attracting protest votes rather than parties having a proper reformist agenda.

At a quite different place, but with the same lack of optimism, is Vittorio Feltri, in his late sixties, slim, white-haired, and courteous. He has been the doyen of Italian journalism of the right for the past 20 years, bringing some of the techniques of tabloid reporting into the world of Italy’s heavily political newspapers, attacking enemies on the left with both a scalpel and a bludgeon. Speaking in his office in Milan’s Il Giornale daily – owned by the Berlusconi family – he says:

There is no credible political force now; the right is disorganized and split, the left is weak, the center nowhere. Populism is the vogue. What comes after Monti is simply unknown; at present there is nothing.

When Mario Monti took over as prime minister in November, Silvio Berlusconi had lost all credibility with his peers in Europe, and had seen a once-secure base erode over two years of scandal and hollow assurances that all was fine when it was not. Berlusconi pledged the support of his People of Freedom party to Monti, as did the center-left Democratic Party. But now that support wavers as the parties’ power-seekers find it popular to distance themselves from, or even oppose, Monti’s politics of austerity.

Monti himself, in public as precise and calm as ever, talks up the problem rather than disguises it. In an interview last week with the Catholic magazine The Christian Family, he said previous governments had racked up huge debts that had “put a burden on Italians who were then children, or had not even been born – that’s the great harm that was done to families … eighty per cent of our time is taken up trying to secure a country devastated by irresponsibility.”

His government, he said, was in an unprecedented situation: having to impose “very harsh measures, necessary to remedy the failures of the past.” No greater contrast could be imagined between the baroque bluster of Berlusconi and the dispassionate dryness of Monti, in both style and substance. Italy switched, in a day, from a showman to a puritan. Yet whatever relief originally came with the country being in the hands of a grownup, albeit a gloomy one, now dissipates.

This leaves the temptation of populism. The roly-poly figure of Beppe Grillo is its manifestation. A comedian of great talent in his mid-sixties, Grillo’s exasperated incredulity at the corruption and uselessness of the political class has now made its way into politics. In local elections last month, his “Five Stars” civic movement confounded the skeptics, broke through, garnered some 15 percent of the vote nationally and won the mayoral seats of several towns.

Both right and left are transfixed by ”Grillismo”. Some of the up-and-coming figures of the left are pressing for an alliance with Grillo, or the creation of their own “civic lists” of ordinary, non-party people who will enter politics without the taint of a failing party system. Berlusconi is widely reported to be examining the possibility of becoming “Grillismo” of the right. He’s rallying those in the working and lower-middle classes who had been enchanted by his own brand of populism for nearly two decades. He believes, it is reported, that they can be roused once more by a leader who, at 75, seems still to have the heart, and certainly has the money, for a fight.

This in spite of yet another trial, now under way in Milan, in which he is accused of having sex two years ago with a then-underage girl, Karima El-Mahroug, a Moroccan known as Ruby Heart-Stealer. The weekly Espresso last week printed an interview with the Brazilian Michelle Conceicao, who claimed she was one of the “harem” paid by Berlusconi to attend his parties. She swears, and says she will do so again in court later this month, that Ruby had sex with the premier, and received 5,000 euros – apparently the going rate – for the coupling. A spokesman for Berlusconi dismissed the claims; as has, in the past and repeatedly, El-Mahroug herself.

Thus Berlusconi still titillates his country and the world from beyond the political grave. He still seems to be having fun, his trademark brilliant smile flashing in photographs and TV clips – while a dour Monti struggles in the coils of the Italian political serpent, a fearsomely powerful beast. Beauty, charm and creativity have done much for Italy in the decades since the war; it is now the turn of discipline, austerity and grind, and no one knows how it will take to that.

ILLUSTRATION: Elsa Jenna/REUTERS

The last few days of Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee celebration have prompted the outpouring of patriotism and affection. But it did not faze Britain’s most determined protester. Peter Tatchell generally campaigns against homophobia and for gay rights: In one of his many (and one of his best) public projects, he tried to make a citizen’s arrest of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe when the latter came shopping in London in 1999, drawing attention to the president having called gays “pigs and dogs”. (London’s finest arrested Tatchell, not the dictator, for that episode.)

He was out again this weekend, on a wet, cool and blustery day as a flotilla of boats sailed down the Thames to salute the monarch. Just by Westminster Bridge, he and fellow leaders of the British republican party rallied a crowd of like-minded folk and some hecklers, who heard him say that though he thought the queen was personally quite nice, she was at the pinnacle of a pernicious class system, possessed hundreds of flunkeys and hundreds of millions of pounds, and must now stand aside to let the British people elect their head of state, as people should in a democratic country.

This wasn’t popular, but my respect for Tatchell, already high, went up. It’s a cliché but also a truth that a democracy is tested by its tolerance for those people and things that majorities can’t stand, and certainly the majority can’t stand the message that the republicans were shouting as they stood across the river from the Mother of Parliaments and the Mother of the Nation passed by in her specially prepared barge. The majority, in varying degrees, love the queen.

Everyone knows the queen is rich, richer than the bankers and corporate bosses who are presently hated for their wealth. But few care, even as we grow more anxious about our own more meager prosperity. Recently, swords have leapt from the scabbards of her legion of defenders to proclaim that she deserves every penny, and more – in part because of the tourist money she pulls in, and in part because she, more than any other figure, has come to epitomize the essence of the state. That’s an essence we can define as we wish, since her steady refusal to be controversial or in any way betray a view allows her to be the passive receptacle of every self-serving myth about Great Britain.

She stamped herself on the country at the very beginning of her reign. She insisted her coronation, in 1953, be televised to a country in which there were few sets. I went with my mother and grandmother to the one TV set in our village, borrowed from its owner, to sit in the packed hall of the Scottish Women’s Rural Institute. As the blurry, tiny figures moved in mysterious ways across a little screen, its crackling sound was turned to full volume. The tensions and jealousies of our small community dissolved. The adults were drawn together to hear her promise, as if in a marriage vow, to serve her country.

As Simon Schama wrote last week, “the simplicity and sincerity of that promise of 1953 – handing over her life to the odd but indispensably comforting role of national matriarch so that a nation in all its stupendous peculiarity will endure – has never deserted her. That is why …  no one should begrudge her a sigh and a smile.”

Well, some, like Peter Tatchell, will. A recent poll showed that less than 20 percent of contemporary Britons thought the monarchy should be abolished and Britain should become a republic: That appears to represent some 12 million people, not negligible even if dwarfed by the 48 million who think otherwise.

The republicans have a few voices in the media: the Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee and the Observer commentator Nick Cohen among them, both of whom have written strongly phrased denunciations of the royal family. But they are drowned by the masses. Even the literati, usually left-leaning, are on the queen’s side, ironically or otherwise.

Indeed, almost everyone who puts pen to public paper finds something nice to say. The novelist William Boyd, introduced three times to the queen, recalls that on each occasion her one line of conversation was “so – you’re the writer” – but recalls fondly her unaffected guffaws at a colleague’s joke. The rebarbative Marina Hyde, who does gossip and show business in the Guardian, calls her “the last silent celebrity.” The waspish writer Simon Jenkins, to whom the queen gave a knighthood for services to journalism, wrote that in her reign, Britain had become “a better place” for almost all.

The British dramatist David Hare, whose prolific work has expressed continuous despair over successive British administrations, celebrated the queen as “one citizen not at the mercy of the market” (she isn’t a citizen), and admires the fact that “her irritation with the present crop of seedy parliamentarians seems obvious … [she is] floating some way above the stink”. This isn’t exactly adoration, but it’s a creative use of the unelected monarch to beat the (“seedy”) elected politician.

That crosses the political divide. Commentators of the right regularly draw the comparison between the monarch and the minister to the former’s advantage. In a piece in the weekly of the right, the Spectator, last week, biographer of the queen Robert Hardman pointed out that the Jubilee celebrations this past weekend cost the public purse £1 million, while the London Olympics, beloved by politicians, will cost the British taxpayers most of the £9.3 billion bill. “Much as it may irritate republicans, it is actually this celebration of monarchy which embodies these contemporary virtues of inclusivity and accessibility. It is the supposedly egalitarian Olympic movement which looks remote, outdated, arrogant”.

A danger lurks in all of this, which should give heart to republicans. Such is the veneration of the queen that no successor can match her – certainly not her eldest son. Now in his sixties, Prince Charles has habits, hesitations and hubris Britons well know (or think we know, from the tabloids who helped destroy his marriage to Princess Diana – though he did more). Prince Charles has certainly softened, and had made a bid for affection by doing things like the weather forecast on the BBC. But as the older generations remember the slight woman who said “I will” when called to reign, so do they remember Charles, who, when asked on television if he were in love with his first wife-to-be, followed Diana’s shy “of course” with  “whatever ‘in love’ means.” Elizabeth the Second may be the last monarch of these islands who knew what being enthroned meant in the 20th, and into the 21st, century. Uneasy will lie whatever head inherits her much more uncertain throne.

Peter Tatchell may win yet.

PHOTO: Britain’s Queen Elizabeth leaves St. Paul’s Cathedral after a thanksgiving service to mark her Diamond Jubilee in central London, June 5, 2012. REUTERS/Andrew Winning