[lbo-talk] Possible Bright Side?

Carl Remick carlremick at hotmail.com
Fri Nov 12 21:22:05 PST 2004



>From: Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu>
>
>Carl quoted:
>
> > A German Lesson for Remaking Iraq
> >
> > By Anne Applebaum
> >
> > Wednesday, November 10, 2004
> > The lesson of the East German transition after 15 years should, in other
> > words, be phrased as a warning: Even if it is possible to get every
> > political and economic element right, even if it is possible to avoid
> > violence entirely, the psychological transition to liberal democracy
>from
>a
> > regime ruled by fear is one that takes at least one generation, if not
>two.
> > Few people are able to walk from a closed society into an open one
>without
> > self-doubt and discomfort. Few people find it easy to readjust their
>
>
>blah blah blah - what a piece of arrogant Gringo shit. ...
>
>But what really gets me is a stupid American bitch who spent her entire
>fucking life in a sheltered suburban environment and either did not live
>the
>United states at all or if she did, she stayed in sheltered resorts and 5
>star Hiltons - and then she has the temerity of speaking with authority
>about life in other countries. What a ruse. That fucking navel-gazing
>arrogance is what foreigners hate about gringos the most - and rightfully
>so.

[I always find Applebaum irritating myself, but I must say she does have familiarity with Europe. As her Washington Post bio (below) notes, her accomplishments include marriage to a Pole ;-) Still, Applebaum always comes across more as a US cheerleader in her columns than as an analyst of Europe.]

Anne Applebaum is a columnist and member of the editorial board of the Washington Post.

She began working as a journalist in 1988, when she moved to Poland to become the Warsaw correspondent for the Economist. She eventually covered the collapse of communism across Central and Eastern Europe, writing for a wide range of newspapers and magazines.

Returning to London in 1992, she became the Foreign Editor, and later Deputy Editor, of the Spectator magazine. Following that, she wrote a weekly column on British politics and foreign affairs, which appeared at different times in the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph, and the Evening Standard newspapers. She covered the 1997 British election campaign as the Evening Standard's political editor. For several years, she wrote the "Foreigners" column in Slate magazine.

Her first book, Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe, described a journey through Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus, then on the verge of independence.

Her most recent book, Gulag: A History, was published in April, 2003 in America and Britain. The book narrates the history of the Soviet concentration camps system and describes daily life in the camps. It makes extensive use of recently opened Russian archives, as well as memoirs and interviews. Gulag: A History won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-Fiction, as well as Britain's Duff-Cooper Prize. The books was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the LA Times Book Award and the Samuel Johnson Prize. It has appeared or is due to appear in more than two dozen translations, including all major East and West European languages.

Over the years, her writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the International Herald Tribune, Foreign Affairs, the Boston Globe, The Independent, The Guardian, Commentaire, Suddeutsche Zeitung, Newsweek, the New Criterion, the Weekly Standard, the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, The National Review, The New Statesman, The Times Literary Supplement and the Literary Review, among others. She has appeared as a guest and as a presenter on many radio and television programs, among them BBC's Newsnight, the Today Progamme, the Week in Westminster, as well as CNN, MSNBC, CBS and Sky News.

Anne Applebaum was born in Washington, DC in 1964. After graduating from Yale University, she was a Marshall Scholar at the London School of Economics and St. Antony's College, Oxford. In 1992 she won the Charles Douglas-Home Memorial Trust award for journalism in the ex-Soviet Union. Between East and West won an Adolph Bentinck prize for European non-fiction in 1996. Her husband, Radek Sikorski, is a Polish politician and writer. They have two children, Alexander and Tadeusz.

###

Carl



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