Newsletter 20 June
23 juni 2024 | Forum for Democracy Intl
FVD International’s director, John Laughland, was invited back by TNT radio this week, this time onto a show called Muckrakers with Andrew Eborn, where he was delighted to be interviewed together with Glenn Diesen, a Norwegian academic whose work he greatly admires. The discussion focused on the misnamed “Ukraine peace summit” held in Switzerland on 15 and 16 June. It was a pointless piece of elitist summitry: when you have 90 countries and other entities around a table, no proper discussion is possible, just set-piece prepared statements read out by each participant for a few minutes. To bolster the impression that the world is united, the organisers artificially inflated the number of participants by listing various EU bodies as separate entities. (They even included the “Ecumenical Patriarchate” although, unlike the Holy See, it has no existence as a subject of international law.) Instead, the summit was mainly notable for the fact that several big countries either did not attend or did not sign up to the final communiqué, among them China, India, Brazil and Saudi Arabia. In other words, it was yet another signs of the impending end of Western hegemony.
Watch John Laughland's TNT Interview here
Sid Lukkassen has written for FVD International again, this time with a note of hope. Nietzsche said that when you stare into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you: Sid uses this idea to discuss the possibility of an absolute foundation, the creation of a new moral universe, rather as Romulus founded Rome. He calls this act ‘being abyssal’, a concept to which he has devoted a whole book. FVD, he says, is an ‘abyssal’ party, in the sense that it opens up to full view the chasms which separate different world views, allowing those chasms to be better understood and, perhaps, exploited. Sid says he wants to unite the Enlightenment and Romanticism - and yet they were united in Kant’s unexpected slogan, ‘Dare to know!’, which combines both classical truth-seeking and Romantic adventurism.
Read Sid Lukkassen's essay here
Stephen Baskerville offers us a look into different depths this week, with an excellent essay on the meaning of Left and Right. He reminds us that the origins of the Left lie in religion, specifically the Puritanism of the English civil war (on which he wrote a superb book). This created a style of politics, based on resentment, in which outcomes are more important than principles. The Left embodies that successful pursuit of outcomes, whence its repeated gains in all kinds of different areas. This has led to a de facto collusion between Left and Right, in which the Left advances and the Right opportunistically follows. This is the sort of mould which FVD wants to break – abyssally.
Read Stephen Baskerville's essay here
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John Laughland,
Director FVD International