The Weekly Forum - 17 July

The Dutch Parliament has gone into summer recess but FVD’s parliamentarians and friends continue to be active. Eric van de Beek, a journalist with De Andere Krant (The Other Newspaper) has published a concise English version of his earlier books on the MH-17 affair – the Malaysian airliner which crashed in Ukraine in 2014 and which the West accused the Russians of shooting down. Eric is convinced that the evidence does not support this claim, which played a key role in ramping up support for the Ukrainians in the aftermath of the Maidan coup in February 2014, and at a time when Kiev was hammering the Donbass militarily causing horrific civilian casualties (which no one heard about at the time or since).  Eric is the only journalist to have followed every day of the trial of four Russian and Ukrainian defendants in a Dutch court – the only one of the four who defended himself was acquitted - and is convinced that the court’s conviction of the other three is unsafe.

Read about Eric van de Beek's book here

Friends of FVD include people who have kindly appeared on The Forum, our weekly video podcast, or whose articles we are honoured to re-publish.  Two of these, Professor Glenn Diesen of the University of South-East Norway and former Czech president, Vaclav Klaus, have recently recorded a podcast as part of Glenn Diesen’s ‘Greater Eurasia’ series.  Their discussion ranged over many issues but concentrated on Europe, wokeism and the Ukraine war.  Klaus is an exceptional figure who has spoken at FVD’s Renaissance Institute and whom FVD International's director, John Laughland, has known since the 1990s, while Glenn Diesen is making his name as one of the leading commentators on international affairs.

Watch the Klaus-Diesen discussion here

And while on the subject of exceptional figures, we were delighted to have Ulrike Guérot as our guest on The Forum this week. Ulrike is an emblematic figure of our time.  A graduate of German universities and Sciences-Po in Paris, she has spent her career as a political scientist and in various think-tanks including the German Marshall Fund and the European Council on Foreign Relations.  In short, hers has been a successful establishment trajectory.  Things started to go wobbly when she questioned the draconian Covid restrictions in 2020 – you see, she believes in democracy and the rule of law – but then severely downhill when she started to call for peace with Russia after 2022.  This has led to her dismissal as professor of European politics at the University of Bonn – she is a victim of Europe’s new authoritarianism. Ulrike is convinced that Europe will survive only if its political structure – whatever that is – encompasses the whole of the European continent, i.e. including its largest country which the EU is determined to exclude.

Listen back to The Forum here