Recently, I was prompted to recall a conversation I had as a child with my parents during the ‘Cold War’ period in which my parents explained to me and my siblings the differences between the oppression that once existed in Nazi Germany and which still existed in the Soviet Union and the freedoms that we enjoyed here, in pre-war and early post-war Britain. Key among those differences were freedom of belief, freedom of expression and…

By Markus Willinger: The Ukraine crisis has not only shown that the old conflict between America and Russia still exists. It has also made it clear that Europe is still the locus of this conflict, but without any independent power of its own to affect the outcome. The Russians and the Americans argue about redrawing borders within Europe, and they don’t care what we Europeans think about it. They don’t care because they don’t need…

By Jez Turner: Communism has executed, slaughtered, massacred and starved hundreds of millions to death worldwide. From the time of the Russian Revolution onwards: through Bela Kuhn; Rosa Luxembourg; the American-backed Stalinist invasion of Europe; the anti-communist resistance movements that fought a savage guerrilla war against the Soviet hordes; the Cold War; the Hungarian Uprising; the Prague Spring; through to the thawing of the Cold War and its final collapse, Communism – whether in Europe…

By Heordreedenn: There is a thought experiment – at least I hope it’s a thought experiment – concerning the best way to boil a frog. Apparently if you just chuck the hapless amphibian into a pan of boiling water it realises immediately that all is not well and jumps out at once. But if you put it in a pan of cold water, and heat it slowly, it never notices what is happening, or at least if…