Christoph Ernst

A fierce and ever-widening culture war is rapidly rewriting the West’s ideas of identity, equality and freedom. Identity has become a powerful organising principle in contemporary Western politics and public life, reviving an older question about the place of dissent in society. Above, Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Socrates (1787). Jan H. Rosenkranz, a German writer and commentator, recently wrote in Die Welt about ‘the surprisingly conservative Generation Z’. Yet, in many countries,...

The Gaza war has stripped away the veneer of the Western Left to reveal a rotting core of cultural Marxism, civilizational self-hatred and an unholy alliance with the architects of group barbarism. Pro-Palestinian rally at Brandenburg Gate In 1933, as the shadow of totalitarianism lengthened across Germany, the aging painter Max Liebermann surveyed the political landscape and remarked, “You can’t eat as much as you’d like to puke.” Nearly a century later, watching the intellectual and...

Europe’s selective outrage over Iran eludes the harder question of whether it can afford to ignore a nuclear-armed revolutionary regime. For 47 years the rulers of Iran have proclaimed America their sworn enemy. The chant of “Death to America” has echoed from Tehran’s streets and pulpits since the revolution of 1979. During those same decades, American citizens have repeatedly found themselves the targets of violence - from Beirut to Nairobi - carried out either directly by Iranian agents or...