The return of the despot

The philosopher Karl Jaspers, writing in the aftermath of the Second World War in Germany, maintained that only a nation prepared to recognize its own guilt can recover from the moral and spiritual catastrophe of totalitarianism. The Germans slowly came to understand this after 1945. In Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the new authorities never acted on this realization.

April 20, 2026 - Jens Malling