The free world faces two attacks at once: from outside by states like Russia or China and from within by anti-democratic parties. It sometimes seems as if some people have grown weary of their own freedom.
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Joachim Kaeppner
“Everything falls apart, the center does not stand up / sheer anarchy is unleashed on the world,” says William Butler Yeats, a poem by Irish Nobel Prize winner William Butler. When he wrote it, in 1919, millions had died in the world war, bloody succession conflicts were raging in many places, such as in Russia, and a long civil war began in Ireland. And about the people in this deeply insecure epoch, which was only the prelude to even worse times, the poem says: “The best lack any conviction; the worst are full of obsessive passion.”