The Week

-- Democracy is a core value for the nations of the EU, right? And ththere are few more brazen enemies of democracy than Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, right? It is therefore not surprising that the EU has banned Mugabe and his cronies from traveling to its member nations. Excellent- a blow for democratic principles. But wait: Here is an organization called the Southern African Development Community, a sort of black EU embracing 14 southern African nations. Zimbabwe is a member. The EU wants to hold a meeting with the SADC, to discuss food aid and joint projects. The meeting was to take place in Denmark, an EU member nation. Zimbabwe wanted to attend. Uh-oh. But this kind of thing is no problem for those worldly, pragmatic Europeans: The EU merely moved the meeting to Mozambique, so that Mugabe's man could take part. Thank goodness those simplistic, moralizing Americans weren't involved!

-- Last issue, we reported on the international racism conference held inin Barbados-intended as a follow-up to the U.N. Durban conference- where attendees voted to expel non-blacks from the proceedings (it was too painful to discuss the slave trade in front of the children of the oppressors). Now the organizers have come running back to master, begging white businessmen to pay off the conference's debt of $100,000. Well, not begging, exactly: "If [whites] don't see fit to contribute, then I would be asking black people to think very carefully about how they would spend their money," thundered the president of the Congress Against Racism. And so the conference had a fitting end.

-- In 1960 Harold Macmillan, then prime minister of Britain, made his fafamous and happily "progressive" Winds of Change speech, welcoming de-colonization, which has turned out to have extraordinarily mixed results. Last August, the island republic of Jamaica celebrated the 40th anniversary of its independence from Britain. A Jamaican newspaper conducted a poll that now has become a subject of outrage and indignation. Omigod, 53 percent replied that the country would have been better off had it remained a British colony, while only 15 percent thought it would have been worse off. Meanwhile in Zimbabwe . . .

-- In the preface to his mighty Dictionary, Samuel Johnson scoffed at ththose who thought that such a work ought to fix the language once and for all: "To enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride, unwilling to measure its desires by its strength." Johnson's preface is apparently not much studied in Romania, where the language of everyday life has been taking in loan-words from English at a fair clip these past few years: "hot dog," "laptop," "show business," and, inevitably, "cool." Parliamentarians in Bucharest have now passed a law insisting that any foreign words spoken at a public event be accompanied by a Romanian translation. The humble hot dog must now be referred to, at least in public, by a Romanian phrase meaning: "a kind of sausage in a kind of roll." The French, of course, have been fighting this battle for decades, with little success. It seems to be an obsession with nations whose language is derived from (or, in the case of Romania, more probably just influenced by) Latin-a last rearguard action against the barbarian invasions of the 5th century, perhaps. In Romania's case, we can look on this nonsense with smiling indulgence. Just 13 years ago the Romanians were groaning under the heel of the odious Ceausescu dictatorship. Now at least they have a real parliament, free to debate frivolities like this.