Grímur Thomsen, a nineteenth-century Icelandic poet, worked in the Danish Foreign Service, as Iceland was then a Danish dependency. Once, he was chatting with a Belgian diplomat of noble birth who could not hide his disdain for the Icelanders, a tiny nation on a remote island. They spoke in French. The Belgian asked haughtily: ‘And which language do the natives in your country speak?’ Thomsen wanted to teach his Belgian colleague a lesson, so he replied: ‘Actually, they all speak Belgian.’ Whereas Belgians speak either Dutch or French, a strange language which might be called Belgian is developing in Brussels, the capital not only of Belgium but also of the European Union. Four words from it are: euromantics, Procrusteans, gigantomania, and conferencitis.

Euromantics

The Euromantics have formed an emotional attachment to the European Union. They often, but not always, have a financial interest in it also. The Euromantics ignore the fact that the EU was formed as a customs union. Instead, they emphasise what they romantically see as its historical mission, to bring peace and unity to Europe. They also ignore the fact that the EU fundamentally changed in the early 1990s after successfully concluding economic integration, creating a European free market, and beginning political integration, or centralisation. When problems emerge in the EU as a result of centralisation, the Euromantics usually respond by demanding more of the same. The failure of a project is seen as an argument for spending more money on it.

Procrusteans

In Greek mythology, Procrustes was the rogue who invited passer-bys to stay overnight. If his guest was too short for his bed, he stretched him on the rack. If he was too long, he chopped his feet off. The advocates of European centralisation are Procrusteans. They believe in one-size-fits-all, blithely ignoring Europe’s incredible diversity. I borrow a mundane example from Daniel Hannan. It is an EU regulation aimed at stimulating competition between ports. But in Great Britain, there are many small ports, privately owned, competing with one another. On the continent, however, the ports tend to be sparser and bigger, and usually state-owned. This regulation imposes unnecessary costs on British ports, while it may make sense on the continent. There are hundreds, or thousands, of such misguided EU regulations. I shall only add a non-economic and dramatic example: abortion. This is an issue that should be entrusted to individual states.

Gigantomania

Gigantomania is the naive belief that the bigger a project is, the better. To the extent that gigantomania is plausible, it is based on economies of scale. But diseconomies of scale should not be dismissed. The bigger an operation is, the less transparent and flexible it becomes. Companies are not more efficient because they are bigger. They are bigger because they are more efficient. It is also sometimes argued that producing public goods on a large scale is efficient due to fixed costs. But the evidence does not bear this out. The cost per capita of producing public safety, a typical public good, is actually higher in some large countries such as the United States than they are for example in the five small Nordic countries. The public good which is, however, best produced on a large scale is defence, a lesson learned by the many small states conquered by Hitler and Stalin in the 1930s and 1940s.

Conferencitis

The liberal German economist Wilhelm Röpke coined the word ‘conferencitis’ to describe the many futile conferences in the 1920s and 1930s on the restoration of monetary stability and disarmament. Unsurprisingly, the talking classes taxing the working classes in Europe believe in talk. The more meetings, the merrier. But the truth is that usually conferences, especially in the social sciences, serve to create unwarranted entitlements and excessive expectations. Most of them are a waste of time, money and talent. As Karl Kraus could have said, conferencitis is that illness for which it regards itself as therapy.

(The Conservative 31 December 2025.)

It was quite an experience to attend a dinner in Rome on 11 December 2025, organised by the Brussels think tank New Direction, as the first Margaret Thatcher Awards were handed out. Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the recipient of the Award in Politics, delivered a brief yet powerful speech in fluent English. She is emerging as the leading European statesman, with a clearer conservative vision than either Merz in Germany or Macron in France. But while I was listening to her and the other speakers, I recalled three visits to the Eternal City from my remote, windswept country in the northwestern corner of Europe, Iceland.

Gudrid in North America

The first visit was in the late 1020s by Gudrid Thorbjornsdaughter (c. 980–c. 1050), a strong-willed woman like Thatcher and Meloni. Born in Western Iceland, Gudrid emigrated with her father to Greenland in the late 990s (Icelandic has no family names, just a first name and then information about whose son or daughter one is, for example Gudrid daughter of Thorbjorn, Einar son of Benedikt). At the age of 27, Gudrid met an Icelandic merchant, Thorfinn Thordson, who married her. In spring 1008, they, along with some other Greenlanders, decided to explore a newly discovered country in the West, sailing there on four ships. The following winter they stayed in what is now Fundy Bay (between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia), where Gudrid gave birth to a son, Snorri Thorfinnson, the first child of European descent born in North America. In 1009, Gudrid and Thorfinn decided to sail south and explore more of the country. They arrived at what is now the Hudson River, where they stayed for a while. But in late 1010, the settlers clashed with some Natives. Realising that in any conflict they would be greatly outnumbered, they returned to Greenland in the summer of 1011.

Gudrid in Rome

After a while, Gudrid and Thorfinn moved to a farm in Northern Iceland. When Thorfinn died and their oldest son Snorri married, Gudrid decided to go on a pilgrimage to Rome. There, she could see many monuments still standing, such as Castel d’Angelo (originally an imperial mausoleum), the Pantheon (originally a Roman temple), and the Colosseum. As an old woman, Gudrid, by now the best-travelled person in the world, told her grandchildren stories of her journeys. Less than two centuries later, these stories were written down at the behest of her descendants, who were leading churchmen.

A Poet Reflects on the Romans

The second visit was by the poet, lawyer, and businessman Einar Benediktsson (1864–1940) in 1903. One evening, as he stood at twilight by the Tiber River, he composed one of his best-known poems, An Evening in Rome: ‘Quiet Tiber seawards slow is flowing.’ He reflected on the history of the Roman Republic and its degeneration during the Empire, concluding that what remained of value was the cultural heritage. The poem is full of metaphors and striking poetic images. Einar composed another poem about his visit to Rome, Colosseum, where the emphasis was on the cruelty of the performances in the ancient amphitheatre, as ‘Beast and man fought out their duel’.

An Engineer on the Verge of Tears

The third visit was by a prominent politician and engineer, Jón Thorláksson (1877–1935), Iceland’s Prime Minister in 1926–1927 and founder of the conservative-liberal Independence Party, which long dominated Icelandic politics. In 1923, he and his wife went to Italy on a late honeymoon. Ten years later, as Mayor of Iceland’s capital, Reykjavík, Jón attended a dinner on 6 July 1933 in honour of the Italian Air Marshal Italo Balbo, who had made a stopover in Iceland on a transatlantic cruise. Balbo spoke little English, so they conversed in Latin, which both had learned in school. Jón told Balbo that on his visit to Rome, he had been on the verge of tears over the destruction which time had inflicted on what had been the Forum Romanum. As a civil engineer, he was a great admirer of Roman construction techniques.

(The Conservative 21 December 2025.)

On 12 November 2025, Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, unveiled the so-called Democracy Shield. This is a project which includes a new institute, the European Centre for Democratic Resilience, which is supposed to enlist experts for the fight against disinformation. Ironically, however, von der Leyen’s European Commission is itself not democratically elected, although it in effect holds both the executive and legislative power in the European Union.

A Sword Against Freedom?

I am reminded of what the distinguished economist Frank H. Knight once said: that when a man or group asked for power to do good, his impulse was to cancel out the last three words, leaving simply ‘I want power’. The Democracy Shield is supposed to be directed mainly against Russian disinformation, in particular attempts to influence elections in the West. Surely, this is a real menace. But where is the guarantee that the Democracy Shield would not be used against free speech, bold ideas, controversial arguments, unorthodox approaches? It should be recalled that the Soviet Union maintained a huge propaganda machine in Western democracies before and during the Cold War. While this machine certainly did have some impact, it was not closed down. The idea of a Democracy Shield is a faint, admittedly very faint, echo of Göbbels’ Ministry of Public Enlightenment (!) and Propaganda, and the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighy Four. It may become less of a Shield for Democracy than a Sword against Freedom.

Freedom for Loki as Well as for Thor

History repeats itself. In 1945, immediately after the surrender of the Nazi occupation force in Denmark, a lively debate took place there about the limits of freedom, the ‘Democracy Debate’. It started with two communist intellectuals, Jørgen Jørgensen and Mogens Fog, asserting that a democratic country had to defend herself. She could not tolerate anti-democratic speech, for example from Nazis. The two communists rejected the famous maxim by the Danish nineteenth-century poet and national liberal N. F. S. Grundtvig that there should be freedom for Loki as well as for Thor. (Loki was a rogue heathen god, malicious and sly, whereas Thor was a heroic heathen god, wielding his hammer against the forces of evil.) Against the two communists, many Danish intellectuals protested that democracy was not least about deliberation and discussion, and that it therefore required freedom of expression.

The most thoughtful contribution to the debate came from a distinguished Grundtvigian, Law Professor Poul Andersen. He argued that there were many different conceptions of democracy and that therefore a ban on anti-democratic speech was difficult to implement. He concluded that any political opinion should be allowed, even if it would imply the rejection of democracy, yes, even if it would be a demand for a constitutional change in an anti-democratic direction. Limitations should only be about the means used, Andersen said. Violence and terror should be excluded.

Truth Strengthened by Refuting Falsehood

It was somewhat incongruous that Danish communists in 1945 demanded a ban on anti-democratic speech, because the historical divide between communists and social democrats was after all that communists would not rule out seizing power by non-democratic means. But John Stuart Mill expressed a idea similar to that of Grundtvig and Andersen in his celebrated Essay on Liberty, that truth would be strengthened if it must refute falsehood. Even the Catholic Church used to appoint a ‘Devil’s Advocate’ (Advocatus Diaboli) to argue against candidates for sainthood. Perhaps Denmark, as a member state of the European Union, will use her influence there to uphold Grundtvig’s maxim about freedom for Loki as well as for Thor.

(The conservative 5 December 2025.)

The Brussels think tank New Direction held a dinner in Rome on 11 December 2025, during which the Margaret Thatcher Awards were presented. It was an elegant and enjoyable event. It caught my attention that on a board in the entrance, twenty prominent thinkers and politicians were listed, presumably individuals with whom the organisers identified. This was an intriguing group.

Eight Men of Affairs

The politicians were Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Lech Kaczynski, Konrad Adenauer, John Howard, and Józef Pilsudski. Perhaps Pope Paul John II and William F. Buckley, who were also on the list, should be included in this group, although they were men of affairs. Thatcher was the only one whom I was fortunate enough to meet, as I have describe elsewhere. She was definitely a free-market conservative, or as the Americans say, a fusionist. So were Reagan and Adenauer, and Buckley was a tireless spokesman for fusionism, trying to unite in one coalition American anti-communists, libertarians, and traditionalists.

Hayek and Friedman

The thinkers on the board were Joseph de Maistre, Roger Scruton, Friedrich von Hayek, Edmund Burke, Giuseppe Prezzolini, Giacomo Leopardi, Milton Friedman, Benedetto Croce, Ludwig von Mises, Thomas Sowell, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Mihai Eminescu. I confess that I had not heard of Prezzolini and Eminescu before. On the other hand, I knew Hayek and Friedman as well as a much younger man at the time could hope to do. Hayek came to Iceland in 1980 and Friedman in 1984. I wrote my dissertation at Oxford on Hayek, focusing on his combination of conservative insights and classical liberal principles, and I consequently had many discussions with him. When I was a Visiting Scholar at the Hoover Institution in the 1980s and early 1990s, Friedman was a Senior Fellow there, and we had many lunches together at the Stanford Faculty Club, usually joined by Friedman’s wife, Rose, and his brother-in-law, Aaron Director. Hayek and Friedman were different personalities. Hayek looked and behaved exactly like an Austrian aristocrat, polite and slightly aloof. In contrast, Friedman was like a lightning rod: although he was small of stature, at receptions you could always tell where he was because that was where the largest group had gathered.

Sowell and Scruton

I met Sowell briefly at the 1980 Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Stanford. He has the ability to state his views clearly and forcefully. He is a public intellectual in the same way as Voltaire in the eighteenth century. I also only met Scruton once, but we spent a memorable evening together over drinks at a Brussels hotel, after a New Direction conference. Scruton was a remarkable thinker, a polymath if there ever was one. He told me that he had only recently realised the strength of Hayek’s argument for spontaneous coordination.

Burke, de Tocqueville, and von Mises

I am reasonably familiar with the thought of three other thinkers on the board, Burke, de Tocqueville, and von Mises, and I indeed devote a chapter to each of them in the book I wrote in 2020 for New Direction on twenty-four conservative thinkers. While de Maistre was a keen observer of human frailty, I do not, however, find him congenial. I must also say that I personally would have put on the board the distinguished economist Luigi Einaudi (President of Italy in 1948–1955) rather than Croce. But certainly the novelist Giacomo Leopardi was well chosen: His vivid account in The Betrothed of a famine in Milan is also a lesson in price theory.

Meloni’s Speech

What unites the twenty individuals on the board? I am not sure that any single definition could encompass them, though most would support private property, limited government, free trade, and respect for traditions. Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s Prime Minister, hit on an important truth in her short but compact speech at the dinner, after receiving the Thatcher Prize in Politics. It is that it matters no less who we are than what we can have. We all need a sense of belonging, membership in a community, the enlargement of our individual selves, in families, circles of friends, neighbourhoods, workplaces, teams, associations, and indeed, nations. Therefore, Europe should be a federation of sovereign nation-states, not a federal state.

(The Conservative 12 December 2025.)

While my sympathy in the war between Ukraine and Russia is with the country attacked, Ukraine, we cannot pretend that the attacker, Russia, ceases to exist if we close our eyes. She will still be there when we open them. So, an accommodation has to be reached, acceptable both to Ukraine and Russia. I am surprised that nobody has proposed what I would call the Nordic solution of the War in Ukraine. For centuries the Scandinavian countries fought one another, but slowly five principles took hold in their relations.

The Five Principles of Nordic Relations

Those principles are: 1) The right of secession. Norway seceded from Sweden in 1905, Finland from Russia in 1917, and Iceland from Denmark in 1918. 2) The autonomy of nationalities, such as that of the Åland Islands in Finland, and Greenland and the Faroe Islands in Denmark. 3) Change of borders by plebiscites. In 1920, Northern Schleswig voted in two constituencies between Denmark and Germany. In the northern part the inhabitants voted overwhelmingly to join Denmark, and in the southern part overwhelmingly to join Germany. Accordingly, the border was moved. 4) Conflict resolution by arbitration. The Åland Islands were craved by both Finland and Sweden. The League of Nations awarded them to Finland. Eastern Greenland was craved by both Norway and Denmark. The International Court of Justice awarded it to Denmark. Both Sweden and Norway accepted these decisions. 5) Cooperation with minimal surrender of sovereignty. In the Nordic Council, parlamentarians of the five Nordic countries meet regularly, and they cooperate on legal and social integration, establishing a common labour market and the abolition of passport controls long before the EU.

Plebiscites in Contested Regions

Ukraine seceded from Russia in 1991, because the Ukrainians constitute a nation with their own clear identity. They had the right to a state to protect this identity. The contested regions of Ukraine are on the Crimean Peninsula and in Eastern Ukraine, Donetsk and Luhansk, and in parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. The Nordic solution would mean an instant ceasefire, followed by a division into constituencies of the contested regions now under Russian control, with each constituency voting whether it wants to belong to Ukraine or Russia, with the plebiscites conducted by the United Nations or some other agent (possibly two Nordic countries alongside Hungary and Slovakia). Then the border would be moved in accordance with the outcomes of the plebiscites. Who should vote? The only feasible answer is to let everybody who now lives in those regions, and all those who can prove that they lived there before the Russian invasion in 2022, vote.

Ukraine in the EEA

Moreover, Russia insists, and has long insisted, that Ukraine would not join NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. While sovereign states should of course have the right to choose alliances at will, perhaps, for the sake of peace, this Russian demand might be accepted. But what Ukraine really wants is to join the West in a broad sense. Perhaps another way of accomplishing this without alienating the Russians too much, would be to follow the Nordic example again. Norway and Iceland are members of EEA, the European Economic Area (with Liechtenstein and, to all practical purposes, Switzerland). The EEA is a forum for economic, not political integration. Could Ukraine not join the EEA? This would be a way to join the West without undertaking all the political (and perhaps in the future military) obligations that follow from EU membership.

Stopping the Bloodbath

There is no question that Russia violated international law by attacking Ukraine. History has also told us that aggressive dictators are emboldened if they are allowed to conquer countries by force. The only way to deal with them is to be strong and firm enough that they dare not attack. But if the borders between Russia and Ukraine are moved by the inhabitants themselves in internationally monitored plebiscites, then neither side can claim victory. Most importantly, the bloodbath will be stopped. And perhaps one day the Russians and the Ukrainians, as closely related as the Swedes are to the Norwegians, can cooperate to their mutual benefit and even be friends, like the Nordic nations.

(The Conservative 30 November 2025.)

Margaret Thatcher was born on 13 October 1925. Appropriately, the Brussels think tank New Direction is celebrating her centenary in Rome on 11 December, handing out the first Margaret Thatcher Awards. I met Thatcher on several occasions, such as dinners given by the Young Conservatives in London and the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC, and at cocktail parties in the House of Lords at Westminster Palace and at the Estonian Embassy in London. But I only had the opportunity to have a real discussion with her at a dinner in London on 5 October 2002. When she heard that I was from Iceland, she congratulated me on my country not being a member state of the European Union of which she had become increasingly critical. She added that one problem with the European Union was that many people on the continent had never understood the British tradition of liberty under the law. Thatcher was a good-looking woman of average height, with blazing, steel blue eyes, immaculately dressed and with her dark blond hair perfectly coiffed. She had a strong presence, and was more prone to talking than listening. Of the two famous actresses who have portrayed her on-screen, Gillian Anderson looked more like her, while Meryl Streep captured her public personality better.

Liberty under the Law

Thatcher’s remark to me about the English tradition of liberty under the law was profound. Limited government had slowly developed in England, with Magna Carta in 1215, the victory of the Parliament over the king in 1646 and the Bloodless Revolution of 1688. On the continent, however, kings had assumed absolute power in most countries, most notably King Louis XIV of France. The English historian George Macaulay Trevelyan once asked his readers to suppose that the struggle in the seventeenth century between king and Parliament had ended differently. ‘The current of European thought and practice, running hard towards despotism, would have caught England into the stream,’ he wrote. ‘England would then have become a mere outlying portion of the State system of Europe.’ Later, the French Revolution in 1789 had not sought to limit the absolute power of kings, but rather to transfer it to self-declared representatives of the people. This led to terror, a military dictatorship and the sanguinary Napoleonic Wars. It is also a sobering thought that in the spring of 1941, there were only six democracies in Europe, Great Britain, Ireland, Iceland, Sweden, Finland, and Switzerland. Great Britain alone fought the Nazis.

Successful Reforms

Thatcher was a student at Oxford when The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich A. von Hayek came out in 1944, and it made a great impact on her. She was also an avid reader of Hayek’s other works. Shortly after she was elected Leader of the Conservative Party in 1975, she attended a meeting at the Party’s research department. When one of the participants mentioned the ‘middle road’, she reached into her briefcase, took out The Constitution of Liberty by Hayek, held it up, slammed it down on the table and exclaimed: ‘This is what we believe.’ Indeed, when Thatcher became prime minister in 1979, she implemented an ambitious and ultimately successful programme of stabilisation, liberalisation, and privatisation. She revealed the unemployment which hitherto had been hidden in unprofitable companies sustained by government subsidies, the ‘capitalism in the oxygen tent’ in Joseph Schumpeter’s apt phrase. Her ideal was a share-owning democracy where every citizen had a stake.

Fortune Favours the Brave

I was at Oxford in the early 1980s. When one of my teachers, the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin, in a lecture blamed her for increased unemployment, I raised my hand and asked: ‘But is unemployment in the short term not because of an inflexible labour market, and will it not be reduced in the long term by economic growth?’ Dworkin replied with a broad smile: ‘But it just takes so long.’ In fact, shortly afterwards the economy started growing and unemployment fell. As the Roman playwright Terence observed, Fortes fortuna adiuvat, Fortune favours the brave.

(The Conservative 22 November 2025.)

Donald Trump Bandaríkjaforseti hlýtur að teljast maður ársins. Hann hefur átt sviðið allt árið 2025, og sálfræðingar ræða jafnvel í alvöru um Trump-heilkennið.
Í stað þess að bölsótast yfir Trump fer þó best á því að reyna að skýra framgang hans. Ein ástæðan er andstæðingarnir. Lýðræðisflokkurinn (Demókratar) hefur færst langt til vinstri undir forystu háskólafólks og opinberra starfsmanna. En venjulegt fólk er ekki hrifið af því, að innflytjendur frá Sómalíu eða Mið-Ameríku lifi á kostnað skattgreiðenda í stað þess að vinna fyrir sér. Það er andvígt linkind við glæpamenn. Íþróttakonur vilja ekki, að karlar geti nýtt sér líkamlegt forskot sitt, skilgreint sig sem konur og hirt öll verðlaun. Konur vilja líka geta farið í sund og brugðið sér á snyrtiherbergi, án þess að öfuguggar glápi á þær, af því að þeir segist vera konur.
Bandarískir skattgreiðendur taka undir það með Trump, að Evrópuríkin eigi sjálf að kosta varnir sínar í stað þess að treysta á Bandaríkin. Þeir sjá enga ástæðu heldur til að ausa fé í alþjóðastofnanir, sem gera lítið annað en vinna gegn hagsmunum Bandaríkjanna.
Ég er ósammála Trump um ýmislegt. Þótt skynsamlegt sé að reyna að kljúfa Rússland frá Kínaveldi, er ástæðulaust að loka augum fyrir harðstjórn Pútíns. Og tollverndarstefna er beinlínis röng. Rök Adams Smiths fyrir verkaskiptingu og frjálsum alþjóðaviðskiptum standa. En Trump talar fyrir þá, sem ekki hefur verið hlustað á, af því að þeir kunna ekki tungutak hinnar hefðbundnu valdastéttar.

(Fróðleiksmoli í Morgunblaðinu 3. janúar 2025.)

Í loftslagsmálum segir heilbrigð skynsemi mér tvennt: 1) að náttúran hafi ekki skyndilega hætt upp úr 1980 að hafa áhrif á loftslag og 2) að það loftslag, sem mældist um og eftir 1980, geti ekki verið hið eina ákjósanlega, svo að allar loftslagsbreytingar eftir það séu til hins verra. Nú hefur Frosti Sigurjónsson, hagfræðingur, frumkvöðull og fyrrverandi alþingismaður, samið fróðlegt kver, Hitamál, þar sem hann rekur skilmerkilega rannsóknir á áhrifaþáttum loftslags, sem eru vitaskuld margir fleiri en koltvísýringur í andrúmslofti. Sumir þættir valda hlýnun, aðrir kólnun. Frosti dregur ekki í efa þá vísindalegu tilgátu, að losun koltvísýrings í andrúmsloft valdi hlýnun. Hann heldur því hins vegar fram, að margir aðrir þættir séu að verki og í báðar áttir, til hlýnunar og kólnunar. Hann bendir líka á, að aukning koltvísýrings í andrúmslofti örvi gróður, sem sé jákvætt. Veruleg óvissa sé um hlutföll einstakra áhrifaþátta og um kosti og galla áhrifanna.
Á fyrstu áratugum þessarar aldar hefur hafist barátta fyrir því um allan heim að minnka losun koltvísýrings í andrúmsloft, ekki síst með því að takmarka brennslu kola og olíu. En slík orkuskipti höfðu þegar farið fram á Íslandi, því að mestöll orka, sem hér er nýtt, er endurnýjanleg og hefur ekki í för með sér losun koltvísýrings í andrúmsloft. Frosti gagnrýnir, að misvitrir stjórnmálamenn hafi skuldbundið Ísland til svipaðra orkuskipta og í löndum, sem nýta aðallega orkugjafa eins og kol og olíu. Hinar nýju reglur leggjast þess vegna af meiri þunga hér en annars staðar á flug, siglingar og vegasamgöngur. Þetta var ein ástæðan til þess, að flugfélagið Play varð gjaldþrota haustið 2025, og þetta hefur líka valdið Icelandair búsifjum. Frosti telur þetta jafnóskynsamlegt og að skipa tveimur mönnum, öðrum akfeitum og hinum nálægt kjörþyngd, að grennast jafnmikið. Það, sem er skynsamlegt í dæmi annars, er varhugavert í dæmi hins.
Ég er sammála Frosta um, að íslensk stjórnvöld hafa ekki nógsamlega vakið athygli á og fengið aðra til að viðurkenna sérstöðu Íslands í orku- og umhverfismálum.

(Fróðleiksmoli í Morgunblaðinu 27. desember 2025.)

Gyðingahatur er að aukast, eins og mannskæð árás öfgamúslima á gyðinga í Sydney 14. desember 2025 sýnir. Þetta hatur á sér djúpar rætur. Önnur er stæk andúð á þeim, sem eru öðru vísi. Þótt gyðingar hafi aðlagast í þeim skilningi, að þeir hlýða jafnan lögum og reglum, halda þeir fast í sérkenni sín. Hin rótin er einskær öfund. Eftir að gyðingahatur miðalda hafði hjaðnað, blossaði það upp aftur á nítjándu öld, þegar háskólar hófu að leggja inntökupróf fyrir nemendur og gyðingar stóðu sig þar mun betur en aðrir, enda bjuggu þeir að árþúsunda bókmenningu. En hvernig skal brugðist við?
Í fyrsta lagi þarf fræðslu um Helförina, þegar nasistar myrtu sex milljónir gyðinga árin 1941–1945. Þegar Hitler var spurður, hvort hann hefði ekki áhyggjur af dómi sögunnar, svaraði hann: Hver man eftir Armenum? Ekki verður nógsamlega á það minnt, að böðullinn drepur tvisvar, í seinna skiptið með þögninni.
Í öðru lagi þarf tafarlaust að vísa öfgamúslimum úr landi. Það er til dæmis með ólíkindum, að enn séu hér á landi þau Falasteen Abu Libdeh, sem fagnaði í Kastljósi árás Hamas á Ísrael, Mohamad Kourani, sem ógnaði hvað eftir annað vararíkissaksóknara og fjölskyldu hans, Naji Asar, sem skvetti rauðri málningu á ljósmyndara Morgunblaðsins, og Ibaa Ben Hosheyeh, sem skrifaði færslu á Facebook um, að gyðingar væru blanda af svínum og öpum (þótt raunar séu þau orð úr kóraninum, Surat al-Maidah, 60).
Í þriðja lagi er ástæðulaust að hleypa gyðingahöturum að í umræðum, þótt ekki sé rétt að mínum dómi að svipta þá málfrelsi. Vestræn ríki verða líka að hætta að fjármagna áróðursvél öfgamúslima, eins og þau gera með framlögum til sjálfstjórnarsvæðanna í Gasa og á vesturbakka Jórdan.

(Fróðleiksmoli í Morgunblaðinu 20. desember 2025.)

Margrétar Thatchers verðlaunin voru afhent í Róm 11. desember 2025, og var mér af því tilefni boðið í kvöldverð með verðlaunahöfum, þar á meðal Giorgiu Meloni, forsætisráðherra Ítalíu. Mér varð hugsað til þriggja íslenskra Rómarfara. Hinn fyrsti var Guðríður Þorbjarnardóttir, sem fór í pílagrímsferð til borgarinnar, líklega í lok þriðja áratugar elleftu aldar, er Jóhannes XIX. var páfi (1024–1032). Hún var þá ein víðförlasta kona heims, hafði dvalist í Vesturheimi, Grænlandi og Noregi og síðan gengið suður. Eðlilegast er að hugsa sér, að sögurnar tvær um fund Vesturheims, Grænlendinga saga og Eiríks saga rauða, hafi varðveist í munnmælum og loks verið skráðar undir handarjaðri afkomenda hennar, sem urðu biskupar á Hólum og í Skálholti, en lítil tengsl virðast vera milli sagnanna tveggja.
Liðu nú aldir. Einar Benediktsson, fésýslumaður og skáld, kom til Rómar árið 1903 og orti þá nokkur kvæði um borgina, þar á meðal „Kvöld í Róm“, og segir þar:

Frændi Einars, Jón Þorláksson verkfræðingur og forsætisráðherra, kom til Rómar tuttugu árum síðar í síðbúna brúðkaupsferð með konu sinni, Ingibjörgu Claessen. Jón var eflaust ekki sammála Einari um styrkleikamun heilans og hjartans, enda hafði hann allra lifandi manna mest vit á dauðum hlutum, eins og Árni Pálsson prófessor sagði. Þó viknaði Jón, þegar hann virti einn daginn fyrir sér rústir Fori Romani, Rómarvalla, eins og hann sagði ítalska flugmarskálkinum Ítalo Balbó, þegar þeir sátu saman í kvöldverði í Ráðherrabústaðnum 6. júlí 1933 og töluðu saman latínu. Jóni fannst sárt að horfa upp á, hversu illa farin hin fornu mannvirki voru. Sic transit gloria mundi.

(Fróðleiksmoli í Morgunblaðinu 13. desember 2025.)