Nick Spicer

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Nick Spicer
Correspondent | Germany
Biography
Nick Spicer, Al Jazeera’s Berlin correspondent since the summer of 2011, was previously posted for the network in Washington for three years. A Canadian citizen, he has nearly two decades of reporting experience with National Public Radio, CBC Television and Radio, The Econonist Intelligence Unit and other media outlets. He has been posted for several years to borh Moscow and Paris, and has reported from conflict areas such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Chechnya. Spicer holds an honours degree in English from Queen’s University at Kingston and a diplôme in international relations from l’Institut d’études politiques de Paris.

Latest posts by Nick Spicer

By Nick Spicer in Europe on March 8th, 2012
Photo by EPA
On this International Women's Day, here's a thought about how we in the media describe the woman often called Europe’s most powerful politician: Angela Merkel.
It is doubtless more a comment on the sad lack of iconic female leaders in politics [or the media's unwillingness to recognise and celebrate them] that the English-speaking press is repeatedly comparing Germany’s chancellor to the former British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher.
It would be churlish for me to point out which media are doing this.
But you need only go to Google News and type in "Iron Lady" and "Merkel" for the examples to pile up in the search results [and, yes, I know the comparision turns up on AJE’s website too. Ouch!]
The parallel is wrong-headed for three reasons.
One: Merkel is a staunch pro-European.
By Nick Spicer in Americas on September 12th, 2010
Reuters photo

And the sky darkened as we came, like a cloud of locusts, come to eat every last shred of your town’s reputation, we journalists and producers and cameramen of the world’s media.

And we lay in waiting outside the church of a man who would compare himself to Abraham (on the "Today Show," in fact): no less than the father of the three monotheistic religions.

And we kneeled before him as if to worship (but really to get out of the camera shot) and mostly asked him easy questions about if and when and how he would burn Quran (a project he has abandoned, he says, forever).

And we showed the world this political "prophet" as if he had something to say, although he had not actually read, he said, the book he was to burn. Ever.

By Nick Spicer in Americas on September 8th, 2010
Photo by AFP

An outsider seeking to understand the angry debate over a Florida pastor who plans to hold an "International Burn a Quran Day" on September 11 would do well to consider two texts familiar to most Americans.

First is Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451 (the title refers to the temperature at which paper burns).

This reading-list staple in American high schools tells the story of Guy Montag, a "fireman" of the future whose job is not to extinguish fires, but, in an over-entertained, savage dystopia, to burn books.

And thereby to extinguish independent thought.

The book echoes the anti-intellectual strain in American culture, something Bradbury worried about in the America of 1953.

By Nick Spicer in Americas on August 22nd, 2010
Photo by Reuters

As he campaigns for members of his beleaguered Democratic party, the US president can no longer fill a stadium with enraptured Americans young and old.

The magic of Barack Obama’s mythopoeic come-from-behind campaign in 2008 has given way to the grim reality of governing a conflicted country, one whose entire economic model has been found wanting by the greatest recession since the 1930s.

And, as Obama stays the course with some of George Bush’s symbolic overseas policies – continuing drone strikes in Pakistan, and largely maintaining status quo on the human rights of “war on terror” detainees - the disenchantment of many American progressives has veered into bitterness.

But as the president loses touch with much of his base, the very man once derided by his presidential rivals as a phony-Jesus, peace-and-love political cream puff is forging a new public persona: Barack Obama, the angry president.

And it's not without good political reason.<

By Nick Spicer in Americas, Europe on June 23rd, 2010
Photo by Reuters

At the risk of insubordination:

Is there not an eerie parallel between the travails of the French national football team and those of the United States' top man in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal?

Of late, each has greatly suffered at the hands of reporters revealing things they apparently weren't supposed to.

France's team self-imploded in the World Cup after the usually quite writerly sports newspaper L'Equipe ran an utterly vulgar headline on June 19.

It was apparently printing the words of star striker Nicolas Anelka uttered to France coach Raymond Domenech at half-time, during the recent match France lost to Mexico.

By Nick Spicer in Americas on June 15th, 2010
Picture from AFP

Out of the murky oil darkening the economic future, and shorelines, of the Gulf of Mexico comes, fittingly, dark humour.

What does BP stand for?

Certainly not “Beyond Petroleum.”

That’s just “greenwashing,” an American environmentalist recently told me in New Orleans.

The American blogosphere prefers these:

Broken Pipes.

Blackened Pelicans.

Beyond the Pale.

And, as BP’s CEO Tony Hayward heads to Congress to face questions this week, there’s a new BP sobriquet, tailor-made for the $4 million-a-year man theoretically in charge of the cleanup.

By Nick Spicer in Americas on June 5th, 2010
Photo by Reuters

Barack Obama, the US president, heads into the summer with a political albatross around his neck of unknowable proportions: the Gulf Coast oil spill.

It is now the biggest oil disaster in US history, a shape-shifting monster slicking up seabirds – including Louisiana's state bird, the Brown Pelican – and threatening not just a visible gumming up of tourist beaches, and the wholesale destruction of fragile Gulf Coast marshlands, but an invisible, decades-long, undersea strangling of a giant food chain linking plankton to small fish to big fish to the American dinner table.

Death of wildlife will not undo a presidency. But front-page pictures of oily seabirds can move public opinion.

By Nick Spicer in Americas on May 17th, 2010
Photo by EPA

"Call me Ishmael."

So begins Herman Melville epic seafaring novel, ostensibly about whaling, an American Odyssey recounting Captain Ahab's obsessive pursuit of a great oil-carrying sperm whale, Moby Dick.

It ends in disaster.

I write this in a sand barrier motel in Grand Isle Louisiana, in a hot room overlooking an empty beach, and just a few of the six hundred-plus oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.

And it is hard not to ask: is BP another Captain Ahab?

Or, worse, is the United States?

Crude oil is not, of course, sperm whale oil, or "spermicetti". But they have had equally pervasive influences on their societies.

In Melville's 19th century, the oil was used to burn in lamps, make candles, soften leather and even, he writes, to anoint kings:

"Certainly it cannot be olive oil, nor macassar oil, nor castor oil, nor bear's oil, nor train oil, nor cod-liver oil.