Wednesday, Feb 8th 2012
One of the secret weapons of the occupation forces in Iraq has been the sheer danger of reporting on the conflict. The occupiers themselves have attacked the local offices of Al-Jazeera, the broadcaster with the least inclination to “embed” itself in the protective grasp of the US army: their claim that this was an unfortunate [...]
John Maynard Keynes once remarked that “practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”. Are we approaching a time when practical men (and women) will have to make a conscious choice between the philosophies of two long-dead economists: Keynes himself and Karl [...]
Chavismo and democracy
The assertion that Venezuela has become a more democratic society under Hugo Chavez is bitterly contested. We can pass over the repeated claims that Chavez is a brutal dictator who has turned Venezuela into a communist state - the people making such allegations are certainly not troubled by the burden of proof. But [...]
This is the second of a three part review of Bart Jones’ Hugo! The Hugo Chavez Story. Read the first part Chavez: The Hatred of the ‘Dark-Skinned Yokel’ here and the second part Chavaz: ‘A Subversive in Miraflores’?here.
Build-up to the putsch
It’s impossible to discuss the reaction provoked by the Chavez government, of course, without addressing [...]
Castro comes to visit
In 1971, Fidel Castro went to Chile as a guest of its new president Salvador Allende. The Cuban leader left with a gloomy view of the prospects for the first democratically-elected Marxist government in the Americas. Confiding to associates in private, Castro predicted the tragic defeat of Allende’s Popular Unity experiment two [...]
When middle-of-the-road commentators are beginning to sound like blood-thirsty Jacobins, you know something extraordinary is going on. The global financial crisis has driven the implacably centrist Simon Jenkins of the Guardian to pen articles like this:
“If the mistakes that have collapsed the world’s financial markets had been made by statesmen and had led to war, [...]
Venezuela faced renewed criticism after the expulsion last month of two members of Human Rights Watch (HRW) from the country, including HRW’s Americas director Jose Miguel Vivanco, after they had published a report accusing the Chavez government of undermining democracy. The expulsion was a foolish and paranoid over-reaction which should not be supported by those [...]
The view from the world’s second-tallest building, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, is a bit of an anti-climax - once you get near the top there’s not much to see that can compare with the skyscraper itself. You can’t help being impressed, though, at the ambition behind the Towers. In case visitors over-look what [...]
Victor Pelevin - Faber & Faber, 2008
Towards the end of the film The Lives of Others, the dissident writer Georg Dreyman, who has out-lasted the Stasi and its state to find a comfortable perch in the new Germany, happens across his one-time persecutor from the DDR hierarchy. The impotent apparatchik can’t resist taunting Dreyman - [...]
Jeremy Paxman once explained the secret of his interviewing technique - before speaking to a politician, he simply asks himself “why is this lying bastard lying to me?” In the case of Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, a journalist would be well advised to stiffen the measure: “Why is this blood-thirsty, amoral gangster lying to me?” [...]
