Real News | The Afghan Chessboard
Pepe Escobar says that the Afghan presidential election is largely designed to legitimize the US and NATO occupation of parts of the country not controlled by the Taliban. But in order to establish an energy corridor from the Caspian to South Asia, bypassing Russia, Escobar argues, the grand American strategy [...]

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 - [...]