Why do dictators want to be writers?

Why do dictators want to be writers?

By Jonathan Power April 9, 2019 “Since the days of the Roman Empire”, Daniel Kalder wrote in his book “The Infernal Library”, “dictators have written books, but in the twentieth century there was a Krakatoa-like eruption of despotic verbiage, which continues flowing to this day.” It’s a strange thing but true that many dictators began […]

The CIA: Surprise, Kill, Vanish

The CIA: Surprise, Kill, Vanish

By Jonathan Power April 2, 2019 The International Criminal Court (ICC) which prosecutes crimes against humanity is under attack again by the Trump Administration for pursuing Americans. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama supported it. George W. Bush tried to close it down but then decided to cooperate with it. Donald Trump is against it and encouraged […]

Trump does not like Russia

Trump does not like Russia

By Jonathan Power March 26, 2019 President Donald Trump has been exonerated of collusion with Russia. As I wrote a while back I expected this conclusion from the investigation carried out by Robert Mueller. The big clue lay in Trump’s anti-Russian posture. Trump has continued the expansion of NATO which Russia, more than understandably, sees […]

Disputing how Europe conquered the world

Disputing how Europe conquered the world

By Jonathan Power March 19, 2019 By 1914 Europeans ruled 84% of the globe. How did they do it? Eleven hundred years ago Europe was a backwater. There were no grand cities, apart from Muslim Cordoba in Spain, and the remnants of Rome and Athens. The Middle East, India and China were further ahead. It […]

Getting the priorities on human rights right in Syria

Getting the priorities on human rights right in Syria

By Jonathan Power March 12, 2019 The long war is almost over in Syria. Tyranny has won. Violence has won. Most have suffered, many unspeakably. For too long all sides were stalemated by each others’ brutality. Now the government of Bashar Al-Assad has come out on top, aided by Russia and Iran. What to do […]

Criticism of Israel is misrepresented as anti-Semitism

Criticism of Israel is misrepresented as anti-Semitism

By Jonathan Power March 6, 2019 After the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in AD 70 the Jews were thrust into the outer world – many into Arab countries, later to become Muslim, where they were extended protection, and later into the Roman and then Christian world where they were accepted for many centuries. […]

The Trump-Kim summit in Vietnam

The Trump-Kim summit in Vietnam

By Jonathan Power February 26, 2019 Kim Jong-un, paramount leader of the North Korean dictatorship, is in Vietnam ready to meet President Donald Trump. Last June the two leaders met, applauded themselves and each other and made some sort of a deal even if it wasn’t the one Trump boasted about – the total elimination […]

The irrelevance of the US/Mexican wall

The irrelevance of the US/Mexican wall

By Jonathan Power February 19, 2019 It’s time overdue that the misleading myths on immigration are thrown into the trashcan. They are causing untold damage. The fact is that President Donald Trump’s own government research shows that Mexican migration has dropped sharply in recent years. In Britain, the Brexit debate which began with a whipped […]

Nigeria’s turning point elections on February 23, 2019*

Nigeria’s turning point elections on February 23, 2019*

By Jonathan Power February 12, 2019 Nigeria is a veritable factory of sophisticated novelists. It was no surprise that Ben Okri won the British Booker Prize that goes annually to the best novelist of the year. Considering that high-class novel writing in English only began in Nigeria in 1958 with Chinua Achebe’s famous work, “Things […]

Trump is building up the US’s nuclear firepower

Trump is building up the US’s nuclear firepower

By Jonathan Power January 31, 2019 The number of nuclear weapons possessed by the US and Russia is a fraction of what it was during the height of the Cold War. Successive presidents on both sides, since the time of John F.  Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, have feared their destructive power. Their supposed value, so […]

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