Rounded Analysis On Contested Issues; Spotlighting Blind Spots; Politics, Religion, Travel, Books
Republican Senator Joseph R McCarthy died in 1957 but the terms McCarthyism and McCarthy's tactics entered the political lexicon to describe witch hunts involving public accusations of disloyalty or subversion without sufficient proof
The words—'Mr Gorbachev, tear down this Wall'—that moved the world would have been edited out from Reagan's Berlin Wall Speech had it not been for the US President's insistence in the face of objections from mandarins
The Inter-linked events lead to peaceful German unification as well but my fascination has been not linked to that alone but also to deep admiration for Germans for their rise literally from the ashes along with Japan post-Second World War
Yevgeny V Prigozhin built the mercenary force Wagner Group as he enriched himself thanks to his ties with President Vladimir Putin which helped him get the Russian government's lucrative contracts for construction and catering
The Iranian revolution and the captivity of 52 Americans crystalized dormant Islamophobia with ubiquitous Khomeini at its center decades before the US invasion of Iraq put another Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani under the global spotlight for entirely different reasons as someone unlike the Iranian revolutionary leader
Democracies were no longer dying at the hands of men with guns with elected governments having caused most breakdowns of democracy through democratic backsliding since the end of the Cold War
The Mecca siege, Iranian revolution and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan back to back in the same year triggered a chain reaction and among other things fuelled Islamophobia, which has now escalated globally to epidemic proportions
