Update: welcome Guido readers Imagine you are William Hague or Hillary Clinton, pressed with a real sense of wanting to Do Something to help the Libyan masses. You draw a noisy stick across the bars of the FCO/State Department cage to rouse the bemused and sulky inmates, and demand ideas for action. […]
A two-party system gets much easier to run when one party runs away. Good stuff gets done quickly.
I appeared on Press TV today in a pre-recorded Agenda programme due to go out on Saturday/Sunday. The subject was Libya, so everything we said probably will be well out of date by then. Press TV, for those unfamiliar with it, is Iran’s official international TV station and so steeped […]
(Apologies to Iain Dale’s readers and other readers – an earlier version got garbled) Ed West at the Telegraph puts the issue with commendable boldness: No Arab country has ever produced a democracy, or at least a lasting democracy; none of the 22 member states of the Arab League are classified […]
Here is an eloquent look at Gaddafi’s wretched legacy across Africa from the Woyingi Blog: You can compare Libya’s Gaddafi to Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s Mubarak but for those of you who are “anti-imperialists” there is a particularly disturbing lesson here because Gaddafi was supposed to be “one of the good […]
Most people seem to think that Gaddafi’s long ‘speech’ last night set a new record for oratorical appallingness: "I am a fighter, a revolutionary from tents … I will die as a martyr at the end," he said. "Muammar Gaddafi is the leader of the revolution, I am not a president […]
The idiom ‘shooting fish in a barrel’ describes an easy job – you just can’t miss. Mythbusters helpfully experiment with different sorts of guns and containers to show what works best. (Advisory: best not to watch if you are a sensitive fish): But that is a hard task indeed compared […]
On the one hand, we have one-man band Dr Gene Sharp (my emphasis): His central message is that the power of dictatorships comes from the willing obedience of the people they govern – and that if the people can develop techniques of withholding their consent, a regime will crumble. For decades now, […]
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is upset: At every level, still, even in the West, women are invisible, neglected, kept down, slighted, patronised, objectified, denied and demeaned in everyday life. Hmm. Here is a woman making a nice living writing for one of the world’s more prominent newspapers, complaining about her own performance […]
Oh, now I see it. It’s all our fault! British weapons are believed to have been used to murder more than 300 Libyan pro-democracy demonstrators. Relatives of those killed during the Lockerbie massacre condemned the ‘shameful’ British dealings with Gaddafi. And Mona Rishmawi, legal adviser for the UN High Commission on […]
