A Shanghai worker imprisoned following the Tiananmen events remains haunted by her experience, finds Kerry Brown.
The heroes of the democracy movement were crushed in 1989. That taught Chinese people an indelible lesson, says the pioneering democracy campaigner, Wei Jingsheng.
Cautious conciliatory overtures between Riyadh and Tehran indicate that the realities of the regional power balance might outweigh long-standing hostilities.
A tight overlap between economic and political elites creates a massive push to shrink the public sector to accommodate private interests. This amounts to an abdication of state responsibility and a betrayal of the social contract between citizens and the state.
The invading NATO forces, in an action allegedly aimed at the defeat of terrorism in a country which had no tradition of terrorist activities, appeared to act with no inkling of the lessons that could have been learned.
What are we meant to conclude from the ‘rise of the far-right’? The narrative tells us that being objective, moderate and ‘technical’ rather than factionalist is what is needed in ‘times of anxiety’.
Europeans, like most other inhabitants of the planet, are currently facing the crisis of ’politics as we know it’ – a state of “interregnum”, as the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci described a time in which the old is already dead or dying, but the new has not yet been born.
The global financial elite has ignored the radical lessons of the post-2007 crisis. But these are needed more than ever.
