Recent actions by the Trump administration have seen much invocation of Godwin’s law, the adage that any political discussion will eventually devolve into a comparison to Hitler and the Nazis. The idea that America’s president is a fascist was initially met with derision, and although resistance to that idea has perhaps softened as we’ve witnessed Trump in action, the Nazi analogy still mostly fails to stick. It might be time to put that aside. This week, a whistle-blower filed a […]

In any other era, the release of a report detailing direct connections between presidential campaign officials and Russian intelligence would be the news event of the decade. The story of a Republican campaign chairman liaising directly with a Russian intelligence officer in order to sway an election would form a central part of any president’s legacy, in the same way that Clinton and Lewinsky or Nixon and Watergate are inextricably linked. In the Trump era, it may prove to be […]

The prospects for freedom have not always looked so grim. Democratic change swept across the world from the mid-1970’s to around 2000. From Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa to Latin America, authoritarians and dictators fell and were replaced by nascent democracies, in what political scientist Samuel Huntingdon called ‘the third wave’ of modern global democratisation. What a contrast to the picture today. Since the Arab Spring provided a brief moment of hope, the cause of freedom has been steadily set back […]

100,000 dead, forty million unemployed, a cratering economy, tear gas and looting in the street. America divided. Please, Mr President, “it’s too much winning. We can’t take it anymore”. A good rule of thumb with Donald Trump has always been that if you think this is the bottom, just wait. There’s still plenty of time before the election for Trump to plumb new depths, spread more mayhem and steer America closer to collapse. The president may judge that this summer’s […]

When the Spanish flu struck India in mid-1918 it found a nation ripe for devastation. Ruled by the haughty British and with a vast underclass of ‘lower caste’ Hindus living in squalor, Spanish flu wreaked havoc, killing around 13-million people, most of whom died in a period of just four months. Globally, Spanish flu mortality was not equally distributed – when the pandemic struck Japan the island nation closed down shipping and transport by sea, and as a consequence Japanese […]