Archive for the 'Books' Category
09 6th, 2009
From The Sunday Times review of Democracy Kills by Robert Cooper, acclaimed author of The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the 21st Century.
The stories told are enough to deal with the notion that all we need is a free election and everyone will live happily ever after….In the end, it has to do with our conception of man. It is not just what people want that matters, it is what serves human dignity.
09 2nd, 2009
London Evening Standard comment September 1st 2009
Once the election results in Afghanistan are finally in, Western governments need to draw up new and detailed initiatives on how to deal with failed states. In the coming years, many other countries will begin that treacherous transition from dictatorship to democracy, and we need to find a way to try to avoid the violence of recent years that has dominated our TV screens.
In Iraq, Western governments had no detailed plans on how to deal with the country once Saddam Hussein had been overthrown. Six years later, Iraq is still racked with violence. Afghanistan was neglected after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. There was no urgency to build the strong institutions needed to modernise the country. The result is the conflict that is taking the lives of British soldiers today.
In the previous generation, too, the West neglected Pakistan after its role in expelling the Soviet Union from Afghanistan ended in 1989. Pakistan swung from appalling democracy to appalling dictatorship and is now branded as one of most dangerous countries in the world.
Over the next few years, Western democracies may be asked to mentor transitions in countries that could either go smoothly or erupt into global crises. They include Burma, which has been under military rule since 1962 and is made up of ethnic communities often at war with each other. Aung San Suu Kyi, its symbol of hope, has spent much of the past 20 years there under arrest. But what would happen if the generals were suddenly overthrown and full and open elections held?
As the relationship between Cuba and the US thaws, Castro’s regime will come under pressure to hold full elections. Cuban exiles will try to win back their country, possibly sparking off massive instability.
How will democratic South Korea and autocratic China carve up the spoils of North Korea when it dissolves, and how should its brutal institutions be democratised?
As of yet, there are no clear policies on these questions. What is now known, however, is that the holding of full sovereign elections while institutions such as the police and the judiciary are corrupt and weak and infrastructure underdeveloped is highly risky, often leading to violence between ethnic, tribal and religious communities. If this were not so, the type of government that democracy is meant to create would not have left so many Africans poorer and caught in cycles of disease and violence.
There are formulas that have been proven to work, including those used in Europe, which just over half a century ago was itself an amalgam of warring and failed states. The Allies waited 10 years before returning sovereign power to Germany after the Second World War, and even now the international community retains control of Bosnia, whose ethnic civil war ended almost 15 years ago.
In East Asia, Japan was under American control for seven years and since then the region as a whole has forged ahead economically under mainly authoritarian and not democratic governments. Taiwan and South Korea have shown the way globally on how to move from dictatorship to democracy without violence – but it has taken them decades and not years to get it right.
Some of the concepts may be hostile to conventional thinking. But if they are taken on board, the next time the West embarks on a democratic mission it will be armed with fresh ideas on how to avoid bloodshed that creates trauma and hatred that can last for generations.
Humphrey Hawksley is a BBC world affairs correspondent. His book Democracy Kills: What’s So Good About Having The Vote is published by Macmillan on Friday.
08 31st, 2009
Democracy Kills: What’s So Good About Having The Vote has been endorsed by none other that Parag Khanna, author of the internationally best-selling Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order, chosen for the New York Times Year in Ideas. Parag himself has been named as one of Esquire’s 75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century. This is what he says:-
A brilliant work. Tersely written and bracing in argument, perhaps only a distinguished, veteran traveler-journalist like Humphrey Hawksley could have written such a book. Democracy Kills is not only a first-hand tour de force review of the last two decades of hotspots, but it also frames one of today’s great global debates with nuance and wit.”
08 29th, 2009
One quick answer to why I didn’t get the flak at Edinburgh from John Nicholson, writing in the Mirror and calling for a revolution among the audience that he describes as “a sleepy and consenual crowd.”
“Everyone at least pretends to be on the same side, or isn’t interested, has no opinion or doesn’t care and its about as vibrant as custard. There is rarely real debate.”
He’s definitely half right. Afterwards, a elderly lady approached and said: “You wouldn’t be talking like that if you’d lived in Spain under Franco.”
Great point, but why didn’t she say it out loud during the session.
08 29th, 2009
A full house at the Edinburgh Literary Festival for the launch for my new book Democracy Kills: What’s So Good About Having the Vote. But I was completely thrown because no-one disagreed with the argument — and this was a highly-intelligent, thoughtful, liberal audience. A hadn’t known what to expect — but not such overwhelming support.
At the end I put to them the question of whether — if they had only two choices of a country to live with their loved ones, their children and grand children — dictatorial Cuba or democratic Haiti — which one would it be.
Any guesses which one prevailed?
05 30th, 2009
The latest Amazon review on The Third World War:-
Prophetic,
| By | Gabbar Singh “Gabbar Singh” (Ram Garh) – See all my reviews |
This review is from: The Third World War: A Terrifying Novel of Global Conflict (Paperback)
I think a lot of incidents that has been written in this novel , have actually occurred after the novel was published like an attack on India on 26-Nov-2008, north korean nuclear tests , pakistan as a failed state, chinese bigotry
05 30th, 2009
Questions are being asked in Washington if the world is a more dangerous place now than it was during the Cold War. Pakistan has gone from America’s key ally in the War on Terror to being on the cusp of a full blown civil war and North Korea has carrie dout yet another nuclear test accompanies with a warning that it would no longer respect the 1953 Armistice agreement that until now has kept peace on the Korean Peninsular. There is far more danger in dealing with rogue and failing states than there is with nuclear-armed mature states. War in Pakistan has become a reality. So far North Korea’s hostility has been confined to missile diplomacy — but that could flip at any time.
05 27th, 2009
American intelligence agencies are urgently working out the breadth of the strategic alliance between North Korea and the Islamic world. They assume that Iranian scientists — as before — were present at the recent North Korean nuclear and missile tests, and they have evidence that North Korean nuclear experts were working with Syria on a nuclear programme. But given Iran and Syria’s links to Hamas and Hizbollah, they need to know if a line has been drawn and by whom when it comes to the sharing of knowledge and nuclear materials.
The Third World War 
& Amazon Kindle
04 15th, 2009
International tensions have remained high after North Korea said it was expelling UN nuclear inspectors and resuming work on its nuclear programme. The US has condemned Pyongyang’s “provocative threats”, saying they were “a step in the wrong direction”. The row follows North Korea’s launch of a long-range rocket on 5 April, which critics say was a missile test. Meanwhile, Britain has urged Pakistan to do more to help in preventing terror strikes in the UK.
THE THIRD WORLD WAR begins with a North Korean missile test and a devastating strike by Pakistani terrorists. Find out what happens next.
and on Amazon Kindle
03 18th, 2009
I can’t reccommend enough Reggie Oliver’s brilliant new collection of strange and mystreious tales — Madder Mysteries
A troupe of performing midgets plague and haunt a theatrical landlady; a head mysteriously appears on the seat beside the driver of a car and starts to plague him with weird inconsequential remarks; a hideous scandal is foreseen by a young Victorian clergyman who goes insane trying to prevent it. This Trollopian tale of Cathedral life, told in journals and letters, is based on events in the life of the author’s own Great Grandfather. A mad actor tells of supernatural revenge involving a mysterious wig; a young student on a Greek Island encounters the bizarre and horrific survival of an Ancient “Mystery Religion”; while “Tawny” is a tour de force, told entirely in dialogue. It takes place at a Christening party where a horrific act takes place, unnoticed by those present until it is too late.
