30 March 2022 Do the Russians Have War in Their Blood? By Gwynne Dyer The geopolitical views of my grandmother, Florence O’Driscoll, could have been summed up in seven words: ‘The Germans Have War in their Blood’. Even as a child I suspected that the world must be more complicated than that, but I never …
26 January 2022 Boris Johnson: The Long Goodbye By Gwynne Dyer The plot couldn’t be more familiar: criminal mastermind gets away with endless daring escapades, and is brought down in the end by some silly little mistake. That’s Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who slid effortlessly through endless scrapes and scandals that would have finished …
2 October 2021 Destroy the Whistle-Blowers! By Gwynne Dyer A long time ago now I was asked to do a television series about the world’s intelligence services – and I turned it down flat. My main reason was a feeling that there was less to the whole intelligence world than met the eye, and the …
27 January 2021 They were planning to put on a play written by an artificial intelligence programme in Prague this month, to mark the invention of robots (or at least the idea of robots) in the same city exactly one hundred years ago. Covid-19 got in the way of that, and it will now only …
Assange: (Almost) Free at Last! On Monday morning, a British judge finally rejected the US attempt to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and jail him forever (or at least for 175 years in a high-security ‘supermax’ prison) on the grounds that he is, as Joe Biden once called him, a “high-tech terrorist”. The vindictiveness of …
15 November 2020 One Hong Kong lawmaker, Claudia Mo, said it was “the death-knell of Hong Kong’s democracy fight.” But she was part of it: one of the fifteen remaining pro-democracy members of the Legislative Council (Legco) who resigned on Thursday in protest at the expulsion of four other democratically elected members of the pseudo-parliament. …
The cost of being a whistle-blower is going up. When Daniel Ellberg stole and published the ‘Pentagon Papers’ in 1971, revealing the monstrous lies that the US government was telling the American public about the Vietnam war, he was arrested and tried, but the court set him free. When Edward Snowden released a vast trove …
In an emergency, the good thing about a dictatorship is that it can respond very fast. The bad thing is that it won’t respond at all until the dictator-in-chief says that it should. All the little dictators who flourish in this sort of system won’t risk their positions by passing bad news up the line …
Salisbury is a nice old English town with a fine cathedral, only an hour and a half from London by train, but it doesn’t see many Russian tourists in wintertime. It’s not as cold as Moscow, but Russians tend to prefer Mediterranean destinations for holiday breaks in early March – unless, of course, they are …
“Look, we have no other choice,” Pakistan’s former prime minister Nawaz Sharif said last May. “These games have gone on too long. Something has to change.” Then he left to be with his wife Kulsoom, who is on life support while receiving treatment for cancer in England. But last week he and his daughter Maryam …