10 May 2023 Turkey: A Hundred Years of Culture War By Gwynne Dyer Turkey’s elections are fairly free, and there is going to be one this Sunday (14 May). President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been in power for two decades, and he should really lose by a landslide. Imagine what the United States would be …
7 May 2023 Massacres and Guns By Gwynne Dyer Here’s how to sound wise when writing a story about mass killings and gun control. Last week saw two such massacres in Serbia (eight deaths and nine deaths respectively) and only one in the United States (eight killed in a mall in Allen, Texas). There was …
12 April 2023 Taiwan: Ignore China’s Conniptions By Gwynne Dyer China has been having conniptions again. President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan had a courtesy meeting last week with the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy. Beijing reacted by issuing a “stern warning” to the United States, and then “encircled” the island (its …
29 March 2023 Israel: The Fascists and the Fanatics By Gwynne Dyer Imagine that Donald Trump had been the president of the United States, in office and out and in and out and in yet again, for more than half of the past 25 years. What would the US look like today? Well, that’s about …
12 March 2023 China: The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves By Gwynne Dyer Xi Jinping was confirmed in a third term as president of China at the National People’s Congress last week, and not one of the 3,000 delegates voted against him. Why would they? Everything is perfect in the People’s Republic of Oz, …
China: The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves Read More »
1 January 2023 The Next Ukrainian Offensive By Gwynne Dyer It’s still unseasonably warm in Ukraine, but there’s a chance of a hard freeze next weekend. By mid-month it should be reliably below zero almost all the time: the ground will be hard and the smaller streams will have frozen over. Expect the next Ukrainian …
21 November 2022 COP 27: Glass Half Full By Gwynne Dyer As after every climate summit, the air is filled with shouts of rage and despair. What was agreed was unclear and inadequate, and what was left undecided or simply ignored was vast and terrifying. For example, they still haven’t managed to agree that the …
4 September 2022 The Last Empire By Gwynne Dyer This is not another pipe-sucking reassessment of Mikhail Gorbachev’s failed attempt to democratise the Soviet Union thirty years ago. He wasn’t actually trying to do that anyway; he was attempting to save the Soviet Union and Communism by civilising and softening the harsh Bolshevik dictatorship that …
It’s only one year since the fall of Kabul last August 15 and everybody in the countries that sent troops to Afghanistan has already forgotten about it (apart from journalists in need of a topic in a slow news month). This was predictable, but it is also unfortunate. The 20-year Afghan war was never more …
11 July 2022 Sri Lanka: A Band of Brothers By Gwynne Dyer “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked (in Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel ‘The Sun Also Rises’). “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” Sri Lanka is much the same. The James Brothers robbed banks. The Marx brothers made people laugh. The Rajapaksa …