Make Sense of the world
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The shock to Western civilization produced by the novel coronavirus known as COVID-19 is only beginning to register. Most commentators have focused on the political and economic dimension of a historical moment unlike any other, in which entire nations across the globe have moved into shutdown...
In 1978-79, the United Kingdom experienced the winter of discontent. Trade unions around the country went on strike. On January 22, 1979, the UK experienced the largest strike action since the General Strike of 1926. Even gravediggers and waste collectors joined in, leaving corpses and...
It is welcome news that the G20, representing the world’s biggest economies and 90% of global GDP, met via teleconference on March 26 to discuss the health and economic crisis caused by the novel coronavirus, known as COVID-19. It has been obvious for several weeks that coordinated international...
After discovering massive oil reserves in the past five years, Guyana, one of the poorest countries in South America, was poised to become one of the richest nations in the world. Also noteworthy is the fact that, since Guyana’s independence from Great Britain in 1966, Venezuela claims nearly...
With nearly every government and populace around the world now mobilized to combat the coronavirus pandemic, the sort of broad-based international coordination often seen in previous global crises remains glaringly absent, and it’s holding us back from a solution. The reasons for this lack of...
The Saudi crown prince and de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), finds himself in a difficult place, fighting three very different sorts of wars. The first — and the longest running — is the Saudi-led campaign against Houthi rebels in Yemen that on 25 March passed its fifth...
The far right thrives on fear. It’s no surprise, then, that it would use the latest pandemic, which has generated widespread panic, to bolster its own agenda. All of the hallmarks of the far right are in play during the coronavirus crisis. It has pushed to close borders. It has demonized...
Many Western governments are willing to climb any mountain and pay any price to save lives. In the process, many of them are also politicizing their response to the coronavirus pandemic while acting too late and too meekly, setting the stage for what is yet to come. The West can learn a lot from...
US President Donald Trump will go down in history as the ultimate master of hyperreal politics. No matter how far he deviates from reality, the American public consistently expresses its approval. The further he wanders from rationality, even when the consequences are measurable in the number of...
On January 28, US President Donald Trump unveiled his long-awaited peace plan for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which he hailed as the “deal of the century.” This is the latest attempt by the US to mediate between the Israelis and Palestinians and end the seven-decade-old...
The triumph of Nazism in the years following the election of 1933 that brought Adolf Hitler to power represents arguably the greatest human catastrophe of the 20th century — a century rich in human catastrophes. Until today, historians, social scientists and writers, from Primo Levy to Jonathan...
