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MercoPress, en Español

Montevideo, April 20th 2024 - 09:20 UTC

Tag: Gwynne Dyer

  • Thursday, December 6th 2018 - 09:28 UTC

    Populism is not an ideology, it's a political technique which thrives on angry people

    Populism is not an ideology. It’s just a political technique, equally available to right-wingers, left-wingers, and those (like Trump) with no coherent ideology at all.

    Five of the world’s largest democracies now have populist governments, claimed The Guardian last week, and proceeded to name four: the United States, India, Brazil and the Philippines. Which is the fifth? At various points it name-checks Turkey, Italy and the United Kingdom, but it never becomes clear which. (And by the way, India’s prime minister Narendra Modi is not a populist. He’s just a nationalist.)

  • Monday, November 19th 2018 - 08:49 UTC

    Automation, rust belts, and the angry and unhappy US electorate

    Automation is farthest advanced in the United States, which has lost one-third of its manufacturing jobs – eight million jobs – in the past 25 years

    Barack Obama said of the U.S. mid-term elections that “the character of our country is on the ballot,” and the outcome proved him right. The United States is a psychological basket case, more deeply and angrily divided than at any time since the Vietnam War.

  • Saturday, June 16th 2018 - 11:22 UTC

    Denuclearization or mutual deterrence in the Korean peninsula?

    Kim persuaded Trump to end the US annual joint military exercises with South Korea, and even got Trump to call them “war games” and “provocative”

    If the Singapore meeting between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un had been a zero-sum game, then Trump definitely lost. But maybe it wasn't. Kim got a meeting with Trump on terms of strict equality right down to the number of flags on display, which is a huge boost for his regime's claim to legitimacy.

  • Saturday, June 2nd 2018 - 08:09 UTC

    Nicaragua's husband-wife team ready to fall: end of the road for the Ortegas

    The protests by now have left 90 people dead and almost a thousand injured. The great majority of victims are students, and others shot by the police

    By Gwynne Dyer (*) - From the Ceausescus in Romania (overthrown and shot 1989) to the Mugabes (removed in a non-violent military coup 2017), husband-and-wife teams running authoritarian regimes seem to have a particularly high casualty rate. And now it may be the turn of the Nicaraguan team: President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Vice-President Rosario Murillo.

  • Sunday, March 18th 2018 - 10:13 UTC

    Another four years for Putin, and with a landslide

    Putin will win in a walk, and yet Russia is a modern, well-educated country with a democratic constitution. It must one day take charge of its own affairs ...

    By Gwynne Dyer - Vladmir Putin is going to win another six years in power by a landslide in the Russian election on March 18 — probably between 60 and 70 per cent of the popular vote. The real question is what happens after that, because he will be 72 by the end of his next term and will not legally be allowed to run for president again.

  • Tuesday, December 19th 2017 - 12:28 UTC

    Hard Brexit, soft Brexit, and the Irish question

    The UK is now halfway out of the EU - or, rather, May's government has now used up half the time that was available to negotiate an amicable divorce settlement

    By Gwynne Dyer - Politicians never lie. Well, hardly ever. They're not into full disclosure, as a rule, but they know that if you lie, sooner or later you will be caught out, and then you are in deep trouble. So just change the subject, or answer a different question than the one you were asked, or just keep talking but saying nothing until everybody gets bored and moves on.

  • Saturday, November 11th 2017 - 09:15 UTC

    The Great October Revolution

    Bolshevism ended horribly: first, civil war and famine, then three decades of lies, oppression and mass murder - Stalin, the Great Purge, the gulag

    By Gwynne Dyer - China Mieville, a novelist I much admire, has published a history of the October Revolution to mark its hundredth anniversary (which is actually on 7 November, since the Russians were still using the Julian calendar in 1917). It had an unusual effect on me. It made me question whether I was right about the utter futility of that revolution.

  • Thursday, November 2nd 2017 - 09:01 UTC

    The silent majority of Catalonia and the December 21st election-referendum

    Last Sunday, a big pro-Spanish crowd came out in the streets of Barcelona: 300,000 people according to the police, more than a million according to the organizers

    By Gwynne Dyer - It's been going on for a while. “Recently in Catalonia we have been living through a kind of 'soft' totalitarianism...the illusion of unanimity created by the fear of expressing dissent,” wrote best-selling Catalan author Javier Cercas in the Spanish newspaper El País in 2014. Those who didn't want independence kept their heads down and their mouths shut, in other words.

  • Wednesday, September 27th 2017 - 07:39 UTC

    Germany's (neo-fascist) protest vote fuelled by extended income gap

    Looking closely, the AfD’s support was strongest in the same parts of the country that voted strongly for the Nazis in the 1933 election that brought Hitler to power.

    By Gwynne Dyer - Angela Merkel’s slogan in her campaign for a fourth term as Chancellor was terminally bland and smug – “For a Germany in which we live well and love living” – but it did the job, sort of. Her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is back as the largest party, so Merkel gets to form the next coalition government. But the neo-fascists are now in the Bundestag (parliament) too, for the first time since the collapse of Nazi Germany.

  • Wednesday, June 22nd 2016 - 04:33 UTC

    Brexit: The apocalypse

    Brexit could become the beginning of the destruction of EU and Western political civilization in its entirety, said Donald Tusk, the president of the European Union

    By Gwynne Dyer - How’s this for apocalyptic? “As a historian I fear Brexit [a British vote to leave the European Union in the referendum on June 23] could be the beginning of the destruction of not only the EU but also Western political civilization in its entirety,” said Donald Tusk, the president of the European Union, in an interview published on Monday in the German newspaper Bild.