Margaret Thatcher died yesterday. Or the day before maybe, I don’t know. At any rate, Thatcher died, and now the hagiographers and the demonizers can have their day. All by herself, apparently, Thatcher “reforged Britain”, “transfixed the United States”, and was “a great leader, a great prime minister and a great Briton.” And how did […]
Ronald Reagan will be celebrated again today (his birthday is February 6, 1911) as a world statesman and champion of democracy (mostly by Republicans and Conservatives in the United States), but this not how people in the Third World experienced his tenure. Take Southern Africa (I grew up in South Africa) for instance. As I […]
Video game plots, especially those involving war, are infamous for their conservative politics. Case in point: the popular “Call of Duty” franchise, which plays out like a rightwing version of US military history. But even we are surprised to see the late Angolan “rebel” leader Jonas Savimbi pop up in “Call of Duty: Black Ops […]
Ted Kennedy passed away last week. Around here the emphasis has been on his domestic legacy (Civil Rights, disability rights, health care reform), but as blogger Texas in Africa (her blog is worth visiting for US debates on development politics) reminds us, that like his older brother, the Senator also played a public role in […]
In an opinion piece in the Washington Post, conservative columnist Michael O’Hanlon goes on about a permanent US military presence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (this in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s visit to Eastern Congo, the site of a civil war implicating not just Congolese but two other countries in the region).
