The Modi Question: Is His Government Hostile to Muslims?

Daily Motion: "Narendra Modi is the leader of the world’s largest democracy, a man who has been elected twice as India’s prime minister and is widely seen as the most powerful politician of his generation. Seen by the west as an important bulwark against Chinese domination of Asia, he has been courted as a key...

Australia Shifts From Right to Left, Primarily Due to Climate Change

CNN: "Australian voters have delivered a sharp rebuke to the center-right government, ending nine years of conservative rule, in favor of the center-left opposition that promised stronger action on climate change." Voters expressed discontent with the conservative leadership that seemed more authoritarian than collaborative, and that it neglected relationships with neighbors such as the Solomon...

What Most Americans Know About Japan…

can probably be summed up in a few words: the attack on Pearl Harbor, almost entirely from the American point of view. Dan Rather Recalls Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941 And the Nature of History. Why Did Japan Attack Pearl Harbor? 2. the US decision to drop a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Testing the Atomic Bomb...

Surprising History of Australia

Americans tend to assume Australia is a newer version of itself: a nation of immigrants on a huge continent where the indigenous peoples have been displaced or diminished to a miniscule number or influence in the face of the inevitability of modernization. That's not necessarily true. Here are some surprising stories of Australian history from...

War Over Taiwan Between China and the US?

By 2031, China's leader Xi Jinping hopes to reunite mainland China, home to one billion citizens, and the nationalist island of Taiwan just 100 miles off the coast, home to 24 million citizens. "The balance of power around Taiwan is fundamentally shifting, pushing a decades-long impasse over its future into a dangerous new phase. After...

‘The Ugly American’: 1950s Book and 1960s Movie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2WHk5RRoHI Here's the original trailer for the 1963 film "The Ugly American," starring Marlon Brando in an Asian country, thinly-disguised as Vietnam, but filmed mostly in Thailand. He over-simplifies a complex situation as a simple struggle between communism and capitalism. The movie bares "scant resemblance" to the1958 novel, but both proved to be "startlingly prescient,"...

Western Companies Face Nationalist Backlash in China

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBA0nSx_IPQ PBS News Hour: "A new report released Friday details a pattern of abuse of Chinese workers along Beijing’s global development initiative, the Belt and Road. The West also accuses Beijing of exploiting ethnic minority Uighurs, using forced labor to produce cotton. Nick Schifrin reports how that Western criticism sparked a nationalist backlash in China,...

China Has Transformed Hong Kong Into Authoritarian City-State

"The free and open place we loved is gone." It is now a typical, mainland city, wrote Keith Richburg, a professor of journalism at the University of Hong Kong and former reporter for The Washington Post. Click. Related: "The mass protests of 2019, in which young people defied the power looming across the border, were the...

China, Singapore and the Twilight of Democracy

Crash Course World History: In this 2015 lecture, John Green observed that "for the last hundred years or so, it seemed that one important ingredient for running an economically successful country was a western-style democratic government. All evidence pointed to the idea that capitalist representative democracies made for the best economic outcomes. It turns out...

Rise of Far-Right Fascism in India?

Arundhati Roy in The Nation: "India is not really a country. It is a continent. More complex and diverse, with more languages—780 at last count, excluding dialects—more indigenous tribes and religions, and perhaps more communities that consider themselves separate nations than all of Europe. Imagine this vast ocean, this fragile, fractious, social ecosystem, suddenly being...