The Pakistani Spectator

George Orwell’s novel “1984″ described a world where ‘war is peace’, ‘freedom is slavery’ and ‘big brother is watching you’. These Orwellian words truly depict our totalitarian world of today.
When confronted with the dismal record of occupations and interventions, the common gung-ho American refrain nowadays is that history is for losers and that history never [...]

The rich have become richer, the poor have become poorer and the vessel of state is driven between anarchy and despotism. (Percy Shelley)
In medieval folklore, vampires, the fiends of the underworld, were fabled creatures of the night. They rose from the graves and roamed the earth feeding on the lifeblood of innocent victims.
Today we are afflicted with modern [...]

“A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility today. How could you have one, if one of its features would be several cities lying in ruins, several cities where many, many thousands of people would be dead and injured and mangled…. That isn’t preventive war; that is war….. It seems to me that when, [...]

“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.” - Jonathan Swift.
No religion is immune to the dangers of ideological absolutism. By the time the Roman Empire ended the Church was a heavy political player in its own right. It claimed that kings and emperors ruled by its [...]

When we were children, we used to think that when we were grownup we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability ….. To be alive is to be vulnerable. Madeleine L’Engle.
Someone asked a sage what part of the paper he read first. ‘The sports page’ was the answer. On [...]

So far humanity has had absolutely no luck creating a society without the ultra privileged. The earliest human societies, though having very little in the way of an elite class still had clan leaders. These were the high at the time. Although this often changed if someone seized power from the current leader, the clan [...]

A Rubik’s cube, invented by reclusive Hungarian inventor Prof. Erno Rubik, has 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible combinations on its six faces. It has only one solution. Governing a state is, if anything, a Rubik’s Cube. An equal number of tried combinations will result in failure, only one combination solves the complex puzzle – honest and transparent governance.
In [...]

“They make a wasteland and call it peace” was the bitter complaint of Caligus, a Scottish commander, when the Romans attacked Scotland.

“Make no mistake: The United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts”, thus spoke President Bush in his address to the nation soon after the events of September 11.
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Anyone can steer the ship when the sea is calm - Publilius Syrus.
Conventional wisdom dictates that people understand the limits of their ability. When someone takes up a job, it is understood that demands and expectations of the same have been reviewed. The foregone conclusion therefore is, that the person will deliver.
When we transitioned from [...]