During the Gulf War, journalists used to challenge government news managers and insisted they wouldn't just accept the official version of events.

People are increasingly beginning to feel that democracy itself is being destroyed by this latest phase of globalization and that politics doesn't matter because it changes nothing.

The European Union is effectively a union dominated by the German political and economic elite. Its main function is to serve as a nucleus for financial capitalism and to ease the road for that capitalism. The other functions just irritate everyone: it's undemocratic; decisions are not made by parliament; the European Parliament is not sovereign.

Proximity to power has an unsurprising ability to mutate a politician's spinal cord into bright yellow jelly.

In the West, since the collapse of communism and the fall of the Soviet Union, the one discipline both the official and unofficial cultures have united in casting aside has been history.

Basically, we are witnessing the twilight of democracy.

There was a good moment in Islam when people were actually challenging authority at every level. Very different from the world we live in.