So which is it to be: the end of communism or the rise of the ayatollahs? As we consider the extraordinary wave of revolutions sweeping the Middle East there is a certain inevitability about the struggle for an appropriate frame of historical reference against which to judge what is happening. This, after all, makes sense.

Those of us who do not have the habit of consulting fortune tellers to make our political predictions are always on the lookout for familiar structures, recognizable patterns matching events from the past or, if it really comes down to it, something to at least pin our hopes (or fears) on.

Vaclav Havel, one time dissident and former Czech president, is convinced that it’s 1989 all over again: “The authoritarian Arab regimes are the product of the same decades that produced the Iron Curtain,” he said. “It turns out that there are core moral and political standards common to all cultures.”

Read the rest of this article »

If you thought there were some standards too low even for the Guardian newspaper group you might well have missed the latest eulogy to one of post-war Europe’s most cruel and repressive dictatorships. That’s right, as the civilised among us this week celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall — one of modern history’s most momentous and uplifting expressions of the human spirit’s yearning for freedom and dignity — the Guardian has pulled from its voluminous list of apologists for totalitarianism to grace us with a piece of fulsome praise for the workers paradise that was communist East Germany.

One would have thought that fresh from its attempted whitewash of the massacre at Fort Hood last week (see previous entry) and after the post-Gaza hate campaign against a state which (by complete coincidence we are asked to believe) happens to be populated by Jews, the moral and civilisation cess pit that is the Guardian no longer has the power to surprise us.

Read the rest of this article »