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Hindustan Times
15-06-2025
- Hindustan Times
The man who made us root for An assassin: A farewell to Forsyth
Dear Reader, The news of Frederick Forsyth's passing sends me upstairs to my grandfather's study. There, through the wood-panelled little room with its writer's leather-topped desk and well worn divan, I head for the bookshelf. Nestled among Wilbur Smith's adventures, Len Deighton thrillers and Desmond Bagley novels, I find what I am looking for—three yellowed paperbacks with crumbling pages. The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File and The Devil's Alternative. Their author, the journalist-turned-novelist who redefined the geopolitical thriller, has died at 86. Looking at these paperbacks, I am back thirty years, to my summer holidays in this house, riveted by Frederick Forsyth. This master thriller writer got me to commit my first literary crime—rooting for a killer ! I followed the Jackal, watching him set up his sniper's nest in a Paris apartment, and actually hoped this assassin would manage to kill Charles de Gaulle. Such is the power of a fiction writer to create empathy for any character, and Forsyth does this superbly for his lone wolf killer in The Day of the Jackal. Little wonder it's sold over 10 million copies, inspiring generations of assassin-protagonist stories from The Manchurian Candidate to Killing Eve. So why should you read Frederick Forsyth? 1. To learn geopolitics - In The Dogs of War, a British mercenary overthrows an African dictator for mineral rights in a fictional Guinea-like nation; it's a pattern that repeats in pursuit of everything from petroleum to silicon chips. In The Odessa File, Nazi networks resurface just as far-right fascist networks today mutate and reappear—they never disappear. 2. For geography and history - This former journalist spent years reporting on the troubled hotspots of the world, from the Biafran War to the Cold War's front lines, and he sets his novels in these conflict zones, everywhere from Europe to Africa to Iraq and Afghanistan. 3. Real insights into military technology - This former RAF pilot-turned-journalist-turned-author features cutting-edge technology—military intelligence, espionage and drone warfare (The Kill List) and details their real-world ramifications. He was prescient about disinformation too (The Fourth Protocol). 4. An insider's view into unholy alliances - Forsyth's books reveal alliances between democratic governments, military contractors, dictators, intelligence agencies and opium smugglers (The Afghan). While this is fiction, much of it is based on real-world politics, making it both insightful and instructive. 5. The books make for great reading - Forsyth is a master storyteller. His books are perfectly paced with memorable characters (the assassin, the journalist, the spy) and non-stop action that keeps you turning pages . Forsyth's autobiography offers riveting insights from a reporter who knew too much. Forsyth was a correspondent in conflict zones, rumoured to be a spy for MI6, the British intelligence service. As he writes: 'The Stasi arrested me, the Israelis regaled me, the IRA prompted a quick move from Ireland to England, and a certain attractive Czech secret police agent—well, her actions were a bit more intimate. And that's just for starters.' A fascinating life, told with thriller-like prose, only everything here is true. Goodbye Frederick Forsyth, and thank you for the sleepless nights spent racing through your pages. Thank you for giving us geopolitics wrapped in pacy prose. Thank you for showing us the world in all its complexity—for investigating morality in the world's darkest corners. Above all, thank you for telling us uncomfortable truths in such an entertaining way that we couldn't look away. From Forsyth's Shadows to The Safekeep: 2024's Women's Prize Winner From the geopolitical shadows of Forsyth's fiction to the emotional shadows of post-war Europe, this year's Women's Prize winner, Dutch trans writer Yale van der Wouden exposes hidden histories through a Rebecca-like gothic tale of love and grief, set in post-war Netherlands, in the shadow of the Holocaust. Creepy and compelling, even if it reads a tad too 'arty'. And finally, as Father's Day approaches, these lines by Dylan Thomas, from Fatherhood: poems about Fathers, remind us of the fierceness of fatherly love and loss. Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light… And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. What are your favourite father and child poems ? (Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and the founder of Sonya's Book Box, a bespoke book service. Each week, she brings you specially curated books to give you an immersive understanding of people and places. If you have any reading recommendations or reading dilemmas, write to her at sonyasbookbox@ The views expressed are personal.)
New York Times
19-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
J.F.K., Blown Away, What Else Do I Have to Say?
On his third day in office in January, President Trump ordered the release of documents from the National Archives related to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As Trump declared on the campaign trail, 'It's been 60 years, time for the American people to know the TRUTH.' The truth is that nothing in the archives is going to dispel the fog of hypothesis, rumor and speculation that swirls around these killings. The assassinations of the 1960s — President Kennedy's in particular — remain the source and paradigm of modern conspiratorial thinking, a style of argument to which the current president is passionately committed. Whatever details emerge now are unlikely to settle the ongoing debates, which are less about what happened in Dallas in 1963 (or Memphis and Los Angeles five years later) than about the character of the American state and the nature of reality itself. Was Kennedy killed by the Mafia? By the C.I.A.? Was he an early, liberal victim of what modern conservatism has come to call the Deep State? A lot of people think so, and there may be unanswered questions hovering around his death. But there's a thin line between skepticism and paranoia, between reasonable guesses and wild invention. The American imagination often gravitates to the far side of that line, and the Kennedy assassination was one of the shocks that pushed us over it. By 1963, we were already headed in that direction. Suspicion was part of the atmosphere of the Cold War years, when what Kennedy himself called the 'twilight struggle' between the United States and the Soviet Union was accompanied by the rapid growth of the American security state, which rested equally on paperwork and secrecy. Through the years of McCarthy, Sputnik and the quiz show scandals, paranoia was in the air. Kennedy's killing was almost immediately folded into a narrative structure that had already surfaced in popular culture as well as politics, a mode of storytelling that treated public events as the expressions of secret plots. Richard Condon's Cold War thriller 'The Manchurian Candidate' (published in 1959 and adapted by Hollywood in 1962) and Thomas Pynchon's shaggy-dog experimental whodunit 'V.' are among the best-known pre-assassination examples of this paranoid style in American fiction. (The phrase 'paranoid style' comes from an influential essay on political conspiratorialism by the Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, originally delivered as a lecture shortly before the assassination and published in Harper's in 1964.) That same year, the Warren Commission Report emphatically concluded that Oswald was the sole shooter and the only party responsible for Kennedy's killing. Yet the report did anything but close the case. Through the years that followed, the commission was subjected to a steady stream of revisionism and rebuttal, carried out first by journalists and politicians and later, perhaps more decisively, by novelists and filmmakers. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
South China Morning Post
07-03-2025
- Business
- South China Morning Post
To its trading partners, the US is suddenly a predatory rogue state
I almost fell out of my seat when on Thursday I opened the South China Morning Post to find a column by Alex Lo asking : 'Is Donald Trump the real-life Manchurian candidate?' Only the day before had I watched the 2004 film The Manchurian Candidate and found myself asking that exact same question. It seems the entire US political system has suddenly, and dangerously, gone weird on us. Advertisement Dozens of the most meticulous, measured and fact-focused journalists and economists that I have followed, trusted and admired for decades seem suddenly lost for words – at least civilised words – at the breathtaking spectacle of a once-rational Republican Party morphing into a machete-wielding rogue for which lifetime allies have suddenly become enemies, and long-time enemies become trusted friends. At the Financial Times, Edward Luce described the US president's 100-minute Congress address as 'a fever dream of extravagant promises'; Gideon Rachman said the 'most positive verdict I heard on the speech ' by US Vice-President J.D. Vance at the Munich Security Conference 'was that it was 'puerile bullshit''. Martin Wolf calls Trump's tariffs 'an act of unjustifiable, indeed economically illiterate, economic warfare'; Maurice Obstfeld sums it all up as 'chainsaw theatrics'. For those of us in Asia, the fevered antics of Trump and his eccentric team also bear an uncanny resemblance to Mao Zedong and the Gang of Four back in 1966 launching the Cultural Revolution They are even using language that smells suspiciously of that dark Chinese decade. Take the 2025 Trade Policy Agenda recently released by US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, a report which opens with: 'The United States of America is the most extraordinary nation the world has ever known.' Noting America's goods trade deficit had soared to over a trillion dollars, the report said: 'President Trump alone recognised the role that trade policy has played in creating these challenges and how trade policy can fix them.' Jamieson Greer appearing before the Senate Committee on Finance on Capitol Hill, February 6, before he was confirmed as the US Trade Representative. Photo: AP In his address to Congress, Trump spoke of 'the dawn of the golden age of America' and of 'action to usher in the greatest and most successful era of our country'. He also proclaimed America 'on the verge of a comeback the likes of which the world has never witnessed, and perhaps will never witness again'. It may not quite be the rhetoric of China's 'Great Helmsman' and his Little Red Book , but it is not many steps behind – and may prove just as naive.
Yahoo
05-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Ghosts of the Cold War
'Here I am, then. I have come home.' So said Pope John Paul II after landing in Warsaw in 1983, bending to kiss the soil of his native country. The mood was patriotic and defiant. 'Poland for the Poles!' came the shouts from the crowd—union men, priests, fathers and their sons. 'We are the real Poland!' The pope continued: 'I consider it my duty to be with my fellow countrymen in this sublime and at the same time difficult moment.' The demonstrators unfurled banners advertising the Solidarity movement and chanted the name of its leader, Lech Wałęsa. The 81-year-old Wałęsa, one of the great heroes of the Cold War, is still very much with us, and still engaged in public affairs. 'Gratitude is due to the heroic Ukrainian soldiers who shed their blood in defense of the values of the free world,' he said earlier this week. 'We do not understand how the leader of a country that is a symbol of the free world cannot see this.' Wałęsa is not the only figure from that day who remains part of our public life. He and other supporters of Polish sovereignty, in Poland and around the world, were being spied on by the KGB's foreign-operations directorate, whose roster of murderers, torturers, and villains included Vladimir Putin. The KGB's mission was to do in Poland what it had done in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s—suppress the movement for liberty and sovereignty. The ghost of the KGB is now working toward that end in Ukraine. Cold War fantasies such as The Manchurian Candidate imagined it would take some incredible and complicated scheme to put a man willing to do the bidding of the KGB and its analogues and epigones into Washington's halls of power. In reality, all it took was a man whose values align with those of the KGB rather than with those of the Founding Fathers. Some of my friends believe that there is some dark backstory to Donald Trump worthy of a 1970s political thriller: some kompromat, some financial leverage, something. That could be the case, but I would not be surprised that when the history of our time is written—if the history of our time is permitted to be written—what we will learn is that Trump did Moscow's bidding because he prefers the politics of Putin to those of, say, Dwight Eisenhower, while sycophants such as J.D. Vance and Ted Cruz did Moscow's bidding on behalf of Trump because they preferred being on the inside to being on the outside. (These are unhappy men: To live in fear of being on the outside looking in is to deny oneself the rarefied pleasure—the great genuine joy—of being on the outside looking out.) What was it that had the pope and his fellow Poles ready to take on Moscow? And what kind of enemy was the regime Putin served? Ask a statistician, in this case R.J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii, who wrote a considerable book on Moscow's 'democide,' as he called it. Probably 61,911,000 people, 54,769,000 of them citizens, have been murdered by the Communist Party—the government—of the Soviet Union. This is about 178 people for each letter, comma, period, digit, and other characters in this book. Old and young, healthy and sick, men and women, and even infants and infirm, were killed in cold blood. They were not combatants in civil war or rebellions, they were not criminals. Indeed, nearly all were guilty of … nothing. Some were from the wrong class—bourgeoisie, land owners, aristocrats, kulaks. Some were from the wrong nation or race—Ukrainians, Black Sea Greeks, Kalmyks, Volga Germans. Some were from the wrong political faction—Trotskyites, Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries. Or some were just their sons and daughters, wives and husbands, or mothers and fathers. And some were those occupied by the Red Army—Balts, Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Rumanians. Then some were simply in the way of social progress, like the mass of peasants or religious believers. Or some were eliminated because of their potential opposition, such as writers, teachers, churchmen; or the military high command; or even high and low Communist Party members themselves. … An infant born in 1917 had a good chance of being killed by the Party sometime in his future. A more precise statement of this is given by the average of the democide rates for each period, weighted by the number of years involved. Focusing on the most-probable mid-risk of .45 percent, throughout Soviet history, including the relatively safe years after the 1950s, the odds of the average citizen being killed by his own government has been about 45 to 10,000; or to turn this around, 222 to 1 of surviving terror, deportations, the camps, or an intentional famine. As pointed out in the text, this is almost twenty times the risk of an American dying in a vehicular accident. Among the great holocausts of the 20th century, the German one stands out for its particular horrors, the Chinese one for the scale of its enormity, and the Russian one—ah, but which Russian one? Vladimir Putin's employers and patrons had a long time to do their murdering, from the gulag to the Lubyanka. The one most relevant to today's headlines is the one inflicted on Ukraine in the 1930s, the Holodomor, when Moscow engineered the intentional deaths by famine of as many as 5 million people in order to crush the Ukrainian independence movement. Putin today bombs maternity hospitals to crush the spirit—and the fact—of Ukrainian independence. Mass graves, torture, murder—this isn't a new story for Russians in Ukraine. 'Peace,' say the ladies and gentlemen over at Fox News. That's what this is all about, we are to believe: peace. Let's not get all judgmental about who murdered whom. There is not much one can say in defense of the man, but Roger Ailes was at least more straightforward than the current Fox News brass when it came to forcing employees to assume undignified positions as the price of career advancement. Back to 1983 for a moment: The pope said a 'kiss placed on the soil of Poland' is 'like a kiss placed on the hands of a mother,' adding the nation has 'suffered much' and 'therefore has a right to a special love.' Ukraine has suffered much at the hands of the same people—and in the case of KGB veteran Vladimir Putin, literally the same people. And, under the current American dispensation, it has a right to … be stripped of its natural resources, apparently, not to mention its sovereignty, and handed over, once again, to domination by the people who have killed millions of Ukrainians and who will, with the tacit consent of these United States, kill many more. The Poles were fortunate to have a pope who could say: 'Here I am, then. I have come home.' It is good to have one of your own in a high place. But Ronald Reagan wasn't Polish. Margaret Thatcher wasn't Polish. William F. Buckley Jr. wasn't Polish. You didn't have to be Polish to understand what was happening in 1983. You don't have to be Ukrainian to understand what is happening today. And though a lot of these proud American patriots turn out to be on the Kremlin's payroll, that doesn't explain the bigger story. Pro-Russian Republicans are pro-Russian because they are pro-Russian. You don't have to be Russian, or a covert Russian asset, to prefer Moscow's way of doing things. You don't have to be an actual literal idiot to be a useful idiot in the Cold War sense, though it helps. You just have to choose to side with the Kremlin. Trump and Vance have chosen, Pete Hegseth and Tucker Carlson have chosen, and Republicans have chosen to go along with them. Reagan spoke of 'a time for choosing.' Now is such a time. It always is.
Yahoo
25-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Kentucky GOP hopefuls start taking shots as race for McConnell Senate seat begins
LEXINGTON, Ky. (FOX 56) — It is an off year for elections in Kentucky, but that's not stopping the campaign machine that's coming together in the race to replace Senator Mitch McConnell. 'There is an early primary that is happening right now, and it's for one vote. It is Donald Trump,' FOX 56 News Political Analyst Jonathan Miller said Monday. Who is running to replace Sen. Mitch McConnell in Kentucky? In a social media video earlier that day, the sole declared GOP candidate for McConnell's Senate seat, former attorney general and gubernatorial candidate Daniel Cameron, tried offering some distance between himself and the office's current occupant. 'Now what we saw from Mitch McConnell in voting against Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and RFK was just flat out wrong,' Cameron said in the video, adding that he would have voted for them if he was in the office and offering other contrasts from McConnell's policy positions. 'And when it comes to Ukraine funding, enough is enough,' he said. Cameron's longtime relationship with McConnell, someone he's cited as a mentor, is one thing Miller said could be a challenge for Cameron when otherwise he considers him the most recognizable name and an early favorite. 'Right now, among the MAGA faction, which is the dominant faction in Kentucky politics, he's (McConnell) unpopular; he's very unpopular,' Miller said. It's a tricky relationship, Miller said Cameron may need to lean on for fundraising, and also one Cameron's potential challengers are likely to seize on. Lexington businessman Nate Morris reposted Cameron's video with a picture parodying a movie poster for 'The Manchurian Candidate,' implying Cameron is McConnell's handpicked successor. Miller considers the wealthy outsider a possible wild card to the developing primary. Lexington ranked 10th worst large city for football fans: WalletHub Kentucky receives failing grades in tobacco control report Kentucky ranks as 2025's worst state to retire in: WalletHub 'Because he doesn't have the personal relationship that Daniel Cameron does with Leader McConnell, because he doesn't have the long-term political alliance that Andy Barr does,' Miller said. Congressman Andy Barr is a third possible name in the mix, who Miller said would also have good name recognition in central Kentucky and can lean on a powerful fundraising machine that already has a $2,000,000 head start. 'He is both a prodigious fundraiser and has a platform from which he can raise significant money, being a senior member of the House Financial Services Committee,' Miller said. Kentucky GOP hopefuls start taking shots as race for McConnell Senate seat begins Trump administration works to end war in Ukraine AG Coleman, others call on EPA to not let CA regulate pesticides Barr didn't give any additional speculation over the weekend over his interest after offering a critical statement of Cameron's record when Cameron announced his Senate campaign last week. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
