Articles and Musings of Dr Robert M Kaplan

Blog Articles & Musings

Mural of Greta Thunberg, The Doom Goblin. Photo by Aslıhan Altın on Unsplash

From the UN to Western Sahara: The Doom Goblin’s search for the spotlight

Sweden has given us many things: Volvo, Ikea, and the latest, Doom Goblin Greta Thunberg. Once a media sensation, she now struggles to maintain her spotlight. Donning a Palestinian scarf, she aims to address Gaza’s issues but encounters unexpected challenges. As she shifts from one cause to another, her search for relevance sparks questions about fame’s fickleness. Join us as we delve into her complex journey and the causes she supports.

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Book Reviews by Robert M. Kaplan

Afrikaners in abeyance

Review of Bridge Over Blood River: History is kind to that rare phenomenon, the truly repentant loser. No one exemplifies this better than the Afrikaner people. Apartheid was not just a mistake; it was a terrible one. The truth is that the Afrikaners, the viciousness of Apartheid notwithstanding, were never truly totalitarian at heart and just lost the will to power.

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22 November 2017 - Ratko Mladić, former commander of the Bosnian Serb Army, at his trial judgement at the ICTY. Photo by UN ICTY / CC BY 2.0.

Ratko Mladić (1942-2026 ): A monster for all time

If anyone in the genocidal 20th century deserved the title of monster, it was the Bosnian Serb genocidaire General Ratko Mladić. The hecatombs the Butcher of Bosnia left in his wake of showed that not every killer met Hannah Arendt’s criterion for the banality of evil; Mladic instead had an evil charisma that appealed only to Bosnian Serbs and Milosevic, his puppet master in Belgrade.

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