It is favoring one worldview, secularism, over another worldview, religiosity, masquerading as neutrality.

You can't numb those hard feelings without numbing the other affects, our emotions.

If you want to open new chapters in relations between old adversaries, you cannot simply close old chapters by denying or suppressing history.

But, in some cases, historical legacies can gain excessive influence, overwhelming leaders capacity to make rational policy choices.

Since 1989 the Party has relentlessly consolidated its central leadership, internal party democracy has been suppressed and voting procedures have actually degenerated.

But China s rulers permit discussion of the Cultural Revolution only within this official framework, suppressing any and all unofficial reflections.

All totalitarian systems have one thing in common by crushing all forms of political expression except adulation of the regime, they make everything political.

For three decades, Mubarak s borrowing only enriched him and his ruling clique while impoverishing and repressing the rest of Egypt. Corruption was rife, but not just the covert type public money was openly used to support many businesses under flimsy pretexts like fostering economic growth and creating employment.

Here in Australasia, we imported this perspective from overseas, actively suppressing more holistic Maori and Aboriginal understandings about human distress.

For three decades, Mubarak s borrowing only enriched him and his ruling clique while impoverishing and repressing the rest of Egypt.

Indeed, by stifling any hint of democracy or political opposition in Iraq, Saddam's police state eliminated all risk of possible contagion of neighboring states.

In agriculture, it protects the world s rich farmers by stifling opportunity for the poor, at a cost of some 280 billion a year to taxpayers and consumers.

If power is the ability to obtain the outcomes one wants, it is important to remember that sometimes our power is greater when we act with others rather than merely over others.

Legally cornered, Musharraf has now decided to abandon constitutionality, removing the leading judges of the Supreme Court and provincial high courts and putting curbs on the media.

Similarly, the eurozone, driven by Germany, could lurch toward greater economic and political union (especially some form of fiscal union), thus containing the problems of its periphery.

On the other hand, he has launched an equally ferocious campaign against political liberalization, arresting and jailing leading human rights activists and cracking down on China s once vibrant social media.

You'll pat your thighs and look wistfully off into the distance, or you'll say something like, Hmm, makes you think when it really didn't, but what you're really what you're really trying to do is change the topic.

Yet we are now witnessing its disintegration, because the Sykes Picot design always implied a strong external hegemonic power (or two) able and willing to maintain stability by channeling (or suppressing) the region s numerous conflicts.

There will be no substantive and permanent peace for any peoples in this troubled region as long as Israel is violating key UN resolutions, official American policy and the international road map for peace by occupying Arab lands and oppressing the Palestinians.