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Remembering the many Václav Havels
During my first encounter with him, in Prague in 1984, when everything seemed hopeless, I was struck by the man’s hedgehog resilience. Here was a rarity: an unusual figure, intense but witty, a clear-headed thinker and a wonderful writer, a courageous individual blessed with a razor-sharp sense of irony; a chain-smoking man of letters whose [...]
John Keane recalls meeting Václav Havel
An interview about Vaclav Havel with The World Today’s Eleanor Hall, ABC Radio, 19 December 2011 Listen to Audio Transcript As mourners gather in Prague’s Wenceslas Square to pay respect to their late former president, tributes to Vaclav Havel have been pouring in from leaders around the world. US president Barack Obama says the man [...]
Global Occupation Movement
John Keane was guest of Radio Australia (ABC) on 21 November 2011 to talk with Isabelle Genoux about the global occupation movement. Listen to Audio
Remembering Maralinga
55 years ago the British government commenced nuclear testing in the South Australian outback. It was named “Operation Buffalo” and it took place at the remote Maralinga site. Four fission bombs were tested and British and Australian servicemen were exposed to the fallout. Today the Maralinga area is a “No Go” zone and the local aboriginal people feel the area [...]
Democracy and extremists
In the aftermath of the Norway mass killing many people are pondering whether modern democratic communities might have to re-think some of their nostrums about what’s said out loud, and how it’s said: about whether certain tendencies within communities can promote or quell extremism. Listen to Audio Here
Is Democracy a Dirty Word?
Abraham Lincoln famously said that democracy is of the people, by the people and for the people; Winston Churchill said that the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter…and American journalist Sydney J Harris wrote that ‘Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be [...]
Australia’s AV preference
BBC Radio 4 interviews Johan Keane about optional preferential voting system in Australia Australia is the only major democracy that uses Alternative Vote system (AV). Can the UK learn anything from Down Under? Correspondent Nick Bryant reports from Sydney on how the system is viewed here.
Refolution in the Arab world
A new word is needed to describe these events of recent months. They should be called ‘refolutions’, radical refusals of the old choice between reform and revolution – remarkably sensitive to the grave dangers and high costs of using violent means to get their way. Read the text here
Democracy in Egypt
The Egyptian revolution came not from the intellectual elite or opposition parties, but via Facebook and the Twitterverse, from the young men and women of Egypt fed up with autocratic, geriatric rule. Nor are they interested in a theocracy. Does this mean we’ve seen the end of an era which began with the Iranian Islamic [...]
Prof. John Keane on Egypt’s revolution
There is no Khomeini and more than that I would say that there’s been a learning process in the region; that revolutions can devour their own children. There is an awareness that the main strategy is to set up checks and balances to prevent that kind of take over and I think that so far [...]