Salman Rushdie Quotes
I'm not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, had you said it was going to happen no one would have believed you. The system seemed powerful and unbreakable. Suddenly overnight it blew away like dust.
Rushdie, Salman. Interview. 2011.
In the Vietnam War, America and her allies were defending the South Vietnamese from the Communist and Nationalist incursions of the North Vietnamese. However, the South Vietnamese government was itself a very fragile democracy which provided rights little better than the Ho Chi Min lead government of the North. Further, the South Vietnamese rulers and governments while claiming to be democracies, were little more than in name only and were very corrupt. As with many unstable and weak governments, South Vietnam had experienced a succession of coups, with some of his advisors favoring the coups and a few actualy supporting them. Johnson was continually frustrated by this and this expression was his own inimitable style.
In 1993 Mooshood Abiola was the apparent victor in the Nigerian presidential election, but the election was `nullified' by the previous President and military dictator, General Ibrahim Babangida. Abiola announced he would attempt to form a government anyway.
In Russia anti-Jewish riots and massacres, called "pogroms," were tolerated by the Tsarist government:
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie FRSL is a British Indian novelist and essayist. His work, combining magical realism with historical fiction, is primarily concerned with the many connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations, with much of his fiction being set on the Indian subcontinent.
