Accepted and vilified, celebrated and rebuked by all, as François Villon would have had it, Machiavelli became a litmus test case for nearly every epoch in European history. Much remains to be done to reject numerous clichés and senseless accusations to fully understand and appreciate his legacy as a humanist, historian, political thinker, and a prophet of modern politics. (Continue...)

Was the God s on the side of the poor and innocent, or did he side with evil due to being totally neutral and impartial to all of his creations? This was the central theological and philosophical issue for the Nobel Prize winning Jewish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-1991) – a major Eastern/Central European author who passed away twenty-five years ago. (Continue...)

Working on my new book of an interpretive vocabulary of politics – a blend of political humor, satire, and my own experience in European politics – I revisited many Soviet clichés, pearls of propaganda, and poisonous darts of demagoguery (all of them alive and well in present Russia). Some of them lead us straight back to the root of the matter. For instance, one of famous Vladimir Lenin’s revolutionary slogans reads: “Communism is Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country!” (Continue...)