Andre Vltchek

The United States believes that it is so invincible, exceptional and so frightening that no one would ever dare to protest, let alone defend its people against constant humiliation, economic embargos and military threats. It used to be like this for quite some time. In the past, the West used to bully the world before and…

Beirut is mad! It is thoroughly insane. And that is not an insult. The inhabitants of this Middle Eastern metropolis are proud of their own lunacy. They wear it as a coat-of-arms, as their identity. “Do you like Beirut?” “Yes. But it is mad,” you reply. “Yes!!!” They grin at you with delight. It means, you understand, and you are part of them. My life has been…

No one is talking about it openly, but, let us face it: those U.S.-made planes are crashing; the performance of Apple phones and computers is falling far behind those made by Huawei and other Chinese companies. Lenovo took over IBM and is doing extremely well. NASA is absolutely incapable of building decent rockets that would be…

Former President of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi, had finished his 15-minute discourse in a courtroom, while being locked inside a sound-proofed cage. He read a poem about his love for Egypt, and then collapsed, and died. His demise sent shock-waves all over Egypt, the region…

You will never read about it, but Dayak people, the “First Nation” of the enormous island of Borneo, are broken, robbed and brainwashed. “Unity in diversity” it says; the motto of Indonesia. But it could be argued that the opposite is true. There is very little unity, and less and less diversity, as…

While the United States has been intimidating dozens of countries all over the world, two cuddly Chinese giant pandas – a three year old male called Ru Yi, and a female one year younger, named Ding Ding – were settling down in their new home, inside the legendary Moscow Zoo. Chewing bamboo shoots, and obviously enjoying…

Year after year, month after month, I see two sides of the world; two extremes which are getting more and more disconnected: I see great cities like Homs in Syria, reduced to horrifying ruins. I see Kabul and Jalalabad in Afghanistan, fragmented by enormous concrete walls intended to protect NATO occupation armies and their local puppets…

It truly looked grand, impressive – the fourth most populous country on earth voted in general elections, which were held on 17 April 2019. Hundreds of positions were for grab: that of the president, the vice president, members of the People’s Consultative Assembly (MPR), and…

Europe, an “old” colonialist continent, is decaying, and in some places even collapsing. It senses how bad things are going. But it never thinks that it is its own fault. North America is decaying as well, but there, people are not even used to comparing. They only “feel that…

In the past, whenever I went to (or more precisely, ‘through’) Israel, it was for some antagonistic purpose: to write about the brutal suppression of the intifada in Gaza or Hebron, to comment on the insanity of the land grab around Bethlehem, or to report from the eerie and de-populated…

Everyone who visits this once ‘hermit Sultanate’ could easily testify: Oman is ‘different’ from the other countries of the Gulf Region. Its people are warm, talkative and proud. Despite the fact that Oman is poorer than Bahrain or Saudi Arabia, it actually feels richer, because there is…

Not long ago, they used to be an absolute disaster: Indonesian trains. Compared to the Dutch colonial era, the network has shrunk dramatically, from 6,811 km to 5,910km in 1950, and to a disastrous 3,000 km recently. Just a few years ago, passengers used to climb onto the roofs…