So I was just looking at an article about the elections in India, and it seems that the Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, is only one shaky coalition government away from gaining power in India.
In Pakistan, the Taliban are only an hours drive from the capital.
For those who don't pay attention to the news, both of those countries have nuclear weapons and have been either on the verge of or actually involved in outright hostilities over the Kashmir.
So if the fundamentalists gain power in those nuclear mutually hostile countries I wonder how that will work out for them?
I'm certainly grateful that the news isn't so boring anymore...
Oh, funny thing, in the Ramayana, one of the great national epics of India, the hero Rama defeats an army of demons with an army of monkeys.
I can picture an Indian astronaut propelled into the future to find a planet ruled by intelligent apes who worship Hanuman, and then he comes across the radioactive ruins of the Taj Mahal. Then a mutant named Ravana grabs his girlfriend...
Well anyway, I'm just being silly. There is no way that fundamentalists or other irrational idealogues would ever gain control of a whole country. Revolutionary Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Nazi Germany, Stalin's Russia, Mao's China, North Korea, and so on were/are just flukes. It couldn't possibly happen now. Not with the UN and the USA in Afghanistant and rocketing Taliban and Al Qaida leaders in Pakistan (say, that's what we did in Cambodia before the Khmer Rouge took over - oh never mind). Anyway, those people are rational enough that they would not use nuclear weapons to commit an act of genocide. Who would do something like that?
Well anyway, I'll be interested to see how that all works out for them.