Pakistan, Jan. 25 -- From a Leftist perspective, Aijaz Ahmad succinctly concluded, "Khomeini's takeover was one of those rare conjunctures in which the revolution and the counter-revolution were condensed in the same moment.It was a decisive retreat of the Left from the Middle East and the rise to ideological hegemony of Islamic fundamentalism in that whole region- the history-as -tragedy-and-as-farce."

The collapse of socialism that started in Afghanistan culminated in the fall of the Comecon countries. Perestroika not only destroyed the Soviet Union but also an entire civilisation as it turned into global perestroika. Gorbachev's racist dream of 'our common European home' was shattered along with the social organisation that kept the S...