Icons of the 20th Century

Ken MacLeod, A canticle for Wojtyla, on the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Karol Jozef Wojtyla, and Fidel Castro:

…four old men with their roots in the Cold War, of which they are the last men standing… inchoate figureheads of a global humanism. It’s a measure of the strangeness of the New World Order that they all, in very contradictory ways, have become icons of its discontents.