With the defeat first of Germany and then of Japan, citizens of the Western world began the task of putting behind them the horrors of the disastrous three-decade stretch that began in 1914, dominated by wars and economic collapse before being drawn to a close by the ominous spectacle of two atomic bombs launched on urban populations from the air. Once those horrors were behind us, a new phase of history could begin. And it was impressive. The French still refer to it as “les trentes glorieuses” — “The Thirty Glorious [Years]” — between 1945 and 1975 in which Western nations became convinced that the economy and global culture were on an upswing that might indeed go on forever.

This feeling of unbridled optimism grew and expanded in a reassuringly measured way for the first half of the “glorious thirty,” despite the rapid emergence and persistence of a Cold War replacing the hot one that ended in 1945. This psychological war between opposing economic theories and political ideologies provided the equivalent of the kind of ominous background musical score Hollywood used to maintain suspense. But no one was eager to see the finishing credits. It had the effect of installing deeply within everyone’s psyche a lingering fear of an imminent nuclear confrontation. Those who lived through that period will recall that the tranquillity induced by the superficial but very real prosperity of the new consumerist culture was regularly punctuated by moments of “duck and .” Prosperous consumers began asking themselves the annoying question: “When, thanks to our trend of upward mobility, will I be able to afford an individual bomb shelter?”

There was a real frightening moment in October 1962: the Cuban missile crisis. But Americans who lived through that period remember the decade of the 1950s, dominated by the paternal presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, as an era of voluntary conformity. These were good times. No reason to rock the boat. Everyone who was white — as well as a select few among the racial minorities — was encouraged to get a degree, secure a job, obtain a mortgage and, more generally, fall into line. “Falling in” nevertheless meant dealing with the perspective of “fallout,” nuclear fallout.

The price of happiness

The 1960s began quietly on a note of continuing consumer confidence. All that was thrown off kilter in November 1963 with the assassination of a president. America’s youth turned away from the prevailing trend of the ‘50s to fall in line and march towards success. They replaced it by a new trend of falling out of line. Apart from political protests and the refusal to accept assassination as a tool of governance, falling out of line included engaging in widely shared licit and illicit pleasures (notably drugs and sexual liberation thanks to a new reading of Jefferson’s “pursuit”). It was a new twist on the consumer society and the pursuit of happiness.

The developing disaster of the war in Vietnam began to undo the trente glorieuses, even if the idea of unlimited prosperity remained the accepted norm, the dominant idea driving the civilization forward. The carefully designed configuration of the pieces on the postwar chessboard — the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade that would evolve into the World Trade Organization — had produced the image of a largely stable “rules-based” international order. It malfunctioned from time to time, like any complex system. Before the end of the century, only a few realized that it was rapidly losing its coherence.

The first sign of structural damage became apparent in 1971 when US President Richard Nixon decoupled the US dollar from gold, dismantling the hitherto brilliantly successful monetary order crafted at Bretton Woods in 1944. As chess logic goes, it was equivalent to a black pawn taking the white team’s queen. Nixon subsequently resigned and the US effectuated a humiliating retreat from Vietnam. The petroleum shock following the Yom Kippur war in 1973 provoked a pattern of increasingly confused defensive moves by the principal chess player. The petrodollar had taken over the role of gold, without actually replacing it. Although it held off the checkmate, it created a permanent state of instability of West Asia, transformed into an increasingly exposed powder keg.

The fall of Saigon in 1975 temporarily cured the US of its military adventurism. Once bitten, twice shy. But contrary to the proverbial logic, the trauma of Vietnam would return with the dawn of the 21st century. In the meantime, the collapse of the Soviet Union provided a new glimmer of hope for a remake of the trente glorieuses. Historian Francis Fukuyama announced the of history. The US model, driven by the peaceful operations of Starbucks and McDonalds, was set to refashion global culture. The European nations believed they could provide a sophisticated variation by adopting a “supporting role” in the screenplay provided by Hollywood. The European nations united (but failed to unify) as they conjoined their economic forces in a glorious European Union endowed with its own rival, but non-threatening currency, the euro.

For nearly a decade, a new order seemed to have prevailed. But then came the true but unexpected Y2K bug. The 20th century and its largely reassuring second half ended not with a whimper, but a bang, on the morning of September 11, 2001. That iconic moment cast a shadow on everything that appeared positive about the expiring century and the triumph of the consumer society. 

Looking back at it today, we are only beginning to see that from start to finish, the historical logic wasn’t about constructing peace and prosperity. The system depended at its core on strategizing war, conducting ruthless competition and deploying skulduggery, aggressivity, manipulation. Everything we felt we had discarded in 1945 now appeared to be present at the core of the system. It wasn’t Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin, but whatever it was, it revealed a growing taste for domination and, along the way, provided multiple examples of a continued taste for genocide. The illusion that order had been definitively restored following World War II was precisely that: an illusion.

German novelist Thomas Mann was a prophet in our midst. No one took him seriously when, in his 1945 titled, “Germany and the Germans” (Deutschland und die Deutschen), he presented the chilling argument that Hitlerism — as a psychological and political phenomenon — had successfully infected the world, potentially outlasting the Third Reich itself. Two years later, US President Harry Truman passed the National Security Act and created the CIA, without that it would consciously or unconsciously derive inspiration from the science of Hitler’s Gestapo.

Evil had not disappeared, but simply gone into hiding

One way of characterizing how people now think of the 20th century is that the first half of it saw the Devil unleashed, especially in Germany and the Soviet Union. Those two nations produced the century’s iconic demons: Hitler and Stalin. In the second half of the century, everyone not named Thomas Mann felt comforted by the idea the Devil had been exorcised. The wisdom and hard work of a new class of disciplined leaders who believed in their class’s commitment to virtue accomplished this noble task.

When Satan seemed to peer at us again from behind the backdrop — for example, when charismatic leaders were assassinated — we were regularly told it was the work of a lone gunman. There was no reason to suspect diabolical machinations. By the final decade of the century, all was on track for Fukuyama’s end of history.

We could feel it during the wonderful decade of the . It was “morning in America.” A new start to a golden age began under the benign English-speaking leadership of US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The culture of individual success had begun replacing the culture of shared prosperity. And, almost on cue, the dreadful Soviet Union that had spawned Stalin, had the courtesy to collapse and usher in a peaceful, unipolar world, from which all devils would be permanently banished.

Everything changed in September 2001. The devils had returned. They were spreading a new plague, with a new name: Global Terror. They were out there somewhere, in faraway lands that nevertheless threatened the livelihood of those of us who were committed to cultivating our gentle prosperity. The fact that our prosperity depended on access to resources from those faraway lands meant that we had good reason to fear the troublemakers, especially those who were far away.

That mentality led to a series of increasingly futile 21st century “forever wars,” the latest of which began only a few months ago. Spreading havoc abroad has become more than a habit. It was clearly an addiction. All in the name of protecting the precious way of life, the fruit of our pursuit of happiness, which we also believe is the key to everyone’s prosperity… so long as they fall in line. But it’s that same mentality that has destabilized the institutions and ultimately undermined the productive capacity of the very civilization we’re now striving desperately to defend.  

In short, far from being exorcised, the Devil is back on his throne and he is amongst us. We simply refuse to acknowledge his presence. We continue to believe he has been permanently exiled without realizing that we’ve been hosting him in our midst all this time. How else can we explain the fact that the US Department of Defense has now been not just renamed, but restructured as the Department of War? Back in the chaotic 20th century, we had two principal enemies: Germany and Japan. We could focus our hatred on them in times of war. Now the enemies are everywhere. Even allies are enemies. They all deserve our hate. So it appears in Donald Trump’s America.

What about Europe?

The EU is not only fraying at the seams, it is lost in the woods of its mindless bureaucracy. These two images up King Lear’s “loop’d and window’d raggedness.” Europe produced maximum horror in the first half of the 20th century. The scenario of chaos may be reemerging today. World War I became possible thanks to the convergence of an industrial revolution and intense competition between competing European colonial powers. The combination of industrial efficiency and unlimited extraction allowed them to build their own military-industrial complexes that inevitably produced the monumental clash of 1914, when they began seriously testing their prowess against one another.

The sense of civilizational unity in the West — notably between the US and Europe, but also among European nations — remains today, but only at the formal level. The thread that holds it together is weakening as we watch the tension grow. It can only thrive by believing there are enemies out there that will unite us in a common effort. But it’s becoming more and more difficult even to name those enemies and be certain of their evil intentions. 

Is Russia really an enemy of Europe? That appears to be a matter of belief, but there are no concrete facts to back it up. And China? The US has obvious reasons to see it as a rival, but does that make it an enemy of Europe? Apparently, if Washington sees China as its principal enemy, Europe has no choice but to follow suit. 

Is Iran a terrorist state threatening the West? Europe didn’t think so when it signed the in 2015 and remained in it even after Trump withdrew. Where’s the threat to our civilization? It only exists if Israel, which isn’t in the West, is deemed to symbolize the West. That symbiotic connection seems to work for the US, but does it make sense for Europe?

In contrast, we may be seeing a return to a state we claim to have cast off in 1945, in which the enemies of European nations are other European nations. To some extent, that is already the case when we consider the case of Russia, a nation that, at least since the Great, has always been European. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, its leaders have sought to integrate Europe. And it’s always been Washington that refused.

This is truly a turning point, but not exactly the former German Chancellor Olaf Sholz referred to. We may be witnessing a return to the nightmare scenario of both 20th-century world wars. 

What’s surprising is that few people seem to notice. Germany’s current chancellor, Friedrich Merz has announced its ambition to rearm and become Europe’s dominant military power. Doesn’t that ring any bells? Shouldn’t we look back and remind ourselves that many people in the US and the UK, prior to the outbreak of World War II, regarded Hitler with sympathy, admiring his ability to establish order? American financial and industrial interests made the of Nazi Germany’s economy possible. It was only when he invaded Poland that they woke up in surprise.

Angels to the rescue?

Are any of Europe’s current leaders concerned by Germany’s newfound ambition to become the continent’s new military powerhouse? Have European media begun to raise the alarm? So far, only a few public thinkers have allowed themselves even to evoke the danger. 

Italian geopolitical analyst Thomas Fazi and French historian and Emmanuel Todd are outliers. Both of them see the risk and offer contrasting but ultimately complementary analyses. Todd fears that France will be a likely future victim of any policy that encourages German rearmament. “For Germany, only hierarchical relationships are conceivable,” he tells us. “The Germans want to dominate Europe because it suits their temperament.”

Fazi wouldn’t disagree, but he makes a complementary . “This is not nationalism, military or otherwise, but its opposite: the undermining of German and European core interests at the hands of a transnationalised globalist elite — Merz is, after all, a former BlackRock executive — that views permanent war and militarisation as a way to entrench its wealth and power at the expense of European prosperity and security.”

The debate will undoubtedly continue. For our own safety and well-being, we should hope that it will amplify, but the consequences are in all cases unpredictable. The big question for Europe is twofold:

1. Is it poised, despite its best intentions, to return to the logic that prevailed during the first half of the 20th century? (Todd’s concern)
2. Is it destined to consolidate its identity as an obedient but permanently humiliated vassal of the US military-industrial complex? (Fazi’s focus)

The devils are loose and, similar to a century ago, Europe is their playground. Are there any European leaders capable of summoning up Abraham Lincoln’s “ of our nature” to rein them in again?

*[The Devil’s Advocate pursues the tradition 51�Թ� began in 2017 with the launch of our “Devil’s Dictionary.” It does so with a slight change of focus, moving from language itself — political and journalistic rhetoric — to the substantial issues in the news. Read more of the 51�Թ� Devil’s Dictionary. The news we consume deserves to be seen from an outsider’s point of view. And who could be more outside official discourse than Old Nick himself?]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Have Europe’s Banished Devils Returned? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

During his 2000 campaign for the presidency, candidate George W. Bush his nostalgia for the golden age of the Cold War, in which the USSR played the role of America’s reliable bugbear.

“When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and we knew exactly who ‘they’ were. It was ‘us’ versus ‘them,’ and it was clear who ‘them’ was. Today, we’re not so sure who the ‘they’ are, but we know they’re there.”

Once elected, Bush believed he had found the solution to the problem. He turned Huntington’s thesis into historical reality when, with the appropriate fanfare, he launched his “Global War on Terror” (GWOT). First in Afghanistan, then in Iraq, a newly “dangerous world” got off to a spectacular start to mark the new millennium and reassure a president in desperate need of an authenticated enemy.

Alas, Bush’s valiant effort never really developed into the kind of heroic cinematic “clash” Hollywood culture may have been hoping for. Instead, it produced two boring and confusing “forever wars.” Conducted in parallel, both dragged on for years over the wastelands of Asia.

Obama offered a bit of stimulus with his “surges,” which nobody really understood and which produced no memorable outcome. Boring and meaningless are the two epithets most people would have applied to the subsequent history of those two wars.

Fast forward to 2026. How things have finally changed!

Two decades on, US President Donald Trump, teaming up with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, may finally be fulfilling Bush’s 2020 call for excitement. The world is now witnessing a clash — if Trump is to be believed — that might just see the end of an entire civilization. Had he lived to read Trump’s solemn promise, Huntington would have deemed himself a prophet: In the first week of April, Trump proudly : “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

Distinguishing between clashes

Despite appearances, today’s civilizational stakes are not the ones Huntington imagined. The current showdown between East and West (the “twain” that author Rudyard Kipling predicted “shall never meet”) is neither ideological, like the Cold War, nor properly religious (the core of Huntington’s thesis). Not that it doesn’t feature some elements of a religious “crusade.” Both Trump and his “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth have sought to frame the conflict as Christian good versus some other religion’s evil. But so far that has backfired, if only because, according to the traditional value system evoked in the liberal democratic West, we identify as “evil actors” the ones who start the wars. The good actors are those who focus on defending their values. For most Americans, this is Trump’s war. He started it. (Some keener observers see it as Trump’s war for Netanyahu.)

Everyone cites World War II not just as a good war, but an exemplary good war. That is because Germany started the hostilities by invading Poland and then demonstrating its alacrity to invade most of its neighbors. Japan then attacked Pearl Harbor. The villains declared their identity by being the ones who attacked without warning.

In the current war in West Asia, Trump’s and Netanyahu’s attempt to reverse the roles by having the “good guys” attack “bad guys” and restore order might have worked had they achieved the quick regime change they believed feasible. But even a clear knockout punch against Iran’s Supreme Leader on the first day failed to deliver the championship belt to the US–Israeli TagTeam. Instead, the war began to spin out of anyone’s control. It quickly took a shape nobody could predict (apart from various well qualified experts whose opinions are systematically ignored). The fact that in the intervening weeks, no coherent narrative has emerged to justify the start or the pursuit of the war means that the US and Israel increasingly appear to the global public as forces of evil.

In other words, even if Trump actually does go ahead with his promise to demolish an entire civilization, one thing is already clear: US soft power — a major factor in Washington’s dominance of the post-World War II order — has taken a serious and perhaps fatal hit.

Analysts agree that in the near future, the US will continue to possess the most powerful military in the world and that the US dollar, even though weakened, will not be quickly dethroned as the privileged global reserve currency. The army and the dollar are two of the three pillars that have anchored Washington’s geopolitical authority. It’s an authority to which every nation understands it is obliged to bow, whether deeply and consistently (US allies) or superficially and irregularly (everyone else). Everyone respects power. Especially when they can trust it. But what happens when trust disappears?

Has Kant led Western culture astray?

Respect begins with trust. Not absolute trust — the “” to be truthful that philosopher Immanuel Kant built his ethics around — but the kind of confidence or stability of judgment one develops in the perception and interpretation of motivational factors that emerge from any relationship. This is never perfect. It is adaptive.

Kant’s insistence on “categorical imperatives” may have had the effect of poisoning our modern Western culture’s ability to construct and understand rational political relationships. In Kant’s system, everyone should trust that others are acting out of duty to the same moral law that they are. This stands as the required condition for mutual respect to emerge.

In the real world, different cultures construct different readings of the “moral law.” Different languages generate contrasting frameworks for understanding what truthfulness may be. Furthermore, different individuals treat language and value systems in ways that will inevitably undermine Kant’s recommendation of with a “kingdom of ends.”

Trust in the real world is built not on truthfulness, but on predictability and the perception of stability. Morality if defined as a value system should not in itself be “open to interpretation,” but its role in defining and guiding relationships must be flexible. Let’s take a simple example. Chinese culture elevates the notion of “harmony” to the highest level in serious decision-making. However complex the conflict, the instinct to seek a solution that promotes harmony will be the privileged reflex.

This contrasts starkly with US culture. For Americans, the motivation to achieve success in realizing one’s vision trumps the goal of harmony. That is why in the West we have to remind ourselves consciously that “win-win” is the most effective strategy. Without that conscious effort, we are likely to apply zero sum, win-lose logic.

This distinction may help us to understand why the many in the US fail to realize that the nation has lost the golden key of soft power it once possessed, perhaps its greatest achievement in the 20th century and the true foundation of its global influence.

At the start of the 20th century, US President Theodore Roosevelt’s trust-busting thrived on the idea that the companies that had become trusts were obvious winners. They would be allowed to keep winning so long as competitors were allowed to rise by sharing the same market space. Roosevelt airbrushed the vampire’s teeth from the portrait of US capitalism. At mid-century, in the aftermath of World War II, the Marshall Plan demonstrated that even though Europe had made a mess of things, it was now incumbent upon the winners to help them stand up and compete.

This wasn’t just fair play. This was Hollywood-endorsed and quasi-saintly benevolence.

The accelerating decline of US soft power

At the same time, even though many of America’s actions across the globe were aggressive, unjust, violent and even spiteful, the US made a valiant effort to build up goodwill by maintaining at the very least the illusion of commitment to helping the underdog and especially not humiliating losers. The most prosperous nation in the history of humanity successfully entertained the lasting impression that it was willing to share its good fortune with the rest of the world. And what is soft power if not success at creating an impression?

That mentality had begun to shift radically by the start of the 21st century. It was replaced by the vision of a world defined not just by a “clash of civilizations,” but by the need to impose on the rest of the world one type of civilization, and to do so with Kantian categorical absoluteness. Bush’s GWOT installed that attitude in a way that Cold War anti-communism never attempted to do. The Cold War claim was that capitalism is better than communism. The GWOT proclaimed that it had become a battle between good and evil.

Bush’s neo-con friends accelerated the trend that began late in the 20th century based on the newly acquired reflex of US administrations to apply increasingly severe and arbitrary sanctions on nations, organizations and individuals who failed to live up to the so-called liberal democratic, rules-based international order — a new “kingdom of ends” — defined and enforced by Washington.

More than a decade later, US President Joe Biden contradicted his own voters’ expectations when, instead of undoing Trump’s of “maximum pressure” on Iran and returning to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action Trump had withdrawn from, he chose to ride the white stallion of “good” that refuses even to listen to “evil.” On the same grounds, he declined Russia’s insistent invitation to sit down and hammer out an architecture for mutual security in Europe. We should note, on that score, that Biden never considered asking Europeans for their input on that decision. We now know the price of following that particular categorical imperative: a costly four-year-old war that has devastated Europe’s economy.

Trump’s “America First, screw the others (including allies)” and his propensity to arrest or assassinate foreign leaders as well as launch wars while conducting negotiations, have sealed the coffin of US soft power and put paid to any remaining of the US military being a “force for good.”

There’s no going back this time. Biden’s failure to undo Trump’s first round dismantling of US soft power made it clear that the past will not return. Whatever happens in Iran, the Persian Gulf, Ukraine or Taiwan in the coming months and years, a different world order will emerge. Whether you like what you see or not, and whether the new order turns out to be manageable or not, no one can deny it will be multipolar. The king who imposed the previous “kingdom of ends” has met the guillotine.

Some of us believe the emerging order can be manageable, but it will require a concerted effort. We also know that there are others who have an interest in proving it can’t be managed. Will that lead to a new “clash of civilizations?”

One thing is certain: Whatever order emerges, the rules it establishes will be different from anything we inherited from the past.

*[The Devil’s Advocate pursues the tradition 51�Թ� began in 2017 with the launch of our “Devil’s Dictionary.” It does so with a slight change of focus, moving from language itself — political and journalistic rhetoric — to the substantial issues in the news. Read more of the 51�Թ� Devil’s Dictionary. The news we consume deserves to be seen from an outsider’s point of view. And who could be more outside official discourse than Old Nick himself?]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Soft Power, Hard Fall: From Marshall Plan to Wrecking Ball appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Actually, the Egyptian writing system is a fascinating combination of both pictographic and alphabetic writing systems. It is also far easier to read than most people imagine. To really appreciate Ancient Egyptian, we have to understand how the Ancient Egyptians wrote their language. To do that, let’s look at some dirty chain texts first.

A friend of mine recently sent me an emoji-filled holiday chain letter. This is an entire genre of spam texts. In case you haven’t been exposed to these wonderful messages, here are some examples:

Generally, these emoji-filled exhortations are text messages, usually wishing you a happy holiday, promising you sex if you forward it to another person and cursing you with a lack of sex if it isn’t forwarded. These messages are usually littered with ham-fisted sex puns.

Emoji chain texts also happen to be the most perfect modern analogy for the writing system of Ancient Egypt that I’ve ever encountered.

The Rebus Principle: a literary equation

Let’s consider an example. From the first chain text:

Consider the function of the “4” emoji. This is nominally a pictorial representation of the number “four,” using the Arabic numeral system. However, in American English, the pronunciation of “four” coincides with the pronunciation of the preposition “for.” Hence, the pictogram “4” can be used to mean “for.” This is an example of the rebus principle, in which words are represented by pictograms that sound the same. Here’s another of the rebus principle, from the Egypt Exploration Society’s webpage:

A picture of a bee followed by a picture of a leaf would be pronounced “bee-leaf,” a homophone of the word “belief.” Thus, the bee and the leaf symbols, together, represent the totally unrelated concept “belief.”

The Ancient Egyptian writing system is based on the rebus principle. Originally, the “mouth” hieroglyph represented the concept of “mouth,” and was pronounced something like r.

Not long after the invention of Egyptian writing, the mouth glyph was assigned the phonetic value of r. A set of these signs was standardized, creating the hieroglyphic alphabet. Here’s the (Middle) Egyptian alphabet:

These signs are used to spell out the sounds of Egyptian in the same way that the Roman alphabet is used to spell the sounds of English. Mostly. In Egyptian, like a lot of Semitic languages (Hebrew, Arabic, etc.), vowels tend not to be explicitly written out. Only the consonants were written down, along with pseudo-vowels like i, sometimes called a “weak consonant.” This lack of vowels in writing leads to a lot of homophones in Egyptian, words that sound (or at least are written) the same but have different meanings.

Semantic determinatives as seen through Earth emojis

Let’s now consider a second example, from the second chain text:

Here, consider how the emojis following the word augment its meaning. It begins with “Happy Earth Day,” followed by an emoji of a plant and three of the Earth. The compound noun “Earth Day” is composed of two words written in the Roman alphabet. The individual characters (a, p, y, etc.) tell the reader how the words are pronounced. This is the hallmark of an alphabetic system; an individual character d represents the sound of a single consonant, and multiple characters representing distinct sounds, like d a y, are placed in sequence to form a word with lexical meaning, “day.” The characters tell you how the word is pronounced, and collectively form a written representation of both the concept “day” and the sound “day.”

The sound-signs forming the word “Earth Day” are followed by a picture of a plant and three pictures of the planet Earth, indicating that “Earth Day” is a concept associated with living, growing things and the planet Earth. In other words, the pictograms following the alphabetic characters add shades of meaning to the phrase “Earth Day,” clarifying the category of concept to which this word belongs.

This is precisely how Egyptian words are formed. Paraphrasing from James Middle Egyptian Grammar, Egyptian words are commonly spelled out alphabetically, but also followed by an additional sense-sign, called a determinative, that adds context and meaning to the sound-signs.

For example, the word ra is written as:

It consists of two alphabetic signs, the mouth hieroglyph, pronounced r, and the arm hieroglyph a, pronounced something like the Arabic ayin. The word ra is followed by this circular determinative, which indicates the meaning of the word ra.

Can you guess what ra means from the determinative sign? You probably can: ra means “sun,” and the determinative is a picture of the sun. The image of the sun clarifies the meaning of the sound-glyphs r and a.

Disambiguation by means of eggplants and seated gods

Let’s consider a third illustrative example. From the third chain text:

The emojis clarify the meaning of “Hot Dog.” The compound noun “Hot Dog” is followed by a peach and eggplant emoji, commonly used to mean “butt” and “penis” respectively. Here, the eggplant and peach emojis serve an important semantic function — they clarify the ambiguity in the sentence “I Want To Eat Your Hot Dog” by explicitly informing the reader, using the eggplant determinative, that “Hot Dog” is a euphemism for “penis.” Thus, instead of the sentence indicating a desire to eat a delicious, all-beef frankfurter, it indicates a desire to perform oral sex.

Ancient Egyptian uses determinatives in exactly the same way as the chain text uses the peach and the eggplant. Returning to our example of ra, consider these two examples of Egyptian words, both spelled ra:

The first word is followed by the “sun” determinative, and thus refers to the concept of the sun, i.e., the ball of fire in the sky. The second is followed by the seated god determinative, and instead of referring to the sun itself, it refers to the sun god Ra. The determinative serves to clarify which concept, both spelled ra, is being referred to in the text.

The determinative is extremely important to understanding written Egyptian, due to the number of homophones in the written language.

Lesson 4: Illustrative Examples

We also notice that in these emoji chain texts, the short, common words without really concrete meanings (like “is” or “to”) are not followed by emoji determinatives, whereas nouns like “Patriotic Daddies” and “COCKtober” are followed by one or two determinatives indicating their meaning or associations in the context of the sentence. 

Egyptian follows the same pattern. Short, common words, like m, meaning “in” or “with,” are composed of alphabetic signs alone, without determinatives.

However, nouns and verbs usually consist of a series of alphabetic signs that indicate the pronunciation of the word, followed by a semantic determinative that indicates its sense, category, or associations.

Let’s consider the example of the Egyptian verb “beget,” meaning “to bring into existence”:

This word consists of five signs: three sound-signs and two determinatives. The first three signs are the coiled rope, pronounced w, followed by two loaf-of-bread signs, pronounced t. Thus, the word is transliterated as wtt and pronounced something like “wetet.”

The next two signs are determinatives and give the sense of the word. The first determinative is a hieroglyph that’s easily recognizable in any era.

It’s a penis, in case you didn’t notice. The penis glyph’s function in indicating the semantic meaning of “beget” is obvious. This sign is actually used in many Egyptian words, such as:

Yes, the penis hieroglyph can mean “thick” in Ancient Egyptian. I guess the priests who came up with this writing system wanted everyone to know a little something about their assets.

Now, back to “beget.” The second determinative in “beget” is the rolled scroll.

The scroll is often used for abstract concepts. This is because abstract concepts are often not easily represented by pictograms, but can be written down on, for example, a scroll.

Putting it all together, the combination of glyphs rope, bread, bread, penis, scroll produces a verb pronounced something like “wetet,” and meaning “to beget.”

Convergent evolution: Hieroglyphs are still used today

Here’s another fun fact about hieroglyphs. By pure chance, many modern emojis look nearly identical to their ancient counterparts. This has some wonderful examples of convergent glyph evolution, reproduced here for convenience.

And so, the next time one of your friends sends you a message like this:

I hope that you can appreciate it (syntactically, if nothing else) as a modern reinvention of an ancient form of writing.

[ edited this article.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post What Ancient Egyptian and Emoji Chain Texts Have in Common appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The three dates that shape the conflict

Atul begins by identifying three decisive turning points: 1948, 1953 and 1979. In 1948, the UN established the state of Israel. It immediately had to fight the invading Arab states. For Israelis, that moment remains inseparable from the trauma of the Holocaust and the fear that the state could be destroyed at birth. Palestinians remember this moment as the Nakba, the mass displacement that accompanied Israel’s creation. Atul suggests these two memories still shape how the region understands security and injustice.

He then turns to 1953, when Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh faced an overthrow after nationalizing oil. Atul presents the coup as a foundational rupture in modern Iranian political memory. Britain and the US, he argues, removed a nationalist leader and restored a monarchy that ruled through repression. He says that the intervention weakened secular opposition and unintentionally strengthened the clerical networks that later filled the vacuum. By 1979, those clerical forces were organized enough to take power during the Iranian Revolution and build a theocratic state deeply suspicious of both Washington and domestic dissent.

Revolution, paranoia and the proxy strategy

The discussion portrays the Islamic Republic as a regime shaped by insecurity from the start. Atul explains that after the revolution, the new leadership distrusted the regular military and built Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a parallel force. The Iran–Iraq War of 1980–1988 then hardened the regime further, reinforcing a political culture built around sacrifice, siege and martyrdom.

From that position, Iran gradually extended influence through allied armed groups across the region. Hezbollah, Hamas and later the Houthis became central as instruments of an Iranian strategy designed to offset conventional weakness. Atul argues that the regime sought legitimacy by presenting itself as the one power willing to resist both Israel and the US, while many Arab governments moved toward accommodation.

Simultaneously, he makes clear that opposition to Western power did not make the Iranian system admirable. He repeatedly stresses its repression of women, students and dissidents, as well as its economic failures and political brutality.

A decisive moment for Israel and the US

Atul argues that Israel and the US believe Iran is now weaker than it has been in years. From the Israeli perspective, the danger is existential. A small state with limited strategic depth cannot easily tolerate the possibility of a hostile regional power gaining stronger missile and nuclear capabilities. As Atul puts it, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has built his career around the doctrine that “peace through strength is the way forward.” In that framework, confrontation appears necessary.

Atul also highlights Israel’s confidence in its intelligence reach and military effectiveness. Atul describes a country that believes it has penetrated Iran deeply and can strike key personnel and infrastructure with precision. Yet he does not present victory as automatic.

Casey raises the possibility of Iran’s “Balkanization.” Atul explores the idea, noting that some American and Israeli thinkers see advantage in a looser, weaker or fragmented Iran. But he also warns that this could produce unintended consequences, including nationalist backlash, prolonged instability and deeper hostility toward outside powers.

Uncertainty inside Iran

Iranian society is fractured and complex. Atul notes widespread discontent with the regime, especially among younger and educated Iranians. Protest movements, secular aspirations and anger at repression all suggest that the Islamic Republic has lost legitimacy among many citizens. Yet he cautions against assuming that foreign bombing will automatically translate into regime collapse.

External attack can strengthen nationalism even where a government is unpopular. Atul remarks that “nationalism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” but he also considers it a real political force. The killing of senior leaders, especially the Ayatollah, may not weaken the regime in the way outsiders expect. Martyrdom carries powerful weight in Shia political culture, and the failing oppressive late ruler has now become a symbol of resistance after being killed by a foreign enemy.

Kaitlyn and others push the conversation toward possible futures, including a democratic Iran. Atul sees some hope there, especially in a decentralized federal model that protects minorities and devolves power. But he also emphasizes that opposition groups remain divided among monarchists, republicans, federalists and competing ethnic movements. That makes any clean transition unlikely.

The war’s economic danger

When Zania asks about stagflation, Atul shifts from battlefield dynamics to global markets. He warns that a prolonged conflict could disrupt shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, drive up energy prices and trigger a supply shock across the world economy. Oil above $90 per barrel is not just a regional problem; it hits transport, industry, fertilizers, food production and financial confidence all at once.

The risk is not merely higher inflation but the toxic combination of inflation and stagnation that defined the 1970s oil shocks. The Gulf’s importance extends beyond crude exports. Capital from Arab states is deeply embedded in global finance, technology, property and sport. If war erodes confidence, both trade and investment could suffer.

This discussion ends with a broader warning: This is not only a Middle Eastern war. It may become a global economic and geopolitical turning point whose consequences reach far beyond the region.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article/video are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post FO Live: How the US–Israel War in Iran Could Redraw Middle East Borders appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Upon seeing this message, most English speakers will wonder what the hell Sunil and I are talking about.

It has to do with a book he’s reading, called Alex’s Adventures in Numberland: Dispatches from the Wonderful World of Mathematics. Chapter one covers counting systems used in various societies — the Arara in the Amazon count in pairs, the Revolutionary French tried to make clocks count by tens and the Babylonians counted in base 60. But the most interesting counting system, to me, was the one used by shepherds in Lincolnshire, England, to count sheep.

1. Yan
2. Tan
3. Tethera
4. Pethera
5. Pimp
6. Sethera
7. Lethera
8. Hovera
9. Covera
10. Dik
11. Yan-a-dik
12. Tan-a-dik
13. Tethera-dik
14. Pethera-dik
15. Bumfit
16. Yan-a-bumfit
17. Tan-a-bumfit
18. Tethera-bumfit
19. Pethera-bumfit
20. Figgit

So when Sunil told me that covera pimp dik bumfit and bumfit pimp dik was 69, all he really said was that 9 + 5 + 10 + 15 + 15 + 5 + 10 = 69, which is true.

I find this counting system fascinating, and not just because counting pimp, dik, bumfit, figgit is hilarious and fun.

First of all, you’ll notice that this system is a hybrid base-five, base-twenty counting system. You have unique words up to ten, then compound words (Tan-a-dik = Tan + dik = 12) up to 15 (bumfit), then some more compounds with bumfit up to figgit (20).

Secondly, this counting system felt weirdly familiar to me. Yan and one, tan and two, tethera and three, pethera and four. What about dik? Well, this is clearly similar to dec, the Latin root for ten (French is dix, Spanish is diez, Italian is dieci). Even figgit looked familiar — the Latin ��ī�����Գ�ī, meaning 20, sounds a lot like figgit. My first thought was that this system is some kind of corrupted Latin, mixed with whatever Celtic language existed in Lincolnshire before the Roman conquest.

I wasn’t right about this, but I was close.

Consonant shifts and Proto-Indo-European

Why does pethera, which begins with a “p,” sound familiar to four, anyway?

Consonant shift! Linguists have discovered regular patterns of consonant shift that occur as languages evolve. The most famous of these sound shifts are the shifts that transform into its daughter languages (Latin, English, Sanskrit, Persian, etc.).

states that the Proto-Indo-European consonants underwent predictable, regular evolution as they evolved into Proto-Germanic and Germanic daughter languages.

For example, the Proto-Indo-European word for “brother,” ��ʰ��é��₂tŧ�� (something like “breh-ter”) evolved into the Proto-Germanic ����ōþŧ�� (“b����-�ٳ���”), and eventually into the Old English ������þ�ǰ� (“b����-�ٳ�ǰ�”).

By the way, that funny letter þ is called , which is an Old English letter pronounced “th.” If you had to read in high school English class, you might remember seeing þ all over the place.

“Father” is another good example of regular consonant shifts. Proto-Indo-European *���₂tḗr (“peh-ter”) evolved into Proto-Germanic *�ڲ���ŧ��, and eventually Old English ��æ����.

So “p” and “f” are linguistically very similar, especially in a Germanic language like English. Pethera and four could easily be derived from a common Indo-European ancestor.

The idea is similar to ��ī�����Գ�ī (Latin) and figgit (Lincolnshire shepherd’s dialect). The “f” and the “v” are very similar sounds, followed by the “g” and “t” sounds. Try pronouncing “vigint” ten times fast and see if it morphs a little into “figgit.”

It was at this point, while googling consonantal shifts, that I found this video from Numberphile, with one of the least searchable titles I’ve ever seen. From Numberphile, I present the gloriously titled :

In the video, Professor Roger Bowley says that the yan-tan-tethera number system is Celtic and predates the Roman conquest of Britain. So my theory of corrupted Latin is wrong — actually, both Latin and this obscure Celtic dialect have a common ancestor in Proto-Indo-European!

This explanation of the yan-tan-tethera origin fits much better than mine does. Wikipedia has a whole list of different variations on the yan-tan-tethera for various English regions.

Apparently, this weird-ass counting system is actually a very old counting system that probably predates the Roman conquest of Britain, and it’s linguistically related to all the other Indo-European languages! Some of the words are even the same!

But wait, what about bumfit?

Consider the bumfit, and make sure it’s hovera covered

Bumfit is a hilarious word. However, I don’t think “bumfit” sounds like “fifteen” at all. Nor does “hovera, covera” sound like “eight, nine” in any way. But if all the numbers in the yan-tan-tethera counting system are derived from Proto-Indo-European, how did eight and nine (*��₽�ḱt���₃ and *��₁né�ܲ� in Proto-Indo-European) become hovera, covera?

The explanation from the same says that bumfit and the rest are Proto-Celtic numerals that died out in modern English. The Welsh numerals do have something in common with the yan-tan-tethera system:

The Welsh pymtheg is … sorta similar to bumfit, I guess? And the Welsh pump, deg, pymtheg, ugain is at least partially recognizable as pimp, dik, bumfit, figgit.

The Ancient British word for twenty, �ɾ��첹�Գ�ī, is essentially identical to the Latin ��ī�����Գ�ī (remember, in classical Latin, “v” is pronounced “w”), so I guess the Wikipedia page’s claim that multiples of five are highly conserved checks out.

But this hypothesis seems somewhat lacking to me. Where do you get hovera (8) and covera (9) from? The Welsh versions are wyth and naw, and the Ancient British versions are oxtu and nawan. That’s not even close.

Counting Rhymes

Another friend of mine, Jill, mentioned to me that she had just finished reading The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone, and the book had mentioned that the children’s nursery “Hickory Dickory Dock, the mouse ran up the clock” was originally a .

Short, common words, learned early in life, tend to be the most constant throughout language evolution (“mama,” “father,” “brother,” etc.). In the same way, counting rhymes, taught to children at a young age, are highly conserved linguistically.

This led me to the fantastic “The Secret History of ‘Eeny Meeny Miny Mo,’” by Adrienne Raphel, on the origin and history of counting rhymes. Seriously, give this article a read; it’s fascinating.

I would venture a guess that pretty much every English-speaking schoolchild knows some version of the rhyme:

Eeny, meeny, miny, mo
Catch a tiger by the toe
If he hollers, let him go
Eeny meeny miny mo

This rhyme has a darker history than I knew. According to Adrienne Raphel:

In the canonical Eeny Meeny, “tiger” is standard in the second line, but this is a relatively recent revision. If it doesn’t seem to make sense, even in the gibberish Eeny Meeny world, that you’d grab a carnivorous cat’s toe and expect the tiger to do the hollering, remember that in both England and America, children until recently said “Catch a nigger by the toe.”

Didn’t know that one. Yikes. But it seems that this is a fairly recent revision of a much more ubiquitous class of counting rhymes. In Denmark:

Ene, mene, ming, mang,
Kling klang,
Osse bosse bakke disse,
Eje, veje, vaek.

And in Zimbabwe:

Eena, meena, ming, mong,
Ting, tay, tong,
Ooza, vooza, voka, tooza,
Vis, vos, vay.

However, while reading this article, one particular rhyme caught my eye.

In 1830, children in Scotland chanted:

Zinti, tinti,
Tethera, methera,
Bumfa, litera,
Hover, dover,
Dicket, dicket,
As I sat on my sooty kin
I saw the king of Irel pirel
Playing upon Jerusalem pipes.

In that rhyme, found in Scotland, we see “tethera, methera, bumfa, hover, dover, dicket,” all recognizable yan-tan-tethera numbers. Raphel goes on to connect this counting rhyme to the same yan-tan-tethera counting system we’ve been discussing, which she gives as:

Yan, tan, tethera, methera, pimp,
Sethera, lethera, hothera, dovera, dick,
Yan-dick, tan-dick, tether-dick, mether-dick, bumfit,
Yan-a-bumfit, tan-a-bumfit, tethera bumfit, pethera bumfit, gigert.

Now I see what’s going on. The yan-tan-tethera counting system is much more than simply a linguistic evolution of the ancient Proto-Indo-European numbers; it’s a counting rhyme! Likely, it is designed to be a memory aid for a nonliterate population that needs to count things.

Some of the numbers are the same as ours — multiples of five, especially, are conserved from their Proto-Indo-European roots, but the system as a whole is meant to roll off the tongue as a rhyme, as unforgettable as “eeny meeny miny mo.” In fact, the children’s nursery rhyme “Hickory Dickory Dock” probably has its in this ancient Celtic counting rhyme, via the numbers “hothera dovera dick.”

The reason the yan-tan-tethera numbers are so fun to say out loud is the same reason that epic poetry is written in rhyming meter — repetitive, rhyming lines are very easy to memorize, which is enormously important for primarily oral cultures.

This really blew my mind.

It turns out that the yan-tan-tethera counting system really was familiar to me, and probably you too — every schoolkid in America already knows it as “Hickory Dickory Dock,” though its origins as a Proto-Celtic counting system are long forgotten.

[Dylan Black first published this piece on .]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post A Brief History of Dik: Indo-European Linguistics and Counting Rhymes, or, Dik + Pimp = Bumfit appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Origins and ideological foundations

Singh begins by explaining the Muslim Brotherhood’s historic context. Founded in 1928 by Egyptian schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna, the organization emerged during an era of imperial competition and political upheaval across the Middle East. Farahat argues that its roots extend further back, linking its formation to late 19th-century geopolitical strategies that sought to mobilize religious identity for political ends. She cites a German memorandum from 1882 that declared, “We will unleash Muslim fanaticism that borders on insanity.”

For Farahat, the Brotherhood is not simply a reformist or revivalist movement but a synthesis of ideological, political and militant strands aimed at establishing an Islamic caliphate. Singh introduces the conventional distinction between al-Banna’s gradualism and later radical thinkers such as Sayyid Qutb, often seen as the intellectual architect of modern Islamist militancy. Farahat rejects this divide, arguing that Qutb did not transform the Brotherhood’s ideology but rather systematized it. In her view, the movement’s foundational texts already contain the elements later associated with militancy.

Structure, strategy and global expansion

Singh and Farahat then turn to how the Brotherhood organized itself and expanded beyond Egypt. Farahat emphasizes the creation of the “Secret Apparatus,” an early paramilitary wing that she describes as central to the movement’s structure. She portrays the organization as combining hierarchical discipline with ideological cohesion, enabling it to operate across national boundaries.

Singh probes the extent to which the Brotherhood influenced or intersected with other Islamist movements. Farahat argues that many modern Sunni militant groups emerged from or were shaped by Brotherhood networks, pointing to historical overlaps in membership and ideology. This claim remains contested in broader scholarship, however.

Farahat also highlights the role of thinkers such as Syed Abul A’la Maududi, the South Asian Islamist intellectual who reframed Islamic political concepts in modern terms. She suggests that Maududi’s reinterpretation of governance and sovereignty helped make Islamist ideas more accessible, providing a vocabulary that later figures, including Qutb, could build upon.

Power, governance and the Morsi moment

Singh shifts the focus to the Brotherhood’s brief period in power following Egypt’s 2011 uprising. Former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi’s administration marked the first time the movement governed through electoral legitimacy. Singh raises the key question: Was this an opportunity for the Brotherhood to evolve into a democratic political actor, or did it reveal deeper ideological constraints?

Farahat argues that the movement’s time in power exposed its underlying agenda. She dismisses its use of democratic language as tactical, describing it as “putting lipstick on a pig.” She feels the Brotherhood functions most effectively when operating outside formal power structures, where it can balance political participation with ideological mobilization.

Singh counters by noting structural constraints, including tensions with Egypt’s military, judiciary and entrenched state institutions. Did the Brotherhood fail because of its own ideological rigidity? Or because it could not successfully navigate Egypt’s political system?

International networks and contested narratives

The final part of the discussion explores the Brotherhood’s international presence. Singh raises reports of internal divisions, such as the alleged split between London- and Istanbul-based factions. Farahat dismisses these as largely superficial, arguing that the organization maintains centralized ideological control despite operating across different regions.

She also identifies countries such as Qatar and Turkey as key hubs, while noting that Western states have at times provided space for Brotherhood-linked networks to operate. Singh situates this within a broader geopolitical context, where states balance security concerns with strategic interests.

While the Brotherhood has, in some contexts, presented itself as a nonviolent political actor, Farahat insists that such claims are inconsistent with its internal discourse and historical trajectory. Her argument reflects one side of a deeply polarized debate about political Islam and the boundaries between activism, governance and militancy.

An unresolved legacy

Singh and Farahat close by reflecting on the Brotherhood’s future. For Singh, the key issue is whether movements rooted in ideological certainty can adapt to pluralistic political systems. Farahat remains skeptical; meaningful transformation, she says, is unlikely without fundamental change.

Nearly a century after its founding, the Muslim Brotherhood continues to shape political debates across the Middle East, not only as an organization but as an idea that remains contested, influential and unresolved.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article/podcast are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post FO Podcasts: The Muslim Brotherhood Explained — Origins, Ideology and Global Influence appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Socrates challenged (and seriously annoyed) the Sophists — the professional educators of his time — not through his own formal analysis but by doggedly developing his spirit of dialogue, compelling his interlocutors to examine and defend their ideas. His disciple, Plato, assumed the task of transcribing what he could remember from those dialogues and used the pretext to elaborate his own original ideas. He thereby established a literary tradition that continues to resonate across nearly two and a half millennia of Western philosophy.

Plato took a further step when he sought to perpetuate and enrich the Socratic tradition by founding his institution of learning, the Academy. Instead of simply formalizing and dictating to the Athenian youth his master’s wisdom, he continued to encourage Socrates’ methodology of dialectic. Plato’s star disciple, Aristotle, went on to imitate his master by creating his own school, the Lyceum. He became known as “the peripatetic,” a term associated with the Lyceum’s covered walkways. Later tradition connected this architectural feature with Aristotle’s practice of walking around the grounds with his students while teaching.

What has become of this tradition of dialogue? After several centuries of students attending lectures in university amphitheaters and more recently being invited to participate in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) in which lectures are recorded and the learning may take place thousands of kilometers away, we find ourselves musing over two questions: “Have we lost our way?” And “Can we or should we seek to find our way back?”

I had already initiated a fascinating dialogue with Claude concerning the role of Shakespearean soliloquy. I see it not only as a literary device but as a potential reflection of how ordinary people dialogue with themselves using their inner voice. Having already developed this discussion I offered a new prompt in which I shared the thoughts expressed above about the origins of Western philosophy, concluding with my questions about the prospect of reintroducing dialogue in our educational strategies. Claude predictably provided a lengthy and thoroughly reflective response.

Here is the first part of Claude’s response:

Your questions deserve a direct answer: Yes, we have likely lost something essential, and yes, we should seek to recover it—but not by going backward. The way forward requires recognizing what those ancient practices were actually doing and reimagining how to achieve those ends with the capabilities we now have.

What Was Lost

The progression you trace—from Socratic street corners to Plato’s Academy to Aristotle’s walkways to amphitheater lectures to MOOCs—represents an increasing separation between knowledge transmission and the cultivation of thinking itself. Each step gained something (scale, systematization, accessibility) but lost intimacy with the process of thought-formation.

What made the Socratic tradition powerful wasn’t the physical walking or even the face-to-face interaction per se. It was that the dialogue forced both participants to externalize their reasoning process—to make visible the movement of thought, the testing of premises, the recognition of contradictions, the reformulation of ideas. The interlocutor couldn’t hide behind memorized conclusions; they had to show their cognitive work.

The lecture format—whether in an amphitheater or a MOOC—typically transmits products of thought rather than modeling the process. Students receive polished arguments, organized knowledge, refined conclusions. They rarely witness the messiness of genuine intellectual struggle, the false starts, the productive confusion that precedes clarity.

So far, so good. This perfectly reflected the point we had been discussing in an earlier phase of our exchange concerning the function of the inner voice we all possess, a voice at least theoretically capable of producing something similar to one of Hamlet’s soliloquies from the play of the same name. Claude then addressed my second question about moving forward:

What “Finding Our Way Back” Cannot Mean

We can’t simply return to small-group peripatetic dialogue as the primary mode of education. The scale is impossible, and more importantly, that method had its own limitations:

• It was often agonistic and exclusionary
  
• It privileged quick verbal facility over deep reflection
  
• It was restricted to an elite few
  
• It had no mechanism for accumulating and transmitting complex technical knowledge

The Socratic method could expose false certainty but couldn’t efficiently teach calculus, molecular biology, or constitutional law.

On this point I felt Claude may have misunderstood my intent. I hadn’t meant to express uncritical admiration of Socrates. I have always found the character of Socrates as he appears in Plato’s dialogue to have an irritating, dogmatic streak, even becoming something of an intellectual bully. But Claude seems to me a bit presumptuous to criticize the Socratic method for failing to teach calculus, molecular biology and constitutional law. This isn’t about the content of learning but the attitude of critical thinking that must precede it: to wit, openness to questioning established assumptions.

Claude helpfully continued by focusing on the core issue: how our understanding of the past may contribute to building a better future for education in the age of AI.

What Recovery Might Actually Mean

Here’s where your intuition about AI becomes crucial. The question isn’t “how do we get back to in-person dialogue?” but rather “how do we create conditions where students develop sophisticated internal dialogue—the soliloquy skills we discussed—that enable them to think well independently?”

Consider what AI dialogue makes possible that neither lectures nor traditional Socratic seminars could provide:

Unlimited externalization practice: Students can engage in extended dialogues where they must articulate their reasoning, not once in a seminar but repeatedly, in different contexts, until sophisticated self-explanation becomes habitual. The AI can play Socrates without the time constraints or social anxieties of classroom performance.

Visible thinking scaffolded: AI can model its own reasoning process explicitly (“Let me think through this step by step…”), demonstrating the kind of metacognitive self-talk that students need to internalize. It can also prompt students to externalize their thinking process, then reflect it back to them in refined form.

Personalized dialectic: Unlike a lecture (one-to-many) or even a seminar (still constrained by time and group dynamics), AI dialogue can adapt to exactly where each student’s understanding falters, pursuing the questions that a particular student needs to confront.

Development of internal interlocutors: Through repeated dialogue with a thoughtful AI, students can internalize not just information but ways of questioning, different perspectives and voices that enrich their private speech. This is the modern equivalent of internalizing the voices from Plato’s Academy—but potentially more diverse and less socially constrained.

The Radical Rethinking Required

Your question implies that education needs fundamental reconception, and I agree. Here’s what that might involve:

From content delivery to cognition cultivation: The primary goal becomes developing students’ capacity for sophisticated self-directed thought—their “soliloquy skills”—rather than transferring information (which is now abundantly available).

Dialogue as practice ground for internal dialogue: External conversations with AI serve as training for the internal conversations students will have with themselves when facing problems, making decisions, or grappling with complexity.

Explicit teaching of thinking processes: Rather than hiding the work of thought behind polished presentations, education would make visible the full range of cognitive moves—questioning assumptions, considering alternatives, recognizing patterns, tolerating ambiguity, reformulating problems.

Assessment of reasoning quality, not just conclusions: Can students explain their thinking? Do they spontaneously question their premises? Can they take multiple perspectives? Have they developed rich metacognitive habits?

Claude continued by referring to an earlier phase of our conversation focused on Hamlet’s soliloquies, which I have not reproduced here.

Are We All Hamlets?

Your earlier question deserves answering: We all could be Hamlets—using language not just to communicate but to transform our understanding and refine our agency. Some people develop this capacity richly; others barely at all. Education has largely left this to chance.

Hamlet’s soliloquies aren’t just emotional expression; they’re cognitive work. He’s using language to examine his situation from multiple angles, test different interpretations, imagine consequences, grapple with contradictions. This is precisely the kind of sophisticated private speech that the research shows improves self-regulation, planning, and problem-solving.

The tragedy of current education is that we rarely teach students that this is what language is for at its highest level—not primarily for impressing others or passing tests, but for deepening one’s own thought.

The Answer to Your Questions

Have we lost our way? Yes, insofar as we’ve focused on transmitting conclusions rather than cultivating thinking.

Should we find our way back? Not back, but through—using new tools to recover old purposes. The AI era makes it possible to provide something like the Socratic dialectic at scale while adding capabilities (patience, availability, diverse perspectives, explicit metacognitive modeling) that the historical Academy lacked.

The question is whether we have the imagination and will to redesign education around this goal, or whether we’ll use AI merely to deliver lectures more efficiently—which would be missing the point entirely.

You’re right that education has largely overlooked this. While metacognitive talk involves talking through what you are thinking while you carry out a taskHigh Speed , most educational systems don’t explicitly teach students to develop richer, more strategic forms of self-dialogue. The focus has been on having students use inner speech for specific tasks rather than developing the quality of that inner speech itself.

Your Hamlet question gets at something profound: education tends to treat language as primarily a tool for external communication and information acquisition, rather than as a medium for reshaping one’s own consciousness and agency. The research suggests that people who develop more sophisticated inner dialogue do indeed use language to change their perception of the world and their role in it—this is precisely what planful private speech enables.

The case for taking soliloquy seriously in education is strong, but underdeveloped. The question isn’t whether these skills exist or matter—they clearly do—but whether we can deliberately cultivate them, and whether doing so in an AI-enhanced educational environment opens new possibilities that weren’t available when education was designed.

That final paragraph sums up the challenge we are determined to meet. By “we,” I’m referring in the first instance to my ongoing dialogue with Claude. This is not the end of our discussion.

But the “we” that is truly concerned should be understood in a much broader sense. This is a profoundly human challenge, a social and political challenge. It concerns all of us. The ultimate stakes should be framed in terms of social well-being, ethical governance and democracy. The AI component must be present. 

Claude has described AI’s possible role in stimulating the Socratic dialectic. But the full dialogue stretches beyond individuals such as myself to the whole of society. The resulting dialogue will be guided by multiple participants and only assisted by AI. The dialogue will necessarily include educators and administrators, public servants and the media. My reproduction in this column of this initial phase of a personal dialogue with Claude should be seen as a possible spark that may one day turn into a blaze.

The notion of soliloquy Shakespeare and other playwrights have bequeathed to us remains a purely human phenomenon. AI may be capable of composing interesting soliloquies by imitating known literary norms. But it cannot produce a meaningful soliloquy of its own. The different chatbots I’ve conversed with consistently admit that “reshaping one’s own consciousness and agency” (Claude’s description) is a function no algorithm can define and execute.

As Claude says, “education has largely overlooked” soliloquy. The chatbot reminds us that “people who develop more sophisticated inner dialogue do indeed use language to change their perception of the world and their role in it.” Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba Group Holding, that teachers must learn “to focus on nurturing curiosity and creativity in the artificial intelligence era.” Many great Western educators have said the same thing in the past, but our educational establishments, with rare exceptions, have failed to implement their ideas at scale. Perhaps fostering the skill of soliloquy is the place to start.

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue.

[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At 51�Թ�, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post To Soliloquize or Not To Soliloquize? That Is Education’s Question appeared first on 51�Թ�.

It is against this backdrop that recent remarks by Moldova’s President Maia Sandu on briefly reignited discussions of reunification with Romania. While this normally would mean political suicide, at least if you are not representing rather fringe parties, the fact that Sandu is�� for reelection��may have played a role in her willingness to speak more freely.

Yet external threats shape her perspective, which holds that developments around Moldova and globally must be taken into account, and that it is increasingly difficult for small countries to survive as democracies and remain sovereign, with the Russian Federation as the principal threat.

This is where context becomes crucial. The Kremlin has unsettled every security assumption between the Baltic and Black Seas.��, wedged between Ukraine and Romania, finds itself in an especially precarious position. These geopolitical shifts have elevated debates that were previously confined to expert circles. Former fringe concepts now register as remote safeguards amid the looming danger of a stalled integration.��

Shared history

Moldova-Romania ties trace to medieval principalities, later unified to the Kingdom of Romania in 1881, with the exception of Bessarabia, as the region between the Dniester and the Prut was called then, which was annexed by the Russian Empire in 1812. Following the empire’s collapse in 1917, Moldova’s first parliament, the , proclaimed independence and, faced with Bolshevik incursions as well as internal instability, requested Romanian military support in January 1918. The subsequent in April to join a union with Romania was therefore less an expression of national sentiment than a response to an immediate security vacuum. The arrangement endured until the Soviet reannexation via the .

Many Moldovans possess multiple citizenships, including Romanian passports which are relatively straightforward to obtain due to liberal naturalization policies for those with ancestral ties to pre-1940 Romania. Around����already have Romanian citizenship, yet this dual status has not translated into majority support for reunification. ��consistently show that support for unification in Moldova fluctuates and remains below a stable majority, with����reunification according to August 2025 polling. Romanian discourse juxtaposes cultural affinity against prospective economic, political and security burdens. What has changed is not the basic likelihood of reunification, but the political acceptability of discussing it openly.

EU integration as the primary path

For Moldova, the primary strategic project remains EU integration as a sovereign state. Candidate status and the opening of��accession negotiations��anchor the country’s political class and civil society in a long-term framework that promises institutional reform, economic modernization and a firmer place in the European legal and security space. Sandu herself����that most Moldovans do not share her personal support for reunification, stating that EU integration is a “more realistic objective.”

Reunification with Romania is not a substitute for this trajectory. It is framed as a backup option in case that path becomes blocked beyond repair — by Russian pressure, internal destabilization or a breakdown of Western political will. 

The security logic behind this contingency thinking is straightforward. If Moldova were to unite with Romania, its territory would, at least in principle, become part of a��NATO ��and thus fall under NATO’s collective defense umbrella. At a time when Russia has demonstrated a willingness to use force and coercion against its neighbors, the promise of collective defense has obvious appeal. But this line of reasoning quickly runs into hard legal and political realities.

The Transnistria complication

The first hard reality is��Transnistria, the breakaway region on the left bank of the Dniester River, where a��small Russian ��and a frozen conflict have persisted since the early 1990s. NATO has traditionally����importing unresolved territorial disputes into the Alliance. Any attempt to extend collective defense automatically to territory that includes a Russian military footprint would force allies to confront the question of whether they are willing to underwrite, with their own security guarantees, a conflict they did not create and do not control. In practice, a reunification scenario would almost certainly require some form of legal or territorial clarification that excludes Transnistria from the area covered by collective defense, at least initially. Otherwise, the very thing that makes unification attractive from a security perspective could end up blocking it.

The second constraint lies not in eastern Moldova, but in Western capitals. Even before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, debates on burden-sharing and diverging threat perceptions had revealed tensions within NATO. Recent crises have deepened doubts about the long-term reliability of US security commitments, not only through rhetoric but via concrete standoffs — such as the recent����caused by US President Donald Trump’s annexation threats — that forced Europeans to confront how vulnerable the Alliance can be to domestic political swings in Washington. Collective defense remains the cornerstone of European security, but its credibility is no longer treated as an unshakeable constant.

Why Article 42(7) matters more

This is why, in discussions about Moldova’s long-term security, the EU’s mutual assistance clause —����of the Treaty on European Union — has become more salient. On paper, its language is more categorical than NATO’s Article 5, obliging EU member states to provide “aid and assistance by all means in their power” if one of them is the victim of armed aggression.

Unlike NATO, this obligation extends to EU member states that are militarily neutral or nonaligned, such as Austria, Ireland or Cyprus. A Moldova–Romania union would therefore not only tie Moldova’s fate to NATO; it would insert Moldovan territory directly into the EU’s legal and political framework for mutual defense.

Why this is not German reunification

The inevitable comparison is with��German reunification��in 1990, but the differences are more instructive than the similarities. German reunification took place at the end of the Cold War in a permissive international environment, underpinned by the comprehensive�� with all major powers and by clearly defined borders once the relevant treaties were signed. There were no unresolved territorial conflicts on German soil, Soviet troops withdrew under negotiated terms and popular support for unification was overwhelming and clearly expressed through the��March 1990 , which functioned as a de facto referendum on unification.

Moldova faces none of these conditions: Russia is an active spoiler, not a cooperative partner; Transnistria remains unresolved; and public opinion on unification is deeply divided. German reunification succeeded because international law, great power consensus, popular will and territorial clarity aligned. In Moldova’s case, all four are absent or contested. The comparison serves less as a roadmap and more as a reminder of how rare and contingent successful peaceful unification actually is.

Internal obstacles remain

Even so, reunification would not magically erase Moldova’s internal and regional complexities. Transnistria is only one of several pressure points.��, an autonomous region in southern Moldova with a predominantly Turkic and Orthodox Christian population, has consistently exhibited stronger pro-Russian political and media orientations than the rest of the country. In a��, which has no constitutional or international legal standing, Gagauz voters overwhelmingly backed closer ties with the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union and signaled that, in the event of Moldovan unification with Romania, they would prefer a different geopolitical alignment and become independent.

For Moscow, both Transnistria and Gagauzia are less about direct annexation than about political leverage: tools to fragment public debate inside Moldova, complicate decision-making and constantly threaten to turn any major strategic choice into an internal legitimacy crisis.

The identity question

The domestic dimension matters at least as much as the geopolitical one. Unification is not only a foreign policy decision; it is an identity project. Many Moldovans hold overlapping or ambivalent identities — Moldovan, Romanian, European, post-Soviet — shaped by family histories, language, education and media consumption. A rushed or elite-driven unification process that disregards this diversity would risk destabilizing the very democracy it aims to protect. Conversely, an honest, pluralistic debate about unification can serve as a barometer for how Moldovan society understands its past and imagines its future.

From a Romanian perspective, the calculus is equally complex. Reunification would entail extending social, infrastructural and security commitments to a significantly poorer neighbor with unresolved territorial issues and a volatile security environment next door. While parts of Romanian society and sections of the political class are emotionally and historically invested in the idea of a “second union”, governing elites must weigh this against fiscal reality, EU-level politics and the risk of becoming a front-line state in an even more direct way than today.

Europe’s test case

Seen from Brussels, Berlin or Paris, Moldova’s potential reunification with Romania is less a question of historic justice and more a test case for the flexibility and resilience of the European order. If the EU and NATO are unable to provide small, vulnerable democracies with credible paths to security and prosperity, alternative scenarios — however risky or imperfect — gain salience. The unification debate is therefore as much a mirror of European uncertainties as it is a reflection of Moldovan and Romanian aspirations.

For now, Moldova’s most realistic and most democratic path remains the one it is already on: gradual��EU accession��as a sovereign state, combined with efforts to strengthen resilience, reform institutions and reduce vulnerabilities to Russian coercion. Reunification with Romania is unlikely in the near term, but Sandu’s podcast remark has moved it from the realm of the unthinkable to the realm of the discussable. That shift, in itself, is politically significant. It signals that in an era of war and systemic competition, even long-settled questions of borders and statehood in Europe are being quietly reopened — not by nationalist dreamers, but by those looking for ways to keep fragile democracies alive.

[David Smith first published a similar piece in .]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Between Putin and Brussels: Moldova Weighs the Unthinkable appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The authors of works acknowledged as belonging to the canon were thus metaphorically canonized. No one expected these fundamentally secular writers and thinkers to exhibit any form of manifest saintly behavior in their personal lives. Nevertheless, their commitment to reasoning and an analysis of the “European soul,” their quest for some form of moral understanding of human relations and analysis of the rules and customs of civilized society gave them a legitimacy most other public figures could only envy. Their status as “spiritual” contributors to the construction of the general population’s worldview positioned them only a notch or two below Scripture itself. Most people believed that such authors lived and reasoned on a higher plane than they could ever attempt to do themselves.

The late 20th century marked a turning point in the West’s perception of its own status as a civilization and the moral value of its writers. Modernism in literature and painting in the first half of the century, accompanying and reflecting the trauma of two incomprehensible world wars initiated by nations that had acquired the most prestigious literary and artistic credentials, set the stage for the marginalization of the canon and everything associated with it. The modernist movement broke down the accepted patterns and models, distorting inherited perspectives (literally, in the case of painting). It called into question almost all the background assumptions that reassured educated Westerners that the assumptions about human behavior regulating their society were fundamentally virtuous.

In the second half of the 20th century, postmodernism ever more radically and analytically “deconstructed” even the traces of those assumptions. Other forces were at work, notably industrial and commercial ones, as the post-World War II West morphed into a civilization of consumption.

Despite the growing challenge to traditional literary and “civilizational” values, in the second half of the 20th century, figures like F.R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling, and Harold Bloom treated the canon as relatively settled: Homer, Plato, Plutarch, Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and so on. To be educated meant knowing these works. The canon served as cultural currency among elites and shaped what “literary” meant.

In 2026, not many people refer to or think about “the canon.” Literature itself has become superseded by and largely assimilated into the general area of “entertainment.” Since the advent of modernism, European literature in the 20th and 21st centuries toned down its ambition compared to the 19th century and the centuries that preceded it. Whether we’re considering writers deemed literary giants such as Marcel Proust, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Robert Musil, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka and Rainer Maria Rilke, their production has left few lasting effects on the general culture. It has not seriously impacted society’s worldview.

Understanding Europe’s current existential crisis

In Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum this week, Europeans have been putting on display the confusion and angst provoked by a history of slow cultural decomposition that has suddenly been brought explosively to the fore by what they increasingly see as the betrayal of their spiritual (but especially economic) heir, the United States newly incarnated for a second time by President Donald Trump. Europe is living its “E tu Brute” moment.

Europe spent centuries building competing empires. Then, with their economies in shambles at the end of World War II, they had no choice but to bequeath the aggregate of their global overseas possessions to the young transatlantic republic that had escaped the war not just unscathed but strengthened by its dominant industrial power. Soon after, the age of European colonies gave way to a new neocolonial world order, in which it wasn’t so much the American nation as the American dollar that gave the orders and called the shots.

A decade before the end of the millennium, history was shaken anew by the collapse of the Soviet Union. The 21st century saw the somewhat surprising but historically logical beginning of a self-induced decline of the now uncontested leader, the US. Its economy and worldview, built on the precarious foundation of military-industrial complex, depended on the perception of existential threat: communist during the Cold War, Islamic terrorist under George W. Bush and inchoately multipolar from 2014 onwards. The US was losing its bearings. Europe tried uncomfortably to adapt and  began dislocating. 2016 saw the ambiguous triumph of Brexit in June and Trump in November, signaling changes and legitimizing a populist worldview neither the established leadership nor the legacy media was capable of making sense of.

Where are today’s literary and philosophical saints, writers capable of reviving and complementing the canon and leaving indelible traces in Western culture? The greats of the 20th century listed above (Proust, Joyce, Eliot, etc.) left no lasting heritage of ideas, concepts and memes. They decomposed ideas and associations instead of composing them. The ultimate irony is that if we look for metaphors to help us understand our own contemporary social and political drama, we must return to writers popular in or around the 19th century.

Four of those writers come to mind: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mary Shelley, Hans Christian Andersen and Alfred Jarry. Let’s remind ourselves of their contribution to understanding our Western civilization of the 21st century and look at the insight they provide.

From Goethe to Jarry and on to Davos 2026

Goethe published his poem, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” three years before the beginning of the 19th century and his monumental Faust, Part Two in 1832. The simple narrative of the early poem prefigures the history of the West’s culture of technological development over the past two centuries. The apprentice learns a spell that gives him the power to get inanimate objects to carry out tasks he is expected to do, but lacking the counterspell, he cannot stop the process he has initiated.

This is a moral tale everyone can relate to that leaves us to meditate on what it means to pursue convenience based on partial knowledge and motivated by impatience. Applied to an example such as nuclear energy, which we impatiently developed not to better understand what it was and how it might be harnessed, but for the purpose of human destruction justified by the “noble” objective of ending a war. It did end the war in Japan, at considerable moral cost, but it also produced the arms race, which poisoned our politics and distorted our economy during the Cold War is reaccelerating even today.

The hero of Goethe’s Faust, inspired by an earlier work of the canon — Christopher Marlowe’s 16th-century drama, “Doctor Faustus” — is motivated by his desire to understand “what holds the world together in its inmost folds.” To make that leap in human intelligence he sells his soul to the devil.        Faust’s tragedy begins when he mistakes power over the world for reconciliation with it. He embarks on a process whose success in growth and ambition is commensurate with the amorality found at its core. The parallels should be obvious with the ensuing history of the technological revolution now coming to a head today with the AI revolution.

Goethe was a true visionary and a committed “modern” thinker. He understood the morality of the work of the devil, but instead of condemning it, he sought to make it profitable, drawing his own moral conclusion that by optimistically continuing to seek understanding, we might achieve clarity. “Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den können wir erlösen.” (“Whoever strives with constant effort, him we can redeem.”) If he were to look at the world today, he would recognize the very processes he described, but I suspect he would see some of today’s striving to be suspect, to the devil’s advantage.

Mary Shelley was far less indulgent with the notion of striving than Goethe in her Gothic 1818 novel, Frankenstein. Like Faust, Victor Frankenstein seeks total access to meaning and rejects mediation, patience and finitude. What he produces artificially imitates nature while failing to recognize what it reveals about nature. What Frankenstein proudly creates escapes any control, but the doctor takes no responsibility for what ensues. Many might see that as a description of where we are today with AI.

The final meme in our list appeared in 1896: Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, a madcap remake of Shakespeare’s Macbeth complemented by elements of pastiche of Hamlet, Richard III and even The Winter’s Tale and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. In other words, Jarry knew the canon and played with it. The play’s plot featuring a sanguinary, bombastic, narcissistic king was so far out and over the top, so dissonant in terms of contemporary aesthetic standards, that some view it as the opening volley of 20th-century modernism. In its way, it was announcing the impending end of the 19th century’s era of peace and rational industrialization less than two decades before the start of World War I.

Why should we return to Ubu Roi today? No one imagined that such a parody of misuse of political power could ever be found in nature, especially in the context of Western democracies. South African author Jane Taylor the eponymous hero of the play in these terms: “The central character is notorious for his infantile engagement with his world. Ubu inhabits a domain of greedy self-gratification.” We don’t have to seek very far to see the astonishing parallel in today’s news.

We’re just left wondering how many deals Trump has done with his version of Mephistopheles.

*[The Devil’s Advocate pursues the tradition 51�Թ� began in 2017 with the launch of our “Devil’s Dictionary.” It does so with a slight change of focus, moving from language itself — political and journalistic rhetoric — to the substantial issues in the news. Read more of the 51�Թ� Devil’s Dictionary. The news we consume deserves to be seen from an outsider’s point of view. And who could be more outside official discourse than Old Nick himself?]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Who Canonized the Western Canon — and Why Did We Kill It? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Malaysia, memory and the return of conservatism

Barnard begins with his lived experience in Malaysia. He began as an American Field Service exchange student in the early 1970s and later stayed in Southeast Asia for roughly a decade due to fellowships and research. Living with a Malay Muslim family, he encountered a syncretic Islam shaped by older animist, Hindu and Buddhist layers. He describes practices that blend Quranic recitation with local shamanic healing, and he emphasizes how normal it once was for Malay life to contain overlapping identities rather than a single purified one.

That pluralism narrowed after 1979. He links the tightening of public norms to the Iranian Revolution, regional religious competition and sustained Saudi missionary influence promoting Wahhabi-style rigor — based on the 18th-century puritanical Islamic reform movement. He illustrates the shift with an anecdote about relatives altering old family photos to match contemporary expectations. The point is not nostalgia for a lost “pure” past, but the political force of edited memory, where a society gradually forgets it ever lived differently.

The medieval “genius” and the translation engine

Barnard’s central historical claim is that Muslim civilization’s early rise is inseparable from institution-building. After the rapid expansion beyond Arabia, rulers inherit an imperial problem: how to govern, administer and learn from older empires, including the Eastern Roman and Persian worlds. Barnard describes the translation movement, associated with Baghdad and the Abbasid era (750–1258 AD), as a practical response to ruling an empire and a cultural project that makes Arabic a language of science.

He highlights Baghdad’s historic House of Wisdom intellectual center as a symbol of this broader ecosystem, a library-and-translation culture that draws on Greek, Persian, Syriac and Indian knowledge. The intellectual effect is not merely the preservation of texts but the creation of an infrastructure for learning and copying at scale. That scale matters when knowledge is threatened by war. Barnard pushes back on the idea that the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258 automatically ends Muslim learning, because manuscripts and expertise have already circulated through multiple cities and libraries across the wider Islamic world.

Literacy, numbers and machines that power modern life

Barnard emphasizes that the “genius” is visible in ordinary material systems. Paper-making spread after contact with China, and the shift from parchment to paper changed the economics of books. He contrasts a Europe of scarce chained manuscripts with a Muslim world of libraries, scribal production and wider literacy. As he puts it, “most people in Europe were illiterate; most people in the Muslim world at the time were literate.” The point is not triumphalism but the civilizational consequence of cheap, reproducible media.

He then turns to mathematics as a transmission story with world-historical consequences. Islam, he argues, carries Hindu numerals and the concept of the number zero westward, helping make higher mathematics workable compared with Roman numerals. He ties this to later European uptake, including the role of medieval figures such as Italian mathematician Leonardo Bonacci (better known as Fibonacci), and to foundational techniques of calculation that have become routine in modern schooling.

A third strand is engineering. Barnard credits medieval Muslim engineers, including Ismail al-Jazari, with recording key mechanisms such as the crank-and-rod system that converts circular motion into linear motion. He treats this as a building block for later technologies, from the steam engine to internal combustion. He adds a related cluster of hydrological innovations, including qanat aqueducts and yakchal ice houses, which link irrigation, food preservation and comfort to sophisticated environmental design.

Human figures, optics and scientific slowdown

Singh presses Barnard on a persistent modern assumption: that Islam simply bans iconography, and that this ban should have constrained medicine and anatomy. Barnard’s says that the strongest prohibition is concentrated in religious settings and sacred texts, where geometry, arabesque and calligraphy dominate. In secular settings, figurative traditions flourish in Persian, Mughal and Turkish miniatures, and even depictions of the Prophet Muhammad appear in some contexts, sometimes veiled or stylized.

Barnard connects this cultural distinction to scientific practice. He argues that medieval Muslim societies did not share the same blanket Christian-era prohibitions on dissection, and that Arabic medical charts and eye anatomy became highly sought after. Terms for parts of the eye passed into Latin and remain in use. He also links Islamic advances in optics to later European art, describing a thesis that Renaissance realism may be aided by lenses and optical devices whose scientific roots reach back to scholars such as astronomer Ibn al-Haytham (better known as Alhazen), famous for work on refraction.

In explaining the scientific slowdown, Barnard frames a long contest between the ulama (clerics) and the falsafa (philosophers). He spotlights the 12th-century scholar al-Ghazali as a figure whose critique of Greek causality gained massive influence. Barnard’s key example is the rejection of cause-and-effect reasoning as a foundation for scientific inquiry. In his phrasing, “God is creating the world every moment to every moment,” which weakens the intellectual scaffolding that makes experimentation meaningful.

Arab cultural colonization

The conversation then shifts to identity politics, especially in Malaysia. Barnard describes the remaking of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital, from a Chinese-British city into an “Arab-Malay” aesthetic landscape, shaped by political incentives to satisfy religious conservatives, and reinforced by Saudi-funded institutions and clerical training pipelines. Singh raises a question about “Arab cultural colonization,” an argument that hardline Islam pressures non-Arab societies to abandon local traditions.

Barnard points out that evangelical, universalizing religions can function as cultural colonizers, and Islam is not unique in that regard. He notes evangelical Christianity’s impact on indigenous peoples in the Americas and on contemporary missionary competition across regions.

Finally, Barnard reads modern architecture as a mirror of political structure. He contrasts Gulf autocracies that compete through monumentality and signature cultural projects with Kuwait’s democratic gridlock that stalls infrastructure, and with Oman’s restrained state-mandated aesthetic under the late Sultan. For Barnard, the outcome is not just pleasing design but a coherent public environment.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article/video are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post FO° Talks: From Baghdad to Dubai: How Power, Oil and Religion Transformed the Islamic World appeared first on 51�Թ�.

For three decades, many in Washington saw the post-1945 order in very different terms. The American political thinker Robert Kagan famously described it as a��“” — an artificial space of relative peace and prosperity, fenced off from the global “jungle” of historical great-power rivalry and tended by US power and alliances. The job of American statecraft, in this view, was to keep the garden alive: expand its borders cautiously, prune its institutions and keep predators at bay.

Trump’s Venezuela operation marks a break with that metaphor. This is not Iraq 2003. There is no talk of a broad “coalition of the willing,” of democratization or of weapons of mass destruction. There is an indictment in a US court, a helicopter raid and an to restore Venezuelan oil production under US guidance — “we’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground,” as Trump put it. The logic is not Wilsonian gardening; it is frankly transactional destroyer-boat diplomacy.

For Trump and his advisers, Venezuela is a test case of a new Monroe Doctrine updated for the twenty-first century: shut out China and Russia, discipline unruly left-wing governments in the hemisphere and secure cheap resources and leverage over migration and narcotics flows. The National Security Strategy’s “” spells this out: Latin America is to be kept “free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets,” and governed by regimes that “cooperate with us against narco-terrorists, cartels, and other transnational criminal organizations.”

Trump’s Venezuela move vindicates neither the liberal center nor its most strident critics. It reveals, instead, how much of our politics — on the populist right and, in a different way, on parts of the left — has slipped back into a geopolitical language of spheres of influence and transactional deals. And it sends a powerful signal to other autocrats, especially in Moscow and Beijing, that the old rule-book of territorial carve-ups may be back in business.

The new Monroe Doctrine as transactional geopolitics

From the White House’s standpoint, the case for attacking Venezuela has shifted over time. Maduro was first as a narcoterrorist heading the so-called Cartel de los Soles; the Justice Department in 2020, and Trump placed a bounty on his head. But specialists in counternarcotics have long questioned whether that organization exists in the form described, and the administration has not presented a clear threat to US national security that would meet UN Charter standards for the use of force.

In practice, the more compelling explanation is strategic and commercial. The new National Security Strategy asserts the right — indeed the necessity — for the US to dominate the Western Hemisphere, keep out extra-regional powers, and secure access to energy and critical minerals. Trump has been unusually blunt about wanting control of Venezuelan oil, which he insists rightly belongs to US companies and, by extension, to American consumers and “the people of Venezuela” once they align with Washington.

This is an old pattern in new clothes. President James Monroe’s 1823 doctrine warned European powers not to meddle in the Americas; President Theodore Roosevelt it into a charter for gunboat diplomacy and “international police power” in the Caribbean and Central America. Trump’s version adds 21st-century targets: Chinese loans, ports and telecoms; Russian military advisers, bases and energy stakes.

What’s missing is any sustained concern with Venezuelan democracy. Washington is sidelining opposition figures like María Corina Machado and Edmundo González — widely seen as the rightful winners of the 2024 Venezuelan election — in favor of a “transition” negotiated with elements of the Maduro regime and US energy firms, with Trump announcing that the US will “run” Venezuela for now. Even sympathetic analysts warn that there is no coherent “day after” plan and that a dash to restart oil production could trigger a scramble for assets and a new cycle of corruption and conflict.

This is regime change, but not in the Iraq mold. It is closer to what The New Statesman “a new era of rogue superpowers,” in which great powers overtly claim regional spheres as their own and use pretexts — drug trafficking, terrorism, separatism — to justify “snatch-and-grab” operations against unfriendly leaders.

From Lebensraumto the “Donroe Doctrine”

Seen in this light, Trump’s Venezuela operation is not an aberration but an extension of a much older tradition of thinking about space and power. In late-19th-century Germany, figures like German geographer and ethnographer Friedrich Ratzel and Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén drew on German biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel’s popularized Darwinism to describe states as organisms competing for space. Ratzel coined the term����to capture the territorial conditions a people needed to flourish; Kjellén of the state as a living being whose borders were never permanently fixed. This intellectual climate helped normalize the idea that great powers were entitled to expand at the expense of weaker neighbors.

German political geographer and his interwar school of��Geopolitik��popularized a language of heartlands, buffer zones and pan-regions — “continental blocks” and civilizational spheres that should be organized under a dominant power. The legal and conceptual term���Ұ���ß�����ܳ� — a large space ordered around a hegemon — was developed most systematically by the conservative jurist��Carl Schmitt, whose on international law in the late 1930s justified regional spheres under German leadership and attacked universalist notions of sovereignty. Haushofer provided the maps and rhetoric; Schmitt provided the juridical theory.

Together, they portrayed Germany as a cramped “middle state” unjustly constrained by Versailles, surrounded by hostile powers and lacking the living space that Britain, France and the US had achieved through empire. This story resonated far beyond the far right.

German Dictator Adolf Hitler radicalized it into a necropolitical program: Eastern Europe, especially Ukraine and Russia, was to be cleared and resettled to secure German existence for a “thousand years.” Political activist and Marxist Franz Neumann, in his powerful 1942 analysis of the Nazi state,��, saw clearly that geopolitics in this guise was not a neutral science but “nothing but the ideology of imperialist expansion” — a language that made war over territory seem natural, even inevitable.

After 1945, this vocabulary became disreputable in Europe, but the underlying logic persisted elsewhere. The Soviet Union asserted a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe; the US asserted one in the Americas. Monroe’s hemispheric exclusion and Schmitt’s �Ұ���ß�����ܳ� ideas found an echo across ideological lines. Trump’s “Donroe Doctrine” speaks directly to that heritage. He is explicit that the Western Hemisphere is America’s unquestioned domain, where “nonhemispheric competitors” such as China and Russia are to be denied serious footholds. He is equally open about wanting a sphere that matches, symbolically, those of Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The goal is not a rules-based order but a negotiated cartel of empires.

What the right misunderstands — and what the left forgets

A powerful strain of the populist right — including Trump himself — embraces this shift. In Trump’s practice, “America First” has meant not pure isolationism, but��mercantilist hard-power politics within a self-defined sphere: over drugs and migration; Colombia and Brazil with tariffs and sanctions; flirt with the idea of or making Canada the “”; and now, physically remove an unfriendly leader in Caracas.

Alongside this, there is indeed a genuinely isolationist current in the Make America Great Again (MAGA) coalition — voices who want to cut aid to Ukraine, avoid confrontation with Iran or China, and focus exclusively on domestic culture wars. The Tucker Carlson/“no more foreign wars” is real. But when push has come to shove, Trump’s own version has dominated: rhetorical Fortress America at home, selective coercion and deal-making abroad, especially in what he considers “our” hemisphere.

The right’s critique of the post-1990 order is not entirely wrong. It is true that globalization eroded the industrial base of many communities, that liberal interventionism produced disasters in Iraq and Libya, and that US elites have too often cloaked raw power in lofty rhetoric. What is wrong is the conclusion: that the cure is to abandon alliances, normalize spheres of influence and treat neighboring states as bargaining chips. That is how Europe sleepwalked into catastrophe a century ago.

The contemporary left, for its part, is divided. The strand that matters most for this argument is not authoritarian “campism” that reflexively sides with any regime opposed to Washington, but a more mainstream current that sees international law, multilateral institutions and transnational activism as sufficient to contain aggression, and that views almost any use of US power abroad as suspect.

Here, too, there is a long pedigree: the disillusionment of 1918, German novelist Erich Maria Remarque’s�� (All Quiet on the Western Front), the interwar peace movements’ faith in Kellogg-Briand, the “” internationalism of US Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, the mid-century cult of the UN. That tradition continues today in climate accords, human-rights campaigns and pandemic-era defenses of “the international scientific community.”

The left is right to stress interdependence and to highlight Western hypocrisy. But it often underestimates how far regimes like Putin’s or Xi’s have moved beyond the rules-based order, and how little they care for the constraints of law when core interests — as they define them — are at stake. In practice, a world in which the US renounces any hard-power role while others pursue spheres of influence would not be more peaceful; it would be more dangerous, especially for smaller democracies like Ukraine, Taiwan, or now perhaps Colombia and Mexico.

A dangerous precedent for Moscow and Beijing

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the Maduro coup is not what it says about Trump’s worldview — that is no secret — but what it signals to other major powers. The administration has justified the operation by pointing to �Ѳ���ܰ���’s US indictment on drug-trafficking charges; officials present the raid as an arrest operation, not a war.

Critics have been quick to note how easily this logic can be repurposed. Commentators have pointed out that one could easily imagine Beijing indicting a Taiwanese president on spurious grounds and citing Trump’s precedent to “execute an arrest warrant” across the strait — or Moscow doing the same with President Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine. Senator Mark Warner, the Democratic vice-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has that if the US asserts a right to use force to capture foreign leaders it accuses of criminal conduct, “what prevents China from claiming the same authority over Taiwan’s leadership? What stops Vladimir Putin from asserting a similar justification to abduct Ukraine’s president?”

This plays directly into the hands of Moscow and Beijing, both of which already treat neighboring democracies as wayward provinces within their historical spheres. Putin speaks of “” Ukraine; Xi speaks of “” Taiwan. If Washington now abandons any pretense of respecting the UN Charter, its objections to those projects will ring even more hollow.

In the longer term, Trump’s move may also accelerate the very multipolarity he claims to resist. Latin American governments that fear US volatility will quietly hedge with China, diversify trade and seek diplomatic cover in BRICS-style forums. A hemisphere that experiences the US primarily as a capricious sheriff, not a partner, will be less receptive the next time Washington asks for solidarity over Taiwan or Ukraine. Trump appears to believe that the world can be stabilized if the great powers simply agree on who owns which sphere. In reality, he is endorsing a crude version of the Athenian historian : the strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must.

Old maps, new dangers

From Ratzel’s Lebensraum to Roosevelt’s corollary, from Schmitt’s �Ұ���ß�����ܳ� to Putin’s “Russian world,” the temptation to divide the globe into tidy zones of influence has always been strongest when empires feel threatened, and elites lose faith in universal rules. It is understandable that, after the fiascos of Iraq and Afghanistan, many on both right and left have turned away from the rhetoric of liberal order.

But Trump’s Venezuela gambit is not a corrective to those failures; it is a relapse into an older, more brutal way of thinking about the world — one that will be eagerly imitated by other strongmen if it goes unchallenged. It shows that the US is not withdrawing from world politics, as isolationists claim, but reentering it on explicitly neoimperial terms in its own backyard. That should worry not only Venezuelans, but also Ukrainians, Taiwanese and anyone else whose security depends on the idea that borders cannot be redrawn at will.

The left is right to insist that we cannot bomb our way to a just world order. The right is correct to insist that power and geography still matter. Both are wrong if they think the answer is to abandon the attempt to build and enforce common rules — whether by retreating into small utopias of cooperation or by cutting deals over other peoples’ sovereignty.

We are unlikely to return to the liberal triumphalism of the 1990s. But we do not have to accept a future in which rogue superpowers arrest each other’s enemies across borders, parcel out regions and call it stability. Kagan’s liberal garden was always more fragile and partial than its defenders admitted. The alternative, however, need not be a jungle of competing empires. The first step is recognizing when our own governments have started to talk like the geopoliticians of the past — and refusing to pretend that this is anything other than a return to a past we thought we had left behind.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The End of the Liberal Garden Era appeared first on 51�Թ�.

And I found that a serpent was coming towards me. It was thirty cubits in length, and its beard was more than two cubits in length, and its body was covered with gold scales, and its eyebrows were of pure lapis lazuli…

And it opened its mouth to me, as I was lying flat on my stomach before it, and it said unto me, “Who hath brought thee hither? Who hath brought thee hither, O miserable one?”

That is from the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, the oldest complete story that has come down to us from antiquity. It was written in Hieratic during the Middle Kingdom of Ancient Egypt, and I read it in the original Egyptian from the comfort of my bed, four thousand years after it was written.

Reading an ancient story is an experience unlike any other. It is a glimpse into the mind of an alien — utterly foreign, yet oddly familiar. A yawning gap of time, culture and language divides me from the author, but I read his tale nevertheless, and I marveled when the sailor encountered the serpent god with eyebrows of lapis lazuli.

I’ve often felt the pressure to better myself, and I occasionally crack a technical manual or a literary classic in my spare time in deference to that pressure. I’ve known colleagues whose hobbies are essentially identical to their work — Nothing would depress me more, though I’d probably be better at my job.

Instead, my hobbies are almost militantly useless. I write a blog in which I the hot-dog-ness of various sandwiches, and spin density waves if they were made of guinea pigs. The only foreign languages I speak are Latin and Ancient Egyptian, into which The House of the Rising Sun (so useful). The history books I love best are the furthest removed from my own time. In general, my delight in a hobby is inversely proportional to its utility.

But despite, or perhaps because of, the unavoidable pressure to be productive that pervades modern life, I feel that my useless hobbies are not only personally valuable, but essential to a life well-lived, and I think the ancient philosophers tend to agree with me.

Crawling in the mud: Zhuangzi and ��ú��é��

��ú��é��, nonaction in accord with the natural flow of the universe, was praiseworthy to the Daoist sage Zhuangzi, born 2300 years ago in ancient China. Zhuangzi was renowned across China for his wisdom, and his counsel was greatly desired by the political elites of the time. When the duke of Qi, one of many desiring wise counsellors, invited Zhuangzi to become his chief minister, his messengers found the old sage fishing among the river reeds. Upon receiving this job offer, Zhuangzi did not look up from his rod and :

“I have heard that there is a sacred turtle in Chu that died three thousand years ago. The duke keeps it in a casket wrapped in cloth and has placed it in a temple. May I inquire whether the sacred turtle wanted to be dead and to have its bones venerated by man? Or was its intention to stay alive and crawl around in the mud, dragging its tail?”

“Naturally,” replied the messengers, “it hoped to crawl around in the mud, dragging its tail.”

“Go home,” said Zhuangzi, “I also want to crawl around in the mud, dragging my tail.”

The serenity of Epicurus

, too, understood the value of nonproductive pursuits. He was a Hellenistic philosopher who suffered from chronic pain all his life, and perhaps fittingly, developed a philosophy focused on pleasure and pain. To Epicurus, what is true pleasure? True pleasure is not the fleeting pleasures of wealth, rich food and debauchery, but a restrained, mental satisfaction that lingers, like heat from the embers of a hearth. True pleasure is the absence of pain and freedom from unnecessary desires.

This pleasure comes with freedom from the desire for wealth, freedom from the fear of death and of the gods, the bond of the tight-knit community and from pure intellectual exploration — this pleasure is serenity, ataraxia in Greek. The fear of death was simply one more pain to overcome in the life of Epicurus, and so his followers wrote thusly on their tombstones: Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo — I was not, then I was, I am no more, I do not mind. 

Epicurus reminds us that the pursuit of wealth does only so much to decrease the pain of life. For indeed, what shall it profit a man, to gain the world but lose his soul?

Aretḗ and the joy of useless excellence

But for me, there is still more to life than ��ú��é�� and ataraxia, for there is pleasure too in purpose. Former US President John F. Kennedy, another great philosopher, spoke to this purpose when he of the Apollo moon mission that we choose to go to the moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone and one we intend to win.

Indeed, to strive for one’s excellence, for one’s �������ḗ, in any field of human endeavor, for no practical benefit whatsoever — this is the highest pursuit of man, his virtue par excellence, and his greatest good. To strive for mastery in a field, regardless of practical benefit and indeed in spite of it, is a noble and fulfilling pursuit.

So why do I waste my time? To exist in non-action, to be free of the burden of utility, to find ataraxia, to strive for something difficult, yet not lose myself in pursuit of material gain, and because ultimately, it is my time to waste.

In the words of Seneca, omnia aliena sunt, tempus tantum nostrum est — All else is foreign to us, only time is ours. And I intend to spend mine generously, spiced with those useless hobbies that bring me joy.

[Dylan Black first published this piece on .]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post In Defense of Useless Hobbies appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The proposal outlines a step-by-step process for removing and disarming the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, commensurate with an Israeli withdrawal, a reduction in Israeli airstrikes, the demarcation of their shared land border and promises of reconstruction aid for Lebanon. 

A difficult process

Realizing the complete ceasefire agreement is tantamount to pulling teeth. No amount of policy gymnastics can identify the right combination of carrots and sticks for fulfilling the agreement. Additional negotiations, extending deadlines, and revisions to stipulations and processes are pointless endeavors while a critical partner to the agreement — Lebanon — retains a perverse sense of entitlement. 

Much of Lebanon is afflicted with a debilitating narcissism. The narcissism would not warrant much attention if the Mediterranean country resembled Singapore, but in the last 50 years, Lebanon has begun to rival Somalia in its dysfunctional and dystopian qualities.

On the one hand, Lebanese governments and many of its people demand respect, attention and support as a state, society and governing system historically grounded in “multiculturism,” “tolerance” and “equity.” But on the other hand, when that state, society and governing system goes awry and affects other countries (which it repeatedly does), the Lebanese demand that they remain the master of their domain. 

The delusion enables a culture of fecklessness that has enveloped leadership and its supporters over the years. Excuses, half-measures, half-truths, indifference, a lack of urgency, platitudes, political theater, victimhood and window dressing consume how the Lebanese state and society discern and function. Even when an opportunity for improvement presents itself (as it did with the November 2024 US-mediated ceasefire), the self-defeating and self-inflicted behavior and thinking prevail, subjecting the country to a painful future.   

On October 8, 2023, the Lebanese militia, Hezbollah, an unprovoked attack against Israel. The militia framed their attack as an act of solidarity with Hamas and their Palestinian allies in Gaza. The Lebanese militia, which proclaims itself as a defender of Lebanon, did not notify the Lebanese government or seek the approval of the Lebanese people prior to their “act of solidarity” with another nationality, no less.

Similar to previous acts of aggression by Hezbollah, the Lebanese state and large swathes of the population were expected, at a minimum, to tolerate the group’s unilateralism and accept any fallout.

Crisis after conflict��

Thirteen months of deadly and destructive conflict between Israel and Hezbollah ensued before US shuttle diplomacy “persevered.” Amos Hochstein, former US President Joe Biden’s envoy, traveled to and between Israel and Lebanon throughout 2024 to realize the ceasefire.

The Lebanese “tolerance” of Hezbollah’s unilateralism resulted in thousands of Lebanese casualties, hundreds of thousands internally displaced, and billions of dollars in damage to property and infrastructure. The conflict compounded the problems and suffering of an already devastated country and people. A historic economic collapse that witnessed the Lebanese pound lose of its value entered its sixth year in August. One of the largest non-nuclear blasts leveled the port of Beirut, killing over and injuring thousands. Five years later, no one has been held for the egregious case of mismanagement, lack of enforcement and prolific corruption. The events add to a state and society that has not fully recovered from the effects of a 15-year civil war and a 29-year Syrian occupation.��

For those unfamiliar with Lebanon, the announcement of a ceasefire on November 26, 2024, provided a glimmer of hope for the ravaged and exhausted country. Biden it as a “new start for Lebanon.” French President Emanuel Macron that it created “conditions to restore lasting calm.”������

Biden and Macron’s optimism deserved some merit. By the start of the “ceasefire,” Israel had weakened Hezbollah’s leadership and capabilities to a degree that Hezbollah’s Lebanese opponents had only dreamed about. Roughly one week after the announcement, longtime Hezbollah ally Syrian President Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia, the flow of Iranian weapons to Hezbollah.

Adding to the optimism, one month later, Lebanese Parliamentarians elected Joseph Aoun to the Presidency (the office had been for 26 months due to political squabbling). One month later, the Lebanese agreed on the formation of Prime Minister Nawaf Salam’s government (a caretaker government had operated for the previous 33 months because of political disagreement).��

However, hope does not spring eternal in Lebanon. One year later, Biden and Macron’s words ring hollow, and the celebration falls on deaf ears. The absence of Assad in Syria has not deterred Hezbollah from attempting to acquire Iranian arms. Aoun and Salam disappoint like their predecessors.

The calm between Lebanon and Israel is a myth. The initiator of the conflict, Hezbollah, remains unequivocal in forsaking its absolutist ideology and arms. Witness the recent of Hezbollah leader, Naim Qassem: “We will not abandon the weapons that honor us, nor the weapons that protect us from our enemy.” Reports grow about Hezbollah’s gradual rearmament. Israel remains in five positions on Lebanese territory near their shared border and regularly Hezbollah personalities and weapons depots with drones and airstrikes.��

Lebanon has not moved forward

The president and the prime minister remain ineffective in their duties to uphold Lebanon’s international obligations and their capacity to enforce the law and policy within its borders. Hezbollah fighters remain in South Lebanon. The Lebanese Armed Forces lag in their disarmament of Hezbollah, raising serious doubts about whether it will ever be completed. How can leadership expect investment in their beleaguered country when their words (thus far) are worthless?  

The Biden administration’s zeal for a diplomatic “solution” to the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict in 2024 gave little thought to the history and parties responsible for instituting the ceasefire. The Trump administration inherited a portfolio that requires too much oversight and arm-twisting with too little reward for a country that is not a US national security priority. As each day passes since November 26, 2024, Lebanon’s perverse sense of entitlement triumphs over constructive change and genuine improvement.      

For years, Lebanese officials have sold a bill of goods that tugs at the heartstrings of the world. Officials present the 82-year-old bankrupt and fractured Mediterranean country with an oversensationalized past as a model of Christian-Muslim coexistence and power sharing — using its 18 recognized religious confessions as a vital example of diversity to the world.

Despite its dystopic and dysfunctional state, the international community is that Lebanon cannot be abandoned to unscrupulous actors (i.e., Iran) and allowed to dissolve. Lebanon’s complete failure will be a stain on the world and somehow raise questions and concerns about the future of Christian-Muslim coexistence and diversity elsewhere.��

International assistance has not made things better

The Lebanese succeeded in promoting their exceptional model and issuing their dire warnings. Since the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1990, the state and society have tens of billions of dollars in aid and assistance with few strings attached. Europe has hosted at least a half dozen international aid conferences, with more proposed. Evidence of European-backed projects is scattered throughout the country. Qatar much of southern Lebanon after the Hezbollah-initiated war with Israel in 2006. At times, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia filled financial shortfalls and funded projects. The United States regularly arms, pays and trains the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF).

Western Europe, America and the monarchies of the Gulf enabled Lebanon’s continued failure. Their 35-year gravy train helped maintain the façade of a state and societal divisions while deepening a culture of inflated self-worth. They bolstered attitudes and behaviors found among long-term welfare recipients. Assistance from others is constantly requested and expected. Accountability is largely absent. Blame is pointed elsewhere. The will to change is fleeting. Given the history, the last 13 months of failing to fully employ the stipulations of the Israeli-Lebanese ceasefire are expected. 

The Lebanese state and, by extension, the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) cannot disarm Hezbollah because it has never matured and rarely been held accountable. Providing basic services like a full day of electricity has been a challenge for decades. Delivering justice remains elusive. Even the family of ex-Prime Minister Rafik el-Hariri could only get a in absentia for his murder on Lebanese soil via an international tribunal in The Hague. In 2017, the LAF required the of Hezbollah to defeat an ISIS force along its eastern border.

The failings of the state fuel the continued apathy for the Lebanese nation. Lebanon’s much-acclaimed “co-existence” and “diversity” perpetuate an environment in which one’s communal identity competes with or supersedes the national identity. For that reason, the LAF remains a hollow institution. How can it be an effective force when many of its members have a greater affinity for its religious community than the people of Lebanon?

The latest US proposal gives the LAF until December 31 to finish the job it has failed to complete in the last nine months. Are four additional months going to reverse long-term attitudes and deep-seated behaviors in the institution? 

To obfuscate the failings and the facades, leadership and its supporters resort to hollow words, half-measures, half-truths, excuses, demands and warnings. Instead of acknowledging that the ceasefire was signed under false pretenses or going back on its word, Lebanese officials seek out opportunities to distract and displace blame. Some measures are insulting, while others manipulate fallacies and fears. 

For eight months, President Aoun and Prime Minister Salam have gone through the motions and indulged in platitudes about the sovereignty and supremacy of the Lebanese state. A recent example appeared on the streets of Beirut. A poster with pictures of the two officials proclaimed: “All of us are with you. One army. One weapon. One state. A new era for Lebanon.” Like leadership’s various feckless words, these posters and slogans will eventually be replaced by a new one.  

In August (five months after the creation of the government and considerable US pressure), the Salam government finally issued the unprecedented authorization to the LAF to disarm the militia. On September 5, the LAF plans to the government for disarming the militia. Were they not obliged to disarm Hezbollah since the start of the ceasefire? What then exactly was the LAF doing between November 2024 and August 2025 in the absence of authorization?����

Noticeably absent from the disarmament plans are deadlines. After 13 months, the LAF is supposed to finish disarming Hezbollah in southern Lebanon (south of the Litani River) by December 31. But no evidence exists of deadlines for the rest of the country. Hezbollah maintains a presence in Beirut, Ba’albek, Jbeil and Hermel. The ceasefire agreement is centered around UN Resolution , which explicitly states that Hezbollah must be disarmed throughout the country. At the current rate, Hezbollah may be disarmed in … five years?

Lebanese officials couple the platitudes and theater with the celebration of issues that are of secondary importance. “Strong words” are directed at Iranian officials. Political posters in urban areas are removed. Palestinians in Lebanon (at least the non-Hamas and non-Marxist ones) are disarmed. The Beirut International Airport and the Lebanese-Syrian border are secured (for now) to prevent cash and weapons transfers to Hezbollah. 

While initially encouraging, the endeavors and words can only distract from the elephant in the room — Hezbollah’s retention of weapons — for so long. When distractions no longer suffice, excuses and alternative outcomes are employed and suggested to (re)direct the blame, buy some time and impede outcomes.  

Israel is a popular excuse

Antisemitism, disdain for Zionism and conflict with its southern neighbor have produced a cottage industry in Lebanon for identifying Israeli complicity in many, if not most, of Lebanon’s woes. The Beirut Port blast in 2020, a case of gross negligence by government authorities, was initially on an Israeli missile strike by many Lebanese. One can visit Lebanon today and find citizens who still believe Israel played a role in one of the largest non-nuclear explosions or perceive the investigation into the blast as Israeli subterfuge.��

Not surprisingly, the same Lebanese leaders and politicians, whose litany of empty promises are many, claim that the Israeli “occupation” and actions are responsible for their dereliction of duties. Nine months after the deadline extension, the Speaker of the Lebanese Parliament for 33 years and Hezbollah ally, Nabih Berri, Israel for delaying the complete deployment of the LAF in southern Lebanon.

In the absence of Lebanese agency and execution, Israel is painted as the aggressor. President Aoun and other Lebanese politicians repeatedly tell the world that Israeli actions are counterproductive. If Israel only withdraws from its five remaining positions inside Lebanon and ceases the targeting of Hezbollah members in the south, the Lebanese could disarm the militia and bring calm to the Israeli-Lebanese border. 

History tells a different story. In 2006, Lebanon UN Resolution 1701, which stipulated an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon and the disarmament of Hezbollah. Israel withdrew only to witness the Lebanese government go back on its word and watch Hezbollah rearm and reembed itself along the border.��

Most Lebanese will tell you that they do not trust their government. Why should Israel trust the Lebanese government … again?

Another popular excuse is Lebanon’s “fragility.” 

How to move forward?

Lebanese officials assert that Lebanon cannot be pushed to disarm Hezbollah. Previous Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdullah Bou Habib and others that immediate disarmament will trigger communal violence. They guilt the world into believing that Lebanon’s Christian-Muslim coexistence equation and diversity hang in the balance if they are pressured.����

Therefore, the process is delicate and requires time. The LAF requires more funding and soldiers. A dialogue with Hezbollah must occur. The disarmament is a “” operation and progress is kept from the public to not humiliate the militia and its Shia supporters.����

All the money in the world and more troops cannot make the LAF an effective fighting force. Money does not generate a love for the nation and the defense of the state. Young Lebanese males who learn to operate sophisticated military equipment do not magically become zealous guardians of a nation they previously had little affinity for.   

Aoun’s dialogue strategy to avert conflict with Hezbollah and its Shia supporters is peculiar. What concessions can be given to a party and its supporters that are already political actors, represented in parliament and members of the government? Surrendering weapons is a black and white issue — you either submit to the will of the state or not. Who exactly dictates the actions and interests of the state? 

A dialogue also raises temporal issues and further questions. Has this dialogue already begun? How long will it last? Should Israel have to wait for the Lebanese to iron out their issues? What if the dialogue breaks down? Then what? Like its struggles to carry out policy, the Lebanese track record with domestic dialogues is poor.

The “classified” disarmament process is ridiculous and unusual for a Lebanese state prolific in incompetence and a society rooted in spectacles. Can one expect a lid to be maintained on a physical, audible and destructive operation by a state that struggles to maintain any sense of order (just try driving in Lebanon)? With the prevalence of social media, can Hezbollah’s Lebanese enemies be restrained from trying to humiliate the party? Some in the Shia would also welcome the opportunity to portray the operation as the victimization of the community at the hands of the state, colluding with Israel and America. 

With the exception of when soldiers died from the explosion of Hezbollah ordnance, the only footage the world witnesses of Hezbollah’s disarmament is when Israel targets their weapons depots. The absence of proof creates doubt about the sincerity and thoroughness of the LAF’s operations. Is it merely a coincidence that the LAF claimed to run out of explosives needed to destroy Hezbollah armaments and infrastructure in the days before the arrival of US deputy special envoy Morgan Ortagus in October?����

History demonstrates that “delicateness” is a ploy to avoid accountability and maintain power. The Taif Agreement, a Lebanese document which bring an end to the 15-year Lebanese civil war in 1990, stipulated political reforms. It’s thirty-five years later, and some of the reforms remain unfulfilled. Why? The powers to be in Lebanon deem it not an appropriate time — it would be too disruptive for the fragile nature of Lebanon.��

The Lebanese reliance on excuses demonstrates a spectacular exhibition of hubris. Many Lebanese officials and elements of society believe the rules do not apply to them despite their precarious plight and predicament. For Lebanon, the beggar can indeed be the chooser. 

Deadlines are made to be broken. The government agreed to institute the ceasefire agreement by January 27, 2025. It then agreed to a 22-day extension. Ten months later, and after considerable arm-twisting, it remains unclear if even one-third of the country will be free of Hezbollah’s weapons. Let’s not forget that the Lebanese agreed to the disarmament process (UN Resolution 1701) almost 20 years ago.

Accountability is for others. After ten months, it remains doubtful that even one-third of the country will be free of Hezbollah’s weapons. Its contempt for accountability is made more outrageous by the bankrupt and broken country’s belief that it can dictate future deadlines for disarmament at its convenience.  

The Lebanese understanding of sovereignty is privileged. Sovereignty is contingent on the actions of others — Israel and the United States. It lacks agency while telling others to mind its own business. The Lebanese mindset is: “If the United States could only prevent Israel from protecting itself, then we could get along with our business, and tomorrow we will start disarming Hezbollah.” Does this country and its leadership believe that it can get away with doing next to nothing — making a few concessions — and expect genuine improvement? Is Lebanon the only country where its sovereignty is the job of others?

The Lebanese exceptionalism further manifests in how it dictates future interactions (or lack thereof) with Israel. Often overlooked in the last 13 months is the continued Lebanese refusal to normalize relations with Israel. Lebanese officials believe it can formally deny the existence of the Israeli state while keeping the forces of “resistance” (i.e., Hezbollah and its allies) at bay. It is a delusional belief by a state that is challenged to deter people from criminal activity, let alone disarm the very people who yearn to eliminate Israel. 

A recent and maybe the most spectacular example of hubris is the by Lebanese officials for additional negotiations with Israel. What is there to (re)negotiate? 13 months ago, Lebanese officials agreed to terms that they failed to fulfill. They have not offered any concessions to reopen negotiations. Why is Lebanon entitled to more negotiations, particularly since it is the weaker of the parties? Do they expect it will simply occur out of compassion?��

The arrogance, delays, excuses, half measures and further negotiations are a blessing to Hezbollah. The militia thrives at undermining processes and impeding outcomes, as demonstrated by reports of its rearmament. The organization’s absolutism — rejecting Israel’s existence—compels it to disrupt and “discover” outstanding issues to justify its armament. 

Two notable examples

On the eve of Israel’s May 2000 withdrawal from Lebanon, Hezbollah announced that Israel occupied the Shebaa Farms (an area unbeknownst to most Lebanese until then). It attempted to discredit the withdrawal as complete despite the UN declaring the Israeli withdrawal as full (the UN recognizes Shebaa as Syrian territory).

More recently, in 2022, following the demarcation of the Israeli-Lebanese maritime border, Hezbollah that some Lebanese waters remained occupied by Israel despite the Lebanese government’s endorsement of the agreement.��

Lebanese behavior and thinking are quite perplexing. They enable opportunities to delegitimize the ceasefire agreement or discredit the process. It comes at a costly price. Violence perpetuates. Economic recovery stalls. Poverty deepens. International goodwill and patience erode. 

Lebanese narcissism has created an unviable environment for enacting policy and international agreements. Has Lebanon earned some special status in the world because of its demographics and history to act and think in such a manner? Is Lebanon serious about wanting a monopoly on violence in its territory? Is the country sincere about wanting to create a viable future? The excruciating exceptionalism of Lebanon endures. 

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Excruciating Exceptionalism of Lebanon appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The ancient Greeks were, quite reasonably, concerned by this question, because their democracies died all the time. In fact, this happened so much that the most eminent philosophers and historians of the classical period developed a theory that rationalizes the rise and fall of democracies, oligarchies and tyrannies. In this article, we will investigate whether their theory, called anacyclosis, holds up under scrutiny, and by scrutiny, I mean Monte Carlo simulations of government transition based on historical data from 1,035 Greek city-states. But first, some history.

The poleis of Ancient Greece

The peculiarities of classical Greece make empirical theories of political revolution much easier to imagine than in, say, the Persian Empire, which was a hereditary monarchy for pretty much its entire history. The dominant mode of social organization in the archaic and classical Greek periods is the polis, the city-state. Usually, there’s an independent mother city (Athens, Sparta, etc.) that politically, economically and culturally dominates its surrounding hinterland. Each city has its own constitution, or form of government, but shares a common Greek culture and language with its neighboring poleis.

This social structure is as dynamic as it is unstable, and there were many political revolutions. The ancient world’s most sophisticated theories of political evolution grew out of this dynamic — they classify government into a few categories based on which group holds power, and posit that they devolve sequentially from higher to lower forms. Let’s take a quick look.

Governmental types in Ancient Greek thought

The Inventory of Archaic and Classical Greek Poleis, about which we will have much more to say later, gives a nice introduction to the types of constitution.

In Greek political theory politeiai [political institutions] were divided into types according to how many people constituted and manned the principal organs of government. Basically, there were three constitutional types: the rule of the one, the few and the many. Pindar is the first we know who distinguished between rule by a tyrant, or the wise, or the whole army. About a generation later, Herodotos has a debate about the three basic types of constitution, here described as demos, oligarchia and monarchia. [In the early 4th century BC], Plato called the three forms tyrannis, aristokratia and demokratia.

Linear evolution in Plato’s Republic

Plato made a finer distinction, dividing government into five categories of constitution in his , and additionally giving their sequence of devolution.

Aristocracy (rule by the best) → Timocracy (rule by honor/worth/money) → Oligarchy (rule by the few) → Democracy (rule by the people/mob) → Tyranny (rule by one man).

Plato writes that governments devolve in this order, from best to worst, in a linear fashion, terminating in tyranny. I went back and checked the Republic to see if Plato makes any claims of a cyclical nature, and I don’t think that it does, but the Republic is very hard to read generally, so I’m not 100% sure.

Aristotle, a student of Plato, the tutor of Alexander the Great and a giant of philosophy in his own right, generally agreed with Plato, but distinguished between a good and a bad form of monarchy (basileia versus tyrannis), minority rule (aristokratia versus oligarchia) and majority rule (politeia versus demokratia). His conception, however, was also linear (as best as I understand).

Anacyclosis in Polybius’s Histories

Polybius was a Greek hostage and historian in Rome during Rome’s rise to power, and he improved upon Plato and Aristotle’s framework. Polybius divided government into three categories, each with a virtuous and corrupt form, for a total of six constitutions. They are as follows, from his :

The virtuous aristocracy is corrupted into an oligarchy, which is overthrown by the people as a democracy, which degenerates into mob rule or ochlocracy. A great leader emerges from mob chaos to create a monarchy, which descends into tyranny before being overthrown by the noble aristocracy, beginning the cycle anew. He called this cycle anacyclosis.

(to whom I must give credit for the genesis of this article), offers the following comments on this process:

There is good reason to think that Polybius and his predecessors arrived at this theory empirically. After observing the rise and fall of many hundreds of city-states, most of which cycled through several of the governmental forms mentioned above, Greek political thinkers concluded that these transitions from one form to another were not random. Rather, they seemed to follow simple and recognizable patterns. For example, tyrants were frequently overthrown by groups of aristocrats, while popular revolutions frequently overthrew oligarchies and ushered in democratic rule. Interestingly, the reverse of these trends (aristocracies being overthrown by tyrants or democracies turning into oligarchies) were statistically less likely to occur.

Through such observations, Polybius extrapolated the likely complete course of political evolution for an independent state whose lifecycle is not cut short by war or disaster.

Polybius, Plato and Aristotle essentially agree on the pattern — we go from rule-by-few (aristocracy/oligarchy) to rule-by-many (democracy) to rule-by-one (monarchy/tyranny), with an optional cycle back to rule-by-few.

Polybius thinks there’s a way out of this cycle. If one combines all three forms of government into a mixed constitution, a blend of democracy, aristocracy and monarchy, one can create a stable system exempt from anacyclosis. Polybius thought that the Roman Republic was the embodiment of this mixed constitution and the reason for its strength and longevity. The Founding Fathers of the United States of America, and John Adams in particular, were obsessed with Polybius and designed the structure of the United States government to avoid anacyclosis.

So to recap, we have several explicit claims, of which various authors claim subsets:

1. Political evolution follows a predictable pattern of oligarchy → democracy → monarchy.
2. This pattern may be linear (Plato) or cyclical (Polybius).
3. The reverse transitions are unlikely/unnatural.

Unfortunately for Polybius, he lacked the tools to quantitatively investigate his theory. Fortunately for us, we are much better than Polybius at linear algebra.

Political evolution is a Markov process

Implicit in anacyclosis is actually a fourth claim, the most important claim, that anacyclosis is “memoryless.” In other words, the next type of government depends only on the current type of government: Democracies always devolve to tyrannies, independent of what preceded democracy. In the theory of stochastic processes, this property is called the . We can use the Markov property to evaluate the validity of Polybius’ claim.

First, though, we need data. Fortunately, the Copenhagen Polis Centre has done most of the work for us, and An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis, a monumental work that compiles the existing data/metadata on the 1,035 identifiable Greek city-states of the Archaic and Classical periods (c.650-325 BC). Among the data found in the Inventory is a list of city-states and their known government types, ordered by date.

This data is actually all we need in order to pretty fairly evaluate the validity of the theory! For each city-state, we can simply extract ordered pairs of government types from this list and count the frequency with which these transitions occur. Because anacyclosis is a Markov chain (remember that means memoryless), these transition frequencies completely define the system! Note that this method completely ignores staying in the same state as a transition of interest (which requires much more sophisticated data parsing). So this method will probe only when governments change between distinct types.

This will make more sense as we actually construct the transition matrix and learn how to analyze Markov processes more generally.

An introduction to Markov processes through the inventory of Greek poleis

A Markov process, named after the Russian mathematician , is a type of random process. It has discrete states and a notion of time. At each time step in the process, each state X has a probability ��(��→Y) of transitioning to state Y. The Markov (memoryless) property ensures that this probability is the only relevant characteristic of the system.

Markov processes are often represented by graphs that abstract these transition probabilities, like the one below from Wikipedia showing a two-state Markov process.

In essence, a Markov process is the simplest form of a probabilistic state machine that still has interesting behavior. For any process that can be assumed to be stochastic, or perhaps a system complex enough that its behavior approximates a stochastic process, we can model it as a Markov process and immediately extract nontrivial, useful properties (as we shall see later).

Processes that (approximately) have the Markov property show up everywhere. Weather prediction, stock price prediction and population genetics are all examples of approximately-Markov processes. In each of these cases, while the real system may have complex dependencies, a Markov model captures enough of the important behavior to be very useful while still being mathematically tractable.

So how would we construct a Markov model for political evolution in Greek poleis? Like any good scientists, the first thing we have to do is create a good visualization of our data, and stare at it.

The data

Looking at our dataset, we have six distinct types of constitutions listed by the Inventory. I’ll quote briefly from it here:

In the Inventory, when we classify the constitution of a polis, we distinguish between basileia, tyrannis, oligarchia and demokratia, but we ignore variants of the latter two types, and all attestations of basileia belong in the Archaic period…

In a few cases of serious doubt, we have used Mix. to describe a polis with an unidentifiable mixture of characteristics.

The inventory also has another category in the data not listed above, politeia, which Aristotle defined as the “good” form of democracy, but is also the general term for a “polity” in Greek. Both of these last forms, politeia and “mixed,” are very rare in the Inventory and slightly confusing.

We should also note that the Inventory says that the term basileia might change meaning over time, as it is only attested in the Archaic period and not the Classical period. Second, that “in actual fact, all polis constitutions were mixed,” to one degree or another.

But for a first cut, let’s ignore these complexities and take a look at the data. First, the total frequency of government types:

The total counts of each type of government in the inventory. I manually removed “klerouchy” and “dynasteia”, additionally (Pol.) in the very first line, because I’m unclear what it means. Each of these occurred only once.

We note that the mixed and politeia types are very rare and not likely to affect our results. Excellent! Let’s ignore them. Second, if we combine basileia and tyrannis, the constitutions are roughly equal in frequency between the autocratic, oligarchic and democratic categories. Interesting! We’ll keep the two types of monarchy separate for now.

Next, we can plot the frequency that any constitutional type appears first or last. If Plato is correct, we would expect to see lots of oligarchies initially and lots of tyrannies finally. We … might see some evidence for that? We really see more of a transfer between oligarchy and democracy from this graph, and the number of monarchies slightly decreases, but not a lot. I don’t think Plato gets much help from the data here.

Finally, we can plot the frequency of government transition types. We define this naively, taking the sequence of governments in the inventory, and plotting the frequency of each ordered pair, i.e., demokratia, oligarchia, basileia would count as one occurrence each of dem.→ol., ol.→bas..

This last plot is pretty much the key to Markov processes. We can simply reinterpret each column of the above heatmap as a probability of transition between states. Thus, by normalizing each column of the transition frequency heatmap, we get a transition matrix T that defines the process. Because our system has the Markov (memoryless) property, the single-step transition matrix entirely defines the process — it is a Markov process.

How does the model work in practice? Let’s enumerate the types of government as the ordered list:

[bas., tyr., ol., dem., mix., pol.]

Then we can define a one-hot vector v that corresponds to my state, e.g., [1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0] = the system is in the basileia state. The probability of transitioning to any other state is then given by a vector p, equal to the transition matrix T times v.

Let’s explicitly construct T for our data. Since “mixed” and politeia are ill-defined and occur so infrequently, I feel fairly justified in simply dropping those columns from the data.

From this matrix, we can then recreate the Markov-process-style node graph.

Assessing validity

We’re now in a position to partially assess the validity of anacyclosis as it relates to the data, in a first-order sort of fashion.

The first claim is that political evolution proceeds in the order oligarchy → democracy → monarchy. Our data is fine-grained enough that we can split monarchy into its “virtuous” and “corrupt” forms, basileia and tyrannis, and so let’s look for oligarchy → democracy → basileia → tyrannis in the data.

Looking first at the basileia → tyrannis transition, we actually find excellent support for this in the data! Basileia to tyrannis transitions happen about 13 times more often than the reverse. However, there’s a confounding variable. Remember that the Inventory says that basileia is attested only in the Archaic period, so any basileia → tyrannis transitions might be the result of redefinition as opposed to transition. Let’s call this one a partial thumbs up, though.

How about the posited oligarchy → democracy transition? Not so much. These two nodes have the tightest connection in the graph, and the transition rates are essentially even, with oligarchy to democracy being ever so slightly more favorable than the reverse.

Finally, what about democracy → monarchy? It seems as though democracies don’t ever go to basileiai, which certainly doesn’t support the theory of anacyclosis, but again, this could be a definition thing — if we started the chain at basileia, we could have passed through the Archaic period before we got back around, when basileiai had turned into tyrannides. Unfortunately, though, the democracy → tyranny transition (29%) is much less common than tyranny → democracy (56%). This gets even worse if we consider basileia the same thing as tyrannis, which has even more asymmetry between the two transition frequencies. So the democracy to monarchy transition doesn’t find much support here; in fact, more the reverse.

In fact, what is the most common cycle? Let’s re-plot the Markov chain where we combine tyrannis and basileia into “monarchy.”

This doesn’t really help us much. The most plausible cycle by far is simply oscillation between democracy and oligarchy, which does not at all fit into the anacyclosis paradigm. It seems we require a more sophisticated analysis to extract the probable dynamics.

Markov chain Monte Carlo

Okay, well then, what does happen to a hypothetical average Greek polis? We can use a Monte-Carlo style simulation to find out.

“Monte Carlo” is a cute name for a very simple technique — if you have the rules of a system and want to understand its behavior, just simulate a whole bunch of random instances of that system and average the results. The simulation method is called “Monte Carlo” because one of the inventors an uncle who gambled too much in real Monte Carlo.

Nevertheless, this simple technique is extremely powerful. To implement, we

1. Choose an initial one-hot state v.
2. Multiply by our transition matrix to get p = Tv, our vector of state probabilities.
3. Choose a random state from p, weighted by the probabilities of each state, i.e., if p = [0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4], we have a 10%, 20%, 30% and 40% probability, respectively, of choosing states 1, 2, 3, 4.
4. Repeat this for n timesteps.
5. Repeat steps 1-4 for m simulations.

Let’s try this out, keeping the basileia/tyrannis distinction, just for fun.

So keeping basileia as a separate category doesn’t do much, its occupancy fraction immediately hits zero (on average) and never recovers. The most distinct feature by far appears to be the oligarchy-democracy oscillation, settling after ten timesteps into an even mixture of democracy and oligarchy (remember this is an average; at each timestep, the system can only be in one state). The tyrannis initialization appears to cause the settling to happen faster, but doesn’t differ in the essential trend. We also appear to stabilize at a steady state for any initialization parameter! Perhaps this is the fabled “mixed” constitution that Polybius thought made the Roman state so powerful and stable? We shall formalize this thought later.

Before we do steady-state analysis, we should check for common cycles. Let’s plot the most common cycles we find, dropping the basileia/tyrannis distinction (both are monarchy) for clarity. 1000 more simulations…

The most common cycle by far is the 2-state democracy → oligarchy → democracy cycle. The next most common state is this same cycle, twice in a row!

But wait, if we look down the list at the fourth most common cycle, it’s democracy → monarchy → oligarchy → democracy, that’s anacyclosis! It is the most common three-state cycle! We found it!

Did we just prove anacyclosis is real? Well, uh, it depends on what you mean, I guess.

Instead of answering the above, difficult question, I choose to reinterpret the original theory in light of the data — when Polybius wrote that “anacyclosis consists of predictable, cyclic transitions from democracy → monarchy→ oligarchy,” he clearly must have meant that given the empirical transition probabilities derived from a Markov model of Greek city state constitutional data, a Monte Carlo simulation will show the most common three-state cycle is democracy → monarchy → oligarchy.

I think this is a very reasonable translation of the original Ancient Greek.

Mixed states and the stable distribution

Now, Polybius was particularly interested in ways out of this endless cycle. How can we find a stable governmental state? Both our answer and Polybius’ answer are the same, and are already hinted at by the results of the simulations. We noted earlier that the simulations, regardless of initialization state, seemed to settle into a predictable distribution of government types, roughly 40% oligarchy, 40% democracy and 20% tyranny. This was also Polybius’ answer, that a mixed state was a stable point of this Markov process.

Polybius took as his example par excellence the constitution of the Roman Republic, which had popular assemblies (democracy), the Senate (oligarchy), and two consuls with executive power (a dash of monarchy). He felt that this mixture was much more stable than any pure state, and lent Rome its fabulous power.

According to our model, Polybius is absolutely correct.

How can we find the stable state of our Markov process? Well, first, we extend the model to allow for mixed states by not forcing our state v to be one-hot. That’s fairly easy. But how do we find the long-term stable state, if there is one?

Let’s think geometrically about our transition matrix. For a 2 × 2 transition matrix, we can visualize its action by seeing how it transforms a set of vectors arranged along the unit circle in the plane.

Under this linear transformation, the unit circle becomes an ellipse. The special directions that remain unchanged (up to scaling) by this transformation are called eigenvectors. These are precisely the principal axes of the resulting ellipse.

Mathematically, an eigenvector v with eigenvalue λ is defined by the equation:

Where T is our transition matrix, but this is very helpful for us, because if I now apply T twice, I get:

Thus, when we apply T repeatedly, each application multiplies the magnitude of v by λ while preserving its direction.

This means:

• If λ = 1, v maintains its magnitude: it’s a stable state.
• If |λ| > 1, v grows without bound.
• If |λ| < 1, v shrinks toward zero.

For Markov transition matrices, the guarantees that 1 is always an eigenvalue, and all other eigenvalues have absolute value strictly less than 1, meaning they decay to zero after a long time. When the Markov chain is also , meaning that you can visit any state from any other state, and you never get stuck in deterministic cycles, this unit-eigenvalue direction corresponds to a unique stable distribution called the .

Any initial distribution will converge to this stationary distribution as we repeatedly apply the transition matrix. We actually saw this in our Monte Carlo simulations — did you notice how, no matter the initial state, we always ended up with the same fraction of oligarchy/democracy/monarchy?

So we can quite quickly find the stationary distribution of our transition matrix by performing an eigendecomposition of our transition matrix. We solve:

For all v and λ.

Let’s take our transition matrix, where we combine basileia and tyrannis into monarchy.

The eigendecomposition of T yields three eigenvectors.

Which does indeed have a unit-valued eigenvector! To find the stationary distribution, we only need to normalize the eigenvector with eigenvalue 1, by dividing it by its column sum (it’s a probability vector, remember).

We can visualize this final distribution with a bar graph. Bar graphs are the most useless graph type, but they are visually arresting due to large bars of solid primary colors, so I’m making one.

This graph shows the anacyclotically stable distribution of the Markov poleis model. I don’t know if the word anacyclotically will ever really catch on in popular discourse, but I think it really rolls off the tongue. Perhaps instead we should call it the Polybian distribution. It does look remarkably similar to the Roman system, which was deeply suspicious of kingship but recognized its utility, and hence had two equal consuls in the place of one tyrant, as well as theoretically balanced popular assemblies and an aristocratic/oligarchic Senate.

So that’s it! This is the final confirmation that Polybius was on the right track, and that if he had only been better at linear algebra, he could have quantitatively estimated the proportion of democracy, monarchy, and oligarchy to inject into a politeia to stabilize it against the inevitable anacyclosis, assuming of course that by anacyclosis he actually meant the stochastic Markov process we’ve been working with this whole time, and not the actual anacyclosis that he wrote down, which is given minimal support by the actual data. Easy!

I should note, for future work, that there is at least one major oversight — for any given year in even the most fractious Greek polis, the probability of government transitioning to an entirely new category is small. In other words, I could have structured this process around a timestep being a single year, instead of an arbitrary “government transition time,” and gotten very different-looking processes, with the same long-run transition probabilities. Oh well, you always have to leave work for the next researcher.

Addendum: methodological validity

Mere minutes after posting this article, I had a thought — is the Greek poleis data set even capable of detecting an anacyclosis cycle in principle?

Let’s say I have a sequence A → B → C → A → …, like our poleis dataset. Then, because of spotty recordkeeping, let’s say I decimate this sample by randomly deleting entries, so maybe I’d get A → B → __ → A → … Without knowledge of the original sample, there’s a spurious B → A transition in our data!

So the question I want to ask here is, given a sequence composed of a pure cycle S = A → B → C → A …, if I randomly sample this sequence by throwing away all but a fraction f of the data points, can I still detect my sequence above noise?

Formally, let’s ask the question in the following way: I sample a fraction f of the data points from my sequence S, and construct a Markov transition matrix T by naively measuring transition frequency between neighbors in my sampled sequence. How often will I measure that the probability of the original sequence is greater than that of the reverse sequence? This is a sensible definition of “noise” because if we are solely interested in three-element sequences with unique elements, there are exactly two, A→B→C and C→B→A.

This sounds like an interesting analytical problem, but keeping with the Monte Carlo theme of this article and my own laziness, let’s just try it in code. I’ll construct a sequence of length 100 (A→B→C→…), decimate it, keeping a fraction f of the data, construct my matrix T, and then check whether the original cycle probability exceeds the reverse cycle probability.

The results are as follows.

And for completeness, does this give sensible results when run it on the reverse sequence C → B → A? In other words, what’s the spurious detection rate for a sequence that doesn’t contain the cycle at all?

Yes. This test does indeed give sensible results.

How about a random sequence? What do we expect on average?

Yes, this also makes sense. For a random sequence, we detect that A→B→C is more probable than the reverse about 50% of the time. I think this is a , where I correctly detect that the probability of my sequence is higher than the reverse sequence (the noise), but this doesn’t mean anything, because the underlying generator is fully random.

Based on this, I think I can say that the cutoff point where this detection mechanism starts to work is when the probability of detection exceeds ~50% on that curve, so let’s say a sampling fraction of about f = 0.2. That’s not too bad. I think I can consider my method valid enough for a Substack article.

[Dylan Black first published this piece on .]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Fall of Democracy Is a Markov Process appeared first on 51�Թ�.

As the LTTE’s activities intensified along the northern and eastern coasts of Sri Lanka, the Sri Lankan Navy retained a largely traditional posture, reflecting the doctrines inherited from the . The British instructors in them the doctrines of Mahan’s concept of absolute naval supremacy and Corbett’s maritime strategy — ideals revered by these postcolonial naval officers but offering little insight into the unconventional challenges posed by the LTTE’s naval wing, the “Sea Tigers.”

At the outset of the LTTE’s naval operations, its mechanical power was to the conventional maritime capabilities of the Sri Lankan Navy, which possessed a larger fleet of Fast Attack Crafts (FAC), while the LTTE’s vessels were limited to small boats with speeds below 25 nautical miles per hour. To overcome this disparity, the LTTE frequently resorted to suicide attacks, inflicting significant damage on the Sri Lankan Navy. 

Following the first suicide attack launched by the LTTE against the naval vessel Edithara, such tactics remained their preferred strategy, progressively undermining the strength and morale of the Sri Lankan Navy. In addition to suicide attacks, the LTTE emulated the tactics of the Italian World War II special unit by training their own divers to sabotage naval vessels docked in harbors. They further improvised their approach in the sea battles, adopting “Wolf Pack” tactics in which the LTTE relied on using many small boats to surround the FACs of the Sri Lankan Navy.

The development of Sri Lanka’s small boat fleet

With time and experience, especially after 2005, the Sri Lankan navy a formidable counterstrategy to match the LTTE’s superiority in asymmetrical sea battles. It may be a truism to state that the circumstances faced by the Navy after the the fourth Elam War compelled them to alter their strategic culture.

For instance, after 2005, the LTTE increased the number of boats it deployed during attacks. The Sri Lankan Navy realized that it would need at least 25 to 30 FACs simultaneously to counter such intense assaults. Yet, acquiring enough FACs from the international market quickly was impossible.

The Navy’s solution for this dilemma was ingenious: to manufacture their own small boats from fiberglass. This extraordinary concept arose from the strategic acumen of then-Navy Commander Admiral Wasantha Karannagoda. to these newly constructed small boats as “arrow boats” because of their resemblance to a sharp arrow, each powered by a 250-horsepower engine. The firepower mounted on these boats ranged from 14.5 mm twin-barrel guns to grenade launchers imported from China.

Two specialized units within the Sri Lankan Navy — the Special Boat Squadron (SBS) and the Rapid Action Boat Squadron (RABS) — to operationalize the small-boat concept and mastered swarm tactics to outmaneuver the LTTE’s naval units. 

Throughout the Sri Lankan Navy’s engagements with the LTTE, the Sea Tigers consistently targeted Navy FACs along the coastal areas of Point Pedro and Mullaitivu in northern Sri Lanka. The primary challenge the Sri Lankan Navy faced in deploying the newly built arrow boats against the Sea Tigers was the absence of a harbor at Point Pedro to station these vessels. However, the boats were concealed behind sea rocks during the intermonsoon period, and their first in 2007 crippled the Sea Tigers.

As recalls later, the first active participation of arrow boats in a sea battle proved their effectiveness to the Sri Lankan navy, as arrow boats could destroy two LTTE Sea Tiger fighter crafts. Later, the Sri Lankan Navy a new concept of combining arrow boats with FACs, which led to an increase in the defensive capabilities of the navy and the protection of its traditional vessels, such as battleships, in the open sea. 

The arrow boats’ successes

argue that the Sri Lankan Navy’s approach to small boats resembled that of the British Navy, which had introduced innovative coastal motor boats during the First World War. This innovation enabled the British Navy to achieve decisive victories against the Imperial German Navy in the North Sea.

Despite the conceptual similarities, the Sri Lankan Navy’s innovation proved decisive, as the maritime activities of the Sea Tigers rapidly declined. Naval engagements between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan Navy along Sri Lanka’s northeastern coast their peak in 2006, prior to the adoption of the small boat concept. 

However, following structural reforms within the Navy, the arrow boats were introduced, marking a significant tactical advancement. Their superior speed and firepower greatly enhanced the Navy’s ability to suppress Sea Tiger activities, reducing the number of direct confrontations between the two forces to only 11 in 2007. Within a year, the number of confrontations declined further, reaching its lowest point in 2008. By March 2009, the Sri Lankan Navy complete control over the island’s coastal waters.

According to retired US Marine Corps Lieutenant General , future conflicts are expected to occur in littoral zones, where the sea meets the land. Conventional naval warfare has largely receded into history since the conclusion of the . The growing complexities of sea routes — encompassing geopolitical rivalries and challenges in maritime governance — now shape the dynamics of modern naval engagements, underscoring the need to reassess Sri Lanka’s maritime strategy.

The small-boat doctrine beyond Sri Lanka

Although no direct parallel can be drawn, Ukraine’s recent innovations in confronting overwhelming Russian naval superiority serve as a salient reminder of the Sri Lankan Navy’s small-boat doctrine. Sea Baby, an unmanned surface vessel (USV) by the Ukrainian security services to counter Russian naval advances in the Black Sea, bears a notable resemblance in design to the arrow boats employed by the Sri Lankan Navy. The small-boat concept did not fade following the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war in 2009; rather, its tactical value was recognized within the domestic defense industry.

For instance, in 2016, nine inshore Arrow boats from Sri Lanka under a contract valued at $4.2 million, reaffirming the strategic and commercial value of the small-boat concept — an emblem of the Sri Lankan Navy’s indigenous innovation.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Concept of Small Boats: Sri Lanka’s Contribution to Naval Battles appeared first on 51�Թ�.

However, it seemed that a glimmer of hope finally appeared in this bleak conflict when Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul and Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet signed a on October 26, 2025. This agreement was signed at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in Kuala Lumpur, with US President Donald Trump and Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim in attendance. The joint declaration aimed to pave the way for a lasting, peaceful resolution to the conflict.

Things went off track

Just over two weeks later, on November 11, the Thai authorities the suspension of the peace treaty, after a series of border incidents, including the deaths of several Thai soldiers who had stepped on , which Bangkok claims were recently laid by Cambodian forces.

For its part, Cambodia denied placing any new mines, insisting they were left over from previous clashes. Phnom Penh has expressed serious concern about Thailand’s actions while also confirming its commitment to upholding the terms of the treaty.

At the same time, armed conflicts along the border have increased significantly, changing from small-scale clashes to involving aircraft, rocket systems and strike drones. In the space of just a few days, both sides have suffered heavy casualties, and tens of thousands of civilians have been forced to flee their homes.

The bloody toll: humanitarian crisis unfolding

According to Thailand’s Second Army operational center, the Cambodian side has lost at least since the conflict entered its active phase in December 2025. Thai forces have also reported the destruction of six Cambodian T-55 tanks, a BM-21 multiple rocket launcher and an anti-drone system. The Thai command stresses that these figures are drawn from combat reports and intelligence assessments.

Thai officials have also acknowledged their own losses: the Ministry of Defence has that nine Thai soldiers and four civilians were killed, and that more than 120 people were wounded.

Thai defense representatives say that intensified attacks along the entire border, including in Sa Kaeo province, are being carried out by Cambodian troops, prompting Thailand to take .

The conflict is accompanied by a huge in Thailand’s border areas. The number of evacuees currently housed in temporary shelters has now reached 222,000, with the provinces of Si Sa Ket, Surin and Ubon Ratchathani being the hardest hit. These provinces have seen tens of thousands of displaced people.

Meanwhile, Cambodian authorities have detained more than 7,000 Thai citizens at the Poipet border checkpoint. Cambodia closed the crossing on Friday and Saturday while the armed conflict was ongoing, and officials have refused to open it temporarily for people to return home. 

The head of this idea, former Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, on social media that the closure of land crossings and ports is intended to protect the safety of Thai and Cambodian citizens.

Colonial ghosts: towards a new war?

The current escalation appears to be even more dangerous than the five-day border conflict in , which resulted in over 30 deaths and 150 injuries on both sides. A map from , when Cambodia was under French colonial rule, is the root of the various land claims. Thailand says the map is wrong. This inaccuracy has led to the long-standing territorial dispute that has already displaced hundreds of innocent people from both countries.

The world is waiting to see whether Trump can use his favored economic tactics to prevent the conflict from escalating and encourage Bangkok and Phnom Penh to resume talks. Or will the October peace deal signed under his leadership fail, causing a full-scale war in the heart of Southeast Asia? Either way, the answer will not depend on just one treaty, but rather on ongoing, direct negotiations between Thailand and Cambodia.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Thailand-Cambodia Case: Will the Peace Deal Hold This Time? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Among developments lost amid the busy global agenda is the ongoing process in Türkiye over the past year aimed at ending the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) movement and ultimately achieving a peaceful resolution to the Kurdish issue.

The human cost of the Kurdish conflict

The PKK, founded in 1978 under the leadership of Abdullah Öcalan, launched an armed struggle against the Turkish army to establish an independent Kurdish state. Since its first attack in 1984, thousands of Turkish soldiers and Kurdish militants have lost their lives. The clashes between the PKK and the army have affected not only the warring parties but, more significantly, the civilian population, and it goes without saying that the Kurds have paid the heaviest price.

As a result of the intensified clashes in the , thousands of Kurdish villages were forcibly evacuated and their inhabitants were subjected to compulsory migration to the cities. This event alone has been one of the historically profound developments that changed the rural-urban population balance of the country and shaped the population structure and spatial fabric of today’s metropolitan cities such as Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir.

It is also necessary to mention the thousands of Kurdish citizens who were and spent their lives in jails because of the Kurdish issue. Among them, politicians, writers, artists and academics are, of course, at the forefront. Thousands of Kurds were also forced to leave Turkiye because of this issue and lived in exile, mostly in European countries, with most of them dying without ever returning to their homeland.

It may be considered a secondary consequence, but it should still be noted that the Kurdish issue has been a controversial topic in Turkish social sciences, a taboo that it has been considered in one’s best interest to avoid if possible. This has naturally prevented the subject from receiving the research it deserves in academic circles. Academics who refused to heed this and wrote on the subject have the price. This price has ranged from years of imprisonment to the loss of one’s job.

Ultimately, the greatest price and sorrow have undoubtedly been paid by Turkish and Kurdish mothers and fathers who have buried their young children due to the conflicts. Any attempt to summarize how important and structural the Kurdish issue is for the Turkish state and society would undoubtedly fall short.

The political breakthrough

Efforts to end the armed conflict of the Kurdish movement and resolve this issue within a political framework have been attempted in recent years but have failed. The most recent of these initiatives, launched in 2012 and named the “,” ended in great disappointment in 2015.

Following talks between state officials — primarily from the National Intelligence Organization and Members of Parliament (MPs) from the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) party of Öcalan, who is on Imrali Island — a of understanding was drafted and read out at Dolmabahçe Palace on February 28, 2015. However, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan later stated that no such agreement existed, and the attempt to resolve the Kurdish issue through politics ended in a major fiasco.

Subsequently, investigations were launched against the Kurdish representatives involved in this process, and some were sentenced to prison. At the same time, pressure on other Kurdish actors also increased. The period between 2016 and 2024 was generally a difficult time for Kurdish politicians, intellectuals and activists. 

Then, on October 1, 2024, on the opening day of the new term of the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TBMM), Devlet Bahçeli, leader of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) — considered the main focus of Turkish nationalism — the seats of the People’s Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party), the main representative of the Kurds, and shook hands with them. However, in previous years, the same Bahçeli had for the closure of the HDP, the Kurdish party that preceded DEM.

Naturally, Bahçeli’s gesture surprised almost everyone, but it was interpreted as a sign of goodwill and a desire for peaceful politics from Bahçeli, who is known for his politeness. However, the truly groundbreaking step, perhaps a watershed moment in Turkish history, came on October 22, 2024. In his weekly group speech, Bahçeli essentially for Öcalan to come to Parliament, call for the dissolution of the PKK and then take advantage of the right to hope (which would secure his release from prison). This was truly a revolutionary statement. It was a radical change in rhetoric that shocked everyone, as it opened the door to amnesty for the “terrorist leader” whom Bahçeli had called a “separatist leader” for years.

Everyone familiar with Turkish politics knows that if anyone other than Bahçeli, an absolute Turkish nationalist, had made this call, an investigation would have been launched the very next day on charges of “dividing the country and the nation.” That is precisely why only MHP leader Bahçeli could make this proposal regarding Öcalan, who plays a key role in resolving the Kurdish issue.

Erdoğan welcomed Bahçeli’s bold call, and the isolation imposed on Öcalan was . From that day onward, visits by state officials and representatives of the DEM Party to Öcalan became more frequent. As a result of these meetings, on February 27, 2025, Öcalan for the laying down of arms. This was the first time the PKK had come so close to disarmament, and it was the biggest step taken to date in the process towards a peaceful resolution of the Kurdish issue.

With this call, diplomatic traffic regarding the resolution of the Kurdish issue intensified. This process, dubbed “” by the Turkish government, was referred to as the “Peace Process” by the Kurdish side. Thus, an irreversible path had been embarked upon.

Steps toward peace

While talks between the parties continued, Sırrı Süreyya Önder, a member of the Kurdish delegation who was respected by all sides, on May 3, following a sudden heart attack. His death deeply saddened many people. The Speaker of the Assembly and other party leaders issued condolence messages. Bahçeli Önder’s funeral. His grief was evident.

On May 12, 2025, a development took place that would be considered a turning point in the Kurdish issue: the PKK organization that it had dissolved itself and ended its armed struggle. Following this, Bahçeli issued a in the language preferred by the Kurds, addressing Öcalan as the “founding leader” and thanking him. Bahçeli continued to surprise with his bold steps.

Then, on July 11, 2025, the PKK its weapons in a ceremony attended by a group of 30 militants. This ceremony was the most concrete sign that the PKK issue and the years of conflict had come to an end. Following this development, a commission was established within the Assembly, comprising representatives of the ruling and opposition parties, to draft the relevant bills for the legal reforms necessary to resolve the Kurdish issue. Chaired by Numan Kurtulmuş, Speaker of the Grand National Assembly of Turkiye, the commission held its on August 5, 2025.

The commission began by hearing from civil society organizations, individuals and government officials involved in the issue, and had heard from nearly 100 individuals by December 4. Subsequently, the commission members discussed Imrali Island to meet with Öcalan.

The parties on the commission showed hesitation regarding this visit, which would be highly symbolic in terms of the state publicly acknowledging Öcalan as an interlocutor for the first time. Some shared the view that the public could interpret this as “the state going to Öcalan’s feet”, which could be problematic. (In fact, such an interpretation is technically impossible, because Öcalan has been imprisoned since 1999. Therefore, meeting with a prisoner is only possible by visiting him in prison. Otherwise, this person would have to be released from prison.) 

The ruling party was also hesitant about this, but Bahçeli once again paved the way. On November 18, he , “If the parliamentary commission does not agree to this visit, if everyone insists on playing the three monkeys, I will openly say that I will take three friends with me, I will not hesitate or shy away from going to Imrali with our own resources, I will not refrain from sitting face to face [with Öcalan] around a table.” Erdoğan endorsed this statement, and, finally, the committee decided that the representatives selected to meet with Öcalan would travel to Imrali.

However, the opposition parties in the commission (except for the DEM Party) — primarily the main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) — send representatives to the Imrali delegation. It should also be noted that there was hesitation about whether the CHP would participate in the commission during its formation.

In a written statement explaining its decision not to send a representative to the delegation meeting with Öcalan, the CHP cited repressive policies such as the ongoing detention of mayors and the case seeking to close the CHP. It was also noted that the meeting could easily be conducted online. The CHP’s decision not to send a representative to the meeting with Öcalan is of critical importance because, as a result of being the main opposition party, it is the most likely to come to power in the event of a change of government in Turkiye following the elections. Therefore, it serves as a precursor to the extent to which it can take bold steps towards resolving the Kurdish issue and produce realistic policies on this matter.

It is clear that a peace process that excludes Öcalan is not possible, and no new leader to replace him has yet emerged among the Kurds. Therefore, it is impossible to resolve the PKK issue and build peace while still referring to him as the “terrorist leader.” For this reason, Bahçeli has changed his rhetoric and prefers to use the title “founding leader” for Öcalan. Meanwhile, the CHP stated that it would continue to participate in the commission and contribute to the process. On October 26, the PKK in a statement made from Kandil that it had withdrawn all its forces from Turkiye.

What comes next

The developments recorded regarding the resolution of the issue, which has been a century-old problem for Turkiye and involves the struggle for Kurdish identity and the constitutional recognition of Kurds, are as follows:

First and foremost, it is necessary to discuss at length Bahçeli — who is described as Turkiye’s Frederik Willem de Klerk (former president of South Africa who worked with Nelson Mandela to end Apartheid), who initiated this process and who holds the title of Başbuğ as the leader of Turkish nationalism — and to examine why he may have resorted to such radical rhetoric and policy changes.

Knowing which potential legal regulations and changes are likely to be essential is also important, as is understanding the parties that oppose this process and their main arguments. Finally, we must examine how the public approaches this process and, of course, the possible developments and probabilities. However, that is best left for another day.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post A New Peace Process in the Kurdish Question in Turkiye appeared first on 51�Թ�.

A recent wave of at sea, the directing of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to launch inside Venezuela, the surge of into the Caribbean, the reopening of a long-shuttered in Puerto Rico and the deployment of the aircraft carrier in the region represent striking but not surprising developments. These are little more than the latest expression of an ideological project through which Washington has long sought to shape the hemisphere in ways that would entrench US power further and protect the profits of Western multinationals.

That formal project dates back to at least the 1823 , when the US unilaterally claimed Latin America as its exclusive sphere of influence. Its revival today is unmistakable and . As Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth , echoing the language of that two-century-old policy, “The Western Hemisphere is America’s neighborhood, and we will protect it.”

The results of that doctrine have long been : immense profits for the few and violence, political upheaval, social dislocation and economic devastation for the many. While Washington’s imperial desires in the hemisphere have long been met by movements challenging US dominance, these have repeatedly been forced back into the subordinate position assigned to them in a global capitalist order designed to benefit their not-so “good neighbor.”

It’s no accident that, by the mid-1970s, Latin America had been transformed into a hemisphere dominated by US-backed right-wing authoritarian regimes. Entire regions like the became laboratories for repression, as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay formed a coordinated bloc of military juntas. With direct support from Washington, those regimes oversaw what came to be known as , establishing a transnational network of state terror. Its consequences were catastrophic: 50,000 killed, tens of thousands “disappeared” and hundreds of thousands tortured and imprisoned for the so-called crime of harboring real or perceived leftist sympathies.

During that earlier period, Venezuela had been largely spared the brutal excesses of direct US interventionism in the region (due in part to the repressive rule of successive US-supported strongmen and ). That changed in 1998, when , far more popular predecessor, became president and pursued policies of and aimed at ensuring the nation’s vast oil reserves (the in the world) served Venezuelans rather than being siphoned off to enrich foreign corporations. From then on, Venezuela became the of Washington’s efforts to undermine, discipline and ultimately neutralize “troublesome” progressive governments across Latin America.

To fully understand Washington’s current warpath in the region, it’s necessary to revisit earlier episodes in which the US intervened, violently and antidemocratically, to shape the political destinies of countries in the hemisphere. Three cases are especially instructive: Cuba, Guatemala and Chile. Together, they illuminate the long arc of US imperialism in Latin America and clarify the dangers of the present confrontation.

The rise of Plattismo in Cuba

Cuba had long been a crown jewel in Washington’s imperial imagination. By 1823, American political elites were already casting the island as to the future of the United States. President John Quincy Adams, for instance, , then a Spanish colony, as “indispensable” to the country’s “political and commercial interests.” He ominously that, should the island be “forcibly disjointed from its own unnatural connection with Spain and incapable of self-support,” it could “gravitate only towards the North American Union.” Thomas Jefferson that the possession of Cuba was “exactly what is wanting to round out our power as a nation.” In that spirit, during the 1840s and 1850s, Presidents James K. Polk and Franklin Pierce sought to from Spain, overtures that were repeatedly rejected.

Those efforts unfolded during a period of rapid US territorial expansionism, marking a time when Washington regarded continental conquest as both a “” and a political and economic imperative. When ostensibly legal mechanisms like could be invoked, they were embraced. When military force offered a more expedient path to territorial acquisition, as with the that stripped Mexico of half its territory and delivered what became the American Southwest to US control in 1848, it was undertaken with little hesitation.

The opportunity to pursue longstanding ambitions in Cuba and inaugurate the US as an overseas empire arrived with the of 1898. In that conflict, Washington intervened in anticolonial uprisings from Puerto Rico to the Philippines, not to champion genuine liberation but to ensure that any subsequent “independence” would be to US strategic and economic interests. What emerged was a political order deliberately engineered to keep Cuba firmly tethered to the priorities and power of the United States.

That would be codified in the 1901 , which effectively nullified Washington’s earlier assurances of Cuban sovereignty and granted Washington the right to establish military bases (including ), substantial control over the Cuban treasury and the ability to intervene whenever the US deemed it to safeguard its arbitrarily defined notion of what constituted “Cuban independence” or to defend “life, property, and individual liberty.”

In practice, Cuba emerged from the war as a dependent protectorate, not a sovereign nation. That model was soon codified for the entire hemisphere with the to the Monroe Doctrine issued in 1904, which granted the United States a self-appointed mandate to police the region to maintain “order.”

In Cuba, that arrangement would serve Washington’s interests for decades. By 1959, on the eve of the Cuban Revolution, US 90% of the island’s trade, 90% of its public services, 75% of its arable land and 40% of its sugar industry. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Cubans remained landless, disenfranchised and mired in poverty.

By breeding staggering inequality, Washington’s imperialism rendered Cuba ripe for revolution. In 1959, following years in exile, Fidel Castro to the island to overwhelmingly popular support, having launched an armed struggle after attempting to run in the 1952 elections that the Washington-backed Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista . Rather than confront the policies that had produced the revolution, US officials moved to make an example of Castro, waging an to undermine his revolutionary government and punish the population whose support had made his ascent possible.

Washington pursued everything from ill-fated invasions to assassinations, plots that, in October 1962, brought the world to the brink of a . It also imposed a punishing designed to choke the island’s economy, render socialism a stillbirth and deter other nations from challenging US hegemony. Those efforts foreclosed the possibility of constructive engagement, which Castro had initially he was open to, pushing Cuba decisively into the Soviet orbit, and creating the very outcome Washington claimed it had sought to avoid.

The fall of Guatemala

did not return to Cuba alone. He arrived alongside the Argentinian Ernesto , who would become a key ideologue of the revolution, bringing with him a commitment to constructing a global, anti-imperialist movement. The two first met in in Mexico City, where Castro was organizing in exile, and Guevara had resettled after working as a doctor in Guatemala, a country he had entered to support the democratic spring of President .

The democratic experiment in Guatemala was abruptly and violently extinguished in 1954, when a toppled Árbenz. From that experience, Guevara carried with him an indelible lesson about the reach of US power and Washington’s willingness to deploy force in defense of corporate interests, along with the profoundly antidemocratic and destabilizing consequences of US intervention across the hemisphere.

That coup in Guatemala was carried out in service to that country’s real center of authority, the Boston-based . Founded in 1899, United Fruit consolidated its foothold there through a series of preferential corporate arrangements, as successive strongmen ceded vast tracts of land and critical infrastructure to the company in exchange for personal enrichment. In the process, Guatemala was transformed into the archetypal “.”

United Fruit came to Guatemala’s agricultural and industrial sectors, transforming itself into one of the most profitable corporations in the world. It secured extraordinary returns through its monopoly power, wage suppression and the criminalization of labor organizing. Its influence extended into the of Washington. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had represented United Fruit as a senior partner at the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, and his brother, CIA director Allen Dulles, had previously served on that company’s board.

Árbenz regarded United Fruit not just as a threat to Guatemala’s sovereignty but also as an engine of injustice. In a country where 2% of the landholders controlled of all arable land (more than half controlled by United Fruit), much of it left deliberately fallow, he sought to challenge a system that denied millions of peasants access to the land on which their survival depended. His land reform applied only to uncultivated land. The government proposed purchasing idle tracts at their declared tax value (based on the company’s own assessments). Yet because United Fruit had its vast land holdings to evade taxes, the company refused.

Árbenz’s policies, driven by the fact that he was a nationalist (not a communist), were committed to dismantling Guatemala’s imperial dependency. His objective was to , as he put it, “Guatemala from a country bound by a predominantly feudal economy into a modern capitalist state, and to make this transformation in a way that will raise the standard of living of the great mass of our people to the highest level.” Yet, in the ideologically charged climate of the early Cold War years, such New Deal-style reforms were recast by Washington as incontrovertible proof that a “” was taking root in Central America.

By 1954, US officials insisted that they had “no choice” but to intervene to prevent the country from “falling” to communism. The relied on an orchestrated propaganda campaign, the financing of a mercenary army and the aerial bombardment of Guatemala City. The combined pressure of all of that coerced Árbenz into resigning. In his , he condemned the attacks “as an act of vengeance by the United Fruit Company” and stepped down in the hope, quickly dashed, that his departure might preserve his reforms.

Power would soon be transferred to the military regime of , while US President Dwight D. Eisenhower that “the people of Guatemala, in a magnificent effort, have liberated themselves from the shackles of international Communist direction.” In reality, United Fruit had expanded its influence, while the country descended into decades of state terror. The that followed claimed more than 200,000 lives, including a against the indigenous Ixil Maya people, carried out with direct .

The crushing of Chilean socialism

If Guatemala exposed Washington’s readiness to destroy a modest social democracy in the name of communism and in defense of corporate power, Chile demonstrated the full, violent maturation of unrepentant Cold War interventionism. When the socialist physician won the presidency in 1970 in a democratic election, Washington immediately went on the , launching a covert, sustained campaign to strangle his government before it could succeed.

Allende sought to expand social welfare and the economy. His program called for the nationalization of strategic industries, the expansion of healthcare and education, the strengthening of organized labor and the dismantling of entrenched monopolistic landholdings. Those initiatives drew support from a broad, multiparty alliance rooted in Chile’s peasants as well as its working and middle classes. Above all, aimed to reclaim the nation’s mineral wealth from foreign capital, especially the US-based copper giant , whose staggering profits bore few meaningful returns for the Chilean population.

President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger found that intolerable and quickly came to regard Allende not just as a symbolic but a to US power in the region. After all, a successful socialist state achieved through the ballot box risked demonstrating that another political and economic path was indeed possible.

What followed was a coordinated campaign of economic, social and political destabilization. The CIA funneled millions to Chile’s opposition parties, business associations and media outlets. It financed strikes and disruptions designed to create and weaponize scarcity, to (in ) “make the economy scream” and erode confidence in Allende’s Popular Unity government. US officials also cultivated ties with reactionary factions in the Chilean military, encouraging coup plots and ultimately directly supporting the of Allende on September 11, 1973.

What emerged was one of the bloodiest dictatorships in the hemisphere in the twentieth century. General regime would carry out widespread torture, disappearances and extrajudicial killings, while US-trained economists radical neoliberal policies (similar to the now being implemented by Javier Milei in Argentina with the help of a US President Donald Trump ) that dismantled social protections and opened Chile’s economy to foreign capital.

Hands off Venezuela

In every instance where the United States intervened in Latin America, leaving tens of thousands dead and entire , it was never really communism that Washington feared. What alarmed policymakers and the corporate interests they served was the prospect that nations in the hemisphere might escape the economic architecture of US dominance.

When Hugo Chávez completed the nationalization of Venezuela’s oil sector in , he followed a long and perilous trajectory established by regional leaders who dared to confront US power. In doing so, they committed what Washington considered the “cardinal sin” of asserting sovereign control over national resources within a hemisphere it had long treated as its strategic preserve. These leaders demonstrated, however briefly, that it was possible to stand up to the United States, but that such defiance would ultimately be met with overwhelming force.

Independent powers in this hemisphere going their own way were the threat that Washington and Wall Street could never tolerate. It’s the same reason the United States is once again maneuvering toward open conflict in Venezuela. To proceed down such a path will, of course, mean reenacting some of the most catastrophic chapters of US foreign policy. The lesson of such imperial adventurism in Latin America is unmistakable. When Washington interferes in other nations, the outcome is never stability or democracy but their absolute negation.

[ first published this piece.]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Trump Corollary: US Imperialism in Latin America From the Monroe Doctrine to Maduro appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Japan’s warning and the weight of history

Atul opens by going through the facts. Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi declared in Parliament that an attack on Taiwan by China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) would create “a situation threatening Japan’s survival”. This public statement confirmed what Japanese diplomats, intelligence officials and military officers had previously discussed only in private: Japan could intervene militarily if China were to invade Taiwan, exercising “collective self-defense.”

Why is this important? Atul dives into the deeper history fueling this contemporary crisis: Japan ruled Taiwan from 1895 to 1945, an often-overlooked fact. China views Japan’s 1895 takeover of Taiwan as the first step in Japanese imperial expansion, an act Beijing has neither forgiven nor forgotten. In the 19th century, Japan decided that it needed to industrialize, modernize and imperialize. The “sudden expansion doctrine” aimed to transform Taiwan into a “showpiece model colony”.

Although the Japanese administration implemented some improvements in the economy, public works and industry, it also imposed a cultural “Japaneseization” on the island, which is what the Chinese, being so proud, deeply resent. Furthermore, Chinese citizens retain painful memories of the long Japanese occupation of the mainland, including events like the Rape of Nanjing.

In light of this history, Beijing has demanded that Japan “fully repent for its war crimes” and “stop playing with fire on the Taiwan question”. This has resulted in a full-blown diplomatic crisis. China suspects that Japan is going to remilitarize. The latest example of this is Japan’s plans to deploy missiles on an island near Taiwan — a plan that China has criticized.

Rising Chinese nationalism, economic repercussions and military tensions

Emotions on Chinese social media are running high. Furthermore, there has been a massive rise in Chinese nationalism over the past few years. These feelings now go beyond rhetoric and have turned into action. China has suspended visa processing for Japanese travelers and issued warnings to its own citizens against visiting Japan. Note that Chinese tourism is a major source of revenue for Japanese airlines, hotels and retail stores. Japan will “obviously suffer” as a result of China’s actions.

The economic impact of this crisis is significant. According to the Japanese Ministry of Finance, the country’s net foreign direct investment into mainland China plummeted by 30.6% in the first three quarters of 2025, reaching the lowest level recorded since the data series began. Furthermore, only a fraction (10%) of 8,300 Japanese firms surveyed by the Japanese Chamber of Commerce in China indicated plans to increase investments.

Japan has also warned its citizens in China about their safety as the crisis deepens. Additionally, Japan has scrambled aircraft after detecting a suspected Chinese drone near its southern island of Yonaguni, which is close to Taiwan.

Why do we have a crisis and what is Japan doing?

At the heart of this dispute are two contrasting geopolitical philosophies. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) considers the “one China policy” its “holy grail.” Beijing views any Taiwanese declaration of independence or outside support for that independence as a direct threat to China’s sovereignty. Atul points out that this could all also be a “cynical play for popularity” because, at the end of the day, the CCP is “no longer communist” in the traditional way. The CCP has now become a repository of Chinese nationalism and wants to return the Middle Kingdom to its former glory. As a result, the rhetoric, both from the regime and within Chinese social media, directed at Takaichi has been “extremely aggressive.”

Conversely, Japan views Taiwan as a de facto independent state. Tokyo is increasingly nervous about China as an “aggressive revisionist power.” Japan views a Chinese threat to Taiwan as a risk to its own national security. Should China gain control of Taiwan, many islands claimed and owned by Japan would fall within threatening proximity of the PLA and its Navy.

In 2020, a Chinese and Russian fleet circumnavigated Honshu Island, which Atul and Glenn viewed at the time as a “wakeup call for Japan”. Atul makes the case that this circumnavigation was the “equivalent of someone waving a gun and walking outside your front door.”

To counter the threat of an assertive China and an aggressive Russia, the Japanese have increased their defense spending and have abandoned self-imposed restraint. However, this increase has occurred during a period when the yen has depreciated substantially against the dollar, meaning that a higher budget does not translate into more US arms. Demography is also a constraint. Despite these barriers to military development, a new determination to invest in defense and prepare against external threats is evident. Tokyo also recognizes that it can no longer rely on the US, so it must “beef up.”

The Japanese are also tired of living with post-World War II guilt. They believe that 80 years of saying “sorry” is enough. The Chinese would claim otherwise. Many Japanese still visit Yasukuni, a very controversial shrine that honors some war criminals. The Japanese do not think this is a big deal. They believe that they have recognized and atoned for their war guilt. Today, the Chinese have emerged as the provocateurs and aggressors. Many Japanese believe that if they do not act against China now, then Japan’s security and sovereignty will be at risk.

Nationalism, a political instrument for the CCP, and a new regional order

Glenn argues that Chinese nationalism should be viewed as a “spigot” that is controlled by the CCP, or really, Xi Jinping. The CCP consciously utilizes nationalism to turn up the pressure when it seeks to exert international influence — particularly on Japan in this instance — or to rally domestic support for the position of the Beijing government. However, this tool carries the inherent risk of becoming uncontrollable. The “tub” into which this nationalist “liquid” pours has no emergency “drain pipe,” and it can overflow.

Atul points out that, despite this official rhetoric, many educated Chinese individuals, and even officials, privately express admiration for the Japanese, citing their organization, culture and courtesy. The Japanese will also similarly say nice things about the Chinese. The economic relationship between the two countries is symbiotic.

Glenn explains that Takaichi is a disciple of the late Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, and that her comments regarding China are no different from what Abe said, or what she herself has said for many years. The Chinese have chosen to make this a bigger issue because they fear increasing Japanese defense capabilities. Tokyo realizes that Japan can no longer rely on the US. Therefore, Japan is increasing its defense capabilities and views Chinese actions as “dramatically significant to the sovereignty, wealth and independence of Japan.” 

The CCP’s interpretation of its sovereignty extends 1,500 kilometers and more from its coast into the shores of the Philippines and other states in the South China and East China Seas. Notably, Chinese nationalists (who moved to Taiwan after losing the civil war in 1949) had an 11-dash line (a visual representation of China’s claims), which the CCP reduced to a nine-dash line, but has recently increased to a ten-dash line. Expansionist Chinese claims are not just a CCP problem; they stem from Chinese nationalism. 

While China denounces Japan’s increasing defense budget and rising militarism, it is fair to say that Tokyo is largely reacting to Beijing’s aggressive nationalism and challenges to the status quo. The Xi-led CCP is actively moving to resolve the ambiguity surrounding Taiwan, with the clear intent to absorb the island. This includes dramatically increasing military activity, such as launching missiles, conducting exercises with the world’s largest navy and escalating the number of overflights around Taiwan, and also actions on the Pacific side of Japan.

Japanese nationalism is also on the rise. Takaichi wants a stronger Japan and is more up for a fight with China than her predecessors. She is a “different kettle of fish” than her previous leaders. She is, after all, the first female prime minister of Japan and a self-proclaimed Thatcherite nationalist. Regardless of whether Takaichi is really different from her predecessors, we are certainly seeing a “more assertive Japan in a more dangerous environment.” China-Japan tensions are on the rise, and conflict is a real possibility.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article/video are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post FO° Exclusive: Tensions Over Taiwan Push China and Japan Closer to Conflict appeared first on 51�Թ�.

It used to be common, even while watching the evening news, to hear of someone in the public eye with a claim to angelic or saintly behavior. It didn’t have to be religious. There was a kind of civic culture that had taken over from the ecclesiastic order that had reigned in former times.

These secular saints might have entered the news cycle or our space of cultural consciousness through acts deemed to serve the local community, mankind in general, sickly children or just their own family. They might even be incarnated as cartoon characters, as different as “Popeye the Sailor Man,” a working-class hero, or global guardian Superman, aka reporter Clark Kent (also a working man). They embodied and defended shared ideals in the community. In the modesty of their daily lives, they put on a display of unquestioned though largely banal virtue.

In some sense, both the fictional and real heroes of the past — Helen Keller, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. — perpetuated an essentially religious tradition that still persisted in the late 20th century but has clearly been surpassed today.

Whereas most people are in some sense aware of the progressive secularization of Western nations, not everyone today, especially among the younger generations, realizes how quickly that transformation has occurred and how deep its effects have been. Those of us old enough to remember what should now be called “the former world order” should be able to understand that what we’re talking about is the wholesale remodelling of our shared value system.

A time for comparative historical ethics

Just think of the choices and even the everyday decisions people routinely made 50 years ago and compare them with today’s behavioral norms. There are acts we see today, in the age of US President Donald Trump, that people in a position of power half a century ago would have hesitated to engage in. We entertain ideas today that no one would have dared express in former times due to their fear of being perceived as too bold, pushy or unjustifiably audacious.

At the top of the list of formerly unperformable acts are ones such as overtly taking advantage of someone else’s weakness. Covert acts could pass muster, provided they took place within the framework of institutional norms. That might, for example, include overthrowing a democratically elected leader in a smaller country or working out deals to extract another population’s wealth.

Today, people in the same elite social category are more likely to feel ashamed of failing to be adequately assertive. They will be blamed for not doing “what’s natural.” We now understand that human nature includes not just the urge to grab, control and exploit whatever is “there for the taking,” it can and should include a complementary virtue: the capacity to act. We have finally overcome the Hamlet syndrome!

The idea of “what’s natural” has a long, complicated history in the West. Many acts we today consider “gross” were once considered natural. For centuries, Europeans deemed it natural to eat with one’s hands, as Indians do to this day. The same Westerners who thrive on handheld sandwiches feel disgust at the idea of seizing cooked food from a plate with their fingers. In his book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), Sigmund Freud expressed his indignation at discovering a staircase that had no spittoons.

Religiously derived ethics

Established religious morals and the “rule of law” have one thing in common: people spend an inordinate amount of time finding ways to contravene them, even while believing to variable degrees that they are the key to civilized life and social stability.

Apart from fanatical Puritans or dedicated students of Emmanuel Kant’s ethics, few people in the lands formerly known as Christendom have sought to align their behavior rigorously with Yahweh’s celebrated gift to Moses: the Ten Commandments. Until very recently, all educated heirs of the European tradition were keenly aware of the prominent place the Ten Commandments held in their culture. Obeyed or ignored, they served as a general reference for idealized social interaction. The Decalogue defined a kind of abstract ideal, or at the very least a vague set of guidelines concerning acceptable, which is to say normal social relations.

No one — not even the Catholic church — expected the Ten Commandments to rule an average citizen’s everyday behavior. Why, after all, install a confessional in churches and assign hours to the priests if people never have anything to confess? Catholic saints — those who withstand and survive the Devil’s Advocate’s inspection — emerge as an exclusive community of people who elevate themselves above the rest of humanity by respecting the spirit as well as the letter of the law. However committed they are to a virtuous life, they confess. One famous saint (Saint Augustine) published a book titled , a pillar of Western culture. Any self-respecting Devil’s Advocate would cast serious doubt on the canonization dossier of a proposed saint who never confessed.  

Honored as much in the breach as in the observance, the Ten Commandments nevertheless have long constituted a kind of backdrop framing for our social order. Its famous locution, “Thou shalt not,” echoed across centuries, inducing an awareness of something that couldn’t be ignored even when not obeyed. It defined a specific area of moral agency in the human psyche that tested our ability to avoid succumbing to temptation. Not because temptation wasn’t worth occasionally succumbing to, but because it represented something everyone seemed to agree we’d rather not talk about in public. Moral decision-making is always fraught with ambiguity. It’s the uncertainty that keeps our awareness of the stakes alive.

Taking stock of the change

US culture, in particular, has practiced a 180° on that one. In our media, both mainstream and social, we now delight in narratives that recount how boldly succumbing to various temptations has become some people’s pathway to success. How many corporate conquerors today aren’t pleased and gleamingly proud to recount in private how cleverly they maneuvered to crush competition or found devious ways to circumvent unnecessary laws?

In a column last year, I cited the inspiring professional advice former Google CEO Eric Schmidt shared with an audience of young Silicon Valley engineers:

“Make me a copy of TikTok, steal all the users, steal all the music, put my preferences in it, produce this program in the next 30 seconds, release it, and in one hour, if it’s not viral, do something different along the same lines.”

He followed this up by explaining:

“If it took off, you’d hire a whole bunch of lawyers to clean up the mess. But if nobody uses your product, it doesn’t matter that you stole all the content.”

I doubt that even the boldest of entrepreneurs 50 or 60 years ago would have been tempted to think such a thing, but even if they had, they would never have expressed it. “Thou shalt not steal” meant not only that you probably wouldn’t get away with it, but that if you were mad enough to try it and succeed, you would almost certainly become a social pariah.

We live today in a different world, one that has elevated success, usually measured by wealth, to the top of our hierarchy of values. We no longer formulate values as necessary constraints. Instead of the negativity of “thou shalt not,” we now frame our values in a very positive way, presenting them as goals to pursue on the road to success rather than rules to respect or behaviors to work out interactively with others.

The Calvinists who played a major role in shaping Western culture between the 16th and 19th centuries saw success as an indicator of virtue. Even if excessive wealth and resounding success were achieved through manifestly unvirtuous means — genocide and slavery, for example — the emerging capitalist-colonial culture had devised ways of repressing thoughts about cause and effect. Even if there were the occasional moments of clarity, whether or not accompanied by pangs of guilt, one would never be vain enough to broadcast that knowledge the way Schmidt did.

Another example, this time from the political realm, highlights the radicality of the transformation. Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in April 2019, coolly to a group of students in Texas his own conversion (something of the opposite of Augustine’s) in these words:

“When I was a cadet, what’s the cadet motto at West Point? He will not lie, cheat or steal, or tolerate those who do. I was the CIA director; we lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s like we had entire training courses.”

Whether it’s commercial, financial or political, success turns out to be an extremely convenient “supreme value.” It functions as a common denominator, justifying extreme virtue as well as abject criminality. Saints can be successful at what they do, but so can sinners, and the latter often more efficiently. Success can be many things, ranging from a singer who sells multiple gold records to an entrepreneur who launches a new, innovative gadget that brings some form of unanticipated and often unnecessary convenience to our lives. But even more impressively, it can occur thanks to the skills of a genius who has mastered the art of building, managing and enforcing a predatory monopoly that guarantees its founders will become multibillionaires. That wealth then provides them with the clout required to influence every important political decision in any of our democracies. Success breeds success.

At this moment of history when the leaders of Christendom (i.e. Europe) are jumping through hoops as they seek literally — according to Belgian bankers and the nation’s prime minister — to steal hundreds of billions of dollars of in the name of assisting a victim of aggression and prolonging a brutal war in which other people are dying, it’s definitely time to ponder how our scale of civilizational values has evolved in the recent past and continues to evolve towards an uncertain future. 

*[The Devil’s Advocate pursues the tradition 51�Թ� began in 2017 with the launch of our “Devil’s Dictionary.” It does so with a slight change of focus, moving from language itself – political and journalistic rhetoric – to the substantial issues in the news. Read more of The 51�Թ� Devil’s Dictionary. The news we always consume deserves being seen from an outsider’s point of view. And who could be more outside official discourse than Old Nick himself?]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post In the Marketplace for Saints, the Pickings are Slim appeared first on 51�Թ�.

This seemingly contradicts the narrative that Bitcoin, as digital gold, will outperform spot-traded gold in the long run. After all, since the launch of spot-traded Bitcoin Exchange-Traded Fund (ETFs) in early 2024, they have outpaced gold’s capital inflows on multiple occasions.

As of September, there is $166 billion worth of BTC in ETFs, with gold ETFs holding more than double that at around $407 billion. But the question is, does the accelerated interest in the ancient metal constitute a short-term macro phenomenon, or a failure of Bitcoin’s long-term store-of-value thesis?

Why is gold up again?

Many analysts attribute gold’s rise to the Federal Reserve, the world’s de facto central bank that maintains the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. But that is only a part of the picture. The underlying driver of gold’s price is actually the prevailing political system across the world: democracy. Democracies have embedded social contracts in which governments provide for their citizens’ welfare to win elections. In that pursuit, the feasibility of providing welfare becomes a distant concern. Instead, such a system creates an inescapable incentive structure for persistent fiscal spending on social programs, healthcare, defense and infrastructure. 

By default, political candidates who fail to ratchet such spending become less competitive than those who promise the world. The United States Government (USG) spent in fiscal 2024, of which 54% ended in welfare spending and 13% on national defense. In turn, the nation’s economic model became debt-powered.

To put it differently, the US has found itself in a permanent state of budgetary deficits. After President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (Public Law 119-21), the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) expects a cumulative deficit to $4.1 trillion over a ten-year period. For fiscal 2025 alone, CBO forecasts a budgetary deficit of $1.9 trillion.

By 2033, it is expected that the Social Security Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) will be insolvent. This may seem bleak, but USG is in a unique position. As a hegemonic empire that transcends mere nations, the USG is not constrained in the same way as an ordinary nation-state.

Namely, it issues the world’s primary reserve currency, the dollar, giving it an exorbitant privilege: the ability to finance deficits by exporting dollars abroad. This ensures that demand for US debt remains robust, at least until confidence in the dollar erodes.

Accordingly, this dynamic runs as follows:

• Mass democracy institutionalizes spending irrespective of fiscal realities.
• Politicians, incentivized by elections, rely on the Federal Reserve to perpetuate a debt-driven economy.
• This process ensures the structural debasement of the dollar.
• Yet, US hegemonic power cushions the fallout, allowing the cycle to persist far longer than it otherwise could.

Even more ominously, this dynamic incentivizes politicians to import an entire new voting bloc in the hopes of rapidly expanding the population to keep servicing the ballooning debt. But now that the US labor market is weak, having been recently revised downward by a record-breaking , the Fed’s interest rate-cutting regime is a near-certainty.

That’s because the Fed needs to stimulate the economy by making capital cheaper. However, lower interest rates reduce the of Treasuries as dollar-denominated assets. Consequently, investors are starting to shift out of cash and bonds into assets that hold value when real yields drop, such as gold.

Investors are increasingly seeking value in gold

When the USG runs budget deficits persistently, spending more than it collects in taxes, it issues Treasury bonds as a way to borrow money. In turn, it has to enormous interest on the debt, having exceeded $1 trillion in Q4 2023.

In fact, for federal spending in fiscal 2025, net interest payments national defense expenditures, at 14% vs 13% of the total budget, respectively. This means that the nation’s economy is drastically losing its capacity for productive growth, as the bulk of capital is drained into debt obligations. Yet, those debt obligations are critical to maintain as they form the basis for investors’ confidence in the dollar and the buying of debt as Treasuries.��

Now, what happens when deficits balloon, but there aren’t enough buyers at reasonable interest rates? At this time, the Federal Reserve steps in by purchasing Treasuries directly or indirectly, thus expanding its balance sheet.

Consequently, as the monetary base is expanded, people can buy less with the dollar than they could previously. Commonly, this is referred to as inflation, which is effectively another informal tax as a consequence of government spending. 

Ultimately, even with US hegemonic status, the dollar steadily erodes as a reliable measure of value. Its role as the global anchor weakens, not through sudden collapse, but through the slow grind of inflation, a hidden levy on all dollar holders. This is precisely why investors turn to gold: it stands outside the cycle of deficits, debt monetization and political expediency. Anticipating this unsustainable trajectory, other central banks keep accumulating gold. We are now at a tipping point at which foreign central banks are about to more gold than Treasuries.

Of course, given the scarcity of gold in the Earth’s crust, at around , it stands to reason that continued central bank accumulation will keep driving its price higher. Unlike the dollar, whose supply can be conjured at will by Federal Reserve bureaucrats tapping a keyboard, the supply of gold is bound by geology, and there is no alchemy to expand it. This immutable scarcity is what underpins gold’s value, and it is precisely this logic that Bitcoin was designed to replicate in the digital realm.

Bitcoin’s counterweight in a debt-soaked world

Gold enjoys a legacy momentum. The precious metal has served as money for thousands of years and permeates every nook and cranny of monetary storytelling. This is in stark contrast with the novel Bitcoin, barely 16 years old, still struggling against perception and regulatory headwinds. Moreover, while retail investors do buy gold, its price is largely driven by institutional actors such as central banks, sovereign wealth funds, commercial banks, asset managers and hedge funds.

Conversely, Bitcoin started bottom up from enthusiastic cypherpunks with libertarian leanings:

• They kept mining and transacting BTC when it had little or no fiat value.��
• They kept evangelizing through forums, conferences, and writings.
• They pushed the BTC narrative as a true monetary alternative after the 2008 financial crisis.

This cypherpunk-libertarian vanguard erected an entire digital economy, as Bitcoin birthed the altcoin sector. Suffice to say, their success has proven extraordinary, as evidenced by Bitcoin’s yearly returns.

However, as Bitcoin’s price kept rising, especially after the $100k milestone, a psychological barrier was erected for new investors. With a market cap of $2.28 trillion, it is no longer easy to move its price, which means outsized gains are no longer likely compared to prior years. Considering that gold enjoys greater institutional engagement compared to Bitcoin, it is easy to see why gold would outperform Bitcoin this year. Or would it?

There are multiple fundamental advantages of Bitcoin over gold:

• Bitcoin is both natively digital and physical, given that its proof-of-work network is secured by real assets: energy and mining machines.
• Bitcoin’s 21 million fixed scarcity is greater than gold’s pseudo-scarcity, with new veins discovered almost on a monthly basis.
• Bitcoin lacks the physical bottlenecks of mining and storage.
• As natively digital, it can be used more effectively as an anchor for the digital economy and across various blockchain networks.

Case in point, publicly traded companies have accumulated over BTC as part of their treasuries. Bitcoin not only serves as an inflation hedge but also as a way to expand companies’ financial flexibility, typically as collateral to raise funds.��

So far, MicroStrategy (MSTR) has been the most successful in this effort, but this is likely only the beginning of the trend. In the long run, even if retail investors begin to favor cheaper altcoins, BTC’s yearly gains are likely to outpace gold because its market cap is only ~9.2% of gold’s.

Moreover, the vast majority of altcoins tend to lose value as new ones enter the market, whereas institutional Bitcoin inflows — beyond spot-traded ETFs — are only starting to accelerate, signaling a structural shift in adoption. 

The bottom line

While gold’s 2025 outperformance may grab headlines, it largely reflects short-term institutional positioning, macro-driven flight from fiat debasement and the legacy momentum of a millennia-old asset.

Bitcoin, by contrast, embodies the long-term principles that gold can only approximate: absolute scarcity, borderless digital utility and an immutable decentralized ledger immune to political cycles. Moreover, its adoption is no longer limited to cypherpunks. Corporations and sophisticated investors increasingly recognize Bitcoin as both a treasury asset and a strategic hedge against fiat debasement.

Ultimately, as the digital economy expands and the limitations of gold’s physical supply become more apparent, Bitcoin’s relatively small market cap is not just to match, but eventually surpass gold’s long-term store-of-value performance as the more enduring form of money.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Why is Gold Outperforming Bitcoin in 2025? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Seeing humanity in everyday Hiroshima

When you walk the streets of Hiroshima, you’ll never be able to guess if the grandmother with a poor gait passing you was the sole survivor of her family in the bombings, or if the gray-haired man was in utero during the bombings. The middle schooler in uniform may come from a family that experienced discrimination due to their exposure to A-bombs, and her mother may harbor resentment toward the Japanese government for never acknowledging the pain inflicted on Koreans who were to serve a nation that denies their dignity.

Experiencing the ordinary in an extremely unordinary city shifts your perspective on the history of human atrocity. What we so often gloss over in history books and mass media, occurring 80 short years ago, appears in the rhythm of daily living with an overwhelming mundanity and a horrifying profundity.

When I see the habits and mannerisms of my own grandparents in these brave, merciful (survivors of the atomic bomb), the unconscious rationalizations that help me justify the bombings as an American citizen are overridden by the power of human connection and compassion. Citizens are treated like pawns in any militaristic society, sacrificed in atrocious ways, often not for their country’s common good, but the corrupted aims of their leaders and generals.

Leaning into the humanitarian within me

What Hiroshima taught me is to lean into the humanitarian within me and implore my friends, family and community to do the same. As an aspiring public servant and diplomat from the United States, I wish to remember the human component in all of my professional endeavors. This task is easier said than done.

Campaigning, political compromises, utilitarian decision-making and diplomatic negotiations can often trivialize the multitude of human stories that even the most minute policy outcomes will impact. In this cynical world we live in, I often ask myself how I can advance each human being as an end in themselves, rather than as a means to an end that benefits me professionally and politically. I refuse to accept that entering the political sphere requires a degradation in moral character.

“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.” —

People in my life ask, “Why diplomacy?”. Our human family has advanced rapidly in the last few centuries; yet, we collectively never seem to realize the limitations (and power) placed upon us by our emotional wiring. Technological innovations will bridge critical gaps in industries such as engineering, nuclear medicine and cloud computing. It will never solve the subjective difficulties of embodied human dialogue, which have consequences in interpersonal, inter-community and international relations.

I consider myself blessed to have not one, but three separate opportunities to engage in meaningful dialogue with students, activists and Hibakusha in the inspiring city of Hiroshima, Japan.

Holding onto hope in global conflict

Many people, including myself, feel despair when reading the news about the conflicts in , , and other places. Individual action is seemingly minuscule compared to political summits, diplomatic negotiations and military exchanges. However, conversations between groups, irrespective of nationality, foster understanding and build unimaginable connections between thoughtful individuals around the world.

We cannot lose hope in these times, for a lack of hope now will render us powerless in the most hopeless of times. A reminder to my fellow Americans who may be reading this: our country has the privilege to govern itself directly and indirectly, and we still have a multitude of . Now imagine people in countries and territories who cannot afford to dissent, and pay with their lives for speaking truth to power.

It is overused, but people are not their governments. If Hiroshima has taught me anything, it is this simple lesson. I conclude this reflection with the profound words of Nelson Mandela: “The best weapon is to sit down and talk.”

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Reflections from Hiroshima: Eighty Years After the Atomic Bomb appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Materiality

The of this institution, in its modern sense, dates back to 17th-century Holland. Its main characteristics were a permanent share capital, publicly tradable shares, separation of ownership and management, limited liability for shareholders and a State charter granting it monopoly rights. It wouldn’t take long, though, before England emerged as a rival. The Glorious Revolution, which put the Dutch Stadtholder on the throne of England under the name of William III, was responsible for bringing these new notions to London.

, however, remained reluctant to the concept of publicly tradable shares. There, the company’s capital tended to be state-owned. This resulted from the resounding failure of its first major private company, which John Law at the beginning of the 18th century.

However, notwithstanding their publicly tradable shares, Dutch and English companies their aims at the service of the grand purposes of the State or the Crown. In this regard, they were not all that different from the French ones. They all became, indeed, implementing tools of the State’s mercantilist and imperialist policies.

In the case of Dutch and English companies, the conquest and colonization of overseas territories was entrusted to them through State charters that granted them commercial monopolies. To this end, these companies had their own armies and fleets, administered territories autonomously and waged war against rival countries and companies. All of this, while the State not only retained a significant share of the profits but also had its flag flying over the conquered territories.

The Dutch East India Company (), responsible for the spice trade with the Far East, was the first major global corporation. It boasted 150 ships, 40 large warships, 50,000 employees and a highly equipped private army of 10,000 soldiers. The English and the French East India companies would the VOC’s size some years later, and the three would vie for control over countries, raw materials and trade routes.

England would eventually reach the top of this competition, bringing this corporate vision of trade and international relations to its highest expression. By , Robert Clive, at the head of the army of the British East India Company (EIC), had conquered a large share of India.

Contrary to the Virginia Company and the Plymouth Company, dating back a century earlier — both English joint-stock companies chartered by the Crown to establish permanent English colonies in North America — the function of government in India remained in the hands of the EIC. Indeed, whereas in the former two cases the Crown retained government, it would take until for it to assume direct governmental responsibilities over India.

In the final years of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the British South Africa Company, a public joint-stock company headed by Cecil Rhodes, also had its own . With it, it conquered the territory of what was to be called Rhodesia (present-day Zambia and Zimbabwe). By Royal Charter, this company was entitled to raise its own police, exert control over taxation, make administrative regulations, grant land rights and establish courts. For all practical purposes, it like a private government very much in the same manner in which the East India Company had done before.��

If something characterized institutions such as the VOC, the EIC or the British South Africa Company, it was their sheer materiality. This means: armies, war fleets, territories and their capacity to wage wars. To an important extent, they represented the most visible manifestation of the power of their states.

Immateriality

Fast forward to the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st (100 years after Rhodes’s exertions in Southern Africa), the nature of the company as an institution changed completely. From its raw materiality, it had evolved into an increasing immateriality. Indeed, globalization led big corporations to divest from everything that wasn’t core to their business, making them more and more bodyless.

The assembly line, which since the time of Henry Ford had become the essence of the manufacturing process, reached such a point of specialization during the height of globalization that it got fragmented. The different components of a single final product came to be manufactured in numerous factories scattered across multiple countries.

Within this model, the large corporation focused on finding the lowest-cost worker for each constituent part of the manufacturing process. Wherever he could be found. But, at the same time, it went on the hunt for the most economical engineer, designer, accountant, financial analyst or customer service representative, also, anywhere in the world. This, of course, required targeting those countries where a higher level of qualifications and lower costs converged for each specific function.

As Thomas L. Friedman , with the global economy transformed into a level playing field of sorts, there was little impediment to having not only production, but also design, research or services, broken up and scattered around the world. All of the above, needless to say, implied a massive outsourcing of blue-collar and white-collar jobs.

This process not only involved outsourcing manufacturing and service operations to other countries but, even more significantly, outsourcing them to other companies. Increasingly, manufacturing and services were not performed directly by the multinational corporations themselves, but were outsourced to local companies in the countries involved. That is, smaller companies were scattered across the most diverse latitudes. As a result, big corporations were able to rid themselves of labor obligations that had traditionally burdened their finances.

Following this trend, the large corporation of the early 21st century tended to strip itself of everything that was not core to its business. Ultimately, the corporation jealously guarded brands and patents, its two fundamental assets, while outsourcing as many functions as possible. Hence, corporation’s notorious contrast with the Dutch or the British East Indian companies, whose materiality runs counter to the disembodiment hereby pursued. 

Materiality or immateriality?

Recent but fundamental changes, though, have brought back materiality into the life of big corporations. The resurgence of geopolitics, the disruption of global supply chains brought about by COVID, the reduction of production costs in developed countries driven by technology, and, most recently, US industrial policies and increasing tariffs, have profoundly undermined globalization.

Under these circumstances, divesting itself from noncore functions lost its meaning. Nowadays, companies are integrating vertically once again, strengthening themselves by adding functions and, above all, .

Is this newfound materiality, thus, the prevailing trend within the corporate world of our day? Not necessarily. Jointly with it, immateriality is the main characteristic of the most consequential technology shaping the future: Artificial Intelligence. A technology based on data, algorithms and computing. Meaning, soft assets that can be shared or duplicated without depletion. AI companies, indeed, do not depend on the accumulation of people or of huge assets, beyond those necessary to make their ethereal nature functional: energy, computer hardware, and networking and data storage infrastructures.

Let’s just consider the event that took place on , 2023, inside OpenAI, the pioneer of ChatGPT. Reacting against the dismissal of its President and founder, Sam Altman, by the board of directors, 70% of the company’s staff rebelled, threatening to resign. Indeed, 738 of the company’s 770 employees forcefully demanded the reinstatement of Altman and the departure of the board members. In other words, a company that was revolutionizing the modern economy had a workforce of fewer than 800 employees.

Since then, OpenAI has somewhat grown. As of 2025, it has employees. Meanwhile, Anthropic, one of its main competitors, valued at $61.5 billion, has just employees. Mistral AI, with a reported value of $12 billion, has employees, while Thinking Machines Lab, also with a valuation of $12 billion, has even fewer personnel: just employees.

The main characteristic of companies like these is that they have very leveraged teams. Meaning, a small group of people that produces an unusually large amount of output, economic impact or value. Within them, each employee can generate high amounts in revenue, as, by its own nature, AI is scalable. That is, able to grow significantly without needing a proportional increase in costs or efforts.

However, the scalability of Artificial Intelligence is not limited to the companies that produce it. As countless corporations in other fields are in the process of engaging with AI for their own business purposes, jobs will undoubtedly be lost to it. The implications of this are clear: Increasing immateriality could be the sign of the corporate world of the future — a very costly immateriality, indeed, when measured in human terms.

The gigantic level of power that can be attained through immaterial algorithms (including machine learning or pattern-recognition ones) is something that Robert Clive, despite his soldiers, war fleets, weaponry and huge territories under his control, could never have imagined possible.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Corporate Power: From Armies and Cannons to AI appeared first on 51�Թ�.

 In the aftermath of this devastation, this crisis must be understood within the broader context of 77 years of military occupation and, specifically, the 20-year siege of Gaza. The standard of healthcare was considerably subpar for decades and the Palestinians, especially the women, have always faced immense healthcare challenges due to a lack of infrastructure and restricted access to essential resources. Hence, the recent period of intense violence and the current health crisis should not be viewed as a new phenomenon, but as a more severe continuation of existing conditions. 

General health and access to clinics and hospitals

The 20 years of blockade and the heavily fortified wall along the Gaza Strip have made it almost impossible to bring in essential medicines and healthcare equipment. Vital medical resources, such as oxygen tanks, diesel fuel for generators, ventilators, anesthetics, X-ray machines and crutches, were among the from entering Gaza. In 2017, the that 34% of essential drugs were missing and reported that out of 17 public hospitals, 14 hospitals faced the possibility of closure due to a lack of essential services. Sixteen other health facilities were likewise facing imminent closure. Basic infrastructure for building clinics was missing due to a ban on concrete and building materials. Moreover, the provision of gas and electricity was spotty and inefficient.��

Since October 7, Israeli military forces have targeted the health care sector. Thirty-three out of 36 hospitals have been or destroyed. On August 25, 2025, Israel double-bombed Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, which was Gaza’s last functioning public hospital. In addition, Israel has over 300 healthcare workers, some of whom subsequently died in detention and over 1000. This shows extensive targeting and destruction of an existing fragile healthcare system, already facing numerous challenges and obstacles.��

Maternal and infant mortality as well as Palestinian women’s reproductive health��

Health indices are clear indicators of the health disadvantage experienced by Palestinian women and their children in the past and present. In 2017, in the Occupied Territories (OTs) was 17 times higher than in Israel, whereas infant mortality was six times higher. Palestine’s OTs refer to the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

A study in 2010 showed of congenital heart defects in Gaza than in Europe and the US. Neonatal and prenatal clinics, as well as reproductive facilities, were few in number and those that were present faced similar challenges in sourcing due to the ban on medicines and equipment. In addition, clear efforts were made by the occupying forces at checkpoints to women from accessing hospital births, leading to increased birth complications and infections.��

Since then, the siege has further limited women’s access to maternity clinics or neonatal care hospitals or basic medications. A targeting of a single reproductive center led to the loss of over , thus harming efforts to counter the birth challenges. “Period poverty” is prevalent, as more than 450,000 are unable to afford sanitary products and have minimal or no access to clean water and soap. This has caused an increase in gynecological and urinary tract infections.��

The psychological toll of this cannot be underestimated. Women describe feelings of shame, humiliation and a lack of dignity. Perceived as a form of “”, as they are forced to care for their basic menstrual and postpartum needs while seeking shelter in overcrowded tents, communal areas and re-using any available unhygienic rags instead of menstrual products.��

Cancer, cervical and breast��

Before October 7, cancer was the leading in the OTs, with a mortality rate considerably higher than in other neighboring countries in the region or in Israel. This was multifactorial: a blockade of cancer-treating drugs, a blockade of radiotherapy equipment, a lack of diagnostic tools and few available cancer treatment hospitals or clinics. Patients desiring treatment elsewhere faced extensive bureaucracy and delays.

��A single referral to a regional cancer hospital and a permit to leave the OTs for treatment could take over to be approved. There was also preventive care or screening tools available. A clear example of this is cervical carcinoma. In Israel, the HPV vaccine has been part of the national vaccination plans for many years now as a prevention for cervical carcinoma and access to yearly pap smears is easily available.

Palestinian women, on the other hand, commonly present late stages of cervical carcinoma and have a high level of . Similarly, a by the United Nations Population Fund, a UN agency working towards improving reproductive and maternal health, found that more than 60% of breast cancer cases are diagnosed at a late or advanced stage of disease. Since October 7, the care for cancer patients has in the OTs. In addition to the already lacking medicines and or treatment options, the only cancer hospital in the Gaza Strip, the Turkish Palestinian Friendship Hospital, was forced to on November 1, 2023, due to a lack of fuel. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) completely it in March 2025. Cancer patients are forced to die under siege, with little hope for cure, treatment, or pain relief.��

Unclean and unsafe water sources��

Access to clean water in the OTs before October 7 was unavailable or limited for many families, leading to waterborne diseases and even death. 73% of the deaths in the OTs were found to be caused by unsafe , which in many cases were preventable. A stated that before October 7, more than 80% of Gaza residents depended on water supplied by trucks, and 1.1 million of its residents were not receiving adequate water. Moreover, basic sewage and water sanitation facilities were missing, as water filtration systems and sewage pumps were among the from entering. In addition, industrial zones in the OTs were (and still are) from regulations leading to the dumping of toxic materials into the environment.��

Since October 2023, the number of water-borne diseases has increased. By October of 2024, a reported over 40,000 cases of hepatitis A, infectious diseases and half a million cases of acute diarrhea were recorded in Gaza. Women, in particular, are impacted by these harms. Known as “WASH,” short for “Water, Safety, Hygiene,” physical needs and domestic roles place women in direct contact with unsafe or toxic water sources, and they, in turn, transmit any diseases to their children or families.��

An example of this is polio. Polio is a preventable disease that has been eradicated in most parts of the world. In August 2024, the first case of in 25 years appeared in the Gaza Strip. Polio can cause paralysis, disease and death among children and unvaccinated mothers. The re-emergence of polio is a dire indicator of the deteriorating health status of Palestinian mothers and children upon exposure to water-borne diseases and untreated sewage.��

Exposure to white phosphorous bombs, depleted uranium and other heavy metals

White phosphorus (WP) is a chemical that can be used as a smoke screen or as a bomb. As a bomb, WP is lethal. Only 10% of the body needs to be exposed to WP for it to be fatal. The problem with white phosphorus is that it is not adequately . Countries such as Israel can purchase the chemical as a smoke screen, only to use it afterward as an incendiary device.��

Previously, Israel used WP to in Gaza in 2006, 2009 and 2014. WP remained within the rubble, leading to continued exposure to those rebuilding their homes. Studies showed that the children of parents who were exposed to WP from either source had a higher chance of . Neural tube defects were most common, which are defects related to the development of the spinal cord and brain. WP also resulted in higher rates of , stunted growth and delayed milestones in their children.��

from other incendiary devices continued to show in samples from mothers for four years after the 2014 bombings. These included barium, arsenic, cobalt, cadmium, chrome, vanadium and uranium. (DU), another unregulated toxic and lethal substance, has been increasing in Gaza since 2008. DU has been found in soil, building materials and hair of individuals. Exposure to uranium leads to kidney toxicity, cancers and birth defects. As the primary caregivers, this exposure affects both mothers and prenatal and postnatal children. The impact of repeated exposure to white phosphorus, uranium and heavy metals upon the health of survivors of the current siege and attacks will need to be addressed and studied.

Disabilities and amputees

Before October 7, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), the population of Palestinians with disabilities in Gaza was between . The number of disabilities had nearly doubled between 2007 and 2017. Another spike in the number of disabled occurred in 2018 during the “Great March of Return” when Israeli snipers aimed at protesters’ limbs.��

Repeated military offenses in the OTs lead to a term known as “,” where an individual was injured and disabled in one event and injured again in another, leading to more than one disability. The everyday life for the disabled in the OTs was a struggle. Infrastructures were rarely accessible or accommodating for people with disabilities. Furthermore, the on essential physical therapy equipment, such as crutches, worsened the quality of life of the disabled Palestinians. Basic pain medications and antibiotics to prevent infection were lacking.��

Only two institutions provided in Gaza. Sheikh Hamad Hospital provided around 150 prosthetics a year. This hospital has been destroyed since October 2023. The Artificial Limbs and Polio Center (ALPC), built in close cooperation with the International Red Cross, cared for over 3000 patients and provided prosthetics and orthotics. It is currently not accessible to patients or care workers.��

Since October 2023, there have been an estimated . A large number of these are children. In the current crisis, many amputations are not directly due to bombs or gunshot wounds targeting limbs, but rather infections and repeated trauma to the site.�� Amputations require long-term care, physiotherapy, follow-up to prevent further injury, in addition to psychological care and pain management.��

Women amputees are more vulnerable to violence due to their restricted movement. In addition to their struggles, they are faced with caring for their disabled children as well, who have also lost their mobility and access to schooling. This is critical as more women have become the primary breadwinners of their families after the death, imprisonment or injury of their spouses or family members. Dreams of education, work and economic independence are currently far-fetched. 

Starvation used as a weapon of war

In 2020, an in Food Bulletin described a high prevalence of anemia and nutritional deficiencies in Gaza. Deficiency of essential minerals was seen in 11.4% to 84.7% of pregnant women and anemia in up to 42.8% of second and third trimester women. 70.9% of preschool children also showed nutritional deficiencies. This was due to the limited passage of nutritious elements through the crossings and checkpoints, including a on canned foods and due to the of agricultural land for fresh food. The Israeli military was of the nutritional needs of the Gaza population. The people of Gaza were and are being starved slowly, systematically and intentionally by their occupiers.��

In August 2025, food insecurity reached the level of famine. is defined as when 20% of households have a lack of food and are starving, and 30% of children show malnutrition. The World Food Program that over 41,000 children are at risk of death due to starvation in Gaza, and over 50,000 malnourished pregnant or breastfeeding women.��

The concern for starvation is not only regarding its immediate effects of disease and death, but also its long-term implications. For children or babies born to malnourished mothers, there is a non-reversible injury in their physical and cognitive development. The lack of essential nutrition leads to and performance, as well as delayed milestones. This poses an extra challenge for society and parents, as children will require additional educational support and resources. In addition, the psychological of undergoing a war-induced starvation cannot be underestimated.����

Post-traumatic stress disorder and gender based violence��

In the years before 2023, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and depression were in the West Bank and Gaza at levels higher than those seen in nearby countries. A higher rate was seen in women. This is not surprising as women are more vulnerable to gender based and sexual violence. In Gaza, up to 51% of women have been exposed to gender-based violence () either within their patriarchal systems or at the hands of the military . It was not just women; a found Israeli military engaged in a systematic effort of sexual violence against Palestinian men and children as well.��

Mental health diseases caused by assault, fear, bombardment and displacement must also be seen in the context of . The trauma experienced by grandparents can be carried through generations. The children of today’s occupation have grandparents who underwent the “1948 Nakba” at the hands of who were later incorporated into the IDF.��

Many can still vividly recall being forced out of their homes, witnessing the massacre of their entire village and experiencing displacement or the displacement of their neighbors. Currently, there are an estimated Palestinian refugees globally. Treatment of mental illness in the context of a 77-year-old occupation needs extensive support and resources from mental health officials, community-based nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the rebuilding of family bonds and community support systems.��

The task of rebuilding the health sector in Gaza is a daunting one. The proposed by the government of Egypt projected a price tag of an estimated $6 billion. In reality, it will likely be a much larger number than that. In addition to funds, expertise is needed in every aspect to ensure the system is rebuilt to humane standards and long-term sustainability. Cooperation between the government and NGOs will be for this endeavor.

Palestinians, living under occupation, must be given their freedom, equal access to health care as Israeli citizens and the ability to move freely in the region to acquire the healthcare that they need. Women, in particular, will need extra care concerning their reproductive health, psychological care, prenatal and post-partum care, as well as resources for their disabled, diseased and cognitively impaired children suffering from the long-term effects of starvation and war. 

The ban and blockade of medicines, equipment, nutritional substances, building materials, etc., must end. A lasting ceasefire and a permanent solution to the 77-year-old occupation are crucial for creating the necessary political, social and economic stability required for the healthcare sector’s reconstruction efforts to succeed. 

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Women’s Health Challenges in Gaza Pre- and Post-October 7, 2023 appeared first on 51�Թ�.

This approach follows the cardinal lines of the Washington pursued between 1947 and 1991 regarding the Soviet Union. Actually, Australian scholar Hugh White to it as “America’s most ambitious strategic doctrine since Truman committed America to contain the Soviet Union”.

Kennan and the policy of containment

George Kennan was the main architect of this policy towards the Soviets. Its foundations were established in the famous “long telegram” that, as American Chargé d’Affaires in Moscow, he sent to the State Department in 1946. In it, he that the Soviet Union “must be contained by the systematic and vigilant application of a set of counterforce measures”.��

In other words, Soviet expansionist impulses had to be confronted wherever they manifested. Furthermore, this involved attempting to drain Moscow’s economic resources by imposing costs on each of its geostrategic moves.

Given the success of this policy, which ultimately led to the demise of the Soviet Union, Washington has prioritized its application towards current China as well. However, the differences in both cases are overwhelming. Beyond China’s economic strength, which the Soviets never possessed, Washington seeks to contain Beijing’s hegemonic expansion in its own backyard. This latter point is particularly noteworthy and warrants further explanation.

Respecting geostrategically sensitive areas��

A few years after the end of World War II, the then-leader of the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin, realized that further European territorial gains beyond the Iron Curtain were no longer possible without directly antagonizing the United States. As a result, the Soviet expansionist drive shifted to what was then beginning to be called the Third World.

At the same time, Washington understood that any attempt to interfere with events behind the Iron Curtain could lead to a direct confrontation with Moscow. Both sides, therefore, agreed to respect each other’s geostrategically sensitive areas.

Thus, while the Soviets did not attempt to expand into Western Europe — a primary strategic area for the United States — Washington did not intervene on the various occasions when Soviet dominance was tested within its own bloc. 

The latter included the brutal repression of anticommunist demonstrations in East Germany in 1953; the Warsaw Pact troops’ invasion of Hungary in 1953, after it had attempted to rebel against Moscow; the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, to confine the inhabitants of East Berlin within communist borders; and the invasion of a volatile Czechoslovakia, again by Warsaw Pact forces, in 1968. 

Similarly, the United States remained unreactive when, through the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine of 1968, the Soviet Union that it would invade any country within its own sphere of influence that attempted to break free from its communist regimes.

The only instance in which a geostrategically sensitive space on the other side was not respected occurred in Cuba in 1962. Indeed, the Soviets attempted to place nuclear missiles in the Western Hemisphere, at just 90 miles from US territory.

It is worth adding that never before or since has the world been so close to nuclear Armageddon as during the in which the two superpowers were locked in a clash of wills. Except for this occasion, confrontations between the superpowers always took place in what both considered peripheral regions.

The big difference

The contrast between US containment of the late Soviet Union and US containment of today’s China is striking. In the current case, Washington seeks to curb Beijing’s expansionist drive not only in relation to Taiwan — a territory it claims as its own — but also in an area that for millennia was tributary to China.

What is at stake for China is not only the so-called “Great Unification of its territory”, but the restoration of its past grandeur through what Xi Jinping has the “Chinese Dream of National Rejuvenation”. Nothing could be more strategically sensitive for a country than this.

Conversely, China would like to rid itself of the inconvenient American presence in its part of the world. Its vision of hegemonic spheres translates into China controlling the Eastern Pacific Ocean, with the exclusion of alien powers. For the US, thus, containing China becomes a highly complicated endeavor.

Indeed, containing a force means confining it within certain boundaries to prevent its expansion, and what China wants is precisely to prevent outside penetration into its self-defined boundaries. How to contain someone who is in the process of containing you? 

A particularly poorly prepared US

Moreover, the United States is particularly unprepared to confront China’s push-out pressure, even if it were ready to use force for that purpose. The US Air Force and Navy ceased working as a team after the end of the Cold War. On top of this, both forces decided to prioritize short-range missions over long-range ones.

The Air Force shifted its emphasis from long-range strategic bombers to short-range tactical fighters, dramatically reducing the former as a percentage of its overall force. The Navy, on its side, pulled off, all together, from long-range strike missions. 

America’s campaigns in both Kuwait and Kosovo, which depended on aircraft flying short distances from their airfields or aircraft carriers, helped craft this policy. The emphasis, thus, is on short-range, high sortie rates and precision strikes. This implies that while the Chinese have developed an intermediate-range area denial strategy, the US forces need to approach their targets in order to be effective.

Additionally, America’s F-22 and F-35A are by design short-range fighters. Fifth-generation stealth strike aircraft, on the other hand, do not have sufficient range to reach their targets from “big wing” oil tankers, and are implicitly vulnerable to attack by a foe.

The proposition of containing China within its own sphere of influence becomes, as a result, highly complex. This bears no correlation to the successful containment of the Soviet Union. In the latter case, the US was trying to prevent the Soviet expansion in peripheral areas of the world. In this one, it seeks to contain China in its own neighborhood, where it gathers the bulk of its military forces in pursuit of an area-denial/anti-access strategy.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Containing China: Lessons From the US’ Containment of the Soviet Union appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Maps appear as innocent tools of orientation, simple representations of physical reality. Yet they are never neutral. As the French geographer famously remarked in 1972, “Geography is first and foremost used to wage war.” The more one understands space, the greater the power to dominate, organize or exclude. New and old power struggles over land are unfolding everywhere. Throughout history, people have fought over who is most legitimate to claim the land.

The earliest maps were strategic devices: they told armies where to strike, where to hide and how to control resources. By the eighteenth century, maps had moved into aristocratic salons, not simply as decorative objects, but as symbols of knowledge and authority. To display a world map was to display power.

Cartography enabled political institutions to establish and enforce borders, while offering citizens a framework to imagine the territory to which they belonged. But what maps offered was not a mirror of the world — it was a vision shaped by political choices and agendas.

The illusion of neutrality

World maps are still widely presented as neutral representations. In classrooms, atlases teach children where countries begin and end. Yet the Earth itself, if observed from space, reveals no such lines. Its surface is marked by oceans, forests, mountains and cities — but not borders. By portraying these boundaries as natural and permanent, maps make it difficult to envision change. They naturalize political decisions and conceal the struggles that created them.

For example, most world maps Europe at the center, implicitly suggesting that it is the world’s reference point. Nations such as New Zealand are pushed to the margins, as if they were peripheral to the world order. Similarly, maps make the United States and Russia appear far apart, even though the two countries nearly touch across the Bering Strait. A flat projection reinforces distance where, geographically, proximity is far more significant.

In this sense, maps function symbolically: they shape our mental geography. They tell us what is central and what is marginal, what is large and what is small, what is powerful and what is weak. The school map becomes not just a pedagogical tool but a political text, teaching children not only geography but geopolitics.

Continents as social constructions

The projection of a spherical Earth onto a flat surface has always been a challenge, but the question is not merely technical. As geographer argues, even continents themselves are social constructs. While they are presented as natural categories, they are in fact human inventions, largely defined and named by Europeans.

Europe is perhaps the most striking case. Geographically, the continent has no clear separation from Asia. Over the centuries, its boundaries have shifted according to diplomatic needs. Russian Tsar Peter the Great insisted in the eighteenth century that the Ural Mountains marked the edge of Europe, ensuring that part of Russia remained within Europe. More recently, in 2004, French President Nicolas Sarkozy justified Turkey’s exclusion from the European Union by : “La Turquie n’est européenne ni par sa géographie, ni par sa culture, ni par son histoire. Elle n’a donc pas sa place en Europe.” (“Turkey is not European by its geography, nor by its culture, nor by its history.”) Such statements demonstrate how the supposedly natural concept of a continent can be mobilized to legitimize political exclusion.

Continents, then, are not mere landmasses surrounded by water. They are categories imbued with cultural and historical weight, used to draw distinctions and to naturalize differences. They become tools of symbolic politics, shaping identities and justifying hierarchies.

The politics of projection

The choice of map projection is never innocent. The most familiar, the Mercator projection, has long been criticized. Designed in the sixteenth century for navigation, it preserves shape but grossly distorts size. High-latitude regions appear far larger than they are, while tropical regions are compressed. As a result, Europe and North America look dominant, while Africa and South America appear diminished.

Alternatives have been proposed. The Gall-Peters projection, introduced in the 1970s, corrected size but distorted shape, leaving continents stretched and unfamiliar. In 2018, cartographers developed the Equal Earth projection, an attempt to reconcile proportion with aesthetics. This new projection has been promoted for use in schools, offering students a more balanced vision of the world.

These are not trivial adjustments. Each projection conveys a worldview. Each shapes how we imagine relative power and significance. A map that shrinks Africa and inflates Europe does more than misrepresent geography — it reinforces a symbolic order rooted in colonial history.

Symbolism and diplomacy

The symbolic function of maps extends directly into diplomacy. The African Union has actively for the adoption of projections that represent Africa more faithfully. Its leaders argue that distorted maps contribute to Africa’s marginalization in global politics.

Fara Ndiaye, the co-founder and deputy executive director of Speak Up Africa, that: “Correcting the map is not only an African issue. It is a matter of truth and accuracy that concerns the entire world. When whole generations, in Africa and elsewhere, learn from a distorted map, they develop a biased view of Africa’s role in the world.”

To see Africa enlarged to its true scale — vast, central and imposing — is to challenge centuries of cartographic diminishment. It is to claim space, both visually and politically, as Europe has historically defined all of Africa’s country borders.

In the Mercator projection, Africa appears to be the same size as Greenland, when in reality it is 14 times bigger. This struggle over maps is not unique to Africa. In Asia, China on maps that include its expansive claims in the South China Sea, using cartography as a tool of territorial diplomacy. At the United Nations, the question of on maps remains politically charged, reflecting the broader contest over recognition and sovereignty. In each case, the symbolic weight of a line on a map far exceeds its apparent simplicity.

Maps also play a role in soft power. Nations use them to project identity and influence. Consider the “Pacific-centered” maps by Australia and New Zealand, which shift the world’s orientation and place Oceania at the center. Or the Cold War era, when both the United States and the Soviet Union maps emphasizing their spheres of influence. In every case, the map is not merely a representation of space; it is a projection of ideology.

The classroom as a diplomatic arena

Perhaps the most enduring impact of maps lies in education. Children around the world learn geography through school atlases, wall maps and globes. The choice of projection, the placement of the center, the colors used to depict countries — all subtly influence how the next generation sees the world.

When students grow up seeing Europe at the center, Africa minimized and borders portrayed as eternal, they internalize a particular worldview. The classroom becomes an extension of diplomacy, where future citizens learn their place in a symbolic hierarchy. This is why debates about which projection to adopt in schools matter so deeply — they are debates about the future mental geography of the world.

A cartography of power

What may appear trivial — a line, a border, a projection — is in fact the product of centuries of power struggles. Cartography is not only about navigation or orientation. It is about shaping imagination, legitimizing authority and distributing voice.

To look at a map is to look at a story: a story of conquest, colonization, resistance and negotiation. To challenge a map is to challenge that story. As Africa seeks to reclaim its true size, as new projections seek to replace old ones and as contested borders remain flashpoints of diplomacy, maps continue to function as battlegrounds of representation.

Reading maps critically

In international politics, symbols matter. They guide perception, shape debate and influence decisions. Maps, perhaps more than any other symbol, carry this weight. They define what is central and what is peripheral, what is legitimate and what is excluded.

By questioning the ways we depict continents and borders, we open space for more balanced international relations. By teaching children that maps are not neutral, we encourage critical thinking about power and representation. And by recognizing the symbolic power of cartography, we see more clearly how the world is organized — not only physically, but politically and imaginatively.

So, the next time you stand before a map, ask yourself not only where things are, but why they are shown that way. For in its colors, lines and proportions, a map is never just geography — it is diplomacy drawn on paper.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post From Mercator to Google: Maps as Instruments of Power and Diplomacy appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Following his speech, he a gathering of pro-Palestinian protesters and journalists outside the UN building using a megaphone, where he urged US soldiers to disobey President Donald Trump’s orders. His exact words were:

The people united will never be defeated. We are going to present a resolution ordering the United Nations to form an army to save the world, whose first task will be to liberate Palestine. From here, from New York, I ask all soldiers in the US Army not to point their guns at humanity. Disobey Trump’s orders, obey the orders of humanity.

Washington responds: visa revocation and diplomatic fallout

In response, the US State Department announced on that it was Petro’s visa due to his “reckless and incendiary actions.” This is the second time a Colombian president has had his visa revoked by the US. The first was during former US President Bill Clinton’s first term in 1996, due to his alleged connection to the Cali drug cartel and Colombia’s refusal to extradite drug traffickers. In August 2025, Arturo Arias, the ex-president of Costa Rica and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, that the US had canceled his visa after he voiced his criticism of Trump on the internet.��

Petro’s visa cancellation appears to have added him to the list of current or former presidents banned from entering the US. This list also includes Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, who was unable to attend the UN assembly for this .

A fractured relationship: Colombia and the United States through history

The revocation of Petro’s visa is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the United States’ decades-long challenging relationship with Colombia, a pivotal nation in the South American political landscape. This relationship is typically portrayed by endeavors to combat drug trafficking, the contradictory romanticization of figures like Pablo Escobar by popular culture — as depicted in the Netflix series Narcos — and the cloaking of the shared history of North and South American decolonial struggles for independence and the contributions of figures like Gabriel García Márquez (the Colombian Nobel Prize winner in literature in 1982 and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude [1967]).

More specifically, setting aside magical realism, the relationship between Petro and Trump has been brief yet intense, and it has been defined by a series of mutual accusations that began in January of this year. 

Petro initially rejected two planes carrying Colombian deportees, arguing that they were not receiving dignified treatment. However, the two countries later reached an amid threats of tariffs.

Petro’s rhetoric of resistance and the echo of Bolívar

Petro chose to address the US president directly. In this missive, which begins with a confessional tone, he writes:

Trump, I don’t really like traveling to the US. It’s boring, but I must admit that there are some good things about it … I don’t like your oil, Trump. You’re going to destroy the human race because of your greed. Maybe someday, over a glass of whiskey, which I accept despite my gastritis, we can talk frankly about this. But it’s difficult because you consider me inferior, and I’m not, nor is any Colombian.

In his lengthy letter, Petro suggests taking a historical journey and recalls the against Chilean President Salvador Allende, which elevated Augusto Pinochet to power. He appears to be defending Colombia’s global standing, highlighting aspects such as “Colombia is the heart of the world, and you misunderstood that. This is the land of yellow butterflies, the land of Remedios’ beauty,” drawing a literary parallel to one of the most stunning scenes in One Hundred Years of Solitude.��

Among other references to the past struggles of the US civil rights movement, Petro contradicts his willingness to share a whiskey with Trump when he adds, “I do not shake hands with white slave owners. I shake hands with white libertarians, the heirs of Lincoln, and black and white peasant boys of the United States.”

In this X message, Petro uses the plural form of “Americas,” making it clear that Colombia will no longer look northward. He also mentions Venezuelan statesman and military officer Simón Bolívar (1783–1830), the hero of South American independence — also known as El Libertador, “the liberator” — highlighting the shared, collective and plurinational history of the Americas, which he believes Trump does not represent. 

He draws attention to Trump’s immigrant past and lack of Native American ancestry, referring to him as an “immigrant” as well: “I raise a flag and, as Gaitán said, even if I am alone, it will continue to fly with Latin American dignity, which is the dignity of America, which your great-grandfather did not know, but mine did, Mr. President, immigrant in the United States.”

Although several months had passed and the scenario was different, Petro maintained the core sentiment of his aforementioned X epistle when he addressed the UN General Assembly. was equally assertive and combative.

Climate, conflict and calls for a new world order

He addressed made by the US government one week prior to the assembly, in which they claimed that neither Venezuela nor Colombia was cooperating in the fight against drug trafficking.��

These statements were made amid the involving the US troops’ launch of a missile at a small boat in Caribbean waters in early September. The US alleged that the ship was trafficking drugs. Standing before the UN, Petro that an investigation was underway to determine if Colombian civilians were aboard the boat. He stressed the importance of initiating due process against the US officials who ordered the missile strike.��

From the podium, Petro provocatively proposed that “Drug traffickers live elsewhere. They live in New York, a few blocks away, and in Miami. They make deals with the DEA. They live in luxury, not poverty. Not in the Caribbean or Gaza.”

The Colombian President also devoted much of his speech to discussing the climate crisis and clean energies, such as green hydrogen and decarbonization. He praised the “enormous absorbent sponge of the Amazon rainforest”. He also accused the “most powerful government in the world” of not believing in science: “That is called irrationalism, and it was that same irrationalism that filled Hitler’s Germany.”

When it was his turn, Trump devoted a significant portion of to the UNGA to criticizing renewable energy and rejecting the scientific consensus on climate change. He claimed that clean energy sources, such as solar and wind power, are less effective and more expensive than fossil fuel alternatives.

Speaking from the UN podium, Petro adopted the tone of the Latin American independence heroes he mentioned in his January letter when he proposed the creation of a UN armed force. He made statements such as, “There is no superior race, gentlemen. There are no chosen people of God. Neither the United States nor Israel are chosen by God. Ignorant fundamentalists of the extreme right think that way. The chosen people of God are all of humanity.”

After this, he added that diplomacy had run its course and urged the UN to establish an armed force to protect the lives of Palestinians: “Words are no longer enough. It is time for Bolívar’s sword of liberty or death because they are not only going to bomb Gaza and the Caribbean, they already are, they are attacking humanity, which cries out for freedom.”

From Bolívar’s dream to a divided continent

In addition to his defiant tone toward Trump and his call for the US military to rebel against him, Petro’s recent public statements are notable for their repeated mention of Bolívar. During his visit to New York, he granted an to the BBC News World based in Manhattan. The words chosen for the headline of the interview’s video were “Trump has failed to understand that Bolívar’s children are not subordinates.”

Bolívar, the “Liberator of America,” fought against the Spanish crown for 20 years to achieve independence for Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela. Born in Caracas to a family of Creole nobility, Bolívar received a European education. He then brought what he had learned about liberation in France to the other side of the ocean.��

In August 1819, Bolívar crossed the Andes mountain range and defeated Spanish troops in the , achieving independence for the region of New Granada, now Colombia. Interestingly, in 1691, Palenque, located in present-day Colombia, was the first colonial settlement to African slaves, who became the first officially freed black slaves anywhere in the Americas.

One of Bolívar’s greatest hopes was a grand confederation of all the former Spanish colonies in America, inspired by the United States’ model. To this end, in 1826, he convened the to organize a confederation of American nations that would support and cooperate with each other for the common good. However, as we know, he did not achieve his goal.��

Nowadays, the differences among countries in the region continue. In the current state of affairs, Trump is favored by Ecuadorian President and Argentine President ,who distance themselves from other regional leaders, such as Chilean President and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who oppose US interventionism.��

Domestic backlash and regional uncertainty

2026 will be a pivotal year for South American politics, with upcoming presidential elections in countries such as Peru, Brazil and Colombia. A map that has always been of strategic imperial interest to the United States, as evidenced by its long history of interventions in regime changes. According to the , “In the slightly less than a hundred years from 1898 to 1994, the US government has intervened successfully to change governments in Latin America a total of at least 41 times.”

Since the late 20th century, the international relations between Colombia and the United States have been marked by bilateral efforts against drug trafficking, such as the , signed in 1999 between the administrations of Colombian President Andrés Pastrana Arango and Clinton, who signed it into US law as an approval of an aid package to both keep drugs outside the US shores and “help Colombia promote peace and prosperity and deepen its democracy.”

A fundamental aspect of the Plan Colombia was indeed supporting of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country’s largest insurgent group, founded in the 1960s, and the National Liberation Army (ELN), both designated as foreign terrorist organizations by the US State Department.��

Álvaro Uribe, elected Colombian president in 2010, began formal peace talks with the FARC in 2012. It wasn’t until US President and Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos’s terms that the peace process actually reached its culmination in Colombia, after only four rounds of negotiations, and with the governments of Chile, Cuba, Norway and Venezuela as hosts, mediators and observers.��

The peace agreement called for the guerrillas to hand over their weapons to a UN commission. It also contemplated that international aid, especially from the United States, would be needed to invest in neglected rural areas and create economic alternatives to drug trafficking.

Unlike the FARC, remains active, particularly along the Colombia-Venezuela border. During his presidency, Petro has pursued the idea of achieving “” by disarming the ELN. However, negotiations in July after the ELN attacked civilians in the Catatumbo border region.��

Due to its involvement in , peasant agriculture and the centuries-long indigenous struggle for land sovereignty, it seems that the ELN continues to hold significant .

Returning to Petro’s controversial visit to New York, during the BBC News World interview, journalist Tom Bateman asked Petro, “Are you concerned that taking this approach of resisting the US administration risks further isolating your country?” Petro responded that he believes it is President Trump who is isolating himself from the world regarding his position on the Palestinian genocide. 

However, a quick review of mainstream Colombian media shows the opposite: the president is facing fierce opposition in his own country. Journalist Daniel Coronell that Petro is “building his pedestal as a martyr” and “dragging Colombia down with him.”��

Former Foreign Minister Juan Carlos Pinzón the Colombian media outlet Semana, “This country does not need clowns.” Pinzón, who is presenting himself as a potential presidential candidate and former ambassador to the United States, also said, “We will resolve the issue with Israel immediately.” The newspaper ran the headline, “Petro without a visa but with a megaphone.”

Francia Márquez, the current Vice President and representative of the Afro-Colombian community, is a prominent figure on the left in Colombia. However, in recent months, her relationship with Petro has been filled with , despite their cordial appearance together at the UN. Adding to the political tension, Manuel Uribe, a future Colombian presidential candidate, was shot and earlier this year. US Secretary Marco Rubio Petro’s inflammatory rhetoric for the assassination.��

Colombia clearly has its own internal and historical struggles to tackle. Only time will tell how Petro’s continued antagonism toward the United States will affect the Colombian general elections next year and how the region’s new leaders in 2026 will align with or oppose the United States’ imperialistic endeavors.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post US Revokes Colombian President’s Visa: The Volatile Relationship Between North and South America appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Bangladesh and its valiant people were in such a predicament for over three and a half years after their liberation when the fruits of freedom and independence almost eluded them and chaos and lawlessness reigned supreme. This raised doubts amongst many whether this was the summum bonum (outcome) of what they had hoped and fought for to achieve. Worse, it prepared the ground for the hatching of deadly conspiracies against those very leaders and people who were instrumental in bringing freedom, dignity, respect and opportunities to a people who had never enjoyed or experienced them before.

The case of Bangladesh was unique for certain ministers and senior officials of the government-in-exile in Mujibnagar, along with numerous sector commanders of the Mukti Bahini, were not prepared for such swift liberation of their land. They had never ever anticipated that the Pakistan military’s Eastern Command would surrender as early as on the 13th day of the Indo-Pak War. That the Pakistan military’s morale would reach its nadir and their soldiers would lose their will to fight and not defend Dacca—despite having 25,000 troops deployed in and around the city with ample fire power and armaments at their disposal to last several weeks—had seemed an impossibility to them.

The idea that the Pakistan military would meekly surrender was considered highly improbable due to another reason—the perceived aura of invincibility surrounding it. After all, there was a belief that the Pakistani military, in comparison to its Indian counterpart, was a superior and formidable fighting force with a rich heritage, fuelling expectations that it would staunchly defend Dacca and put up a fierce final stand, come what may.

In fact, following the outbreak of the full-fledged war on 3 December 1971, some of the sector and sub-sector commanders I had met told me that the Pakistan military machine would put up a staunch resistance to the Indian military’s swift advance towards Dacca. They thought that the Pakistan military would throw in all its might and resources to defend Dacca at all costs just as the Russians had done at Stalingrad. Moreover, the Indian Army, they believed, did not have the required wherewithal to make rapid advances towards Dacca as it would have to cross three mighty rivers (including the Meghna and Madhumati), in addition to numerous smaller waterways, giant water bodies and rivulets along the way. 

Thus, the general belief that reverberated like a silent murmur was that the Indian Army would get severely bogged down by fierce, intense and prolonged battles while overcoming the heavily defended Pakistani fortifications, which would further significantly slow down the pace of its advance toward Dacca.

��But their perception of the Indian generals’ strategic knowledge, depth and capabilities was flawed as many of them had not seen the operational virtuosity of commanders of the Indian Army—like Lieutenant General Sagat Singh, Major Generals Ian Cardozo, Nagra, Klerr and Lachchman Singh to name a few—leading their men from the front. And those who had seen them and had worked in close coordination with them in Sylhet and Comilla Sectors, like Majors Khaled Mosharraf and Chittaranjan Dutta, had just the opposite view; they were of the firm belief that the Indians would suddenly take the Pakistanis by surprise by making audacious moves, including airborne and heliborne operations, which would stun the Pakistani General Headquarter (GHQ).

[ has given 51�Թ� permission to publish this excerpt from Mujib’s Blunder, Manash Ghosh, Niyogi Books, 2025.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Mujib’s Blunders appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The soundscape of the bazaar, once dominated by the intermingling tones of Nepali and Hindi, now finds itself interspersed with the measured intonations of Mandarin. This is a reflection of shifting trade flows: Pashupatinagar sits along one of the most important crossing points between Nepal and India, but it now finds itself increasingly oriented toward China.

Shopkeepers such as Lal Bahadur Gurung steadily watch as the loading zones swell with goods stamped in Chinese characters. He notes with a mix of resignation and pragmatism that trucks from the Chinese side, rather than the Indian, have become the norm, and that mistakes in documentation appear to be overlooked by Nepali officials, a sign of how quietly the commercial hierarchy is being rearranged.

The subtlety of these shifts does not diminish their importance. Commerce here is now paved not only with physical goods but also with the reconfiguration of local allegiances and economic dependencies. China has moved beyond the role of a mere trading partner, increasingly asserting itself as the axis along which commerce, population flows and, more quietly, new ideas and expectations traverse the mountains.

Tea and commerce at a crossroads

The transformation of Pashupatinagar mirrors a broader shift in the economic lifelines of eastern Nepal. One sector that illustrates this change vividly is the tea industry. In eastern Nepal, the Ilam region, famed for its rolling tea gardens, has seen the direction of tea exports shift northward. 

Tara Adhikari observes that whereas Kolkata in India was once the default destination, Chinese buyers now offer more lucrative deals. Nepal’s exports of tea to China nearly doubled to during the 2023 fiscal year, though they remain vulnerable to bureaucratic hurdles and bilateral political shifts.

Across the border, the slow of the tea industry in the Darjeeling district has been decades in the making. Once celebrated as the “Champagne of teas,” Darjeeling’s delicate muscatel brew commanded premium prices in Europe and Japan. Over the past two decades, however, production volumes have dwindled, labor unrest has flared and younger generations have turned away from the low wages and physically demanding work of plantations.

The rise of cheaper teas from Kenya and Nepal, some falsely sold as Darjeeling, has undercut both prices and prestige, while climate change has disrupted rainfall patterns and shortened the plucking season. Compounding the crisis is the ongoing demand for , which has led to repeated strikes and shutdowns, leaving tea gardens stranded in bureaucratic limbo. Many estates now lie neglected, their machinery rusting, their slopes overgrown and their workers caught in a twilight zone between heritage and hardship.

What was once the pride of the Eastern Himalayas is today a fragile legacy, still fragrant but fading. Uncertainties of bureaucratic regulation and the inherent vulnerability to the oscillations of bilateral diplomacy accompany these commercial relationships, yet they come with complexities for profit.

Local anxieties are sharpened by the realization that a downturn in Beijing-Kathmandu relations could translate directly into reduced incomes for Nepali producers, prompting urgent questions about who, if anyone, can safeguard their interests amid great power politics.

Darjeeling’s Gorkhas: kinship, identity and rising ambivalence

Shifts in trade and commerce are also reshaping identity across borders. In Darjeeling and Kalimpong, communities feel the strain of China’s growing presence. These Gorkha communities have long understood identity through kinship and shared history rather than strict national lines. That ethos, rooted in the tradition of joint military service to India and Nepal through the of the Indian Army, now contends with new realities.

Havaldar Prem Singh Subba, a retired noncommissioned officer (NCO) of the 11th Gorkha Rifles, laments the blurring of these once-firm affiliations. He notes that China’s approach has achieved proximity without confrontation.

For students in Ilam, just 50 km from the Indian border, the prospect of education in Chinese cities such as Chengdu is now real. This has been made possible by an expansion of Chinese scholarships, which have supported over 6,400 Nepali recipients since the onset of the Belt and Road Initiative () in 2013. These programs often cover tuition, housing and even laptops.

The question lingers in these hills: if too many are lured away by China’s opportunities, who will maintain the continuity of the mountain homelands?

Confucius Institutes and Beijing’s soft power in Kathmandu

From identity in the hills to education in the capital, China’s influence reaches deeply into Nepalese society. Within , one of Nepal’s leading higher education institutions, the melodic cadence of Mandarin is no longer a rarity but a regular feature of academic and student life. Since the founding of Nepal’s Confucius Institute in 2009, thousands of Nepalis have taken Chinese language courses and participated in programs facilitating cultural exchanges.

Many Nepali students report that, compared to what is available through Indian partnerships, Chinese scholarships are more generous. This broad-based educational outreach is a manifestation of Beijing’s effort to exercise soft power and shape the worldview of Nepal’s rising generation.

However, these benefits are not unconditional. Political topics that touch on contentious issues such as , or remain off-limits, a tacit indicator that China’s embrace imposes its boundaries on educational discourse.

Pokhara’s international airport: a monument to debt

Vast infrastructure investments match educational and cultural outreach. Among them, few projects are as symbolic as Pokhara’s . On the tranquil shores of Lake Phewa, the construction of Pokhara International Airport stands as a potent symbol of Nepal’s closer economic integration with China.

Its gleaming infrastructure is emblematic of a partnership that is transforming the landscape. This modern airport was completed with a $216 million loan from China’s Export-Import Bank, accounting for three-fourths of the total cost at an interest rate of 2%.

Although the project was celebrated as a milestone in Nepali ambitions for economic growth, its cavernous terminal now often sits devoid of travelers. Meanwhile, Nepal’s external debt soared to in September 2024, with much of it coming from China. In March 2013, this debt was merely $3.5 billion, which means it has grown threefold in a little over 11 years.

For local observers and international analysts alike, this rising debt is a matter of great concern. Some draw parallels to , the control of which the Sri Lankan government transferred to China when Colombo was unable to pay back Beijing’s debt. 

The security dimension: Nepal’s growing military-to-military ties with the PLA

If infrastructure represents economic alignment, the military dimension demonstrates strategic recalibration. The evolution of Nepal’s military relationship with China has unfolded with remarkable speed over the past decade. Throughout the 2000s, Chinese engagement with the Nepalese Army was limited in scale, comprising sporadic material donations and occasional training programs.

This relatively low-key involvement gave way to more substantive collaboration starting in 2008. By 2017, Nepal and China had inaugurated their first-ever joint military exercise, the exercise, which took place over ten days at the Special Forces Brigade in Kathmandu. The focus was on counterterrorism and urban warfare tactics.

Over the years, the scope, frequency and sophistication of joint maneuvers have all increased. In September 2024, the Mount Everest Friendship joint military drill was in Chongqing, drawing specialized units from both militaries together for ten days of intensive training. The exercises spanned a wide variety of mission profiles, urban counterterrorism, rapid deployment, improvised explosive device detection, checkpoint operations, infiltration, armed rescue, humanitarian relief, disaster management and peacekeeping scenarios.

Official accounts from both Nepal and China describe these events not only as means of tactical improvement but also as opportunities to cement deep communication channels and foster a durable framework for long-term cooperation and regional stability.

Alongside these drills, Nepali officers increasingly train in Chinese institutions, gaining exposure to Chinese organisational methods, logistics and infrastructure management. In spring 2024, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to supply Nepal with armored vehicles and to build an ammunition plant inside Nepal, further broadening the military-industrial partnership.

Other forms of support, from donations of medical and disaster relief equipment to collaborative work on logistics and communication projects, have also proliferated, with Nepal’s army leadership repeatedly to the PLA for its assistance in public statements.

While this deepening engagement is officially presented as a positive step in bilateral defense cooperation, many regional analysts it as a significant instance of China exercising “soft balancing” in South Asia. This is a strategy aimed at reducing India’s longstanding military influence over Nepal. 

Indian strategists warn that Chinese investments in Nepali security infrastructure — whether roads, logistics hubs or communications systems — carry long-term implications and might, in the event of a crisis, allow China to exert far more substantial influence over Nepali internal security decisions.

Mountain frontiers: Humla and the shadow of encroachment

The risks of alignment are not only economic or military but also territorial. Nowhere is this clearer than in Nepal’s far west.

The remoteness and tranquillity of Humla District, in far-western Nepal along the border with the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, heighten the impact of outside intervention. Here, concepts of sovereignty are inscribed in the memory of boundary stones, the regulation of grazing rights and the oral histories of its villagers.

Maya Devi Rokaya, a veteran resident of Limi village, recounts how the Chinese presence did not first appear with soldiers but with construction workers. When villagers protested the building of eleven concrete houses on what they insisted was Nepali soil, Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital, remained conspicuously silent.

The villagers were urged to keep their objections quiet, for, in the calculus of power, antagonizing Beijing seemed inadvisable. Younger locals, such as Dorje Lama, whose livelihoods once depended on cross-border trade, observe that their landscape has undergone a shift with the appearance of new concrete deposits and the mysterious disappearance of historical boundary markers.

by independent researchers and satellite imagery confirm villagers’ claims of Chinese-built structures inside Nepali territory. The of an official response from Kathmandu highlights Nepal’s hesitancy to challenge its northern neighbor.

Historical ties: Nepal and Tibet through war, trade and faith

This hesitancy cannot be understood without recalling the deep historical ties between Nepal and Tibet, which long shaped the Himalayan order.

Nepal’s relationship with Tibet is centuries old. The spread of Buddhism from Nepal to Tibet during the in the seventh century, facilitated by the diplomatic marriage of King Amsuvarman’s daughter to the Tibetan king Songtsen Gampo, established not only a religious bond but also a lasting cultural exchange.

Nepalese artisans and monastic scholars played a vital role in transmitting Mahayana Buddhist traditions to Tibet, and the cultural exchange continued as monks and merchants moved back and forth, contributing to a rich hybridization in art, language and spiritual practice.

The historical foundation of this bond was further strengthened and complicated by commerce. For centuries, Tibet’s need for foodstuffs and manufactured goods and Nepal’s hunger for Himalayan salt, wool and livestock gave rise to profitable, arduous through perilous high passes at Kuti and Kerung. These routes lay within the control of Nepali rulers, a fact that both fostered mutually beneficial relationships and served as a frequent source of tension, especially during efforts to monopolize trade or assert control through taxation.

Conflict was ever a shadow at the margins of this partnership. Three major erupted between Nepal and Tibet in 1788, 1791 and 1855, each culminating in significant diplomatic treaties. The first conflict concluded with the Treaty of Kerung in 1789, following which Nepal withdrew its forces in return for annual payments and exerted de facto control over key India-Tibet trading routes. Noncompliance by Tibet prompted a resumption of hostilities.

In 1792, with the intervention of the Qing dynasty, the Treaty of Betrabati established new protocols, including quinquennial tribute missions to Beijing, a joint commitment to maintain agreed-upon borders and an understanding that the Chinese imperial court would mediate future Kathmandu-Lhasa disputes. Nepal formally acknowledged Chinese suzerainty over Tibet and agreed to submit to the terms of the Qing emperor.

The 1855 war led to the Thapathali Treaty, conferring on Nepal significant commercial privileges in Lhasa and the continued right to send tribute missions. The Newar community in Lhasa became key players in commerce, culture and the spiritual life of Tibet, straddling the boundaries between Hindu and Buddhist traditions.

The Chinese takeover of Tibet dramatically reshaped these longstanding relationships. Nepalese traders found themselves expelled from Tibet, and the historic trade passes fell silent. It was not until China’s economic reforms in the 1980s that these borders began to open cautiously once more. 

Today, the revitalized route serves as the principal gateway for trade between Nepal and China, echoing but fundamentally altering the balance that once defined trans-Himalayan commerce.

Political shifts and modern trade realignment

The echoes of history reverberate in Nepal’s modern trade strategy, which must constantly adjust to shifting power dynamics.

The necessity of accommodating new power dynamics has left Nepal in a perennial state of balancing. The closure of traditional Sikkim routes, the construction of new roads and changing dominance between China and India have all informed Nepal’s evolving diplomatic strategy. Following Tibet’s annexation, Kathmandu formally recognized Tibet as part of the People’s Republic of China, even as informal ties persisted through the migration of Tibetan refugees after 1959.

Modern trade statistics reflect a complicated picture of growth and imbalance. In the most recent fiscal year, Nepal’s trade with China expanded markedly, with exports to China rising by over 50% and imports from China growing by more than a third. Border trade surpassed in the 11 months ending in July 2024, up from $300 million the previous year, following the reopening of major border points at Rasuwagadhi-Kerung and Tatopani-Zhangmu.

Despite these increases, Nepal remains acutely aware of the fragility that comes from this dependence, especially given the persistent trade deficit and vulnerability to non-economic factors.

The contemporary balancing act

All these threads — commerce, culture, security, history — converge in Nepal’s ongoing struggle to balance its relationships with its two powerful neighbors.

In the present moment, Nepalese political discourse is replete with debate over the risks of “being the dynamite between two elephants.” Local practices reflect persistent ambiguity: in border towns, Indian rupees circulate alongside Nepali notes, and Chinese digital payment platforms make steady inroads.

Meanwhile, India’s attempts to counterbalance this shift through measures such as investment in infrastructure and energy projects proceed but are often hampered by bureaucratic and logistical delays. Remittances and dependence on Indian markets continue to provide the foundation of Nepal’s economic stability, but the rise of China as a strategic and economic patron has shifted the national gaze northwards.

Nepal’s search for equilibrium between its two powerful neighbors, long mediated by the dynamism of its unique relationship with Tibet, encapsulates a narrative of continuous adaptation and transformation. The country’s willingness to diversify its economic, educational and military ties to China must be understood within the larger context of strategic necessity: deepening military exercises and economic partnerships with Beijing have been pursued as a hedge against overreliance on India.

Yet, these ties come with new forms of risk, especially as China’s infrastructure, loans and influence in border regions expand. The integrity of Nepal’s sovereignty is now threatened less by dramatic invasions than by the slow, persistent assertion of influence. As the villagers of Humla have learned, sovereignty can sometimes be eroded not by gunfire but through concrete, incremental encroachment.

How Nepal manages this delicate balancing act — navigating the competing interests of its neighbours, maintaining vigilant oversight of border communities and sustaining the cultural threads that have always tied it to both Tibet and India — may ultimately determine not only the country’s future but also the shape of Himalayan geopolitics in the coming century.

[Shokin Chauhan first published a version of this piece on Substack.]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Chinese Creep into Nepal: A Historical and Contemporary Narrative appeared first on 51�Թ�.

In one event, supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro called for amnesty for the “rioters” of the attack, those who invaded and vandalized the buildings of the Three Powers in the capital, Brasília, in an attempted coup d’état.

In another instance, defenders of democracy, in a more organic and subtle manner, demonstrated against this same amnesty and a Proposed Constitutional Amendment (PEC) that would shield politicians from investigations, showing that organized civil society is attentive to regressive movements.

The difference between the two groups, however, is deeper than simple political disagreement; it is rooted in a historical distortion that echoes the nation’s darkest times.

Reversed history

The main banner of Bolsonaro’s supporters is amnesty for those who participated in the January 8th protests — particularly Bolsonaro, who was to 27 years in prison for attacks on democracy. The narrative propagated is that they deserve the same pardon that was granted to political prisoners and exiles during the (1964–1985).

This comparison is not only fallacious but dangerously distorted. In 1979, the was a historic achievement of social movements and the opposition. Pardon was granted to those who fought for freedom and against the oppression of an authoritarian regime. They were the victims of the state, the defenders of democracy.

The amnesty was, therefore, a victory for civil society against dictatorial power. Today, the request for amnesty is for the invaders and coup plotters, for those who attacked democratic institutions. It is the exact opposite. It is not about forgiving those who fought for freedom, but about absolving those who tried to destroy it.

To understand the gravity of the situation, one must look beyond the headlines. The pro-amnesty demonstration, led by the former president, took place on September 7, the date that celebrates Brazil’s independence from Portugal.

However, in a scene that shocked many Brazilians, a giant was unfurled in the middle of the crowd. This act, more than a mere show of support, is a glaring contradiction. The search for help and identification with a foreign superpower on the day of national independence reflects a departure from any real patriotism, suggesting loyalty to external ideals that do not align with Brazil’s sovereignty.

In contrast, the demonstration against amnesty, which gathered to defend democracy, proudly displayed the Brazilian flag, symbolizing the defense of the nation and its institutions. It was a milestone for a country that has become divided, especially due to the actions of former President Jair Bolsonaro in recent years.

The desperate movement

In the theater of global politics, few scenes are as strange and revealing as that of a Brazilian congressman seeking diplomatic help in Washington. Recently, in an unprecedented move, Congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro to the United States in an attempt to pressure the American government to intervene in the legal situation of his father, Jair Bolsonaro.��

The goal was clear and bold: to avoid the former president’s conviction and force political amnesty through the veiled intimidation of American figures such as President Donald Trump. But what this strategy ultimately revealed was the fragility of a political movement and the resilience of Brazil’s democratic institutions.

The being promoted is that Jair Bolsonaro is a victim of political persecution. The argument, repeated ad nauseam, is that he deserves the same amnesty granted to opponents of Brazil’s 1964 military dictatorship. This historical farce that the congressman tried to export has already been explained above. The attempt to equate the two scenarios does not hold up in any court of reason or history. Eduardo Bolsonaro’s trip was merely an attempt to give international weight to a fallacious narrative, presenting his father not as a defendant, but as a political martyr.

Eduardo Bolsonaro’s plan was simple but naive: to pressure the Brazilian judicial system through Donald Trump’s influence. The congressman participated in closed-door meetings, made public appearances and gave interviews in the hope that the weight of US conservative politics would intimidate Brazilian institutions. But the plan, in practice, fell apart. 

Brazil’s legal and judicial system, in a demonstration of its independence and strength, followed its course. The Supreme Court and judicial bodies did not allow themselves to be influenced by external pressures, whether they came from demonstrations on Paulista Avenue or from political corridors in Washington. The condemnation of Jair Bolsonaro for his anti-democratic acts is clear proof that this strategy failed.

Eduardo Bolsonaro’s bold move to seek the support of a foreign leader in an attempt to reverse an internal Brazilian decision evaporated on Tuesday (September 23) during the UN General Assembly, when Trump said that the Brazilian president is “a nice guy” and that the two leaders should meet soon, without specifying how or where. 

Current Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva responded that he hopes the possible meeting will take place “soon,” “like two civilized human beings,” and without “room for jokes.” Responding to a question from Brasil about whether he fears any kind of “embarrassment,” Lula said he is “very optimistic about the meeting.” “Trump turns 80 in June next year. I turn 80 in October this year. There is no reason for joking around in a relationship between two 80-year-old men. I will treat him with the respect he deserves as president of the United States, and he will certainly treat me with the respect I deserve as president of the Federative Republic of Brazil.”

Democracy in turmoil

It served as a reminder of how fragile some views of sovereignty can be. By seeking the intervention of a leader from another country, Eduardo Bolsonaro not only exposed the weakness of his own movement but also disrespected the principle that Brazil should resolve its own problems according to its own laws.

In the end, the trip and the attempts at intimidation did not result in amnesty or acquittal for his father. Instead, they served to demonstrate the strength of Brazilian democracy, which remained steadfast. This lesson, both for Brazil and the rest of the world, is a reminder that justice and the law must prevail over show diplomacy and blind family loyalty.

The coup movement, despite not being immediately successful, left deep scars. The attempt to delegitimize the elections, constant political instability and the denial of scientific and historical facts are symptoms of a broader crisis. 

Economically, the climate of uncertainty drives away investment and undermines stability. Socially, the fabric of the nation is frayed, with families and friends divided by political lines that seem insurmountable. The current struggle is not only for freedom, but for a basic understanding of what reality is and respect for the rules of the democratic game. 

The approval of an amnesty would be a dangerous signal, a testament that impunity for anti-democratic acts is possible, opening the door to future coup attempts.

Brazil in 2025 is at a crucial moment. Resistance to amnesty is not just a reaction to an act of violence, but an active defense of the future. Civil society, the independent press and democratic institutions, such as the Supreme Court, are being tested. 

The lesson that Brazil can offer the world is that democracy is not something that can be taken for granted. It needs to be defended, valued and, above all, understood. The history of 1979 shows us that forgiveness is for those who fight for freedom, not for those who try to imprison it.

�մǻ岹��’s battle is to ensure that history does not repeat itself in reverse, with the executioners being treated as heroes and the defenders of the law as enemies. It is a global call for vigilance.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Brazil at a Crossroads: The Farce of Amnesty and the Battle for Democracy appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Plaut opens with a quote from former African American slave Elizabeth Freeman: “Any time while I was a slave, if one minute’s freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it — just to stand one minute on God’s earth a free woman — I would.” For Plaut, this testimony captures the essence of slavery’s horror and the immeasurable value of freedom.

The transatlantic trade

Plaut turns to the transatlantic slave trade, which lasted from 1444 to the 1850s. While the outlines are familiar, he emphasizes that tens of thousands also came from Portuguese and East Africa, some reaching the United States. Captors included Portuguese, British, French, Danish and others, each profiting from the vast human traffic.

He recalls the infamous Zong incident of 1781, which he calls “possibly the worst thing, the worst event of all.” The captain of the slave ship Zong claimed to be running out of water and threw 133 slaves overboard alive. The event became known only through a court case — an insurance dispute over “lost cargo.” To Plaut, the fact that human life was reduced to a financial claim demonstrates slavery’s cruelest logic.

Ancient and Islamic dimensions

Plaut observes that the enslavement of Africans predates the Atlantic system. Egyptian slavery along the Nile lasted centuries. After Muhammad’s death, Arab armies swept into Egypt, across North Africa and into Spain and Portugal. This conquest fueled Mediterranean and trans-Saharan trades, sometimes reaching as far as China. Large numbers, especially from Sudan and Ethiopia, were taken across the Red Sea to the Saudi Arabian city of Mecca, Iraq and Syria. These routes endured for generations, shaping populations far from Africa’s shores.

Plaut notes how enslaved Africans, usually men, were taken to India as military slaves. He cites military leader Malik Ambar, a slave from Ethiopia who defeated two Mughal emperors. Descendants remain in India and Pakistan, often called the Siddi ethnic group. Plaut comments that they “all have a pretty tough time of it,” reflecting on their marginalized status in modern society.

The Indian Ocean trade

He describes the Indian Ocean trade dominated by the Omanis. Beginning in the first century CE, it later expanded with Portuguese, Dutch and British involvement. Omanis relied on Indian merchants and financiers to organize activities and mercenaries from the Baloch ethnic group. The wealth was so immense that the Omani Sultanate moved its capital from Muscat in Oman to the Tanzanian archipelago of Zanzibar, a symbol of slavery’s financial engine.

Plaut highlights Afro-Omani ivory and slave trader Tippu Tip, whose name echoed the sound of his guns. He cites the 1866 account of Edward Seward, the British consul in Zanzibar, who saw a caravan of 300 slaves. Purchased for mere cotton cloth, they marched nine hours daily and were fed only boiled sorghum and water. Men were bound in forked sticks; women and children were tied by the hands. Seward described children beaten to death and paths littered with corpses, a haunting record of human misery.

Enslavement in modern times

Plaut discusses slavery that continued into the twentieth century, showing a 1935 image of Ethiopian merchants and their slaves delivering money to Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie for his war against Italy. This, he observes, is an aspect of Selassie’s reign “not much commented on.”

The Sokoto Caliphate

Plaut explores the Sokoto Caliphate, an Islamic state that lasted a century and comprised 30 emirates from Cameroon to Burkina Faso. In the mid-nineteenth century, Sokoto may have held as many slaves as the four million in the US on the eve of its Civil War. Plaut finds it “extraordinary that something of such importance has somehow been missed.”

Measuring the catastrophe

Plaut estimates that across five millennia, “at least 50 million Africans” were enslaved. He also notes that present-day conflict zones often align with old slave routes. He suggests slavery’s destructive legacy persists.

Chains unbroken

Plaut ends with the image of former US President Barack and former First Lady Michelle Obama at the Door of No Return on Gorée Island, Senegal, in 2013. He calls it “extraordinarily uplifting” and proof that “injustice is not imprinted on history.” His talk, drawn from his , Unbroken Chains: A 5,000-Year History of African Enslavement, reminds us that slavery’s story is ancient, tragic and still echoing.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article/video are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post FO° Talks: The 5,000-Year Secret History of African Slavery They Don’t Teach You appeared first on 51�Թ�.

But we should also ask: Why is October 7 treated as a zero point? Who decided that? The French historian François Hartog reminds us that dividing time into “before” and “after” is never neutral. He calls it a of historicity, the way communities shape their sense of past, present and future. In our presentist age, the present dominates, bending both past and future to its needs. Declaring October 7 as “Year Zero” is exactly that: a way of reorganizing memory around one rupture while pushing decades of siege, dispossession and occupation into the shadows.

How political narratives create beginnings

We have seen this before. February 24, 2022, is remembered as the beginning of Russia’s war in Ukraine, when tanks rolled toward Kyiv, Ukraine, and missiles fell across the country. Yet the conflict did not start there. Russia Crimea in 2014, redrawing European borders by force. In Ukraine’s Donbas region, war had already killed more than  people over eight years, long before the “official” invasion. By focusing on 2022, the deeper arc of Russian expansionism, NATO tensions and Ukraine’s Maidan revolution gets folded into a single day.

The same pattern appears with June 28, 1914, the date of the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which textbooks still call the spark of World War I. Assassin Gavrilo Princip’s shot mattered because Europe was already a powder keg: great‑power alliances, an , decades of mounting colonial competition and regional destabilization caused by the . Teaching 1914 as the sole “start” of World War I ignores the long fuse that had been burning.

Even the Russian Revolution is commonly dated to October 1917, when the Bolsheviks seized power. By then, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia had already abdicated after the February Revolution. World War I bled Russia dry, and workers’ and soldiers’ councils were already challenging authority. The was decisive, but Soviet memory later fixed it as the singular start, erasing the February movement and the years of hunger, strikes and mutinies that made revolution inevitable.

History almost never begins on a single day. These dates are chosen because they make stories easier to tell — stories that comfort one community while erasing another.

And yet, not all ruptures are the same. When Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, burying Pompeii, nature itself imposed the beginning and the end. No state, no narrative was needed to stamp the date in memory.��

Human conflicts aren’t like that. October 7, like February 24 or June 28, is not a natural eruption but a chosen symbol, a shorthand for histories that many would rather compress or forget. When the rupture is human, we have to ask: Who declared it? What gets silenced in the process? To stop at October 7 is to be duped, to be carried along by a story that comforts power and erases continuity.

Sacred rhythms of time

There is another way to build time. Polish-American Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel the Sabbath a “palace in time,” a cathedral made of hours instead of stone. It is temporal architecture: continuity rather than rupture, a rhythm that holds communities together and resists the endless demands of commerce and domination. American journalist Judith Shulevitz the Sabbath as “counter‑time,” a disruption of ordinary chronology. And it isn’t just Jewish: Christian Sunday, Muslim Friday and Jewish Sabbath all show how sacred intervals bind communities through shared time.

Time can therefore be structured to include or exclude. It can be continuity, like Sabbaths and Sundays, or it can be rupture, like political anniversaries. Declaring October 7 as Year Zero isn’t neutral. It asks us to grieve one people’s suffering in isolation while pushing another’s into oblivion. If time is truly for community, remembrance must hold all griefs together or it isn’t remembrance at all.

A more unusual example illustrates this point. The Hopi and Navajo tribes have tied to agricultural and cosmic cycles, where ceremonies renew harmony rather than move forward. The lesson is that time structures community by anchoring people in cycles of land, ancestors and renewal, quite different from the ruptures we see in a Western, commodity‑driven view of time. In Hindu cosmology, time is vast and cyclical: (epochs) and kalpas (cosmic cycles lasting billions of years). Festivals such as Diwali or Holi punctuate time as reenactments of myth, not as historical beginnings.

When memory becomes a weapon

Even within Judaism, voices warn against weaponizing memory. American Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss has that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war policies betray Jewish ethics and put Jews everywhere in danger by fueling antisemitism. Weaponized memory doesn’t just endanger the “other” — it endangers the very community that claims it.

This is where we need to distinguish between two very different uses of time and, therefore, commemoration of anniversaries. On one hand, historiography can be bent to political and economic interests: It turns a date into a rupture, a “before and after,” and organizes memory in ways that serve power. October 7 being treated as Year Zero is an example of this; it makes one story total while pushing others to the margins.

We have seen this before. The Holocaust, one of the greatest wounds of the 20th century, can be remembered as a universal warning against dehumanization — never again for anyone — or it can be weaponized to silence criticism and justify new forms of domination. When memory is instrumentalized, it loses its power to unite and heal; it becomes another tool of division.

On the other hand, ceremony and remembrance can build community. In the rabbinical tradition, the Sabbath is not a zero point but a rhythm, a weekly refounding of belonging. Heschel called it a palace in time: not history written against someone, but time consecrated for everyone. Here, remembrance is not about erasing or dividing, but about reconciling and holding grief together.

Toward shared remembrance and healing

Commemoration remains essential. We owe it to the dead and the survivors. Now the kind of commemoration we need is not one that hardens borders between peoples, but one that creates space for community across them. Hartog reminds us that societies always build their own regimes of historicity; Heschel shows us that time can be a sanctuary, not a battlefield.

If peace is to be rebuilt, it will not come from zero points imposed by politics. It will come from choosing a different architecture of time and symbols, one that resists manipulation, embraces continuities and allows us to mourn together. True remembrance is not a prison of the present; it is a palace to be built by all.

[ and edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Beyond October 7: Memory, Mourning and the Need for Collective Healing appeared first on 51�Թ�.

And that makes me deeply sad, because I think remembering those events — and their aftermath — is in some respects more important than ever for America. Some of my students these days are too young to remember 9/11 directly at all, of course, but many of us still do. In a stunningly short time on that beautiful September morning 24 years ago, viciously radicalized ideologues who loathed our country and everything it stands for killed more Americans than had died at Pearl Harbor.

My 9/11 story

I myself was running a US Senate subcommittee staff at the time for Senator Susan Collins of Maine, and I had an appointment that morning in my office with a senior official in the US Secret Service with whom I was negotiating to host some Congressional Fellows detailed over from that organization to help us in our work. Needless to say, my friend at the Secret Service didn’t make our appointment that morning — though, rather remarkably, his assistant called to apologize for his having to miss the meeting.

Shortly thereafter, a friend called me to say that from his office in the Old Executive Office Building, he could now see a plume of smoke rising from the general direction of the Pentagon. A moment after that, an agitated Capitol Police officer banged on the door to our office suite, saying that we needed to leave the building now.

We didn’t know it at the time, but United Airlines Flight 93 — which had left Newark, New Jersey, earlier that morning for San Francisco before being hijacked in mid-flight — was then on its way toward Washington, DC, apparently intending to do to us at the US Capitol what American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 had done to the Twin Towers in Manhattan, and what American Airlines Flight 77 did to the Pentagon.

As I assembled my staff at our pre-established emergency rally point outside, facing DC’s Union Station, two deep “booms” echoed around, which we feared were the sounds of more terrorist attacks, but which turned out to be Air National Guard F-16s from Andrews Air Force Base going supersonic overhead as they raced westward in hope of intercepting Flight 93.

Lots of folks have their own “Where were you on 9/11?” stories, of course, and there’s nothing particularly special about mine — except perhaps that those of us in the US Capitol complex at the time should perhaps be especially grateful for the amazing, self-sacrificial courage of the passengers of Flight 93 for storming the cockpit, attacking the al-Qaeda terrorists there with their bare hands and causing the plane to crash in that fateful Pennsylvania field before it could reach its intended target.

That’s the sort of thing that we ordinary folk like to think we could do in extremis to save so many lives, but dear Lord, could we really? I also later learned, by the way, that those intercepting F-16s had scrambled so fast from Andrews that they were still unarmed. Their pilots were going to ram their planes suicidally into Flight 93 to bring it down. So much about that day still takes one’s breath away.

Remembering what followed

I tell “my” 9/11 story so many years later not because it has any particular significance in itself, but because I want my fellow citizens today to remember that 9/11 was deeply, terribly real. And I particularly want us to remember what happened thereafter in America, because much of it makes me feel just as proud of us as a people as does remembering those courageous passengers and Air Guard pilots.

To be sure, in the wake of those horrible attacks, an entire generation of American national security policy pivoted toward radical Islamic terrorist threats, and we spent decades mired in conflicts in the Middle East.��The United States had, I would argue, little choice but to respond forcefully, but there is clearly a great deal to regret about the impact that period has had upon our life, political culture and role in the world. The unhappy political and geopolitical aftershocks of those ill-fated engagements will be with us for a long time yet, I fear.

But here’s what I think is an even more important point. In our country’s moment of need, in response to unprecedented threats, a generation of Americans stepped up boldly and served our country — in the armed services, in our intelligence agencies and in the new apparatus then being built for homeland security. The American taxpayer, moreover, was willing to support all this, resourcing national security policy to the hilt with a minimum of foolish gamesmanship and crass partisanship.

Ours was then an America that prized public service, recognized that we need government institutions that work, understood that this is nowhere more true than in defending against foreign adversaries who wish us ill and was willing to pull together to this end across domestic divisions and accept great risks and burdens to preserve our freedoms and protect our interests in a dangerous world.

I think we are still that America, or at least that we can be that America once again, if we allow ourselves to stop hating and fearing each other more than we do our real enemies.

America’s new divisions

We’ve still got a lot of work to do, of course. The day before this year’s anniversary of 9/11, America suffered another episode in its lamentable history of periodic political violence, with the horrific of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.��

That appalling crime — along with the of two Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota in June, not to mention the near-miss against President Donald Trump himself on the campaign trail in 2024 — suggests how far we still are from reclaiming America’s political culture from the cults of reciprocal demonization that have so afflicted it.��

These cults have pulled us dangerously away from our better selves as a nation and a people, and they stand egregiously in the way of us reclaiming the greatness that our system of government, our deepest values and our history continue to make possible. 

Nevertheless, it is with a guarded hope for our collective future that I look back today upon that terrible September morning in 2001, when this Senate staffer and Navy intelligence officer stared in shock at the roiling rubble of the Twin Towers on television while a pyre of black smoke rose from the Pentagon on the horizon and from that wreckage in a field near Stoneycreek Township, Pennsylvania.

You don’t need to have a personal “9/11 story” to be a part of America’s collective and continuing 9/11 story. You just need to remember that it is possible with moral courage to pull together in times of need across the poisonous polarities that separate us. Remember that though we may believe different things about politics, we are patriots and fellow citizens together, and that foreign ideologues violently arrayed against the values and freedoms that made this Republic so great present threats and challenges immeasurably more grave than the domestic issues that divide us.

So let’s remember all that, and let us work together as fellow Americans to write the next chapter in this national story, for our own children and grandchildren to proudly tell about us.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post 24 Years Later: 9/11 in the Rear-view Mirror appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Brazil witnessed for the first time the trial of the architects of a plan to destabilize institutions and the democratic rule of law. The seriousness of the charges and the importance of the verdict for the country’s future reflect the unprecedented nature of the case.

Bolsonaro is the tenth head of state to be punished for this crime in the world, and the first in Brazil’s history. The newspaper conducted a survey of leaders convicted since 1946 and identified a total of 186 convictions of 128 heads of government in 69 countries. Most of these convictions, however, were for corruption crimes, not attempted coups.

Brazil has experienced at least or coup attempts since the end of the monarchy in 1889. The most infamous and damaging was the seizure of power by force in , when a military uprising overthrew President João Goulart, ushering in a 21-year dictatorship.

Jair Bolsonaro this stance throughout his political career, since the 1980s, and refused to call the regime that was imposed a dictatorship, classifying it as a period of “order and progress” (which is the motto written on the Brazilian national flag).

When he voted of the impeachment of then-President Dilma Rousseff in 2016, he dedicated his vote to Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, “the terror of Dilma Rousseff,” in his words — Ustra had tortured the president during the dictatorial regime.

The decision and the sentences

The final decision was four votes to one. Justices Alexandre de Moraes (rapporteur), Flávio Dino, Cármen Lúcia and Cristiano Zanin voted for conviction, while Luiz Fux voted for acquittal. The sentences, based on evidence such as notes, live videos, use of the Brazilian Intelligence Agency (ABIN) for espionage and draft coup documents, were established as follows:

Jair Bolsonaro: Sentenced to 27 years and three months in prison, to be served in a closed regime, in addition to a fine of more than Brazilian Real (about $80,000). The former president and the other defendants were sentenced to ineligibility for eight years, added to the eight years already determined by the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) in 2023. The reporting minister, de Moraes, pointed to Bolsonaro as the leader of an armed criminal organization that sought the violent abolition of the democratic rule of law.

Other defendants: Walter Braga Netto (general and former minister), Almir Garnier (admiral and former Navy commander), Anderson Torres (former Minister of Justice), Augusto Heleno (general and former Minister of Institutional Security), Paulo Sérgio Nogueira (general and former Minister of Defense) and Alexandre Ramagem (federal deputy and former director of Abin) were also convicted, with prison sentences ranging from 16 to 26 years. Mauro Cid, Bolsonaro’s former aide-de-camp, received a two-year open prison sentence, benefiting from a plea bargain.

The defendants were convicted of various crimes related to the attempted coup, including armed criminal organization, violent abolition of the democratic rule of law, aggravated damage to federal property and deterioration of listed heritage sites.

Context: The chronology of the alleged coup

What led Brazil to this decisive point was a series of events that, according to investigations by the Federal Police (PF) and allegations by the Attorney General’s Office (PGR), form the basis of the indictment.

According to the complaint, the plot began in March 2021, when the STF former President Lula’s convictions, and his release from prison made him eligible to run for office. From then on, Jair Bolsonaro’s support group allegedly began a campaign to question the electoral system and delegitimize the possible victory of an opponent. In , the PGR and the PF indicated that a criminal organization had been structured with plans to interfere in the elections.

After Bolsonaro’s by Lula in the presidential election in October 2022, the movement allegedly became more radical, with supporters camping in front of Army barracks calling for military intervention. Investigations revealed the existence of a , the “Green and Yellow Dagger,” which was reportedly presented to military commanders in December 2022 but was rejected by the Army and Air Force leadership. The complaint points to the existence of a “coup decree,” which provided for the annulment of the elections and the arrest of Supreme Court ministers.

The crisis reached its peak on , 2023, with the invasion and destruction of the headquarters of the Three Powers in Brasília, in acts that investigations by the PF and the Joint Congressional Investigating Committee (CPMI) concluded were part of a planned and financed mobilization. In July 2023, the investigation also a draft decree on Law and Order at the home of former Justice Minister Anderson Torres, which would confirm plans to arrest Minister Alexandre de Moraes and annul the election.

The culmination of this investigation occurred in November 2024, when the PF Bolsonaro and 36 other individuals. The PGR formalized the complaint to the STF in February 2025, and the court accepted the request in March 2025, turning the accused into defendants.

Trump on the scene: the international dimension

The trial took on a complex international dimension. The lawsuit is a domestic matter, but the shadow of US President Donald Trump looms over the case with profound political and diplomatic consequences.

According to analysts, the relationship between Brazil and the US is experiencing a deepening crisis, with Washington tariffs on Brazilian products and sanctions against members of the Supreme Court. These measures are seen as a direct reaction by the Trump administration in support of Bolsonaro. 

The strategy of rapprochement with the US was articulated by federal deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of the former president, who to the country to ask for international support and seek “fair punishment” for de Moraes and the Federal Police.

Trump’s support for Bolsonaro was not limited to statements. The American president spoke out against the legal proceedings, calling them a “witch hunt,” and imposed 50% tariffs on Brazilian products. The US government then announced sanctions against de Moraes, revoking his visa and those of his family members, and opened a trade investigation against Brazil, accusing the judiciary of “censoring” American technology companies. Experts believe that these acts of intimidation and bullying reflect Trump’s personal affinity with Bolsonaro, as both have been of attempting to overturn election results and incite their supporters.

The political and diplomatic consequences of this interference are notable. US pressure has worn down Brazilian public opinion and, according to , has reinforced the perception that Bolsonaro participated in the coup plot. However, this interference does not seem to have changed the opinion of his most loyal supporters. In the political arena, the growth of about Bolsonaro had led parties to rethink the costs of a strong defense of the former president.

The protagonists and the next steps

The progress of the process reflects the actions of two key figures: Alexandre de Moraes and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

As rapporteur for the investigations, de Moraes has become the main face of the judicial response. His have been marked by conducting investigations, authorizing searches and seizures, and now, by reporting on the trial, with a vote that points out that the defendants not only planned but also initiated concrete actions to discredit democracy.

For his part, Lula has taken on the role of defender of the rule of law, vehemently the acts of January 8 and defending the work of the PF and the judiciary. His stance has reinforced the autonomy of institutions and the country’s democratic legitimacy in the eyes of the international community.

The defendants’ defense can still appeal the decision, which prevents immediate imprisonment. Bolsonaro is currently under provisional , and the final decision on where he will serve his sentence will be made after all appeals have been exhausted. The loss of the convicted men’s military rank will be reviewed by the Superior Military Court (STM) after the final judgment.

This trial was not just an isolated case. It served as a global reminder that democracy, even in consolidated nations, is not immune to internal (and external) threats. The way Brazil dealt with this plot determined the strength of its institutions and its reputation as a nation that, above all, submits to the law and the Constitution.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Trial of Jair Bolsonaro: The Future of Brazilian Democracy appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Rewriting Alabama’s story

Okeowo began writing after the 2016 US presidential election, frustrated by narrow portrayals of the South as little more than a caricature of red states and cultural backwardness. Having spent much of her career reporting in Africa and Latin America, she wanted to apply the same nuanced lens to Alabama that she used abroad. She draws on her background as the daughter of Nigerian immigrants who built a life in the South despite intending to return elsewhere. Her parents’ story is emblematic of Alabama’s complexity: They came almost by accident, stayed out of necessity and discovered friendship, work and community.

She situates their experience alongside those of other groups who often fall outside the conventional black-and-white narrative of Alabama. Native Americans, immigrants and Latino families have all made the state their home, even as policy and prejudice sometimes sought to drive them out. Okeowo underscores that their resilience — their refusal to leave, their ability to adapt and their insistence on belonging — is what gives Alabama its true potential.

Okeowo’s book title, Blessings and Disasters, reflects the state’s oscillation between extremes: slavery, Jim Crow discrimination and regressive laws on one side, and the Civil Rights Movement and grassroots organizing on the other. For her, Alabama is both a microcosm of America’s contradictions and a stage for its most pivotal struggles.

Stories and lessons for the world

Like her earlier , A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa, Okeowo’s Alabama narrative focuses on ordinary people in extraordinary situations. She writes about a woman from a multigenerational activist family, the operator of a Confederate museum who preserves a contested history, and a young Latino migrant who unexpectedly became an activist after harsh anti-immigrant legislation was passed. Their stories show how everyday lives can be upended by politics but redefined through courage.

Okeowo emphasizes that Alabama is not unique in its struggle to be understood. Abroad, her Nigerian parents associated the state mainly with the Ku Klux Klan and racism before realizing it contained far more. The same pattern plays out globally: Mexico is often reduced to drug war headlines, Nigeria to corruption and countless other places to their worst crises. What links these regions is the failure of outsiders to look past the most dramatic or negative stories.

By documenting Alabama’s overlooked complexities, Okeowo hopes readers will reflect on their own countries and consider who tells their stories, which narratives get accepted and what is left unsaid.

Persistence amid struggle

A central lesson, Okeowo insists, is the power of persistence. Alabama’s history of progress has been painfully slow, marked by long stretches of stagnation or even regression. Yet despite these obstacles, change has happened because people refused to leave. Communities organized, activists persisted and ordinary families stayed put through generations of hardship. Even now, when new legislation seems to push the state backward, grassroots work continues on the ground.

She argues that this model of persistence — patient, determined and often invisible — carries lessons for societies everywhere. Many today face polarization, authoritarianism or deep structural inequality. Progress is never automatic, she cautions, and sometimes it can take decades to bear fruit. But Alabama shows that incremental, stubborn resistance can eventually reshape even the most hostile environments.

Loving home while acknowledging its sins

The conversation closes with Okeowo’s belief that people can love their homes while still confronting their flaws. Having left Alabama and faced questions about why she would ever stay, she insists that the state’s sins are undeniable and must be critiqued. Yet she is also grateful for the opportunities Alabama gave her family and siblings, and for the sense of belonging it provided.

She frames this as a universal challenge: How can people both acknowledge a place’s history of injustice and still commit to improving it? For Okeowo, this balance is not just possible but necessary. It prevents nostalgia from blinding us to injustice, while also keeping cynicism from erasing the bonds of community. The people who manage to do both — love their homes while striving to change them — are the ones who keep a place alive. That, she concludes, is what ultimately makes Alabama, and indeed any community, worthwhile.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article/video are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post FO° Talks: Alabama Can Teach the World a Lot About Racism, Resilience and Community appeared first on 51�Թ�.

In this conversation, Agrawal reflects on his activism during the Emergency, the challenges of mobilizing the Indian diaspora in America and the global significance of their efforts.

Indira Gandhi’s Emergency

Agrawal recalls June 25, 1975, as a watershed moment in Indian politics. On that day, Gandhi’s administration arrested opposition leaders, including Jayaprakash Narayan, and the prime minister declared an internal Emergency. She suspended civil liberties and imprisoned thousands. For Agrawal, who was already engaged in developmental causes, this moment underscored the fragility of democracy.

He places these events in context: America at the time was witnessing anti-Vietnam War protests, while Indians had only recently supported Gandhi during the Bangladesh Liberation War. India itself was still reeling from droughts and famine in the late 1960s, experiences Agrawal witnessed firsthand.

Protests in America

On June 30, 1975, just days after the Emergency was declared, Agrawal and his friends, including Anand Kumar — a close associate of Narayan — organized a protest outside the Indian Embassy in Washington, DC. Agrawal drove from Philadelphia to Maryland to join the organizers.

In the days leading up to the demonstration, they circulated petitions, collecting names and states of residence. Many were hesitant to provide full details. Those who did were, in Agrawal’s words, “fairly brave souls,” given the “fear complex” in the community.

At the embassy, officials refused to accept the petitions. The protesters left them on the steps, where Agrawal, a photographer, captured a striking image: the petitions scattered on the ground beneath the boots of a heavy police presence summoned by the embassy. To him, the image symbolized how power structures resist dissent. It even reminded him of fascist imagery from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s regime in World War II.

How Indian Americans united

The following day, the Washington Post published photos of the protest in its newspapers. Soon after, the protesters held a press conference at the National Press Club, calling for the Emergency to be lifted, political prisoners freed and democratic rights restored.

They continued with demonstrations on August 15 — India’s Independence Day — in front of the ambassador’s residence in Washington, at the Indian consulate in New York, and in Chicago. IFD also began publishing a newsletter: Indian Opinion.

Agrawal emphasizes that the group stayed “Gandhian in spirit,” deliberately non-partisan and focused on democracy rather than party politics. Their supporters came from across the spectrum — from Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) right-wingers and Jan Sangh to leftists — and tried to maintain neutrality.

Global media coverage

Without today’s communication tools, mobilization depended on cold-calling Indian names in phone books and organizing at Indian stores. They received mixed responses: Some hung up, some feared reprisals but donated money, while others quietly supported.

The Indian embassy, meanwhile, monitored activists, photographing them and even revoking passports. Kumar, a PhD student at the University of Chicago, had his government scholarship suspended, which drew headlines. Support also came from India Abroad, a new newspaper committed to covering censorship in India; Indian papers blacked out entire articles.

Initially, American media, including The New York Times, were sympathetic to Gandhi. They interpreted events through a Cold War lens. But credibility shifted when she postponed elections in 1976. Support from groups like the Quakers and the American Friends Service Committee, who were “friends of [Jawaharlal] Nehru and [Mahatma] Gandhi,” also boosted the movement. Major outlets like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Washington Post began covering the protests more seriously. Congressmen arranged hearings in Washington with testimony from Indian leaders such as Subramanian Swamy and Ram Jethmalani, supported by Senator Ted Kennedy’s office.

Walk for Human Rights

By the fall of 1976, the activists sought a bold, symbolic action. They launched the Walk for Human Rights from Independence Hall in Philadelphia to the United Nations in New York, ending deliberately on October 2 — Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday.

The Gandhian, non-violent march lasted ten days. It began with 30–40 people and consolidated into a committed group of about ten. The walkers stopped at several universities, including Temple University in Pennsylvania, Princeton University and Rutgers University in New Jersey, and Columbia University in New York. Here, they spoke about human and political rights.

Agrawal says the march increased their credibility both with the diaspora and with Indian officials. He later learned that Indian minister YB Chavan asked US President Gerald Ford to ban the demonstrations. Ford reportedly refused, affirming that America was a democracy.

For participants, the walk was cathartic. Agrawal believes it even pressured Gandhi, who cared deeply about her global image, to reconsider her position. He argues this contributed to the Emergency being lifted and elections being called in 1977.

The diaspora during Emergency

The Indian diaspora in America at the time was tiny — perhaps fewer than 100,000, concentrated in universities and a few cities. Most professionals avoided involvement, fearing repercussions for themselves or relatives in India. Students were more active, though some leftist groups criticized IFD’s Gandhian methods as “too docile.” Meanwhile, supporters of RSS and Jan Sangh pursued their own lobbying and fundraising, especially as many of their families were directly affected by arrests.

Agrawal reflects that even today, in moments of crisis, only a small minority of Indian Americans would get directly involved, while most would remain passive or offer private support.

Aftermath and legacy

The Emergency ended on March 21, 1977. The Indian government held elections later that year. Agrawal and his colleagues sent a detailed letter to the new prime minister, Morarji Desai, and Members of Parliament, urging reforms such as repealing the Maintenance of Internal Security Act and creating a Right to Information Act.

In October 1977, Agrawal became one of four activists invited to meet Desai and External Affairs Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Both leaders thanked them for their efforts. Agrawal remembers the meeting as gratifying, even if not all their proposals were adopted. For him, the experience confirmed the value of diaspora activism in defending India’s democratic traditions.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article/video are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post FO° Talks: How Indians in US Fought Against Indira Gandhi’s Emergency appeared first on 51�Թ�.

A conflict with colonial roots

This conflict is not the first time gunfire has echoed along the Thai-Cambodian border — and it likely won’t be the last. The of the dispute trace back over a century to the colonial cartography of French Indochina. When Cambodia from France in 1953, ambiguities in the 1907 Franco-Siamese border treaties left several stretches of the frontier undefined. Among the most contentious sites is the area surrounding the Preah Vihear temple complex, an ancient Angkorian site perched on a cliffside that both nations claim as their own.

Despite the International Court of Justice ruling in 1962 — and a reaffirmation in 2013 — that the temple and adjacent territory belong to Cambodia, Thailand has consistently implementing the verdict in full. For both countries, the site is more than just land; it represents national pride, cultural heritage and sovereignty.

A political powder keg

The timing of this latest escalation on July 24 seems far from coincidental. Thailand, currently grappling with internal , recently saw its fourth change in leadership since the 2023 elections. The acting Prime Minister, Phumtham Wechayachai, has been under intense pressure to assert control after a between former Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra and Cambodia’s de facto powerbroker, Hun Sen, painted Thai leadership in an unflattering light. For many observers, stoking nationalism through a border conflict appeared to be a calculated move to shift public focus away from domestic disarray.

Cambodia’s motivations, while similar, are anchored in internal consolidation. Prime Minister Hun Manet — the son of longtime leader Hun Sen — continues to establish his authority. A national rallying cause, such as a foreign threat, can serve as a unifying force, especially as Cambodia faces economic headwinds and widespread dissatisfaction.

The with a gunfight near the Ta Moan Thom temple complex, situated close to Thailand’s Surin province and Cambodia’s Oddar Meanchey. The situation quickly spiraled. Cambodia launched BM-21 Grad rocket systems, some targeting civilian infrastructure. Thailand retaliated with F-16 airstrikes. By the time a ceasefire was declared, at least 34 people — including civilians — had been killed, and over 270,000 displaced.

The Thai government closed all border crossings and began evacuating civilians within a 50-kilometer radius. Both sides deployed additional troops, and fears of a wider war mounted. Yet, neither country formally declared war — a telling sign that despite the fierce rhetoric and bloodshed, both governments are wary of crossing a line from which there would be no easy return.

On July 28, under the auspices of Malaysia, the two countries agreed to an “immediate and unconditional” . Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, acting as mediator and in his role as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations () chair, hailed the agreement as a “vital first step” towards restoring stability.

But hours after the ceasefire took effect, confusion set in. The Thai military Cambodia of violating the truce with fresh attacks. Cambodian officials, in turn, denied any new hostilities, stating that calm had returned to all fronts. Both sides cited contradictory timelines for follow-up military meetings, further reflecting the lack of mutual trust. While some displaced families have started returning home, uncertainty lingers. The ceasefire may be holding in spirit more than in practice.

Global reaction: Watchful, but distant

The has reacted in a measured way to the situation. The United States and China — both key players in Southeast Asia — welcomed the ceasefire and offered to monitor its implementation. However, neither appears willing to involve themselves deeply.��

The US, under the current administration, is preoccupied with other global flashpoints. China, which has significant economic ties to both nations, prefers quiet diplomacy and has already proposed mediation, though with little visible urgency.

ASEAN, meanwhile, faces a credibility test. The organization enforcement mechanisms or a peacekeeping arm, but Malaysia’s active diplomacy may signal a more proactive regional role. If Kuala Lumpur succeeds in facilitating sustained dialogue, it could elevate ASEAN’s standing as a regional conflict mediator.

Why a prolonged war is unlikely

Despite the recent violence, most analysts believe the conflict is unlikely to escalate into full-scale war. The reasons are primarily economic. Thailand heavily on Cambodian labor — estimates suggest between 500,000 and 1.5 million Cambodians work in Thailand’s agriculture, construction and services sectors. These workers send home roughly $2 billion annually, accounting for nearly 10% of Cambodia’s GDP.

Cambodia, on the other hand, relies on Thai imports and uses Thailand as a key for goods and tourism. Over 40% of international tourists to Cambodia arrive via Thailand, and tourism represents a fifth of the Cambodian economy.��

Both countries, in other words, have too much to lose. A prolonged conflict would devastate trade, cause labor shortages, inflate prices and severely damage their tourism sectors.

What comes next?

The path forward hinges on rebuilding trust — a tall order given the nationalistic posturing on both sides. Border demarcation, which would provide a long-term solution, remains politically toxic for leaders fearful of appearing weak.

The current scenario suggests a likely return to the status quo: a “cold peace” marked by occasional flare-ups, symbolic military actions, and rhetorical sparring. The border dispute will continue to serve as a tool for domestic distraction, not a problem to be solved.

Still, the hope remains that diplomacy — perhaps facilitated by ASEAN or neutral countries like Malaysia — can create the conditions for dialogue. Confidence-building measures, joint economic projects in border areas, and people-to-people exchanges might offer a roadmap for easing tensions.

But unless both Phnom Penh and Bangkok find the political courage to compromise and confront their respective national narratives, the ghosts of colonial borders will keep haunting Southeast Asia. For now, the ceasefire may have paused the gunfire — but the conflict itself is far from over.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Thailand-Cambodia Ceasefire: A New Path to Peace or Prolonged Conflict? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Switzerland has been neutral not just now, but for a long time, since the early 19th century. In 1815, following the wars led by Napoleon, the Congress of Vienna the world recognized Switzerland’s neutrality, a status it has maintained ever since. Even with big powers around it, Switzerland has stayed out of wars, maintaining peace and independence through dialogue and negotiation.

More than a neutral party

But Switzerland does more than just avoid wars — it helps make peace. With tensions growing worldwide, Switzerland’s role in solving conflicts becomes more critical. Being neutral allows it to host discussions and maintain its fairness. By not joining groups like (although they are close allies), it can offer a free space to build peace.

Over the years, it has helped resolve conflicts and has been a venue for discussions aimed at ending wars. For example, Geneva has seen big talks that the Cold War and more, like those about Iran’s .

Switzerland also supports that work for peace and stability, like the United Nations Office at Geneva, which deals with UN work in Europe. It also has the International Committee of the Red Cross () and the World Health Organization (), which provide significant assistance during major crises. These groups and Switzerland’s work ensure it remains central in global peace efforts.

One aspect of Switzerland’s role that often goes unnoticed is how its financial power contributes to peace. Although it lacks the big guns of other major nations, it is as a safe and reliable haven for money, particularly in challenging times. Its are known for being stable, private and trusted, drawing in big companies and people with a lot of money.

When there are fights or crises, Switzerland’s financial system becomes even more crucial. As global markets fluctuate amid conflicts, Swiss banks offer a stable, neutral environment for financial transactions. They often provide the know-how and help needed to rebuild places wrecked by wars.

Commitment to human rights

Switzerland’s decision to remain neutral also means it strongly advocates for helping others and human rights. It pushes for the safety of normal people in war zones and backs the , which set the rules to treat people in wars in a human way.

The ICRC has also played a crucial role in assisting in dangerous and war-filled places. Switzerland’s neutrality enables it to lead in mitigating the harmful effects of wars without becoming entangled in the political or combat sides of conflicts.

Switzerland’s commitment to human rights extends beyond its borders. For years, it has given people running from wars a to start again. It works closely with large organizations to ensure that these people’s rights are protected and they receive the necessary assistance during difficult times.

The perfect spot for neutrality

Being in the middle of Europe helps Switzerland in its role in world peace and talks. Being easily accessible from both Western and Eastern Europe, with good transportation options, makes it an excellent spot for large meetings, aid work and peace talks.

Also, the have always been a natural shield, helping to maintain the country’s freedom and neutrality. During the big wars, this helped keep it safe and a place of escape for those fleeing the fighting. Today, its mountains stand as a sign of the country’s wish to stay free and peaceful.

As global tensions escalate, particularly among major nations vying for power, Switzerland’s role as a neutral nation remains crucial. It stands for peace, helping others and being stable in money, which gives a needed balance to the often wild and fight-filled world relations. Switzerland’s approach of not using guns but still providing support shows a good path for other countries.

In a world where conflicts can erupt at any moment, Switzerland serves as a beacon of hope — a nation that has preserved its freedom, facilitated dialogue and championed peace.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Switzerland’s Neutrality is Key in a World of High Tensions appeared first on 51�Թ�.

On March 11, 2025, the SNHR published a documenting coordinated attacks carried out by “groups linked to the Assad regime” concentrated in the governorates of Latakia, Tartus and Hama. The report meticulously traced the movements of alleged-Assad loyalists and vaguely described that the efforts of the transitional government to pursue the attacks resulted in “extrajudicial killings … driven by vengeful and sectarian motives.” 

This publication came after an agonizing five days of horrifying reports, testimonies and videos emerging from the Syrian coast, with countless sources reporting on more than since March 6 in sectarian-driven massacres aimed at eliminating specific Alawite communities. Many from the coast described civilians being humiliated, abducted or killed, with thousands of Syrians to Lebanon for safety.

The SNHR’s report referred to the 803 documented extrajudicial killings as “individuals” and “people” rather than “civilians,” and dedicated the majority of the report to the alleged attacks on government security forces, rather than the civilians they claim to advocate on behalf of. The report concluded by commending the transitional government’s to investigate, “considering this a positive step that seriously reflects the transitional government’s seriousness” in achieving justice, even though the killings were actively ongoing — carried out, at least in part, by state security forces — at the time of publishing.

In an published the following month, the SNHR explained that it was not possible to distinguish civilians from potentially plain-clothed opposition groups aligned with the former regime. The SNHR had never before hesitated to identify victims as civilians, given that it has regularly on the “daily death toll of civilian victims” in addition to its annual reports that explicitly document the civilian victims of the Syrian civil war. Just over a year ago, the SNHR documented over victims killed throughout the entire civil war — a war notably marked by several competing armed groups that often operated in plain clothes.

The SNHR report also alleged that the Assad regime was responsible for an astounding 201,206 of those victims. The Islamic State — an entity that has outright terrorized the region for a decade — was responsible for just over 5,056 civilian victims since its inception. Hayat Tahrir al Sham, the group now controlling Damascus, was found accountable for merely 538 civilian deaths across its entire existence. Not only could the SNHR distinguish between civilians and combatants with enough certainty to publish, but it somehow had enough reliable information to identify perpetrators. So what makes civilians elusive now? 

International standards of casualty reporting

At the foundation of contemporary casualty reporting is the Charter for the Recognition of Every Casualty of Armed Conflict, which holds that all deaths in armed conflict must be recorded, identified and acknowledged. The High Commissioner for Human Rights established international standards for casualty reporting. These standards and guidelines include the Guidance on Casualty Recording (), the Every Casualty’s Standards for Casualty Reporting (), and the Guidelines for Documenting International Crimes (). These documents serve as guidelines for best practices for organizations engaged in this work across contexts of armed conflict or deteriorating human rights. 

First and foremost, casualty recorders must establish a standard of proof that indicates the degree of certainty or confidence in any given data point. The UN typically employs the standard of “reasonable grounds to believe” that an incident has occurred. Transparency and consistency are necessary for the criteria of inclusion. Definitions of casualties and coding categories for victim status need to be provided. Where a firm, legal determination of the status of a casualty cannot be made, it should be clearly stated. Similarly, an explanatory rationale should be provided in cases where a determination was made regarding an uncertain case. 

All individuals considered to provide testimony should first undergo a vulnerability assessment. An interview will only proceed if the individual is capable of giving consent. Documentation of testimony should occur once the individual provides consent. The documentation should include biographical data, a summary of testimony and factual descriptions of any evidence provided, excluding individual opinions and irrelevant comments. A recording organization should aim to collect information on location, date, incident type, the number of killed/injured, causes, IHL status and alleged perpetrator, with violation details if possible, for any given incident it documents. 

All possible efforts should be made to identify the victims of an incident, as in specific contexts, naming victims is the only means of avoiding duplicate recordings, addressing denials of casualties by parties to the conflict and initiating accountability mechanisms under international law. Unidentified individuals should be included in the data even if not all information can be feasibly obtained, as there is a possibility they may be identified and verified at a later stage.

Finally and most critically, publicly released information must include a clear statement of methodology and definitions that are consistently applied and as inclusive as possible in the collection process, thereby building impartiality and broad confidence in the organization. Organizational transparency is explicitly required regarding the motives for recording, any potential organizational affiliations, the methodology of data collection and analysis, internal organizational structure and funding.

A comparative analysis of the SNHR methods

The published of the SNHR begins with the organization’s main goals, which include preserving the rights of all victims through documentation, holding perpetrators accountable for verifiable crimes, deterring violations and supporting efforts in transitional justice and advocacy. This document also immediately clarifies that all participants are fully informed of the methodology and the purpose of their testimony and that all information obtained “will not be made publicly available” for security purposes — hence not publishing — thereby silencing victims’ voices. 

This represents an immediate deviation from international standards. At the same time, informed consent is a baseline in any humanitarian field; the ultimate goal of documentation work is to publish and amplify the voices of the victims. There is no explanation or rationale provided for this policy in the SNHR methodology.

In terms of definition and scope, the SNHR opts to define concrete terms — “massacre”, “detainee”, “forcibly disappeared person”, “citizen journalist”, “media worker”, “medical personnel” and “combatant” — and maintains definitions generally consistent with those standardized by the . 

Notably absent from the defined terms is the term “civilian”, the very category of victim that the SNHR aims to capture. From a practical perspective, this means that the distinction between civilian casualties and combatant casualties is not well-defined.

Earlier versions of the SNHR’s methodology (see Table 2), accessible only through internet archives, defined a civilian victim as someone killed by any of the listed parties involved in perpetrating violations within Syria. This definition notably deviates from the international standard, which defines civilian status by the absence of active participation in hostilities. The 2016 methodology stated that the documentation of military victims from the armed opposition was unlikely due to challenges in obtaining reliable information from conflict zones and the understandable reluctance of families to disclose such details. This victim classification was verbatim in the SNHR methodology documents through 2019.

The key deviation from all international standards is the SNHR’s explicit statement that “in cases of the absence of conclusive evidence of the victim’s status and resulting uncertainty over his/her classification as a civilian or a combatant, [the SNHR] registers him/her as a civilian”. Furthermore, no clarification is provided regarding what constitutes evidence of combatant status. The lack of definition of evidence for combatant status and the absence of a category for individuals of uncertain status could result in combatants being classified as civilians.

SNHR’s documentation processes

At this point, it is notably unclear how a report is derived from the source, what types of sources are utilized for corroboration, and what standard of proof is applied in the documentation process. When describing the use of open sources, the document says only that they obtain materials through “staff or volunteers” and the “internet”. The document details that they also archive photos and videos that may constitute evidence, but does not clarify the authentication of such materials beyond the use of metadata and comparing visual references. 

From start to finish, this document fails to adhere to the standards of international recording, leaving significant question marks around the validity of victim classification between civilians and combatants, the standard of proof for incorporating a reported incident into data and even the actual process of taking a report. To better understand how these international standards are translated into transparent data collection, one must examine the methodology and public operations of several comparable human rights and casualty recorders, primarily focused on the context of Syria.

Methodology of other organizations

Airwars

sets an international gold standard for civilian casualty reporting, explicitly stating that its methodology aims for a high degree of conformity to the EveryCasualty standards. In addition to reports of violations received from individuals to identify incidents for investigation, they rely on daily monitoring of local language media, social media and international/local NGOs. With the scope of assessing all known claims of civilian harm across monitored conflicts, Airwars explicitly defined the term civilian by the standard of non-combatants who were taking no active part in hostilities, unless otherwise specified in a given report. 

Following the receipt of a report or an incident flagged as a potential violation, the investigative team collects as much information as possible, relying on accessible footage of incidents, published reports (by the state, military or other CRN members) and on occasion, militant/terrorist propaganda sources that are directly pertinent to an event to sufficiently corroborate an individual report and subsequent information received about an event.  Every reported incident is geolocated, either to the exact location, which can be explicitly proven through photographic or video evidence, or to the nearest verifiable location (e.g., landmarks, streets, neighbourhood, village, town, city, province, etc.). Based on the scope and provided methodology, it does not appear that Airwars engages in interviews or direct engagement with eyewitnesses. Most notably, Airwars has a policy of naming civilian non-combatant victims whenever possible for organizational transparency, recognition of the victims and to combat denials of responsibility from belligerents.  

For every alleged incident, a provisional assessment is published of the civilian casualties based on the investigation’s findings, with events coded as confirmed or contested based on the available information. They also publish methodology notes that explain in more detail how their standard approach and methodology apply in different information environments. Surprisingly — or perhaps unsurprisingly — this degree of methodological transparency was not an outlier amongst other casualty recorders.

Syrian Observatory for Human Rights

On a smaller scale, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) was in 2006 to monitor, document and publish developments within Syria. It currently monitors political, military and humanitarian developments to provide accurate and credible daily reports. In contrast to SNHR, the SOHR is not a non-profit organization, and it does not claim to collect and analyze data in a formal capacity. In interviews over the years, founder Rami Abdelrahman has that he receives reports of fatalities from over 200 individual sources within Syria, with whom he maintains contact via mobile phones and platforms such as Skype and WhatsApp, with four volunteers inside Syria helping to report and collate the information provided by activists.

Operating like an independent publishing house, the SOHR seeks to publish factual, unbiased reports of developments on the ground based on independent, corroborating sources, including testimony from contacts within Syria, photo or video evidence and reports published by official sources. The SOHR also occasionally publishes the relevant content of interviews conducted, as well as photos or videos documenting developments, with care taken to anonymize any data that may put individuals on the ground at risk. This demonstrates that there are feasible measures to establish transparency in this context of data collection that do not put vulnerable individuals, witnesses or contacts at an elevated risk.

Violation Documentation Center of Syria (VDC), and the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre (SJAC)

The Violation Documentation Center of Syria () and the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre (), two organizations comparable in size and scope to the SNHR, further demonstrate how easily it is to fill the gaps left in the Network’s methodology. Publishing in the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression, the VDC focused on documenting violations committed by all actors in Syria, recording as much verifiable information as possible about each incident for publication in a database of violations, as well as in monthly and annual . 

The center’s investigatory process includes an initial stage of background research from hospitals, morgues/cemeteries, families of victims, media centers and official reports, as well as the collection of videos, images and any other forensic information related to the victims or the violation. Regular follow-ups are conducted to document new information or clarify existing details. The VDC conducts detailed credibility assessments of sources, and all collected materials are presented to data inspectors who ensure accuracy, correctness and completeness before supplementary information is entered into the database.

Similarly, the aims to document human rights and international humanitarian law violations in Syria by collecting interviews with survivors and eyewitnesses of such violations, as well as documents, physical evidence, photographs and videos of the violations. With their organizational focus explicitly on “not harm,” the SJAC stands out for its transparency in methodology, with training materials published openly on their website in English and Arabic to facilitate the high-quality collection, documentation and preservation of evidence for use in transitional justice efforts. 

In these trainings, each type of violation is clearly defined, followed by a series of ethical considerations to precede any interview and the standard questions relevant to documenting such a violation. They conclude with standards for maintaining impartiality in post-interview reflections, documentation and subsequent analysis, as well as detailed templates for obtaining informed consent.

Despite variations in their scope, definitions and classifications of the data collected, each of the organizations above provide considerably ample transparency around their documentation rationale, the procedure or methodology employed as well as broader organizational details, such as the working staff, advisory or executive boards, external partners and sources of funding — all details that are notably absent from the current SNHR organization.

Investigative findings: financial and organizational opacity of the SNHR

Unlike established NGOs, the SNHR does not provide a public listing of its staff or board of directors on its current official . For comparison, Human Rights Watch, Airwars and most casualty recording non-profits prominently display their board members, ensuring transparency in leadership and establishing credibility through the impartiality of those individuals. In a document obtained from internet archives, which first appeared on the SNHR website (albeit under its former ) in 2017, the following individuals are listed as members of the organization’s executive board (see Table 1).

Table 1: Individuals named as the organization’s executive board

Several of these individuals have been or are currently involved with parties related to the Syrian civil conflict in a manner that would typically be described as a conflict of interest, disqualifying them from such a board position. The notable and recent appointment of Mustafa to the Ministry position received no coverage in any SNHR reporting, as one might expect. The remaining board members and staff are mostly unlisted and untraceable, except for a few additional names that were found in connection with certain publicly filed tax documents.

Despite ongoing documentation activities from 2011 to the present, the SNHR was not publicly registered as an organization until 2015, when it was registered in both the United Kingdom and the United States under two separate incorporations. In its decade of tax-exempt status, the SNHR has only filed taxes four times: for 2016, 2017, 2022, and 2023. This chronic failure to file likely resulted in the revocation of tax-exempt status in 2019 for the UK and in 2021 for the US. For whatever reason, the SNHR was allowed to establish a new incorporation in the US the very next year, regaining its tax exemption and operating under this registration since.

The minimal information provided for 2022 and 2023 fails to clarify the origins of any charitable contributions or the organization’s financial operations. The table below outlines a comprehensive timeline of the organization’s history, highlighting the SNHR’s lack of financial transparency, alterations to its methodology and public presentation and the extent of influence its data had on the US State Department year by year.

The lack of transparency in financial operations and organizational oversight, combined with the controversial affiliations of the SNHR’s alleged board members, undermines its claim to impartiality. Its leadership structure and staffing have an immense lack of clarity, accountability mechanisms and even impartiality, given the close affiliations between several alleged board members and Qatar-based organizations and the groups now governing Syria. Unlike the various nongovernmental organizations examined throughout this piece — from Airwars to Human Rights Watch — the SNHR stands out for its lack of adherence to international standards regarding financial and organizational transparency.

Table 2 Timeline of Organizational History: The Syrian Network for Human Rights

Moving forward: a need to address the SNHR’s shortcomings

From the perspective of a humanitarian practitioner, the methodology and reporting of the SNHR are unsatisfactory at best and a blatant example of humanitarian malpractice at worst. The vague definitions of scope and key terminology, along with the inconsistent application of a flawed methodology, combined with the concerning organizational opacity detailed above, make it difficult to ignore or brush off conflicts of interest and blatant subjective bias in SNHR’s reporting.

The Syrian civil war, like any war in the twenty-first century, was fought on the ground and in the media, and the SNHR played a significant role in shaping the mainstream narrative surrounding the Syrian context for states, intergovernmental organizations and humanitarian organizations alike. The findings outlined in this report cast serious doubt on the independence and impartiality of the organization and, at the very least, necessitate a critical review of the SNHR’s internal processes, funding and the impact of its publications on engagements with Syria. 

As the country continues to oscillate between periods of violence and promises of a new future, the field of human rights owes the Syrian people integrity, impartiality and independence in the documentation of their turmoil. The definition of “civilian” status remains unchanged in the context of political elections. The Syrian people deserve humanitarians and documentarians who will see their humanity no matter who is in power.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Human Rights and Organizational Wrongs: Investigating the Malpractice of the Syrian Network for Human Rights appeared first on 51�Թ�.

On August 17, 1998, after months of denials, US President Bill Clinton to a grand jury: “I did have a relationship with Ms. [Monica] Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong.”

Sex scandals in American politics were certainly nothing new. President John F. Kennedy’s remained whispered rumors, never televised. Gary Hart, daring reporters to follow him, like a stone when they did. Even Clinton himself had navigated earlier allegations from women, namely and , that might have ended another politician’s career. But Monica Lewinsky was a different proposition. She wasn’t merely another woman; she was the central, unwitting protagonist in an international psychodrama.

What set her affair with Clinton apart wasn’t the sex, juicy as that was. It was the unprecedented, raw access: the leaked transcripts, the damning voicemail, the infamous navy blue . This wasn’t just a scandal; it was a high-definition spectacle, delivered directly to every household and in real time.

Accidental celebrity

Clinton made history by becoming the first sitting president to testify before a grand jury as the target of a investigation. The questions were deeply personal and, at times, vulgar; the setting borderline surreal. Beamed from the White House via closed-circuit TV, Clinton answered prosecutors’ questions with lawyerly evasion and painstaking, almost excruciating, phrasing.

In one memorable exchange, the prosecutor asked: “Mr. President, do you understand that the statement that there ‘is’ no sexual relationship, an improper sexual relationship, or any other kind of improper relationship, could be false if indeed there was one, even though it’s in the past?” Clinton’s convoluted response became an instant cultural touchstone: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the—if he—if ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not—that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true .”

Following his grand jury appearance, Clinton delivered a televised address to the nation. It was short, stiff and heavy with legalisms. He admitted the relationship had been “not appropriate” and that he had misled people, including even [his] wife.” He appeared unsettled yet spoke with an underlying defiance. The nation and indeed the world remained transfixed, unsure how to feel — disgusted, tantalized or simply impressed by Clinton’s audacious bravado.

Three days later, on August 20, American cruise missiles struck targets in Sudan and Afghanistan. Officially a response to the East Africa embassy bombings, Operation was immediately dubbed a distraction. Jokes were made comparing these events to the previous year’s comedy film, ; in the film, a government spin doctor (Robert De Niro) and a Hollywood producer (Dustin Hoffman) work to fabricate a war in Albania to distract the public from a presidential sex scandal. It was, perhaps, the first time in history a significant international military action found itself relegated to a mere footnote in a domestic sex scandal.

What held this entire spectacle together, making it so utterly compelling, was Clinton himself. He wasn’t imposing like President Ronald Reagan, patrician like President George H.W. Bush or saintly like President Jimmy Carter. Clinton was fundamentally different. He possessed the easy manner of a man you might chat with in a Walmart supermarket checkout line — someone seemingly knowable, perhaps even someone who might flirt with you. His flaws, his all-too-human messiness, ironically, made him the first truly relatable president. That quality, once unthinkable in a commander-in-chief, now became an unexpected asset.

The age of the spectacle

By the end of that August, America’s political culture had undergone a quiet yet profound and lasting transformation. The presidency, once associated with distance and solemn dignity, had become a pivotal component in the nation’s entertainment machinery.

By the late 1990s, America was already a nation expertly “trained in watching.” Talk shows routinely blurred the line between confession and performance. Paparazzi relentlessly pursued not just film stars, but increasingly, personalities. Shows like packaged dysfunctional families as primetime entertainment. Stores now offered more than groceries — they stocked America’s new unholy secular scriptures: glossy weekly gossip magazines like People and National Enquirer. Into this readied landscape stepped Lewinsky: intern, lover, national punchline and, ultimately, a reluctant protagonist in the most-watched real-life soap opera the world had ever seen.

But to grasp how Monica became Monica™ — a name that, for a time, needed no surname — we need a brief glance at the preceding cultural landscape. Few figures shaped that terrain more dramatically than Madonna. Throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, the diva transcended mere pop stardom; she was a cultural agent provocateur who taught audiences how to look, how to stare and, crucially, how not to look away.

She turned taboo into a trending topic years before hashtags even existed. Whether on stage, publishing her explicit 1992 book, or using the word “” repeatedly on the Late Show with David Letterman, Madonna didn’t just push boundaries — she dissolved them. More significantly, she made it respectable, even desirable, to gaze intently… and to enjoy the spectacle.

By the time Clinton’s affair was exposed, the public was ready. What once might have been muttered discreetly became common watercooler chat. And the media, by then no longer deferential gatekeepers but increasingly predatory content chasers, knew how to satisfy the appetite for tittle-tattle. Monica™ was like a gift from heaven.

Clinton’s scandal wasn’t merely covered; it was serialized. It possessed a clear structure, escalating suspense, compelling secondary characters (like civil servant and attorney ) and even unexpected wardrobe plot points. Lewinsky’s semen-stained blue Gap dress transcended mere evidence, as did a cigar Clinton used as a sex aid. They became pervasive cultural references, almost sacred objects in a new age of scandal. The narrative had sex, power, concealment, betrayal and a president who, with every denial, seemed only to get more intriguing.

In an earlier era, shameful exposure meant indelible disgrace, dishonor and often everlasting stigma. But shame was in the process of being redefined. It might still have felt temporarily humiliating, but it carried no lasting loss of respect or esteem and the disgrace was far from indelible: It was quickly effaced. But, with the rapid ascendance of celebrity culture, shame seemed oddly out of place. Becoming famous by any means necessary was quickly becoming a legitimate career aspiration and shame, at times, was simply accepted as collateral damage.

Lewinsky became an accidental celebrity: a woman who, by her own later , lost not just her privacy but her “reputation and dignity and … almost [her] life.” Clinton, meanwhile, seemed to waft above it all, protected less by institutional power than by his sheer attractiveness, an undeniable charisma and an audience seemingly too rewarded by his very human antics to abandon him.

It’s easy to categorize the scandal as purely political, and of course, it did have political consequences. But at its heart, it belonged less to Washington, DC, than to global popular culture. The public wasn’t shocked by what Clinton did; it was utterly captivated by the unprecedented access. People were allowed to watch it all unfold. The real revelation wasn’t about morality; it was about media. The affair didn’t signal the fall of a president; it heralded the rise of the culture of spectacle.

Scandal fatigue

“If you can’t trust the president to tell the truth, who can you trust?” an incredulous reporter asked. But for much of the public, that question entirely missed the point. By then, Clinton was no longer being measured by old-fashioned virtues like trustworthiness or reliability, but by his performance.

Remarkably (perhaps), his approval ratings spiked after he admitted to the Lewinsky affair. This wasn’t despite the scandal: it was, in a perverse way, because of it. His transgression became fused with his relatability, even his disarming authenticity. The public was so exhausted by the continual prurient allegations against the president that what might have started as shock or indignation became an agreeable distraction. “” was the term used to describe the cultural desensitization.

He lied, he squirmed, he strangled grammar (as demonstrated previously when he defined the word “is”). But he did it all in plain sight. For a public raised on The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Geraldo Rivera Show and the confessional stylings of reality TV, that transparency almost felt honest. (Today, of course, we are all habituated to US presidents who lie, squirm and strangle grammar.)

Lewinsky, meanwhile, was publicly and savagely destroyed. “I was of losing a personal reputation on a global scale,” she reflected years later, keenly aware of the Internet’s embryonic yet devastating role in her humiliation. Her name became a cipher for shame, a global punchline in a thousand late-night monologues. Yet, in time, she courageously reclaimed her voice, emerging not as an object of scandal but as a speaker, writer and against cyberbullying. If Clinton represented the survival of political power through personal disgrace, Lewinsky came to represent something arguably more modern and profound: the possibility of a woman surviving a potentially global scandal and, in the process, discovering agency.

The end of privacy

Perhaps the most enduring legacy of August 1998 wasn’t political or purely personal. It was cultural: the irrevocable departure of the concept of a “private life” for public figures and, eventually, for virtually everyone. Clinton’s affair and the ravenous media machinery it cranked into life were features of a nascent era in which visibility became permanent, intimacy became endlessly shareable and secrets became monetizable. And everyone was left asking and answering a question: If the most powerful man in the world couldn’t conceal an affair, who the hell could?

Fast-forward to July 2025. At a performed by rock group Coldplay in Foxborough, Massachusetts, the jumbotron’s kiss-cam pans to a couple sharing what appears to be an intimate moment. The image flashes on massive screens across the stadium. The woman recoils, visibly embarrassed, as she realizes she’s been caught on camera. Coldplay frontman Chris Martin even comments on the scene. Within hours, the video of the brief encounter goes viral across social media. Reddit threads wildly about a potential affair as TikTokers frantically try to the pair. X explodes with . No one, anywhere, pauses to ask if this exposure was fair or proper. The story wasn’t about morality.

That fleeting moment, brief yet dramatic and seemingly random, is connected to August 1998 by a kind of molecular chain. It serves as a gentle reminder that the rules, such as they were, have fundamentally changed. There is no on-stage versus off-stage anymore. No quiet corner of life remains immune to broadcasting. There is no longer true privacy. We are all potentially “that woman” or “that man” now — framed, packaged and offered for the casual delectation of anyone. We are all shareable now. And today, we are so accustomed to it, we don’t notice. And, if we did, large demographics wouldn’t care. Generations Y and Z are products of the post-private era.

Clinton was the first president of that era. He was a politician who smudged the demarcation lines between statesman and spectacle, between leadership and sheer . He didn’t fall from grace so much as slide into a new kind of fame, the kind in which the fall itself was an essential part of the entertainment. The sleazy kind.

Lewinsky, more than anyone, bore the cost. She didn’t crave celebrity status; it was affixed to her. The affair, the dress and the endless denials weren’t just political moments. They were cultural markers, showing the world that no one, not even the president of the US, is exempt from unwelcome, permanent exposure.

[Ellis Cashmore’s “” is published by Bloomsbury.]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky and the Politics of Spectacle appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Now, 98 years later, Trump fulfilled a campaign pledge on his first day back in office as president, an executive order ending “birthright citizenship,” which for over 150 years has automatically granted American citizenship to anyone born on the territory of the United States. America’s sometimes violent 250-year struggle to define who and what is an “American” continues a revolutionary argument between beliefs and blood and soil.

A battle between beliefs and blood

Birthright citizenship — jus soli — has been guaranteed by the to the US Constitution for 160 years. It underpins one of the tenets of American society: Americans are defined, and America is woven together by a set of ideals — democracy, the rule of law, individual rights, tolerance of all creeds and races — by who you are.����

But repeatedly in American history — in the 1840s, 1870s, 1920s, 1960s and today — anti-immigrant militancy has when America’s founding white Protestant culture and population have felt threatened by large numbers of non-white, non-Protestant immigrants.�� Demands soar to restrict citizenship by jus sanguinis, birthright by blood, by what your heritage is. This is what Donald Trump is trying to do, part of his actions to stop all illegal immigration.

The view from the border

One look at the US-Mexico border explains the origins of Trump’s executive order nullifying birthright citizenship, and of his and his supporters’ anger about illegal immigration. Many Americans feel the United States has lost control of its own border.  

Just in 2022, 2.6 million illegal immigrants entered the US from Mexico. Over 14% of the US population is immigrants, the highest proportion since Trump’s father brawled about America’s . Over 11 million residents are “illegal aliens,” or “undocumented migrants.” Most are Spanish-speaking Hispanics, almost half of whom struggle with English.����

The myth of the criminal immigrant

Many citizens denounce “illegals” for taking jobs, lowering wages, increasing crime and not paying taxes but benefiting from government social programs, all while infecting America’s English cultural roots, language and gene pool. “They are violent criminals,” “the dregs of society,” Trump has repeated.  

Most Americans do want to see illegal immigration controlled, but literally of Trump’s assertions and beliefs are true: The total number of illegal aliens — 11 million — has remained stable for a decade. Illegal aliens pay taxes, receive far less welfare payments than native Americans, learn English, have equal or superior education levels to Americans and commit fewer crimes than Americans. And Americans ending birthright citizenship 52% to 24%.

Economic consequences and political intent

Eliminating birthright citizenship would harm several of the key factors in America’s historic economic dynamism. Immigration, half of which is illegal, provides America with a growing population and a mobile and low-cost labor force. Stopping illegal immigration will cause labor costs to rise, increase inflation and lower US GDP growth. 

US population growth will stop, the US will rapidly become an older society, with a more rapidly worsening worker-to-pensioner ratio, and higher government deficits. And, in towering and socially dangerous ironies, ending birthright citizenship for babies born to two illegal immigrants would the unauthorized population by 4.7 million people in the coming decades. Denying citizenship to babies with one illegal parent would double the illegal US population over the next two decades and create a permanent subclass of up to 24 million stateless people living in a shadow society outside US law.��

For Trump and his supporters, the issue, ultimately, is cultural and racial, just as citizenship questions have always been in America. Economic facts are secondary, or simply not believed.  The progressively Trump-tinged courts will find ways partially to accept Trump’s argument, despite the clarity of the American Constitution. 

“What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” Trump has said.  What is happening is that Trump and his supporters, like his father Fred and so many before him, feel threatened by immigrants who do not look like Fred or Donald Trump.  

[ first published a version of this piece.]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post One Language, One Flag, One People: Trump’s War on Birthright Citizenship appeared first on 51�Թ�.

With the “,” as American strategist Bernard Brodie put it as early as 1946, the primary goal of armed forces should no longer be to win wars, but to prevent them. However, many observers consider a strategy of war prevention based on the threat of nuclear annihilation to be incompatible with the moral and legal principles of proportionality or the protection of non-combatants in war. The central , however, is that the system of nuclear deterrence forces all of humanity to live in a constant state of fear.

Given such fundamental questions, the atomic bombings of 1945 are no longer just about the political or military decisions made at the time. The answer to the question of whether the use of the bombs was justified also determines whether one fundamentally approves or rejects the system of nuclear deterrence as a means of preventing war. It is no longer possible to view these events independently of such ideological considerations.

The nuclear debate: Traditionalists vs revisionists

To this day, historians and political scientists continue to engage in a bitter over the events of August 1945. “Traditionalists” that the bombs brought about Japan’s rapid surrender, thereby sparing the United States an invasion of Japan that would have cost the lives of many thousands of American (and Japanese) soldiers. Hence, Former US President Harry Truman’s decision to drop the bombs was the right one. Only later did the ethical dilemmas arising from the bombing become fully apparent.��

“Revisionists” argue that the bombing was unnecessary, as Japan would have surrendered soon anyway. They claim that it was the Soviet Union’s entry into the war, rather than the bombs, that made Japan’s surrender. Moreover, the US only used the bomb to impress Stalin with a display of power and to conduct the post-war negotiations from a position of strength. Although this alternative interpretation of events has found many adherents, it remains highly problematic, as it replaces missing evidence with bold speculation and, above all, judges the actors of that time with the benefit of hindsight. 

The struggle between traditionalists and revisionists continues, as it has become a battle for America’s past. However, in one important respect, international politics follows the traditional view of the events of that time: the system of mutual nuclear deterrence that emerged after the Soviet Union acquired the bomb in 1949 is based primarily on the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The fear of a nuclear inferno shapes international politics by injecting caution. Former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s 1955 that in the nuclear age “safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation” remains true today.��

The dimensions of nuclear deterrence

Nuclear deterrence does not come about solely by the cautionary images of bomb victims or the mere existence of the bomb itself. To deter an opponent, the defender must threaten reprisals that the potential attacker perceives as credible. It also requires that a nuclear arsenal must remain intact and undestroyed during a surprise attack. Generations of scientists, mostly from the US, have therefore endeavored to explore the phenomenon of nuclear deterrence in all its dimensions. 

While the first analyses following Hiroshima focused on the strategic implications of nuclear weapons for international relations, the scope of deterrence research expanded significantly in the . Using game theory and behavioral psychology, researchers investigated how rationality — the functional condition of nuclear deterrence — is reflected in political and military decisions. During this period, they also developed the conceptual foundations of nuclear arms control.

In the , a new field of research emerged, focusing on case studies of nuclear crises and the decision-making processes of political and military elites. These more empirically and historically oriented studies showed that some earlier deterrence works were far too abstract to reflect complex realities. By highlighting the different interests and emotions of the actors involved, this field of research raised awareness of the need to consider cultural differences as well as the risk of misperceptions. Above all, however, it brought into sharper focus that nuclear deterrence is not a panacea: it may be able to prevent some, but not all conflicts.��

The next steps for nuclear deterrence

Today, countries are working on the concept of deterrence to space, cyberspace or hybrid warfare. However, as the growing number of cyber and hybrid attacks demonstrates, the deterrence paradigm, let alone its nuclear dimensions, sits uneasily with non-military threats. A stronger focus on resilience may offer greater security benefits.��

The next step for deterrence research is already becoming clear, however: How to organize nuclear deterrence in a world with three or more major nuclear powers. For example, will soon have caught up with the nuclear arsenals of the US and Russia, turning nuclear deterrence into a complicated equation with many unknowns.

Deterrence research will always face accusations that it ultimately maintains a dangerous and immoral system that deliberately accepts mass murder. For decades, the orthodox school of thought, which views nuclear deterrence as a strategy for preventing war, has been accused of being a closed community that to question its assumptions. Furthermore, the critics say that the nuclear weapons discourse employs emotionless language that feigns rationality, reducing nuclear mass murder to mere “collateral damage” and thus obscuring the terrible consequences of its policies.��

Continued debate and a search for alternatives

Since the beginning of the nuclear age, critics have attempted to expose nuclear deterrence as a misguided approach. Arguing that the mere existence of nuclear weapons will eventually result in their use, they have put forward a host of arguments why the abolition of these weapons is the only rational conclusion. 

However, thus far, at least, all the alternatives suggested by deterrence critics have had no lasting political impact. This lack of longevity is due less to resistance from the nuclear technocracy than to the alternatives’ analytical weaknesses: they sound convincing in theory, but fail in reality. 

One such example is the argument that nuclear weapons could be abolished by changing societal norms, as was the case with slavery. However, such comparisons are flawed, as not all norms are equally strong. Abolishing slavery was a moral goal in itself, whereas abolishing nuclear weapons . As long as people believe that such weapons provide security, they will require more than a shift in societal attitudes for their abolition. Nations will need to establish alternative means of security that they can all agree upon — alternatives that currently remain elusive.

The idea of outlawing nuclear weapons is equally . Although the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which stigmatizes nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence as illegal, came into force in 2021, it remains ineffective, as none of the nuclear powers or their allies have signed it. The anti-Western stance of some of its prominent supporters and some flawed treaty language had made the Treaty questionable from the beginning. Numerous nuclear threats accompanied Russia’s assault on Ukraine, further marginalizing that project.��

Some critics of deterrence have sought to push an entirely different line of argument. They argue that the bomb is simply and, hence, they can abolish it without any loss of security. However, in their attempts to demonstrate the irrelevance of nuclear weapons, they employ dubious logical leaps and implausible interpretations of historical events.��

Above all, real-life events, such as Russia’s attack on Ukraine, the recent destruction of many of Iran’s nuclear installations by the US and Israel and the debate on the reliability of the US “nuclear umbrella” for Europe, have brought home that the theory of irrelevance is, well, irrelevant. 

There are even more perspectives to criticize nuclear deterrence, from on accident-prone nuclear infrastructure to highlighting the “systemic injustice” of the nuclear deterrence system, such as the insufficient attention given to the health problems of people living near former nuclear testing sites.��

Each of these approaches has some validity: Exposing nuclear safety shortcomings serves as a constant reminder that the nuclear enterprise must adhere to the highest safety standards, while emphasizing the long-term effects of nuclear testing shows that nuclear weapons carry that go well beyond what the official defense budgets list.��

Yet none of these criticisms have been powerful enough to effect a major change in the national security and defence policies of Nuclear Weapons States, their allies, and possibly many more that expect at least some indirect protection from nuclear deterrence. 

80 years later

80 years after Hiroshima, the debate about the wisdom of dropping the atom bomb continues. Yet, the system of nuclear deterrence that emerged after 1945 has become a major element of international politics. 

Critics will continue to point to the moral and conceptual flaws of nuclear deterrence and demand the abolition of nuclear weapons. However, they are unlikely to prevail against the view that, to quote , a non-nuclear world would be “a nervous world”, as each crisis could compel countries to (re-) acquire a nuclear capability. “The urge to preempt would dominate; whoever gets the first few weapons will coerce or preempt.”��

Nuclear deterrence remains a major factor in international politics, as long as mankind has not found a better way to prevent war, even though it is not foolproof. Even 80 years later, the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki continue to induce restraint in international relations. 

[ edited this piece]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Eighty Years After Hiroshima: Why Nuclear Deterrence Will Remain appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The — named after the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Antonio Trajani — introduced the citizenship restrictions, which have now been converted into law (Law 36/2025). The new rules limit the principle of jure sanguinis (“right of blood”) to descendants within two generations (parent or grandparent). In contrast, the previous legislation imposed no generational limits on ancestry for citizenship claims.

These changes mark a sharp break with the broader Italian diaspora that played a formative role in shaping nations and national identities in countries across the Western Hemisphere. Many descendants trace their lineage to great-grandparents or more distant ancestors who emigrated from Italy during the major waves of migration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

South America: The land of unlimited opportunities

Although the Italian dream of “L’A�����������” is often linked to the United States for millions of Italians, Argentina, Brazil and other South American countries were the true lands of opportunity.

For the first generation of immigrants, Italy remained a vivid memory, shaping constant comparisons between past and present. Yet, as these communities prospered abroad, life in Italy gradually became a more distant part of their identity.

Today, Italian descendants make up a of the population in several South American countries. Argentina has the highest percentage, with approximately 62% of its population claiming Italian heritage. Uruguay and Paraguay follow, with 44% and 37%, respectively. Venezuela ranks fourth with 16%, followed by Brazil with 15% and Colombia with 4%.

The connection of these large immigrant communities to Italy evolved with the birth of new generations in South America. Personal memories gave way to a romanticized, inherited imagination that continues to shape the identities of many who wear their Italian heritage with pride. This enduring bond reflects the resilience of a people who, while forging a new future, chose to reimagine rather than abandon their past.

Meloni’s motivations

The Meloni government has defended the new citizenship law as a necessary measure to curb abuses of the system and manage the overwhelming number of applications that have inundated Italian consulates in South America. Officials have argued that many applicants sought an Italian passport for the convenience of European Union access without having substantial cultural or linguistic ties to Italy. Indeed, the number of Italians residing abroad increased from 2014 to 2024, mainly due to the granting of citizenship in Brazil and Argentina. In 2024 alone, Italian authorities granted citizenship to approximately Brazilians.

In addition to generational limits, the new law introduces the requirement of an “effective bond” with Italy, meaning that having a distant ancestor alone is no longer sufficient for citizenship. Applications submitted before March 28, 2025, will be evaluated under the previous, more inclusive rules, prompting a surge in filings and creating legal uncertainty for incomplete cases. The government has also centralized application processing, citing efficiency and fraud prevention.

The reaction from Italian communities in Brazil and Argentina has been one of shock and anger. Many families have spent years and significant financial resources gathering the necessary documents to prove their lineage. Community leaders and legal experts have condemned the law as a “betrayal” that severs a vital link between Italy and its global diaspora.

Legal challenges are rising as plaintiffs argue that the new law is unconstitutional and violates the principle of non-retroactivity, asserting that individuals acquire the right to citizenship at birth. The Italian Supreme Court has been to the law initiated by the lower court in Turin. The legal battles’ full impact remains to be seen.

At a Supreme Court hearing in Rome on June 6, 2025, lawyer Monica Lis Restanio that citizenship is a birthright that cannot be arbitrarily revoked. Representing the associations challenging the law (Avvocati Uniti per la Cittadinanza Italiana [AUCI] and Associazione Giuristi Iure Sanguinis [AGIS]), she emphasized that Italian citizenship is a familial bond passed down through generations and only the individual’s voluntary renunciation can sever it, not administrative discretion.��

Italian immigration and its lasting influences

Italian immigrants brought with them regional cultural diversity and skills shaped by early 20th-century industrialization. Their human capital enriched the racial and social fabric of South American societies, adding complexity to nations seeking to modernize and forge new national identities.

In the vibrant neighborhoods of Buenos Aires and São Paulo, entire communities pulsed with the energy of Italian immigrants whose presence would leave a lasting mark in these cities. It was in the slang of the streets, the Lunfardo of Buenos Aires and the Cocoliche of its theaters, where Italian words were into the very fabric of the local language, creating a new, hybrid vernacular. Far beyond the local influence, Italians shaped the Brazilian Portuguese in such a way that words in the national language are estimated to be of Italian origin.

The cultural impact of Italian immigrants endures to this day in the national life of these countries. In Argentina and Uruguay, the passion for football is a mirror of the Italian .��

In Brazil, particularly in the South, the legacy of Italian agricultural colonies is deeply embedded in the landscape. The introduction of winemaking and new culinary traditions has left a lasting imprint, significantly shaping the country’s national cuisine.

Alongside technical skills, Italian immigrants brought a shared sense of entrepreneurial vision that helped drive social change. like Matarazzo and Crespi played key roles in developing Brazil’s food and textile industries, as the Bardella, Dedini and Romi families meaningfully shaped the country’s equipment and heavy industrial sectors.

Italian immigration played a key role in shaping early 20th-century social and labor movements in South America. Many immigrants arrived already influenced by anarchist and communist ideas, which they shared with local workers. In 1900, Italians made up of São Paulo’s factory and office workforce. Their newspaper (1902–1908) was Brazil’s first formal socialist leaning publication, highlighting their political impact.��

The boundless identities of Italian descendants

The new Italian citizenship law is a significant turning point in Italy’s relationship with its descendants abroad. It is moving from a policy of open ancestral recognition to a more restrictive approach that prioritizes a closer and more recent connection to the Italian nation-state.

At the heart of Meloni’s citizenship approach lies a Manichean and homogenizing vision of “Italianess,” rooted in a narrow idea of social cohesion. This perspective overlooks the rich mosaic of local cultures that have defined Italy since its unification in the late 19th century, in a world shaped by imagined communities and evolving identities.

Thankfully, the Italian Supreme Court appears to support the view that defining “Italian identity” is inherently complex and that politically or ideologically driven concepts should not be the basis for citizenship rights.

[ edited this piece]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Citizenship Lost: How Giorgia Meloni Closed Italy’s Door to Millions appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Jazz, empire and the Cold War

To protest Lumumba’s assassination, jazz drummer Max Roach and his wife, singer Abbey Lincoln, in a demonstration at the United Nations in New York. Soundtrack reaches its crescendo when Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln perform “Freedom,” as protesters storm the United Nations Palace shortly after news of Lumumba’s assassination breaks.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’État brilliantly examines how jazz artists became involved in the Cold War and the CIA’s geopolitical agendas. Grimonprez’s captivating documentary uses Patrice Lumumba’s assassination as a starting point for an electrifying of jazz politics in the 1950s and 1960s — a vital chapter in history: the process of decolonization. It offers a dynamic account of , colonialism and the larger Afro-Asian struggles of the era.��

The film presents a breathtaking, idea-packed journey that links American jazz to the complexities of geopolitical scheming. This is more than just a — it exposes the Cold War and the brutal legacy of African colonialism.

The film explicitly shows how the CIA used unwitting jazz musicians as distractions to obscure political meddling in countries around the globe — including legends like Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie and Nina Simone. It also tells the remarkable story of Andrée Blouin — Lumumba’s adviser, speechwriter and a women’s rights activist. The Italian newspaper ��’A������Ծ����� recently published an remembering how Lumumba appointed Blouin as his top adviser when he formed his short-lived post-independence government in 1960.��

To Western diplomats and journalists, her presence in the government signaled Congo’s alleged turn toward communism. A few years earlier, she had with the leader of the Guinean Democratic Party, Ahmed Sékou Touré’s, independence movement from France. At the time, she was seen as “a beautiful but also dangerous woman, perhaps the most dangerous woman in all of Africa,” as The New York Times , quoting a Belgian official. The international press even suggested she was “the courtesan of African heads of state.”

Grimonprez a frenetic editing style, presenting history as a scribbled manuscript filled with footnotes and quotations, lending the film a satisfying visual and stylistic eccentricity. In tackling such a delicate subject, he makes a brilliant choice: he intertwines history with the story of jazz, starting with two equally important elements — the United States’ use of jazz as an ambassador of American culture (sending musicians like Louis Armstrong to perform abroad, including in Congo during that time), and jazz’s role in the Afro-American civil rights movement and its support for African liberation. Through this evocative framing device, Grimonprez constructs a fascinating Soundtrack to a Coup d’État, telling a story through music that must not be forgotten.

Lumumba, Congo and the global stakes of decolonization

Indeed, one of the film’s central themes is the strategic deployment of jazz and Black American jazz musicians as instruments in the US imperial arsenal. Dizzy Gillespie toured the Middle East in 1956 to honor the Shah of Iran. He , “I would be a better emissary than Kissinger.” Later, Louis Armstrong traveled to the Congo to perform for thousands — a concert that served as a smokescreen while the CIA plotted Lumumba’s assassination.

Soundtrack decolonization, neo-imperialism, cultural and economic exploitation and political murder. Centered on the former Belgian Congo, the film blends news clips, TV broadcasts, home movies and headlines into a dense collage, with jazz — both American and African alike — providing the tempo. This gloomy yet exhilarating history lesson opens with the percussive fanfare of legendary bebop pioneer and bandleader Max Roach.��

Its chronology begins with the held in Indonesia in 1955. That event brought together leaders of newly independent nations from Africa and Asia — including Egypt’s Nasser, India’s Nehru, Indonesia’s Sukarno and China’s Zhou Enlai — and established a new international order of non-aligned countries.

In an interview, Grimonprez , “This took four or five years of research, and the editing was four years.” He recounts several unexpected findings, such as the role of William Burden, whom the US appointed as ambassador to Brussels shortly before Congo’s independence. Burden had close ties with CIA Director Allen Dulles. In audio memoirs featured in the film, Burden says, “Belgium is toying with the idea of assassinating Lumumba, and I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea either.” He continues, “Patrice Lumumba was such a damn nuisance, it was pretty obvious to go for a political assassination.”

The film at the Sundance Film Festival in the US at the beginning of 2024, sparking growing interest. Grimonprez compiles a remarkable archive of Cold War-era documents. His documentary features figures like Patrice Lumumba — Congo’s independence leader — and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, who championed a United States of Africa alongside leaders like Nasser, Nehru and other voices from the non-aligned movement.��

The film alternates their voices with those of Western and Eastern leaders, prominently featuring Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. One scene shows Khrushchev his shoe on the UN desk, seizing global attention. During those UN sessions, Africa took center stage alongside debates about the roles of international powers and major mining companies, which were determined to block Congo’s independence and Lumumba’s nationalist vision.��

As the film reminds us, Congo the uranium used for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. The US had no intention of letting this strategic resource fall into Soviet hands. Today, Congo remains rich in cobalt, coltan and other minerals essential for electronics, electric vehicles and the global energy transition.

In discussing the UN, Grimonprez the story of Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld. “He’s a person who is suffering, and you can read it in his face. In the General Assembly, the Global South community was pushing for a United Nations force against the colonial powers. Hammarskjöld was siding with the Global South. But he had his back against the wall. And the United Kingdom and the United States were both threatening to withdraw their funding.” He continues, “An important source for the film was Ludo De Witte’s The Assassination of Patrice Lumumba, published in 1999. He was able to gather a lot of evidence in United Nations cables and Belgian correspondence that pointed to the fact that, indeed, Dag Hammarskjöld was complicit and involved in the downfall of Lumumba, as was the Belgian monarchy.”

The legacy of a revolution — and its soundtrack

In 1960, when Belgian authorities a roundtable on Congo’s decolonization in Brussels, Congolese politicians demanded Lumumba’s release before independence. Congolese musicians celebrated this moment. While staying at the Plaza Hotel, they “Independence Cha Cha” — a song that quickly became an anthem of liberation across Africa.

On June 30, 1960, Congo declared independence. Lumumba colonial and Western interests, sealing his fate and that of the nation. At Léopoldville’s Palais des Nations, a packed hall of Congolese and foreign dignitaries listened first to King Baudouin, who paternalistically recalled Leopold II’s colonization of Congo. Next up was Joseph Kasa-Vubu — the first president of an independent Congo — who spoke calmly, and then Lumumba took the stage.

Facing Belgium’s king, Lumumba , “Our wounds are still too fresh and too painful to be driven from our memory. We have known sarcasm and insults, endured suffering and torture. We are proud of the struggle that led us to this moment.” He reminded the world that the Congolese did not receive freedom as a gift — they fought for it.

Lumumba’s bold speech accused Belgians of racism, theft and oppression. Days later, the army , Belgian settlers fled, Katanga seceded and Lumumba traveled to New York to address the UN. US President Eisenhower refused to meet him. Instead, through Ambassador William Burden, he gave tacit approval to act against Lumumba. In early September, Lumumba Kasa-Vubu, who had just fired him. UN troops arrived, and Army Chief of Staff Joseph Mobutu seized power, dissolved the government and placed Lumumba under house arrest — leading to his eventual assassination.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’État offers a powerful historical analysis of the early years of African independence and the brutal machinery of Western imperialism. America’s interest in the Global South during the Cold War needs little explanation. What makes Grimonprez’s work so compelling is how it shows that American emissaries of art and culture acted as influential tools of empire, as effective as any spy network or military intervention.

“ most of the film takes place in the halls of power and explores covert espionage against the newly independent Congo, Soundtrack’s final message functions as a rallying call for global mass mobilization. Better late than never.”

[ edited this piece]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat: Jazz and International Politics in Léopoldville appeared first on 51�Թ�.

On October 9, 1861, Napoleon III to his Ambassador in London, Count Flahaut, that if Mexico could be regenerated under the influence of France, they would have erected an insurmountable barrier against the encroachments of the United States. On July 5, 1862, he a letter to General Elie Frederic Forey, emphasizing that France had a historic mission to restore the strength and prestige of the Latin race that lived on the other side of the Atlantic.��

Napoleon’s Pan-Latin project

The aims, barriers and Latin strength mentioned earlier represented two sides of the same coin. They laid the groundwork for Napoleon’s project in the Americas. One aim was to counterbalance the rising Anglo-Protestant power by strengthening the influence of Latin Catholicism. A Latin power, of course, remained under the tutelage of France.��

The nature of the Latin connection between France and the Hispanic part of the Americas stemmed from their shared Roman heritage, a heritage also shared by Brazil. However, although Brazil is considered a fundamental part of “Latin America,” it represented a completely different proposition in terms of France’s imperial ambitions. With an Emperor from the Royal House of Braganza ruling that country and Great Britain leading its international trade, Brazil was beyond the reach of Napoleon’s .��

Such a common heritage dates back to ancient times. The original Latins inhabited central Italy in what is now the region of Lazio. Through conquests led by their dominant city-state, , the rest of Italy became “Latinized.” In other words, the term Latin lost its specific ethnic meaning and gained a political and cultural one. As Roman power expanded to what would later become France, Spain and Portugal (among others), these regions also became Latin spaces. Roman law, traditions, architecture and the Latin language were imposed upon them.

Circa 313 AD, Roman Emperor Constantine , promoting its rise, which would shortly thereafter become the official religion of the Roman Empire. Thus, this marks the origins of the Roman-Catholic Church.��

, in its context, was the language spoken by ordinary citizens of the Roman Empire, distinct from the cultivated form of Classical Latin. It encompassed the vernacular dialects that later evolved into the so-called Romance languages. These include languages like Italian, French, Spanish or Portuguese.

The Pan-Latin thesis that emerged during Napoleon III’s reign aimed to highlight the shared traits between the “Latin Race” of the Americas and Europe. Both groups, on either side of the Atlantic, shared religion, culture and Romance languages. As a result, the Latins of the Americas were encouraged to become natural allies of Latin Europe in their cultural struggle not only against the Anglo-Saxon world but also against Teutonic and Slavic Europe. 

Of course, Mexico was just the first step in Napoleon’s plan to establish other French satellite monarchies in the region. But how did Napoleon’s ambitions over Mexico materialize? To answer this, some background information is required.

How did Napoleon’s ambitions materialize?

Since its independence from Spain, Mexico’s Conservatives had always aspired to a monarchical system of government under a European prince of royal blood. Time and again, this idea tended to re-emerge among their most notorious representatives, particularly . This became more urgent for them after a weak Mexico faced the loss of half of its territory to a much stronger United States.

In the 1850s, however, the gained control of Mexico and began passing a series of reform laws aimed at reducing the power of the Church and the Army. This process culminated with the enactment of the , which triggered a military revolt by the increasingly marginalized Conservatives. It was known as the .

By December 1860, the Liberals had won this war, and in March 1861, , who led this faction as Provisional President, was officially elected President of Mexico. The defeated Conservatives saw the possibility of a monarchical regime, under a European prince of royal blood, as the only remaining solution to their problems.��

Thus, they proceeded to (some of their members had been doing so since the beginning of the civil war) Emperor Napoleon III. Their objective was that a European prince, under his stewardship and with military support, would become the monarch of Mexico.

This proposal was music to Napoleon’s ears, who, after his country’s military success in , aimed to expand his empire. Not surprisingly, he wanted to follow in the footsteps of his famous uncle of the same name, who, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, had controlled Europe for a decade and a half.��

Significantly, the gates of Mexico and Hispanic America had just opened to European infiltration. Indeed, in , seven southern states seceded from the United States, forming a new country called the Confederate States of America. The war between the two parties resulted in a sudden halt to the enforcement of the . This doctrine, issued in 1823 by President James Monroe, formally warned European monarchies that the United States would not tolerate further colonization or the creation of tributary monarchies in the Americas.

Furthermore, Napoleon III that the South would win such a war, implying that Mexico’s northern neighbor would not be a strong United States, but a weakened Confederate States of America. A new country in need of France’s recognition and support. In other words, ambition and opportunity aligned perfectly. As a result, in 1861, France Mexico.��

Maximilian of Habsburg, brother of the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph, was the designated French puppet to become the Emperor of Mexico. In Napoleon’s words:

The Prince who may mount the Mexican throne will always be forced to act in the interests of France, not only from gratitude but even more because his country’s interest will be in accordance with ours, and he will not be able to maintain himself without our influence.

After consolidating the conquest of most of the country by French troops and relegating President Benito Juarez to its fringes, the crown was offered to the Austrian prince on July 10, 1863. According to the , signed between Maximilian and the French Empire, the future Mexican Empire was required to cover all military costs associated with the French invasion and presence in Mexico. Maximilian was finally enthroned in May 1864. However, it was to be a short-lived and tragic reign.��

Surviving defeat

A combination of factors brought this adventure to an end. First, Napoleon III underestimated the stubborn resistance of the Mexican forces under Juarez. Second, choosing Maximilian was unsuitable, as his liberal ideas more closely with those of Benito Juarez than with those of his Mexican Conservative allies. Third, the American Civil War with the Confederacy’s defeat on June 2, 1865, which not only re-established the Monroe Doctrine but also created conditions for war with the United States, which began sending surplus weapons and ammunition to Juarez’s troops. Fourth, France itself started to feel threatened by the rising power of under Bismarck’s capable leadership. The 40,000 French troops stationed in Mexico became increasingly needed in France.

On February 5, 1867, the last French troops Mexico City. Although Maximilian was advised to withdraw with them, he chose to stay in Mexico, supported by the Mexican Conservatives. However, this poorly matched alliance could not withstand the growing strength of Juarez’s forces, now aided by American arms. On May 15 of that year, Emperor Maximilian was captured, and after a court-martial, he was on June 19. Two reasons motivated his execution: the atrocities committed by the French troops and a message to deter future invaders.����

Maximilian’s patron, Napoleon III, would also suffer a crushing defeat three years later. Overwhelmed by the strength of the Prussian military in a war between the two countries, and captured at the battlefield of Sedan, Napoleon’s regime was by his own citizens on September 4, 1870.��

Curiously, the term survived the defeats of the American Confederation, the Maximilian monarchy and the Napoleonic Empire itself. Furthermore, it was accepted as a sign of identity by the very people it was supposed to be imposed upon as an imperialistic project.������

Given this final connotation, how can we explain the effortless adoption of the term by Hispanic and Portuguese (Iberian) Americans themselves?  

How to explain the success of the term

An initial assumption might be that the Pan-Latin thesis is opposed to the US, especially since a few decades earlier, the United States had forcefully taken of Mexico’s territory. However, that was not the case, as admiration for the US political system and entrepreneurial ingenuity remained high among Iberian American elites of that time.��

The answer lay in rejecting Spain and everything Spanish, which was common among Hispanic American and the so-called Positivists who gained power in most of the region after them. Although both Liberals and Positivists rejected the French invasion, they rejected even more the heritage left by Spain, which they saw as a heavy burden on their efforts to modernize their countries.��

The answer could also be found in the fascination that the Iberian American elites of the time felt towards French culture and civilization. Indeed, once the invading troops had been forced to withdraw in humiliation, there was no reason to reject the flattery of being considered the transatlantic cousins of the French. 

As the well-known Mexican intellectual remarked:��

Where could we have looked at in search of models and inspiration? Nineteenth-century Latin America found its immediate answer in France and in the city that Baudelaire called ‘the capital of the XIX Century’. Parisian influence was felt everywhere from The Hague to Algiers, from St. Petersburg to Cairo. Nonetheless, in Mexico, Bogotá or Buenos Aires, it filled up the deep void left by Spain. Repudiating Spain meant accepting France as a new temple of freedom, good taste, romanticism, and all the good things that life had to offer. 

Redeeming the Western credentials of the region while bypassing Spain was well-received by the elites of the day. Especially so, if the country they admired the most became their bridge to the Western world. It was thus that a notion born with imperialistic designs ended up being gladly accepted by those upon whom it was supposed to be imposed. Hence, the paradoxical nature of the notion of Latin America. 

[The ideas expressed in this piece can also be found in Alfredo Toro Hardy’s book “”]

[ edited this piece]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Latin America: A French Idea That Outlived Its Empire appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The industrial revolution settled on the paradigm of democracy as its new universal ideal. It took time to understand how the new theology could work. By the 21^st century, it had bred a new Manichean order that divided the world into good (democracy) and evil (autocracy). US President Joe Biden predicated his entire foreign policy and general worldview on that binary opposition. It had the advantage of pre-emptively justifying various forms of international aggression.

In a soberly pessimistic for Unherd with the title, “How Western democracy died, Real change is an illusion,” Thomas Fazi analyzes the historical processes that have led us to the current network of social, political and economic crises the “free world” is now counting on the “” in the White House to solve.

With the political ideology built around the idea of a government “of the people, by the people and for the people” firmly implanted in the average citizen’s mind, modern democracies count on the ritual of programmed elections, crafted to produce moments of high drama by the media, to hide from view the diminishing role of those expendable quantities we call “people” in the practice of democracy.

A new largely self-selected elite, endowed with deft management skills, is formally elected at regular intervals to defend the inertia of a system solidly built to respond to interests largely unrelated to the needs and wishes of the people. The most obvious but far from unique example of this collection of interests is the US first described, with great foreboding concerning the future of democracy, by US President Dwight Eisenhower.

At one point, Fazi invokes “Carl Schmitt’s ‘state of exception’, whereby constitutional safeguards are suspended to impose decisions unachievable via normal democratic channels.” Schmitt was the critic of the Weimar Republic’s dysfunctional parliamentary democracy. With the rise of Hitler, he “democratic dictatorship.”

Despite the opprobrium attached to his endorsement of Naziism, Schmitt’s writing has remained broadly influential in the field of political theory. It was Schmitt who that contemporary political concepts should be thought of as “secularized theological concepts,” an observation potentially useful today to help us understand the pseudo-moral reasoning generously deployed in contemporary propaganda.

Fazi goes on to cite Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who “emphasized over 20 years ago, the state of exception has now become a permanent condition in Western states.” Fazi calls this a paradox, which, if permanent, can no longer be deemed a state of exception. It “becomes the rule.” The danger should be obvious. “If elites manage to entrench their control through increasingly authoritarian means, the West will enter a new era of managed democracy — or democracy in name only.”  

�մǻ岹��’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition: 

Managed democracy:

A sophisticated form of oligarchy that replaces belief in the virtues associated with the “will of the people” with a newly instilled faith in the innate capacity of a group of efficient managers whose deep understanding of the system obviates the need to consult their uncomprehending citizenry. 

Contextual note��

If democracy is dead, what’s the date on its death certificate? And why didn’t anyone — or at the very least the media — appear to notice? 

“As far back as 2000,” Fazi reminds us, “political scientist Colin Crouch coined the term ‘post-democracy’ to describe the fact that, even though Western societies boasted the trappings of freedom, they had increasingly become a meaningless facade. Elections, Crouch argued, had become tightly managed spectacles, orchestrated by professional persuaders who operated within a shared neoliberal consensus — pro-market, pro-business, pro-globalisation — and offered voters little choice on fundamental political or economic questions.” 

At one point, Fazi stops to focus on an interesting concept that has emerged to describe the reality of today’s democracies: “post-politics.” Democracy isn’t the only moribund patient. Politics itself will soon be waiting for burial. “This strategy of depoliticising democracy birthed what have called ‘post-politics’: a regime where political spectacle thrives, but where systemic alternatives to the neoliberal status quo are not just repressed but foreclosed.”

The process is now visible thanks to the recently discovered power of our leaders to brand all forms of unorthodox thought, whether true or false, “disinformation.” Branding leads to censure. Exercising the power to foreclose anything that challenges the status quo doesn’t just constrain democracy; it also undermines it. The very idea of politics, understood as human decision-making, ceases to exist. It’s as if we are living within the confines of a neoliberal machine capable of self-government and requiring little or no direct human input. The only human skills required are pulling the right levers at the appropriate moment. As we enter the age of AI, we cannot discount the idea that the system could conceivably attain total autonomy. Some call it the matrix. 

It isn’t just democracy that has expired, but human agency itself in government. The art of politics — decision-making affecting the common good — has been replaced by what I’m tempted to call “interest management” rather than Fazi’s “democracy management.” Whether the official form of government is democracy, monarchy, timocracy (military rule), oligarchy or tyranny, politics for Plato and Aristotle was the story of a group of people governing their community. Post-politics leaves the people aside in favor of focusing only on economic forces.

How often do we hear and accept the idea that markets make decisions? Pushed to its extreme, that literally means living people no longer have a direct role to play in collective decisions. Not even the elite, who nevertheless profit from it.

Historical note

History has become engaged in a major transitional period. Two patently avoidable wars — in Ukraine and the Middle East — are raging, in which democracies are not only involved but whose stakes their supposed leaders believe to be existential. These conflicts highlight the absurdity of a post-political (dis)order. Have we, along with our democratic leaders, asked ourselves the following questions? Do our citizens’ nations want these wars? Do we know whether they feel they’re benefitting from pursuing them? If they had been given the choice, what would they have preferred at the outset: an excess of diplomacy or an excess of destruction?

We don’t know the answers to those questions because nobody in the political order of those democracies asked them before committing. We do know that occasions for diplomacy were rebuffed, most obviously in the case of Ukraine. The weakening of democracy and the disappearance of democratic reflexes appear to be major factors in the widely lamented death of diplomacy.

Few will admit that democracy and diplomacy have finally given up the ghost. They haven’t fully expired, and some hope that with the right treatment, they can revive. But they resemble a terminal patient surviving on life support. Their vital functions are compromised. The coordinated reflexes of taking the debate to the people (democracy) and privileging negotiations when faced with the prospect of open conflict (diplomacy) have given way to a form of institutional inertia that now precludes serious human intervention.

The US hasn’t declared a war, as its constitution requires, since World War II. That hasn’t stopped it from fomenting and actively supporting wars in every corner of the world. Diplomacy only kicks in when the conflict has ended, and most of the conflicts never end.

Fazi calls his readers’ attention to what he calls “the EU’s escalating techno-authoritarian regime.” The populations of European democracies are beginning to realize that they have no say in determining or even influencing many of the most significant policies (especially foreign policy). Instead, an executive committee of unelected managers in Brussels, led by the twice-anointed Ursula Von der Leyen, has increasingly usurped the theoretical sovereignty of the nations.

What governing skills do these executives claim to have? It’s a toss-up between exercising the tools of “managed democracy” (i.e., managing other people’s democracies) and “post-political” decision-making (following the dictates of identified “interests”). It all boils down to what Fazi calls “the exhausted model of elite-managed liberalism.”

The vaunted “rules-based order” instituted in the aftermath of World War II has discarded or perhaps simply misinterpreted most of its rules. Instead of rules, it’s all about balancing random forces (interests) that can only be understood and managed by a small number of largely self-selected people. That is the new world order. Its long-term or even medium-term stability appears increasingly doubtful.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of 51�Թ� Devil’s Dictionary.]

[ edited this piece]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post A Post-Political World and the Powerless Public appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Josef Olmert: Hello. Hi to my watchers, to my readers, to my followers. This is the fourth and last in my short series on US–Israel relations. And the idea is really to lead us to the current situation with US President Donald J. Trump, his second administration, with a brief review of his first and the in-between period of the US presidency of Joseph Biden — Joe Biden Jr. — as president. And then we’ll come to the current situation, with the exception that I have to make already now: that we are in a situation that is unfolding. And there might be people who say, “Oh, it’s too early even to talk about US–Israel relations under Donald Trump.” So what I’m going to do is, therefore, to talk about what I consider to be situations that already are fully now results, and maybe inevitable results, of what we already discussed, and how they are happening right now — not talked about, but happening.

Therefore, if we make any predictions for the future, they will be based on what I would consider to be a more solid ground. That’s about the methodics of all that. And I need to say, because I do get reactions, comments, responses from people who watch, read, and they are asking questions that lead me to say what I’m saying to you now.

The American Jewish community and Israel’s image problem

Josef Olmert: So today, very briefly, just to remind you: In our previous episode, we discussed more in-depth processes, mostly in the American Jewish community, that led to changes in attitudes towards Israel. And we touched upon, therefore, what was happening in Israel at the same time that might have led to these changes in American attitude towards Israel, but also the rise of new movements in the US that were either more or less supportive of Israel. Of course, the evangelical Christians on the one end being more supportive; the left-wing, the progressive movement on the other side, in the Democratic Party mainly, that has been much more negative, still is, and becoming more and more negative.

And that brings us, really, to the situation that we are going to delve into in great detail today in our episode.

Trump’s first term: populism, promises and policy shifts

Josef Olmert: And I would say to you that when President Trump was running for president in 2015, 2016, he was not taken seriously, not just by Jews, but also by ordinary America, of course, the commentators. And I cautioned people at the time — it’s not like an “I told you so, period” — but I cautioned people, because I talked to people about the significance of the politics of identities and populist politics altogether, in the unfolding political climate in the US, as well as in other Western democracies.

And by the way, I gave the comparison with Israel. I analyzed the fact that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Bibi Netanyahu, at that time was already in his sixth year as prime minister in his second term, after the one that he was in from 1996 to 1999 — this one was from 2009; we talk about 2015, 2016 — that Netanyahu also succeeded in Israel with the politics of populism and identities. And this is a successful political card.

And Trump made promises about Israel, and everybody said, “No, I mean, don’t take them seriously.” And he fulfilled, to a large extent, a great deal of his promises. For example, the moving of the embassy to Jerusalem, which was, by the way, the policy of every American president before him, with the exception that they didn’t fulfill their decision because of whatever reason that they gave. That was basically based on the idea, “Yes, we say to the Israelis and to the Jews and to the pro-Israel community, we want to move the embassy — but we can’t do it now.”

Trump did it. Trump also withdrew out of the Iran nuclear deal, as was expected by the Netanyahu government in Israel.

Let me say something here: Netanyahu was not wrong in his opposition to the nuclear deal as was devised by President Obama’s administration. Where were the problems that he had, and they have to do with what’s happening now, so therefore I’m saying them now:

He didn’t know the limits of, or the ways in which to express, his opposition to the Obama administration policy, and therefore he made a terrible mistake of showing in Congress and giving his speech — that was in March of 2015. In January of 2015, that is to say, two months before, the speech was announced by then-Speaker John Boehner. (By the way, I have a picture with John Boehner in my study, because I met him before — I met many other people.) And I then cautioned from getting biting gifts — I cautioned Netanyahu not to do the speech. That was a big mistake.

It comes back to what we discussed before in the previous episode about bipartisanship, or lack thereof, under Netanyahu. It was a big mistake.

The other mistake, which might have even been bigger, was that while he said no to the deal as was devised by Obama — with the support of other powers, as part of Obama’s internationalist policy — he did not offer any alternative. He basically created the impression from day one that all he wanted was to see an American military operation against Iran — or else to justify an Israeli one. But even then, he was not preparing one.

In 2011, the Israeli military establishment was waiting for a word from Netanyahu that he was giving the green light for an attack on Iran. He asked for three days to make a decision. He then said no. And there still are reports to that effect that even today, he basically did not approve all kinds of plans that were supposed to finance projects that were designed to improve technological abilities that were to be connected with an attack on Iran and so on and so forth.

So Netanyahu basically said to Trump, “Cancel the agreement, period,” without offering an alternative.

Why is this important? Because it’s the same mistake he has done since the beginning of the war in Gaza, on the 7th of October 2023, to this very moment. While he said, “no, no, no, no, no,” to everything offered by other people, to other countries, including the best friends of Israel, he does not provide any alternative.

Then Trump, for example, said something which is again interesting: that when the US, with Israeli support, decided to eliminate the arch-terrorist Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guards in Iran, Netanyahu said yes. And then he said no, he would not be part of it. Which, by the way, caused ongoing damage in the relationship between him and Trump, because Trump — and that we know already — doesn’t like what seems to be weak people, leaders, losers. For Trump, the fact that Netanyahu did not show up in the end, as opposed to what Trump did, was an indication of lack of stamina, resolve, real determination.

But there were also examples of how Israel was so helpful to the American administration. For example, in the war against ISIS, I don’t know how many of my watchers and listeners and readers remember that Trump, in public, said something that compromised the invaluable, great support that Israel gave to American intelligence to locate ISIS targets in Syria. Israelis were furious. But Trump said, “He’s a great friend.”

MAGA and the limits of right-wing support

Josef Olmert: Trump gave a lot of support also in the UN, the national organizations. But Trump also was the leader of MAGA, and that’s the point that I want to emphasize here. And we saw it after the incident in Charlottesville — if I even call it an incident, I believe what happened there in 2017, referring to “good people on both sides.” I immediately wrote an in which I said, “There are no ‘both sides’ where there are swastikas.”

When Trump referred to “good people on both sides,” he also referred to those that were marching with people that waved the swastikas. That led me into discussion with myself about MAGA.

First of all, it was “America First,” which was a bad memory to me. For those who remember history — I mean, I don’t remember it from that time, but I know it — there was Charles Lindbergh with his America First Committee. That was basically a pro-Nazi domestic American organization that didn’t want America to join the Second World War. You can argue, “Okay, he just used the words; he didn’t mean very much.”

The MAGA movement is a nativist movement. The MAGA movement is isolationist. When you look at the roots of the MAGA movement, when you look at the terminology used, the symbols used, the organizations that were at the forefront of the movement, you have to come to the conclusion that this movement cannot be the pro-Israel movement that existed in the past under the great US President Ronald Reagan — when the world was divided according to the Cold War, and Israel was on that side, the good side. Or under US President George W. Bush, let alone previous presidents from before. Because their opinion about how the world is divided is totally different.

And nativist movements in America or in Europe, by definition, have more than a nucleus of antisemitism, because any movement which is also based on xenophobic feelings is bound to be antisemitic. And no antisemitic movement can be good to Jews, can be good to Israel. It’s as simple as that.

And it was very convenient to many Israelis to accept the better sides of Trump’s policies, but to ignore the roots of it that were based on assumptions and ideologies and terminologies which, as I said, by definition are not good to Jews and Israel.

And how many more times can I say it? How, with more decibels, stronger volume, to say it in order to make the point? Because it is a point that is still debated, even among Jews: What makes you really anti-Israel?

The MAGA movement was on the right side. The alternative to the MAGA movement as a mass mobilization political movement is the “woke” movement, which is, again, anti-Israel. The two most important political movements — and I say movements, not parties — in terms of mobilizing public opinion in the US from right and left, as developed in the last ten to 15 years, are not pro-Israel. And it’s just a question of time when these movements affect the political parties that they try to influence from the outside or by infiltrating from the inside. They already did it in the Democratic Party, and they are doing it now — and have done it — in the Republican Party.

And it will bring me to the current situation momentarily.

Biden’s presidency and the fracturing of democratic support

Josef Olmert: Joseph Biden Jr. — interesting fellow. I, by the way, met him personally: I had dinner with him in Tel Aviv in December of 2002, ahead of the invasion of Iraq. He came to visit the Middle East with a colleague from the Republican Party, Senator Chuck Hagel, a Republican from Nebraska who later became the moderate Republican defense secretary under US President Barack Obama; a much more moderate Republican than the Republican Party already at that time.

And Biden gave a brilliant prediction and analysis of what would happen in Iraq after the war. Because everybody knew there was going to be a war, the Bush administration would do it at that time. Much later on, I wrote an article in The Huffington Post, where I blogged for seven, eight years, praising Biden for the fact that he read and understood the situation in Iraq very properly. I also talked about the ethnic and sectarian divisions in all this.

The problem really is — and this is not something that we need to develop in this particular episode, because it’s much beyond the topic that we are discussing — Biden, who came to be president, was not the Biden of earlier years. And we understand it, Now we know more truth about it.

The Biden administration, from the beginning of its term, in all kinds of subtle ways that became much more obvious during the early stages of the war in Gaza — and much later on, as the war dragged on — developed the sense that we have problems with Israel. Exactly on the main core point of what the Israeli lobby and pro-Israeli lobbies all the time emphasized: that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, a beacon of freedom, of human rights, of civility and all that comes with it.

The attack on Israel with regard to that was already at the time of Jimmy Carter. But who remembers Jimmy Carter? He was way back.

Now, Biden, whether wittingly or not — I would say intentionally — slowly, gradually, systematically, consistently built up the case in all kinds of ways, undermining this Israeli argument or claim to fame, if you will.

The forefront of it was what’s called “The Squad” in the Democratic Party. And it was much beyond it. It infiltrated and crept into the trade union movement, the labor movement that in the past was one of the beacons of support for Israel; minority communities — African Americans, but also Asian Americans, which is very interesting; Latinos — tolerating the infiltration of Qatar and other states into universities in America, Saudi Arabia and others — relying on people that were clearly not in the pro-Israel camp anymore, but were at various levels of being anti-Israel.

And the fact is that while still a majority of the Democratic caucus in the House voted with Israel, there was a growing number of the progressives that were already taking their distance. So you could see the cracks in the bipartisan coalition for Israel.

The Netanyahu speech was, in that case, a gift he gave to these people. A stupid gift. Terrible mistake, as I said.

Trump’s second term: strategic ambiguity

Josef Olmert: The Trump administration these days — let’s move on now. First of all, in the last campaign that brought Trump again to the presidency — he didn’t even talk about Israel. He talked about Israel or the Middle East, made very, very superficial, almost insignificant comments or references. The promises were not there, you know.

Everybody took for granted that Trump is pro-Israel and will continue to be. The person that completely misread all this was Benjamin Netanyahu, again, in Jerusalem, believing that somehow Trump is going to be the same Trump of the first administration. He ignored the fact that in second administrations, presidents do tend to change.

I would remind people here that even Ronald Reagan — a great friend and supporter of Israel — he is the president that gave the first kosher certificate to the PLO before he left his second term. He was the one who authorized the beginning of official contact between the US and the PLO in 1989, as an example. But I can give you other examples.

Then came the inauguration, and I noticed something very interesting: While the inauguration was taking place, immediately afterward, US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff — I don’t get into too many details about him and his connections with Qatar, all this I leave to investigative journalism — but I don’t need to get into investigative journalism to analyze what he said on Inauguration Day, about what would be the four main pillars of American policy in the Middle East, the name “Israel” was not mentioned. The name “Iran” was not mentioned. The name “Hamas” was not mentioned.

Remember, it is in January of 2025, and the war was already raging from October of 2023. That was the first red light.

But forget about this. Maybe it was a ceremonial occasion. You don’t get into details, you just give main, big points and so on and so forth.

Gulf-centric policy and Israel’s marginalization

Then, of course, let’s see what has happened since then.

Some of his appointments have definitely been very pro-Israel. For example, Elise Stefanik, a congresswoman from New York, to be ambassador in the UN — and she made the point already, before: She’s going to fight hard about anti-Israelism in the UN as the first, if not the most important, but one of the main missions. This appointment, by the way, was canceled for all the obscure reasons. Why did he cancel her appointment, arguing that, “we need her in Congress,” when he did not cancel other appointments of people that had to resign from Congress and lead to early elections? I mean elections like in Florida. Well, I’m just leaving you with the question.

Ambassador Mike Huckabee — great, great supporter of Israel, there’s no question about it. But was he appointed as a policymaker? Or as the person that is supposed to say the good stuff to the Israelis, as opposed to the leaks coming consistently from the White House that are the bad stuff? Good cop, bad cop? Yeah — I leave my audience with this question.

All kinds of other appointments — I was skeptical about Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, for all kinds of reasons. I was skeptical about National Security Advisor Mike Waltz for all kinds of reasons. I did welcome the appointment, of course, of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, for all kinds of reasons.

But — you know — instead of getting into every little detail, like this appointment, that appointment, let’s try to talk about three or four particular issues that are typical of what has happened, and still is happening, and would lead me, therefore, to a conclusion at the end of this discussion.

Take, for example, the question of fighting terrorism. Proud American President Donald Trump surrendered. Yes, he surrendered to the Houthis in Yemen. He gave up to terrorists because he allows them, maybe even encourages them indirectly, to keep attacking Israel, but not attacking America. Sure, it’s a pro-American move: “We don’t attack America.” But is it a pillar of your foreign policy to abandon a friend and ally like that?

Cautionizing, legitimizing attacks on Israel by saying, “You can do that. What can I do?”

Donald Trump started the negotiations with Iran with changing views about what the demands from Iran are. And we still don’t know the final outcome of all that. But if the final outcome would be that Iran is still allowed to maintain a nuclear program — even for civilian purposes — it means that he doesn’t do anything different than what the Obama administration did.

Donald Trump put pressure on Israel to stop the war in Lebanon, exactly at the time when Hezbollah was ready to get the final blow from Israel. Yes, in the Lebanese situation, after 11 months of relative inaction by Israel, finally, Netanyahu, under pressure, decided to take the initiative. And it paid off so well to Israel, because this was the area in which you can talk specifically about the total defeat, almost, of the terrorists. Why “almost?” Because something else was needed to finalize the job. And then the American administration put a stop to it.

Donald Trump promised hell to Hamas in Gaza if they don’t release all the hostages within a short period of time. Nothing of this happened, of course. Edan Alexander was released — it is great news, fantastic news — but he is one hostage and an American citizen, which is also raising questions about the division between Americans and Israelis. You fight terrorism, you fight terrorism — it is one problem.

And I can go on with some more examples like this.

Where does it come from? Where was the Israeli reaction? And therefore, how do we put it all in perspective? Where it comes from is Trump’s version of isolationism. And many people will say it’s great, it’s a good American interest. So if that’s an American interest, not to get into war almost at all cost, I will be the last one to criticize it. But I need to mention it in the context of the Middle East. Because what does it mean? It means that we tolerate the terrorists, that we coexist with them. And for the sake of clarity, I will refer not just to people like the Houthis or Hezbollah or Hamas, but Iran.

Donald Trump doesn’t really care, apparently, about the fact that these systems will continue to exist. If he believes that by coming to some accommodation with them, he will be able to tame them, that’s a terrible, terrible mistake. Taming the shrew — ah! Impossible.

But if it falls into the basic tenets of how he views American isolationism and his supporters, then I can understand that there are implications.

Donald Trump wants political solutions that will be short-sighted — short of one situation that he raised and then did nothing about, which I immediately criticized, arguing it’s not going to happen because it’s just not even a half-baked cake. This is the talk about removing all the people of Gaza. It’s — let me use a non-diplomatic word — nonsensical.

But what helps him in that is that, yes, he has done already now some things that are very pro-Israel. He unfroze the embargo on arms to Israel that was basically imposed by Biden. He ordered his people in the UN organizations to continue to support Israel, even though it hasn’t yet come to any big test, like, say, a resolution in the Security Council about possible sanctions against Israel. That remains to be seen.

And at the same time, he makes it very clear that the focal countries of his new policy in the Middle East are the Gulf states: Saudi Arabia and Qatar, mainly, and the UAE, because they have something that Israel doesn’t have. They have the resources, the money.

And to give a kosher certificate, for example, to Qatar is the total opposite of anything which is like fighting terrorism. It is the greatest possible encouragement of terrorism because of what Qatar is and who the Qataris are. It’s as simple as this.

Israel’s paralysis and the waning American umbrella

Josef Olmert: What helps him with all that is — and that brings me back to what we already discussed — the total paralysis of the government of Israel under Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu has no alternatives to anything, has no proposals to anything, has no initiatives — because he cannot do anything if he wants to maintain his current coalition, which is based on some lunatic — I would say lunatic — extreme right-wing parties, led by Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir and Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich. And for Netanyahu, this is the number one interest.

So even if Netanyahu were to change a little bit on all kinds of issues, or even to a large extent, it may not have changed completely the overall perspective that Trump has about how he should do his own policies and conduct them. But when Netanyahu does nothing and offers nothing, it makes it so much easier.

And that is the same mistake that Netanyahu has done throughout his political career — and definitely when it came also to the Obama administration: to say no with great, polished English is all very nice and easy. But to say yes requires courage, resolve, determination, leadership, which he lacks.

And what happens now is that because of the distance that is being created between Trump and Israel — he’s in the Middle East, but not in Israel. He’s praising Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, he’s meeting the terrorists like Mohammad al-Julani in Syria, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the model countries for relations with the US. More and more countries are encouraged now to take more and more anti-Israel positions because they believe that the balance is changing. The umbrella of defense provided to Israel by the US is weakening, if not in the process of disappearing — which is, again, something very bad to Israel.

A troubling future for US–Israel relations

Josef Olmert: I can go on and on. I think I’ve said enough to lead me to interim conclusions.

Beware, Israel. The second administration of Donald J. Trump is going to be the greatest challenge to Israeli foreign policy in our memory, definitely in my memory. And I’m not a young person.

Israel will have to understand that America is changing. And with it are changes in American foreign policy, also in the Middle East.

And I will sharpen the point here by saying: The changes about Israel between this administration of Trump and the first one — in terms of the action but also the image, the perceptions — are just so important. These changes will not be the ones that will lead to a rebellion against Trump in the Republican Party, even by the greatest supporters of Israel, short of maybe a few. If there will be a rebellion against him, but it will be over other issues: the effect of the tariffs, the economic situation, the index of living, inflation, success or failure on the southern border and so on and so forth.

And that’s where we are standing, from the perspective of being in Israel now with less and less bipartisan support. If the Republican administration is the one that is changing the way I described, Israel cannot expect the Democrats to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for Israel. That could not happen.

So I have to leave my audience with this perspective: that for those who care about Israel and for Israel — and I’m one of them, of course — this is a very troubling, pessimistic, but I believe realistic assessment of the situation.

Thank you all.

[ and edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article/video are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post FO° Talks: From MAGA to Gaza — How Trump Changed US–Israel Relations Forever appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Harshan Kumarasingham knows this firsthand. Born to Sri Lankan heritage, raised in New Zealand and now teaching in Scotland, his life reflects the British Empire’s global web. Importantly, this noted scholar’s ideas of “Eastminster” and “vice-regalism” explain how imperial power morphed, not vanished, after the end of the empire.

From Westminster to Eastminster

Great Britain’s Westminster model of democracy evolved over centuries. Once Britain acquired its empire, colonial administrators exported this model to the colonies. Yet they modified the model right at the start. All power was ultimately concentrated in the hands of the viceroy, who was deputizing for the British crown. So, the colonies inherited a vice-regal form of government with the trappings of the Westminster model.

After independence, colonies moved rapidly from the Westminster model to the Eastminster one. After World War II, independence came suddenly. Colonies did not have time to evolve political norms or other institutions. They inherited the apparatus of the state from the colonial government that answered to London, not to the natives. Unlike the UK, the colonies did not experience the slow evolution of democracy over time.

Local elites took over the centralized oppressive structures of colonial governments. Most postcolonial leaders had studied in British institutions such as Oxford or Cambridge. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, went to the same school as Winston Churchill, the British wartime leader. The likes of Nehru adopted the English language and British ideas, even when they were fighting their colonial masters.

After independence, the local elites chose the modified Westminster model that Kumarasingham calls the Eastminster model themselves. Nobody forced India, Sri Lanka or Pakistan to choose this model. The postcolonial elites chose this model willingly, but, over time, adapted it to their own purposes.

Eastminster model has a concentration of power

As mentioned earlier in this write-up, the colonies had experience of vice-regal government. At the end of the day, the viceroy was in charge and the natives did not matter. So, even when democracy came to the colonies, the Eastminster model allowed leaders to concentrate power.

It is the Eastminster model that has allowed Indian leaders like Indira Gandhi in the 1970s and Narendra Modi today to concentrate power. This model allowed Sri Lanka to move from a prime ministerial form of government to a presidential one. In Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah became the governor-general, not the president. The full title of the British viceroy was the viceroy and governor-general of India and Jinnah knew exactly what he was doing when he took that title. It concentrated all power and authority in his hands.

Many Eastminster states now blur the lines between democratic rule and monarchy. They face weak checks and balances. These leaders can silence the opposition. They also enjoy broad symbolic authority, much like the colonial governors who preceded them.

Settler vs subject states

Of course, not all colonies are the same. Settler dominions — Canada, Australia and New Zealand — where the population came from the British Isles, at least in the early days, managed to adopt the Westminster model successfully. The prime ministers of these countries answer to their parliaments. They function in a system of checks and balances and are ultimately answerable to their people.

Unlike settler colonies, the leaders in subject colonies like India or Kenya had little in common with their people. They had become anglicized and were importing alien traditions to their native lands. To their credit, these Eastminster elites often tried to govern fairly. India’s Nehru, Pakistan’s Jinnah, Sri Lanka’s Don Stephen Senanayake and Malaysia’s Tunku Abdul Rahman wanted to include minorities and create modern countries. But all of these leaders ruled top-down, not bottom-up.

Note that this top-down structure was baked into these subject colonies. The British did not create social hierarchies in these colonies. Yes, they certainly reinforced and exacerbated them. After independence, these hierarchies did not go away.

Elected monarchies and the rise of illiberalism

The Eastminster model is increasingly throwing up populist leaders who now act like monarchs. Ironically, many of them have humble beginnings. Modi sold tea outside a train station. Kenyan President William Ruto was a barefoot schoolboy who used to sell chickens at a roadside stall. Yet both of them have concentrated power in their hands and act like kings.

The issue in the Eastminster model is not the background of the leaders. In many countries, plebeians have replaced patricians. The issue in Eastminster democracies today is chronic institutional weakness. Unlike Westminster democracies like the UK or New Zealand, Eastminster parliaments lack real opposition. Unreformed colonial-era bureaucracies hold too much sway. Nehru’s state-led economic model is a classic case in point that handed power to powerful bureaucrats and left little room for rivals. Hence, Eastminster systems often lack the basics of liberal democracy: debate, pluralism and strong courts.

Thanks to weak institutions, many democracies are turning illiberal. Turkish voters have thrown in their lot with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a strongman who has been in power forever. In Eastminster, many leaders rule by fiat. Democracies have often failed to deliver and people prefer food and stability over rights and freedoms. Singapore, an authoritarian democracy, clearly proves this point.

The problems of Eastminster are now infecting Westminster. The UK elected Boris Johnson and is now flirting with Nigel Farage. America has elected Donald Trump again. The West can no longer assume that elections equal liberty. Nor can former colonies. All must rethink what democracy really means — and what they want from it.

[ and edited this piece]

The views expressed in this article/video are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Eastminster and Vice-Regalism: How the British Empire Still Shapes Former Colonies appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The enduring bond between people and royalty

Love and respect for royalty remain strong in India, much like in the United Kingdom. Far from contradicting egalitarian values, Singh Mewar believes this bond strengthens them when the institution of royalty is used to serve the people. He shows this commitment through nine Guinness World Records, including the largest clothing donation and the largest distribution of educational supplies. His foundation, the Maharana Mewar Charitable Foundation, undertakes a wide range of projects: promoting girl child education, supporting war widows, preserving art and heritage and maintaining livelihoods in fading industries. At the heart of his work is a desire to keep “inspirational and aspirational value” alive in society.

A deep commitment to education

Education is a central pillar of Singh Mewar’s mission, though he wasn’t academically inclined in his early years. Today, he runs two schools under his foundation — launched by his grandfather and expanded by his father — and is now pursuing a PhD after completing his Master’s degree. He views education not merely as formal instruction but as a broader path to peace, well-being and global progress. His doctoral research focuses on how young children manage stress — a universal challenge that transcends national boundaries. He finds it troubling that children today spend more time on devices than in active, creative play.

Philanthropy rooted in responsibility, not privilege

As a modern royal, Singh Mewar embraces the responsibility to use his influence for good. He engages across platforms — government, schools, communities — to shape policy and encourage meaningful change. Real impact, he insists, comes from genuine involvement, not ticking boxes. For him, giving back is not a duty imposed by title but a moral responsibility rooted in gratitude toward one’s country, heritage and upbringing.

The Lake Palace: luxury, livelihoods and legacy

Claire and Singh Mewar also discuss the Lake Palace, a globally renowned symbol of beauty and luxury. Singh Mewar addresses the perceived tension between running such a lavish property and engaging in social service. He believes there is no contradiction: tourism, especially through landmarks like the Lake Palace, creates economic ripple effects that benefit entire communities. The hotel generates extensive employment and plays a pivotal role in placing Udaipur on the global map.

The Lake Palace has become synonymous with Udaipur. Today, nearly every household in Udaipur’s old city is connected to tourism in some way.

Looking to the future: India’s youth and the age of AI

Singh Mewar is strongly optimistic about India’s future. He celebrates the country’s youthful energy. With more than half its population under 35, India stands at the cusp of generational change. Singh Mewar sees this generation as bursting with ideas, creativity and conviction. India has tremendous potential in the age of AI, and he urges young people not just to “go through life,” but to “grow through life.”

Heritage and modernity are not opposites but allies, and the past can be a powerful foundation for building a brighter, more inclusive future.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article/video are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post FO° Talks: Meet Lakshyaraj Singh Mewar, Prince of Udaipur appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Although there was growing towards the Indira Gandhi-led Congress government in the mid-1970s, this infamous event’s immediate trigger was the Allahabad High Court . It declared her election to the Lok Sabha invalid. The court also disqualified her from holding public office for six years.

Instead of resigning as prime minister, she chose to declare a state of emergency and establish her absolute authority over the country. Citizens’ fundamental rights, which included freedom of speech, stood suspended. Newspapers and magazines could only publish what the government approved. The public broadcasting organization Doordarshan and radio station All India Radio, both already run by the government, became propaganda instruments of Indira’s regime. Over people, including my father, K.R. Malkani, were arrested under the draconian Maintenance of Internal Security Act (). Under this act, anyone who even spoke out against the government could be arrested and held indefinitely without trial, on the pretext of maintaining national security.

Indira declared the Emergency during our school summer holidays. I was eight years old then. As young children, my ten-year-old sister and I knew that my father would fearlessly write against Indira. The following are all the stories I have recollected and documented from that period.

The night of June 25, 1975

On the night of June 25, our family was sleeping in the courtyard at the front of our house, as we often did during Delhi’s scorching summer. My sister and I slept through the night, unaware that we had had visitors at an unearthly hour.

The next morning, my mother, Sundari Malkani, told us that the police had visited us soon after midnight. They did not enter the courtyard but called out my father’s name from the gate. My parents woke up and learned that the police wanted my father to accompany them to the nearby station. When my mother asked them why, their response was that my father knew the reason. For some support, my mother woke up my older brother, who was 17 then. She wanted to request a neighbor to accompany my father to the station. As she opened the back door to walk to his house, she realized that the police had our home surrounded.

I also learned from my father’s , The Midnight Knock, that before leaving home, he turned and looked at us children, thinking that perhaps this might be the last time he would see us.

I don’t recall my sister or myself crying upon hearing the news. We probably didn’t understand what it meant for our family. I didn’t know the meaning of the word arrest until my mother explained it to me.

My mother’s incredible bravery

I learned, also from The Midnight Knock, that my father had left a modest balance in his bank account. Meanwhile, on that dark night, my mother was left with two frightening worries. The first was my father’s safety; under MISA, officers would not convey why a person was being arrested, where they were being taken and for how long. The second was our family’s financial uncertainty. Our sole breadwinner was now gone, but we still had to be fed and educated. Throughout that dark period, she was very brave. Despite our family having almost no money at hand, the swim classes my sister and I started that summer continued unabated.

All three of us studied in Modern School, New Delhi’s then-most expensive school, which was also considered one of the best in the country. It wasn’t easy for my parents to afford the fees but they cut other household and personal expenses to give us a good education. Thankfully, my brother had finished his schooling by 1975. Moving my sister and me to a government-run school would have reduced monthly expenses but it would have also compromised the quality of our education and exposure. For our futures’ sake, we stayed at our school. I learned several years later that my mother’s Delhi-based brother was financially supporting her, as were at least two family friends, one in Mumbai and another outside India.

The family car was provided by my father’s office. It could not be sold off to get money to run the house, nor could it be left unused month after month. During this time of uncertainty, my strong mother learned how to drive and took up the additional responsibility of driving the family around. Unlike the summer of 1975, when we used to take a bus to National Stadium for swim classes, the following summer she would drive us and a few other kids from the neighborhood to swim lessons.

Despite the financial hardship, my mother managed to give us little pleasures of childhood as best she could. One of those was when right after swimming, she would occasionally take us for a movie instead of immediately heading home. I recall after one swim practice, we headed to the modest Stadium Cinema nearby, which was playing the Hindi movie, . None of us fancied watching it! was the most famous Hindi movie running during that period. Although we had much time on our hands during the summer holidays, not to mention the luxury of a car to drive us places, she didn’t take us to watch it — possibly because of its violence and abusive dialogue.

Another time, when I asked for a bicycle, my mother tried to get me a second-hand one. When I saw the poor state it was in, I became very sad. So she bought me a new one, although a cheaper brand than the standard Atlas or Hero bike. I can’t imagine what other expenses she would have compromised on to buy me a new, high-end one.

Visiting various jails

But going swimming and watching the occasional movie were among the sweeter memories from those 21 months. We also visited the jail regularly to spend time with my father. I don’t know how and when my mother learned his whereabouts. He was first sent to a jail in Rohtak, Haryana, about 40 miles from Delhi. My uncle had two cars. Each time we went to visit my father, my uncle would lend us his personal driver and one of his cars, while he would drive himself to his office in his other car.

In the Rohtak jail, all the MISA detainees and their visitors met in a large hall. I did not know anyone else there. In the same crowded venue, my father had pointed out architect and politician once, whose wife would visit him.

The next “home” for my father was the jail in Hissar, also in Haryana. It was about 100 miles from Delhi. Our first trip there took us a long time. We returned home at about 10 PM.

In Hissar, the rules were more stringent for visitors. We met my father in a small room in the presence of a few jail officers (or perhaps officers sent by the government) whose job was seemingly to listen to everything we said to each other. The seating was limited; during one visit, we were short one chair. Being the youngest visitor there, I sat on my father’s lap. I was quiet and shy by nature, so when I wanted to say something to him, I started talking softly to him. One of the officers objected to this. My mother responded to him saying that “children are innocent” (“bachchay to masoom hotay hain”). But he still wasn’t okay with me saying something he couldn’t hear. I don’t think I completed my sentence at all after that.

The third jail my father occupied was Delhi’s Tihar Jail. I don’t remember much of it at all. On either side of the huge door of the jail were the words, “Hate the sin, not the sinner.” I think it was here that as we waited to enter the jail one day, a large group of prisoners were being taken away in a bus. They were chanting in unison in Urdu, “Shanti Van say aayee aavaz, aaja beti mere paas” (“A voice is calling from Shanti Van — former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s cremation ground — come to me, my daughter”). My mother found it amusing.

For the jail visits, my mother would prepare a meal that all of us would eat together. This gave my father a break from jail food.

The jails allowed only two adult visitors at a time. My brother was 17, but the authorities still counted him as an adult. So, when any other adult relative wanted to visit my father along with us, my brother would have to stay home.

Balancing school and jail visits

Jail meetings were held late in the afternoon. To arrive on time, my sister and I had to leave during school hours. Initially, we both were in junior school — which encompasses elementary/primary and middle school — at Humayun Road. But after fifth standard (or fifth grade), she moved to senior school at Barakhambha Road. My uncle’s driver would first come to my school to fetch me, then to my sister’s school and then to our place for my mother and any other family member.

Up until fifth standard, we were not allowed to wear watches in school. So I had no idea what time it was or when I was supposed to wait outside school for my ride. The driver would reach my school and go hunting for me on campus. He would find me only by luck, because I was never looking for him! My sister, by contrast, was responsible and would be waiting outside the school when the driver and I arrived.

Once during a parent–teacher meeting, my sister’s teacher said she was taken aback when my sister sought permission to visit our jailed father. She said she had initially wondered what crime he had committed! But upon hearing the situation, the staff began showing thoughtfulness toward us and respect for my father.

Only one experience during this period was different. My Hindi teacher, Mrs. Sahai, a well-known terror, once asked the class to write an essay on Indira as our homework. When my mother saw the assignment, she was furious and asked me not to write it. The next day, I received a white card from the teacher — a severe punishment in my school, and the only time I ever received one. I started crying in class but she still wanted me to write the essay. Pressured, I managed to write a page, which is far shorter than a conventional essay.

I narrated the happenings to my mother. As I left the room, her neighborhood friend dropped in to meet her. My mother explained what happened, crying. It was also the only time I saw her cry during those 21 months.

We will never know if the topic of the essay was the teacher’s choice or mandated by the government. It may not have been the latter, given that my sister did not get the same assignment. If this was the teacher’s own choice, I can’t imagine what purpose it served for anyone, including her.

Given how my family was impacted by Indira’s Emergency, it was ridiculous of Sahai to punish me for not completing that assignment. A few days later, she tried to do damage control by telling me that a teacher is the children’s mother in school. That made me think: Should the “mother in school” do something that makes the real mother cry? Of course, I didn’t dare ask her that.

My father, a well-read prisoner

My father was an avid reader and used to spend most of his waking hours at home, reading. His favorite was Choose Life: A Dialogue (Echoes and Reflections), a dialogue between scholars Arnold Toynbee and Daisaku Ikeda. A few times during my childhood, he had cited the saying, “A fool lends a book, and a bigger fool returns it!”

Being locked in jail had a silver lining: It enabled him to spend his time as he pleased. I imagine he spent a lot of the time in open discussions about the government, something Indira could do nothing to stop, given that the “offenders” were already in jail. He would also play badminton — we had given him one of the racquets from home — and read a lot.

One of my Pune-based cousins owned a called Modern Book Stall. My father used to give my mother names of books he wanted to read, which she would send to my cousin. Whenever he sent us the books, we would take them to my father.

During one of our visits, he had finished reading all the books he had in jail, and we had no new one to give him. I generously offered him my The Adventures of Tintin , which I’d brought to read in the car. He accepted the offer. He had the habit of marking interesting sections in the margins of books he read. I don’t remember if he found anything in Prisoners of the Sun worth marking, but he wrote down a few words on the last page, which he wanted to explain to me the meanings of. The first among those was “Inca.”

I don’t know how much of the story he understood, given that he hadn’t read the , The Seven Crystal Balls. But then again, neither had I.

The bored spy in our neighborhood

My mother was sure our phone was being tapped. She also spotted someone standing some distance from our house and watching our place all day. Presumably, the government hired this person to keep surveillance on our visitors. Every journalist with a spine was already in jail, as were Opposition — political parties not supporting the ruling cabinet — leaders and tens of thousands of Opposition workers. So, this person clearly wouldn’t have anything interesting to report.

Possibly bored with the lack of action, he once asked a neighbor’s domestic worker — informal workers in India who perform household tasks for clients — to keep an eye on our place while he took a break. The domestic worker then informed the lady of the house of this conversation. The good neighbor promptly came and told my mother about it, confirming her suspicion.

A meeting with Indira that didn’t happen

One person who used to visit our house during the Emergency was a man named Bhikshu (ordained Buddhist monk) Chaman Lal. I have no recollection of who he was or what he looked like. Some years after the Emergency, my father narrated one incident related to him.

On one of his visits to our home, he told my mother that he was going to meet Indira and tried to convince her to accompany him, saying that she did not need to say anything during the meeting. My mother wasn’t sure if this was right. At that same time, her brother happened to drop in at our place. He heard this suspicious-sounding invitation and advised my mother to decline it.

While narrating this story, my father said it was a very wise move. The visit could have been projected by the media as a meeting in which my mother apologized for my father’s stand against Indira — something he would never have done.

My mother, an active rally-goer

One Sunday evening, a large rally was organized, possibly by some Opposition leaders who were released from jail early. My mother drove to the rally and took a few interested people with her. She said it was a very well-attended one. While the rally was on, a helicopter hovered over the venue, possibly to assess how big the anti-government/Emergency movement was. They organized a second rally for the following Sunday.

Through the ‘70s, Doordarshan was a drab affair — we’d rarely switch the TV on. But every TV-owning household would watch the movie that aired on Sunday evenings, however boring it may have been that week. But the station announced unexpectedly that it would broadcast the relatively new movie, , on the evening of the second rally, instead of a much older movie, which I remember being . It seemed a desperate attempt by the government to prevent people from attending the rally. But it worked! My mother mentioned at home that the crowd this time was much smaller than in the first.

India’s growing resentment

As the oppression continued, the populace’s resentment of Indira grew. While people did not dare speak against her outside of private conversations with trusted people, I remember an incident that demonstrated the popular acrimony. Along the road leading to Minto Bridge in Delhi, a very long billboard had been put up. It had Indira painted in the center, with a vast number of small, faceless figures behind her, implying she was leading the country’s masses. I used to see it every day as my school bus passed from the nearby outer circle of Connaught Place, New Delhi’s business hub.

One day, my mother learned that someone had smeared tar on Indira’s face on that billboard. I saw the spectacle on my busride the next day. Before long, the tar was scraped off and her face painted back on the billboard. Whoever the “tartist” was, it was incredibly brave of them to do so, knowing any person could well have spotted them and got them arrested.

And then there was this joke I heard in school. I shared it with my mother, who had a good laugh over it. It went like this: Rajiv Gandhi (Indira’s older son, who was a pilot then) is flying Indira and Sanjay Gandhi (Indira’s younger son) in a plane. As they fly over a village, they look down at it. Indira says, “If I throw ten rupees down from here, that will make the villagers very happy!” Sanjay betters her proposal and says, “If I throw 100 rupees down from here, that will make the villagers happier!” Rajiv betters both their proposals and says, “If I throw both of you down from here, that will make the villagers the happiest!”

As time passed, some prominent Opposition members were released. Shri L.K. Advani and Shri A.B. Vajpayee were among them. After his release, one Opposition leader went to meet Indira. He asked her about Nana Deshmukh’s and my father’s release. She said my father would be released soon, but did not commit to Deshmukh’s release. However, from what I recall, he was released soon after, while my father continued to wait in jail. We will never know for sure why my father was among the last to see release, given the hardship we — his family — were enduring. One can only assume it was driven by personal hatred.

Election day: March 16–17, 1977

Ultimately, elections were announced. My mother was very active on election day. She drove several elderly people in the neighborhood to the polling booth and back. As the day progressed, she also went to some neighbors’ homes reminding them to go and vote. She had a very close friend two houses away from ours whose husband was an unwavering Congress voter. As my mother was visiting other houses in the neighborhood, she asked my sister and me to go and remind her friend to vote. Innocent of the reason for her not going there herself (I suppose she was hurt at them not committing to vote for the Janata Party), we both went to their place. The friend’s husband looked slightly surprised on hearing our message, possibly thinking it was nice of my mother to remind them despite his political preference.

My father’s release

The election results were announced over a few days. For us kids, it was a novel and delightful experience that Hindi movies were being broadcast for a few days in a row. The unfolding election results — what little we understood of them — would have added to the delight.

From what I recall, my father was released only after the government’s defeat was announced. My mother and a few neighbors went to Rohtak to bring him home. I think my uncle’s car and driver were unavailable that evening, and one neighbor had volunteered to drive our car. A huge number of people visited us that night to meet him.

The next morning, I told the other kids at my school bus stop that my father had been released. At last, it had happened!

A quarter-century after the Emergency was lifted, when my father lived in the city of Pondicherry, a close friend of the Nehru-Gandhi family visited him. During their chat, my father asked him what had made Indira finally lift the Emergency. His insight was that major democracies in the world had strongly objected to the imposition of the Emergency in India. He also mentioned that the jailing of Gayatri Devi, the Rajmata (“Queen Mother”) of the royal family of Jaipur had particularly offended the British royal family. Indira eventually succumbed to international pressure.

The Emergency can’t be forgotten

The majority of India’s population today was born after the Emergency. They know little, if anything, about that period. However, as the famous saying goes, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

While one can safely assume that no political party today will impose the kind and extent of oppression the Emergency did. But since the Emergency, and indeed, even in the preceding it, the Indian government has imposed or attempted to impose curbs on its people’s freedoms. A particularly perverse attempt was the of 1988, introduced by the same party that imposed the Emergency. The decade of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance wasn’t particularly supportive of . On the other hand, similar have been hurled by the Congress against the Union Government led by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Fortunately, the present government has ensured greater visibility of this period by declaring today, June 25, as Samvidhan Hatya Divas (“Day of murder of the constitution,” or Constitution Murder Day). Additionally, over the decades, several books — from the late ‘70s to a few years ago — have been written on the Emergency. Notable among these are B.N. Tandon’s Prelude to the Emergency, Coomi Kapoor’s : A Personal History, A. Surya Prakash’s : Indian Democracy’s Darkest Hour, my father’s The Midnight Knock, Janardan Thakur’s the Prime Minister’s Men and Advani’s , My Life. Interestingly, aside from the last (which has a chapter on the Emergency), each of these was published when Congress was not in power in New Delhi.

A deeper understanding of the Emergency will give us context to understand the present better. That dark chapter of history must be discussed and documented extensively for the benefit of future generations.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post My Memories of the Emergency: The Darkest Period in Independent India’s History appeared first on 51�Թ�.