The business of peace by Timothy Davies

We call it peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance, reconstruction, or international solidarity, depending on which diplomatic suit we happen to be wearing. But beneath the vocabulary lies an uncomfortable truth: we have become remarkably efficient at financing the machinery of conflict and considerably less imaginative about financing the conditions that make peace possible.

On 26 October, the European Council's mobilisation of €4.9 billion for Ukraine under the European Peace Facility brings this contradiction into sharp focus. Supporting a country fighting for its survival is not charity. It is a strategic necessity. But it also exposes a fundamental question that international institutions have avoided for far too long: what exactly are we buying when we invest in security without adequately investing in the economic foundations of peace?

The answer, unfortunately, is often another temporary reprieve. Traditional humanitarian aid was never designed to carry the weight of wars that last for years, destroy entire economies and leave millions of people trapped between displacement and destitution. Emergency food, shelter and medical assistance save lives. They are indispensable. But humanitarian relief cannot substitute for functioning hospitals, rebuilt schools, reliable electricity, employment, functioning public institutions and an economy capable of giving people something more convincing than the promise of another aid shipment.

People cannot live indefinitely inside an emergency appeal. And yet the international system behaves as though they can. We divide crises into convenient bureaucratic chapters: first the fighting, then the humanitarian response, then reconstruction, then development. It is a beautiful sequence on paper, rather like planning a dinner party while the kitchen is burning. Real conflicts refuse to respect our funding cycles. Infrastructure collapses while negotiations continue. Children lose years of education while donors debate priorities. Businesses disappear, skilled workers flee, and public institutions weaken. By the time reconstruction becomes politically fashionable, the damage has multiplied and the bill has grown.

This is not simply inefficient. It is politically irresponsible. The European Peace Facility reflects an important recognition that European security cannot be separated from the ability of vulnerable states to defend themselves. But the wider lesson must extend beyond military assistance. Security investments need to connect with economic resilience, public services, institutional accountability and the eventual capacity of societies to stand on their own feet.

Otherwise, we risk building a permanent international economy of emergency: donors paying to manage the consequences of instability while failing to address the conditions that allow instability to reproduce itself.

There is money in that arrangement, certainly. There are contracts, procurement systems, conferences, consultants and enough impressive acronyms to keep an entire diplomatic industry employed. What there is not always enough of is political courage to ask whether the money is changing the future or merely subsidising the present.

Structural reform must begin by abandoning the fiction that economic reconstruction is something to consider after peace arrives. In prolonged conflicts, rebuilding is part of the struggle for peace itself. Keeping electricity flowing, restoring livelihoods, supporting local enterprises and maintaining education are not decorative extras attached to a security strategy. They are components of it.

This also means demanding accountability. Aid must reach communities rather than disappear into corruption, fragmented programmes or geopolitical vanity projects. Local institutions must have a genuine role in deciding priorities. Donors must coordinate their efforts, measure long-term outcomes and resist the temptation to announce spectacular sums while ignoring whether those resources translate into durable improvements in people's lives.

And Europe must understand that strategic autonomy is not merely about weapons factories, defence budgets and military readiness. A continent that can defend its borders but cannot help build resilient societies in its neighbourhood will remain strategically vulnerable, whatever the speeches in Brussels might suggest.

None of this means choosing reconstruction over defence. A country under attack cannot rebuild its future if it loses the ability to protect it. It means understanding that defence without a credible economic future can become an endless expenditure, while reconstruction without security can become an expensive invitation for destruction to return.

Peace is not the silence between two bombardments. It is the ability of a family to plan next month without fearing that everything they own will disappear tomorrow. It is a school that opens, a hospital that functions, a worker who earns a living and a government that can deliver more than another appeal for international assistance.

If billions are being mobilised in the name of peace, then peace must become more than a convenient label attached to security spending. The real test is not how much money Europe announces. It is whether that money helps create a society that will eventually need less emergency assistance, less external protection and fewer international conferences about its survival. Until then, we are not building a peace economy. We are financing the waiting room of the next war.

The native language of onions #Poem by Abigail George

 

You speak
You utter the words
You stand in the doorway, hovering
Am I speaking to a black hole?
In my head I say the words
that I am not brave enough to speak aloud
Your addiction is like a furnace
It is fire, it is volcano lover, it threatens my sensibility
I no longer wish to speak to you
Why?
Because you have no self-respect
When I try to talk to you
you blow smoke in my face
When I ask you, don't you want to talk to someone
a psychologist, an ex-addict, a priest
About what!
You shout
You holler
Your problems, I answer to your silence
At night, I ask your shadow
What is your song?
Sometimes, I look at your children
and see your legacy burning in their eyes.

The small revolt by Zarah Rivera

The future of live culture may belong to the people who can still hear one another without a corporate sponsor shouting over the music.

Somewhere, right now, an algorithm is deciding what you should listen to, a marketing department is calculating how much your enthusiasm is worth, and a corporation is preparing to sell you the experience of being different from everybody else. Welcome to modern culture, where rebellion comes with a wristband, individuality is available in a limited-edition package, and freedom has a sponsorship deal.

But something is going wrong with this magnificent machinery of manufactured excitement. People are tired. Not necessarily tired of music, art or the collective electricity of a crowd, but tired of being treated as consumers in a gigantic entertainment supermarket. And while the cultural industry continues building bigger stages, more expensive festivals and increasingly absurd commercial spectacles, another movement is gathering strength in smaller rooms, unconventional venues and fiercely independent cultural corners. The revolution, it seems, has decided that it does not need a stadium.

Digital mass culture promised unlimited choice. What it delivered was an endless corridor of increasingly similar choices, arranged by algorithms whose understanding of human curiosity appears to have been developed by an ambitious refrigerator.

Listen to one electronic track, and the machinery will offer you a thousand variations. Watch one performance, and the platforms will bury you beneath recommendations designed to keep you occupied rather than inspired. Everything is personalised, yet everything feels strangely impersonal. We have more access to culture than any generation in history, but access is not the same as discovery, and endless consumption is not the same as participation.

The corporate festival has followed the same logic. Bigger names, bigger screens, bigger ticket prices, bigger sponsorship banners. The audience becomes a temporary population of wallets, photographed against spectacular backdrops and encouraged to believe that purchasing admission constitutes cultural belonging.

It is entertainment on an industrial scale, and its greatest achievement may be convincing people that expensive conformity is an act of freedom.

Enter the micro-festival: the intimate gathering organised around a particular sound, artistic obsession, political attitude or subcultural identity. Events such as Rotterdam's Left of the Dial demonstrate the appeal of bringing emerging and unconventional artists into a concentrated, discovery-driven environment rather than treating culture as a parade of established commercial properties.

Underground electronic gatherings operate on a similar principle. Their attraction is not simply the music. It is the feeling that something is happening here, among these people, at this particular moment, which cannot be adequately reproduced by a livestream or recommended by an algorithm.

A small venue can be culturally enormous. A makeshift stage, a basement dance floor or an improvised performance space can create more meaningful encounters than a million-pound production engineered to impress everybody and challenge nobody.

These places allow audiences to discover artists before the industry declares them profitable. They give emerging performers room to experiment, and they allow subcultures to develop their own language without immediately translating every gesture into marketing material.

Most importantly, they restore the possibility of surprise. You arrive for one band and discover another. You meet strangers who share an interest you thought was impossibly obscure. You encounter art that does not resemble the carefully packaged content already circulating through your digital life. Culture becomes an experience again, rather than another item in the consumption queue.

Naturally, the commercial machinery is already waiting at the door. Once micro-festivals become fashionable, promoters will be tempted to scale them up, introduce premium passes, invite corporate partners and transform underground authenticity into a marketable lifestyle. Nothing kills rebellion quite as efficiently as a consultancy report explaining how to monetise it.

Small does not automatically mean independent, progressive or artistically brave. Micro-festivals can be elitist, financially precarious and inaccessible to people without disposable income. Intimacy is no substitute for fair pay, decent organisation and inclusive spaces.

Their future therefore depends on more than keeping attendance figures low. It requires affordable tickets, support for local artists, accessible venues, transparent finances and organisers willing to protect artistic freedom when commercial pressure arrives.

Cultural institutions must also abandon their obsession with visibility measured through attendance statistics and online engagement. Their responsibility is not merely to attract crowds but to create conditions in which culture can develop, communities can meet and unfamiliar ideas can survive.

The irony is delicious. After decades spent convincing us that everything must become bigger, faster, more connected and more profitable, culture may be rediscovering the radical value of being smaller, slower and occasionally impossible to categorise.

This is not a nostalgic demand to abandon technology or pretend that independent culture can survive without money. It is a refusal to confuse technological distribution with cultural meaning, or commercial success with artistic importance.

The next significant cultural movement may not begin with a global marketing campaign. It may begin in a neglected warehouse, a neighbourhood club, a converted shop or a small festival where somebody takes a chance on an artist nobody has heard of.

There will be no enormous sponsor logo. Perhaps the sound system will occasionally malfunction. The toilets may be terrible. The audience may number only a few hundred. And something extraordinary might happen.

That is precisely what frightens the entertainment industry. Genuine cultural communities are difficult to manufacture, harder to control and almost impossible to reduce to predictable consumer behaviour. They create loyalties that cannot be purchased through targeted advertising and discoveries that do not require corporate permission.

The digital giants can continue selling us infinite entertainment. The stadiums can continue expanding. The algorithms can keep explaining our preferences to us until we no longer remember how to develop any of our own.

Meanwhile, somewhere in a dark little room, a musician will begin playing, a stranger will turn towards another stranger, and an unexpected community will come into existence. No algorithm arranged it. No corporation owns it. For a few hours, culture will belong to the people who actually make it and experience it. And that, in an age when everything has a price, is a rather dangerous form of freedom.

Maples & Oranges #075 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

Taunting oranges in the midst of other fruity links,
constantly spreading the wares of their juicy gloom.

For more Maples & Oranges, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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Green colonialism by Marja Heikkinen

Europe has discovered a wonderful way to feel morally superior while behaving like an empire. It calls it the green transition. Replace coal with wind turbines, petrol with electric cars, and fossil fuels with minerals dug out of the ground, preferably somewhere far away from the comfortable people who will enjoy the benefits. Then put a photograph of a polar bear on the government website and congratulate yourself on saving the planet.

There is just one inconvenient problem. The land belongs to someone. In Sápmi, the ancestral territory of the Sámi people stretching across northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia, the race towards a carbon-neutral future is colliding with the rights of Europe's Indigenous people. Reindeer herders watch their pastures fragment under the pressure of wind farms, mines, roads, power lines and other infrastructure sold to the public as environmental necessities. The green revolution arrives with promises of progress and leaves behind a familiar question: who gets to decide what happens to Indigenous land?

Apparently, not always the people who have lived there for generations. The irony is almost too grotesque to tolerate. Europe congratulates itself on defending human rights, confronting colonialism and learning from the crimes of its industrial past. Yet when the demands of economic growth collide with Indigenous rights, governments suddenly develop a remarkable talent for selective deafness. Sámi traditions become an administrative complication. Reindeer migration routes become obstacles on a planning map. An ancient relationship between people, animals and land becomes a negotiable inconvenience in the grand spreadsheet of national prosperity.

Apparently, the planet must be saved, but the people who have protected their environment for centuries must first explain why their existence matters. Nobody seriously disputes the urgency of the climate crisis. Renewable energy is necessary. Fossil-fuel dependence must end. Europe cannot continue burning its way towards ecological disaster and expect future generations to thank it for the smoke. But urgency is not a blank cheque, and climate change is not a magical legal exemption allowing governments and corporations to disregard Indigenous rights.

A wind turbine does not become morally innocent simply because its blades turn in the name of sustainability. A mine does not become an instrument of justice because its minerals end up inside an electric vehicle. Extractive colonialism does not disappear when the machinery is painted green.

The real question is not whether Europe needs renewable energy. It is whether Europe can imagine a renewable future that does not reproduce the same old hierarchy: powerful institutions decide, corporations profit, politicians celebrate, and Indigenous communities are expected to absorb the damage.

This is where the Scandinavian reputation for progressive governance deserves some uncomfortable scrutiny. Truth and reconciliation are attractive concepts when they involve historical apologies, solemn speeches and carefully arranged ceremonies. They become considerably less attractive when reconciliation requires governments to change present-day decisions, surrender some control and accept that Indigenous consent cannot be treated as a decorative paragraph in an environmental impact assessment.

The Sámi do not need another lecture about the importance of sustainability from politicians whose definitions of sustainability conveniently accommodate the destruction of traditional livelihoods. They need meaningful participation, enforceable protections for their land and culture, and decision-making processes that respect their rights rather than treating consultation as a public-relations exercise.

International human rights standards, including the principle of free, prior and informed consent in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, exist for a reason. Consent is not the same as being informed after the important decisions have already been made. Nor is consultation meaningful if the answer that communities give can simply be ignored when it becomes inconvenient.

And let us abandon the patronising suggestion that reindeer herding belongs to a romantic past that must inevitably surrender to modernity. The future is not automatically superior because it arrives with a billion-euro investment, an engineering team and a minister holding a hard hat. Cultural survival is not backwardness. Indigenous land rights are not an obstacle to civilisation. And economic development is not a sacred entitlement that automatically outranks every other human interest.

Europe stands at a crossroads. It can build a climate policy worthy of its democratic principles, or it can use the climate crisis to excuse another round of dispossession. It can recognise that Indigenous people have rights, knowledge and political agency, or continue treating their homeland as an empty warehouse of resources.

The industrial revolution once transformed land, labour and human lives into raw material for somebody else's prosperity. The green transition risks repeating that history with cleaner machinery and better advertising. Europe cannot claim to be saving the future while sacrificing the people whose past it has never properly respected.

If the price of a green Europe is the disappearance of Sámi livelihoods, the destruction of their cultural landscapes and the denial of their right to determine their own future, then this is not a revolution in justice. It is colonialism with a conscience-free carbon footprint. The planet deserves a future. So do the Sámi. And if Europe cannot defend both, perhaps its green credentials are not as brilliant as it thinks.

Silhouettes of Love and Lust #Poem by Strider Marcus Jones

 

i love to watch the chocolate
slowly melt
between your lips
of silky liquid felt,
then lick and lap
soft suck sips
in rhythm with your hips,
making such moments of motion
plough tidal waves in your ocean
as each surge of storm
throbs to be born
until the stone and dust
of autumn yellow moon
casts silhouettes of love and lust
that burst and bloom
through every love-soaked scented night
shuttered from politics so coccooned
in plutocracies of blight.

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Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. He is the editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal https://lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogspot.com/. A member of The Poetry Society, nominated for the Pushcart Prize x4 and Best of the Net x3, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms.

The tracks across Africa by Thanos Kalamidas

Africa’s great infrastructure debate is often conducted as if roads, ports, electricity grids and telecommunications were separate problems. They are not. They are parts of the same problem; whether a continent can move people, goods, information and opportunity across borders quickly enough to turn geography from a handicap into an advantage.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in Africa’s war zones and dangerous regions. A road that disappears into mud during the rainy season is not infrastructure in any meaningful economic sense. A bridge that can be destroyed by one armed group is not a reliable commercial corridor. A port without dependable rail connections is little more than an expensive parking place for ships. And a country whose capital is effectively disconnected from its frontier may possess sovereignty on a map while lacking it in practice. Africa needs infrastructure not merely to grow. It needs infrastructure to become governable.

This is particularly urgent in countries affected by insurgencies, civil wars, terrorism and chronic political instability. The instinct is understandably to treat these areas primarily as security problems. Governments deploy soldiers, purchase surveillance equipment and build checkpoints. International organisations discuss stabilisation. Yet an isolated village remains isolated. A remote town remains dependent on a single road. Farmers remain unable to reach markets. Hospitals remain difficult to supply. Young people remain trapped in economies where the fastest route to employment may be joining an armed group.

Security without connectivity is an expensive form of postponement. Railways are especially important because Africa has an opportunity to rethink the geography inherited from colonialism. Too many railway systems were designed to carry minerals, agricultural commodities and other resources from the interior towards a coastal port. They were not designed to create a dense economic network between African societies.

That logic should be reversed. The African railway of the future should not simply connect a mine to a port. It should connect cities to cities, farmers to markets, landlocked countries to seaports, industrial zones to consumers and neighbouring states to one another.

A functioning continental railway network could become one of Africa's most powerful instruments of economic integration. It could make regional trade cheaper, reduce dependence on imported goods from outside the continent and allow businesses to think beyond national borders. A manufacturer in one country could obtain components from another, assemble them in a third and sell them across a fourth without treating every border crossing as an expedition.

This matters enormously for the African Continental Free Trade Area. Free trade is a wonderfully simple idea until someone has to move a container across 1,500 kilometres of inadequate roads, unreliable border posts and fragmented transport systems. Tariff barriers can be negotiated in conference rooms. Infrastructure barriers are encountered every kilometre.

Africa cannot trade itself into integration if it cannot physically connect itself. The security argument is equally compelling. Infrastructure can make dangerous regions less remote. A railway does not defeat an insurgency by itself, but it changes the economics of isolation. Regular transport brings commerce, workers, engineers, teachers and medical supplies. Communication networks follow transport corridors. Markets develop around stations. Towns that were once peripheral can become economically relevant.

The point is not to militarise infrastructure. It is precisely the opposite. Economic activity creates an alternative to the armed economy.

An unemployed young man in a forgotten border region does not necessarily become a militant because he is ideologically committed to violence. Sometimes the militant organisation is simply the only institution offering money, status, food, transportation or a sense of belonging. Building a railway station does not magically defeat extremism, but building an economy around that station can begin to make extremism less attractive.

There is also a strategic dimension. Africa's enormous distances make communication itself a matter of national security. Governments cannot effectively administer territory they cannot reach. Emergency services cannot respond to communities that are practically inaccessible. Soldiers cannot protect populations they cannot rapidly reinforce. Markets cannot function where transport is unpredictable.

Infrastructure is therefore not merely an economic category. It is an instrument of state capacity. But Africa should avoid another familiar mistake: building impressive infrastructure that serves photographs better than economies. Grandiose airports, isolated highways and prestige railways can consume billions while leaving the underlying transport system fragmented. The objective should be connectivity, not monuments.

A railway from nowhere to somewhere is useful. A railway from somewhere to everywhere is transformative. That requires regional planning. Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan, for example, cannot sensibly plan their transport futures as completely separate national projects. Nor can West Africa afford to regard each national railway as an independent undertaking when its economic future depends increasingly on cross-border commerce.

Africa needs corridors rather than isolated projects. And it needs redundancy. In dangerous regions, a single road or railway should not become the sole artery of an entire economy. Multiple transport routes, functioning ports, bridges, air links, digital networks and energy connections create resilience. When one corridor is disrupted by conflict, floods or political disputes, another can carry traffic.

That is what mature infrastructure does: it gives societies options. There is a deeper political lesson here. African states have spent decades debating borders inherited from colonial rule. Yet the most effective way to make those borders less economically important is not necessarily to redraw them. It is to build through them.

A railway does something diplomats often struggle to accomplish. It creates a practical reason for neighbours to cooperate. Once a railway crosses a frontier, customs officials, businesses, railway authorities, security agencies and communities acquire a shared interest in keeping it functioning. Infrastructure creates interdependence, and interdependence can become a form of peace.

Africa does not need another generation of speeches about the "potential" of the continent. Potential has become one of Africa's most overused words. What matters is whether that potential can physically move.

Move the grain. Move the copper. Move the manufactured goods. Move the workers. Move the medicine. Move the information. Move the people. And, above all, connect the places that have been allowed to remain disconnected.

The continent's dangerous zones will not become safe simply because someone builds a railway. But they are unlikely to become sustainably safe while they remain economically abandoned.

Africa's infrastructure challenge is therefore much larger than concrete, steel and asphalt. It is a question of whether distance will continue to dictate poverty, insecurity and political weakness.

For too long, Africa has been described as a continent waiting for development. Perhaps the more useful description is a continent waiting to be connected.

Berserk Alert! #127 #Cartoon by Tony Zuvela

 

Tony Zuvela and his view of the world around us in a constant berserk alert!
For more Berserk Alert! HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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Trekking Chat #018 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

They trek across surreal cartoon streets, armed with quirky sarcasm
and boundless humor. They map uncharted valleys, befriend bizarre creatures
and find the real adventure in their square frames.

For more Trekking Chat, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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The price of principles by Robert Perez

There is something very convenient about imposing economic sanctions when you are not the person checking the heating bill. You can condemn Moscow over breakfast, announce another package of restrictions before lunch, and deliver a magnificent speech about democratic values in the afternoon. Then winter arrives, energy prices climb, inflation eats another hole in household budgets, and suddenly the champions of economic warfare discover that principles, like everything else, have a price tag.

Welcome to the Western sanctions dilemma, where geopolitical morality meets the supermarket till and loses some of its rhetorical confidence. Sanctions against Russia were never supposed to be painless. The objective was to restrict the Kremlin’s financial oxygen, weaken its capacity to wage war, and demonstrate that territorial aggression carries consequences. There is a legitimate argument for all three objectives. The question is whether Western governments have confused imposing punishment with achieving results, as if every additional restriction automatically brings Moscow closer to surrender.

It does not. Russia has adapted, redirected trade, cultivated alternative buyers and developed mechanisms to survive the economic siege. That does not mean sanctions are useless, nor does it mean they have failed completely. It means economic warfare is a contest of endurance, adaptation and political will. And political will is precisely where the cracks begin to appear.

The Kremlin can afford to treat hardship as a strategic instrument. Authoritarian governments routinely transfer the cost of their ambitions onto populations with limited opportunities to challenge them. Western democracies, meanwhile, must explain to pensioners why heating their homes has become a luxury, to workers why transport costs keep climbing, and to families why the weekly shopping basket resembles a financial ambush.

A government can survive an unpopular winter, perhaps. Repeated winters of rising bills, stagnant purchasing power and political lectures about sacrifice are another matter. The danger is not simply inflation. It is the growing suspicion that ordinary citizens are being asked to finance a geopolitical strategy whose objectives remain distant, whose timetable is uncertain and whose costs are distributed with astonishing unfairness. Wealthier households can absorb expensive energy. Poorer families must choose between warmth, food and other essentials. Apparently, the defence of the international order comes with a means-tested heating policy, although nobody has had the courage to advertise it.

And here lies the hypocrisy. Politicians celebrate national resilience while quietly hoping that voters will confuse endurance with consent. They demand sacrifices from citizens but rarely explain what measurable outcome would justify them, how long the sacrifice might last, or what happens if the adversary simply refuses to break.

Sanctions are not a moral trophy. They are an instrument of policy, and instruments must be judged by their effectiveness, not by the righteousness of the hands holding them. Yet abandoning sanctions whenever energy prices rise would be equally foolish. It would teach Moscow, and every other government contemplating aggression, that Western resolve has an expiry date determined by the next electricity bill. Apply enough economic pressure, wait for voters to become angry, and watch democratic governments negotiate against their own domestic exhaustion.

That is not a sustainable strategy either. The answer is neither unconditional escalation nor an embarrassing retreat disguised as pragmatism. It is a sanctions policy connected to clear objectives, coordinated enforcement, serious investment in energy security, diversified supplies and targeted protection for vulnerable households. Governments must close loopholes, confront evasion and stop pretending that announcements are equivalent to achievements. They must also be honest about the costs and establish criteria for reviewing measures that produce diminishing returns.

Most importantly, Western leaders must stop selling sanctions as a painless substitute for difficult foreign policy decisions. Economic pressure can constrain an aggressor, but it cannot guarantee political capitulation. Anyone promising otherwise is selling certainty in a market where none exists.

The fundamental problem is not that principles have become too expensive. It is that politicians have repeatedly behaved as though principles can be defended without a credible plan for paying the bill. Democracy cannot demand infinite patience from citizens while offering them an infinite supply of slogans. Nor can it abandon international law every time the price of heating rises.

The West must decide what it is prepared to sacrifice, for how long, and towards what achievable end. Otherwise, sanctions risk becoming a magnificent exercise in moral theatre: Moscow adapts, politicians congratulate themselves, and ordinary Europeans keep paying for the performance. Principles matter. But if governments cannot explain how their economic weapons are supposed to win the war they were designed to influence, perhaps the first thing requiring sanctions is their own political complacency.

Siren Songs Of Sydney #Poem & #Painting by Nikos Laios

 

On a dark velvet night
I discovered the soul of this city;
Pulsating beats wrapped in
The rushing sounds of traffic,
And the tree-tops bent by a
Cold breeze on a windy night,
The sounds and the aromas
Of boulevards, streets and alleyways
Mingling with fat drops of rain splashing
The pavements as I strolled among
The steel and glass towers,
Bars, pubs and clubs.
The colours of neon signs
Reflecting on the wet pavements
Like a fauvist painting,
And I was mesmerised by it all;
The intoxicating stimulation
And the beautiful smiling
Faces of this vibrant metropolis,
Seduced by its siren songs
As I navigated the night
Like a modern Odysseus
Returning home.

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With a digital painting from Nikos Laios

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Check Nikos Laios' eBOOK, HERE!