Russia’s quiet empire in Africa by Robert Perez

There’s a particular kind of silence that follows Russian mercenaries across Africa, a silence that feels less like absence and more like the muffled hum of a machine working in the dark. Across the Sahel, Central Africa, and parts of the continent where governments wobble and institutions buckle, these men, whether labeled Wagner, Africa Corps, “contractors,” or whatever new euphemism Moscow rolls out, have become a familiar presence. Not official soldiers. Not tourists. Something in between: the foot soldiers of a geopolitical ambition that pretends not to speak its name.

Africa has seen mercenaries before, of course. Europeans, Americans, former colonial officers who never quite forgot the scent of the territories they left behind. But the Russian presence today feels different, less freelance, more orchestral. What used to look like operations run by an eccentric oligarch now resembles a state-managed franchise of influence. The brand has changed, the actors have shifted but the script, violence as diplomacy, plausible deniability as doctrine, remains intact.

And African governments, many of them facing insurgencies, civil unrest, or chronic distrust between leaders and the governed, have found in these mercenaries a seductive offer: strength without questions, manpower without conditions, protection without moral paperwork. The West, with its lectures and its legalities, seems ponderous by comparison. Russia, by contrast, arrives with a grin, a contract, and a convoy of men who don’t bother to pretend they’re peacekeepers.

At first glance, this might look like simple transactional politics. A government needs help; a foreign power provides it. But the transactions rarely end where they begin. Russian mercenaries don’t simply fight rebels or guard presidents. They guard gold mines, escort convoys of timber, advise ministries, monitor information flows, and whisper into the ears of those in palaces. They embed themselves, politically, economically, psychologically. War becomes the pretext; influence becomes the product.

What Moscow wants from this is not hard to imagine. It wants what every empire wants: leverage. Space. Resources. Gratitude where possible, dependence where preferable. Through these mercenaries, Russia has found a way to wield military influence without the liabilities of formal occupation. If a mission goes well, Russia gains a new ally. If it goes badly, it shrugs and blames “contractors acting independently.” This is geopolitics at wholesale prices.

But the more unsettling question is what Africa gets from the bargain. To be fair, some leaders get exactly what they want: a force ruthless enough to do the things their own armies won’t or can’t do. For governments threatened by insurgencies or coups, the arrival of Russian fighters can feel like the arrival of order itself. No oversight committees. No meddlesome international organizations. Just results.

The people, however, often get a different story. Villages emptied. Arrests without explanation. Violence that feels less like counterterrorism and more like message-sending. And then there is the opacity, contracts signed in private, mineral rights exchanged for “security partnerships,” budgets that disappear into shadows. It’s a security model built on fog.

Russia senses opportunity here. As the West retreats, bogged down in its own crises, bruised by its own inconsistencies, Moscow moves in with the confidence of a power that has learned to thrive in the cracks. It knows that influence in Africa yields diplomatic support abroad. It knows that access to resources means leverage in the global marketplace. And it knows that an African government grateful for its survival is an ally unlikely to defect.

This is not the swaggering imperialism of old Europe; it is something subtler, more improvisational. It thrives in political dysfunction, in the spaces where the state doesn’t quite reach. It is intervention wearing the mask of invitation.

Yet there is an irony at the heart of all this. For all the talk of sovereignty and partnership, Russian mercenary involvement often deepens the very vulnerabilities it promises to solve. A government that leans on foreign fighters to maintain control becomes dependent on them by design. The presence meant to stabilize ends up ossifying fragility. And when those fighters also hold access to the nation’s wealth, gold, diamonds, rare minerals, the line between protector and proprietor becomes thin to the point of invisibility.

Russia, for its part, has built a geopolitical strategy out of this ambiguity. It doesn’t need to conquer territory outright; it merely needs to ensure that the governments it helps rely on it more than on their own people. Influence becomes a long-term rental rather than a purchase. And Africa’s conflicts, tragic, complex, decades in the making, become the perfect landscape for such an approach.

But perhaps the larger question is not about Russia at all. It is about the vacuum others left behind. Russia did not push its way into Africa so much as it slipped into spaces where trust in Western promises had eroded, where countries felt lectured instead of listened to, and where elites sought protection unburdened by democratic expectations. The mercenaries, in this sense, are not merely instruments of Russian power, they are symptoms of a global imbalance, reminders of a world where influence is increasingly transactional and morality is increasingly negotiable.

What, then, is the real role of these Russian fighters? They are enforcers, yes. Resource brokers, certainly. But more than anything, they are the quiet architects of Russia’s reinvention as a power unbounded by conventional alliances or traditional diplomacy. They allow Moscow to project strength while claiming innocence, to shape events while avoiding accountability.

The question is not whether Africa will wake up to their presence. It already has. The question is whether the continent will come to see these men as security providers or as the scaffolding of a new kind of empire, one that builds itself not with flags and proclamations but with deals struck in shadows and enforced at gunpoint.

And if the world continues its own distracted drift, Russia won’t have to work nearly as hard to maintain its quiet empire. All it will need to do is show up, silently, efficiently and everywhere the cracks are wide enough.

Cannon-fodder loudmouths by Markus Gibbons

It is a curious spectacle, a man who has never marched under the flag, nor even earned a single merit badge in Scouts, now rising to the thunderous roar of indignation against a sitting senator; all because of a shaky, potentially staged video purporting “illegal orders.” This man, brimming with performative ardor and narcissistic authoritarianism, demands punishment. He craves retribution. But his fury says more about him, his insecurity, his longing for misplaced power, than it does about the senator, the video, or justice itself.

At the center of this melodrama is a public figure whose resume consists entirely of punditry and posturing. Yet he positions himself as a guardian of duty, honor, and military discipline. He brandishes the symbols of service, two vague words: “orders” and “duty” as though they were the triggers of some moral minefield. And he expects those symbols to detonate, to punish and to terrify. But the only bomb they set off is in the theater of his own ambition.

Let us parse what is being demanded. The call for “punishment” vague, ominous, echoes with threat and with spectacle. No due process is named. No transparent hearing is proposed. Just the primal echo of denunciation: Shame. Disgrace. Backlash. This is not the language of justice; it is the language of a lynch mob assembled in front of television cameras. The difference between patriotism and vengeance, between moral clarity and mob fervor, is not lost on those who have bled, who have marched, who have stood watch. Yet to our loudmouth apparatchik, it is invisible.

He is quick to call for retribution against perceived wrongdoing. But what of the wrongdoing, the video? Is it verified? Is the chain of custody intact? No mention of that. Has the senator been asked to respond? Has she been offered a chance to explain, to contest, to rebut? Has there been even a presumption of innocence? Not in his world. In his world, guilt is immediate. The unverified image, the half-heard statement, the suspicious edit: all become proof enough. It is the very definition of arbitrary authority, cloaked in the trappings of righteousness.

This, one must note, is a man who, by his own admission, by his public biography, has never borne arms, never carried a rifle, never pledged an oath under threat of mortal consequence. His battlefield is a TV studio. The closest he comes to the sacrifice he speaks of is the sacrifice of nuance, integrity, truth. And yet he demands of others sacrifices vast in scope: career, reputation, trust in institutions.

Let us not mistake this for a moment of integrity so much as a moment of performative ascendancy. He wants to slay a public official on the altar of outrage. It is a sacrifice to his own vanity, not to principle. The roar he summons is aimed not at corruption, but at applause. He measures success not by fairness, but by the echoing cheers of a crowd hungry for easy condemnation.

Worse still, the chaos he yearns to rain down is contagious. For if one unverified video becomes sufficient grounds for censure, then tomorrow another voice, maybe yours, maybe mine, could become the next target. Under his logic, suspicion is enough. Outrage must follow. Punishment is demanded. The precedent sets not justice, but arbitrary terror “We suspect. We condemn.”

Some may say such condemnation serves a higher cause, accountability, discipline, deterrence. But let us ask: accountability of what? And disciplined in whose name? Institutions built on law, transparency, collective memory, these crumble when outrage becomes the currency. When reputations flip with a tweet; when political currency accrues to the loudest shouter.

I am reminded of the old saw: “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Our pundit, lightweight, loud, self-sure, wields his hammer against anyone he perceives as a nail. The nails need only appear. The deeper the hole he drills, the less he cares for what falls through. Washington is littered with their broken fragments.

And, yes: there will be applause. Headlines, trending hashtags, finger-wagging commentary. The kind that never returns but is often forgotten once the next provocation emerges. The pendulum swings. The public forgets. The next outrage demands attention. And so the cycle renews.

But attention is not justice. Noise is not remedy. And fury is not righteousness. Honor, discipline, service, these are earned in silence and sweat, in the shadows before dawn, when no one watches, when no microphone is present. They are not earned in the glare of spotlights, shouting from a desk.

If we are to value justice, let it be guided by evidence, by fairness, by measured process — not by the thundering chest-beats of the untested. If we are to hold power accountable, let that accountability be firm, principled, transparent, not reactive, vengeful, mediated through theatrics.

Otherwise, what are we defending? Where is the boundary between patriotism and performative vengeance? Between civic duty and somebody’s career climb? Between honor and the hollow echo of a shout?

In the end, the loudest voice is seldom the wisest. And the quickest call for punishment is seldom the fairest. It is easier to demand someone’s downfall than to examine one’s own motives. But integrity demands more. It demands patience. It demands fairness. It demands that we judge not with the microphone, but with the scales of justice.

Let us remember: virtue does not demand spectacles. It requires steady hands, quiet resolve and a heart capable of seeing truth beyond the glare.

Screen time and the state by Virginia Robertson

Australia has long enjoyed an image of sunny freedom, sprawling beaches, easy laughter, democracy with a light touch. Which makes it all the more surreal that in 2025 the nation finds itself arguing before the High Court about whether teenagers should be legally permitted to use Instagram. Two teenagers, in an act of civic engagement that lawmakers should perhaps applaud rather than litigate, allege that the ban robs them of their constitutional right to communicate freely. That it has come to this, a courtroom showdown over the thumb-scrolling privileges of minors says far more about us than it does about the apps in question.

The new law, which prohibits Australians under sixteen from using social media platforms, is the kind of sweeping gesture that governments reach for when they feel obliged to “do something” about a cultural phenomenon they can neither fully understand nor control. It exists at the intersection of public panic, political theatre, and a kind of nostalgic paternalism, an insistence that protecting young people means protecting them from the world, rather than equipping them to navigate it.

At its heart, the ban reveals a generational misalignment of expectations. Adults, remembering their own adolescence with soft-focus fondness, imagine that teenagers today would be happier if they were liberated from the digital labyrinth. They presume that the modern teen, once freed from TikTok, will stroll outdoors, take up pottery, and rediscover the pleasures of eye contact. But such romantic projections ignore the reality that for adolescents and inconveniently for most adults as well, communication increasingly happens online. Social media is less an optional pastime than the infrastructure of contemporary social life.

To ban teens from it is to ban them from the agora, the cafeteria, the town square. It is to impose social exile in the name of social welfare.

Of course, the law’s defenders argue that social media is uniquely corrosive to developing minds. It is addictive, performative, manipulative, and sometimes cruel. But this is hardly a novel human dilemma wrapped in a new interface. Every generation has had its supposedly corrupting cultural menace: the novel, the waltz, the rock album, the video game, the television set. Each has been accused, at some point, of morally unspooling the young. And each time, adults have underestimated the adaptability of youth and overestimated the fragility of society.

The ban also exposes a certain contradiction within modern democracies. We praise young people for civic engagement, marching for climate action, protesting injustice, speaking out online, yet we simultaneously attempt to mute them by restricting the very tools that have amplified their voices. Teenagers are old enough to join political movements, but, under this law, too young to post a selfie with a message that might matter.

Moreover, as technologies evolve, legislating against them becomes both futile and faintly absurd. Teenagers are the world’s most prolific hackers of parental controls, virtuosos of the workaround. If lawmakers believe that a generation capable of jailbreaking its own smartphones will be thwarted by an age-verification pop-up, they have mistaken wishful thinking for policy.

What the law does achieve, however, is symbolic comfort for anxious adults. It gestures toward the fantasy that there was once a golden age of childhood purity, uninterrupted by screens and algorithms. But this, too, is nostalgia masquerading as wisdom. Past generations dealt with their own social maelstroms, war, industrialization, epidemics, economic collapse. Adolescence has always been turbulent; the technology simply changes its soundtrack.

The remarkable part of the High Court challenge is that it is being brought by teenagers themselves, who assert that their government has misread both their capabilities and their rights. They are not demanding unfettered chaos. They are demanding recognition as citizens capable of participating in the communication networks of their era. For adults who frequently dismiss teens as apathetic, the case should serve as a quiet, slightly uncomfortable revelation: young people are paying attention, and they expect to be heard.

One cannot help but reflect on how societies throughout history have treated teenagers, not as full citizens, admittedly, but rarely as the delicate creatures we imagine today. In many cultures, sixteen-year-olds worked full time, married, sailed on ships, ran farms, went to war, and held responsibilities that would stun the contemporary adult who panics at the idea of a fifteen-year-old using a smartphone unsupervised. We have, paradoxically, inflated our expectations of teens’ vulnerability while shrinking our estimation of their competence.

Perhaps our discomfort is less about teens and more about ourselves about the adult fear of a world relentlessly changing, of digital spaces we cannot fully supervise, of youth culture that moves at a speed we cannot match. Banning teenagers from social media lets us pretend that we, the grown-ups, are still the gatekeepers of reality. But the truth is that reality has already migrated online, and our children are simply better at living there than we are.

None of this is to say that social media is harmless. It isn’t. It requires guardrails, literacy, resilience, and yes, adult guidance. But guidance is not the same as prohibition. Education is not the same as erasure. A society that responds to technological complexity by reaching for a legal off-switch is one that misunderstands both technology and society.

The High Court’s decision will inevitably shape the legal landscape. But the larger question, the one that lingers beneath the legal briefings and parliamentary soundbites is what kind of relationship we want between the state, young people, and the digital world. Do we construct policy from fear, or from trust? Do we aim to shield the next generation, or to strengthen it?

Australia’s social media ban has forced these questions into the national conversation. And in doing so, it has reminded us that the real debate is not about apps. It is about agency. It is about who gets to speak, who gets to listen, and who we imagine ourselves to be in a society increasingly mediated through screens.

Puppi & Caesar #35 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

Another cartoon with a mean and know-all of a bully cat, Puppi and her intellectual, pompous companion categorically-I-know-all, Caesar the squirrel!  

For more Puppi & Caesar, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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How a book exposed Greece’s manufactured amnesia by Thanos Kalamidas

Alexis Tsipras probably didn’t expect that publishing Ithaca would shake the Greek political ecosystem the way it did. He wrote a memoir; Greece heard a battle cry. Within hours of its release, every corner of the media landscape, television panels, newspaper columns, radio talk shows, social feeds dripping with venom or praise, turned into a tribunal. Everyone had something to say about Tsipras, about the past, about what they think happened and most importantly about who should be ...blamed. But in this cacophony something remarkable, albeit unintended, emerged, Tsipras’ book didn’t just revive political debate, it exposed in full nudity the monumental success of Mitsotakis’ and the far-right’s propaganda machine in reshaping public memory itself.

Greece isn’t suffering from political division only; it’s suffering from political amnesia. And Ithaca became the flashlight in a room where someone had been switching off lights one by one for a decade.

Let’s make something clear before diving into the swamp; Greece did not collapse under Alexis Tsipras. The nearly decade-long bankruptcy, the humiliation of the memoranda, the international ridicule, the crushing austerity that numbed an entire population, none of it began in 2015. These wounds were already festering long before Syriza ever approached power. Yet today, thanks to the relentless narrative engineering orchestrated by New Democracy’s communications apparatus and enthusiastically amplified by its far-right satellites, thousands of Greeks have been subconsciously conditioned to believe that Tsipras somehow authored the Greek tragedy.

This is not just political spin; this is historical erasure.

For years, Greek conservatives have operated with one unwavering objective, shift all blame of the crisis to the left, cleanse their own fingerprints from the scene, and retell the story with themselves as reluctant fire-fighters instead of the arsonists who drenched the house in petrol.

Tsipras writes his version of events in Ithaca, and whether one fully accepts his viewpoint or not, the explosive reaction reveals something deeper, we have allowed an entire chapter of the country’s recent history to be rewritten by those who should have been held accountable for it.

It was not Tsipras who handed Greece the first two memoranda. It was not Syriza that set the country ablaze with corruption, backroom deals, tax evasion sanctuaries, and grotesque waste of public money. It was not the left that hollowed out the health system until hospitals resembled abandoned barracks. Nor was it Tsipras who butchered pension after pension, sending generations of elderly people into despair. These were the trophies of the PASOK–New Democracy duopoly, decades of rotten governance crowned by the Samaras–Venizelos era, which brought Greece to its knees.

Under Antonis Samaras’ government, the first two memoranda landed with the precision of a guillotine. Salaries were slashed, small businesses suffocated, the middle class evaporated, the young emigrated and the phrase “we are broke” became the national lullaby. The social fabric didn’t tear, it disintegrated.

And yet, wander into the digital coliseum today and you’ll find an astonishing revisionist chorus chanting that Tsipras “destroyed” Greece. That he “caused” the crisis. That before 2015 everything was somehow manageable, maybe even fine. A fantasy bordering on mass hallucination.

This is where Mitsotakis’ political marketing brilliance or cynicism cannot be underestimated. Since 2019, New Democracy has deployed an industrial-level propaganda machine using privateers like the fascist propaganda and mudslinger tool, the “squad of truth”. It is polished, disciplined, well-funded, and synchronized across every platform. Private media, already dependent on government-friendly funding, has offered itself willingly as an organ of repetition. And repetition, as every propagandist knows, becomes truth if hammered often enough.

Thus, “Tsipras ruined Greece.”
Thus, “New Democracy saved the economy.”
Thus, “the crisis started in 2015.”

History, rewritten by press release.

The dangerous part is not that these claims are wrong, they are absurdly wrong. The danger lies in how effortlessly they have been absorbed by a portion of the population desperate for a simplified, blame-free narrative. After all, the true story is messy and implicates almost every political dynasty of the last half-century. It requires confronting the fact that Greece’s political elite spent decades looting public institutions, inflating public debt, hiring legions of party loyalists, and treating national wealth as private inheritance.

Far easier, then, to pin it on one man in 2015.

Tsipras’ Ithaca comes as an inconvenient reminder of that erased decade. Whether or not one admires him, whether or not one agrees with the choices he made during the negotiations of 2015, the book forces Greece to re-engage with what actually happened. It disrupts the manufactured myth. And myths, when challenged, provoke rage.

This is why the reaction has been volcanic. The country is not debating the book; it is debating the narrative that the book threatens.

The Mitsotakis establishment knows that controlling the past is the ultimate political weapon. If New Democracy can convince voters that Samaras’ austerity was heroic, that PASOK’s corruption was a bureaucratic hiccup, that the banking collapse was an unfortunate accident, and that the memoranda arrived like harmless paperwork instead of national execution orders, they gain not just votes, they gain absolution.

And absolution is priceless in politics.

Yet the most troubling element is not what politicians say. It is how easily we, the public, have accepted the edited version. We have allowed ourselves to forget that teachers fainted in classrooms from exhaustion, that hospitals collapsed under shortages that young people fled en masse because Greece had ceased offering even the minimum promise of a future. We forget that poverty was not “introduced” during Syriza but normalized long before it. We forget because forgetting is comfortable.

But nations that forget their recent past become playthings of those who rewrite it.

Ithaca reopened the wound and thank god it did. Not because Tsipras is beyond criticism, not because he holds a monopoly on truth but because his book disrupts a dangerously convenient story.

If Greece wants to reclaim a sense of reality, it must first reclaim its memory. Not the memory shaped by press advisors, not the memory sanitized by party loyalists, but the memory of what people actually lived through.

The political earthquake caused by Ithaca is not about Alexis Tsipras at all.
It is about whether Greece will allow its past to be rewritten by those who caused its collapse and who now insist they were the saviours all along.

Thanksgiving Dinner #poem by Dr. Lawrence Nannery

Pennsylvania woods.
A grey day, in season.
Grey winds blow with mastery.
On the ground, in the clearings,
Mottled browns on brown.
Snow has powdered the wet leaves, the dead land.
The smells of autumn have fled.
The earth has been stripped of birdsong.

All the more, then, in this dusk of seasons …
All the more is the worth of this fire in the fireplace,
Crackling against the cold and the whistle in the chimney.
This gathering at the hearth is where light will dispel the dark,
Where the warmth of company and the food ever so slowly gather.
It's a time of inward turning.  All the more, then,
Am I lonely for my own here in this refuge, this house of friends and cheer.

This home is so well-thought-ahead,
So benign, with everything arranged just so,
Everything fitting in with everything,
The shams matching the curtains, and the baseboards the doors.
Even the soup ladle, by God, feels just right to the hand
Though it is not bone, not wood, not metal.
Even plastic things can be tradition in this well-appointed, well-lived-in house.

The home is a huddle of good feeling.
The women of the house are jolly, with ever so much to do.
The men are relaxed, appreciative, and the talk they make benign.
As folks arrive they comment on the air inside and the air outside.
This is a time to turn aside from troubles and toils.
In the calming circle of pulsing light, they all warm up
To their own expectations, and slide into easeful and warming things to say.

This place, where everyone and everything has its place, is not my place.
I am in exile.

II

The family has gathered itself, and in the throbs of firelight
It encloses itself against the outside cold.
Dinner is set; banter rises; members are seated one by one.
In the golden circle each is present to all.
Their faces all glow and reflect one another like copper pots,
The reflections saying: "this is us, we are such."
Each has a place and a part to play.
They tell me in charity that here there is a place for me.
But how could that be?

Astride the border of past and future the family celebrates itself
And carries itself forward with ceremonies of remembrance and renewal.
The purposive dinner is slowly consumed, with oohs and aahs from all.
Warm hearts and warm wines confer solidarity
Against what is outside the windowpanes.
Gold is the turkey, gold is the wine,
And golden the crust of the just-baked bread.
The overhanging lamp sprinkles diamond light on all and
The uses of the glasses and the ladles and knives and forks
Sound like bells.  In the general glow,
In the well-meaning home, one is struck by the well-meaning generosity.

Through the windows I barely see the browns and tans of the season,
The black bark and the chilly damp feel —
But the kindness of these strangers, having taken me in,
Their warm plenitude, cannot drive away my ghosts.

Speaking of ghosts, the speeches render up the family ghosts.
It is the universal resurrection of entombed memories, saved up for just this day.
The telling of the stories is the thing.
Hale mention of spirits who have unspooled their thread of time.
Pious memories that instruct, or humorous bits that arouse a spark in the eye.
Defeats and sorrows are forgotten for the sake of smooth amusement.
Those who had a part to play in the originals hold forth again,
Play them again, and will do so until they die.

Sad to say, these ghosts are not my ghosts.
I am in exile here.

III

These kind folk would comfort me, would have me forget,
But the windowpanes now show me a honeygold child, a ghost of my own.

Oh, circle-eyed child who believes everything, and listens for my voice,
You are more real to me than the rest of the world combined.
It is you in the windowpane, little ghost, with your tell-tale foggy voice,
It is you.
Yes, we two are ghosts, glowing in the heart, hidden away, as far apart as
The earth and the moon, as silent as the missing birdsong,
But bending toward one another, anxious to share everything with one another.
Our union is unseen by the others, but like the fog we move silently
Past every obstacle, through every medium, hovering glowing gollywogs,
Invisible, indivisible …

I am bursting to run from here screaming
To go to where you are, and with you run and hide from all constraints —
Just be with you and forge the rest —
But they would come for me and take you away
And the end would just be the beginning again.

IV

It feels loneliest now, in this darkling of seasons.
Mid this family not my family, Thanksgiving my mourning.
I am not with you, and mourn my aborted family,
Which floats in all directions, a broken unreality.
Such shards, such detritus of the broken past, neither anchors nor sustains.

The long-dead poet described me well: "a single swimmer in a waste of waves."
From exile here I sing to you, son, my pillar of light in a blighted world.
Leaping over wrongful judgments, and hypocrisy, and evil unconcern
I pledge to you: hope, and care, and a presence that can never be erased
By the hand of man.

V

Your pure little heart is the beating anchor that sustains me.
Each night I dream fantastic reconciliations with you.
I dream that my laughter will reach you, so far away.
I dream of a perfect reunion with you, my perfect child,
And I am not yet dead.
Driven by instinct, the desire that can never cease,
I will not quit until I give you a Chagall bent-neck, front-face kiss.
And then my loyalty and your loyalty shall give such a roar!

Oh, then you shall see a Thanksgiving to excite the soul!
On that day we will leave behind all lies, and sorrow, and restraint, and shame.
On that day we shall give such thanks!
We’ll devour so much we'll near to burst,
Finally together, finally at home, worthy of one another,
In a curing circle of light that also saves, and abides,
And never dims.

The uncomfortable host by Brea Willis

The announcement landed with the thud of something both predictable and absurd, Turkey has won the right to host next year’s U.N. climate talks C31 and more consequentially, to preside over them. The deal, struck with its geopolitical frenemy Australia, gives Ankara the gavel at a moment when global climate diplomacy feels like a weary travelling circus looking for cities willing to rent the tent. Yet the symbolism is hard to ignore. Once again, the world has entrusted the steering wheel to a leader whose commitment to democratic norms is, at best, conditional and, at worst, cosmetic.

So the natural, if sarcastic, question emerges: Who’s next? Chernobyl for C32? Pyongyang offering eco-tours of its reforestation zones? The absurdity is tempting, because for many watching these negotiations unfold year after technocratic year, the whole process feels like a slow march toward an environmental cliff while world leaders argue about whose turn it is to hold the map upside down.

But beneath the humour lies a deeper frustration. The climate crisis, we are told with mounting urgency, requires unprecedented cooperation, honesty, accountability. Yet the United Nations keeps handing its most important annual gatherings to governments that bristle at transparency and treat dissent like a hostile invasion. COP30’s drama, those empty seats that once might have held a sharp-elbowed, deal-breaking American president, who instead chose voluntary absence tinged with hostility, exposed the fragility of the entire structure. These conferences are less about science and more about political theater. And the stage managers matter.

In this sense, the choice of Turkey is not an aberration; it is a pattern. Erdoğan’s government, after all, has mastered the art of projecting international clout while tightening the screws at home. Environmental activism within the country is often met with suspicion if not outright repression. The idea that such a government should preside over a summit designed to champion global environmental justice feels like inviting a landlord with a history of eviction to lead a tenants’ rights meeting.

Of course, defenders will say that every nation deserves a seat at the climate table, that the crisis is global, borderless, and requires all voices, even those that crackle with authoritarian overtones. And perhaps there is truth in that. Yet there is a meaningful difference between participation and leadership. One suggests responsibility; the other confers legitimacy. Presiding over a COP meeting is not a ceremonial honour. It means guiding the negotiations, shaping the agenda, framing the debates. It means having moral authority—or at least the illusion of it.

The U.N., in its perpetually diplomatic way, likes to pretend that politics can be neatly bracketed away from the climate challenge, that the conference rooms are somehow neutral territory, insulated from the gritty realities outside the high-security perimeter. But the truth is less tidy. The host country sets the tone, who feels safe, who feels silenced, who gets their side-event approved, who gets their protest corralled into a distant parking lot. These are not trivial details; they shape what the world understands climate justice to be.

Democratic governance is not a luxury additive to climate action. It is the substrate that allows solutions to take root. Communities must be able to speak. Scientists must be able to warn. Journalists must be able to poke at the vulnerabilities. Civil society must be able to demand better. This is not ideological preference. It is operational necessity. Climate policy built without public accountability tends to be either performative or extractive, often both.

Look back to COP30’s disorienting energy, the vacuum left by Trump’s pointed nonparticipation. That absence was not passive; it was a message. It showed how much damage can be done when a major emitter decides the room doesn’t matter. But it also revealed something subtler: how brittle even the most important climate gatherings are when democratic legitimacy falters. Authoritarian leaders do not fill the void with urgency; they fill it with image-crafting and geopolitical manoeuvring dressed in green rhetoric.

Which brings us again to Erdoğan, a leader whose political instincts skew toward control rather than collaboration. He is, to borrow the analogy already floating around, as well suited to preside over a global climate summit as Kim Jong-un would be competent at command, allergic to scrutiny. The comparison is dramatic, yes, but satire exists because reality keeps trying to catch up.

One might hope that the symbolic discomfort of Turkey hosting C31 will spark overdue conversations about who gets to shepherd climate negotiations and why. Instead of rotating the conference like a diplomatic Eurovision, the U.N. might consider criteria that reflect the actual values these summits claim to champion: protection of free expression, transparency, independent science, environmental justice. Not because purity is required, none of the major powers are saints but because leadership should reflect aspiration, not resignation.

Climate change is the defining crisis of our era, but the way we stage its solutions often feels like a parable about misplaced priorities. We fret over gigatons while ignoring governance. We applaud pledges while sidestepping rights. We search for global unity while repeatedly seating the least unifying hosts at the head of the table.

So yes, Turkey will host C31. And the world will show up, because it has to. But the quiet question humming beneath the negotiations, the question leaders prefer not to hear is whether the process can keep tolerating this mismatch between message and messenger. The planet demands action, but action requires trust. And trust, like democracy, is not something you can outsource to the highest bidder or the loudest strongman.

Berserk Alert! #101 #Cartoon by Tony Zuvela

 

Tony Zuvela and his view of the world around us in a constant berserk alert!
For more Berserk Alert! HERE!
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Reflections on The Thanksgiving Turkey as Ritual Scapebird: An Unconventional Narrative by Dr. Emanuel Paparella

“Nothing so unites us as gathering with one mind to murder someone we hate, unless it is coming together to share in a meal.”

                                                               – Margaret Visser, The Rituals of Dinner

“When Audubon painted it, it was a sleek, beautiful, though odd-headed bird, capable of flying 65 miles per hour. Today, the turkey is an obese, immobile thing, hardly able to stand, much less fly. As for respectability, the big bird is so stupid it must be taught to eat”

                                                               --From Moneysworth, a consumer newsletter

Since the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock the turkey has been tied to the American character and sense of national identity. Its transformation as mentioned in the second quote above, also hints at a transformation in the American character. To be sure, traditionally the bird has not been a respected figure in America. The turkey is ceremonially linked to Thanksgiving, the oldest holiday in the United States but at the same time it is culturally rooted in ambiguity. Benjamin Franklyn proposal to adopt it as the nation’s symbol rather than the bold eagle, was more in the nature of a joke than anything else. In 1984, Andrew Feinberg wrote in The New York Times that by 1873, “turkey” had come to mean an advantage or easy profit; soon the word came to refer to anyone who could be easily duped or caught. According to Wicked Words, students before and after 1945 used the term to characterize an incompetent person who continually makes mistakes.

Turkey bashing can be traced back in part to the “turkey shoots” of colonial times. In the turkey shoot, live turkeys were tied to trees or put in boxes to be shot in the head. The “sport” is based on the shooting of wild turkeys at roost in the trees. According to a writer in 1838, turkeys are “easily killed at roosts, because the one being killed, the others sit fast.” Thus a “turkey shoot” came to signify a simple task or an easy target. Surprising to many, the bird the early Europeans encountered was not the bird that dominates modern hunters’ discourse. From the 17th through the 19th centuries, wild turkeys were characterized as showing an almost Disneylike friendliness towards people. According to Madison, “Wild turkeys, as the first settlers found them, were as trusting and unwary as they were plentiful.” The 20th-century effort to create or restore a “true wild turkey,” using everything from artificial insemination to high-tech trapping and relocation of turkey populations “tainted with domestic blood,” has been largely superficial. The so-called wild bird keeps revisiting the human scene, walking around in suburbia, midtown, the Bronx.

The mythology of antiquity offers two opposing models of the human-nonhuman animal relationship central to this discussion: the Orphic model and the Dionysian model. The Dionysian model is based on the primitive god Dionysus, the Greek personification of intoxication, ferocity, and the chase. Followers of Dionysus were famous for their frenzied dismemberment and devouring of live prey. Wild animal fled from their Dionysian pursuers, scattering in fear in all directions prior to being torn apart when caught. The legendary Orpheus was not a god but a mortal revered for the godlike, peace-bringing power of his music. Each morning Orpheus greeted the sun with his song. His melodies attracted the birds and other wild creatures; even the mountains were moved by his music. Orpheus charmed animals but he did not deceive them. He lured animals to himself but not to harm them. It is easy to imagine the turkey among the animals Orpheus would have charmed, because the turkey is drawn to music, of which there are some interesting accounts.

Dionysus and his followers, which included the Maenads, the “Raving Women,” also lured animals to themselves, as well as chasing them. These manic embodiments of “false Orpheus,” who finally tore Orpheus to pieces, drew the denizens of the forests and fields from their hiding places to suckle and soothe them as part of a destructive seduction ritual. It is easy to imagine the turkey among the animals fooled by their wiles, as the turkey’s allurability is a primary attraction of turkey hunting. Teasing “love sick” turkeys with sirens’ songs is a key element of the euphoria leading to the climax of pulling the trigger in turkey hunting. Turkey hunters brag about the erotic pleasure they get from mimicking turkey courtship behavior, imitating a “hot hen” so that a lovesick tom will “offer its head and neck for a shot”. It suggests a hatred that humans have had for nonhuman animals through the ages, rooted in our hatred of ourselves for being animals, which we project onto them.

At the same time that humans experience hatred towards nonhuman animals and the “degrading” condition of animality, because we are animals and because the knowledge that we are animals is embedded in our biology and in our status as creatures rooted in the natural world, thus despite Aristotle’s reminder that we are “rational animals,” we remain ambivalent. A basis for cautious optimism is the emnity that many people feel for animals, which may be gaining ground on the animus that has characterized so much of our relationship with other species and nature. Because of its mythic role in American history, the bird comes loaded with all of the ambiguity and “hypocrisy” that the role implies. Just as the wild (“sacred”) bird and the domestic (“profane”) bird join together ambiguously in the popular image and the DNA of the “Thanksgiving Turkey,” so the bird is increasingly being placed in the role of ambassador of a gentler concept of Thanksgiving. In some cases people are adopting turkeys and treating them as guests at the Thanksgiving table, showing, through a different set of symbols, that there are ways other than ritual apologetics to give thanks, do good, and exorcise guilt.

However, this is still a long way from the mainstream, which officially considers the charm of a turkey to consist in the fact that the bird tastes good, while providing the easiest way to feel part of a community, by eating and saying what everyone else does. Otherwise, the turkey is considered a “dirty bird,” addicted to filth and infected with harmful bacteria, that becomes magically clean only by being sprayed with acid, irradiated, cooked, and consumed, a “stupid” creature that figures in the seemingly incompatible role of a sacrifice (a pure, precious offering), while serving as a scapegoat under the collective idea that heaping society’s impurities onto a symbolic creature and “banishing” that creature can somehow bring purification.

Scapegoats are not just victims; they are innocent victims who are blamed and punished for things they are not responsible for. Theoretically, scapegoats are not seen as such by scapegoaters, because scapegoating is not about evidence but about transferring blame. The role of recognizing a particular instance of scapegoating belongs to the “outsider,” someone who sees the ritual from an unconventional standpoint, be it historical, cultural, subcultural, logical, or intuitive. In reality, people’s perceptions of a scapegoat event of which they are a part may be more or less clear. The scorn heaped on the turkey at Thanksgiving shows a degree of uneasiness and defiance that indicates an awareness of scapegoating by those who practice it.

The idea of the Thanksgiving turkey as a scapegoat may seem like a parody of scapegoating, but that is what a scapegoat is – a parody of guilt. The scapegoat after all is a goat. Animals, social animals especially, have been scapegoats in storytelling, myth, and history every bit as much as humans, and probably more. Under European penal codes, from the 12th to the middle of the 18th century, “guilty” animals were tried and convicted of crimes for which they were punished by being buried alive, burned alive, mutilated, hanged, and, in classic scapegoat fashion, banished from the place of their alleged crime. In light of such history the so-called White-House turkey pardoning ceremony, in which each year prior to Thanksgiving Day, the President of the United States “pardons” a single turkey from slaughter, can be seen as an inverted scapegoat ritual, a parody of a parody, burlesquing the acquittal of the accused.

So how does the Thanksgiving turkey fit the scapegoat pattern? Consider that not everybody is happy at Thanksgiving or Christmas as they’re supposed to be. Two cultures coincide during the holiday season, the official “pious” culture epitomized in the 20th century by Life magazine and the Saturday Evening Post, and nowadays by the neo-conservative, religious Right element, versus a miscellany of dissident, unhappy, irreverent, and marginalized individuals and groups, the two cultures being straddled by curmudgeons who lampoon the sanctities from secure posts within the system. If a citizen wishes to express discontent with the day derision of the turkey comes in handy. Blaming the bird allows a certain amount of criticism and resentment to seep into a celebration that Life magazine once said does not brook angst or serious criticism.

The turkey thus functions as a bearer of impious sentiments deflected from their true causes, like the obligation to be thankful, whether one has reason to be thankful or not. Sorrow, death, suffering, injustice—these are not the fault of the bird whose fate, after all, is to be murdered for the meal, which is a cause of many people’s great unhappiness. But these negatives contradict how things are supposed to be, how we’re supposed to feel, and what may be properly expressed.

As a ritual scapegoat bearing a burden of sarcasm, the turkey fits into the carnivalesque tradition of taunting and torment stretching from Dionysus to Rabelais and beyond. Opposite the sanctimony of pious occasions, the carnivalesque spirit emphasizes sarcasm, indecent abuse, the banquet, and a grotesque concept of the body. Just as the banquet and the grotesque body go together in the carnivalesque tradition, so the human body and other animal bodies are grotesquely mixed in it. The “transformation of the human element into an animal one; the combination of human and animal traits is, as we know, one of the most grotesque forms” of the carnivalesque style.

Nobody laughs at the Eagle. For impiety you have the Turkey. The turkey is the grotesque body at the core of America’s Gargantuan holiday feast, exhibiting those “physical and moral abnormalities” that have marked scapegoats through the ages. The modern bird’s swollen body, distorted physical shape, and inability to mate naturally remind us not only of the cruel arbitrariness of fate, but of the sinister power of humanity. The carnivalization of the turkey functions as a magic formula for conquering our fear of being a “turkey.” We poke so as not to be poked at. By devouring another, we master our fear of being devoured. Today the fear of our own potential for gluttony, of being helplessly manipulated by the cosmic scheme, our fellow man, and our own folly has been transposed to the Comic Monster we are about to consume. Man triumphs over the world, devours it without being devoured himself.”

In the age of obesity, America must somehow manage its portion of humanity’s primeval desire to have “somebody” suffer and die ritualistically for the benefit of the community or nation at a time when the consumption of nonhuman animals has become morally problematic in the West as well as industrialized to the point where the eaters can barely imagine the animals involved in their meal. The turkey is a kind of test case. Either eating meat is fun, as a journalist said in an interview about turkeys, or eating meat is mean, as a child told her mother why she would not eat turkey at Thanksgiving. As the single most visible animal symbol in America, the de facto symbol of the nation and the icon of American food, the turkey brings into focus the conflict between animal rights people and the rest of society. In any case, there is more to being thankful than eating a turkey.

2nd opinion, quarantined! 25#18 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

Seriously, a human hater self-centred agoraphobic in quarantine!
I think you’ll need a second opinion after this.

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The Betrayal of Arab Leaders: Perpetuated Animosities and Wars by Mahboob A. Khawaja, PhD.

“War provides an outlet for every evil element in man’s nature. It enfranchises cupidity and greed gives a charter to petty tyranny, glorifies cruelty and places in position of power the vulgar and base.” (C.E.M Joad. Guide to Modern Wickedness, 1936)

Leaders or Puppets of Western Powers

Divided and defeated they are even though European colonization ended more than a half of century ago. Islam civilized the Arabian tribalism and anarchy, professed and preached a message of universal brotherhood, peace and harmony but it was reversed and lost by the fake prosperity of oil discovery and its consequential economic wealth offering disdained comfort and expectations.

Former colonial cliches embedded in fraudulent schemes of things for modernity originate from European and American hegemony of the Arab Middle East. Most Arab states have no armies or formidable defense capacity to safeguard their national interests and live in an ill-informed reality of colonial assigned national identities. All mythological concepts unfold ego-driven authoritarianism glued to the shameful glory of distractions and dreadful cruelties experienced by the Arab masses. When Arab leaders were educated Muslim and visionary for the good of mankind, they acquired triumph and honor for their endeavors and universality of Islam. Israel and America dominate the Arab genetically modified culture of thinking and imagination as they consumed contaminated foods and made song and dance and sports a way of life. A century earlier, it was Islam imbued with Arab culture for guidance and glory, now the fervor spells into obscene dances, music, football matches and loss of originality of culture and sense of universality. Not triumph but annihilation of Arab identity awaits to collective consciousness. Futuristic Arab generations are degenerated and left to have nothing to inherit except the treacherous illusion of fame and fortune. The natural resources belong to the people not princes or kings. Israel and America continued to propel new animosities and bogus wars across the oil exporting Arab world. They imply psychological twists and turns to make peace but intend on prolonging the wars, occupation and crimes against humanity in Gaza- Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and the rest of the Arabian Peninsula. Their ceasefires are a prelude to further conflicts and schemes of occupation. They view occupation of Arab lands as a way of life to enforce the ‘Greater Israel.’ A scenario being repeated since 1948.

John Perkins (Confession of an Economic Hitman, 2006), describes House of Saud ‘cows to be milked as long as necessary’ and portrayed Saudi Arabia in a US-led scheme of money laundering and fake security alliance of 12B annually for the protection of the House. of Saud.https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Economic-Hit-John-Perkins/dp/0452287081A Saudi Prince with no accountability makes billions into trillion investments in split second to appease the US President.

Are Israel and America set for the conquest of the Arab world? The war on Gaza and West Bank, Palestine has crippling impacts on the Arab states. Please see more: https://realovi.wordpress.com/2025/03/14/howarab-muslim-leaders-betrayed-the-people-by-mahboob-a-khawaja-phd/ Editor Antonio Rosa (Transcend Media: 11/10/25), exposes the reality of the on-going genocide in Gaza and other parts of Palestine: “Genocide in Pictures: Worth a Trillion Words.” https://www.transcend.org/tms/2025/11/genocide-in-pictures-worth-a-trillion-words-74/

War Monsters Bomb the Spacious Earth – A Trust to Humanity

Israel has bombed Gaza - three times more insane than what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the World War2. Do Israelis or Americans believe in God and accountability for their actions? The Torah and Bible fully reflect on this core human responsibility and punishment to those who violate the Divine Covenants. The Earth is a trust to mankind; those bombing and destroying it are mentally sick and defy the Divine Truth. The earth is a living entity and spins at 1670 km per hour and orbits the Sun at 107,000 km per hour. Imagine, if this spinning fails, what consequences could occur to the living beings on Earth. Think again, about the average distance of the earth from sun is 93 million miles - the distance of the Moon from Earth is currently 384,821 km equivalent to 0.002572 Astronomical Units. Earth is a “trust” to mankind for its existence, sustenance of life, survival, progress and future-making. The Earth exists and floats without any pillars in a capsule by the Will of God, so, “Fear God Who created life and death.” Is human intelligence still intact to understand this reality? Wherever there is trust, there is accountability. The Divine Revelations (the Quran: 40: 21) offer a stern warning to conscientious leaders and nations:

Do they not travel through the earth and see
What was the End of those before them. They were even superior to them in strength
And in the traces they have left on the earth. But God did call them to account for their sins
And none had they to defend them against God.

And killing of innocent people is prohibited in the Ten Commandments (Torah):

'Thou shalt not kill' (Exod. 20:13; also Deut. 5:17). Jewish law views the shedding of innocent blood very seriously, and lists murder as one of three sins (along with idolatry and sexual immorality), that fall under the category of yehareg ve'al ya'avor - meaning "One should let himself be killed rather than violate it.

War Racketeering and the Arab Leaders

“War is a racket Then and Now”, Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler (WAR IS A RACKET) of the US marines served 33 years and tells “the wars sustained capitalist governance and made millionaires into billionaires. WAR is a racket.  It always has been.  It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.  It is the only one international in scope.  It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”https://www.amazon.ca/War-Racket-General-Smedley-Butler/dp/B09NRNV4DD/ref=sr_1_1Undoubtedly 2.4 million people of Gaza are innocent victims of Israeli War and Palestine is lost by Arab political conspirators. Please see:https://realovi.wordpress.com/2025/10/06/the-fallacy-of-gaza-peace-plan-and-failure-of-arab-muslim-leadership-by-mahboob-a-khawaja-phd/.War is a crime in civilization context. Militarization complements the characteristics of warmongering and it has been institutionalized in the superpowers democratic system of governance and its spill-over impact is spreading fast across the globe. What is the cure to raging indifference and cruelty to the interests of the whole of mankind?The 21^st century new-age complex political, economic, social and strategic challenges and the encompassing opportunities warrant new thinking, new leaders and new visions for change, conflict management and participatory peaceful future-making. The imperial networks export wars and conflict-making and conflict-keeping across the Middle East.

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Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in international affairs-global security, peace and conflict resolution and has spent several academic years across the Russian-Ukrainian and Central Asian regions knowing the people, diverse cultures of thinking and political governance and a keen interest in Islamic-Western comparative cultures and civilizations, and author of several publications including: Global Humanity and Remaking of Peace, Security and Conflict Resolution for the 21st Century and Beyond, Barnes and Noble Press, USA, 2025 https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/global-humanity-and-remaking-of-peace-security-and-conflict-resolution-for-the-21st-century-and-beyond-mahboob-a-khawaja/1147150197 and We, The People in Search of Global Peace, Security and Conflict Resolution. Kindle Direct Publishing-Amazon, USA: 2025 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F6V6CH5W

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Check Mahboob A. Khawaja, PhD. NEW eBOOK,
Wars on Humanity:
Ukraine, Palestine and the role of Global Leaders
HERE!