Aime Cesaire: (1913 - 2008) A Black Orpheus by Rene Wadlow

 

My negritude is not a stone,
            nor deafness flung out against the clamour
                        of the day
            my negritude is not a white speck of dead water
            on the dead eye of the earth
            my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral.
                                    Return to My Native Land 

Aimé Césaire, whose birth anniversary we note on 26 June, was a Matinique poet and political figure, a cultural bridge builder between the West Indies, Europe and Africa. A poet, teacher, and political figure, he had been mayor of the capital city, Fort-de-France for 56 years from 1945 to 2001, and a member of the French Parliament without a break from 1945 to 1993 — the French political system allowing a person to be a member of the national parliament and an elected local official at the same time.  First elected to Parliament as a member of the Communist Party, he had left the Party in 1956 when he felt that the Communist Party did not put anti-colonialism at the center of its efforts.

The Communist Party’s position was that colonialism would end by itself once the workers had come to power. Césaire went on to form a local political party which existed only in Martinique and was largely his political machine for creating municipal jobs.  Césaire faced a massive rural to urban migration on the 400,000 person West Indian department of France. One answer to unemployment was to create municipal posts largely paid for from the central government budget — a ready pool of steady political supporters.  Césaire also did much to develop cultural activities from his mayor’s office— encouraging theatre, music and handicrafts.

Aimé Césaire’s wider fame was due to his poetry and his plays, — all with political implications, but heavily influenced by images from the subconscious.  Thus it was that André Breton (1896-1966) writer and ideologue of the Surrealists saw in Césaire a kindred soul and became a champion of Césaire’s writing. Breton had been interested in African art and culture, by its sense of motion, color and myth.  Breton often projected his own ideas onto African culture seeing it as spontaneous and mystical when much African art is, in fact, conventional and material.  Nevertheless, Breton, who spent some of the Second World War years in Martinique, was able to interest many French writers and painters in African culture.  It was Breton who encouraged Jean Paul Sartre to do an early anthology of African and West Indian poetry –Black Orpheus- and to write an important introduction stressing the revolutionary character of the poems.

Aimé Césaire’s parents placed high value on education — his father was a civil servant who encouraged his children to read and to take school seriously.  Thus Césaire ranked first in his secondary school class and received a scholarship in 1931 to go to France to study at l’Ecole Normale Supériéure — a university-level institution which trains university professors and elite secondary school teachers.  He was in the same class with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Leon Damas from Senegal. They, along with Birago Diop also from Senegal, started a publication in Paris L’étudiant noir (The Black Student) as an expression of African culture.  One of Césaire’s style in poetry was to string together every cliché that the French used when speaking about Africa and turning these largely negative views into complements.  Thus he and Senghor took the most commonly used term for Blacks ,Nègre, which was not an insult but which incorporated all the clichés about Africans and West Indians and put a positive light upon the term.  Thus negritude became the term for a large group of French-speaking Africans and French-speaking West Indians – including Haiti – writers.  They stressed the positive aspects of African society but also the pain and agony in the experience of Black people, especially slavery and colonialism.

In 1938, just as he finished his university studies, Césaire took a few weeks vacation on the coast of Yugoslavia.  There he wrote in a burst of energy his Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of the Return to My Native Land), his best known series of poems.  In 1939, he returned to Martinique having married another teacher from Martinique who was also trained in Paris.  Both started teaching at the major secondary school of Martinique and started being politically active.  However, by 1940, Martinique was under the control of the Vichy government of France and political activity was firmly discouraged.  Thus Césaire concentrated on his writing.  He met André Breton who spent the war years in the USA. Breton encouraged an interest in the history and culture of Haiti.  While Haiti is physically close to Martinique, Haitian history and culture is often overlooked — if not looked down upon — in Martinique.  Césaire wrote on the Haitian independence leader Toussaint L’Ouverture as a hero, and later a play in 1963 La Tragédie du roi Christophe largely influenced by the early years of the dictatorship of Francois Duvalier.

With the end of the Second World War, the French Communist Party had one third of the seats in the Parliament of the newly created Fourth Republic.  The French Communists were looking for potential candidates from Martinique where the Party was not particularly well structured.  They turned to young, educated persons who had a local base.  Césaire, with his Paris education and as a popular teacher at the major secondary school fitted that bill. He was elected the same year both to Parliament and to the town hall.  When in Paris, he took an active part in cultural life, especially with African students and young intellectuals.  In 1947, along with the Senegalese Alioune Diop and Senghor, he founded the journal Présence africaine which later became also a publisher of books and the leading voice of the negritude movement.

As the French Communist Party had a rule of tight party discipline, Césaire played no independent role in the French Parliament until he left the Party in 1956. However, his 1950 Discours sur le Colonialism, at the same time violent and satiric became the most widely read anti-colonial tract of the times, calling attention to the deep cultural roots of colonial attitudes.   After 1956, most of his efforts in Parliament were devoted to socio-economic development for Martinique. His strong anti-colonial efforts were made outside Parliament, especially in the cultural sphere.  Nevertheless, as a member of Parliament he could open doors that poets do not usually enter.

Césaire, who read English well, was interested in the writings of Langston Hughes whose poems were close in spirit and style.  He translated into French some of the poems of the Negro poet Sterling A. Brown.

In the 1960s, Césaire turned increasingly to writing plays, especially on the history of Haiti, as the earliest independent State of the West Indies. These were verse plays as the actors’ dialogue were nearly poems.  As the French African colonies became independent in the 1960s, he stressed that the end of colonialism was not enough but that colonial culture had to be replaced by a new culture, a culture of the universal, a culture of renewal.  “It is a universal, rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars that are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all.”

 **********************************

Rene Wadlow, President, Association of World Citizens

Ian Glim #011 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

A bewildered soul navigating global complexities armed
only with earnestness and a sharp, sarcastic wit.

For more Ian Glim, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

---

The art of deal with lies and threats by Marja Heikkinen

Someone should tell Donald Trump that the art of the deal is supposed to involve persuasion, leverage and strategy; not a steady diet of exaggeration, misinformation and threats that flirt with the language of catastrophe.

The mythology surrounding Trump often assumes that disruption itself is evidence of strength. But disruption is not a strategy. Chaos is not competence. Repeating falsehoods loudly enough does not transform them into facts, no matter how often political movements attempt to prove otherwise. A deal built on misinformation is not a deal at all. It is merely an attempt to manipulate reality until reality refuses to cooperate.

What is particularly troubling is the casual manner in which extreme rhetoric has become normalized. Threats that once would have generated bipartisan outrage are now absorbed into the daily political cycle, processed for a few hours, and then forgotten beneath the next controversy. Language matters. When powerful figures speak recklessly about violence, destruction, or the collective punishment of populations, those words do not float harmlessly into the air. They shape public attitudes. They lower moral barriers. They make the previously unthinkable seem acceptable.

The most successful negotiators in history understood something Trump often appears unwilling to acknowledge, sustainable agreements require trust. Not friendship, necessarily. Not affection. But trust. The other side must believe that facts matter that commitments mean something, and that today's agreement will still exist tomorrow. Threatening entire populations or indulging rhetoric that hints at devastation does not create trust. It creates fear, resentment, and instability.

There is also a deeper irony at work. Trump frequently presents himself as a champion of strength, yet strength is often confused with volume. Real strength is restraint. It is knowing when not to escalate. It is understanding that every conflict does not require a theatrical performance. The loudest person in the room is not automatically the strongest one. More often, the loudest person is simply demanding attention.

Politics has always contained exaggeration, ambition, and ego. Those qualities are hardly unique to Trump. What distinguishes the current moment is the degree to which factual accuracy and moral responsibility are sometimes treated as optional accessories rather than essential requirements. Leaders are not judged solely by the enemies they threaten. They are judged by the consequences of their words and the standards they establish for everyone else.

If Trump truly wishes to be remembered as a great dealmaker, he might consider a forgotten principle of negotiation: lasting victories do not come from intimidating the world into submission. They come from convincing people that cooperation is preferable to conflict. The art of the deal was never supposed to be the art of the threat.

The lock on the door by Mira Radulova

Hungary’s decision to amend its constitution and impose a cumulative eight-year limit on any prime minister’s time in office is more than a procedural adjustment. It is a statement about the lessons learned from an era dominated by Viktor Orbán.

The measure is plainly aimed at preventing Orbán, recently removed from office by voters, from engineering a political comeback. Critics will inevitably argue that such a constitutional change is undemocratic because it denies citizens the right to re-elect a leader they may one day wish to return. Yet that objection misunderstands the challenge posed by modern authoritarianism. The greatest threat to liberal democracy today rarely arrives through tanks in the streets or generals seizing broadcasting stations. More often, it comes through elections themselves.

Across the world, would-be strongmen have discovered that democratic systems can be manipulated from within. Once elected, they gradually weaken independent institutions, undermine the judiciary, intimidate the media, and reshape electoral rules in ways that make future defeats increasingly difficult. The ballot box remains, but the playing field becomes steadily less fair. Voters continue to cast ballots, yet meaningful political competition slowly erodes.

Orbán became one of the most prominent examples of this phenomenon. His supporters praised him as a defender of national sovereignty and traditional values. His opponents viewed him as a leader who concentrated power, weakened institutional checks and transformed Hungary into a model of illiberal governance. Whatever one’s ideological sympathies, it is difficult to deny that his long tenure demonstrated how durable political dominance can alter the character of a democratic system.

That reality explains why term limits have become a common constitutional safeguard. They are not expressions of distrust toward voters. Rather, they are expressions of distrust toward power itself. Democracies function best when no individual becomes indispensable. Regular leadership renewal prevents the state from becoming synonymous with a single personality and reduces the temptation to bend institutions toward personal political survival.

Of course, term limits are not a cure-all. A weak democracy can still be captured by successors, political allies or entrenched party machines. Constitutional rules alone cannot substitute for an independent judiciary, a free press and a vibrant civil society. Nevertheless, they can provide an important line of defence.

The Hungarian amendment may provoke controversy, but it reflects a broader democratic instinct: when a political system has experienced prolonged domination by one figure, citizens often seek mechanisms to ensure that such concentration of power cannot easily recur. That is not necessarily a rejection of democracy. It can be an attempt to preserve it.

In the end, democracies are judged not only by how they choose leaders but also by how effectively they prevent leaders from becoming permanent fixtures. Hungary has decided that one lesson of the Orbán era is that the door should remain open to political change but locked against endless return.

The end of the clock-watching office by Farida Iri

For more than a century the standard working day has been treated as if it were a law of nature. Employees were expected to arrive at roughly nine in the morning, leave around five in the evening, and somehow perform at their best within those carefully marked hours. Yet the modern economy is slowly confronting an uncomfortable truth: human beings are not machines, and productivity does not operate according to a universal timetable.

The traditional workday made sense in an industrial era when labour was tied to factories, assembly lines and physical supervision. If workers needed to be beside a machine, synchronized schedules were unavoidable. But much of today's economy depends not on repetitive physical tasks but on thinking, writing, designing, analysing and solving problems. These activities do not always flourish between nine and five. For many people, their sharpest hours arrive long before dawn or well after sunset.

Companies have spent years mistaking presence for performance. The employee visible at a desk at 9:01 a.m. was often considered more committed than the colleague who produced better results at midnight. Managers measured attendance because it was easy, not because it was meaningful. The result was a culture that rewarded conformity rather than output.

The growing acceptance of asynchronous work challenges that assumption. Instead of requiring everyone to operate simultaneously, asynchronous organizations focus on completed tasks, clear communication and measurable outcomes. Employees contribute when they are most effective, while digital tools ensure that work continues moving forward regardless of who is currently online.

This shift reflects a deeper recognition of biological reality. Some individuals naturally function best early in the morning. Others experience peak concentration during the evening. Forcing both groups into the same schedule creates a predictable waste of talent. The early riser spends late afternoons fighting fatigue. The night owl spends mornings battling mental fog. Neither is working at full capacity, despite technically following the rules.

Critics argue that flexibility risks creating chaos. Collaboration, after all, still matters. Teams cannot operate entirely in isolation. Yet the choice is not between rigid schedules and complete anarchy. Successful asynchronous organizations establish overlapping hours for essential meetings while allowing substantial freedom elsewhere. The goal is coordination without unnecessary uniformity.

There is also an economic argument. As competition for skilled workers intensifies, employers can no longer assume that talented people will accept outdated workplace structures. Flexibility has become a competitive advantage. Companies that accommodate different working styles gain access to a broader pool of talent while often reducing burnout and turnover.

The most surprising aspect of this transition is how long it took. The technology enabling asynchronous work has existed for years. What was missing was a willingness to abandon an old managerial instinct: the belief that work only counts when a supervisor can see it happening.

The future workplace may not eliminate schedules altogether. But it is increasingly abandoning the fiction that productivity occurs on a single universal clock. The smartest companies are discovering that when people are trusted to work when they are at their best, the results speak louder than any timesheet ever could.

Ant-sized Culinary #010 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

In the bustling undergrowth of Picante Hill, Anton the culinary ant dons his oversized toque and delivers deliciously chaotic cooking wisdom, one tiny misadventure at a time.

For more Ant-sized Culinary HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

---

June 25, 1876; The Battle of Little Bighorn

The story Americans long told about the Battle of Little Bighorn was simple, cinematic, and wrong. It was a story of doomed heroism: a gallant cavalry commander, outnumbered and surrounded, fighting to the last man against impossible odds. The phrase “Custer’s Last Stand” entered the national vocabulary as shorthand for courage in defeat.

The reality is more interesting and more unsettling. What happened on June 25, 1876, along the rolling bluffs of the Little Bighorn River in what is now the state of Montana was not a glorious last stand. It was a military disaster brought about by arrogance, poor intelligence, flawed assumptions, and a profound underestimation of Native American power. The battle was less a tale of heroic sacrifice than a case study in how empires convince themselves of their own inevitability.

For a brief moment on the northern plains, history reversed itself. The hunters became the hunted. The conquerors were overwhelmed. The United States Army, accustomed to imposing its will on Indigenous nations, encountered an opponent that was larger, more unified, and more capable than it imagined. And it paid the price.

By 1876, the federal government was determined to force all Plains tribes onto reservations. The discovery of gold in the sacred Black Hills after the expedition led by George Armstrong Custer in 1874 accelerated the process. Miners flooded territory guaranteed to the Lakota under treaty. Rather than stop the trespassers, Washington chose a familiar solution: compel the Native inhabitants to surrender more land.

Many Lakota bands refused. Among those resisting were followers of Sitting Bull, the spiritual leader whose influence extended far beyond his own people, and Crazy Horse, perhaps the most gifted battlefield commander on the northern plains.

The U.S. Army devised a multi-column campaign designed to trap and destroy the non-reservation bands. On paper, it looked efficient. In practice, it scattered troops across enormous distances, relied on imperfect intelligence, and underestimated the mobility of Indigenous forces.

The campaign assumed Native resistance was collapsing. It was not. In fact, a remarkable concentration of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho families had gathered near the Little Bighorn River. Estimates vary, but the encampment may have contained thousands of people and well over a thousand fighting men. It was likely the largest Indigenous gathering the Army had encountered on the Great Plains. Yet Custer either did not know this or refused to believe it.

Few nineteenth-century American officers cultivated celebrity as effectively as Custer. Young, flamboyant, and relentlessly ambitious, he emerged from the American Civil War with a reputation for audacity. He wore dramatic uniforms, courted publicity, and possessed an almost theatrical confidence in his own instincts.

That confidence had often been rewarded. Military institutions frequently promote officers who take risks and succeed. The problem is that success can gradually convince a commander that his instincts are infallible. Past victories become evidence not merely of competence but of destiny.

Custer increasingly behaved as though rules applied to other men. One revealing anecdote occurred years earlier when he abandoned his command without authorization in order to visit his wife, earning a court-martial. Even his supporters acknowledged his impulsiveness. What admirers called boldness often looked remarkably similar to recklessness. At Little Bighorn, that distinction became fatal.

As Custer approached the village, scouts warned him about its size. Accounts differ regarding exactly what was said, but the essential fact is clear: multiple observers believed the encampment was unusually large. Indigenous scouts reportedly expressed concern. Some officers suggested caution. Custer pressed ahead.

His reasoning was not irrational. He feared the village might disperse if given time. Plains tribes often avoided direct confrontation by moving quickly. Surprise seemed essential. But surprise only works when one understands the scale of the target. Instead of concentrating his strength, Custer divided it.

He sent Major Marcus Reno to attack from one direction. Captain Frederick Benteen was detached on another mission. Custer retained roughly 200 men with his immediate battalion. Military history is filled with commanders who divide forces to gain flexibility. It is also filled with commanders who discover, too late, that separated units cannot support one another. Little Bighorn became one of the most famous examples.

The battle initially unfolded in ways Custer likely expected. Reno advanced toward the village. Then reality intervened. Instead of fleeing, large numbers of warriors rapidly organized and counterattacked. Reno's position deteriorated. His retreat became chaotic. Survivors eventually established defensive positions on high ground.

Meanwhile, Custer was moving north. What happened next has fascinated historians for nearly 150 years because there were no surviving American witnesses from Custer's immediate command. Archaeology, Indigenous testimony, and forensic analysis have gradually reconstructed the final hours.

The old image depicted Custer and his men standing shoulder-to-shoulder in a dramatic final circle. Evidence suggests something different. The battle appears to have unfolded across multiple ridges and positions. Units fragmented. Defensive lines collapsed. Soldiers retreated and regrouped repeatedly. Some fought desperately. Others likely panicked. Command and control evaporated under mounting pressure. This was not a carefully choreographed last stand. It was a battlefield unraveling.

One reason the traditional American narrative proved so durable is that it transformed a Native American victory into a story about American sacrifice. The victors became background characters. Yet the battle cannot be understood without appreciating the extraordinary performance of Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho fighters.

Leaders such as Crazy Horse demonstrated tactical flexibility, speed, and aggression. Warriors exploited terrain, concentrated force against isolated groups, and maintained pressure until resistance collapsed.

The battle also reflected years of accumulated military experience. Plains warriors had fought not only rival tribes but increasingly sophisticated engagements against U.S. forces. They understood cavalry tactics. They understood firearms. They understood how Army units moved.

Popular mythology often portrayed Indigenous fighters as primitive opponents overwhelming Custer through sheer numbers. That interpretation misses the point. Numbers mattered. Skill mattered too.

The irony of Little Bighorn is that the victors won the battle but lost the war. News of Custer's defeat electrified the United States. The timing was particularly dramatic. The nation was celebrating the centennial of the United States Declaration of Independence. Instead of patriotic triumph, Americans learned that an entire cavalry battalion had been annihilated. Public outrage surged.

Rather than weakening support for western expansion, the defeat intensified demands for military action. Additional troops poured into the region. Within a few years, resistance had largely been crushed. Crazy Horse surrendered and later died in Army custody. Sitting Bull eventually fled to Canada before returning years later.

The immense village that had gathered along the Little Bighorn disappeared. Its victory proved impossible to sustain against the industrial and demographic power of the United States. History is often cruel in this way. Tactical brilliance cannot always overcome strategic realities.

After the battle, Custer's reputation underwent a curious transformation. Military failures are usually blamed on commanders. Yet Custer's widow, Elizabeth Bacon Custer, spent decades defending and romanticizing her husband's legacy. Through books, lectures, and public advocacy, she helped construct the enduring image of the fallen hero.

The effort succeeded. Generations grew up imagining Custer as a knightly figure overwhelmed by savagery. Paintings depicted noble resistance. Popular culture repeated the legend. The myth served a political purpose.

If Custer died heroically, then the broader conquest of the West could still be viewed as righteous. If the battle became a tragedy rather than a blunder, Americans could mourn without questioning the assumptions that produced it.

Myths often reveal more about the societies that create them than about the events themselves.

The Battle of Little Bighorn remains compelling because it resists simplification. It was neither a straightforward massacre nor a romantic last stand. It was a clash between expanding American power and Indigenous nations fighting for survival. It was a stunning military victory achieved by people whose ultimate defeat was already looming on the horizon.

Most of all, it exposed the danger of certainty. Custer entered the campaign believing he understood his enemy. He believed speed could compensate for incomplete information. He believed boldness could overcome risk. He believed previous successes guaranteed future ones. Those assumptions lasted until they encountered reality.

On a hot June afternoon in 1876, reality arrived in the form of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors who refused to behave according to the script the Army had written for them. The result was not merely the destruction of Custer's battalion.

It was the destruction of an illusion. For a few hours at Little Bighorn, the expanding American frontier stopped moving westward. The people whom history had cast as obstacles seized the initiative and shattered one of the most famous cavalry commands in American history. The battle endures because it reminds us that power is never as absolute as it appears and that the most dangerous mistake any commander can make is believing his own legend.

Back to where Labour began? By Jemma Norman

The resignation of Keir Starmer as Prime Minister and Labour leader marks more than the end of a political career. It signals the exhaustion of an era, the collapse of a particular theory of Labour politics and the reopening of a question that has haunted the party for decades, what exactly is Labour for?

Starmer arrived at the leadership promising competence, seriousness and electability. After years of factional warfare, ideological turbulence and electoral disappointment, he presented himself not as a visionary but as a repairman. The message was simple; Labour could only change the country if it first convinced the country that it was safe. The radical edges were sanded down. The language softened. The ambitions became managerial rather than transformational.

For a time, the strategy worked. Voters weary of chaos and scandal found reassurance in moderation. Business leaders relaxed. Editorial boards nodded approvingly. Labour appeared respectable again.

Yet respectability has always been an uneasy currency for a party born from trade unions, workers’ associations and collective struggle. The deeper Starmer moved toward the political centre, the more Labour seemed to drift away from the communities that created it. The party spoke increasingly about stability and increasingly less about power, who has it, who lacks it and how it should be redistributed.

This was the paradox at the heart of the Starmer project. The closer Labour came to looking like a conventional governing party, the further it seemed from looking like Labour.

His resignation therefore feels less like a sudden political event than the final chapter of a long ideological journey. The question now is whether the party continues down that road or turns around.

There will be voices urging Labour to move even further toward the centre. Their argument is familiar. Elections are won in the middle ground. Radicalism frightens voters. Pragmatism beats passion. In many respects, these arguments have shaped Labour strategy since the days of Tony Blair.

But another interpretation is emerging. Perhaps Labour's problem was not that it remained too attached to its roots. Perhaps the problem was precisely the opposite. Perhaps years of triangulation, caution and professional political management gradually hollowed out the party’s sense of purpose. Political parties can survive policy disagreements. They struggle to survive identity crises.

The working class that once formed Labour’s unquestioned foundation has changed dramatically. Industrial communities have declined. Employment patterns have fragmented. Cultural divisions have deepened. Yet the disappearance of the old working class does not mean economic insecurity has disappeared. It has merely taken new forms. Gig workers, renters, precarious professionals, care workers and those locked out of home ownership all face pressures that Labour was historically created to address.

The challenge is not to recreate the past. Nostalgia is not a political programme. The challenge is to recover the underlying mission that made the party matter in the first place.

Starmer's departure may therefore become something larger than a leadership change. It may become a moment of reckoning. Labour can continue as a cautious vehicle of technocratic administration, forever adjusting itself to prevailing political winds. Or it can attempt the more difficult task of rediscovering a clear social purpose.

The choice is not between the future and the past. It is between drift and direction. And for the first time in years, Labour may have no choice but to decide.

The lonely populist by Emma Schneider

For years Donald Trump enjoyed a curious advantage in Europe. Even as mainstream conservatives, liberals and centrists recoiled from his style of politics, a handful of nationalist leaders saw him as a kindred spirit. Among them, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni stood out as perhaps his most important ally, a disciplined conservative who shared parts of his worldview while carefully avoiding many of his excesses. That relationship now appears to be unravelling and in the most Trumpian fashion imaginable.

The dispute is remarkable not because of its substance but because of its pettiness. Trump’s decision to attack Meloni’s popularity, question her political standing and accuse her of repeatedly seeking photo opportunities follows a familiar script. The American president has often treated politics as a loyalty test in which allies remain useful only so long as they provide admiration. Once that admiration appears insufficient, friendship quickly turns into grievance.

Meloni’s response was unusually direct. By describing Trump’s attacks as “senseless” and “unprovoked,” she signalled a growing frustration that many foreign leaders have experienced over the years. The challenge with Trump has never been ideological disagreement alone. It is the unpredictability. Alliances that seem solid one week can become targets of ridicule the next. Political partnerships are transformed into personal feuds, often without warning.

The irony is that Meloni has arguably been one of the most successful right-wing leaders in Europe precisely because she avoided becoming a European version of Trump. While her critics frequently portray her as a hard-line populist, her time in office has been characterized by pragmatism. She has moderated positions, worked within European institutions and generally sought stability over confrontation. In many respects, she has governed more like a traditional conservative than a revolutionary nationalist.

That may be exactly the problem. Trump has always shown greater affection for disruption than for governance. Leaders who compromise, negotiate and adapt tend eventually to disappoint him. Political success achieved through moderation is often viewed by Trump’s movement as a form of surrender rather than maturity.

The broader significance extends beyond Italy. Across Europe, many politicians who once admired Trump have become increasingly cautious. They may share concerns about immigration, national sovereignty or economic globalization, but they also recognize the costs of attaching themselves too closely to a figure whose political relationships are notoriously transactional. Loyalty flows in one direction, and it rarely guarantees protection.

Meloni’s clash with Trump therefore symbolizes something larger than a personal disagreement. It highlights the inherent instability of a political movement built heavily around one individual’s perceptions and grievances. Traditional alliances, whether domestic or international, require a degree of mutual respect and predictability. Personal loyalty alone is rarely enough.

If this quarrel continues, Trump may discover that even Europe’s nationalist leaders have limits. The strange coalition that once linked American and European populists was always held together by shared enemies more than shared interests. When the inevitable disputes arrived, it was only a matter of time before friendship gave way to accusation. In that sense, the breakdown of the Trump-Meloni relationship is not surprising at all. It is simply the latest example of a pattern that has become unmistakably familiar.

#eBook: The general who burned the gate by Ovi History

 

The 1461 Coup That Almost Toppled the Ming. A microhistory of palace intrigue, military ambition, and the cost of failure in 15th-century Beijing.

At dawn on 7 August 1461, the Forbidden City woke to the smell of smoke and the clatter of crossbow bolts against lacquered pillars. Cao Qin, a decorated general of Mongol-border campaigns, had launched what remains the most audacious and most nearly successful, palace coup in Ming dynasty history.

With fewer than seven hundred mounted loyalists, most of them Mongol auxiliaries from the Datong garrison, he seized the Eastern and Western Gates before setting them ablaze. For six hours, the Son of Heaven was saved not by his generals but by servants slamming timber bolts and a loyal earl who fought his way through burning alleys with a wounded arm.

This book reconstructs that forgotten rebellion minute by minute, using the sparse but damning evidence of the Ming Shilu and the private journals of eunuch officials who watched from rooftops as the capital burned. It asks a deceptively simple question, why would a man who commanded imperial guards, who had been showered with silver and silk by the restored Zhengtong Emperor, choose to torch the very palace he had sworn to protect?

Ovi History eBook
May 2026

Ovi eBook Publishing 2026

The general who burned the gate

Read it online or download HERE!
Read it online & downloading it as PDF or EPUB HERE!
Or enjoy reading it online & downloading it as PDF HERE!
All downloads are FREE!

---

For more eBooks check Ovi eBookshelves HERE!

Walk the talk 26#010 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

The term “talk the talk, walk the walk” is a phrase in English
that means a person should support what they say, not just with words,
but also through action. Actions speak louder than words.

For more Walk the talk, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

---