When Empire Speaks of Freedom: War is on the Way by Javed Akbar

Empires do not export democracy; they export obedience. That is the moral alchemy at the heart of imperial power—where domination is laundered into virtue and coercion is repackaged as goodwill.

This time, if regime change cannot be achieved, regime destruction will suffice: civil war, fragmentation, and the shattering of a multi-century project for a unified, sovereign Iranian state. So far, however, events have refused to follow the script.

Before regime change can be sold, a people must first be simplified. Iranians are said to despise their government. Venezuelans are declared desperate for liberation. These claims are repeated with absolute certainty, never substantiated with evidence, and always freighted with consequence.

No society on earth is an ideological monolith. Who has ever encountered a country governed by unanimity? No one. Such uniformity would be unnatural—indeed, pathological. Yet when war planners and their media support structures go to work, entire nations are suddenly portrayed as echo chambers: robotic, instinct-driven, stripped of contradiction, dissent, and agency. Humanity must be suspended before bombs can fall without moral friction.

Of course, there are Iranians who oppose their government. There are also Iranians who support it. This is not exceptional; it is human. What is exceptional is the demand that we believe Iranians have ceased to behave like humans precisely at the moment their country enters the crosshairs of U.S. and Israeli power.

It is both an intellectual fraud and a moral transgression for any non-Iranian to claim authority over the political will of Iranians. No outsider possesses the right to dictate how a people conduct their internal affairs. That right belongs to them alone, as a matter of sovereignty and dignity. What does demand scrutiny—indeed, resistance—is the moment Western governments begin mobilizing public opinion for war, laundering aggression through the language of concern and care.

The true audience for this critique is not Tehran, but our own societies—where narratives are engineered, consciences anesthetized, and citizens prepared, yet again, for catastrophe marketed as humanitarian rescue.

We are repeatedly asked to accept a convenient fiction: that “democracy” in Iran would yield a government neatly aligned with U.S.–Israeli strategic interests. This claim collapses under even the lightest scrutiny. Israel—because of its occupation, its genocidal policies, and its industrial-scale slaughter of Palestinians—is deeply unpopular not only across the region, but across the world. A genuinely democratic Iran, responsive to its people rather than to foreign patrons, would almost certainly reflect that reality. And that, precisely, is the problem.

Real democracy is dangerous to the empire. It cannot be tolerated where public opinion runs decisively against U.S. militarism and Israeli impunity. This is why “democracy promotion” so reliably culminates not in self-determination, but in monarchies, dictatorships, or compliant client states. The script is familiar: liberation rhetoric first, domination machinery close behind.

Oppose U.S.–Israeli regime change in Iran, and the response is predictable. You are accused of silencing Iranian protesters, dismissing dissent, or denying agency. The charge is dishonest—deployed because honesty would unravel the case. This is not an attempt to instruct Iranians on their choices; it is a warning to Western audiences about what they must not endorse. In the present climate, any call by the war-mongering propaganda apparatus for regime change inevitably feeds a lavishly funded machine designed to condition public opinion for war.

Once, defiance of imperial overreach was a mark of patriotism. Today, it is mocked as naïveté, while submission to power is dressed up as moral responsibility. The moral compass has been turned on its head.

So, the question remains: what happened to the nation that once claimed to stand for law, human rights, and peace?

The answer is written plainly—in every regime-change lie, in every people reduced to abstractions, in every war sold as salvation. An empire that confuses domination with virtue must always dehumanize those in its path, because only by denying the humanity of others can it live with the crimes it commits in its own name.

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Javed Akbar is a freelance writer with published works in the Toronto Star and across diverse digital platforms.

Beyond Pinochet’s shadow in a Trumpian hemisphere by Emma Schneider

Chile is at an inflection point. The election of José Antonio Kast, a politician whose ideology treads uncomfortably close to the darkest chapters of Chile’s history, has thrown not just Chile but all of South America into a state of charged speculation. The question is simple yet alarming; how far right is Kast willing to take Chile? And just as crucial in the age of a resurgent Trumpism, how dangerous could his presidency be for the rest of the continent?

Kast did not rise in a vacuum. His ascent is a backlash against years of leftist governance, economic frustration after pandemic shocks, and deep societal divides exacerbated by protest movements and political polarization. He skilfully channelled anxieties about crime, immigration, and cultural change into an electoral triumph that has many observers worried he could push Chile well beyond the conservative mainstream.

Let’s be clear: Kast is not a re-enactor of Augusto Pinochet, at least not in the literal sense. He does not openly advocate for dictatorship or military rule. Nor does he promise to abolish democratic institutions. But that’s precisely the danger: the drift toward authoritarian instincts doesn’t need tanks in the streets to matter; it only needs the erosion of norms and the weakening of the checks and balances that safeguard democracy.

Kast has made clear his admiration for certain elements of Chile’s military regime in the 1970s and 80s. He has waffled on human rights abuses committed under Pinochet and has sometimes framed them as necessary evils in the fight against communism. For many Chileans, that historical relativism crosses a line; it signals a willingness to legitimize repression if it serves political ends. In a region where the ghosts of authoritarianism still stir in Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and beyond, that is not a trivial matter.

In policy terms, Kast’s platform leans heavily on law and order, cultural conservatism, and neoliberal economics. He promises to roll back regulations he sees as stifling growth, to cut taxes, and to empower the private sector. On crime, he has pledged harsher penalties and expanded powers for police. On social issues, he stands firmly against abortion, gender-based reforms, and progressive education policies.

Chile has the legacy of the dictatorship etched into its psyche. Memories of torture, disappearances, and political purges are not academic; they are individual and collective wounds. Many Chileans, particularly the younger generation who came of age ignorant of the dictatorship’s everyday terror, view Kast’s overtures toward Pinochet as alarming revisionism. They see in him a politician comfortable with the language of extremes, even if he stops short of full authoritarianism.

This is where the real fear lies, not in the outright return of a Pinochet-style regime, but in the normalization of illiberal tropes under the veneer of democracy. Kast could very well preserve formal democratic institutions while pushing them into deformation: delegitimizing courts that check executive power, attacking critical media as purveyors of “fake news,” and cultivating a narrative of “the people” versus “the corrupt elites.” Many authoritarian leaders in history have followed this exact playbook. The danger is not tanks, but terminological erosion, where democratic language covers illiberal substance.

And because Chile has long been considered one of South America’s most stable democracies, its political trajectory matters regionally. A rightward shift under Kast doesn’t operate in isolation; it reverberates across borders already strained by polarization. In Argentina, the pendulum could swing further right as voters react against leftist policies. In Brazil, Bolsonaro still looms as a symbol of hard-right governance. Even in Peru and Colombia, where political volatility is the norm, the specter of emboldened conservatism fueled by Chile’s example cannot be ignored.

Throw into this mix the presidency of Donald Trump in the United States, a leader with his own history of flirting with authoritarian rhetoric and undermining democratic norms and the constellation becomes even more concerning. A Trump presidency amplifies right-wing leaders in Latin America who see in him a model or patron. Elected officials gain confidence when their ideological compatriots hold power in Washington; coups and crackdowns seem less risky when the global superpower looks away or offers tacit support.

Under Trumpism’s hemisphere, leaders like Kast could feel emboldened to push boundaries, especially on issues like immigration, trade, and security cooperation. They might read that stance as a green light to confront international human rights bodies, reverse progressive reforms, and redefine civic liberties. The institutional safeguards that have kept nations like Chile anchored could fray under sustained pressure from populist nationalism.

Yet, it is also worth remembering that Chile is not Peru, nor is it Venezuela. Its civil society is robust, its judiciary independent, and its people politically engaged. If Kast’s government overreaches, it will face resistance from protest movements, from courts, from media, and from within his own coalition. Chile’s vibrant street politics, which helped bring about constitutional reform debates and forced reckonings with inequality, remains a powerful counterweight.

Still, what keeps political watchers up at night is not the likelihood of a repeat of the 1973 coup. It’s the subtle, creeping normalization of illiberalism that chips away at democratic resilience. Kast’s presidency might not end in tyranny but it might very well make authoritarian ideas respectable again in South America. And in an era when democracy’s fragility is on display from Kyiv to Islamabad, that risk is far too great to dismiss as merely speculative.

Chile’s destiny under Kast will not be Pinochet redux. But it could be something more insidious: a slow drift toward a politics where dissent is disparaged, institutions are weakened, and the price of stability is compromise on fundamental freedoms. In a Trumpian hemisphere, that’s a future none of us should be comfortable betting on.

The long arc under pressure by Markus Gibbons

Martin Luther King Jr. has become a monument Americans visit without reading the plaque. His words are quoted, his image softened, his radicalism carefully laundered for bipartisan comfort. During the era of Donald Trump’s presidency, marked by strongman rhetoric and an abrasive disregard for democratic norms, King’s legacy felt less like a ceremonial inheritance and more like a moral stress test. The question was not whether King belonged to history, but whether his demands still applied to the present.

Trump’s political style thrived on division sharpened into spectacle. He governed less as a custodian of pluralism than as a performer of grievance, turning institutions into props and opponents into enemies. In that atmosphere, King’s insistence on a beloved community sounded almost quaint, like a hymn hummed inside a burning building. Yet it was precisely this discomfort that revealed King’s relevance. King did not preach harmony as mood music; he demanded it as a structural transformation. Unity, in his vision, was not the absence of conflict but the presence of justice.

What made the Trump years feel authoritarian was not tanks in the streets but the steady erosion of shared reality. Truth became flexible, loyalty personal, and power theatrical. King warned about this long before social media and cable news. He spoke of the danger of moral emptiness disguised as order, of leaders who promised safety while shrinking the nation’s conscience. His critique of the “white moderate,” more devoted to order than justice, echoed loudly in an era where civility was invoked selectively, often to silence dissent rather than to discipline power.

King’s legacy is often reduced to a dream, conveniently stripped of its economic clauses. But Trump’s America, with its tax policies tilted upward and its rhetoric aimed downward, made it impossible to ignore King’s unfinished business. King died planning a Poor People’s Campaign, insisting that racial justice without economic justice was a polite lie. In an age of gilded populism, where billionaire interests wore the mask of working-class fury, King’s moral clarity cut through the costume. He understood that inequality was not an accident of the system but one of its features.

There was also the question of protest. Trump portrayed dissent as disloyalty, a personal affront to authority. King, of course, treated dissent as democratic hygiene. Nonviolent disruption was his chosen instrument not because it was gentle but because it was relentless. He understood that power rarely concedes without pressure, and that pressure must be public, inconvenient and morally legible. Watching militarized responses to protesters during the Trump years felt like a rerun of arguments King had already won, at least on paper.

Perhaps the most unsettling contrast lay in language. Trump’s rhetoric revelled in dominance and insult, reducing politics to a contact sport. King’s language, by contrast, was capacious, biblical, and exacting. He believed words could build a world. This was not naïveté; it was strategy. In moments of authoritarian drift, language becomes a battlefield. To degrade it is to prepare the ground for cruelty. King’s disciplined eloquence stands as a rebuke to the idea that leadership requires vulgarity to appear strong.

Yet invoking King during the Trump era also carried a risk. He could be turned into a talisman, waved around to certify moral superiority without demanding sacrifice. King’s legacy is not a shield; it is a summons. It asks uncomfortable questions about complicity, courage, and cost. Would we accept being unpopular? Would we risk losing elections, donors, or comfort for the sake of justice? King lost his life answering those questions without the assurance of victory.

In the end, the Trump presidency did not diminish King’s legacy; it clarified it. Against the glare of authoritarian temptation, King’s vision appeared not outdated but unfinished. He offered no promise that history bends automatically toward justice, only that it can be bent by human hands willing to ache. Remembering King in such times is not nostalgia. It is a decision about what kind of country we are still trying to be, and how much we are willing to endure to get there.

Fika bonding! #115 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

Fika is a state of mind and an important part of Swedish culture. It means making time for friends and colleagues to share a cup of coffee and a little something to eat.

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New World Order in Search of Humanity, Law and Order by Mahboob A. Khawaja, PhD.

Paradox of Time and History

Is the New World Order a hypothetical phenomenon or a convenient reality to be imagined? How do you assess its evolving substance for the future? Who would usher the New Order or would it be a remaking of historical belligerency by despotic rulers against the people? Who would the new kings, new emperors and new rulers of the 21^st century and beyond world? Recall Hans Morganthau (Politics of Nations), called power politics a ‘psychological sickness’. Flamboyant proclamations of an imaginary world of power defies the logic of the present time and place of order. H.G. Wells, the British author, tried to redefine “new world order” as a synonym for the establishment of a technocratic world state and of a planned economy, garnering popularity in state socialist circles.

Some authoritarianism- lords, emperors and nobles stemmed from the 16^th century European Renaissance although knowledge, science and intellectual awakening were the products of new manifestations. The so-called Western democratic culture of superior power is shortsighted and naive. Enlightened and people-oriented leaders hold visions for change and sustainable future-making, not greed or egoistic insanity to quell law, freedom, justice and global peace. Leaders and powerful nations search for stability and a sustainable future cannot be idealistic and perfectionist. Progressive nations look for continuous change and adaptability to future-making and not running after idealistic perfection which means the end game and nothing else.

NATO is in crisis on security, war in Ukraine, Greenland and divide between Europe and America. The US needs a navigational change but entrapped in chaos. After WW2, states and nations professed binding commitments to hold the Charter of the UNO and “save the succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” Not so, those pioneering the evolutionary Charter went astray to invade other nations and indulge in crimes against humanity, aggression and genocide. Historically, leaders and nations claiming to be the most powerful on earth violate the Laws of God and come closer to an end of their time and history. The Earth was meant to sustain life for all sanctity of human values and universal brotherhood. Imperialists time and again broke the covenants and victimized other nations in Asia, the Arab world and Africa. What a contrast, what a tragedy those responsible to shield global values turned out to be aggressors, hangmen and criminals under International Law. Israel leads the contemporary history of crimes against Palestinian people and global institutions appear dysfunctional to extend any protection or security to the people of Palestine. The masses live in fear and corrosive values of international norms. President Trump wants to make America great again by denying the existence of multicultural socioeconomic and political reality of the 21^st century evolutionary world. It is not Greenland occupation or attack on Valenzuela or threat to Canada and Panama to empower America as a Great Nation but allegiance to the UN Charter, respect of states sovereignty, non-intervention, peace, order and harmony between nations and respect of law to contribute for global stability and peace.

To enhance America as a progressive nation, the essence is an integral part of emigrants from Europe and other parts of the globe as the historic foundation of this nation. Alarmingly, the immigrants are haunted and deported to foreign countries as gangsters, drug dealers and criminals. Is American history in conflict with its own formulation? Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’ Day will be celebrated on January 19. A visionary, a proactive pioneer of enriched moral, intellectual values of peace, humanity and global harmony. American history shall remember and honor such a role model of human consciousness, peace and brotherhood. When Western history wills, tragic history happens. Wars, colonization, aggression and military occupation are all distinct historical milestones of authoritarian leadership. Machiavelli’s Prince relives to unleash tragic tensions of time and history – the endless echo flows from the same myriad of supremacy, hatred and psychology of political maneuvering to control people and thinking minds. To wake -up informed mankind of the 21^st century, and beyond you have a new World Order overshadowing all encompassed universal proclamations, charters, Magna Carta, nobility of rational thinking, collective consensus of time and history – it is a new beginning of unthinkable dark future. We, the People are engrossed by the few- the egoistic lords of lawless unexcitable shadows of power politics and fearful of their own inner soul, survival and strength for future-making.

Politics of Fallacy and Power of Hegemony

Chris Hedges (Grand Illusion: 1/11/26) spells out the facts of American authoritarianism. https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/grand-illusion?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=i6yl0&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

We are cursed by what the historian Barbara Tuchman calls the “bellicose frivolity of senile empires.”…….

Our high priests of war, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine, are no different from the fools and charlatans who snuffed out empires of the past — the haughty leaders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the militarists in imperial Germany and the hapless court of Tsarist Russia in World War I. They were followed by the fascists in Italy under Benito Mussolini, Germany under Adolf Hitler and the military rulers of imperial Japan in World War II.

Monroe Doctrine was an intent of history not facts of history to be instigated by futurists US presidents. Global peace and order are not the by-product of authoritarianism. The creation of UNO assured the much desired stability after the bloodbath of WW2. Yet the lessons of history are ignored and stuffed in lost visions. The Chris Hedges Report (“The Machinery of Terror” 1/11/26), recalls annals of history: https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-machinery-of-terror?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=i6yl0&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email...As Trump threatens other territories, from Cuba to Greenland to Mexico, many are questioning just how far his administration is willing to go in pursuing hemispheric domination—and, in historian Jay Sexton’s words, whether Trump’s ambitions will prove to be “another flash in the pan or the beginning of a more consequential strategic turn.”

Philip A. Farruggio (“Dead Country Walking”, Dissident Voice: 1/10/26) offers a rational inner sight to contemporary problems: https://dissidentvoice.org/2026/01/dead-country-walking/

In a prison, they call those awaiting the executioner ‘ Dead Men Walking’. Well, only a damned fool would not see what this Trump-led government has been doing since January 2025. ….. the fools in our Congress, our media, and the MAGA faithful won’t push away from this horror and demand that this cognitive failing hustler and his minions just go away! We are a Dead Country Walking that has plenty of military power and ammunition with absolutely NO MORAL COMPASS!

Contemporary Crises are a Menace to Global Peace, Law and Order

West European and American history needs no new introduction in the surge of imperialism and conquest and military domination of small and vulnerable nations across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

The Middle East Peace Plan is a hoax, a sham and failure of Arab-Muslim leadership. The composition of “Board of Peace” is a board of real estate agents to exploit Gaza and undo freedom of Palestine. Everyday innocent people are bombed and displaced by Israel. PM Netanyahu and his extremist governance would soon put the finished answer to Palestine and a Greater Israel would dominate the Arab Middle East. It is oil and land to be grabbed by the US-Israel strategic plan. Phil Rockstroh (“The Toxic Innocence of Empire: The US and Israel, Forever Blameless, Always Pure in Motive On the madness of perpetual war and imperialist overreach”, Dissident Voice: 1/09/26), views the US-Israel policies and practices as of a superior race acting to shield its own transitory image: https://dissidentvoice.org/2026/01/the-toxic-innocence-of-empire-the-us-and-israel-forever-blameless-always-pure-in-motive/https://dissidentvoice.org/2026/01/the-toxic-innocence-of-empire-the-us-and-israel-forever-blameless-always-pure-in-motive/

There is an exact and troubling historical correlation between the Trump administration’s imperialist aggression against Venezuela and Israel’s perpetual crimes against humanity. Both can be traced to a Western settler-colonialist worldview possessed by a sense of insatiable entitlement, and the psychological carnage concomitant to a citizenry given to the brutality inherent to the pursuit of colonialist and/or imperialist agendas. Whether the collective mode of mind is termed Manifest Destiny or Zionist doctrine, both are manifested in the ethnic cleansing of indigenous people that can be traced back to a European belief system that insists upon its innate (White supremacy-rancid) …

The UNO was an outcome of collective wisdom and resolve to foresee global peace, non-intervention and non-aggression and respect of human rights and sovereignty of states. Its main aims were to prevent wars and restore trust in collective dialogue and participation in peace and conflict resolution. Imagine some eight decades later, we continued to witness abrogation of human rights, lost freedom and justice in all parts of the globe. Those holding the Gospel in one hand have planned wars, killing, occupation and intervention in other states propelling greed of oil and money and monstrous control of helpless people. Raging wars in Ukraine, Palestine and elsewhere see no beacon of hope, knowledge and collective wisdom to stop or to change the nuisance of political power and sadistic leadership minds capable of offering a promising world of tomorrow or day after tomorrow.

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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!

When they came for the ...allies by John Reid

In recent weeks, an unsettling chapter has opened in the fraught relationship between government power and academic freedom, one that should alarm anyone who values civil liberties. The Trump administration’s attempt to compel the University of Pennsylvania to hand over personal data on Jewish faculty, staff and students; contact information, emails, phone numbers, home addresses, That of course, was met with swift and justified outrage from faculty groups. They denounced the move as nothing less than government overreach, a glaring abuse of authority with “ominous historical overtones.” That phrase is more than mere rhetoric; it is a sober acknowledgment that history teaches hard lessons about what happens when the state targets a community defined by religion, ethnicity or political identity.

What makes this situation so troubling isn’t merely the specific request itself; it’s what it says about the vulnerability of academic institutions in the face of political pressure and how quickly these vulnerabilities can become an instrument of fear. Universities are meant to be bastions of free thought, safe spaces where scholars and students engage with ideas without dread of surveillance or retribution. That ideal is already under strain in a polarized age but to see a government pursue the personal data of a distinct group within a university, on the basis of identity, raises the specter of authoritarian intrusion into civil society.

Many have rightly drawn comparisons to the famous lines of Martin Niemöller, the German pastor who survived Nazi concentration camps and later reflected on the cowardice of the intellectual and spiritual classes during Hitler’s rise. “First they came for the Socialists… Then they came for the Jews… Then they came for me… And there was no one left to speak for me.” Niemöller’s words are a warning, not just about persecution, but about the ease with which decent people can convince themselves that the target of state aggression is somehow separate from them. The lesson is universal, attack one group’s rights, and you weaken the rights of all.

It is telling, then, that the administration’s demand was not limited to anonymous statistical data or broad trends. It sought identifiable information, individuals could be named, contacted, even harassed. That’s not research, that’s a register. Registers have dark connotations in modern history. They have been used to track, segregate, and ultimately dehumanize. To shrug at this because it’s happening in the United States in 2026 is to be complacent about the fragility of free society. Big data and bureaucracy are potent tools; in the wrong hands, they are indistinguishable from instruments of oppression.

What is particularly jarring in this episode is the reaction within parts of the academic community itself. Reports have emerged of some Jewish students, perplexingly celebrating the administration’s similar request for information on Palestinians and their supporters on campus. It is an astonishing display of what might be called “oppression envy” the notion that if an intrusive policy is directed at a group one opposes, it must be justified or even desirable. That reaction betrays a deep misunderstanding of solidarity and self-interest alike.

Any policy that sets a precedent for the collection of personal data based on identity, be it religious, ethnic or political, should be opposed universally, not only when one’s own group is targeted. When we cheer because “it’s them, not us,” we are participating in the very dynamic that erodes our collective defense against tyranny. The machinery of state power does not discriminate in the long run; it shops for legitimacy, and it finds willing collaborators when it can. Once the first register is written, adding others becomes easier.

The stinging irony here is that those who cheered the targeting of Palestinian students may soon find themselves defending their own rights tomorrow. The logic of “they deserve it” is self-defeating. If the assault on civil liberties is justified for one group, why not another? Why not any? Rights that are instrumental, only valid when convenient, are no rights at all. They are privileges that can be revoked.

What should unify us, at a minimum, is the defense of academia as a space free from surveillance and intimidation. Universities are not extensions of political power; they are crucibles of critical thought. Scholars must be free to inquire, teach and debate without fear that their identities will be harvested for political ends. If the government wants insight into campus dynamics, it should pursue it transparently, ethically, and with respect for privacy and due process. Nothing about this latest demand met that standard.

The faculty outcry against the administration’s actions was not hyperbolic. It was deeply rooted in a recognition that the request was a breach of trust between students, staff, and the institution, one that risked cultivating an environment of suspicion and fear. To be a university is to foster openness, not to bow to political dictates. When government pressure encroaches on these principles, academics must resist, not selectively, but universally.

The Trump administration is no longer in power. Yet the impulse to consolidate data, to surveil, and to categorize people based on identity is not unique to any one leader or party. It is a perennial threat that requires perpetual vigilance. Niemöller’s words echo across time not because they are quaint historical artifacts, but because the pattern they describe, the complacency in the face of injustice, is evergreen.

We must reject policies that single out any group for intrusive scrutiny. We must reaffirm that personal information is not fodder for political whims. We must remember that when civil liberties are compromised for some, they are compromised for all. In defending the rights of Jewish faculty and students today, we defend the rights of every scholar tomorrow. That is the true lesson history demands we learn and relearn before it is too late.

The day an Indian woman took power by Avani Devi

On January 19, 1966, Indira Gandhi became the Prime Minister of India. It was a political event, of course, but it was also something quieter and more radical: a psychological earthquake. A woman stepped into the highest office of the world’s largest democracy at a time when most Indian women were still being taught to lower their eyes, soften their voices, and shrink their ambitions to fit inside kitchens and courtyards. History records the date. Women felt the tremor.

To understand what that moment meant, you have to imagine the everyday reality of Indian womanhood in the 1960s. Education for girls was growing, but slowly. Employment outside teaching or nursing was rare and often frowned upon. Marriage was destiny, not a choice. Politics belonged to men with starched shirts, thick glasses, and louder opinions than conscience. Power wore a moustache.

Then came Indira Gandhi, slight, unsmiling, draped in cotton saris, her hair streaked with premature gray like a declaration of seriousness. She did not arrive waving the banner of feminism. She did not speak in the language of liberation or sisterhood. In fact, she often resisted being labelled as a “woman leader” at all. She insisted on being judged simply as a leader. That insistence itself was revolutionary.

For many women, her rise did not immediately change laws or wages or social customs. Fathers still controlled daughters. Husbands still controlled wives. Villages still whispered when a woman spoke too boldly. But something subtler shifted. The ceiling, once invisible and unquestioned, suddenly had a crack in it.

Representation is not a small thing when you have been trained to believe you are small.

A woman occupying that chair in Parliament House disrupted the story Indian society had been telling itself for centuries: that authority was masculine by nature. Indira Gandhi’s very presence contradicted the idea that leadership required a deep voice, a heavy fist, or a male lineage. Ironically, she did have a lineage, Nehru’s daughter, born into politics but she also carried the burden of proving she was more than a surname. When critics dismissed her as a “goongi gudiya,” a dumb doll, women across the country recognized the insult. They had heard it all their lives in different forms.

And then they watched her refuse to be one.

She ruled with a firmness that unsettled many men and complicated the feelings of many women. She was not gentle. She was not nurturing in the way society expected women to be. She was commanding, sometimes ruthless, often lonely. And that too was a lesson: power in a woman does not look like softness with better manners. Sometimes it looks like steel wrapped in silk.

For urban women, especially students and professionals just beginning to imagine careers, Indira Gandhi became proof of concept. Proof that ambition was not a moral defect. Proof that authority did not rot a woman’s femininity. Proof that a woman could be feared, respected, criticized, and obeyed on a national scale.

For rural women, her impact was more symbolic than practical, but symbolism travels far in places where opportunity does not. Her photograph in newspapers, her voice on the radio, her face on posters, these were small rebellions pinned to mud walls and tucked into memory. A girl fetching water could now picture a woman commanding generals. A mother bent over a stove could say, even if only once, “Our country is run by one of us.”

That mattered.

Of course, symbolism is not salvation. Indira Gandhi did not dismantle patriarchy. She did not rewrite domestic hierarchies. She did not build a nation where women were suddenly safe, equal, or free. Many women continued to live lives of quiet endurance, limited choices, and inherited silence. Her government did not center women’s rights as its mission.

But history is not only shaped by policies. It is shaped by permission.

Her leadership gave women permission to imagine themselves differently. Permission to speak a little louder in classrooms. Permission to argue with fathers about education. Permission to apply for jobs that once felt absurd. Permission to think of themselves as citizens first, daughters and wives second.

There is something deeply political about imagination. Once a woman can imagine herself in power, she becomes harder to govern through fear alone.

Indira Gandhi’s tenure would later become controversial, stained by authoritarian decisions and the dark chapter of the Emergency. She remains a complex figure, neither saint nor simple villain. But complexity does not cancel significance. Women do not need their icons to be perfect; they need them to be possible.

On that January day in 1966, possibility took human form.

A woman stood at the center of the Indian state and refused to apologize for her authority. She did not represent every woman’s struggle, but she cracked open the door through which millions would eventually walk, some cautiously, some angrily, some running.

And once a door to power is opened by a woman, it never truly closes again.

Me My Mind & I #02: No Bells of Saint Crazy #Cartoon by Patrick McWade

 

A different way to check internal and external ...thoughts!
'Me My Mind & I' is a cartoon series by Patrick McWade.
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Alexandre Marc : Con-federalism, Cultural Renewal and Trans-frontier Cooperation by Rene Wadlow

Alexandre Marc (19 January 1904 - 22 February 2000) was born as Alexandre Markovitch Lipiansky in Odessa, Russia in 1904.  He later simplified his name by dropping Lipiansky (which his sons have reclaimed) and modifying his father’s first name to Marc which he used as a family name.  His father was a Jewish banker and a non-communist socialist.  Alexandre was a precocious activist. He was influenced by his early reading of F. Nietzsche, especially Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  He started a non-conformist student journal while still in secondary school during the Russian Revolution, asking for greater democracy and opposed to Marxist thought.  This led to death threats made against him by the Communist authorities.

The family left Russia in 1919 for France but not before Alexandre had seen some of the fighting and disorder of the Russian civil war.  These impressions left a deep mark, and he was never tempted by the Russian communist effort as were other intellectuals in France who had not seen events close up.  During part of the 1920s, Marc was in Germany studying philosophy where intellectual and philosophical debates were intense after the German defeat in the First World War and the great difficulties of the Weimar Republic.  He saw the forerunners of the Nazi movement.  Marc was always one to try to join thought and action, and he had gone back to Germany in 1932 to try to organize anti-Nazi German youth, but ideological divisions in Germany were strong.  The Nazi were already too well organized and came to power the next year. Marc, having seen the destructive power of Nazi thought, was also never tempted by Right Wing or Fascist thought.

Seeing the destructive potential of both Communist and Fascist thought and sensing the deep crisis of Western civilization, Marc was looking for new values that would include order, revolution, and the dignity of the person.  There was no ready-made ideology which included all these elements, though two French thinkers — difficult to classify — did serve as models to Marc and t Denis de Rougemont and some of the other editors of L’Ordre Nouveau: Charles Péguy and  J Proudhon . Marc wrote a book on the importance of Péguy at the start of the Second World War.  Marc was living in Aix-en-Provence at the time, and the book was published in still unoccupied Marseilles in 1941. He also met in Paris Nicolas Berdiaeff, Jacques Maritain and Gabriel Marcel.  It was from these meetings that the personalist doctrine of L’Ordre Nouveau was born. The rallying cry of personalism was “We are neither collectivists nor individualists but personalists …the spiritual first and foremost, then the economic, with politics at the service of both of them”.

In 1943 when all of France was occupied, he was in danger of arrest both for his views and his Jewish origins. Although in 1933 Marc had become a Roman Catholic in part under the influence of intellectual Dominicans, for the Nazi occupiers — as well as for some of the French Vichy government — “once a Jew, always a Jew”. Therefore he left for Switzerland where he was able to get to know the working of Swiss federalism with its emphasis on democracy at the village and city level.  He was also able to meet other exiles from all over Europe who had managed to get to Switzerland

Alexandre Marc seemed destined to use words which took on other meanings when used by more popular writers.  The name of the journal L’Ordre Nouveau was taken over after the Second World War by a French far-right nationalist movement influenced by a sort of neo-Celtic ideology and was widely known for painting Celtic cross graffiti on wall in the days before graffiti art filled up all the space.  Revolution, especially after the Nazi-Fascist defeat, could only be considered in the broader society in its Marxist version.  Person, which as a term had been developed by the Roman stoic philosophers could never carry the complexity of meanings which Marc, de Rougemont, and E. Mounier wanted to give it.  The Jewish philosophers Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas also used the term “personalism” in the same sense as Marc, but their influence was limited to small circles.  In fact, “individualism” either seen positively or negatively, has returned as the most widely used term.  In some ways, this difficulty with the popular perception of words exists with the way Marc uses “federalism” by which he really means "con-federalism".

Alexandre Marc and Denis de Rougemont met again in Switzerland at the end of the Second World War when de Rougemont returned from spending the war years in the USA.  They started reconnecting people whom they knew in the pre-war years who also saw the need for a total reformation of European society.  Both de Rougemont and Marc were good organizers of meetings and committees, and they played an important role in 1947 and 1948 setting up the first meetings for the foundations of the European movement and the European federalists, especially the August 1947 meeting at Montreux, Switzerland in which world citizens  and world federalists were also present.

Both men stressed the need for education and highlighted the role of youth to move European unity beyond the debates of the 1930s and the start of the Cold War, though both continued to stress the importance of the themes which brought them together in the 1930s.  They were both founders of centers for the study of European federalism and an exploration of European values. It was in the context of seminars and publications of the two centers that I worked with both in the 1970s.   Culture in the philosophical sense was crucial for both, and their efforts in Geneva and Nice were rather similar.  Marc and de Rougemont had a personal falling out that lasted nearly a decade, due, it seems, to the tensions surrounding the break up of de Rougemont’s first marriage.  But even during this break, de Rougemont always spoke to me highly of Marc and his ideas.  De Rougemont knew that I was seeing Marc and had an interest in the intellectual currents of France in the 1930s.  The two men came together again later, especially after de Rougemont’s happy second marriage.  From his death bed, de Rougemont spoke to Marc on the telephone concerning the need to reprint the issues of L’Order Nouveau since the articles were still important. The reprinting has been done since.

Both de Rougemont and Marc shared a distrust of European integration as it was being carried out within the European Community and later the European Union  Both men stressed the need for local democracy, and shared a strong distrust of the politicians prominent in the nation-state system.  De Rougemont went on to give most of his attention to the role of regions, especially the trans-frontier Geneva area which combines part of Switzerland and France and is an economic pole of attraction for the Italian Val d’Aoste. Marc continued to stress what he called “global” or “integral” federalism, a federalism with great autonomy and initiative at every level as over against “Hamiltonian” federalism which he saw as the creation of ever larger entities such as the United States, whose culture and form of government Marc distrusted. Marc remarked that  ‘Hamiltonian federalism’ as a whole was turning its back on spiritual, cultural and social questions and devoting itself to a form of action that can be defined as ‘political’ and underlined the contradiction that is inherent in the lobbying of governments on federalist issues.

De Rougemont was the better writer.  His last book The Future is within Us, though pessimistic, especially of political efforts, remains a useful summing up of his ideas. (2) Although Alexandre Marc wrote a good deal, his forms of expression were too complex, too paradoxical, too filled with references to ideas which are not fully explained to be popular.  Marc’s influence was primarily verbal as stimulant to his students.  Having seen early in his life the dangers of totalitarian thought, he always stressed the need for dialogue and listening, for popular participation at all levels of decision-making. As with ‘order’ ‘revolution’ ‘the person’, ‘federalism’ was probably not the term he should have chosen to carry the weight  of his ideas. The other Alexander — Hamilton — has infused the word ‘federalism’ with the idea of unification of many smaller units.  ‘Popular participation’ is probably a better term for Marc’s ideas, if the word ‘popular’ could carry the complex structure which Marc tried to give to the word ‘person’. Con-federation is probably the better term for the de-centralized administrative structures that Marc proposed.

Marc was a complex man, one of the bridges who helped younger persons to understand the debates which surrounded the Russian Revolution, the rise and decline of Fascism and Nazism, and the post-Second World War hopes for a united Europe.  As de Rougemont on his death bed said to Marc “We have been able to do nothing. We must start again. We must talk to the young. We must carry on.”

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Notes:
1. For the 1930s period see: Christian Roy. Alexandre Marc et la Jeune Europe: L’Ordre nouveau aux origins du personnalisme (Presses d’Europe, 1998) J. Laubet del Bayle. Les non-conformistes des années 30 : Une Tentative de renouvellement de la pensée politique francaise (Seuil, 1969) Michel Winock. Esprit : Des intellectuels dans la cité 1930-1950 (Seuil, 1996)

2. Denis de Rougemont The Future is within US  (Pergamon Press, 1983)

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Rene Wadlow, President, Association of World Citizens

AntySaurus Prick #123 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

Dino is a vegetarian virgin dinosaur and his best friend is Anty,
a carnivorous nymphomaniac ant.
They call themselves the AntySaurus Prick and they are still here
waiting for the comet to come!

For more AntySaurus Prick, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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ASEAN’s Multilateral Dilemma: Continuity and Change from NAM to BRICS by Anis H. Bajrektarevic & Evi Fitriani

 (No Asian Century without true multilateralism)

ASEAN’s enduring strength has never been its ability to project power, but its capacity to manage diversity through restraint, process, and dialogue. In an increasingly polarised strategic environment, pressures to align more explicitly with emerging blocs such as BRICS risk diluting ASEAN’s long-standing emphasis on autonomy and consensus. For Southeast Asia, security is less about joining alternative power centres than about preserving decision-making space amid intensifying great-power rivalry. A revitalised non-aligned approach—adapted to contemporary challenges such as economic fragmentation, digital governance, and maritime security—offers ASEAN greater flexibility to engage all major actors without becoming dependent on any. In this sense, non-alignment is not a rejection of cooperation, but a pragmatic strategy to sustain ASEAN centrality in a multipolar, yet deeply contested, regional order.

Let us continue with a rather simply question: Why ASEAN’s security lies in non-alignment, not bloc membership?

For more than two decades, the “Asian Century” has been treated as an inevitability rather than a hypothesis. Yet inevitability is not strategy, and Asia’s economic rise has not produced commensurate strategic autonomy. As this author warned in No Asian Century, “growth without agency is not power.” It is exposure.

Nowhere is this clearer than in ASEAN’s strategic predicament.

The region is richer, more connected, and more central to global supply chains than ever. It is also more militarised, more contested, and more instrumentalised by external powers. This is not ascent; it is crowded relevance.

Consequentially, ASEAN is increasingly urged to anchor itself more firmly in BRICS—or, alternatively, to revive the logic of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). The choice is often framed as outdated idealism versus modern multipolar pragmatism. This framing is false.

BRICS: an alternative centre, not an alternative logic

BRICS markets itself as a corrective to Western dominance. In reality, it substitutes one form of centrality for another. The bloc is multipolar in composition but hierarchical in effect, shaped by stark asymmetries of power, demography and strategic ambition.

For ASEAN (and RI for that matter), deeper institutional attachment to BRICS would not mean insulation from great-power rivalry. It would mean internalising it. Sino-Indian competition, Russia’s confrontation with the Atlantic world, and the geopolitical agendas of newly admitted members are not externalities. They are the bloc’s operating environment.

As (one of the co-authors) observed, “multipolarity without rules multiplies friction.” For smaller and mid-sized states, friction is not leverage; it is vulnerability.

BRICS offers financial instruments and political visibility, but not protection in the sense ASEAN requires. Protection implies predictability, autonomy and room for manoeuvre. A bloc dominated by continental powers with unresolved rivalries offers none of these.

Non-alignment: misunderstood, not obsolete

Non-alignment is often caricatured as neutrality. Historically, it was the opposite: a strategy of autonomy (active peaceful coexistence – strategic equidistancing engagement, not a passive neutrality) in a system designed to deny it. NAM failed not because its premise was wrong, but because it lacked economic integration, technological depth and institutional discipline.Those deficits are not arguments against non-alignment today. They are arguments for upgrading it.

The contemporary international system increasingly resembles the one that gave rise to NAM: weaponised finance, sanctions as diplomacy, fractured trade regimes, and information warfare. In such a system, alignment reduces options; autonomy preserves them.

ASEAN already behaves as a de facto non-aligned actor—hedging, consensus-building, resisting exclusive security commitments. The problem is not doctrine; it is institutional confidence.

ASEAN’s real security deficit

ASEAN’s vulnerability is not military inferiority. It is structural dependence.Security in 2026 is decided less by troop numbers than by: (i) control over supply chains and standards; (ii) digital and data sovereignty; (iii) food and energy resilience; and (iv) narrative and diplomatic bandwidth – to name but few most pressing ones.

Neither BRICS nor NAM can deliver these automatically. But BRICS constrains ASEAN’s room to build them independently, while non-alignment preserves that space.As No Asian Century(almost two decades old, but still highly relevant work) reminds us, “Asia’s problem is not lack of power, but lack of cohesion.” ASEAN’s cohesion is diluted, not strengthened, by bloc discipline.

(We are drifting from a Kantian promise of cooperative order into a Hobbesian reality of coerced choice. Rules increasingly yield to power, norms to narratives, and multilateralism to managed loyalty. In such a system, as Prof. Anis H. Bajrektarevic has warned, the message to smaller states is blunt: comply or die. For actors like ASEAN, the challenge is not to moralise this shift, but to survive it—by preserving strategic autonomy in a world where alignment no longer guarantees protection, only obedience.)

Centrality must be defended, not donated

ASEAN’s strategic value lies in being indispensable, not aligned. The moment it becomes a junior partner in any camp, its celebrated “centrality” becomes rhetorical.

Selective engagement with BRICS is sensible. Conceptual renewal of non-alignment is necessary. Exclusive commitment to either is unnecessary—and risky.

There may be no Asian Century, as Bajrektarevic famously argued (long ago), because Asia has yet to decide whether it wants to be a subject or a venue of global politics. ASEAN’s answer to that question will determine its security more than any acronym it joins.

History rarely rewards those who choose sides early. It remembers those who made themselves unavoidable.

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Anis H. Bajrektarevic, Chairperson and prof. Intl. Relations & Global Pol. Studies
Evi Fitriani, Dean of the FISIP, University of Indonesia, Jakarta