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
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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.
For more 'Me My Mind & I' HERE!
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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

Faith in the crossfire by Virginia Robertson

World Religion Day arrives each year with soft language about harmony, shared values, and the human hunger for meaning. It is a day designed to remind us that faith traditions, at their best, are moral compasses rather than weapons. Yet the calendar keeps spinning, and the world keeps contradicting the greeting-card version of belief. In today’s reality, religion is less a bridge and more a border wall, less a shelter for the vulnerable and more a banner waved in political combat. The gap between what this day represents and how faith is actually used has become impossible to ignore.

We live in a time when outrage travels faster than reflection and certainty is prized over curiosity. Religion, once a language for wrestling with doubt, has been repackaged as a megaphone for it. Social media rewards the loudest prophets, not the wisest ones. Algorithms prefer anger to nuance. And so faith, which should humble us before the complexity of existence, is flattened into slogans, reduced to hashtags, and sharpened into a cultural weapon.

Into this landscape steps what many have come to call Trumpism, not merely a person but a style of politics that thrives on division, grievance, and theatrical conflict. It borrows religious imagery while emptying it of moral content. Crosses become campaign props. Bibles become stage accessories. The language of salvation is recycled to promise national rebirth, as if redemption could be won at the ballot box and damnation assigned to whoever voted differently.

Trumpism does not need theology; it needs loyalty. It does not ask believers to love their neighbors but to suspect them. It replaces the ancient commandment to care for the stranger with a modern obsession with walls, purity tests, and enemies. In this worldview, compassion is weakness, doubt is betrayal, and complexity is a lie invented by elites. Religion becomes less about transforming the self and more about policing others.

World Religion Day, in contrast, imagines something quieter and more radical, that different paths can exist without canceling each other out, that belief does not require uniformity, and that reverence can coexist with disagreement. It speaks the unfashionable language of coexistence in an era addicted to conquest. But such language struggles to survive when outrage is profitable and fear is politically efficient.

Hate is not an accidental byproduct of this moment; it is a strategy. It mobilizes faster than hope. It simplifies reality into heroes and villains, saints and sinners, patriots and traitors. It is emotionally efficient, requiring less effort than understanding and less courage than empathy. Wrapped in religious vocabulary, hate gains a sacred glow, making cruelty feel like duty and exclusion feel like righteousness.

The tragedy is not only political but spiritual. When religion is reduced to an identity badge, it loses its power to challenge the ego. Instead of asking difficult questions about greed, violence, or indifference, it becomes a mirror that flatters its holder. God is recast as a supporter of our side, a cosmic voter who shares our opinions and blesses our resentments.

This is not new, but it is louder than before. Empires have always enlisted gods in their campaigns. What is new is the speed and scale at which this manipulation travels. A misleading quote, a doctored image, a sermon clipped into a meme can circle the globe before breakfast, reinforcing tribal lines with every share. The result is a world in which people who pray to the same deity cannot agree on the meaning of mercy.

World Religion Day, then, risks becoming ceremonial theater, a polite pause before the shouting resumes. Yet dismissing it would be too easy, and too convenient for those who benefit from the chaos. The day still carries an inconvenient message, that faith traditions, stripped of political costumes, often converge on the same moral ground. Do not kill. Do not steal. Care for the poor. Speak truth. Restrain your power. Remember that you are not the center of the universe.

These principles are profoundly unhelpful to movements built on ego, dominance, and spectacle. They resist being monetized. They slow down the machinery of rage. They insist that dignity is not a limited resource.

To take World Religion Day seriously in 2026 is not to pretend that everyone will suddenly hold hands. It is to acknowledge that belief systems can either anesthetize conscience or sharpen it. They can excuse cruelty or expose it. They can sanctify walls or dismantle them.

The choice is not between religion and secularism, or between left and right. It is between faith as a tool for self-examination and faith as a license to dominate. Between belief as a call to humility and belief as a costume for power.

In an age where Trumpism sells certainty and hate offers instant belonging, the older, harder path of compassion looks almost subversive. It lacks the drama of enemies and the comfort of simple answers. It demands listening, apology, restraint. It demands admitting that no flag, no party, and no doctrine has a monopoly on truth.

World Religion Day does not solve our problems. But it exposes the lie that hatred is inevitable and that division is destiny. It reminds us, quietly and stubbornly, that faith was never meant to be a throne. It was meant to be a mirror.

#eBook Mating center by Frank Belknap Long

The lovely woman approaching him on the travel strip was non-sex-privileged, he could tell by her attire but she looked at him boldly. As she came abreast of him she stumbled, and he instinctively flung out his arm to catch her. The feel of her body against his sent a shock through his system.

Mating center

She was trembling also, and she whispered strange words to him. "It is breaking down! Can't you feel it? The love instincts are returning—" "No," he protested.

She clung to him, grinding her body against his. "Love me," she whispered. "I know you want me. I can see it in your eyes." He tried to push her away.

Frank Belknap Long Jr. born April 27, 1901 and died January 3, 1994, was an American writer of horror fiction, fantasy, science fiction, poetry, gothic romance, comic books, and non-fiction. Though his writing career spanned seven decades, he is best known for his horror and science fiction short stories, including contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos alongside his friend, H. P. Lovecraft.

In Public Domain
First Published 1961
Ovi eBook Publishing 2024

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Marx cousins #020 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

Groucho Marx attempts to seduce Karl Marx’s beard,
only to be met with a scathing analysis of capitalism
disguised as a poorly-aimed spittoon.

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NATO’s cracks that will never heal by Thanos Kalamidas

Whether Trump ever invades Greenland or not is almost beside the point. The damage is already done. The sentence has been spoken, the thought normalized, the unthinkable turned into a cocktail-party hypothetical. That alone should terrify anyone who still believes NATO is a sacred pact rather than a fragile agreement duct‑taped together by fear, memory and fading habits of trust.

NATO was never just a military alliance. It was a psychological contract. A vow that certain lines would never be crossed, certain ideas would never even be entertained. You don’t joke about annexing allies. You don’t float trial balloons about carving up friendly territory like a bored emperor scanning a map for his next hobby. You don’t treat sovereign partners as real estate listings. Once you do, the alliance stops being a family and becomes a hostage situation.

And that is the real wound, not to NATO’s tanks, not to its budgets, not even to its readiness reports but to its spine. Trust is the only weapon NATO has that cannot be manufactured. Missiles can be built. Soldiers can be trained. Strategies can be rewritten every decade. Trust, once poisoned becomes a slow, expensive disease that no summit communiqué can cure.

For seventy-five years NATO sold itself as predictability in an unpredictable world. A boring machine of consensus, paperwork, shared drills and mutual defence clauses written in the dry language of lawyers and the wet ink of history’s blood. Its power was not drama but reliability. You knew who was on which side. You knew the rules. You knew that if the worst happened no one would suddenly decide that alliances are optional and borders are merely polite suggestions. Now that certainty is gone.

When the leader of the alliance’s most powerful member casually questions the value of NATO flirts with abandoning it or toys with the idea of territorial acquisition from a partner, something fundamental collapses. Even if nothing happens. Even if it was “just rhetoric.” Even if the administration changes and a more civilized tone returns. The crack remains. Because allies do not listen only to what you do. They listen to what you consider doing.

Every European capital heard the message loud and clear, the United States is no longer a constant; it is a weather system. Sometimes sunny. Sometimes violent. Sometimes destructive. Always unpredictable. You can negotiate with an enemy. You can deter a rival. But you cannot build your survival strategy around a roulette wheel disguised as a superpower.

So NATO today exists in a strange limping state. Officially united. Practically nervous. Publicly loyal. Privately preparing for betrayal. Defence ministries are no longer asking how to coordinate with Washington; they are asking how to survive without it if necessary. Not out of ideology, but out of instinct. And that instinct is deadly to alliances.

Once partners begin planning for abandonment, cooperation turns transactional. Solidarity becomes conditional. Meetings become performances. Statements become theater. The famous Article 5 starts to read less like a guarantee and more like a clause written in disappearing ink.

Some argue that NATO has survived worse. Vietnam. Iraq. Trump before. Yes. But this is different in one crucial way: this time the threat is not disagreement over policy. It is disagreement over the very idea of alliance itself. The suggestion that loyalty is negotiable. That treaties are temporary. That partners are burdens unless they pay rent. That logic is not diplomacy. It is protection racket economics. And once that logic enters the bloodstream of global politics, it does not politely leave.

Even if future American presidents wrap themselves in Atlantic flags and recite speeches about shared values, European leaders will remember. Militaries will remember. Intelligence agencies will remember. The maps will be redrawn quietly; budgets shifted silently, doctrines rewritten in cautious language that translates to one brutal sentence: trust no one fully.

NATO will continue to exist, of course. Bureaucracies are immortal. Logos outlive principles. There will be summits, group photos and carefully choreographed smiles. But the soul of the alliance, the assumption that some things are simply unthinkable, has been punctured.

Greenland, in this context, is not geography. It is symbolism. It represents the moment when alliance stopped meaning “we stand together” and started meaning “we stand together unless something better comes along.” That is not an alliance. That is a marketplace. And marketplaces do not inspire soldiers to die for each other.

The tragedy is that NATO does not collapse with an explosion. It erodes. Quietly. Politely. With press releases and diplomatic language and carefully chosen words that hide the rot underneath. One day the building is still standing, the flag still flying, the anthem still playing, yet everyone inside knows the foundation is cracked and the exit signs are suddenly very important.

Trust, once lost, does not return with elections. It returns, if ever, with decades of consistent behaviour, humility, and restraint. Three qualities modern geopolitics treats as weaknesses.

So no, the real danger is not American troops landing in Greenland. The real danger is that NATO has already learned to imagine it. And once an alliance can imagine its own betrayal, it has already begun to die.