The quiet exit by John Kato

America has left Iraq; not with helicopters disappearing from a burning embassy roof, not with Saddam Hussein statues collapsing under television cameras, but quietly, administratively, almost bureaucratically. The last American troops have gone, and Washington has closed another chapter of its extraordinary Middle Eastern adventure.

That quietness may be the most important part of the story. For more than two decades, American power has been the enormous, sometimes hated, sometimes necessary shadow hanging over Iraq and much of the Middle East. Now that shadow is retreating. Washington insists this is a transition from a wartime coalition to a normal bilateral security relationship. Baghdad calls it sovereignty. Iran-backed militias call it victory. The Kurds are looking at the empty space where American air defences used to be and wondering who fills it.

Everybody has a different vocabulary for the same event: America is no longer prepared to be the region's permanent security guard. And that changes everything. The fantasy that the United States can simply leave the Middle East and the Middle East will politely continue behaving as before is precisely that, a fantasy. Power does not disappear because a superpower removes its soldiers. Power moves. It leaks into the streets, the ministries, the militias, the oil fields and the negotiating rooms.

Iran understands this perfectly. Turkey understands it too. Saudi Arabia understands it. Israel understands it. And Iraq, after years of being the battlefield on which other people's ambitions collided, now has to discover whether sovereignty means actually controlling what happens inside its borders.

That is the uncomfortable question. The Iraqi government has been trying to bring armed factions under state control, but the most powerful Iran-aligned groups have resisted disarmament or attached conditions to it. The deadline for militia disarmament has already been pushed into 2027. So America leaves behind not an empty battlefield but an unfinished political equation.

And here is the great irony: the American military presence was supposed to be temporary, yet its disappearance creates a permanent question. Who now prevents one regional power from becoming too powerful? The answer, increasingly, will be: nobody.

Or rather, everybody. Iran will seek influence. Turkey will protect its interests in northern Iraq. Saudi Arabia will watch Iranian expansion with suspicion and calculate its own response. Iraq will attempt to balance all three while preserving its own independence. None of these actors needs Washington to give permission anymore. They will bargain directly, threaten directly, trade directly and, when necessary, confront directly.

This is not necessarily a recipe for war. It could produce something more complicated and potentially more interesting: a Middle East forced to negotiate its own balance of power. But there is a price for every new order. America's presence was destructive, controversial and frequently disastrous. The 2003 invasion created consequences that still haunt the region. Yet American power also provided a security architecture, however imperfect, that smaller actors could sometimes exploit or hide behind. Remove the architecture and suddenly everyone must calculate the risks themselves.

That is the real meaning of the quiet exit. Washington may believe it is leaving Iraq behind. Iraq, however, is not leaving American history behind. Nor is Iran. Nor Turkey. Nor Saudi Arabia. The American century in the Middle East may not have ended with a dramatic defeat. It may simply have ended with America deciding that the bill was no longer worth paying. The danger is that somebody else will happily pick up the cheque.

High Priestess #Poem & #Painting by Nikos Laios

 

Shall the high priestesses
Even speak to us again?
Will they ever return to the
Sacred alters and temples,
Valleys and groves?

Are we still caught in
The spell of this rude
Semitic God,
His Prophets
And his saints?

Shall we continue to
Kiss the hands of
Decrepit old men
On their golden
Thrones proclaiming
That they are the voices
Of a Middle Eastern God?

Shall we ever
Wake up from
This hallucination?

We have banished
Women for too long now
From the sacred places.

I walk through the ruins
Of Grecian temples
And ask, shall the
High priestesses
Ever speak to
Us again?

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With a digital painting from Nikos Laios

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Check Nikos Laios' eBOOK, HERE!

An alliance with fine prints by Kingsley Cobb

The reported decision by the Trump administration to exclude Britain, France and the Baltic states from a Pentagon-led meeting on NATO’s future is not merely another diplomatic quarrel. These are not peripheral countries wandering into the wrong room. They are long-standing members of the alliance, important military contributors and, in the case of the Baltic states, countries living directly beside the security threat NATO was built to deter.

And that is precisely why the symbolism matters. NATO was never supposed to operate like a nightclub where the owner decides who is fashionable enough to enter. Its strength was supposed to come from institutional permanence: an attack on one member concerns all, military planning is shared, commitments survive elections and governments change. The whole point was to make security less dependent on the personality, mood or immediate interests of whoever happened to occupy the White House.

Now that principle increasingly looks negotiable. The emerging American approach appears to favour smaller circles of cooperation built around particular objectives and particular governments. We have already seen the language of coalitions of the willing gaining prominence elsewhere in Washington's foreign policy. The logic is simple enough: work with those who agree, exclude those who hesitate, reward those who cooperate and make everyone else understand that access is conditional.

That may produce faster deals. It may even produce impressive photographs. But security is not a shopping list. A military alliance is valuable precisely because its members cannot easily be separated into today's useful friends and tomorrow's inconvenient ones. The deterrence comes from the expectation that the coalition will still exist when the crisis arrives, not merely when everyone agrees with Washington's latest policy.

There is another problem. Exclusion creates its own politics. If Britain, France or the Baltic countries can be pushed outside an important NATO discussion today because they disagree with Washington on a particular matter, every other ally begins asking the same question: What happens when it is our turn?

That question can be more damaging than any formal withdrawal. Alliances depend not only on weapons, bases and intelligence. They depend on confidence. A country must believe that consultation means something, that its contribution matters and that today's disagreement will not suddenly transform it from ally into suspect.

The danger is therefore not that NATO disappears tomorrow morning. It is something more subtle: NATO becomes hollowed out while remaining perfectly alive on paper.

The irony is almost painful. NATO leaders reaffirmed collective defence and Article 5 at the Ankara summit in July, while the alliance simultaneously committed to a more European contribution to its own defence. NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte has explicitly described the future as a stronger European role inside a still-transatlantic alliance.

That should be an opportunity for maturity, not fragmentation. Europe is already being pushed toward greater responsibility. Fine. Let Europe carry more of the burden. Let America demand greater defence spending, more ammunition production and stronger European military capabilities. Those are legitimate debates.

But demanding that allies become stronger while treating some of them as second-class participants is a different proposition.

The great historical achievement of Western security was never that Washington could gather a convenient group around a table. It was that countries with different governments, histories and interests built a structure capable of surviving disagreement.

Turn that structure into a collection of temporary friendships and the alliance acquires fine print. And once allies start reading the fine print, deterrence starts becoming a matter of trust. That is a dangerous currency to spend.

The Aegean mirage by Thanos Kalamidas

For years, if not decades, centuries and definitely going back to WWI, the West has been selling the same comfortable fantasy about the Eastern Mediterranean, Greece and Turkey are difficult neighbours, NATO keeps them talking, diplomats keep the temperature down and therefore everything is under control. It is a beautiful fantasy. It is also becoming dangerously detached from reality.

Whenever Ankara raises the temperature, Athens is advised to remain calm. Whenever Turkish ambitions collide with Greek sovereignty, Greece is encouraged to show restraint. Whenever the Aegean becomes another theatre of strategic pressure, European diplomacy discovers its favourite word: dialogue.

Dialogue is wonderful. Unfortunately, it does not define maritime boundaries, defend sovereignty, or limit strategic ambition. While everyone has been congratulating themselves on the Mediterranean’s supposedly calm waters, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been building something considerably more ambitious, a strategic network extending far beyond traditional Western alliances, deep into the Gulf and South Asia.

The emerging defence relationship involving Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan is not simply another diplomatic handshake. It is part of a broader Turkish effort to multiply its strategic options, cultivate regional partnerships and reduce dependence on any single geopolitical bloc.

This does not mean Turkey has abandoned NATO; that interpretation would be simplistic. The far more intriguing development is precisely the opposite: Ankara appears increasingly comfortable moving through several strategic worlds simultaneously.

NATO when NATO is useful. Regional partnerships when they are useful. Transactional diplomacy when that is useful. Strategic autonomy when nothing else will do.

And why shouldn't Turkey act this way? The West has spent years teaching its allies that permanent guarantees are rarely as permanent as they sound. Ankara has simply learned the lesson on its own terms.

Greece, however, is travelling in another direction. Athens has invested heavily in Europe, international law, multilateral institutions, and the rules-based international order. Its assumption of the rotating presidency of the UN Security Council temporarily places Greece at the centre of global diplomacy, reinforcing the image of a nation seeking security through institutions rather than geopolitical improvisation.

And here lies the uncomfortable contradiction; Greece is asked, occasionally pressured, to believe in international rules while Turkey demonstrates just how much room there is for a powerful regional state to operate outside them.

The Aegean, therefore, cannot be reduced to another quarrel over islands, territorial waters, continental shelves, or energy resources. Those disputes are real but beneath them lies a much larger confrontation between two fundamentally different visions for the Eastern Mediterranean.

Athens wants a region governed by European principles and international law. Ankara wants the freedom to define its strategic environment through power, bilateral arrangements, military capability, and regional influence.

These visions can coexist for a time, but they cannot be assumed to be compatible forever. This is where the Western approach becomes increasingly absurd: Turkey is "too important" to confront. Turkey controls geography. Turkey matters to NATO. Turkey matters for migration. Turkey matters in the Black Sea. Turkey matters to the Middle East.

Fine. Turkey matters.

But Greece matters too. Europe cannot endlessly demand that Greece be the adult in the room while treating Turkish strategic experimentation as merely sophisticated diplomacy. Athens should show restraint. Athens should avoid provocation. Athens should compromise. Athens should understand Ankara's security concerns. But where is the equivalent expectation of Ankara?

A security system cannot survive when restraint is demanded from one side while strategic flexibility is celebrated on the other.

Greece has every right to insist that international law actually means something. Defending sovereignty does not become nationalism simply because somebody across the water dislikes the argument.

This distinction is vital, as NATO’s southern flank is beginning to look less like a single strategic structure and more like two different geopolitical philosophies temporarily occupying the same map.

There may still be one alliance, and there may still be one NATO headquarters. Yet underneath the institutional rhetoric, Athens and Ankara are preparing for vastly different futures. Greece is tying its security to Europe, international law, and multilateral diplomacy. Turkey is constructing a wider, more transactional regional network where alliances overlap, interests shift, and strategic autonomy is treated as an objective in itself.

The West can continue pretending that these trajectories are perfectly compatible; Greece should not. The Aegean is not an empty blue space between two NATO flags. It is Europe's south-eastern frontier, a strategic corridor connecting the continent with the Black Sea and the Middle East, where sovereignty, energy, migration, and military power collide.

The dangerous European habit of treating Greek sovereignty as an inconvenient detail whenever Turkey becomes strategically useful must end.

The Aegean does not need another sentimental speech about friendship between neighbours. It needs Europe to understand that peace is not maintained by endlessly asking one side to swallow every strategic challenge in the name of stability. Peace requires boundaries. Peace requires rules. Peace requires consequences when those rules are broken.

Above all, peace requires recognising that Greece is not NATO's inconvenient southern relative waiting for permission to defend its interests. Greece is Europe. The Aegean is Europe.

The real Mediterranean illusion is not that Greece and Turkey disagree, everybody knows they do. The illusion is that disagreement automatically guarantees stability. It does not. The waters may still look calm from Brussels, but beneath them, the tectonic plates are shifting. Sooner or later, Europe will have to decide whether it wants to keep admiring the surface or finally look underneath.

Fika bonding! #130 #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.

For more Fika bonding!, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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The nuclear gun on the wall by Gabriele Schmitt

The nuclear threat was always there and that is precisely what makes Vladimir Putin’s latest warning about Kaliningrad so unsettling. Nuclear weapons did not suddenly appear in the Kremlin’s arsenal because the war in Ukraine became difficult. They have been sitting in the background throughout the conflict, like the loaded gun on the wall of a badly written political thriller. What has changed is that Putin has now pointed at it.

Speaking at the Valdai Forum, Putin said Russia would use “all weapons” at its disposal if Kaliningrad or other Russian territory were directly attacked, explicitly leaving nuclear weapons within that formulation. His warning followed a Russian diplomatic message to NATO concerning the possibility of the Baltic exclave being isolated. NATO has rejected the suggestion that its activities threaten Kaliningrad.

That distinction matters. A threat is not an intention, and an intention is not an action. But nuclear politics has never depended entirely on what leaders intend. It depends on what others believe they might do.

And that is where the danger begins. Kaliningrad is an awkward geographical fact: Russian territory wedged between Poland and Lithuania, both NATO members. It is strategically important precisely because geography has turned it into a potential pressure point between Russia and the alliance. Moscow sees NATO military activity around the Baltic through the prism of encirclement. NATO sees Russian military power in Kaliningrad through the prism of deterrence and defence. Each side can therefore interpret the other's precaution as preparation for aggression.

This is how security dilemmas become machines that manufacture their own justification. Putin's argument is familiar. Russia does not intend to attack Europe, he says, but if Russia is attacked, Russia will respond with everything available. He has also warned that the world is living through a dangerous moment and that increasingly uncompromising confrontation could reach a point where events become impossible to reverse.

The uncomfortable question is not whether Putin genuinely believes this logic. It is what happens when two nuclear-armed sides construct their security around assumptions about what the other side might do.

Ukraine has already demonstrated something the Kremlin would rather not acknowledge: wars do not proceed according to the neat timetable of the people who start them. A conflict intended to produce a particular political result can become prolonged, expensive and unpredictable. Weapons improve. Targets expand. Red lines multiply. Political rhetoric becomes progressively more dramatic because retreat becomes harder to explain.

Then comes the nuclear vocabulary. Nobody should panic because Putin has mentioned nuclear weapons. Panic is precisely the wrong response. But neither should Europe become so accustomed to nuclear threats that they become background noise. Normalising such language is itself dangerous.

The real nightmare is not necessarily a deliberate decision to begin a nuclear war. It is miscalculation: an incident in the Baltic, a military exercise misunderstood, a drone strike, a naval confrontation, a political leader believing the other side will back down. Once nuclear weapons enter the calculation, the distance between accident and catastrophe becomes terrifyingly short. Europe therefore needs something less theatrical than another exchange of threats. It needs discipline.

Russia must understand that nuclear intimidation cannot become a routine instrument of diplomacy. NATO, meanwhile, must make its defensive intentions unmistakable while maintaining credible deterrence. Communication channels matter as much as missiles. So does political restraint.

Because the most frightening sentence in Putin's latest intervention was not “nuclear”. It was the suggestion that nobody can be certain destructive weapons will never be used. That is the truth everybody already knew. Now everybody has heard it aloud.

The integration mirage by Sabine Fischer

There is something deeply revealing about the language surrounding Italy’s new school decree. It is called integration. It is presented as common sense. It promises equal opportunity, better language learning and an end to so-called “ghetto classrooms.” Yet somewhere between the political slogan and the school gate lies the uncomfortable question: when does integration stop being integration and become assimilation by decree?

Italy’s Council of Ministers has approved measures banning face coverings such as the burqa and niqab during school activities and introducing a 30 percent ceiling for certain foreign pupils in first-year classes. The government says the classroom limit concerns students without adequate Italian and is intended to prevent concentrations that make integration harder. The decree also provides additional language support and measures involving parents who face serious language barriers.

There is nothing controversial about expecting a child to learn the language of the country in which that child attends school. Language is the bridge between the classroom and society. A child who cannot understand the teacher is not being integrated; that child is being left behind.

But bridges are built by opening roads, not by moving the destination. The danger begins when nationality becomes an administrative category for deciding who belongs in the classroom. Italy's own figures illustrate the absurdity of treating “foreignness” as synonymous with educational isolation: students without Italian citizenship represent roughly 11.6 percent of the country's total school population, while the new rules target particular categories of pupils with limited Italian and different educational backgrounds.

A classroom is not a demographic spreadsheet. Children do not arrive carrying the political arguments of their parents. They arrive with backpacks, homework, football cards, mathematics problems, anxieties, friendships and the extraordinary capacity children possess to become Italian, Swedish, French or anything else without first asking permission from a ministry.

And here is the great irony: the best integration usually happens precisely where separation is least visible. Put children together, teach them together, make them speak to one another, argue with one another, play with one another and eventually grow up together. That is how a society creates citizens rather than parallel communities.

The face-covering question is different and deserves its own serious discussion. Schools need to be places where teachers can communicate with pupils and where identities can be established when necessary. A democratic state has legitimate reasons for requiring faces to be identifiable in certain circumstances. But turning a relatively specific educational problem into a symbol of national civilization risks transforming the classroom into a theatre for cultural warfare.

That is the moral mirage here. The government says it wants to prevent “ghetto classrooms.” Fine. Then invest in teachers, language education, smaller classes, preschool access, counselling and support for families. Italy's decree does contain funding for additional language activities, which is considerably more constructive than simply drawing a demographic line across the classroom.

But integration cannot be legislated into existence by percentages. Nor can Italian identity be protected by teaching children that some classmates are first and others are conditional members of the same national story.

Europe has spent decades discovering that exclusion is remarkably efficient at producing the very alienation that politicians later use as evidence that integration has failed. The cycle is brutally simple: separate people, complain that they do not integrate, separate them further, then announce that separation proves the failure of integration.

A school should be the place where that cycle is broken. Italy does not need less Italian identity. It needs an Italian identity confident enough to teach Italian without fearing the presence of another language, confident enough to defend equality without turning clothing into a cultural battlefield, and confident enough to understand that tomorrow's Italians may have parents who arrived from somewhere else.

The real test of integration is not how efficiently a government can make newcomers resemble yesterday's Italians. It is whether tomorrow's children can become Italians without having to erase where they came from first.

The blind side by Polly Hobbs

Privilege is often discussed as a matter of money, status or access. But its most interesting consequence is not what privilege gives people. It is what privilege can prevent them from seeing.

This is the uncomfortable territory of standpoint epistemology: the idea that social position influences what people are able to know. It does not mean that every member of a privileged group is ignorant, or that every marginalised person automatically possesses superior wisdom. It means something more subtle and, therefore, more troubling. Experience determines which parts of reality demand our attention.

A person who moves through society without regularly encountering discrimination may sincerely believe discrimination is exaggerated. Someone whose gender is rarely questioned may regard sexism as an abstract political argument. A wealthy person may understand poverty statistically while remaining remarkably unfamiliar with the humiliations produced by having no money. The absence of an experience can become an experience of its own: the experience of never having to notice.

This is how privilege can become epistemological. The privileged individual does not necessarily wake up every morning thinking, “I belong to the dominant group.” Quite the opposite. Privilege works best when it becomes invisible. A person enters a building without wondering whether there is a ramp. Applies for a job without considering whether a name will influence the response. Walks through a neighbourhood without calculating whether the police might interpret their presence differently. Speaks in a meeting without wondering whether their authority will be questioned because of their identity.

The world simply appears normal. And that is precisely the problem. “Normal” is rarely neutral. It is often the social arrangement experienced most comfortably by those who occupy the centre. Everyone else learns the geography of the margins.

The danger is particularly obvious in political debate. Dominant groups frequently demand evidence of injustice in forms that reproduce their own blindness. Where is the statistic? Where is the individual case? Where is the undeniable proof? Yet the people demanding proof may be the very people least exposed to the phenomenon being measured. They are asking the blind spot to provide its own visibility.

Of course, standpoint is not a replacement for evidence. Experience can illuminate reality, but it can also distort it. Marginalised people are not magically objective, and privileged people are not intellectually incapable of understanding injustice. The point is not to replace one hierarchy of knowledge with another. It is to recognise that knowledge itself has social conditions.

This should make everyone, not merely the privileged, more intellectually humble. The real challenge is learning to ask what one's position makes difficult to see. What experiences are missing from one's understanding? Which complaints sound exaggerated simply because they describe a world one has never had to navigate? Which institutions appear fair because they have been designed around one's own circumstances?

A society becomes more intelligent when it stops confusing familiarity with truth. Privilege, then, is not simply an advantage in the distribution of wealth, opportunity or power. It can also be an advantage in deciding what counts as reality. And that may be its most durable power.

The uncomfortable lesson is that ignorance does not always look like ignorance. Sometimes it looks like common sense. And common sense, occasionally, is simply privilege speaking in a very confident voice.

AntySaurus Prick #138 #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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The algorithmic empire by Thanos Kalamidas

The United Nations has discovered artificial intelligence. The machines, unfortunately, discovered the United Nations some time ago. That is the uncomfortable joke behind the grand discussions now surrounding AI governance. World leaders gather in New York, pronounce the words security, responsibility, humanity, and international cooperation, and then return to governments that still struggle to regulate yesterday’s technology. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is moving at a speed that makes diplomatic procedure look almost geological.

The problem is not that the UN is discussing AI, it absolutely must. The problem is that much of the conversation risks being conducted through the mental architecture of the twentieth century: identify the dangerous technology, establish rules, create monitoring mechanisms, and hope sovereign states behave themselves. It worked, imperfectly, for nuclear weapons. AI is something else entirely.

A nuclear weapon requires extraordinary physical infrastructure. AI requires computing power, energy, data, talent, chips, and access to networks. These resources are not distributed remotely equally.

The UN itself has acknowledged this enormous capacity gap. Its current discussions include proposals for stronger access to infrastructure, skills, data, and technology, whilst a recent UN report highlighted fragmented financing for AI capacity-building in developing countries. The first Global Dialogue on AI Governance was deliberately designed to bring the Global South into the conversation.

That is welcome. But participation is not the same thing as power. A country can have a seat at the diplomatic table and still have no semiconductor industry, no hyperscale data centres, inadequate electricity grids, limited research capacity, and little influence over the companies developing the most powerful models.

This is where the AI debate becomes uncomfortable. The great technological powers are not merely developing products; they are building the infrastructure upon which everyone else may eventually depend. The danger is therefore not only that AI might become autonomous, malicious, or uncontrollable. The quieter danger is dependency.

The Global South could become the customer, the data source, the testing ground, and eventually the labour market of an AI economy designed somewhere else. That would be an old colonial pattern wearing a new digital suit.

This is why the UN cannot allow AI governance to become another exclusive conversation among governments, technology corporations, and the countries that possess the money to build the machines. António Guterres has warned that power is increasingly shifting towards a handful of private corporations and individuals, whilst global institutions still reflect an older distribution of power. That observation goes directly to the heart of the AI problem.

There is also a delicious contradiction here. Some governments argue that global regulation would interfere with innovation. Others demand stronger international rules. Technology companies themselves increasingly acknowledge that no single country or company can manage the technology alone. At the same time, the companies possessing the greatest technical capacity remain overwhelmingly concentrated in a small number of states.

So who exactly is writing the rules? And for whom?

AI governance cannot simply become nuclear non-proliferation with better software. The objective should not merely be preventing catastrophic misuse by powerful states; it must also prevent the creation of a permanent technological hierarchy in which a handful of countries own the intelligence and everybody else rents it.

The UN therefore needs to talk about infrastructure with the same seriousness with which it talks about ethics. Electricity, broadband, data centres, computing capacity, education, open research, local-language systems, and technical skills are not peripheral development issues, they are the foundations of technological sovereignty.

Otherwise, we may succeed spectacularly in regulating the future whilst leaving most of humanity without any meaningful ownership of it. That would not be global governance. It would simply be global dependency with a United Nations logo on the paperwork. The machines will not care who writes the rules. People should.

The violence we normalize by Mia Rodríguez

October 2 is the International Day of Non-Violence, chosen because it is the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi, the man who demonstrated that political resistance does not require becoming what one is resisting. The United Nations created the day to promote a culture of peace, tolerance, understanding and non-violence.

There is something almost brutally ironic about celebrating that principle in 2026. We live in an age in which violence has become political language. Not merely the violence of wars, bombs and guns, but the violence of intimidation, humiliation, militarised policing, political threats and the deliberate creation of fear. Violence has become a performance, and politics has discovered that frightened people are easier to mobilise than hopeful ones.

America offers perhaps the most disturbing illustration. Under Donald Trump, immigration enforcement has become one of the central theatres of this politics. ICE has expanded arrests on a massive scale, while federal immigration officers have increasingly become visible instruments of a campaign built around deportation and deterrence. In July and August, ICE recorded more than 50,000 arrests per month, according to figures reported this year.

And then there are the guns. In September, an ICE officer shot Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, a Venezuelan man, in Austin, Texas, during an immigration enforcement operation. Perez was subsequently placed in federal custody while seriously wounded; his attorney disputed important elements of the government's account. The circumstances remain under investigation.

That is precisely where a democratic society should stop and ask a very simple question: When did enforcement become synonymous with force?

Nobody seriously argues that a state does not need laws, borders, police or immigration procedures. A functioning society requires them. But the existence of authority does not give authority a moral blank cheque. The state possesses extraordinary power precisely because an individual does not. That imbalance creates an extraordinary responsibility.

And violence does not begin with a bullet. It begins with language. When political leaders describe opponents as enemies, immigrants as invaders, protesters as criminals and disagreement as betrayal, they are not simply choosing colourful vocabulary. They are lowering the psychological barrier against violence. Once another human being has been transformed into an enemy category, cruelty becomes easier to justify.

This is why the International Day of Non-Violence matters. Not because repeating the word peace once a year will magically make politicians peaceful. It matters because non-violence is not passivity. Gandhi understood that perfectly. Non-violence can be confrontation without hatred, resistance without revenge, courage without brutality.

The alternative is frighteningly simple: answering violence with greater violence until nobody remembers who started it. Police officers deserve protection. Migrants deserve human dignity. Protesters deserve lawful assembly. Citizens deserve security. Government deserves legitimate authority. None of these principles cancels the others.

That is the point. A democracy is not measured by how efficiently it can frighten people. It is measured by how firmly it can exercise power without losing its humanity. The political temptation of violence is that it produces immediate images of strength. A uniform. A convoy. A raid. A detention centre. A wall. A weapon. A frightened crowd. It looks decisive on television.

But strength and brutality are not synonyms. The real test of power is whether those who possess it can restrain themselves. On October 2, the world will once again remember Gandhi. Perhaps this year we should remember something more uncomfortable: non-violence is not an antique philosophy belonging to another century. It is a warning to our own.

Because when governments teach citizens that fear is strength, when police power becomes spectacle, and when political leaders discover that anger is easier to sell than compassion, violence no longer needs to be declared. It simply becomes normal. And once violence becomes normal, democracy has already begun to lose something much more important than an argument. It has begun to lose its soul.