Secretary General Mark Rutte was not appointed to flatter strongmen or to audition for a role in anyone’s campaign theater. He was put there to do the unglamorous, grinding work of balance: to keep quarrelsome allies at the same table, to translate clashing national anxieties into shared strategy and to remind powerful presidents that alliances are not stage props for personal mythmaking. NATO does not need a hype man. It needs an adult.
Rutte comes from a political culture that prizes coalition over coronation. Dutch politics is built on compromise hammered out in small rooms, not on messianic speeches delivered to roaring crowds. That instinct matters now more than ever, when the temptation to reduce geopolitics to personality cults is strong and profitable. The Secretary General’s job is not to echo fantasies about resurrected empires or civilizational crusades but to dilute such fantasies before they curdle into policy.
Donald Trump’s approach to the world has always been operatic: villains, heroes, betrayal, dominance, and the promise of historical conquest framed as “winning.” It is emotionally efficient and intellectually thin. Empires, in this worldview, are real estate deals with flags. Treaties are invoices. Allies are either freeloaders or extras. Reality however is slower and far more stubborn. It is made of supply chains, domestic politics, treaties written in dull legal language, and publics that panic when coffins come home.
Rutte’s task is to stand in the middle of that messy reality and insist that power is not a solo performance. NATO is a pact of equals in theory and of nervous, unequal democracies in practice. Some are large, some are small, some rich, some fragile, but none are ornamental. The alliance survives precisely because no single leader, however loud, is allowed to turn it into a personal empire-building franchise.
There is a certain drama-loving segment of global politics that expects international officials to pick sides like fans in a stadium. Boo this leader, cheer that one, repeat the slogans, amplify the spectacle. That is not leadership; it is surrender to noise. Rutte’s credibility depends on his refusal to become a ventriloquist’s doll for any capital, including Washington. Especially Washington, when Washington flirts with dangerous simplifications.
Trump’s rhetoric about borders, conquest, and domination is not merely crude; it is strategically corrosive. It invites adversaries to test red lines, reassures autocrats that democracy is just another costume, and unsettles smaller allies who depend on predictability more than bravado. When such rhetoric comes from the White House, the Secretary General’s responsibility is not loyalty to the speaker but loyalty to the structure that prevents the world from sliding into competitive paranoia.
That structure is boring by design. It is committees, procedures, coordination, and endless statements that sound like they were written by cautious lawyers. Boring keeps soldiers alive. Boring keeps miscalculations from becoming funerals. Boring is the thin wall between rivalry and catastrophe. Anyone who tries to turn NATO into a gladiator arena for personal grudges misunderstands its purpose or deliberately cheapens it.
Rutte is not required to be charismatic in the Trumpian sense. He is required to be stubborn, predictable, and mildly allergic to spectacle. His success should be measured not by how often he trends on social media, but by how rarely allied capitals panic at three in the morning. His loyalty should be to the idea that security is shared or it is fiction.
The uncomfortable truth for empire dreamers is that the twentieth century already demonstrated how those dreams end, in ruins, tribunals, and textbooks written by survivors. The twenty-first century does not need a sequel with better cameras and worse judgment. It needs custodians of restraint.
If Rutte ever forgets that, he will have failed his office. If he remembers it, he will disappoint those who crave drama but reassure millions who simply want to live without the constant background hum of impending war. That is not weakness. It is civilization’s quiet maintenance work, the kind that rarely earns applause but keeps the lights on.
A Secretary General should be a referee, not an echo. The whistle matters more than the roar.
History will not grade him on how gracefully he smiled beside presidents, but on whether the alliance remained functional when egos swelled and facts were bent. Neutrality between democracies is not cowardice; it is architecture. Without that architecture, speeches become weapons and tweets become strategy. No institution designed to prevent war should ever be run like a reality show finale. The stakes are permanent.
There is a particular fantasy that returns whenever a democracy grows tired of itself, the fantasy of the strong hand, the swift order, the permanent exception. In the American version it often arrives dressed as nostalgia, a red hat pulled low over the eyes, promising to restore a greatness that was mislaid somewhere between a factory closing and a cable-news panel. Donald Trump did not invent this longing but he has learned to speak it fluently, the way a con artist learns the local dialect before borrowing your watch.
Dictatorships as history has shown do not usually announce themselves with trumpets. They slip in under the door on the back of an emergency. A war, conveniently distant and morally simplified, works well. So does a convulsion at home, cities burning on television, the flag folded into a costume of panic. Martial law is not sold as a crown but as a crutch. Just until the leg heals, the story goes. Just until order returns. History, which has the weary tone of someone who has heard this joke too many times, suggests that the crutch tends to become the limb.
Trump has spent years rehearsing the language of the exception. He speaks of enemies as if they were weather systems, unavoidable and destructive, requiring extraordinary measures. He speaks of elections with the affection of a landlord discussing termites. The details shift, immigrants one season, journalists the next but the melody is consistent, only I can fix it and what I need to fix it is fewer rules.
One can imagine the menu of justifications laid out like laminated options at a roadside diner. A foreign adventure, preferably against an adversary, who can be reduced to a headline villain, would do nicely. Iran is a familiar antagonist in the American imagination, a silhouette already stenciled onto decades of rhetoric. Even the more surreal suggestions that occasionally drift through political conversation, Greenland, Canada, Mexico, share the same narrative utility. They are places that can be pointed to on a map while the word “security” is spoken slowly, reverently as if it were a prayer.
If war is the blunt instrument, domestic unrest is the scalpel. A serious breakdown of order in one state or one city can be magnified into a portrait of national collapse. Minnesota, invoked lately in anxious shorthand, becomes less a place than a symbol, proof that the country is slipping its leash. Cameras linger on flames. The causes are compressed into a single word, chaos and the solution appears, already ironed, in a uniform.
Once the uniform is in the room elections begin to look untidy. Ballots are fragile things, made of paper and trust. They do not photograph well beside armored vehicles. It becomes easy to postpone them “temporarily,” the way one postpones dental appointments, until postponement becomes habit. Freedoms, too, start to feel inefficient. Speech is noisy. Assembly is unpredictable. The temptation to trade them for silence, for straight lines and early bedtimes, grows stronger the longer the emergency lasts.
The real tragedy is not that such a transformation would be dramatic but that it would be banal. Racism and prejudice, already threaded into the fabric of daily life, would be elevated from private vice to public policy, from muttered belief to printed directive. Torture would be renamed with a bureaucratic euphemism, as if pain were merely a clerical error. Imprisonment would expand to fill whatever space the imagination allows. Death would become statistical, a column in a report, a number that can be lowered with the right font.
Supporters would insist that none of this was the plan. The plan, they would say, was safety. The plan was to feel less afraid. And for a moment, perhaps, they would. Fear is exhausting; obedience is restful. There is a relief in being told that complexity is a luxury and doubt a weakness. There is a seduction in watching someone else carry the burden of decision, even when that someone is carrying it toward a cliff.
What makes this fantasy durable is not Trump himself, who is too loud to be subtle and too thin-skinned to be timeless. It is the part of the American psyche that mistakes domination for competence and cruelty for candor. The part that hears the word “dictator” and imagines efficiency instead of funerals.
The question, then, is not whether one man dreams of ruling without interruption. Many men do. The question is whether a country, bored with its own arguments and bruised by its own failures, will decide that the noise of democracy is more frightening than the silence that follows it. Democracies rarely die screaming. More often, they sign themselves away, one emergency at a time, grateful for the quiet.
Something unsettling has happened in the heart of Minneapolis, something that should make every American uneasy, regardless of politics. In broad daylight, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, Alex Pretti, was shot and killed by federal immigration agents. At first the administration offered a narrative of danger: he allegedly approached officers with a handgun and posed a threat. But a closer look at the footage and firsthand accounts tells a profoundly different story, a story that raises serious questions about power, truth and fear in modern America.
One witness, mere feet away, provided a sworn affidavit that upends the official account. According to their testimony, Pretti did not brandish a weapon. He did not charge at officers. Instead, he held a camera, attempting to help a woman who had been pushed to the ground during an ICE operation, when agents tackled him and opened fire. The witness states bluntly that federal agents “just started shooting him” and that the government’s own description is “wrong.”
But what turns this from an ordinary tragedy into a national reckoning isn’t just the violence of the act itself. It’s the testimony that followed: the same witness said they do not feel safe returning home because they fear federal agents may come after them. That someone who saw violence firsthand now fears reprisals, not for committing a crime but for bearing witness should jolt us out of complacency.
To grasp the gravity of this statement, we have to ask ourselves, since when does observing law enforcement make someone a target? When did the act of watching, of recording, of testifying, become a risk to one’s own safety? And why does this witness feel that the very institutions meant to protect justice are the ones to be feared?
It’s not an abstract fear. According to reports, other bystanders were taken into federal custody in the aftermath of the shooting. Tear gas was deployed around apartment buildings. Local efforts to document the event were met with resistance. These are the instincts not of a transparent inquiry, but of a frightened power trying to control the narrative and suppress dissent.
The witness’s fear reflects a broader collapse of trust that has seeped into American civic life. For decades, there has been a growing chasm between federal authority and public confidence. This event does not stand alone: it is part of a pattern of aggressive federal enforcement tactics under the guise of immigration control, justified by rhetoric of law and order but with scant oversight and accountability. When the government repeatedly frames its own citizens as potential threats, when elevated officials double down on disputed claims, when local authorities are pushed aside in favor of federal narratives, the social contract that underpins democracy begins to fray.
What makes the Minneapolis shooting so troubling isn’t solely the loss of life, it’s how that loss is now being contested on the battlefield of public perception. In any healthy democracy, a witness who says “I saw the truth” is protected, not feared. A legal process that hinges on witness accounts should encourage testimony, not stifle it. Yet here we are, seeing a witness retreat into fear, worried about federal agents “looking for” them simply for bearing witness to an unsettling moment.
This moment forces a reckoning about power and accountability in America. A government that cannot tolerate scrutiny that treats dissent like a threat does not deserve the mantle of democracy. A society in which citizens fear those who enforce the law more than those who break it is not just unsafe; it is unmoored from the principles that define the republic.
And yet, even as this witness expresses fear, there is another instinct that emerges: resilience. In their affidavit and recorded statements, there is not just fear but determination, disgust at what they saw but also a clear sense that truth matters. This is not the posture of a coward, but of someone confronting a crisis of authority head-on. In documenting injustice, they embody a quintessentially democratic act, speaking out when power goes unchecked.
The Pretti killing should be more than a headline and a flashpoint for protests. It should be a call to examine not just the actions of a handful of federal agents, but the broader climate that allows and perhaps even encourages such actions to occur without accountability. A democracy that sacrifices truth for convenience, that substitutes fear for transparency, is no democracy at all.
In that sense, the witness’s fear is a warning sign and their courage, a reminder. We must choose what kind of society we want to be: one where citizens can return home in peace after witnessing violence, or one where the act of speaking truth to power becomes reason to fear the very institutions sworn to protect us.
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! For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!
The Oriyomi Hamzat miracle is a testimony that things can change in Nigeria; it’s a testimony that huge money is not necessary to win elections in Nigeria.
An advertisement line calls Nigerians to “kill corruption before it kills them.” That line is too late for today because corruption has already killed Nigeria. What remains is for the whole nation to be wiped out. And that is at the door.
But despite the destruction corruption has inflicted on Nigeria, I recently saw a glimmer of hope in Ibadan. A radio broadcaster in Ibadan gave hope recently when he held a political rally in Ibadan. It was reported that some people had called on him to contest the governorship of Oyo State. When most of us saw his advertisement, we thought he was joking. He is not that rich, but his radio station is very popular. Agidigbo FM is a darling of the masses. At the coronation of the late Oba Moshood Olalekan Balogun a few years ago, I saw him as he approached the Mapo Hall venue of the coronation, where he was one of the comperes. A group of women ran after him, calling him “the people’s father.” It was my first time seeing him in person even though I had heard of his Agidigbo radio. In his recent campaign at the Liberty Stadium, he rubbished everything people have thought of elections in Nigeria and the nature of the electorates. The man, Oriyomi Hamzat, said when the Accord Party, the platform he hoped to use in the 2027 elections, met him some three days before the campaign asking that he give the people “money for food” so they would attend the rally, he told the party officials he didn’t have to give the people “money for food” because they were the ones that invited him and he expected them to attend. When the officials asked him if he had bought “aso ebi,” the popular traditional uniform people wear for occasions, he told them it was not necessary. Hamzat said somebody in the group bought his own dress and gave him 2000 pieces to give to people. It was reported that the Oyo State government rejected his request to use the government’s commercial buses to deliberately frustrate the campaign. But despite that, many people sent buses to him, even from outside the state, to convey people to the venue of the campaign. We had the first premier of the western region, Obafemi Awolowo, who never bribed the electorate with money; Oriyomi Hamzat is bringing that back again.
Oriyomi Hamzat, Founder, Agidigbo FM, Ibadan, Oyo State
It was a very big and pleasant surprise at the Liberty Stadium venue of the campaign, as the whole stadium was packed to capacity. It surpassed every permutation. The attention sent signals that a new dimension is being added to the political contest, at least in Ibadan and Oyo State. It showed that the electorate in Nigeria can make good choices, that they can vote for credible candidates if their votes are allowed to count. It was these people who invited Oriyomi Hamzat to enter the political fray. The campaign was tagged “Oyo npemi,” Oyo beckons. How did this miracle take place? Can we call it a miracle? Oriyomi Hamzat had demonstrated a heart for the people in his activities without meaning to enter into politics when he did them. He was entirely focused on the masses. He redefined radio broadcasting. While other media continue to focus on the elites, as they have for so long, he went to the downtrodden. He went to the homeless, featured their predicament, and sometimes helped raise money to give them homes. He highlighted the many teenage pregnancies that the government is unaware of, let alone attending to. There was a case of a teenager who was gang raped by about ten people in Oja’ba market in Ibadan who didn’t even know who the father of her baby was. She couldn’t say which of them was responsible for her pregnancy. There was the case of another who had two boyfriends at the same time, and the two of them were contesting her pregnancy. Oriyomi Hamzat attacked the welfare issue like only Obafemi Awolowo had done before him.
His radio station became so popular among the poor populace that they stayed up till the early morning hearing tales of hitherto voiceless people. And perhaps because of the heightened affliction of the current government since 2023, with people hoping desperately for a change, they looked out for Oriyomi Hamzat. Hamzat is very bold. He took sides with the poor people. At a funfair organized by the former wife of the Ooni of Ife, Naomi Silekunola, Agidigbo FM was the media partner. Naomi Silekunola organized a funfair in December 18, 2024, for poor children to have some money and fun on Christmas. Silekunola promised 500,000 Naira to 5,000 children. Poor parents in Ibadan trooped to the Islamic High School venue as early as 5 am, which resulted in a stampede. Some parents threw their wards over the fence when they couldn’t enter through the gate. In the end, 35 children died. Oriyomi Hamzat threw himself into the rescue operation and was stripped to his boxer pants by hoodlums who had trooped into the venue. Naomi Silekunola and Oriyomi Hamzat were arrested and charged by the police for negligence. Eventually the case against them was withdrawn. Rather than diminish, the popularity of Oriyomi Hamzat soared among the masses. He has demonstrated again an unparalleled love and compassion for the people. The unfortunate accident that attended the funfair gave him a shock, which landed him in the hospital.
Yet, elites in the city still felt governorship of Oyo State was beyond Oriyomi. He is not rich, and he is not among the heavyweights who have been throwing their weight around for many years. The elites doubted Oriyomi, but the people went to invite him. He answered them, and despite all obstacles in his way, the response of people at the campaign was massive. In no time, the same elite began to ask, “Where is this Oriyomi Hazmat heading for?” They could not doubt the massive embrace. What is the lesson here? Nigerian electorates know what and who they want. They are not as daft as the elites who have been swindling them for many decades think. When they see good candidates, they know them. I’m also one that wrote down the masses of Nigeria as incapable of choosing credible candidates, but the invitation of Oriyomi Hamzat by the masses beat me hollow. I’m sure the established politicians are running helter-skelter now, bemoaning the sudden and unexpected woe that the entry of Oriyomi has become for them. He has no doubt changed the political calculation in Oyo State. If this trend continues, Oriyomi will certainly win the state for the Accord Party.
The Oriyomi miracle is a testimony that things can change in Nigeria; it’s a testimony that huge money is not necessary to win elections in Nigeria. It is proof that honest and good character can be appreciated by ordinary Nigerians. It shows that this monster called corruption that has killed Nigeria can also be tamed. I’m absolutely convinced that Nigeria can say no to corruption. Everybody does it, and it has become so ingrained, it’s something you have to do to get by. If everybody is doing it, why not you? If leaders are doing it, why not you? In a situation where life has been snuffed out of the average Nigerian, especially by the obnoxious policies of the Bola Tinubu administration, what can the average man do? Stealing is not comfortable, and scholars who have studied it have said that, given a choice, nobody will want to steal because it is a more painful and hazardous job than working. There are some Scandinavian countries today where prisons are closing up because the courts are not getting criminals to convict again. Those countries have very high taxes, like Tinubu wants to take in Nigeria. In the case of those countries is that almost everything is free. There is a job for everybody, and therefore stealing has become rare. In the case of President Bola Tinubu, Nigerians are very doubtful that anything meaningful will get to the masses even after the huge taxes in his so-called tax reforms, some of which amount to double taxation. The money that will be so collected will end up in the pockets of the politicians whose mouths enlarge like hell every now and then to swallow the people’s commonwealth. Nigerian politicians have never had it better under any regime than that of Bola Tinubu.
When former President Olusegun Obasanjo established the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), there was hope that with a body solely set up to arrest and prosecute corrupt officials and jail those convicted, corruption would be tamed. The leader of the team that started the EFCC is now the National Security Adviser to President Bola Tinubu, who is at the forefront of negotiating with bandits but for the threat of President Donald Trump of the US. A catcher of thieves who became a negotiator with those thieves. Bandits are plain armed robbers who, by the law of the nation, should be killed. But Nuhu Ribadu and his cohorts in the administration want them celebrated and begged. Can anybody satisfy a thief? How much do you want to give a thief who makes many millions in stealing at each strike? Yet, EFCC and its twin agency, the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC), are still very necessary; let’s hope that the nation will get incorruptible leaders and operatives to run them. The current chairman of the EFCC, Olanipekun Olukoyede, said a while ago that his operatives take bribes from suspects they investigate. The courts add their own corruption to the difficult task of fighting corruption. Many cases have been lost that some senior lawyers say shouldn’t have been lost but were lost through compromises of judges. Some cases drag on for eternity until they are forgotten or the suspects die.
But there is yet one angle that is worth considering. Oriyomi Hamzat has convinced me that Nigerians want good government, that Nigerians know their enemies, that they also know their friends, and that, encouraged, Nigerians can forsake corruption. The angle is to let Nigerians be the watchman of his brother and of his sister. It is to employ the services of WhatsApp groups. There is hardly any secondary school class or university class that does not have WhatsApp groups. It is carrying the battle to the elites in the groups they keep on WhatsApp. An old secondary school in Lagos, one of those that have produced very influential Nigerians, pioneered that. There was one of them who held an important post in the national legislature. When he was spending money like it was going out of fashion, his classmates on WhatsApp called him out. They knew his salary, and they questioned where he found the huge money he spent to celebrate a birthday of one of his parents and where he got the money to buy a very expensive car for his wife. The fight was so intense that material from their WhatsApp group was made to filter out, and they became subjects of national discourse. WhatsApp groups should not be a place for stroking the egos of members, as it has become in Nigeria. They must be used to fight corruption. They must be used to demand and ensure accountability. Government must ensure that as a policy.
The government will make a law that will compel all organizations, private and public, to publish the salaries of all their staff. There will be no exemption. The allowances will also be included. It is Nigerians who live with these people who know their lifestyle and who can call them to order. The published salaries and allowances will serve the purpose of this WhatsApp watchdog, and it can also be used by whistleblowers. It will ensure that no Nigerian lives above his or her means. While this reorganization of the moral fabric of the nation goes on, the EFCC and ICPC laws must be upgraded to make corruption punishable by death. I guarantee you in a few years corruption will be wiped out. It will be amazing how Nigerians will fight the corrupt in their midst. Nigerians are capable of making good choices. That is the lesson Oriyomi Hamzat’s massive and successful outing in Ibadan teaches.
First Published in METRO
***********************
Tunde Akande is both a journalist and pastor. He earned a Master's degree in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos.
There it was in black and white, a letter from Attorney General Pam Bondi to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz that seemed like another in a long line of procedural squabbles over sanctuary jurisdictions and immigration enforcement. But tucked into the usual Republican litany about cooperating with federal immigration authorities was a line that ought to make any lover of democracy sit up, “Minnesota’s voter registration practices must comply with federal law.” Beneath the sterile legalese lies a dangerous insinuation that the state’s electoral processes are somehow fundamentally flawed, that federal authorities might “remedy” this perceived flaw, and that such remedies might extend well beyond respectful adjudication into the realm of authoritarian intervention.
To parse this moment properly, we have to recognize that the idea of federal oversight of elections is not novel. The Voting Rights Act, Section 5 preclearance, and various civil rights statutes have long sought to ensure that elections are free and fair, particularly in places with histories of discriminatory practices. But the context in which the Trump administration and its allies have resurrected these claims is unmistakably pernicious: weaponizing concerns about voter fraud, a phenomenon so rare it could be studied with a magnifying glass and still elude detection into a bludgeon aimed at the very machinery of democratic participation.
Bondi’s invocation of “compliance with federal law” is dressed up in the sober language of statutory obligation but it functions rhetorically as an augury. It signals to the base that the 2024 midterms are not merely a contest of ideas, but a battlefield on which the rules themselves are up for grabs. It suggests that the federal government, under the stewardship of a president who has openly hinted, threatened, and fantasized about ways to remain in power beyond constitutional limits, might soon be demanding not just documentation of compliance, but an overhaul of state practices that stand in tension with the priorities of the national party.
And let’s be clear about what’s at stake in Minnesota. Unlike the caricature of a “sanctuary state” bent on flouting federal authority, Minnesota has a proud tradition of inclusive civic engagement. The state embraces automatic voter registration, pre-registration for teenagers, and same-day registration, practices that expand the franchise rather than restrict it. To paint these practices as suspect is less about legal compliance and more about political intimidation.
This is where the larger pattern becomes impossible to ignore. For months, the Trump campaign and its allies have doggedly pursued the narrative that the 2024 election, particularly in key battleground states, will be rife with fraud, chaos, and illegitimacy. The campaign’s complaints aren’t confined to rhetoric at rallies or bombastic tweets; they have metastasized into quasi-legal challenges, calls for federal intervention, and now, letters from state and federal attorneys general asserting that local electoral policies somehow violate nebulous interpretations of “federal law.”
The genius of this maneuver, from the perspective of those who wish to undermine democratic norms, lies in its plausibility. Who could argue against “compliance with federal law”? No sensible observer wants election chaos or illegal disenfranchisement. But by couching the demand in these neutral terms, Bondi’s letter sets the stage for a slippery slope, federal audits, subpoenas, even court actions that could delay certification of results or justify aggressive oversight of local election boards.
Consider how easily this could escalate. A Republican attorney general accuses a state of lax voter registration standards. The Department of Justice or an administration-aligned surrogate swoops in, demanding access to registration databases, challenging local procedures in federal court, threatening injunctions. Suddenly, a state’s ability to run its own elections, a pillar of federalism, is under siege, not because of demonstrable fraud, but because of a manufactured crisis that serves political ends.
This is why the language of the letter matters. It is not merely a request for clarification or a routine legal nudge. It is an opening salvo in what increasingly resembles a campaign to nationalize election oversight under the guise of legal compliance, while in reality undermining public confidence in electoral outcomes that might not go the Trump ticket’s way.
It is tempting to dismiss such moves as bluster, the sort of overwrought political posturing that dissipates as soon as the spotlight moves on. But we would be foolish to underestimate how rapidly erosion of democratic norms can occur when each small step is justified as “ensuring compliance” or “protecting the integrity of elections.” We have seen this playbook before: distrust the media to the point where nothing published can be believed; sow doubt about mail-in ballots until participation itself is suspect; cast aspersions on “rigged” systems until the very act of voting becomes a fraught exercise in skepticism.
The genius of authoritarian playbooks whether in Turkey, Venezuela, or Hungary, is not that they overthrow democracy in a single stroke, but that they normalize incremental encroachments until citizens no longer recognize what has been lost. A letter about voter registration practices might seem innocuous in isolation, but it is part of a broader narrative that delegitimizes local control and invites centralized scrutiny when it suits partisan aims.
Minnesota’s governor would be well within his rights to respond with measured concern, not just defending the state’s practices, but warning that such interventions set a perilous precedent. Because the real threat is not voter fraud; it is the subversion of trust in the very processes that make self-government possible.
When federal officials start telling states how to run their elections under the pretext of “compliance,” we are no longer talking about enforcing the law. We are talking about shaping power. And at that juncture, democracy itself becomes the collateral damage.
“Sometimes it seems as if he had the faculty for shattering, in ways hard to understand, the relationship to reality of all those who entered his presence.” - Historian Joachim Fest from the biography HITLER
The war-spasm warps the surreal head and ponderous body, and twists tighter and tighter again and again the frozen heartof the Ice Giant. The giant is prepared for the battle of Ragnarok.** The giant vows to slay the champions of sanity and to eliminate every life form from the whole of Middle Earth.
From the foul and diseased mouth of the giant, spills the River Styx. The waters wash and drool, thick and greasy with oil and blood.
In the Ice Giant’s mind the volcano of self-hatred erupts. From every orifice spit and gush enormous serpents of molten fire. The snakes of vengeance.
Any life touched is immediately a life lost. Lands are laid waste. Darkness descends. Growing stops. The atmosphere universally suffocates and is globally drowned by torrents of black rain. Only a single cause is known for the anomaly of sticky black rain.
Self-deceit is the worst lie. It cannot be forgiven. Because the love of self-loathing must not be confessed.
The Ice Giant will perish, and the whole of Middle Earth destroyed with him. Any atrocity, no matter how extreme, to keep the secret hidden! Although the secret of the shadow—for shame!—has always been in plain view. Or so says the blind sycophant to the deaf secretary. “The efficiency of death defines progress.”
*Gotterdammerung, the twilight of the gods, is the end of the world and Ragnarok is the final mega-battle,the apocalypse, of Norse mythology.
David Sparenberg is a humanitarian & eco-poet, international essayist and storyteller. He has published four OVI eBooks in 2025, including the most recent, Eco Woke, andTroubadour& the Earth on Fire. OVI eBooks are Free to download, as contributions to global democracy, literacy and cost-free education. While David Sparenberg lives in he Pacific Northwest, he identities not only as a World Citizen but a Citizen of Creation. Democracy first, Biocracy to follow.
Don't miss David Sparenberg's latest eBook Troubadour and the Earth on fire , Download for free, HERE!
The International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust arrives each year like a bell rung in heavy fog, solemn, necessary and too easily muffled by the surrounding noise. It asks for stillness in a culture addicted to velocity, for moral clarity in an era that treats history as a buffet. We say “never again,” and then we check our phones. We light candles and then return to our preferred arguments, already warmed up, already rehearsed, already eager to recruit the dead into the service of the living.
The Holocaust is not an abstract warning label affixed to civilization; it is a record of what happens when prejudice becomes policy and fear acquires a bureaucracy. Its victims were not symbols. They were accountants who forgot umbrellas, children who hated homework, women who sang badly, men who worried about their blood pressure. Their destruction was industrial, imaginative in its cruelty, and justified with the paperwork of reason. To remember them is not merely to grieve. It is to accept that modernity itself, with its forms and files and railways, can be turned into a weapon.
Yet remembrance today is conducted in a strange hall of mirrors. On one side, anti-Semitism has learned new costumes. It wears the shabby coat of conspiracy, the tailored suit of “just asking questions,” the casual hoodie of meme culture. It thrives online, where old libels are given new fonts and the Jew is again cast as puppet master, pathogen, parasite. Synagogues need guards. Jewish schoolchildren learn evacuation drills not unlike those practiced in places officially described as war zones. We repeat “never again,” while the vocabulary of “again” quietly repopulates the streets.
On the other side stands the government of Israel, draped in the language of historical trauma while practicing a politics of permanent emergency. Under Benjamin Netanyahu, memory has been hardened into armour. The Holocaust is invoked not as a human catastrophe but as a strategic asset, a moral credit card that never expires. Gaza becomes a laboratory for disproportionality, and suffering is measured with a calculator that only counts on one side of the border. Civilian death is described as unfortunate weather, an unavoidable climate condition of security.
To criticize this is not to deny Jewish history; it is to refuse its conscription. The dead of Auschwitz did not perish so that other civilians might be flattened with cleaner technology and better press briefings. Their absence does not grant moral immunity. Memory is not a shield that turns missiles into virtues. When a state claims eternal victimhood, it risks becoming deaf to the sound of its own boots. Trauma, left untreated, has a habit of reproducing itself in unfamiliar faces.
What makes this moment particularly grotesque is the forced binary it offers. Condemn anti-Semitism, and you are told to accept every action of the Israeli state as a sacred reflex. Condemn the destruction of Gaza, and you are accused of flirting with the ghosts of European hatred. The argument is arranged like a narrow hallway with armed guards at both ends. Choose your execution. Nuance is smuggled out in ambulances, bleeding quietly on the floor.
Holocaust remembrance should expand our capacity for moral imagination, not shrink it into a tribal coupon. It should train us to recognize early symptoms: the language that dehumanizes, the jokes that rehearse contempt, the policies that turn neighbours into numbers. It should make us suspicious of leaders who speak in absolutes, who confuse strength with righteousness, who treat empathy as a strategic vulnerability. The lesson of that catastrophe is not that one people must forever be untouchable, but that no people should ever be.
Anti-Semitism and the devastation of Gaza are not competing tragedies in a grotesque Olympics of pain. They are connected by the same human failure, the inability to see the other as fully real. The conspiracy theorist and the missile technician share a deficit of imagination. Both reduce lives to abstractions, whether as demonic plots or acceptable collateral. Both rely on distance, one psychological, the other physical. Both are fed by the comforting lie that safety is achieved by shrinking the circle of who deserves to live.
A commemoration that avoids this connection becomes a museum with excellent lighting and no exits. We admire the exhibits, nod gravely, and then return to a world organized around newer, faster justifications for cruelty. The victims of the Holocaust do not require our silence; they require our courage. Not the theatrical courage of slogans, but the tedious, socially expensive kind that insists on holding two truths at once: that Jews are still endangered by hatred, and that Palestinians are still endangered by power.
The dead cannot correct us. They cannot object when their memory is rented out to excuse the inexcusable. That responsibility belongs to the living, who, inconveniently, must think. To honour the victims is not to fossilize their suffering into a political tool, but to let it interrogate our present behaviour with unbearable precision. Remembrance, if it is honest, should make us less comfortable, less certain, less willing to trade one group’s terror for another’s. Other
The countdown clock to the midterm elections is no ordinary ticking timepiece, it’s the rhythmic heartbeat of a nation wrestling with itself. With each passing day, the anxiety under the political surface ripples outward and for President Trump and the constellation of cronies orbiting his administration, the news is becoming less of a whisper and more of an approaching storm. What once might have been dismissed as political noise is now a crescendo of consequences that voters can no longer ignore.
From the outset of his tenure Trump was the combustion point of American political life. His ventures into the presidency were animated by spectacle, fire, and a devotion to disruption. But as the midterms approach, the glow of incendiary rallies and combative tweets has faded into the harsh glare of legal scrutiny and public skepticism. The fantasy of irrepressible power is colliding with the stark realities of courtrooms and subpoenas, legal jeopardy that cannot be spun away with a late-night monologue or a rally-stage slogan.
Voices clamoring for accountability, whether through impeachment or vigorous judicial action, are not the ramblings of fringe spectators. They are echoes of a deepening unease across the electorate. Even beyond party lines, Americans are beginning to ask the same fundamental question: Can the machinery of democracy withstand a presidency that repeatedly tested its boundaries?
This is not merely about partisan disagreement. The heart of the matter is whether the rule of law, so essential to the social contract, applies equally to all even to those who have wielded the highest office in the land. When a commander-in-chief and his closest allies find themselves entangled in an array of legal challenges, the nation’s collective confidence is pulled taut. It’s not just about guilt or innocence; it’s about the message sent when norms are shattered, and institutions are pressured.
The legal spotlight serves as a sobering counterbalance to political bravado. For too long, the boundary between theatrical politics and responsible governance has blurred. When you have a president whose approval ratings have teetered on division, whose rhetoric routinely inflamed cultural fault lines, and whose loyalty to democratic principles was questioned by both critics and erstwhile supporters, it’s no surprise that the judicial system has become a focal point for accountability.
Let’s be clear: the rising calls for impeachment and the increasing momentum of court cases are not politically partisan theatrics, they are democratic mechanisms in motion. These are not ceremonial gestures; they are constitutional safeguard rails meant to catch a system pushed to its limits. What’s happening is not a vendetta; it’s a reckoning.
Watching the drumbeat of legal developments, some defenders of Trump howl about persecution. Yet this is precisely where the genius of American democracy reveals itself: no one is above the law. A system that can subject a sitting or former president to legal scrutiny is not weak, it’s robust. It’s a reaffirmation that accountability is not discretionary.
There’s a broader lesson here that extends beyond individuals and party politics. The midterms represent a crossroads for the nation. Will voters choose to reward defiance and chaos, or will they signal with ballots that adherence to institutional integrity matters? The answer will shape the next chapter of American governance.
Critics will argue that courts and impeachment efforts are inherently political tools. Indeed, politics cannot be disentangled from these processes, they are, in essence, political by design. But that doesn’t make them illegitimate. It means we must scrutinize how they’re used and ensure they serve the public interest, not partisanship.
The fervor around Trump’s legal battles has polarized public opinion, but polarization shouldn’t blind us to substantive issues. If there are credible allegations that demand thorough examination — whether about abuse of power, obstruction, or other misconduct, those must be addressed openly and transparently. Citizens want accountability, not cover-ups; they want justice, not jingoism.
What’s remarkable is how the situation has exposed fissures in the political landscape. It’s not just Democrats calling for action; there are Republicans, journalists, legal experts, everyday citizens who are unsettled by how far the executive branch stretched norms. The groundswell is not merely reactive it’s reflective, a collective reassessment of what leadership means in a constitutional republic.
So when the clock ticks down to the midterms, remember it’s not just counting the days. It’s counting the patience of voters, the credibility of institutions, and the strength of democratic traditions. A nation that tolerates one set of rules for its leader and another for its citizens is a nation courting instability. But a nation that insists on accountability, no matter how uncomfortable, proclaims its commitment to enduring principles.
In the end, the midterms are more than an electoral checkpoint. They are a referendum on the very idea that in America, law and liberty go hand in hand. And whether history looks back on this moment as a restoration of democratic equilibrium or a deepened fracture depends on how the American people choose to respond as the final seconds on that clock dwindle away.
