When empires smile at each other’s madness by John Reid

There is a particular kind of silence that follows the first missiles of a war that everyone pretends was inevitable. It is the silence of diplomats suddenly “unreachable” of analysts scrambling to sound surprised, of allies staring at their phones wondering when exactly they lost control of the narrative. Imagine that silence settling over the Caribbean as U.S. forces attack and occupy Venezuela without provocation, wrapped in the usual language of “security,” “stability,” and “temporary necessity.” Now imagine Vladimir Putin watching it unfold, leaning back with a satisfied smile. Not because he cares deeply about Venezuela, but because nothing validates his worldview more than watching Washington do exactly what it condemns.

In this scenario, the hypocrisy is not a bug. It is the feature. The United States storms into yet another sovereign country confident that outrage will burn hot and then cool that headlines will move on, that sanctions will remain selectively moral. Putin doesn’t need to intervene. He doesn’t need to shout. He just needs to point, quietly, and let the images circulate. Every tank rolling through Caracas becomes a talking point in Moscow, Beijing, and every capital already tired of lectures about international law delivered from the barrel of a gun.

But the real entertainment, the kind that comes with popcorn and a front-row seat, begins later. It begins when Donald Trump, returning from ...Venezuela, with his familiar mix of bravado and grievance decides that Greenland should finally be taken seriously, not as an ally’s territory but as a prize. Not purchased politely, not negotiated slowly but invaded swiftly under the banner of “strategic necessity.” In one reckless stroke, the rules are not merely bent; they are shattered in full view of those who once believed they were protected by proximity, history, and shared values.

This is where the smile widens in the Kremlin. Because an invasion of Greenland is not just another illegal war; it is a betrayal written in bold letters. NATO allies would wake up to discover that the danger was never “out there” but embedded within the alliance itself. Friends would find themselves caught with their pants down, stunned that the red line they assumed existed was imaginary. And Putin, watching the chaos wouldn’t need to lift a finger. The West would be doing his work for him.

The tragedy here is not that strongmen enjoy watching other strongmen stumble. That has always been the case. The tragedy is how predictably this collapse unfolds when power replaces principle. For decades, the United States has insisted that its interventions are different. Cleaner. Necessary. Reluctant. Yet every bomb dropped without consequence erodes that claim. Venezuela becomes just another example filed away by leaders who no longer believe in the rules-based order because the rules were never consistently applied.

Trump invading Greenland would be the final punchline. It would confirm what critics have argued for years, that alliances under the wrong leadership are transactional illusions. That shared values can be overridden by ego. That treaties mean little when they stand in the way of spectacle. The shock wouldn’t come from adversaries. It would come from allies realizing they had been cast as extras in someone else’s reality show.

Putin’s satisfaction in such a moment would not be emotional; it would be strategic. Every fracture within NATO is a victory without cost. Every confused press conference in Europe is proof that the West’s moral authority has evaporated. Russia wouldn’t need to expand its influence aggressively; it would simply wait as the vacuum forms. Power, after all flows naturally toward absence.

And what of the global audience? They would watch this unraveling with a mix of cynicism and fatigue. Many already believe that international law is a slogan, not a shield. Seeing Venezuela occupied and Greenland invaded would not radicalize them; it would confirm their suspicions. The message would be unmistakable, sovereignty is conditional, alliances are fragile and the loudest country in the room sets the rules until it decides to break them.

This is not an argument about left or right, Democrat or Republican. It is an argument about restraint and memory. Empires fall not only because they are challenged, but because they forget why others once followed them. The smile on Putin’s face would not be about Russia’s strength. It would be about America’s willingness to abandon the very standards it once claimed to defend.

And when the popcorn is finished, when the laughter fades, the cost will remain. Not paid by presidents or generals, but by a world that has learned, yet again that chaos is contagious and that watching it happen is far easier than stopping it.

The Prince's Tale #Poem by Jan Sand

The prince rolled his eyes.
He twirled his mustache.
He emitted several sighs,
Shoulders shrugged with panache.

His palms opened to the skies.
“Memory can be slippery”, he said,
“Like mud.  Sometimes it dies.
Or then again, it may be fed
By loss.  I remember well the day
The princess spotted me, bent down,
Kissed me on the nose. Without delay
I felt panic, leaped upon her gown.
My bones creaked and grew
And in a snap, I joined humanity.
No longer I was the frog I knew.
She proclaimed love! This seemed insanity!
But, she was determined, so, we wed.
She did admit that, for a former frog
I was not too bad in bed.
She snored and slept like a log.
To be a man, I accept
Held some compensation, some surprise.
I converse like an adept
But retain an appetite for flies.”

Oil, flags and the illusions of control by Emma Schneider

If Donald Trump truly wants to “run” Venezuela and its oil, there is no clever shortcut, no artful deal, no strongman handshake that gets him there. He would have to put troops on the ground. A lot of them. And once that first boot hits Venezuelan soil, the fantasy collapses into a familiar, grinding reality: a war without clean edges, without gratitude, and without an exit strategy. It would not be a quick intervention. It would be Iraq, Afghanistan, and Korea fused into a single geopolitical nightmare, replayed in a country that has every reason to resist.

Oil makes men reckless. It has always done so. It creates the illusion that control of a resource equals control of a nation. Venezuela’s oil reserves are vast, tantalizing, and politically radioactive. But oil does not flow just because a foreign power wants it to. Pipelines need security. Refineries need workers. Ports need stability. All of that requires something far more difficult than rhetoric: legitimacy. And legitimacy cannot be airlifted in.

Venezuela is not an empty chessboard waiting for an outside player to impose order. It is a traumatized, polarized, fiercely nationalistic society that has already suffered through sanctions, economic collapse, corruption, and authoritarianism. Add foreign troops to that mix and you don’t get liberation; you get unification against you. Nothing consolidates fractured political camps faster than a foreign army claiming to know what’s best.

The idea that Venezuelans would welcome American troops as saviours is a comforting myth, mostly told by people who will never hear gunfire. Even those who despise their current leadership do not necessarily want a foreign flag flying over their infrastructure. History is unforgiving on this point. Populations can hate their rulers and still fight invaders with relentless determination. Pride survives poverty. Sovereignty matters, especially when it has been violated before.

And make no mistake: this would be an occupation, not a police action. To “run” oil means guarding wells, roads, workers, and exports across a country with jungles, mountains, sprawling cities, and porous borders. It means constant exposure to sabotage, ambushes, and insurgency. It means militias, criminal networks, and political factions all discovering that armed resistance suddenly pays very well. Every pipeline becomes a target. Every convoy becomes a headline.

Trump’s brand of foreign policy thrives on spectacle and pressure, not patience. But occupations demand patience in obscene quantities. They devour budgets, attention spans, and political capital. They require an American public willing to watch casualties mount for goals that grow murkier by the month. They require allies who are willing to be hated alongside you. And they require a commander-in-chief who can explain, year after year, why staying is better than leaving.

Iraq should have cured Washington of the belief that oil can finance its own conquest. Afghanistan should have ended the fantasy that superior firepower equals political control. Korea should remind anyone paying attention that even decades later, foreign troops can still be frozen in time, guarding unresolved wars. Venezuela would borrow the worst elements of all three: resource temptation, insurgent resilience, and long-term entanglement.

There is also the inconvenient matter of precedent. If the United States openly invades a country to control its oil, it forfeits the moral language it relies on everywhere else. Every future condemnation of aggression becomes hollow. Every lecture about sovereignty sounds transactional. Rivals would not miss the opportunity to mirror the logic elsewhere, citing America’s own actions as justification.

Domestically, such a war would rot institutions from the inside. Emergency powers expand. Dissent gets framed as disloyalty. Oversight weakens under the weight of “national security.” Wars fought for abstraction, oil markets, leverage, prestige, have a way of bleeding into civil life long after the shooting stops.

The cruel irony is that Venezuela’s collapse is real, and its people do need relief. But relief delivered at gunpoint is indistinguishable from domination. True recovery would require diplomacy, regional cooperation, economic restructuring, and time tools that are slow, frustrating, and unsatisfying to leaders addicted to decisive gestures.

Trump’s rhetoric thrives on dominance, on the idea that nations can be “run” like properties. Venezuela exposes the fatal flaw in that thinking. Countries are not assets. Oil is not obedience. And power, when applied without consent, does not stabilize, it ignites.

If troops go in, they will not be greeted by gratitude. They will inherit a war that cannot be won on television or declared over at a podium. And once it begins, no slogan will be loud enough to drown out the echo of history repeating itself yet again.

Worming #122 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

A family of worms and all their worm friends worming in new adventures.

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Nigeria after the echo of bombs by Eze Ogbu

Nigeria is drowning in fear, and the water keeps rising. From the villages of the Middle Belt to the crowded streets of the northeast, violence has become a constant background noise, so familiar that outrage now competes with exhaustion. Every attack blurs into the next, every funeral into another statistic. Yet in this grim landscape, one uncomfortable truth deserves to be said plainly, Trump’s bombs did not save Nigeria. They did not stabilize it. If anything, they poured fuel onto fires that were already burning and sparked new ones that no one seems prepared to contain.

The logic behind those bombings was seductively simple. Strike the extremists hard, crush their leadership and terror will retreat. It is a logic that flatters power and impatience, the belief that fear can be bombed out of existence. But Nigeria is not a chessboard, and its violence is not a single enemy that can be erased with airstrikes. It is a tangled web of ideology, poverty, corruption, ethnic tension, climate pressure, and state failure. Bombs can shatter buildings, but they do not untangle webs. They tear them wider.

In the short term, the explosions offered something that looked like progress. Militants scattered. Camps were destroyed. Headlines spoke of decisive action. But beneath that surface, something more dangerous was happening. Groups fractured rather than vanished. Fighters slipped across borders, blended into communities, or pledged loyalty to splinter factions even more radical than before. Violence did not end; it diversified. Nigeria did not become safer; it became more unpredictable.

Worse still, the bombings imported new terrors into the country’s already crowded nightmare. The global spectacle of foreign intervention gave local extremists exactly what they crave: validation. They reframed their cause as resistance against external aggression, recruiting not just the desperate, but the angry and humiliated. Each crater became propaganda. Each civilian death, whether acknowledged or denied, became a story whispered in markets and mosques, growing sharper with every retelling.

Nigeria’s tragedy is that it is constantly treated as a battlefield rather than a society. When bombs fall, nuance dies first. Entire regions become shorthand for terror, entire communities viewed with suspicion. The result is collective punishment by neglect. Schools close. Farms are abandoned. Young people grow up knowing soldiers more intimately than teachers. In that vacuum, extremism does not need to knock; it simply waits.

The irony is painful. The stated goal of the bombings was security, yet insecurity has metastasized. Armed groups now overlap with criminal gangs, bandits, and traffickers, blurring motives and multiplying threats. Kidnapping has become an industry. Villages pay taxes not to the state, but to whichever armed group passes through that week. Fear has been decentralized, franchised, and made resilient.

Meanwhile, the Nigerian state remains trapped in a reactive crouch, emboldened by foreign firepower but hollowed out from within. Bombs create the illusion of strength while postponing the hard work of reform. They distract from questions that truly matter: Why are security forces distrusted? Why do victims feel abandoned? Why does justice arrive late, if at all? No airstrike can answer those questions, and none was meant to.

Perhaps the most corrosive impact is psychological. When foreign bombs rain down, they send a message, intended or not, that Nigerian lives are a problem to be managed from afar. That sovereignty is conditional. That complexity is inconvenient. Over time, this erodes faith not only in government, but in the very idea that peace can be homegrown. Dependency replaces agency, resentment replaces hope.

Nigeria does not need more explosions echoing across its soil. It needs investment that does not arrive disguised as missiles. It needs schools protected as fiercely as oil interests, justice pursued as relentlessly as militants, and leadership brave enough to confront corruption with the same enthusiasm shown for war. Violence here is not a sudden infection; it is a chronic illness worsened by blunt treatment.

Trump’s bombs may be history, but their aftershocks are not. They linger in new alliances, new hatreds, and new graves. If Nigeria is to stop drowning, it will not be pulled to safety by foreign firepower. It will rise, slowly and painfully, only when fear is answered not with louder violence, but with dignity, accountability, and the radical patience that real peace demands. Until then, every bomb dropped in the name of security will continue to echo as a reminder of shortcuts taken, lessons ignored, and lives lost in a struggle that demands understanding more than destruction. And humility.

Ovi History #eMagazine #15: Joan of Arc

 

The fact that a death and not current events motivated the theme of the Ovi History issue was pure coincidence. Still, here we are; 15th issue of Ovi History and first for 2026 and that while events and the madness of the very few shakes humanity.

And yes it was the death of a controversial silver screen star, Ms Brigitte Bardot and her very politically controversial past that brought in mind Jean d'Arc whose legend lives similar to Ms Bardot presence.

St. Joan of Arc is a national heroine of France, a peasant girl who, believing that she was acting under divine guidance, led the French army in a momentous victory at Orléans that repulsed an English attempt to conquer France during the Hundred Years’ War. Captured a year afterward, Joan was burned to death by the English and their French collaborators as a heretic. She became the greatest national heroine of her compatriots, and her achievement was a decisive factor in the later awakening of French national consciousness.

Joan was the daughter of a tenant farmer at Domrémy, on the borders of the duchies of Bar and Lorraine. In her mission of expelling the English and their Burgundian allies from the Valois kingdom of France, she felt herself to be guided by the voices of St. Michael, St. Catherine of Alexandria, and St. Margaret of Antioch.

Joan was endowed with remarkable mental and physical courage, as well as a robust common sense, and she possessed many attributes characteristic of the female visionaries who were a noted feature of her time. These qualities included extreme personal piety, a claim to direct communication with the saints, and a consequent reliance upon individual experience of God’s presence beyond the ministrations of the priesthood and the confines of the institutional church.

For this issue of Ovi History, two historical fiction short stories from Lucas Durand and James O. Miller.

So,
Read the Ovi History eMagazine online HERE!
View, read it online or download it in PDF/epub format HERE!
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With the hope that you will read and learn from the articles,
do read this historic chronicle

Thanos Kalamidas

Bread, fear and the long game of power by Zakir Hall

The protests erupting across Iran are on the surface about money. Prices rise faster than wages, subsidies shrink, the currency weakens, and ordinary life becomes an exhausting exercise in calculation. Can I buy meat this week? Can I pay rent next month? This is not ideological revolt but material anxiety, the kind that creeps quietly into kitchens and shop queues. The real question, however, is whether economic anger alone is enough to destabilise a regime that has survived war, sanctions, isolation, and repeated waves of dissent.

Economic protests are dangerous precisely because they are not abstract. They do not require a manifesto or a charismatic leader. Inflation does not need translating. When affordability collapses, loyalty erodes in small, cumulative ways. People may not shout slogans about overthrowing the system, but they stop believing its promises. That erosion matters. Yet history shows that economic pain does not automatically become political rupture, especially in a state built to absorb pressure.

The Iranian system has developed a thick skin. It has learned to treat protests as weather rather than earthquakes. Security forces are experienced, fragmented protests are contained, and the narrative is quickly reframed as foreign agitation or temporary hardship. Most crucially, the regime understands that desperation does not always lead to rebellion. Often it leads to withdrawal. People focus on survival, not revolution. They work second jobs, sell assets, lean on family networks, or leave the country if they can. This quiet adaptation reduces the energy required to sustain mass mobilisation.

There is also a structural problem with protests driven primarily by affordability. They tend to be reactive rather than strategic. Anger spikes when prices jump or subsidies vanish, then dissipates when the immediate shock fades. Without a unifying political demand, these movements struggle to evolve. Bread protests can shake a city, but they rarely build the organisational backbone needed to challenge a state. The regime can offer partial relief, cosmetic reforms, or simply wait. Time is often on its side.

That does not mean the protests are meaningless. Far from it. Each wave chips away at the myth of competence. The Islamic Republic has long justified repression with a promise of stability and resistance. When it cannot deliver basic economic security, that bargain weakens. Importantly, economic protests draw in demographics that ideological movements sometimes miss: shopkeepers, pensioners, provincial workers, and lower income families who once formed a passive base of support. Their anger is not radical, but it is corrosive.

The danger for the regime lies less in collapse and more in accumulation. Economic grievances intersect with other unresolved tensions: generational fatigue, social restrictions, corruption, and a growing sense that sacrifice is unequally distributed. When people see elites insulated from inflation while ordinary citizens slide backward, resentment deepens. The protests may not articulate regime change, but they normalise dissent. They make public anger routine rather than exceptional.

Still, destabilisation is a high bar. The Iranian state remains coherent. The military and security apparatus show no signs of fracturing. There is no organised alternative power centre, no unified opposition capable of converting street anger into institutional challenge. External pressure, often assumed to be a catalyst, can just as easily strengthen the regime’s siege mentality. In this context, economic protests alone are unlikely to topple the system.

What they can do, however, is trap it. Governing becomes more expensive, both financially and politically. More resources go into control, subsidies, and damage limitation. Less credibility remains for grand ideological claims. The regime survives, but at the cost of stagnation and distrust. This is not collapse; it is decay.

The real threat is long term. A state can withstand hunger longer than hope, but not forever. If affordability continues to deteriorate, if younger generations see no future inside the system, and if protests keep resurfacing with monotonous regularity, the question shifts. It is no longer whether one protest can destabilise the regime, but whether the regime can indefinitely manage a society that no longer believes improvement is possible. History suggests that is a far more fragile position than it appears.

For now, Iran exists in a tense middle ground, neither exploding nor healing. The streets flare, quiet, then flare again. Power holds, but inspiration thins. Economic protests are not the end of the story, yet they keep writing uncomfortable footnotes. Regimes rarely fall from a single blow. They fall when endurance outpaces belief, and belief is steadily becoming unaffordable. That is the silent arithmetic reshaping Iran today.

Nuttley #45: Nuttley @ Doctor #Cartoon by Patrick McWade

Nuttley is a comic strip with Nuttley as its protagonist.
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Kahlil Gibran: The Foundations of Love by Rene Wadlow

Life without love is like a tree without blossom and fruit. And love without beauty is like flowers without scent and fruits without seed... For Love is the only flower that grows and blossoms without the aid of seasons...Love is a rose, its hear opens at dawn."

Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) the Lebanese poet, whose birth anniversary we mark on 6 January, in many ways represents the deeper spirit of Lebanon though he lived most of his life outside the country: in Paris as an art student and in the USA where he started to write directly in English. His best known book The Prophet was written directly in English.

In "My Birthday", written in Paris on the 6th of January 1908 Gibran wrote "Thus have I walked round the sun twenty and five times. And I know not how many times the moon has encircled me. Yet I have not unveiled the secrets of life, neither have I known the hidden things of darkness... Much have I loved in these five and twenty years. And much that I have loved is hateful to people, and much that I have hated is by them admired... I have loved freedom, and my love has grown with the growth of my knowledge of the bondage of people to falsehood and deceit... Love is the only freedom in the world because it so elevates the spirit that the laws of humanity and the phenomena of nature do not alter its course."

In a vision that was correct, he added in the 1908 birthday essay "And today, today I stand in remembrance as a tired wayfarer who stands mid-way on the ascending road." He died in 1931 at the age of 48. (1)

For Gibran, Love and Beauty are the foundations of existence. As he wrote in an essay which gave the title to the book "A Tear and a Smile" Then my heart drew near to wisdom, the daughter of Love and Beauty, saying 'Give me wisdom that I may carry it to humankind'. She answered 'Say that happiness begins in the holy of holies of the spirit and comes not from without.

A Tear and a Smile sums up well Gibran's attitude toward life which is always made up of contrasts: light and dark, knowledge and doubt.

How beautiful is life, beloved.
Tis like the heart of a poet,
Full of light and spirit,
How harsh is life, beloved
Tis like an evildoer's heart
Full of guilt and fear.

In "The Hymn of Man", nearly a credo of his views, he stresses the 'both/and' of contrasts:

I have hearkened to the teachings of Confucius and listened to the wisdom of Brahma, and sat beside the Buddha beneath the tree of knowledge. Behold me now contending with ignorance and unbelieving.

I have borne the harshness of insatiable conquerors, and felt the oppression of tyrants and the bondage of the powerful. Yet I am strong to do the battle with the days.

I was,
And I am.
So shall I be to the end of Time.
For I am without end.

(1) Quotations are from Kahlil Gibran A Tear and A Smile. Translated from the Arabic by H.M. Nahmad (London: William Heinemann, 1930)

Painting: Age of women by Khalil Gibran

 ***********************************

Rene Wadlow, President, Association of World Citizens

Ghostin’ #121 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

They are like neighbours we are aware of,
except we are NOT aware of and
they have absolutely nothing to do with Halloween.

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Swedish "mafia", redefines corruption and the migration crisis in Europe by Christos Mouzeviris

Recently I came across and artice in EU Observer : "From welfare to 'Wild West': The man who profited from Sweden’s refugee crisis", which is part of a series of investigations conducted by Dutch investigative collective Spit and Italian publication Altreconomia into Europe's privatised migration market across six countries: Italy, Albania, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the UK.

In this story, we learn how a former member of the progressive left in Sweden turned the 2015 refugee crisis into a lucrative business, exploiting not only the people who had fled wars and persecution with housing in Sweden, but also his own country and affecting Europe as a whole to an extend. The business exploits of Jan Emanuel, a former socialist member of the Swedish parliament, have led to a soul-searching of a welfare state that gives an outward image of offering everyone high-quality publicly funded services in the Scandinavian nation.

Sweden in the 2000s had already outsourced most of its welfare sector to private companies (wait, what?). And Emanuel's case, a reality TV star turned new-public-management capitalist, demonstrates an even deeper pivot towards the capitalisation of public services. At one point, he became Sweden's most expensive refugee contractor, billing the state €10,000 per month per child: €2,100 for the family where the child was staying.

As Sweden grappled with some ten thousand people arriving every week during the fall of 2015, the opportunities to outsource the public services to the private sector exploded. It was an unprecedented influx for a state that, up until then, had the capacity to take in only 2,500 per week.The total number of refugees reaching Sweden in 2015 was 162,877, of which 70,000 were minors. Half of the minors came alone.While Germany had received the highest number of refugees in Europe in 2015, Sweden received the most per capita.

The article continues to describe how Emanuel set up his first "business"- HVB-homes: care homes for homeless and runaway youth.Youth care is the part of the welfare sector where privatisation has penetrated deepest, with 90 percent of HVB-homes being run by private contractors.His homes were soon criticised for understaffing. One of them promised 24 hour-staffing, but in reality, the nighttime staff was Jan Emanuel himself, who dropped by once in a while.

But it all went wrong in the end, as at his care home outside Uppsala, where unaccompanied minor refugees were housed, crimes were reportedly rampant. Meanwhile, Emanuel became part of former Social Democrat PM Göran Persson's circle, which was awash with men wanting to make a quick buck, many of them securing a well-paid job in banking or lobbyism after leaving politics. One of them was Per Nuder, often referred to as ”Sweden's most well-paid lobbyist,” who helped Jan Emanuel sell his HVB company for €2.2m, whereof Nuder's own share was €1.2m.

And this criminal activity spread throughout Sweden and across Europe as well. A total of 278 new companies specialising in the care of unaccompanied minors were founded just in the fall of 2015. About 14 percent have registered criminals on the executive board, while some have ties to organised crime, such as the motorcycle mafia Bandidos.

This revealing article, should be making headlines across Europe, however our media focus on the war in Ukraine and other issues, to turn our attention away from the crimes committed by such individuals, to the detriment of all: European citizens and migrants alike. Firstly, it is very interesting that this case comes from Sweden, a country often portrayed as a model for every other European nation; low criminality and corruption, high living standards, stable economy, progressive views on social issues, including migration.

The reality is very dissimilar as it seems. If such scandals took place in Bulgaria, Greece, Romania or Italy, the European press would be quick to make them known and blame these nations for Europe's migration woes. But when it comes to Sweden, a poster child of European leftist liberalism, the story is quite different.

In addition, European media usually blame "human traffickers" of third nations in north Africa, the Middle East or Turkey for the massive influx of migrants and refugees, but never people like Emanuel, individuals with strong and good connections and part of the political fabric of each EU member state. You see if they expose these individuals, the story of the so called "refugee crisis" that Europe is facing for over a decade now, quickly becomes a money making scheme for some of the European elites and other opportunists like Emanuel, to the detriment of European tax payers, that are asked to pay the bill as always.

So how will this narrative, to maintain this multicultural model that European elites pushed for in decades hold, or the "refugees welcome" movement, when it becomes clear that it is all a hoax, a exploitative scheme and nothing more? How will our ruling elites justify their actions and policies they adopted, if articles like these expose the corruption involved?

You see, it is easier to blame Belarus or Putin for engaging in a "hybrid war" against the so called liberal free democracies of Europe, by pushing thousands of refugees into EU member states, but who is going to hold these individuals like Emanuel accountable, for the damage the do to European societies for their own profit? Who is going to deal with the mess they are creating?

And so basically Sweden is considered progressive in its policies by privatising everything, even its own welfare sector to private companies, while other countries in EU- predominantly from the South and Eastern regions, are deemed as "backwards", just because they do not follow suit. As if privatising every state company or organization, is the way forward and something that needs to be copied from everyone, if they want to achieve the high-standards of Sweden's social and economic policies.

Well, I would not think so anymore. When you pass ownership to private companies of your welfare sector, you basically give power to individuals like Emanuel to make profit, while your tax payers and citizens are asked to pay and live with the consequences. And latelly we can witness the results of such crazy policies, when Finland and Sweden boasted the highest unemployment rates in October 2025, together with Spain.

It is not "progressive" to privatize all state bodies and organizations, especially those who deal with immigration and social welfare of the state. You are technically passing all responsibility and power to private owners, who in turn can turn your country into whatever they want, according to their interests and not necessarily the interests or wishes of your citizens. I am sorry but it must be the state that is held accountable by a parliament and the in extend the voters, that should maintain all controll and accountability.

Not that in nations that do not go down this way, there is no corruption or abuse of power, but at least they are not hailed as "progressive" in a mockery of the situation and only to promote an agenda or this rampant liberalism and faux progressiveness that has gripped Europe latelly, and which our elites tried to sell to us as the new norm. In addition, the result and consequences of this madness, is quite the opposite of what one would expect.

The Sweden Democrats, is a nationalist and right-wing populist political party in Sweden founded in 1988. As of 2024, it is the largest member of Sweden's right-wing bloc and the second-largest party in the Riksdag. Sweden, after resisting the Far Right and populism for years, has finally gone down the road of many other European nations, by turning to nationalism for solutions.

And people like Emanuel, jump on the rightwing populist trend, after for years posing as Leftwing Liberals. He is now a frequent guest on podcasts, he declares that there are too many immigrants and if they can't adapt, they need to get out, as he poses admiringly next to controversial British-American influencer Andrew Tate in a TV show.

Consequently, thousands of immigrants are caught in a system that basically never cared for their welfare and only brought them into Europe to profit from their presence and desperation. They find themselves in a continent that increasingly turns against them, profiling them as "free loaders", "muslim cancer", "third world colonists that will turn Europe into their lands", as they are caught in a system that wants them to remain second class citizens, so it can blame them for everything in the future.

As for the European citizens, they are also lied to by their own governments and media, that the problem of migration is brought upon them by outside enemies of Europe like Putin, or corrupt human traffickers in poor countries and that we have no other option but to accept millions of migrants that we cannot integrate, do not want them to assimilate into our societies, thus resulting to the rise of the Far Right across our continent; something that can only mean trouble for the future for everyone in Europe; divisions, segregation, economic downturn, limitations of freedoms for both natives and immigrants, limitations of freedom of movement and ultimatelly everything that Europe allegedly stood for.

This is shamefull and not only for Sweden, but for all Europe as a whole since this is surely not a strictly Swedish phenomenon. As this article explores and states, this incidents also affect the Netherlands, the UK, Italy and Albania so we are talking a pan-European issue that has been kept under wraps by our media and politicians, so the European elites cannot be held accountable for the grave mistakes, corruption and sell-off of European wealth and indentity or values. It is time to expose them and realize that we are been lied upon. The enemy is not the migrants, but politicians and opportunists like Emanuel, who with their connections and money, are destroying our nations and continent and are themselves in turn supported or covered by powerfull elites, with suspicious, dangerous agendas.

First Published in The Eblana European Democratic Movement