THE STAIN #Thoughts by David Sparenberg

There is an ecology to war. But we do not teach it to our children. They grow alienated and enlist and never learn how the Earth is forced to suffer from the politics of organized human violence.

There  is an ecology for peace. But it is unknown throughout the nation, not conscious or considered among the masses. Media participates in this sin of omission. Public education fails,  is value-remis, grossly irresponsible, and pedantically misdirecting. The young are taught in the wrong way and for wrong reasons. Were it otherwise, we would not be in this  present crucible of affliction. And this is not the first time in a lifetime that America has motored its way along the imperial road to perdition.

Generation upon generation, power remains in the ferocious clutches of an elite of evil intention. Ordinary people become complicit with political mass murder. Everyday in which bombs explode, homes are blown apart,  survivors are maimed, lives are shattered, and the death count increases, what ought to be intolerable to a simple standard of decency,  continues unexpunged.

Willfully ignorant of the ecology of peace, we the people—banal faces hardened behind masks and turned obscurely toward shadows—roar and rage from killing field to killing field leaving dead zones in the wasteland aftermaths of hypocrisy. We call the technologies of destruction progress and go on patriotically diseased by the fatal, surreal stain of compromise, crime and corruption.

Such is the world we acquest to. Such are the deals we routinely make for petty convenience and landfill commodities. Such are the painted mirrors the civilization of lies addictively stares into.  Already we are slave labor locked behind the gates of hell! Yet we continue to pretend we are not. When is enough deception enough?

How pervasive is the cumulative trauma of time? How  indelible is the stain of the pornography of betrayal,  destruction and the political atrocities of mass murder? When do enough of us tell those who misuse us: “No more!”?

In emergency, truth defines itself in action. Awareness is prelude to what has to follow.  How many of us are sensitive still to make happen what “eventfully” has to follow? Who comprehends the reality of the equation which must be changed? Human worth is on the line. Human survival more than not is likely also. The means of annihilation are among the arsenals and political play things of those who believe in the dogma of their right to dominate populations and  administer death.

Being human is not an evolution of the physical body only. It is the empathy of shared vulnerable. It is a quality of  relatability and the diligent working of imagination with actual possibilities. There is a need in  human identity to be clean—for the stain of guilt and shame brought on by financial dispossession, moral rape, corporate plunder, and weaponized bloodshed, to be removed. There is  also a need at the core of human self-assessment for freedom. Freedom, which is interconnective from the first instance, requires honesty. Honesty is an act of courage.

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David Sparenberg is a humanitarian and eco poet, an international essayist and storyteller. He published four eBooks with OVI Books (Sweden) and the Word Press in 2025, the fourth of which was TROUBADOUR & the Earth on Fire. David will have a fifth new OVI eBook, MANIFESTO: Ecology, Spirituality & Politics in a Higher Octave, published in April 2026. David Sparenberg lives in Seattle, WA in the Pacific Northwest of the United States but identifies as an Ecotopian Citizen of Creation.

The price of distance by Jemma Norman

There is something faintly surreal about a nation attempting to redraw the moral boundaries of its democracy from thousands of miles away. The British government’s decision to cap political donations from citizens living abroad at £100,000 a year and to freeze cryptocurrency contributions altogether, arrives less like a bold reform and more like a belated admission, the system has already drifted too far into the abstract.

Money, after all, has always had a way of dissolving borders faster than politics can define them. For years, the United Kingdom has allowed expatriates, many long detached from the daily consequences of British policy, to exert significant financial influence over its elections. That arrangement rested on a polite fiction that citizenship alone guarantees a shared stake in national outcomes. But what does it mean to “belong” politically when one has not lived under the laws, taxes or social realities of a country for decades?

The case that seems to have crystallized this question is almost too on-the-nose. A single donor, a crypto-investor based in Thailand for a quarter of a century, reportedly funnelled £12 million into a political party that has been more than willing to position itself as a disruptor of the status quo. The symbolism is difficult to ignore. A political movement that thrives on the language of sovereignty and national control has, at least in part, been buoyed by wealth generated and stored in a borderless, largely unregulated financial ecosystem.

Cryptocurrency, in this context, is not merely a technical concern. It represents a philosophical one. Traditional political donations, for all their flaws, are traceable, regulated, and tethered to identifiable institutions. Crypto donations, by contrast, flirt with anonymity and opacity. They introduce the unsettling possibility that political influence can be exercised without the kind of scrutiny that democracy depends on. The government’s moratorium, then, is less about innovation than about visibility about insisting that power, if it is to be legitimate, must also be seen.

Yet the cap itself raises its own ambiguities. Why £100,000? Why not £10,000, or nothing at all? The figure feels less like a principled limit and more like a negotiated compromise, a number large enough to preserve the relevance of wealthy donors while small enough to signal reform. It suggests that the problem is not influence per se, but excess. That there exists some acceptable threshold at which distance and money can coexist without distorting democracy.

This is a comforting idea, but not necessarily a convincing one. There is also, hovering at the edges of this debate, the specter of expectation, the quiet assumption that vast fortunes, particularly those born of technology and global capital, might one day flow into British politics. The disappointment surrounding those expectations has been palpable in certain corners, as though political movements were entitled to billionaire patronage simply by virtue of ideological alignment. It is a peculiar kind of dependency: railing against elites while waiting for one to arrive.

What the government’s announcement ultimately reveals is a deeper unease about control. Who gets to shape a nation’s future? Those who live within its borders, experiencing its consequences firsthand? Or those who, having left, retain both the means and the desire to influence it from afar?

There is no easy answer, only a growing recognition that democracy, like geography, has limits. And that when those limits are ignored, the distance between power and accountability begins to look less like a gap and more like a void.

A law without mercy by Mary Long

There are moments when a law reveals more than its text, when it exposes a nation’s anxieties, its power structures and its moral boundaries. The Israeli parliament’s recent passage of legislation mandating the death penalty for Palestinians convicted of deadly terrorist acts in military courts is one such moment. It is not merely a legal development; it is a statement of intent and a troubling one.

At first glance, the justification appears straightforward, deterrence. Proponents argue that harsher penalties will discourage acts of violence. But this logic rests on a fragile foundation. Decades of research on capital punishment have failed to establish it as a uniquely effective deterrent. Violence born of desperation, ideology, or cycles of retaliation is rarely curbed by the threat of death. Instead, such measures risk deepening the very grievances they claim to address.

What distinguishes this law, however, is not just its severity but its asymmetry. It operates within a dual legal system in which Palestinians are tried in military courts, while Israeli citizens, Jewish or Arab, are generally subject to civilian courts. The new measure, in practice, applies overwhelmingly to Palestinians. Its language may gesture toward neutrality, but its implementation tells a different story. Laws do not exist in a vacuum; they inherit the inequalities of the systems in which they function.

The removal of the right to appeal is particularly stark. Appeals are not procedural luxuries; they are safeguards against error, bias, and the irreversible consequences of flawed judgments. To eliminate that safeguard in cases involving the ultimate punishment is to accept, implicitly, that mistakes are tolerable, even when they cannot be undone. In any justice system, that is a perilous position.

Israeli civil- and human-rights groups have described the law as discriminatory, and it is difficult to dismiss that characterization. When a law disproportionately targets one population while leaving another effectively untouched, the question is not simply whether it is legal, but whether it is just. The distinction matters. Legality can be engineered; justice must be earned.

There is also a broader political dimension. Policies like this do not emerge in isolation; they are shaped by and in turn reinforce a climate of fear and polarization. In such an environment, toughness becomes a political currency. Leaders demonstrate resolve through severity and dissent is often framed as weakness. Yet history suggests that measures perceived as collective punishment tend to entrench divisions rather than resolve them.

One might argue that states have the right, even the obligation, to defend their citizens against violence. That is undoubtedly true. But the means of that defense are not morally neutral. A system that appears to assign different values to different lives risks undermining the very principles it seeks to protect. Security achieved at the expense of equality is a precarious kind of security.

What makes this law particularly unsettling is its permanence. Temporary measures enacted in moments of crisis have a way of becoming fixtures. Once established, they reshape expectations and normalize what might once have seemed unthinkable. The danger is not only in what the law does today, but in what it makes possible tomorrow.

In the end, the question is not simply whether this policy will deter violence. It is whether it will bring the region any closer to a sustainable peace. Justice systems that are perceived as fair can serve as foundations for stability. Those seen as discriminatory often do the opposite. A law without mercy may project strength, but it risks eroding the very legitimacy on which lasting security depends.

George Russell: To see things in the germ, this I call intelligence by Rene Wadlow

“Are there not such spirits among us ready to join in the noblest of all adventures— the building up of a civilization —so that the human might reflect the divine order?  In the divine order there is both freedom and solidarity. It is the virtue of the soul to be free and its nature to love; and when it is free and acts by its own will, it is most united with all other life” George Russell: The Song of the Greater Life

George Russell (1867-1935) whose birth anniversary we mark on 10 April was an Irish poet, painter, mystic, and reformer of agriculture in the years 1900 to the mid-1930s. He wrote under the initials A.E. and was so well known as A.E. that his friends called him “A.E.” and not “George”.  He was a close friend and co-worker with William Butler Yeats who was a better poet and whose poems are more read today.  Both A.E. and Yeats were part of the Irish or Celtic revival which worked for a cultural renewal as part of the effort to get political independence from England.

Ireland lived under a subtle form of colonialism rather than the more obvious Empire in Africa or India where domination was made more obvious by the distance from the center of power and the racial differences.  The Irish were white, Christian, and partially anglicized culturally.  English and Scots had moved to Ireland and by the end of the 19^th century became the landed gentry.  Thus Russell and Yeats felt that there had to be a renewal of Irish culture upon which a state could be built. Yet for A.E. political independence was only a first step to building a country of character and intellect “a civilization worthy of our hopes and our ages of struggle and sacrifice”.  He lamented that “For all our passionate discussions over self-government we have had little speculation over our own character or the nature of the civilization we wished to create for ourselves…The nation was not conceived of as a democracy freely discussing its laws, but as a secret society with political chiefs meeting in the dark and issuing orders.”

For A.E. the truly modern are those engaged in meditation and spiritual disciplines, a way of reaching “the world of the spirit where all hearts and minds are one.” Unless the Celtic peoples create a new civilization, they will disappear and be replaced by a more vigorous race. An Irish identity must be open and unafraid of assimilating the best that other traditions have to offer.  As A.E. wrote“To see, we must be exalted.  When our lamp is lit, we find the house our being has many chambers…and windows which open into eternity.” As he said of Ireland, "a land where lived a perfectly impossible people with whom anything was possible."

When the Irish Free State was created in 1919, the island was partitioned, Northern Ireland remaining part of the United Kingdom.  Tensions between the Free State government and the Republicans who rejected the partition led to a civil war.  Even after the civil war’s end in 1923, Republican resistance and general lawlessness continued throughout the 1920s.  During its first decade the Free State government faced a serious crisis of legitimacy.  It had to assert the new state’s political and cultural integrity in the face of partition and the lack of social change.  In its economic structures, legal system, post-colonial Ireland looked much like colonial Ireland.  Therefore the government stressed an “Irish culture” of the most repressive and narrow form.  The Roman Catholic Church had a unique and virtually unquestioned monopoly on education in Ireland.  Popular Irish nationalism had been structured around the antithesis between Ireland and England, and this continued after independence when it was said that all “immorality” — obscene literature, wild dances and immodest fashions — came from England.  After 1923, the Catholic hierarchy fulminated most consistently and strongly  against sexual immorality, not merely as wrong, but, increasingly from the 1920s on, as a threat to the Irish nation.

To counter this narrow, state organized vision of culture, A.E. put all his energies into a revival of rural Ireland through organizing the Farmers’ Co-operative Movement.  He stressed that “the decay of civilization comes from the neglect of agriculture.  There is a need to create, consciously, a rural civilization.  You simply cannot aid the farmers in an economic way and neglect the cultural and educational part of country life…On the labours of the countryman depend the whole strength and health, nay, the very existence of society, yet, in almost every country politics, economics, and social reform are urban products, and the countryman gets only the crumbs which fall from the political table. Yet the European farmers, and we in Ireland along with them, are beginning again the eternal task of building up a civilization in nature — the task so often disturbed, the labour so often destroyed.”

Both A.E. and Yeats came from Protestant backgrounds and were deeply influenced by Indian thought reading the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads where sexual passion is the link between body, soul, and spirit.  In his only novel The Avatars, A.E. wrote “such was the playof Helen which made men realise that beauty was a divinity.  Such was the play of Radha and Krishna which taught lovers how to evoke god and goddess in each other.”  The Avatar in Hindu thought is a spiritual being which takes human form in order to reveal the spiritual character of a race to itself such as Rama, Krishna or Jesus. In Indian thought the Avatar was always a man and came alone.  But in A.E.’s story the Avatars are a man and a woman who teach the unity of all life as seen by the love between the two.  There is but one life, divided endlessly, differing in degree but not in kind.  “The majesty which held constellations and galaxies, sun, stars and moons inflexibly in their paths, could yet throw itself into infinite, minute and delicate forms of loveliness with no less joy, and he knew that the tiny grass might whisper its love to an omnipotence that was tender towards it.  What he had felt was but an infinitesimal part of that glory.  There was no end to it.”

A.E. knew that he was going against the current of the moment. As he wrote “There never yet was a  fire which did not cast dark shadows of itself.”  At the end of the novel, the Avatars are put to death, but their teaching goes on “It is this sense of the universe as spiritual being which has become common between us, that a vast tenderness enfloods us, is about us and within us.” Yet below the surface of narrow tensions in Ireland A.E. saw that “We are all laying foundations in dark places, putting the rough-hewn stones together in our civilizations, hoping for the lofty edifice which will arise later and make all the work glorious.”

He lived the last years of his life in London, outside of Irish politics. He had a close friendship with Henry Wallace who became the first Secretary of the USA New Deal in 1933 and saw in the efforts to help the depression-hit farmers under Wallace his hope for rural renewal.

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Rene Wadlow, President, Association of World Citizens

Carpond #011 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

A cacophony of singalongs, stifled yawns,
and surprisingly insightful debates
on the existential dread of a four wheeler vacuum

For more Carpond, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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Hugo Grotius: The Law of States By René Wadlow

Hugo Grotius (April 10, 1583 – August 28, 1645) whose birth anniversary we mark on April 10 played a crucial role in the development of the Law of States, in particular through two books written in Latin Mare Librium (Liberty of the Seas) 1609 and De Jure Belli ac Pacis (Law in War and Peace) 1625) Grotius is a key figure in the transition between the older feudal period and the important role of city-states and the development of a state system.

Grotius showed his intellectual talents early in life and was considered a youthful genius. At 17, in 1601, he published Adamus Exul (The Exile of Adam). In the drama, Satan is sharply critical of God’s grand design and is jealous of Adam being prepared to share in it having done nothing to bringing it about. Grotius’s Eve is a lovely, loving and enchanting partner, but is bored and ready for an apple. John Milton who met Grotius in Paris and read Adamus Exul there used many of the same themes in his Paradise Lost.

Hugo Grotius was Protestant and also wrote on religious subjects. However, he was caught up in intra-Protestant theological disputes in what is today Holland. Due to these theological tensions, he lived most of his life in Paris – 1621 to 1644 – where he served as the Ambassador of the Court of Sweden, a Protestant country. He was well thought of by the French King, Louis XIll, and Cardinal Richelieu, the power behind the King.

As the feudal period was ending, laws had to be formulated so that relations among states were not to be based only on material strength. Just as Hugo Grotius was writing at a time of a historic shift from the structures of the feudal period to the creation of states, so today there is a shift from international law in which the focus is on law concerning states to an emphasis on law with the focus on the individual citizen. Just as feudal structures and city-states did not disappear, so today, states are still present but there is a shift in focus. Today, we have an increase in multistate entities such as the European Union, the African Union, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe on the one hand and multinational corporations and individuals on the other.

The shift to the law of the person grew from the lawlessness of states during the Second World War. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights created a new focus, and it was followed by the two International Covenants on Human Rights and then the Convention against Torture, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Convention of the Rights of the Child, the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination.

The system of monitoring, investigation and reporting set up by the United Nations (UN) human rights bodies are important avenues to focus upon individuals. As then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said, “No shift in the way we think or act can be more critical than this: we must put people at the center of everything we do.” The UN’s influence is derived not from power but from the values it represents, its role in helping to set and sustain global norms, its ability to stimulate global concern and action, and the trust inspired by its ability to improve the lives of people.

UN efforts to extend international law to the practice of transnational corporations have not acquired the momentum that the focus on the rights and obligations of individuals has done. However, there is a growing emphasis on what is increasingly called “civil society”. The civil society that has emerged and evolved around the UN spans a wide range of interests, expertise and competencies. While there are UN structures for dealing with non-governmental organizations which are granted consultative status, there is no equivalent structure for dealing with transnational corporations although some have real influence on the policies of governments and the lives of people.

Today, there is a need to increase the rule of law within the world society. We need individuals with the vision and dedication of Hugo Grotius.

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Rene Wadlow, President, Association of World Citizens

The day the umbrella closed by Mathew Walls

There is a peculiar comfort in permanence. For decades, Europeans have treated NATO not merely as an alliance but as a kind of geopolitical law of nature like gravity or the North Sea wind. It is simply there. Until, perhaps, it isn’t.

The idea of the United States stepping away from NATO, once unthinkable, now flickers at the edge of plausible debate. And like all unsettling hypotheticals, it reveals more about Europe than about America.

At first glance, some might argue that such a rupture could be a blessing in disguise. Europe, long accused, not always unfairly, of strategic complacency, might finally be forced to grow up. Defense budgets would rise not out of polite commitments but out of necessity. Military coordination, currently filtered through Washington, would have to become genuinely European. In this telling, autonomy replaces dependency; hesitation gives way to urgency. A continent that prides itself on unity would finally have to prove it under pressure.

There is a certain appeal to this vision. It flatters European self-perception. It suggests that beneath the bureaucracy and the slow summits lies a dormant strength waiting to be awakened. But it is also, perhaps, dangerously optimistic.

Because what disappears with an American exit is not just funding or firepower. It is the psychological architecture of deterrence. NATO has never been only about tanks and aircraft; it is about credibility, the quiet, unspoken assumption that any aggression would trigger a response too large to contemplate. Remove the United States, and that certainty fractures. What replaces it is ambiguity, and ambiguity is the breeding ground of miscalculation.

And then there is the more unsettling dimension: unpredictability. A United States unconstrained by alliance obligations does not simply become absent; it becomes untethered. Freed from the mutual expectations that have shaped transatlantic policy for generations, American decision-making could become more transactional, more impulsive, more narrowly defined by immediate national interest.

In such a world, even far-fetched scenarios begin to feel less absurd. The notion of pressure economic, political, even territorial, applied in unexpected places no longer belongs purely to fiction. Greenland, often treated as a geopolitical curiosity, suddenly re-enters the conversation not as a joke but as a symbol of how quickly norms can erode when guardrails are removed.

Would such outcomes actually occur? Perhaps not. But the mere fact that they can be seriously imagined is itself a warning.

For Europe, the real question is not whether American withdrawal would be good or bad. It is whether Europe is prepared for the kind of world in which that question matters. Strategic independence is not a slogan; it is a burden. It requires not only investment, but political will, the willingness to make hard decisions quickly, and to accept the consequences.

For decades, Europe has benefited from a system in which the hardest edges of power were softened by partnership. If that partnership dissolves, the softness goes with it.

And so the comforting illusion of permanence gives way to something colder, but perhaps more honest, alliances endure not because they must, but because they are continually chosen.

The unsettling possibility now facing Europe is that one day, that choice might not be mutual.

Your loveliness doesn't hurt me anymore #poem by Abigail George

 

Give me Marina Tsetaeva
Give me Karin Boyes
Give me Petya Dubarova
I sent you a poem
You did not respond
I told you I would always
carry your heart with me
But it meant absolutely
nothing to you
Europe has carried you away
but all it has given me
is quiet despair
The kind of desperation
of no longer having you in my life
You never read any of my books
You turn to Jhumpa Lahiri instead
Mohsin Hamid
while I have Fatima Sydow
for courage
a fridge tart on the table
that doesn't quite make up
for your absence
Dear Sister, I'm sorry
I'm sorry for what I said
or did not say
or what I did
in childhood
in youth
Just know this
I will always
carry your heart
with me
and the scars
you have given me
for an eternity.

Sceptic feathers #126 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

Cynicism with feathers on thin wires.

For more Sceptic feathers, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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Why is America great and Nigeria not? By Tunde Akande

Nasir El Rufai, may his talent not be wasted, recently wrote an article just as he had just finished burying his mother who died while Nasir was in Tinubu’s gulag, that was widely circulated on social media. He argued with figures that the problem of underdevelopment in Nigeria is not the absence of talent but about the inappropriate reward structure. Talents go where the good money is, but in Nigeria the money is in what a friend called “man know man” or connection. That big money is not going to talents is not the major reason for Nigeria’s poverty and underdevelopment. Lack of appropriate orientation, especially among the youths, is also a major reason.

Alex Barbir and President Bola Tinubu

Nigerians have the opportunity to watch a young man, just 27, from the United States of America, Alex Barbir who has gained national and international attention as he brought succour and justice to the displaced people of Benue and Plateau states.

Alex Barbir has made a lie of the propaganda of President Bola Tinubu in his use of lobbyists to cover up the real cause and motive of insecurity in Nigeria. Alex Barbir is an American citizen and humanitarian who left the comfort of his great country to come to rural Benue and Plateau states to help poor Nigerians rebuild their homes which were destroyed by Fulani terrorists who aim to take over their lands and Islamize them. Barbir has been using his phones constructively and fearlessly to bring to the attention of the international community the real issues behind the insecurity in Nigeria.

The latest killing in Angwa Rukuba in Jos happened on Sunday March 29, 2025, during Easter worship. Barbir got to the scene immediately as he heard gunshots from his house. He provided footage to inform the whole world of what was happening. The governor of Plateau State, Caleb Mutfwang, drove there in an Armoured tank. President Bola Tinubu did not get to Jos until April 2, about five clear days later, and that attracted opprobrium from Nigerians. The President’s attitude was seen as another example of his disregard for Nigerian lives. For Alex Barbir, the killing illustrates once again that while Nigeria has enough security men on ground, there was a police station at a junction about five yards from the scene of the killing, yet no security showed up until the assailants had gone. Alex Barbir’s NGO, Building Zion, has been reconstructing houses that were burnt by Fulani terrorists in Benue and Plateau states so that those people displaced and relocated to ADP camps can return to their homes to show to the terrorists that their aim is in vain and unattainable. Alex has also been speaking truth to the government and other authorities in Nigeria. He is one voice that has made a lie of various efforts to play down the fact that the attacks are not a Christian genocide.

Alex Barbir has consistently maintained that Nigerians should not allow the terrorists to silence them as they have now. Alex has been targeted by Sheik Ahmad Gumi, an Islamist who asked the DSS to arrest him for his audacity. Gumi has become untouchable for the government of President Bola Tinubu as he was to the government of late President Muhammadu Buhari. Sheik Ahmad Gumi represents the untouchable Fulani oligarchy who have ruled Nigeria since independence and have held it down. But Alex maintains that God wants justice here on earth now and that the people must be a voice for justice. He told his audience that he was not afraid to die for his advocacy.

Alex Barbir teaches Nigerian youths many lessons in how a nation becomes great. Nigerian youths adore the US and would give anything to be there. They call America God’s own country but they don’t think about how America became great. America became great because there were many Alex Barbirs among the youths who were prepared to use their lives to serve their nation and humanity at large.

Alex Barbir is an outstanding footballer (Americans call it soccer) who won laurels. After his high school at Forsyth, he moved to Pennsylvania State University where he shone in soccer. He transferred to Liberty University in Florida, where he earned a degree in interdisciplinary studies. He could have remained in sports making money, he could have remained in corporate America making money but he decided to provide leadership in far away Benue and Plateau states when he saw how the people were being killed to take their land and Islamize them. He abandoned his cozy lifestyle and opportunities in America and came to Nigeria where he saw government failure in providing security not because government does not have the means but because government was not ready being that the President is a man pleaser who fears the Fulani oligarchy and is only interested in winning elections and retaining power to help himself and his cronies. 

Alex Barbir is not like youths who see university certificates as meal tickets. He is not like Nigerian youths who don’t think they have a role in the greatness of their own country. He is not like Nigerian youths who only think of their tribe shouting very hard on social media that their country be divided not knowing that a well built nation is an instrument that backs them up anywhere in the world.

Gumi wants Alex Barbir silenced but Alex is aware of the tremendous power that backs him up. He knows the greatness of America is enough power that Gumi Islamism cannot withstand. He keeps saying, “Trump knows I’m here.” And that is true. Gumi, the Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Muhammad Sa'aad Abubakar 111, Professor Usman Yusuf and other Islamists know the easiest way to get the North invaded by America is to touch Alex Barbir.

Be aware youths, that you are as big as your country is. If you want to remain a slave in your country and a slave in others that you may visit, continue to play ethnic and religious politics. If the early leaders of Nigeria were shortsighted and therefore played religious and ethnic politics which have caused great division in the country, should you let that continue? Now is the time to say no to this old thinking and to say no to the current leadership, all of them should emulate Alex Barbir who can speak anywhere in the world, who can get anywhere and build justice.

Alex is using crowdfunding to get his “Building Zion” going, and he is using his skills in social media to bring attention to the problem of the oppressed and to provide succour to them. A new Nigeria is not just a talk in your mouth, it is action that you take just as Alex Barbir told his youth audience in Angwa Rukuba, Jos. It is not your violent killings based on ethnic or religious emotions, it is the unity, fairness, meritocracy and equity you demand. That is why America is great and Nigeria crawling.

First Published in METRO

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Tunde Akande is both a journalist and pastor. He earned a Master's degree in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos.

Liberation by ruin by Marja Heikkinen

There is a particular strain of political rhetoric that thrives on contradiction but rarely has it been distilled into something so stark, so unsettlingly blunt, as the promise to “liberate” a nation while simultaneously threatening to bomb it into oblivion. It is the kind of statement that does not merely stretch logic, it snaps it clean in half and dares the audience to accept both pieces as a coherent whole.

The idea of liberation has always carried with it a moral weight. It suggests dignity restored, autonomy regained, a people rising from the grip of oppression into something freer, fuller, more self-determined. But when paired with the imagery of relentless bombardment, of infrastructure reduced to rubble, of cities plunged into darkness, of civilians caught in the indiscriminate sweep of modern warfare, the word begins to hollow out. It becomes less a promise and more a pretext.

What makes this rhetoric particularly jarring is not just its aggression but its casual certainty. The assurance that such devastation could unfold within “a couple of weeks” speaks to a worldview in which war is not a last resort, but a tool readily available, almost procedural. It is the language of someone who treats complex human societies as abstract chessboards, where moves can be calculated without fully reckoning with the lives that would be irrevocably altered or ended by each decision.

There is, too, an unsettling paternalism embedded in the notion of externally imposed liberation. It assumes that freedom can be delivered like a package, dropped from above, regardless of the cost borne by those on the ground. History, of course, has repeatedly challenged this assumption. Nations do not emerge stable and democratic from the ashes of destruction simply because someone powerful declared it so. More often, they inherit new forms of chaos, their social fabric torn in ways that take generations to mend—if they mend at all.

And yet, such declarations are not made in a vacuum. They are performed, crafted for an audience, calibrated to project strength, decisiveness and moral clarity. The contradiction itself may even be part of the appeal. To some, it signals toughness, the willingness to do whatever it takes, unconstrained by the hesitations or ambiguities that typically accompany discussions of war. But this performance comes at a cost. It normalizes a language in which human suffering is abstracted, reduced to a strategic variable rather than recognized as an inevitable consequence.

What is perhaps most troubling is how easily this rhetoric can shift the boundaries of what is considered acceptable discourse. When the prospect of widespread devastation is framed not as a tragedy to be avoided, but as a viable path to a supposedly noble end, it alters the moral landscape. It invites a kind of numbness, a quiet recalibration in which the unthinkable becomes merely controversial, and the controversial becomes, over time, routine.

In the end, the contradiction at the heart of such statements is not just a rhetorical misstep; it is a reflection of a deeper dissonance. It reveals a vision of power unmoored from empathy, one that conflates dominance with deliverance. And in doing so, it raises a question that lingers long after the speech has ended, what, exactly does liberation mean when it arrives hand in hand with ruin?