Humanity in Search of Peace, Security and Global Order by Mahboob A. Khawaja, PhD.

Global Leaders and Political Wickedness

Every day is fast becoming a killing day as if there is no morally conscientious humanity, no responsible leaders and no legitimate systems of political governance accountable for wrong actions. Evil and insanity are not imaginary but real and happening across the globe, be it Gaza, West Bank Palestine, Lebanon, Ukraine-Russia unwarranted war and must be stopped to protect innocent human lives. The US administration supports bombardments of civilian in south Lebanon, occupation of Palestine, crimes against humanity and Israeli genocide. Do the Arab leaders have deafening minds, eyes and ears?

All global institutions of peace, security and conflict resolution appear broken and sidelined by egomaniac politicians. Mankind feels helpless as its freedom and future is at stake. The increasing impacts of the US-Iran war depicts an insecure Arab Middle East without public institutions and responsible leadership. Daily bombardments, forced displacements of Palestinians affirm the planned operation and working of Greater Israel with American supplied weapons and complicity.  Shamefully, Arab-Muslim leaders failed to protect their people and culture from Western instigated aggression. Comparative analysis often unfolds hidden truths about human nature and its wickedness. Are there any global leaders of human conscience to extend security and protection of life to the masses of Gaza? There is a vital issue of ethnicity and Arabs were and remained colonized by the Western world. Are there any international organizations to help avert the catastrophic bloodbath in progress across Gaza and the occupied West Bank? Were the Geneva Conventions and International Humanitarian Laws just paper-based, dry inked narratives without any power to serve the cause of humanity? How come the Arab-Muslim leaders are nowhere to be seen on this planet to defend the cause of Faith and protect Palestinians from Israeli-American sponsored war of extermination? 

The Earth (A LIVING ENTITY) being bombed is the earth given to mankind by God as a "TRUST." DO YOU NOT SEE IT FLOATING IN SPACE JUST BY THE COMMAND OF GOD? WHEREVER THERE IS A TRUST, THERE MUST BE ACCOUNTABILITY. When evil-mongers and wrong-doers violate the sanctity of the Laws of God, they are held accountable - history tells without any prejudice. This author has walked through the ancient graveyards of so many nations used to claim being the "most powerful “on this earth - dead bones and silent forever and nothing else.  The succeeding generations CURSE them for their crimes against humanity.  THE GLOBAL INSTITUTIONS APPEAR BROKEN AND DYSFUNCTIONAL TO STOP THE INSANITY. If you don’t believe in the encompassing truth, just view the real “genocide pictures” presented by Editor Rosa on Transcend Media, September 8, 2025: https://www.transcend.org/tms/2025/09/genocide-in-pictures-worth-a-trillion-words-66/

Mike Adams (“Dystopian Nightmare: Ten Unbelievable Things that Will Happen Soon if We Don’t Stop the March of Tyranny and the Enslavement of Humanity.” (Transcend Media), warns of dire consequences to mankind.(https://www.transcend.org/tms/2023/06/dystopian-nightmare-10-unbelievable-things-that-will-happen-soon-if-we-dont-stop-the-march-of-tyranny-and-the-enslavement-ofHumanity now faces a critical choice: We either choose the path of total enslavement under an authoritarian, techno-fascist dictatorship, or we choose to instead embrace decentralized finance, free speech, rationality and the rule of law.

Are the American - Israeli Leaders above International Laws and Accountability?

The besieged 2.5 million people of Gaza by Israeli forces blocking food, fuel, water, medicine and bombed hospitals portray clear pictures of tormenting pains, horrors and massive devastation planned and carried out as the global community witnesses in deaf silence as if the masses of Gaza are not normal human beings. The world is not infinite but subject to time and destiny. God, The All Knowing and Merciful has defined the roles and responsibilities of its creations. Would the Western nations hold Israeli PM Netanyahu and President Trump accountable for their insanity against the people of Palestine? The women and children of Gaza cry out loud asking for humanitarian help if there are any Arab, Muslim or Western leaders to rescue them from extreme deprivation, starvation and planned extermination. Their cries end-up in deaf silence as no Western, Arab or Muslim leaders respond to their pains and horrors inflicted daily by the Israeli forces. Remember! Those challenging the Laws of God are chastised by the Laws of God without exception. Are they waiting to meet the same end as did Pharaoh at the Red Sea? The Egyptians, Qataris, the UAE’s and Saudis and others carry no strength or political value in global context and appear morally, intellectually and politically bankrupts a scum floating on a torrent of naive puppets and discredited leaders. Please see more:https://realovi.wordpress.com/2025/03/14/howarab-muslim-leaders-betrayed-the-people-by-mahboob-a-khawaja-phd/

Israel so far, has dropped more than 70,000 ton of bombs on Gaza- more insane than what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War 2. The earth is living and spins at 1670 km per hour and orbits the Sun at 107,000 km per hour. Imagine, if this spinning fails, what consequences could occur to the living beings on Earth. Think again, about the average distance of earth from the moon is 238,855 miles (384,400 km), equivalent to 0.002572 Astronomical Units. Earth is a “trust” to mankind for its existence, sustenance of life, survival, progress and future-making. The Earth exists and floats without any pillars in a capsule by the Will of God, so, “Fear God Who created life and death.” Is human intelligence still intact to understand this reality? Wherever there is trust, there is accountability. All human beings are accountable for their actions. The Divine warning (The Quran: 7: 56), warns: Do no mischief on the Earth after it hath been set in order, but call on God with fear and longing in hearts; For the Mercy of God is always near to those who do good.

The Divine Message (Quran:40:64), clarifies:

It is God Who made for you the Earth as a resting place and the sky as a canopy; And has given you shape and made your shapes beautiful, And has provided for your Sustenance, of things pure and good; Such is God your Lord. So Glory to God, The Lord of the Worlds.

The Jewish people (progeny of Jacob), followers of Moses  were warned  and prohibited of killing of innocent people as enshrined in the Ten Commandments (Torah):

'Thou shalt not kill' (Exod. 20:13; also Deut. 5:17). Jewish law views the shedding of innocent blood very seriously, and lists murder as one of three sins (along with idolatry and sexual immorality), that fall under the category of yehareg ve'al ya'avor - meaning "One should let himself be killed rather than violate it.

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Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in international affairs-global security, peace and conflict resolution and has spent several academic years across the Russian-Ukrainian and Central Asian regions knowing the people, diverse cultures of thinking and political governance and a keen interest in Islamic-Western comparative cultures and civilizations, and author of several publications including: Global Humanity and Remaking of Peace, Security and Conflict Resolution for the 21st Century and Beyond, Barnes and Noble Press, USA, 2025 https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/global-humanity-and-remaking-of-peace-security-and-conflict-resolution-for-the-21st-century-and-beyond-mahboob-a-khawaja/1147150197 and We, The People in Search of Global Peace, Security and Conflict  Resolution. Kindle Direct Publishing-Amazon, 05/2025 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F6V6CH5W

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Check Mahboob A. Khawaja, PhD. eBOOK,
Wars on Humanity:
Ukraine, Palestine and the role of Global Leaders
HERE!

An exile who still hears the applause by Avani Devi

Sheikh Hasina’s promise to return to Bangladesh in December is the sort of political declaration that sounds, at first, like confidence. Listen more closely and it sounds like something else: a challenge thrown across a border, a refusal to accept that history has already moved on.

Two years after the extraordinary collapse of her government, Hasina remains convinced that her political story is unfinished. Speaking from India, she has again presented herself not as a defeated former prime minister but as a leader temporarily separated from her country. That distinction matters. Exile, in her telling, is an interruption. To her opponents, it is justice finally catching up.

The tragedy is that both narratives contain uncomfortable truths. Hasina presided over Bangladesh for years with the confidence of someone who had stopped believing power could ever be taken away. Her government brought economic development and a measure of stability, but political stability gradually became inseparable from political control. Opposition parties were weakened, dissent was increasingly treated as disloyalty, and institutions that should have acted as restraints appeared too often to function as extensions of the executive.

Then came the students. The protests became the political earthquake that years of managed politics had failed to predict. What began as a movement around student grievances developed into something much larger: an expression of accumulated frustration from a generation that had grown up under Hasina and no longer accepted the argument that stability justified everything.

The government's response transformed a political crisis into a national rupture. Deaths during the protests shattered whatever remaining legitimacy the authorities possessed. When Hasina finally fled, the image was brutally simple: a government that had appeared immovable had suddenly become homeless.

Now she wants to return. That promise will thrill her supporters and alarm those who remember the violence. But there is a peculiar danger in imagining that political legitimacy can be restored simply by crossing a frontier. Hasina may believe that her return would represent vindication. For many Bangladeshis, it could instead reopen wounds that have barely begun to heal.

Her conviction in absentia adds another layer of political theatre. A death sentence is an extraordinarily grave punishment, and political justice becomes particularly suspect when the accused is tried while outside the country and the country itself remains deeply polarised. Accountability is necessary after deadly repression. But accountability loses its moral force when it begins to resemble revenge.

Bangladesh therefore faces a dilemma larger than Hasina herself. It must decide whether the fall of one powerful leader will produce a healthier political system or merely replace one form of intolerance with another.

Hasina’s December pledge may prove empty, impossible or transformative. But the real question is not whether she can return. It is what kind of Bangladesh would receive her.

A democracy confident in itself should be capable of confronting its former rulers without fearing them. It should investigate abuses without turning courts into instruments of political vengeance. And it should allow even deeply unpopular politicians to exist within the political argument, provided the law is respected.

Hasina once seemed to embody the permanence of Bangladeshi politics. Now she embodies its unresolved past. Her return, if it happens, will not simply be the return of an ex-prime minister. It will be Bangladesh deciding whether it has learned anything from the moment when a government that looked permanent discovered, almost overnight, that the people had stopped applauding.

The convert in the oval orbit by Kingsley Cobb

Politics has always had room for unlikely conversions, but few would have predicted that Laura Loomer might one day emerge as one of Volodymyr Zelensky's most enthusiastic advocates in Washington. If the reports surrounding her meeting with the Ukrainian president prove to mark a genuine shift rather than another tactical repositioning, they reveal something larger than the evolution of a single political influencer. They expose the fluidity and fragility of the ideological loyalties that have shaped the American right during the Ukraine war.

Loomer built much of her profile by appealing to the populist instincts of the MAGA movement, where scepticism of aid to Ukraine became increasingly fashionable. The conflict was often portrayed not as a defining battle over European security but as an expensive distraction from America's domestic challenges. Within that ecosystem, criticism of Kyiv became almost a badge of ideological purity.

Yet politics rarely stands still. If Loomer has indeed decided that supporting Ukraine better serves both American interests and Donald Trump's political future, the significance extends well beyond social media headlines. Her audience is not the Washington foreign policy establishment. It is precisely those conservative activists who have spent years dismissing Ukraine as someone else's war.

Influencers occupy a peculiar position in modern American politics. They are neither elected officials nor traditional journalists, yet they often possess greater influence over public opinion than either. They speak directly to millions without institutional filters, turning political narratives into personal loyalties. When one changes direction, followers often reconsider positions they previously regarded as unquestionable.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this reported transformation is the suggestion that Loomer's next objective is not merely supporting Zelensky but convincing Trump to loosen whatever political or psychological attachment critics believe he still has toward Vladimir Putin.

That may prove to be an impossible assignment. Trump has never fit comfortably within the traditional Republican foreign-policy framework. His worldview has consistently favoured personal relationships between powerful leaders over alliances built through institutions. He often speaks admiringly about strength, decisive leadership and deal-making, qualities he has, at various times, attributed to Putin even while criticising Russia's invasion.

Changing that instinct requires more than presenting intelligence briefings or strategic arguments. It requires persuading Trump that standing firmly behind Ukraine enhances rather than weakens his own political brand.

That is where figures like Loomer may possess unusual influence. Unlike diplomats, retired generals or establishment Republicans, she communicates in the language of Trump's political base. If she concludes that supporting Ukraine can coexist with America First politics, she offers conservative voters a bridge rather than a contradiction.

Whether they choose to cross it is another matter entirely. The MAGA coalition has never been monolithic. It contains traditional conservatives, libertarians, economic nationalists, isolationists and voters driven primarily by cultural issues. Ukraine has often functioned as a proxy debate over America's broader role in the world. Is the United States still the indispensable guarantor of international order, or should it retreat from conflicts beyond its borders?

Those questions remain unresolved. What makes Loomer's apparent reversal fascinating is not simply that she may have changed her mind. Democracies benefit when public figures reconsider positions in light of new information or personal experience. The more revealing question is whether her followers are equally willing to reconsider theirs.

Political movements frequently celebrate loyalty while treating intellectual flexibility as weakness. Yet history suggests that successful movements survive precisely because they adapt.

If Laura Loomer now believes Ukraine deserves stronger American backing, the real story is not her personal evolution. It is whether one of the loudest voices in Trump's political universe can redirect part of the movement's compass away from admiration for Putin and toward recognition that America's strategic interests may ultimately be better served by ensuring Ukraine remains free.

If that happens, the most surprising battlefield of the Ukraine war may not be in Europe at all, but inside the competing instincts of the American conservative movement itself.

Nuttley #51: videos #Cartoon by Patrick McWade

 

Nuttley is a comic strip with Nuttley as its protagonist.
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Ian Glim #014 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

A bewildered soul navigating global complexities armed
only with earnestness and a sharp, sarcastic wit.

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The clearing oddly starts from football by Robert Perez

The isolation of Gianni Infantino from FIFA’s member associations would be more than a sporting scandal. It would be a political weather vane. If the world’s football establishment decided that its president had become too compromised, too powerful or simply too closely identified with one political camp, the symbolism would travel far beyond Zurich. It would suggest that the era of institutional immunity is ending and that Donald Trump and his loyalists may increasingly discover that loyalty is not the same thing as permanence.

Infantino’s predicament, in this interpretation, would matter because FIFA is precisely the sort of institution that has historically been comfortable with political ambiguity. Football crosses borders, regimes and ideologies with remarkable ease. Presidents shake hands with autocrats, democratic leaders and oligarchs alike. The governing principle is usually pragmatism: keep the game moving, keep the money flowing and keep politics at arm’s length, even when politics is standing directly on the pitch.

That arrangement is becoming harder to sustain. The removal, or even serious institutional isolation, of a powerful international figure would demonstrate that global organisations are beginning to rediscover an old political lesson: leaders are temporary; institutions are supposed to survive them.

That lesson has particular relevance for Mr Trump. Trumpism has always depended partly upon the assumption that institutions can be captured faster than they can resist. Put loyalists into government, pressure independent agencies, intimidate critics, cultivate friendly media and transform every administrative dispute into a test of personal allegiance. Eventually, the machinery of government begins to resemble the political personality of its occupant.

But institutions have memories. They also have antibodies. The more aggressively a political movement tries to colonise them, the more likely it is that resistance eventually emerges from within. Courts, civil services, universities, professional associations, corporations, sporting bodies and international organisations may tolerate political pressure for a surprisingly long time. What they tend not to tolerate indefinitely is the demand that their legitimacy be subordinated to one individual.

This is where the Infantino example becomes interesting. The significance would not lie simply in one football administrator losing influence. It would lie in the visual spectacle of institutional doors closing.

There is something especially powerful about political decline when it becomes visible. A leader who once received red-carpet treatment suddenly receives a formal invitation instead of a personal welcome. Allies become cautious. Former admirers discover principles. Invitations disappear. Telephone calls are returned less enthusiastically. Officials who once competed for proximity begin calculating the risks of being photographed beside you.

Political isolation rarely arrives with a trumpet. It arrives through small bureaucratic acts. That is why the eventual reckoning with Trumpism, if it comes, may look less like a dramatic revolution than a gigantic administrative spring-cleaning.

The first casualties will not necessarily be the loudest Trump loyalists. They may be the useful ones: the administrators who convinced themselves that accommodation was merely professionalism; the executives who mistook proximity for influence; the international figures who believed that transactional politics could remain permanently transactional.

Eventually they may discover that association has a half-life. This does not mean that every Trump-aligned person should be expelled from public life. Democratic institutions cannot become machines for political purification. A genuine post-Trump settlement must distinguish between ideological disagreement, political loyalty and misconduct. Otherwise the cure becomes another form of institutional capture.

But democratic systems do need to recover the courage to enforce standards. The larger question is therefore not whether Trump or his loyalists lose particular positions. It is whether institutions regain the confidence to say that no political leader owns them.

For decades, powerful figures have benefited from the belief that global institutions are too fragmented, too compromised and too dependent on personalities to resist. The emerging lesson may be the opposite.

Institutions can be slow. They can be cowardly. They can even be corrupt. But once they begin turning away, they can become remarkably merciless. And the most consequential political clearance may begin not with an election night, but with the quiet realisation that the invitations have stopped arriving.

The politics of taking by Solomon Mensah

 

South Africa has opened another chapter in the long, unfinished argument over land and inevitably, over race, history and political power. A court case challenging the country’s expropriation law has begun, with the Democratic Alliance, a member of the governing coalition alongside the African National Congress, joining the challenge. The legal question is technical. The political question is anything but.

The law permits the state, under certain circumstances, to expropriate privately owned land without compensation when agreement with the owner cannot be reached. That phrase “without compensation” has become political dynamite in a country where land remains one of the most visible symbols of apartheid’s legacy.

The ANC argues, with considerable historical justification, that South Africa cannot pretend that the distribution of land was the innocent result of market forces. Generations of discriminatory laws dispossessed Black South Africans, restricted where they could live and work, and concentrated agricultural land in white hands. Democracy ended apartheid; it did not magically redistribute its economic consequences.

But history is not a blank cheque. A democratic government has to distinguish between correcting historical injustice and weakening the security of property ownership. The first is necessary. The second can become economically disastrous. Investors do not require perfect governments; they require governments whose rules can be understood and whose property rights cannot suddenly become political bargaining chips.

That is where this court case matters. The Democratic Alliance’s participation is particularly revealing. It demonstrates that opposition to the law is not simply a white conservative reflex, nor can the government dismiss critics as defenders of apartheid privilege. The governing coalition itself contains competing visions of what land reform should mean.

And then there is Donald Trump, hovering over the debate like an American megaphone. Trump has used South Africa’s land policy to support his claim that white farmers are being persecuted. That argument deserves scrutiny precisely because South Africa’s genuine problems are serious enough without importing American culture-war mythology into them.

There is a legitimate debate about expropriation. There is also a vast difference between saying that a law creates risks for property rights and claiming that South Africa is engaged in a campaign of racial persecution against white farmers. The former is a constitutional and economic argument. The latter is a political narrative and a highly combustible one.

South Africa should not allow either side to turn land into a morality play with only heroes and villains. The descendants of people dispossessed by apartheid deserve more than sympathy. They deserve meaningful access to land, housing, opportunity and wealth. Farmers who have built productive enterprises deserve predictable legal protection. Neither proposition cancels the other.

The real test is whether South Africa can pursue land reform without making ownership arbitrary, and whether it can protect property rights without making historical injustice permanent.

That is precisely why the courts matter. Land reform cannot be conducted through slogans, presidential rhetoric or foreign political grandstanding. It needs transparent rules, constitutional safeguards, competent administration and an economic strategy capable of turning redistribution into opportunity.

South Africa has spent decades arguing about who owns the land. The harder question is what kind of country that land should produce. The answer should not be revenge. It should be justice with a functioning economy attached.

#eBook: Sunday Mutiny by Kristina Claesson

 

The girl was small for nine, with hair the colour of dry straw and eyes that seemed to take in everything while giving nothing back. Her name was Elin, and on the first Sunday of June, she simply did not get dressed for church.

Her mother, Birgitta, stood in the doorway of the bedroom, the starched collar of her good dress cutting into her neck. The house smelled of coffee and the ironed linen that had been laid out since Friday.
"Elin. The car leaves in twenty minutes."

The girl sat on the edge of her bed, still in her nightgown. She was reading a book, something about horses or maybe it was about girls who ran away. It was hard to tell from the doorway.
"I'm not going."

Kristina Claesson, a retired health worker from a sleepy South Swedish town, who dedicates her newfound freedom to chronicling the people and the utterly absurd events that unfold in her otherwise idyllic community in …English of all choices!

Ovi eBook Publishing 2026

Sunday Mutiny

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Ant-sized Culinary #013 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

In the bustling undergrowth of Picante Hill, Anton the culinary ant dons his oversized toque and delivers deliciously chaotic cooking wisdom, one tiny misadventure at a time.

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Algorithm’s red problem by Mary Long

Artificial intelligence may turn out to be one of the Chinese Communist Party’s greatest achievements and one of its most awkward political inventions. Beijing wants machines that can write, think, predict, translate, manufacture and govern. It also wants them to remain obedient. That combination may prove considerably harder to engineer than a chatbot.

The Communist Party has always understood the value of information. Control the newspapers, television stations, universities and publishing houses, and you can shape the boundaries of public thought. The internet complicated that arrangement, but China responded with an extraordinary architecture of censorship, surveillance and digital control. AI appears at first to be the logical conclusion: an infinitely scalable bureaucracy capable of monitoring everything and everybody.

But artificial intelligence introduces an uncomfortable contradiction. A system designed to process enormous quantities of information is inevitably exposed to enormous quantities of ideas. And ideas, unlike data centres, do not always respect borders.

The Party's problem is not that AI will suddenly become a revolutionary Leninist philosopher and announce itself as chairman of an underground machine committee. The more serious danger is subtler. AI can make information cheaper, faster and more accessible. It can translate languages, compare competing historical narratives, identify contradictions and answer questions that previously required access to libraries, foreign websites or specialist knowledge.

That creates a political dilemma. A government can censor an article. It is considerably harder to censor every possible question that an intelligent machine might be asked about that article.

Beijing therefore faces an almost comic technological paradox. It wants Chinese AI to become globally competitive while simultaneously demanding ideological conformity. It wants innovation without intellectual unpredictability, creativity without dissent, autonomous systems without autonomous thinking. It is asking Silicon Valley's most ambitious dream to wear the uniform of a civil servant.

Perhaps that can work for a while. Chinese companies can build extraordinarily capable systems while imposing strict political boundaries. Algorithms can be trained, filtered and monitored. Citizens can be discouraged from asking certain questions. The machines can be taught that some historical events simply do not exist.

But intelligence has a troublesome habit of making comparisons. The greater AI becomes, the more difficult it may be to maintain a completely sealed informational universe. Chinese citizens do not need an AI to tell them that another political system is perfect. They merely need a machine capable of exposing the distance between official promises and observable reality.

And there is an even deeper problem. AI could weaken the Party's monopoly not by overthrowing it, but by making ordinary citizens less dependent upon institutions. A small entrepreneur can use AI as an accountant, lawyer, translator and marketing department. A student can use it as a tutor. A programmer can use it as an engineer. A journalist can use it as a research assistant. Knowledge becomes decentralised.

That is potentially more disruptive than a protest slogan. The irony is delicious. The Communist Party spent decades building a digital state capable of controlling information. Now it is helping create technologies that could make information extraordinarily difficult to control.

AI will not necessarily destroy the Party. Governments have survived technologies that were once expected to liberate humanity. The Party remains powerful, organised and remarkably adaptable.

But AI presents it with a question that cannot easily be answered by censorship: how much intelligence can an authoritarian system tolerate before intelligence itself becomes politically inconvenient?

China may discover that the most dangerous thing about artificial intelligence is not that machines learn to think. It is that people do.

The kids are Not alright by Virginia Robertson

For millions of young people, the future has become an invoice. They graduate into economies that demand experience before offering employment, housing markets that regard a salary as an amusing suggestion, and universities that can leave them carrying debts for the privilege of becoming employable. They are told to be entrepreneurial, resilient and adaptable, as though insecurity were a character-building exercise rather than a political choice.

And then there is Donald Trump. Trump did not create youth unemployment, student debt or the cost of living. Nor did he invent the political habit of asking younger generations to accept less while older generations protect what they already have. But his politics has become a vivid expression of the impatience, grievance and nostalgia that flourish when a society cannot convincingly promise its young people a better tomorrow.

The great Trumpian bargain is emotional before it is economic: you may not be getting a secure future, but you can at least be told that someone else is to blame. Immigrants, elites, universities, bureaucrats, foreigners, liberal cities, globalisation, there is always another culprit waiting in the wings.

What is striking is how little this answers the young person's mundane questions. Can I afford rent? Can I repay my education? Can I find a job that does not require me to live permanently in my parents' spare room? Can I start a family without treating childcare as a luxury product? Can I imagine retirement when I have barely imagined next Tuesday?

These are not ideological questions. They are arithmetic. Across rich democracies, young adults have inherited a peculiar contradiction. They are more educated than many previous generations, more connected, more technologically capable and more culturally fluent. Yet the economic ladder beneath them has become slippery. A degree is no longer a ticket into the middle class; it can be merely the entrance fee. Home ownership increasingly resembles an inheritance strategy. Stable employment is treated as a perk. Even leisure has become something to optimise, monetize or postpone.

International Youth Day should therefore be less a celebration than an audit. Politicians love young voters when they are symbols. They love photographs of students, panels about innovation and speeches about tomorrow. What they dislike is the bill for making tomorrow possible.

That bill involves affordable housing, decent wages, accessible education, vocational training, public transport, childcare and a labour market in which automation and artificial intelligence create opportunity rather than simply another excuse to squeeze payrolls. It also involves something less tangible but more important: political imagination.

Young people do not need another sermon about resilience. They have already demonstrated plenty of it. They need institutions that stop confusing endurance with success.

The real generational scandal is not that the young are angry. It is that their anger is entirely rational. If International Youth Day means anything in the Trump era, it should be a warning. A generation priced out of its own future will eventually stop believing in the people who designed the present. And when that happens, nostalgia will not save the old order. Neither will another slogan.