The server war by John Kato

The old image of war is wonderfully obsolete. Generals once dreamed of taking the capital, destroying the bridges, surrounding the fortress and cutting the railway. The map was physical. The targets were obvious. Oil was stored in tanks, money was stored in banks and armies moved along roads that could be bombed.

Now the battlefield has servers. Ukraine's recent drone campaign inside Russia has made that transformation impossible to ignore. Alongside the continuing attacks on refineries and other energy infrastructure, Ukrainian drones have struck major Russian data centres, including facilities connected to Yandex and Sberbank. The October 14 strike on a major Sberbank facility in Saratov followed several attacks on Yandex data centres. Russian officials have said systems continued operating, but the message of the attacks is obvious: Russia's digital nervous system is becoming part of the war.

This is not simply another chapter in the drone war. It is the beginning of the server war. And that should frighten everybody. The twentieth-century economy depended upon oil. The twenty-first-century economy depends upon oil and computation. Banking, logistics, artificial intelligence, communications, government administration, industrial production and military planning increasingly depend upon enormous quantities of data being processed somewhere, by something, continuously.

Switch off the electricity and a modern economy starts choking. Disrupt the servers and increasingly the same thing happens. That is why the Ukrainian targeting of Russian energy infrastructure and digital infrastructure belongs to the same strategic story. A refinery converts crude into fuel. A data centre converts information into economic and technological capability. One feeds the machinery; the other increasingly tells the machinery what to do.

The Russians understand this too. Their own campaign has repeatedly targeted Ukrainian energy systems, while Russia has also been developing its digital and AI capabilities as strategic assets. Ukraine's decision to reach into those systems is therefore not some eccentric fascination with technology. It reflects the brutal logic of asymmetric warfare: if you cannot destroy the enemy's army head-on, attack the infrastructure that allows the enemy to keep generating power, money, intelligence and capacity.

And drones make this possible. A state can spend billions protecting a refinery, a military headquarters or a strategic industrial facility, yet a relatively inexpensive unmanned aircraft can travel hundreds of kilometres and turn an enormous security calculation into a very bad morning.

That is the revolutionary part. The fortress is no longer necessarily a fortress. Sometimes it is a warehouse full of servers. But there is a line that must not be erased in the excitement of this new warfare. A data centre is not automatically a legitimate military target merely because it belongs to a bank, technology company or powerful corporation. If the facility is purely civilian, deliberately attacking it raises serious legal and ethical questions. If it directly supports military operations, intelligence, command systems or other military functions, the analysis changes. The distinction is crucial because once every commercial server becomes a battlefield target, civilian digital infrastructure everywhere becomes dangerously exposed.

And that is the nightmare waiting beyond this war. Imagine a future conflict in which attacking an opponent's financial data centres is as routine as bombing fuel depots. Imagine stock exchanges, payment systems, cloud infrastructure and hospital servers becoming targets. Imagine a government waking up to discover that its banking system is functioning only intermittently because someone three hundred kilometres away decided that a server farm was the twenty-first-century equivalent of a bridge.

That is not science fiction anymore. The Ukraine war is becoming a laboratory for it. The irony is almost obscene. Humanity built the digital economy believing that information would make societies more connected, efficient and prosperous. Now armies are discovering that connectivity also creates vulnerability. The more dependent a society becomes on networks, the more valuable those networks become as targets.

This is why the Sberbank and Yandex attacks matter even where the immediate physical damage appears limited. Their significance lies partly in what they reveal about the future of strategic warfare. Ukraine is demonstrating that the battlefield can move from the refinery tower to the server rack without changing its fundamental objective: degrade the opponent's ability to sustain war.

The oil refinery burns visibly. The server farm can fail silently. One produces smoke. The other can produce paralysis. And the second may ultimately be more frightening. Russia's war against Ukraine has already demonstrated that cheap drones can challenge expensive air-defence systems, that software can become a weapon and that commercial technology can acquire military significance almost overnight.

Now the server room has joined the battlefield. The generals of the future may care less about capturing a hill than about controlling the machines processing the information behind it. The fortress is becoming obsolete. The refinery is still important. But increasingly, whoever controls the data controls the machine. And whoever can switch off the machine may not need to capture the fortress at all.

You didn’t click anything by Sidney Shelton

There is something profoundly obscene about a world where you can be infected with military-grade spyware without clicking a link, opening an attachment or doing anything remotely stupid. You can simply read the news. You can open an app. You can exist online.

And somewhere inside the machinery designed to sell you trainers, holidays and toothpaste, somebody may have found a way to turn an advertisement into a weapon. This is no longer a cute little privacy problem for people who object to cookies following them around the internet. It is a national-security failure hiding inside the business model of the modern internet.

The newly exposed “AdFection” operation is terrifying precisely because it exploits something so ordinary. Targeted advertising is built around identifying devices, profiling users and deciding, in milliseconds, which advertisement should appear on a particular screen. Researchers have now technically demonstrated that this machinery can be abused to deliver mercenary spyware through an advertisement, requiring no click from the victim. In documented cases, devices at Al Jazeera were infected with Candiru spyware through targeted ads.

Read that again. The advertisement does not need to persuade you. It does not need you to click. It only needs to reach you. That changes the political and security equation completely. For years, governments and technology companies have told citizens that online safety is partly their responsibility. Don't click suspicious links. Don't download strange files. Don't answer unknown messages. Update your software. Be careful.

Fine. But what happens when the malicious code arrives through the legitimate advertising infrastructure of the internet? What exactly is the user supposed to do then?

The dirty little secret of ad-tech is that surveillance was already the business model. Billions of advertising transactions constantly process information about where people go, what devices they use and what can be inferred about them. The system was designed for commercial profiling. The problem is that once you have created a gigantic machine capable of identifying and reaching particular human beings at extraordinary scale, somebody eventually asks a much darker question:

Why use it only to sell things? That is the point at which advertising becomes infrastructure for espionage. The investigation found that Discover-Tech's advertising platform was able to act as a bridge between the commercial advertising ecosystem and mercenary spyware companies. Researchers analysed billions of bidding records and found the company's ads appearing across tens of thousands of apps and more than a hundred thousand websites. The exposure also reached networks associated with governments, defence organisations and critical infrastructure. An advertisement appearing on such a network does not itself prove infection, but it demonstrates something deeply uncomfortable: the machinery could reach places that governments presumably consider sensitive.

And this is where the usual language of “privacy” becomes dangerously inadequate. Privacy is about what somebody knows about you. National security is about what somebody can do with that knowledge. A mercenary spyware operator that can profile a target, identify their device and silently deliver an exploit through the advertising ecosystem has crossed that line.

We should therefore stop pretending that ad-tech regulation belongs exclusively in the consumer-protection department. This is now a cybersecurity question, a sovereignty question and potentially a weapons-control question.

If a company can sell access to a digital infrastructure capable of silently compromising journalists, activists, government officials or military personnel, why should it be regulated more lightly than companies moving conventional surveillance equipment across borders?

Because the product is invisible? Because it arrives disguised as a banner advertisement? Because lawyers can put “marketing technology” on the corporate website? That is bureaucratic absurdity. The advertising industry cannot continue demanding trust while operating a supply chain so complicated that malicious actors can hide inside it for years. The fact that Discover-Tech could appear within recognised advertising ecosystems before being removed is not simply an embarrassing mistake. It exposes a structural weakness in an industry that has become one of the world's largest surveillance machines.

The response should therefore be much bigger than banning one company. High-risk ad-tech vendors need serious identity verification, ownership transparency, security audits and meaningful accountability. Advertising platforms should have to know who is buying the ability to reach particular devices and why. Government and military networks should treat third-party advertising as a potential attack surface, not harmless decoration. And companies selling spyware should face controls comparable to those imposed on other forms of sensitive technology.

Most importantly, governments need to stop pretending that “zero-click” is somebody else's problem. Because this technology does not care whether you are a dissident in Tehran, a journalist in Doha, a civil servant in Brussels or an engineer in Stockholm. You don't need to click anything. You don't even need to make a mistake. The weapon can arrive because the internet decided you were the right person to show an advertisement to.

That is not the future of surveillance. It is the present. And if governments allow the advertising industry to remain the open sewer through which mercenary spyware can flow, then the next great cyberattack may not arrive in an email, a phishing message or a suspicious download. It may arrive between two perfectly ordinary advertisements. You won't click it. That is precisely the point.

The long silence by Paula Bartlett

For decades, Jeffrey Donaldson was not simply another politician. He was an establishment figure, a parliamentarian, a party leader, a knight, a man who occupied rooms where reputations were made and protected. Now he is a convicted sex offender serving a 15-year sentence. That transformation is not merely the story of one man's crimes. It is a warning about what happens when societies become too comfortable with powerful people, too protective of institutions and too suspicious of the victims who challenge them.

Donaldson was convicted in June 2026 of 18 child sexual abuse offences, including rape, involving two girls and spanning periods between 1985 and 2008. On October 15, he was sentenced to 15 years. He denies the offences and intends to appeal. The judge described his descent as catastrophic, while prosecutors stressed that his public reputation and position did not place him beyond the reach of the law. Good.

Because that is exactly where the story should begin rather than end. The comfortable reaction is to describe Donaldson as a monster who has finally been caught. It makes everybody else feel wonderfully clean. The bad man has been identified, condemned and removed. Society can now congratulate itself and move on.

But history does not work so conveniently. The abuse occurred over decades. The victims were children. They carried the consequences into adulthood while Donaldson continued his political career, eventually reaching the leadership of the Democratic Unionist Party and becoming one of Northern Ireland's most recognisable political figures.

That contrast should make every political institution uncomfortable. Not because we can automatically claim that colleagues knew what he was doing. We cannot. Not because every party member should be treated as complicit. That would be both unfair and unsupported.

But because institutions have repeatedly demonstrated, across countries and political traditions, an extraordinary capacity to protect reputation before protecting vulnerable people.

The unwritten rule is always the same: don't make trouble. Don't embarrass the party. Don't damage the movement. Don't destroy the career of someone important. Don't bring scandal into the family. And, above all, don't believe the person who has the least power in the room. That culture is far more dangerous than any individual politician. The victims in the Donaldson case were children when the abuse began. The justice system finally heard them decades later. Their courage is therefore not a footnote to this story; it is the central fact.

One victim described the theft of her childhood and the shame she carried. The other described devastating long-term consequences. Prosecutors said both women had kept memories of the abuse buried for years before eventually reporting it.

This is what delayed justice actually looks like. It is not an abstract legal inconvenience. It is a person carrying a secret through school, relationships, adulthood and ordinary life while the person accused of abusing them continues receiving titles, influence and public respect.

Fifteen years in prison cannot return those lost years. Nothing can. But the conviction destroys one particularly poisonous myth: that status is a shield. Donaldson's political career included senior parliamentary roles, leadership of the DUP and a knighthood for political service. Those symbols of respectability did not survive the evidence presented in court. His knighthood has since been removed.

And perhaps that is the most important lesson. Respectability is not evidence of innocence. A suit is not evidence of character. A title is not evidence of virtue. A political career is not a certificate of moral immunity. For too long, institutions have confused reputation with truth. They have treated the preservation of public confidence as more important than the uncomfortable investigation that might actually deserve public confidence.

That era must end. Modern investigations, survivor advocacy, improved forensic techniques and a greater willingness to revisit historical allegations have made it increasingly difficult for influential people to assume that time will erase evidence or silence victims. The past is no longer necessarily buried simply because decades have passed.

And that is a profoundly healthy development. The passage of time should never become an accomplice. Nor should political importance. Nor should religion. Nor should party loyalty. Nor should a knighthood. The Donaldson case is not proof that every political institution knowingly protects abusers. It is something more uncomfortable: proof that institutions must constantly demonstrate that they will investigate powerful people with the same seriousness they apply to everyone else.

Because justice arriving forty years late is still justice. But let us stop romanticising the delay. For the victim, forty years is not a delay. It is forty years of life. The real measure of a democratic society is not how loudly it celebrates a powerful man's conviction after the evidence becomes impossible to ignore. It is whether the next frightened child who speaks is believed before another four decades have to pass. That is where the real test begins.

2nd opinion! 26#18 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

Seriously, a human hater self-centred agoraphobic in quarantine!
I think you’ll need a second opinion after this.

For more 2nd opinion, quarantined!, HERE!
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The subsistence generation by Nadine Moreau

There is something seriously damaging about a world that tells its young people to study hard, work harder, dream bigger and then hands them an invoice they cannot afford to pay. The modern economy has perfected a particularly obscene trick: it sells young people the promise of a future while quietly making that future unaffordable.

And now the young are beginning to return the merchandise. From Tirana to Paris to Buenos Aires, students are taking to the streets, confronting police and challenging governments that appear increasingly comfortable with a generation living permanently on the edge of financial exhaustion. These movements are not identical, and pretending they are one international revolution would be lazy analysis. But beneath their different demands lies a common question: what exactly is the point of following society's rules when society appears to have abandoned its side of the bargain?

In Albania, frustration over corruption, university conditions, employment prospects and a controversial luxury development has helped turn months of protest into a wider confrontation with the government. In France, students have challenged overcrowded classrooms, teacher shortages and deteriorating educational conditions. In Argentina, demonstrators have opposed cuts threatening public universities.

Different countries, different political systems, different immediate grievances. Yet the same generational impatience is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Politicians keep explaining that economic reality is complicated. Of course it is. Budgets are finite, governments face difficult choices, and no responsible person believes that money grows on parliamentary benches. But economic realism cannot mean that ordinary people must accept permanent insecurity while those with money, connections and political influence continue to negotiate their own exemptions from hardship.

For young people, the mathematics has become brutally simple. Education costs money. Housing costs money. Transport costs money. Food costs money. Even the privilege of looking for a job can cost money. Meanwhile, a degree increasingly resembles an expensive lottery ticket whose prize is the opportunity to compete for work that may not pay enough to rent an apartment.

Then the same society lectures graduates about personal responsibility. Wonderful. Apparently, the young are responsible for their employability, their productivity, their retirement savings and their ability to survive an increasingly expensive world. Governments, meanwhile, are somehow not responsible when schools deteriorate, public services weaken, corruption flourishes or economic policies leave an entire generation wondering whether independence is becoming a luxury reserved for the wealthy.

The traditional political response is equally predictable. Protesters are immature. Their demands are unrealistic. They are manipulated by extremists. They should return to their classrooms, respect authority and wait patiently for the benefits of economic growth.

How long, exactly, should they wait? Until they are forty? Until their parents have retired and their children inherit the same problems? Until patience itself becomes a hereditary condition?

There is a particularly insulting hypocrisy in societies that celebrate youthful ambition while treating youthful labour as disposable. Employers demand experience from people who have not been given the opportunity to acquire it. Governments celebrate entrepreneurship while housing costs consume the savings needed to start a business. Politicians praise education while arguing over the resources required to provide it.

And then they express astonishment when students stop applauding. The danger is that legitimate anger can be hijacked, manipulated or consumed by violence. Burning buildings, attacking police officers and destroying local businesses do not automatically create a fairer society. Such actions can alienate potential supporters and leave ordinary workers paying for damage they had no part in causing. Governments have a responsibility to protect public safety, but they cannot use every broken window as an excuse to ignore every legitimate grievance.

Nor should they confuse silence with consent. The answer is not another glossy youth strategy, another ministerial photograph with carefully selected students or another promise that prosperity is just around the corner. It requires affordable housing, accessible education, decent wages, functioning public services, credible action against corruption and an economic model that does not assume young people can survive indefinitely on temporary contracts and parental assistance.

Most importantly, young citizens must be treated as participants in democracy rather than inconvenient customers complaining about a defective product. The subsistence generation is not necessarily demanding a revolution. Many are demanding something far less extravagant: a life in which working, studying and contributing to society can provide a reasonable chance of living with dignity.

If governments cannot understand that distinction, they should not be surprised when the streets become the only classrooms in which young people believe anybody is listening. The young are not rebelling because they have forgotten the rules. Increasingly, they are rebelling because they have learned them, followed them and discovered that the promised reward may never arrive. And when an entire generation begins to suspect that the future has been sold before it was born, the problem is no longer youthful impatience. It is a political and economic system running out of excuses.

The conversation between Antigone and her mother #Poem by Abigail George

Where the television room meets the kitchen,
that is the bronzed sand of the shoreline.
The sun rises over the tranquil ocean that is the kitchen.
The child, a ripple effect, watches cartoons.
The cartoons make waves.

I say nothing of the heartbreak and the sea
inside the abyss of my eyes. They did not ask me to help with lunch.
My mother is in the kitchen frying strips
of crumbed chicken in a pan, while my brother puts the macaroni on.

There is heartbreak in my mother’s back, in her hair.
The sausage rolls were good, I told my mother
in the kitchen as I wiped the counter down with white vinegar
and a damp cloth. Were they expensive?

The tiny earthquakes of heartbreak.
She is silent as she prepares Sunday lunch.
The sun sets on the scene in the kitchen, and inside, I am numb,
I am sea levels rising. I am the condensation on the bathroom mirror.
I am Tenzing Norgay.

Berg gull bear snowfall in a field.
The sun is in the ceiling now, a chrysalis.
And I remember the mulberry tree in the backyard
that my mother cut down with an axe by herself.
How I am that tree.

The vinegar myth by Casey Norris

There is something irresistibly modern about the apple-cider-vinegar ritual. A spoonful of something sour before a plate of pasta, rice or bread, and suddenly the carbohydrate problem appears to have acquired a simple household solution. No complicated diet, no expensive supplement, no biometric gadget flashing angry numbers from a wrist. Just vinegar.

The attraction is understandable. Carbohydrates can produce a rapid rise in blood glucose, particularly when they are eaten in large quantities or in highly refined forms. The body breaks carbohydrates down into glucose, insulin responds, and the familiar post-meal spike arrives. Apple cider vinegar, largely because of its acetic acid, appears to interfere modestly with that process. It can slow gastric emptying and may influence how quickly glucose becomes available to the bloodstream.

That is interesting science. It is not nutritional magic. The trouble begins when a modest physiological effect is promoted into a lifestyle revolution. The internet has an extraordinary talent for taking a small biological observation and turning it into a slogan. “Drink vinegar before carbs” sounds wonderfully precise. It implies that the sequence of dinner can somehow cancel the consequences of dinner itself. It cannot.

At most, vinegar appears capable of taking some of the sharpness out of the glucose curve. That distinction matters. Flattening a spike slightly is not the same thing as preventing glucose from entering the bloodstream, and neither is equivalent to making a carbohydrate-heavy meal metabolically harmless. The total amount and quality of carbohydrate still matter. So do fibre, protein, physical activity, body composition and the broader pattern of eating.

There is also a delicious irony here. Humans have spent decades inventing increasingly sophisticated technologies to understand metabolism, only to discover that one of the oldest ingredients in the kitchen may have a small role in managing it. Vinegar has been around considerably longer than the wellness industry, and it has never required an Instagram account.

But the sensible interpretation is precisely the boring one: vinegar might be useful, but it is not a licence to eat whatever one wants.

There are practical questions too. Acidity is not entirely benign. Regularly drinking undiluted vinegar can irritate the mouth and throat and contribute to dental enamel erosion. For some people it may also cause digestive discomfort. The fashionable image of knocking back a concentrated shot before every meal is therefore considerably less clever than it looks.

The larger lesson is about our appetite for shortcuts. Blood glucose is a complicated physiological system, yet modern wellness culture continually searches for a single lever: one ingredient, one timing trick, one supplement, one morning ritual. We want metabolism to behave like a machine with an emergency button labelled “reset”. It does not.

If adding a small amount of vinegar to a meal helps someone modestly reduce a post-meal glucose rise, that may be perfectly reasonable. But the useful question is not whether vinegar can defeat carbohydrates. It is whether vinegar can become one small component of an already sensible eating pattern.

That is a much less exciting proposition, which is probably why it is also much closer to the truth. The miracle, as usual, is moderation. And unfortunately for the wellness industry, moderation does not come in a bottle.

Fika bonding! #131 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

Fika is a state of mind and an important part of Swedish culture. It means making time for friends and colleagues to share a cup of coffee and a little something to eat.

For more Fika bonding!, HERE!
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The Great Calcutta Riots: Challenging Communal Narratives of 1946 By Habib Siddiqui

The Great Kolkata Riots of August 1946 remain one of the most contested and emotionally charged episodes in the modern history of Bengal. For Bengali-speaking people on both sides of today’s border, the events of Direct Action Day (August 14, 1946) have long constituted a historical puzzle: how a day announced as a peaceful political demonstration by minority Muslims in Calcutta — intended to express their desire for Pakistan and their fear of becoming second‑ or third‑class citizens in a Hindu-majority India — could so quickly descend into one of the bloodiest communal riots of late colonial India.

On August 4, 1946, a conference of Muslim League representatives was held at Zakaria Street, Calcutta, to consider the program for Direct Action Day. It was later elaborated and circulated through local newspapers, pamphlets, and posters. The League President gave orders to observe the day in a peaceful manner to show support for the League’s decisions, regarding the withdrawal of acceptance of Cabinet Mission proposals and the policy of attaining Pakistan.10 The Calcutta District Muslim League called for a “complete hartal and general strike in all spheres of civic, commercial and industrial life,” except in emergency services.

Non-Muslims were also called upon to join hands with Muslims in their fight for Pakistan. A mass procession and a meeting were organized at the Ochterlony Monument and H.S. Suhrawardy, the then Prime Minister of Bengal, was scheduled to preside over it. Muslims were asked to congregate in Maidan to display their solidarity and united strength.

A recent Facebook post attributed a partisan account of the riots to Jyoti Basu, the long-serving Communist leader of West Bengal. Yet, as I noted after listening to the audio version read by Ashim Kumar Pal, such narratives often present only one side of the story, omitting the Muslim experience entirely. This omission is not trivial. As Lt. General Sir Francis Tuker, General Officer Commanding Eastern Command, an eyewitness to the sad event, observed in While Memory Serves, “One great reality of Indian politics has for years been communalism. But unfortunately, the Congress Party hid it from the world, with the inevitable result that India today is decisively parted into at least two nations.”

Tuker’s memoir is indispensable for anyone seeking a balanced understanding of the riots. He describes how, in the days leading up to Direct Action Day, “biased, perverted and inflammatory” articles appeared in both Hindu and Muslim newspapers, while political leaders on all sides indulged in irresponsible rhetoric. His assessment is blunt: goondas — Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim — were responsible for much of the mayhem, but certain political leaders helped create the conditions for violence. He singles out Congress leader Kiran Shankar Roy, who on 14 August 1946 urged Hindus to defy the government-declared holiday and keep their shops open, dismissing the Muslim League’s call for a peaceful hartal. Roy’s speech, Tuker argues, “provoked trouble” rather than defusing tensions.

Hindu public opinion at the time was mobilized around slogans such as Akhand Hindustan and Bande Mataram, which reinforced a hardened sense of Hindu identity. Many Hindu extremists interpreted Direct Action Day as an opportunity to “teach the Muslims in Calcutta a lesson,” resulting in widespread attacks on Muslim neighborhoods. As Tuker records, by 7:30 a.m. on 16 August, Hindus had already erected barricades at the Tala and Belgachia bridges to prevent Muslims from entering the city and proceeding toward the Ochterlony Monument, where a mammoth assembly was scheduled to be addressed at 3 p.m. by H. S. Suhrawardy, the Prime Minister of undivided Bengal. Tuker wrote: “Hindus had erected barricades at the Tala and Belgachia bridges to prevent Muslims from entering the city and taking their processions to the middle of the town to the Ochterlony Monument where a mammoth Muslim assembly was to be addressed at 3 p.m. by Mr. H. S. Suhrawardy.”

The peaceful Muslim marchers were assaulted with deadly weapons, triggering riots that soon engulfed Calcutta and later spread to Bihar, U.P., and East Punjab. Tuker’s description is chilling: “Buses and taxis were charging about loaded with Sikhs and Hindus armed with swords, iron bars and firearms.” Many Sikhs employed by Marwari businessmen acted as enforcers, targeting Muslims with impunity.

Even Muslims who were members of the Congress Party were not spared. The killing of Dr. Jamal Mohammed, an eye specialist of Bhowanipore, illustrates the ferocity of the communal frenzy. As reported in Morning News (2 September 1946), Dr. Mohammed pleaded, “Why are you killing me… I am a Congressman and have served the Congress all my life.” The mob responded, “We don’t care… You are a Muslim and that is enough.” His murder was part of a broader pattern aimed at erasing Muslim presence from Hindu-majority localities.The Kazipara bustee, a Muslim pocket on Debendra Ghosh Road in Bhowanipore, was completely wiped off, which killed around one hundred Muslims. Muslim residents of Bhowanipore suffered enormous losses, as every Muslim house in the area was destroyed.

Abul Hashim, General Secretary of the Bengal Provincial Muslim League, offers further insight in In Retrospection, underscoring the climate of fear and the breakdown of trust between communities. He writes, “On the 13th of August I issued a statement to the press in which I stated that Muslim League would observe the Direct Action Day to demonstrate their grievances against British Imperialism. I made it clear that our target was British Imperialism alone.” He continues:

“I appealed to all sections of the people to make'Direct Action Day' peaceful and not to degenerate itinto a strife between people and people despite provocation from elements that might play the game of theimperial power whose purpose was to suppress popularupsurge in the country.

The Muslim League had no knowledge, no apprehension and no anticipation as to the unprecedented violencethat started in the morning and continued in the afternoon of the 16th of August when we were all in the midstof the meeting held at the foot of the Octerlony Monument. The Muslims were unarmed and unprepared tomeet the situation. Men may lie but circumstancesnever lie. I brought from Burdwan with me my twosons, Badruddin Mohammad Umar, a boy of 15, andShahabuddin Mohammad Ali, a boy of 8 to showthem the great gathering that was expected on the occasion at Calcutta. I took my sons to the Maidan and LalMiah of Faridpur took his grandson aged six or seven. Ifwe apprehended any danger we would not have takenour sons and grandsons to the Maidan.”

Abul Hashim recalls that the meeting had barely begun when he reminded the audience that their struggle was directed against Fort William, not the people of India. However, word quickly arrived from all sides that violent communal riots had erupted across Calcutta. Upon hearing the news, he immediately rushed back with his sons to his residence on Ripon Street.

He recalls:

“Mr. Suhrawardy declared August 16th a public holiday, a decision described as a major blunder. While peace-loving citizens were largely uninvolved, subsequent events suggested the riots were organized by British imperialist agent provocateurs. The violence lasted for five days, from August 16th to the 20th. Although Mr. Suhrawardy requested army assistance and relocated to the Lal Bazar Police Headquarters control room to manage the crisis round the clock, the army did not deploy, local police were overmatched, and dispatched armed reinforcements failed to reach their destinations, leaving the city unprotected. Order was eventually restored after the Punjab government sent a large contingent of armed constables at Mr. Suhrawardy's request, during which time he also risked his life by driving through the city during the dayand by night. Central Calcutta was the centre of the great killing.

A friend informed me that he saw Moulana Azad Subhani walking along Bowbazar Street. I immediately sent volunteers with armed police to Bowbazar to find the Moulana. Fortunately enough they saw the Moulana in Bowbazar Street. They picked him up and brought him to my place. Monnujan Girls Hostel, a hostel for post-graduate women students, was situated at Vivekananda Road in Central Calcutta. The hostel was attacked and the life and honour of the women students were threatened. The hooligans attempted to pull down the Muslim League flag from the hostel but the students gallantly resisted. As soon as news came to me I sent a truck with volunteers and armed constables to rescue the inmates of the hostel. They were brought to my residence at 37 Ripon Street. Immediately through a Press statement I informed the parents and guardians of the women students that they were safe at my residence. When the riot subsided Mr. Suhrawardy provided funds for sending them some.”

To this archival record must be added the testimony of ordinary Muslim residents whose experiences rarely appear in mainstream accounts.An extract from the confidential reports of the Intelligence Branch described how an old resident from KatuaKhoti Lane, Md. Rafuquddin, left his para (neighborhood) on August 16, 1946:

“From the morning of 16/8/46 the people of our own mohalla was preparing for a procession of ML [Muslim League] to attend the meeting at Esplanade. That being a Ramzan day I went to bazar at about 1:30 pm. On the way to bazar I saw some people gather in our locality for procession. At around 2 p.m. I heard slogan “Allah Akbar” mixed with great noise from Bazar and saw the procession of our mohalla (KatuaKhoti Lane) proceeding towards Esplanade. As soon the procession reached Jagu Babu’s Bazar brickbats, stones was (sic) thrown at it from both sides of the road. As the procession was disorganized the Hindus and Sikhs were attacking it from both sides with lathi and daggers. After midnight we heard slogans of Bande Mataram and Jai Hind gradually approaching our locality to attack the locality. The Police Patrol party came after repeated phone calls from our locality. In the morning we set up peace committee with Hindus of our locality but failed. At about noon we left our house, leaving everything to the mercy of the Hindus and took shelter in Presidency jail. I went to see my house after 2 days and saw it along with other houses were broken and all our household property were looted. I have lost everything except the lives of my family members.” [Extracts from “Reports of the IB Officials and Assistants Regarding the Incidents Witnessed during the Direct Action Day Declared by AIML Office of DIG, IB,” Intelligence Branch Records, File No. 717/46(6), West Bengal State Archives, Kolkata.]

Similar was the fate of Sharfuddin Ahmad. He lived in Chetla, a predominantly Hindu area. He left his house after Muslim families in his locality were attacked by some Revolutionary Socialist Party goons.

He describes:

“My house at 6 Mahesh Chandra Datta Lane is the only Muslim house situated in a backward area in Chetla, P.O. Alipore. The first report that we heard of riot was from a RSP fellow recently came to my locality living at 7 Mahesh Datta Lane. He began to gather crowds around him and said Muslims gave such exciting statement in front of gurudwara that the Sikhs could not keep their heads cool and that Muslims forcibly entered Kalighat gurudwara. I found he was spreading mischievous lies in my locality fomenting trouble that would victimize my family and relatives. So I asked him what slogans excited Sikh and he said fumbly ‘Congress Party Dhangsa Hok’ and denied that he said Muslims entered Gurudwara. So I told my neighbor that he is spreading false rumours. I saw later that the RSP fellow had gathered a number of lathis and dozen low class people in a room 100 yards from my house and so I rang to Khan Bahadur Abdur Rahman, Minister of Bengal who telephoned Alipore P.O. to arrest these men. In the same building one Police magistrate was living who could not find the room of these men. Soon after 50 young men began to tour the area with baton, knives, rocks in Mahesh Chandra Datta Lane alone. All Friday nights conch shells were blown creating false panic and alarm. At 12 I toured my area in a peace squad, which met hostile elements among the Bhadralok class in front of a mosque at 12 Moyerpara Road. On the same day at 2:30 four Sikh with 200 Hindus of mixed elements attacked the above mosque and murdered the Imam and another Moulavi. The whole of Saturday night we passed a house where 6 Muslim families have been living for nearly half a century. On Sunday morning on receipt of information from friendly neighbours all the families left the house, leaving everything and fled on foot to house of Khan Bahadur Abdur Rahman, Minister. After this we heard of stray stabbing cases on Muslim in Chetla area and the same RSP fellow responsible for the murder of Ghulam Muhammed Mustafa Chaudhuri who was kidnapped and murdered near our house and thrown into Tolly Nala fromDurgapur Bridge. No Police or Military came. I am staying in a safe Muslim place with my own family. I would not venture to return to my house in a predominantly Hindu area.” [“Reports of the IB Officials and Assistants Regarding the Incidents Witnessed during the Direct Action Day,” Intelligence Branch Records, File No. 717/46(6).]

A particularly harrowing account comes from Abdul Mannan, who lived near the Bowbazar area of Calcutta, where only three Muslim families resided in the neighborhood. Abdul Mannan was just fourteen years old during the riots, yet the scenes he witnessed from the road‑facing window of his grandfather’s second‑floor home remained etched in his memory for the rest of his life. From that vantage point, he saw Hindu goondas corner Muslim passersby and kill them with curved knives, slashing open their stomachs until their intestines spilled onto the street. These were not isolated incidents; Mannan recalled watching such killings, each one imprinting itself with traumatic clarity.

When the mob eventually approached his family’s home, it was the Chinese tenants on the ground floor — owners of a small shoe shop — who intervened. They confronted the attackers and managed to drive them away, saving the Muslim family from certain death. Abdul Mannan’s maternal uncle, Mr. Noor, a Police Magistrate at the time, was able to move the family to the local police station for safety, where they remained sheltered for a week before returning home. During their absence, the Chinese tenants again protected the house, preventing Hindu goondas from attacking or destroying it. Abdul Mannan, who later became Assistant Regional Director of Radio Pakistan in Chittagong in the 1960s, would recount these memories to his children after the family migrated to East Pakistan, describing how the terror he witnessed as a fourteen‑year‑old boy never faded, even decades later. His recollections underscore both the brutality of the violence and the unexpected solidarities that emerged amid the chaos.

My own parents — then teenagers and unmarried students in Calcutta— experienced the riots firsthand. Their recollections, which I recorded in my books, align closely with Tuker’s account. As I wrote in Bangladesh: A Polarized and Divided Nation?, my father survived an attack on Baker Hostel by armed Hindu goondas. Along with other Muslim students, he resisted the attackers before taking refuge inside empty water tanks on the hostel roof. “For days, afraid of being killed, no Muslim dared to come out of his/her hiding place.” These experiences convinced many that partition — of India, Bengal, and Punjab — had become the only viable option.

Despite the wealth of eyewitness testimony, the Muslim perspective on the Great Kolkata Riots remains underrepresented in mainstream historiography. Very few Muslim historians have taken up the task of challenging fabricated or one-sided narratives propagated by communal Hindu writers who place the entire blame on Muslims. As a lifelong student of South Asian history, my research indicates that while H. S. Suhrawardy’s decision to declare a government holiday for Direct Action Day has been criticized, he cannot and should not be held responsible for the riots. He repeatedly requested military deployment to maintain order, but the British Raj refused to cooperate — allowing the violence to escalate. The demographic toll speaks for itself: eyewitness accounts suggest that perhaps four out of every five victims were Muslims, many killed by knife- and dagger‑wielding Hindu and Sikh mobs.

Recent scholarship reinforces this picture of asymmetrical suffering. As Sohini Majumdar notes, many Muslim residents — regardless of political affiliation — were attacked, displaced, or forced to abandon homes in mixed neighborhoods. Muslim girls’ hostels were raided, students were assaulted, and entire bustees such as Saheb Bagan were wiped out by organized Hindu mobs. These incidents reveal how communal violence reshaped Calcutta’s urban geography, transforming previously mixed localities into sharply segregated “safe” and “unsafe” zones.

Such evidence complicates simplistic narratives of Muslim aggression and highlights the diversity of Muslim experiences — ranging from trauma and displacement to moments of protection by Hindu neighbors who resisted the communal tide.

The Great Kolkata Riots of 1946 were not inevitable. They were the product of communal polarization, political irresponsibility, and administrative failure. But they were also a moment of profound historical rupture — one that shaped the destinies of millions and continues to haunt the collective memory of Bengalis today. Understanding this event requires acknowledging all perspectives, especially those long marginalized or deliberately erased.

A more nuanced engagement with the Great Kolkata Riots is overdue. By confronting the distortions and omissions that have shaped its memory, we move closer to a history that does justice to all who lived through it.

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Dr Siddiqui is an author of several books, including Bangladesh: A Polarized and Divided Nation?(Amazon, 2021) and 'Modi-Fied' India: The Transformation of A Nation (Peter Lang, 2026).

The convenient immigrant …Parisian student by Thanos Kalamidas

What is profoundly dishonest about the far right's gaze upon a young person in the streets of France? It sees a hood. It hears an accent it does not like. It finds a foreign surname somewhere in the family tree and suddenly imagines it has explained an entire political movement. The American vice-president does it. Donald Trump does it. Greek Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis does it. Different countries, different politicians, same lazy recipe, when young people protest against the conditions of their lives, blame immigrants.

And in doing so they achieve two things at once. They expose their xenophobia and they erase the students. That second part deserves considerably more attention. France's student movement did not begin because somebody woke up one morning and decided that immigration was an exciting new political hobby. It began with students protesting school conditions, teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms, inadequate facilities and the increasingly frightening prospect of entering adulthood with fewer opportunities and greater insecurity. The movement spread rapidly and developed into something much broader, with tens and then hundreds of thousands taking to the streets.

That is a youth movement. It belongs to them. But the far right cannot resist stealing it.

Suddenly, the discussion is no longer about classrooms, teachers, housing, living costs, inequality, employment or what kind of future today's young people are being handed. Suddenly, the student standing in the street becomes an immigrant. His politics disappear. Her anger disappears. Their demands disappear.

Their ethnicity becomes the story. It is an extraordinarily convenient trick. Trump has explicitly attempted to frame the French unrest as a consequence of mass migration and Islam rather than as a movement centred on schools and the future of French youth. JD Vance has similarly blamed immigration for the violence surrounding the demonstrations. Georgiadis, meanwhile, described the French unrest as the product of a mixture of immigrants from different generations and the far left, portraying the country's turmoil through the same immigration-centred lens.

The political convenience is almost obscene. If students are angry because their schools are failing, governments have to answer questions. If students are angry because they cannot see a secure future, governments have to answer questions. If young people believe public institutions have failed them, politicians have to answer questions.

But if the problem can simply be called "immigration", the questions disappear. Brilliant. The student becomes the immigrant. The grievance becomes the invasion. The protest becomes the riot. The political argument becomes a security problem.

And suddenly nobody has to discuss why an entire generation is angry. Of course, violence must be condemned. Burning buildings, attacking police officers, looting businesses and destroying public property are not somehow transformed into legitimate political expression because the perpetrators are young or angry. The violence that erupted in parts of France was real, serious and destructive, and those responsible should face the consequences of their actions. Hundreds of thousands, however, marched peacefully, while the government's own figures and reporting from the demonstrations distinguish the enormous peaceful mobilisation from the violent fringe.

That distinction is precisely what political opportunists do not want. Because once you separate the rioter from the student, you have to listen to the student. And that is much more uncomfortable. The young people marching are not props in somebody else's immigration debate. They are not disposable extras in a culture-war campaign manufactured by politicians thousands of kilometres away. They are citizens. They are the people who will inherit the consequences of today's political decisions long after today's ministers have retired, today's presidents have left office and today's social-media warriors have found another country to lecture.

They are asking a brutally simple question: What kind of country are you leaving us? And the answer from the far right seems to be: Stop complaining. Blame your neighbour.

It is intellectually pathetic. It also reveals something darker. The far right increasingly treats second-generation immigrants as permanently foreign. Born in France? Still an immigrant. Raised in France? Still an immigrant. French citizen? Still somehow an outsider. Protest against the government? Evidence of failed integration. Protest alongside others? Proof of an immigrant conspiracy.

At what point does a person finally become French? Apparently, never. This is the poison hidden inside the rhetoric. Second-generation immigrants are simultaneously told that they must integrate and then informed, whenever convenient, that they will never quite belong. Their Frenchness is conditional. Their citizenship is questioned culturally even when it is unquestionable legally.

And then politicians wonder why alienation grows. The students of France deserve better than this intellectual fraud. They deserve to have their arguments heard, even when those arguments are uncomfortable. They deserve classrooms that work, teachers who are there, institutions that listen and a future that does not feel like a punishment for being born at the wrong economic moment.

Most importantly, they deserve to own their movement. Not Trump. Not Vance. Not Georgiadis. Not Le Pen. Not Macron. Not the far left either. The students. Because the easiest way to defeat a young generation is not necessarily to silence it. Sometimes it is simply to convince everybody that nobody should listen to what it is saying.

The jungle has no rulebook by Robert Perez

The most dangerous phrase in Washington's new war on drugs may be the simplest one: “on land.” For decades, the United States has treated Latin America's narcotics trade primarily as a law-enforcement, intelligence and interdiction problem. Now the Trump administration is pushing the military deeper into the region, with hundreds of U.S. troops deployed for training and joint exercises and a stated ambition to take the fight against designated criminal organisations from the sea onto the jungle floor.

That is not merely an expansion of an operation. It is a change of category. And categories matter when people start dying. The argument from Washington is seductive in its simplicity: cartels are dangerous, drugs kill Americans, therefore the military should hunt the people responsible. It sounds tough. It sounds decisive. It sounds like the kind of policy that fits comfortably into a presidential speech about restoring order.

But the drug trade is not an invading army. Criminal organisations are brutal, heavily armed and capable of controlling territory. That does not automatically transform every suspected trafficker, logistics operator, boat crewman or warehouse worker into a lawful military target. The mere fact that soldiers are carrying the weapons does not magically transform a policing operation into a war.

That distinction has already been badly blurred by the administration's maritime campaign. More than 200 people have reportedly been killed in strikes against suspected drug-trafficking vessels, while serious questions remain about the evidence supporting individual targets and the legal basis for using lethal military force.

Now Washington wants to take that model ashore. That should make every democratic government in the Americas nervous. Because the jungle is not an ocean. On a boat intercepted hundreds of kilometres from shore, the Pentagon can create an image of a clean battlefield: target, missile, explosion, mission accomplished. On land, reality becomes considerably messier. Villages exist. Families exist. Informants lie. Intelligence is incomplete. Criminal groups deliberately operate among civilians. Governments have different laws, different courts and different ideas about sovereignty.

There are no neat red circles around the “bad guys.” And once the United States begins conducting lethal operations inside another country's territory, the legal questions multiply violently. Who authorised the strike? Who identified the target? What evidence was available? Was arrest possible? What happens when the intelligence is wrong? Who investigates a civilian death? Which country's courts have jurisdiction? And, perhaps most importantly, what happens when the definition of “terrorist organisation” becomes a convenient replacement for evidence?

This is where the counter-narcotics mission risks becoming something much larger than counter-narcotics. The administration has designated numerous Latin American criminal groups as foreign terrorist organisations and increasingly describes the confrontation in military language. But changing the label does not automatically create an international armed conflict or grant unlimited authority to kill. Human-rights lawyers and international institutions have already challenged the legal theory underpinning the maritime strikes, arguing that suspected criminals cannot simply be converted into military targets by presidential declaration.

Washington may disagree. It is entitled to make that argument. But Latin America has heard this music before. The hemisphere remembers military dictatorships, covert operations, interventions, disappearances and governments claiming that extraordinary threats required extraordinary powers. The United States cannot seriously expect Latin American societies to forget that history simply because today's targets are called cartels instead of communists.

And there is an additional stupidity here: killing people is not the same thing as dismantling a criminal economy. Cartels are businesses. Kill one commander and another appears. Destroy one route and another opens. Bomb a warehouse and the supply chain adapts. Organised crime survives because it has money, corruption networks, political protection, weapons and enormous consumer demand.

A missile cannot arrest corruption. A drone cannot prosecute a banker laundering cartel money. A soldier cannot bomb away the American appetite for cocaine. Yet military power is politically addictive precisely because it creates immediate images of action. Governments can announce strikes. Generals can display maps. Presidents can promise that the enemy is being destroyed.

Meanwhile, the harder work, investigation, prosecution, financial intelligence, anti-corruption operations, border cooperation, judicial reform and reducing demand, looks painfully boring. Democracy has always had this problem: the spectacular solution is often easier to sell than the effective one.

The United States has every legitimate interest in fighting drug trafficking. Latin American governments have every right to seek American intelligence, equipment and training. Joint operations can be lawful and useful when they respect sovereignty, human rights and clear rules of engagement.

But once counter-narcotics becomes a battlefield without a clearly defined war, the distinction between policing and warfare begins to disappear. And when that distinction disappears, so does accountability. The jungle should not become the place where the rules go to die. Because if Washington can redefine criminal suspects as wartime enemies today, another government can copy the formula tomorrow. And once that precedent spreads across the Americas, nobody should be surprised when the next jungle contains not fewer bodies, but fewer rules.