The politics of a headscarf by Sabine Fischer

Austria has decided that a girl of twelve may be trusted with algebra, geography, puberty and the increasingly complicated emotional weather of adolescence, but apparently not with a piece of fabric on her head. The state, in its wisdom, has therefore appointed itself guardian of her wardrobe.

The symbolism is difficult to miss. The law is defended as a measure of secularism and protection, yet it arrives with the political assistance of the far-right Freedom Party, a movement whose ideological universe has never exactly been famous for its delicate handling of minorities. That should make anyone interested in liberal democracy pause.

The problem is not whether governments have the right to regulate religious expression in public institutions. They sometimes do. The problem is what happens when the regulation is directed overwhelmingly at one religious minority and dressed up as emancipation.

Austria already bans full-face veils in public. That is one argument. A fourteen-year-old wearing a headscarf is quite another. A full-face covering can raise legitimate questions about identification and public interaction. A headscarf does not conceal a person's identity. It is visible precisely because it expresses identity.

The distinction matters. There is something profoundly uncomfortable about telling a Muslim girl that she must remove her headscarf in order to demonstrate that she is free. Freedom becomes a rather strange concept when the government exercises it on your behalf by deciding what you cannot wear.

The defenders of the law will insist that this is about children, not Muslims. Perhaps some genuinely believe that. But politics is not judged solely by intention. It is judged by consequence. If a law repeatedly lands on one religious community, places teachers in the role of clothing police and threatens families with fines, then the state has created a very particular kind of equality: everyone is equal, but some citizens are considerably more likely to receive a visit from the headmaster.

And what exactly is the teacher supposed to accomplish? Mathematics in the morning, constitutional theology before lunch?

Teachers should educate children. They should not be transformed into miniature border guards of secular identity, interrogating pupils about religious clothing and organising disciplinary meetings with parents. The classroom already has enough problems without adding a bureaucratic theology department.

There is also the constitutional question. Austria's previous attempt to impose a narrower prohibition was struck down because religious neutrality requires the state not to favour or punish particular beliefs. That principle deserves more than another legislative experiment.

Secularism is supposed to protect the state from religion and religion from the state. It is not supposed to become a religion of its own, complete with sacred clothing rules and political commandments.

Europe has spent decades insisting that Muslim immigrants must integrate. Fair enough. Integration, however, cannot mean permanent demonstrations of submission. A democratic society should be capable of saying: you may disagree with us, dress differently, worship differently and still belong here.

If a girl freely chooses to wear a headscarf, the liberal response should not be to congratulate the state for making the choice disappear. Nor should anyone romanticise the possibility of family or community pressure. Both forms of coercion deserve scrutiny.

But the answer to coercion cannot automatically be another coercive authority. Austria's real test is therefore not whether a twelve-year-old removes her headscarf. It is whether the republic can resist the temptation to turn Muslim children into political symbols.

A democratic state should be confident enough to tolerate difference. Otherwise, beneath all the talk of protecting freedom, there is only another authority telling people what freedom is supposed to look like.

Walk the talk 26#015 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

The term “talk the talk, walk the walk” is a phrase in English
that means a person should support what they say, not just with words,
but also through action. Actions speak louder than words.

For more Walk the talk, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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The Yemen question by Emma Schneider

The most disturbing thing about the latest hint that Yemen may possess chemical-weapons stockpiles is not necessarily what may be hidden in Yemen. It is what the allegation forces us to ask about everywhere else.

Chemical weapons were supposed to belong to history's darkest museum: mustard gas in the trenches, nerve agents in Cold War bunkers, photographs of terrified civilians fleeing invisible clouds. The world built treaties, inspectors and elaborate systems of verification precisely because civilization had decided that poison gas was a line that civilized states would not cross.

Yet here we are, in another Middle Eastern war, wondering whether chemical weapons may still be sitting somewhere in warehouses, military compounds or forgotten bunkers.

Yemen is particularly alarming because war has a habit of turning inventories into mysteries. Governments collapse. Command structures fragment. Military installations change hands. Records disappear. Intelligence becomes contradictory. Weapons once controlled by a state can become controlled by nobody or by everybody.

That is the nightmare. The international chemical-weapons regime has achieved something extraordinary. The declared stockpiles of states belonging to the global convention have been destroyed under international verification. But "declared" is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. The system depends upon states telling the truth, inspectors gaining access and governments retaining enough institutional stability to know what they possess.

War is exceptionally good at destroying all three assumptions. And Yemen is hardly alone in living at the intersection of civil conflict, regional intervention, clandestine weapons networks and collapsing state authority. Syria demonstrated how quickly chemical warfare could return from the historical basement. The recent discovery of remnants of the Assad-era programme should have reminded the world that destroying a declared arsenal is not necessarily the same thing as discovering every weapon, every precursor, every laboratory or every buried secret.

The uncomfortable question, therefore, is not simply: Does Yemen have chemical weapons? It is: How many Yemens are there?

How many countries have weapons nobody has officially declared? How many arsenals are poorly documented? How many governments possess suspicious industrial chemicals that could be diverted during a collapse? How many military depots are sitting in countries where nobody can confidently say who controls them six months from now?

The answer should concern us more than another round of diplomatic finger-pointing. Chemical weapons are particularly dangerous because their proliferation does not require a superpower. A government with a functioning bureaucracy can build an elaborate programme. A collapsing government can inherit one. A militia can seize pieces of one. A terrorist organization does not necessarily need a vast industrial complex if it can obtain the right materials and expertise.

The world therefore needs to stop treating chemical disarmament as a box that was checked in 2023. It is not finished. The real test of the international system begins when a country becomes too chaotic to police itself. Inspectors need access. Intelligence services need to share information. Chemical industries need stronger safeguards. And when governments collapse, the international community needs contingency plans for securing dangerous sites before somebody else discovers them.

Otherwise, we will continue congratulating ourselves on having eliminated the world's declared chemical arsenals while quietly accumulating an unknown number of undeclared question marks. Yemen should not become another Syria-style lesson learned only after the photographs arrive. The world has spent decades building a fence around chemical weapons. It now needs to check whether anyone has been digging tunnels underneath it.

What Poets Need #Poem by Abigail George

 

Maybe I need
to see mountains and trees

Maybe I need
to read more love poems,

instead
of sad poems,
political poems,
war poems,

And instead of writing poems about children
being born in refugee camps,

children playing with guns,
children dying to belong

Maybe I need
to fall in love
with mountains and trees

Maybe I need
to go to the sea
and immerse myself in the saltwater,

feel it against my skin

Yes, every poet
needs to be reminded

of the gentle hands
of their mother,

of their grandmother
wiping their nose

Europe’s debt trap Is called America by Zakir Hall

America has a debt problem. Europe may have an exposure problem. That distinction matters. The United States is now carrying a federal debt mountain so enormous that the numbers have become almost meaningless to ordinary human beings. Trillions upon trillions are borrowed, refinanced and rolled over, while Washington behaves as though the national credit card has no spending limit. The American political system has perfected the art of arguing about taxes and spending without seriously confronting the arithmetic underneath them.

But there is a second story, and it is one Europeans should be paying much closer attention to. Europe is deeply invested in America. European governments, banks, pension funds, insurers, investment managers and other financial institutions hold enormous quantities of American financial assets, including U.S. Treasury securities. Five EU member states alone accounted for roughly $1.72 trillion of Treasury holdings at the end of 2025, while European countries including Britain, Switzerland and Norway collectively held close to $3.1 trillion.

That does not mean European banks are simply the people who “load” America's debt. The ownership structure is considerably more complicated, and much of the European exposure is private rather than governmental. But the broader point is uncomfortable: Europe has become financially entangled with the American debt machine.

And that creates a peculiar imbalance. Washington can borrow because the world continues to regard U.S. government debt as one of the safest places to put money. Europeans buy American debt because they need liquid, relatively secure assets. American politicians therefore enjoy an extraordinary privilege: they can spend today while someone else's financial institutions help provide the capital.

It is a wonderful arrangement, particularly if you happen to be the borrower. Until confidence changes. The danger is not that America suddenly announces that it cannot pay its debts. The modern financial system does not usually collapse so theatrically. The danger is slower and more insidious: higher yields, falling bond prices, tighter liquidity and a gradual reassessment of American fiscal credibility.

And then Europe discovers that its supposedly safe American assets are not quite as safe as the political slogans suggested.

European banks already have substantial dollar-denominated balance sheets, with U.S. Treasuries and agency mortgage-backed securities forming an important part of their dollar securities holdings. A serious repricing of American debt would therefore not remain conveniently on the other side of the Atlantic.

It would travel. Through banks. Through pension funds. Through insurers. Through investment portfolios. Through currency markets. Eventually, through European taxpayers. This is why Europe's problem is not simply that America owes too much money. It is that Europe has become accustomed to America's financial dominance and has built part of its own financial security around it.

There is an almost comic contradiction here. European politicians complain about American unilateralism, American tariffs and American geopolitical unpredictability while European capital continues financing substantial quantities of American government debt.

Europe is simultaneously criticizing the casino and keeping a large amount of its savings at the roulette table. That cannot continue indefinitely. Europe should not dump American assets recklessly. That would hurt European investors as much as anyone else. Nor should Brussels fantasize about some spectacular financial revenge against Washington. Financial warfare is rarely as satisfying as politicians imagine.

The sensible response is diversification: deeper European capital markets, stronger euro-denominated safe assets and less dependence on any single foreign financial system. America's debt problem belongs first to America. But Europe's exposure to it belongs to Europe. And that may ultimately prove the more uncomfortable bill.

Maples & Oranges #072 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

Taunting oranges in the midst of other fruity links,
constantly spreading the wares of their juicy gloom.

For more Maples & Oranges, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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Europe’s Otherness Problem: From Bosnia to Palestine By Habib Siddiqui

There are moments in history when a society reveals its soul. Sarajevo was one such moment. Srebrenica was another. And now, thirty years later, the world’s reaction to the death and public celebration of Ratko Mladic– the “Butcher of Bosnia” – exposes yet again the moral bankruptcy of the global order we pretend governs humanity. It is a painful reminder that the United Nations, conceived as humanity’s shield against genocide, has become a weakened world-body incapable of protecting the vulnerable. Worse still, the Western powers who claim to be guardians of civilization have repeatedly enabled the very horrors they vowed never to allow again.

I arrived in Sarajevo on May 5, 2022, invited to speak at a genocide conference. It was not my first time speaking orwriting about Bosnia; both my voice and pen had been committed to its tragedy since the early 1990s, when the world watched the destruction of a multiethnic society with a mixture of indifference, paralysis, and selective outrage. But walking the streets of Sarajevo – feeling the weight of its history, sensing the quiet dignity of its survivors – was different. It was visceral. It was haunting. It was a confrontation with the consequences of global hypocrisy.

Sarajevo was once known as the “Jerusalem of Europe,” a city where Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived side by side for centuries. Under Ottoman rule, it embodied the Qur’anic principles of la ikraha fid-deen – no compulsion in religion – and lakumdeenikumwaliyadeen – to you your faith, to me mine. It was a city where difference was not a threat but a fact of life. Yet when Yugoslavia fractured, Bosnia’s Muslim identity became its death sentence. Europe, which never truly reconciled with its own history of religious chauvinism, looked away as Serb nationalists turned Bosnia into a killing field.

The siege of Sarajevo lasted 1,425 days – the longest siege of a capital city in modern warfare. More than 11,000 civilians were killed, including over 1,000 children. Residents lived without electricity, water, medicine, or safety. Snipers targeted anyone who dared cross a street. Mortars fell on markets, playgrounds, funerals. The city was starved, terrorized, and isolated. And the world watched.

But the darkest chapter was Srebrenica.

Srebrenica was not merely a town; it was a promise. A UN-declared Safe Zone. A sanctuary that was supposed to symbolize the world’s commitment to “Never Again.” Instead, it became the site of the worst genocide in Europe since the Jewish Holocaust. Over 8,372 Bosniak men and boys were slaughtered by the Bosnian Serb Army under Ratko Mladic. Bodies were dumped in mass graves, then dug up and scattered into secondary and tertiary graves to hide the evidence. The killers included units of the VRS and paramilitary groups like the Scorpions – entities responsible for atrocities that should have shaken the conscience of every nation.

Yet the UN failed. Catastrophically. Fatally.

Kofi Annan later admitted that the UN’s errors were “rooted in a philosophy of impartiality and non-violence” that was tragically unsuited to Bosnia’s reality. The organization that was supposed to prevent genocide instead became a silent witness to it. Its peacekeepers were outnumbered, under-armed, and politically constrained. Its Security Council was paralyzed by the geopolitical interests of powerful states. Its moral authority evaporated in the killing fields of Srebrenica.

And Europe – self-proclaimed cradle of human rights – allowed it to happen.

Today, more than 750 mass graves have been uncovered across Bosnia. In Srebrenica alone, 91 mass graves have yielded nearly 7,000 identified remains. Of the estimated 20,000 soldiers involved in war crimes, only about 500 have been convicted. Justice has been slow, incomplete, and often symbolic.

But perhaps the most grotesque betrayal is happening now.

During my visit to Bosnia, the posters of Ratko Mladic near Srebrenicawere everywhere – smiling, glorified, celebrated. The town, once 75% Bosniak, has been ethnically cleansed. The survivors live elsewhere. The perpetrators and their supporters remain. And now, with Mladic’s death, thousands have attended his funeral in Serbia, honoring a man convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity.

What does it say about a society when it celebrates a mass murderer?

What does it say about Europe when it tolerates such celebration?

What does it say about the world when genocide becomes normalized?

The answer is devastating: our global system is broken. The UN is weakened. Western powers are hypocritical. And the lessons of Bosnia have not been learned.

The same nations that failed Bosnia now enable Israel’s ongoing destruction of Palestinian life. The same governments that refused to confront Serb nationalism now defend Israeli expansionism. The same Western capitals that mourned Srebrenica now justify the genocide of civilians in Gaza. They speak of human rights while funding occupation. They preach international law while shielding those who violate it. They condemn genocide only when politically convenient.

This is not accidental. It is structural.

Former colonial powers have always been comfortable with the suffering of “others.” Bosnia’s Muslims were othered. Palestinians are othered. The Rohingya are othered. The Kashmiris are othered. The list is long, and the pattern is unmistakable. When the victims are Muslim, the outrage is muted, the action delayed, the justice deferred.

And so Ratko Mladic, responsible for the murder of thousands, is honored by his supporters. His crimes are minimized. His legacy is sanitized. His funeral becomes a nationalist spectacle. It is sickening. It is obscene. It is a moral indictment of Serbia, of Europe, and of the international community that allowed him to operate for years with impunity.

The world promised “Never Again.” Bosnia proved that promise was hollow. Palestine proves it daily. The UN, weakened by political manipulation, has become a stage for speeches rather than a force for justice. Its resolutions are ignored. Its warnings dismissed. Its credibility eroded.

And yet, the survivors of Sarajevo and Srebrenica endure. Their dignity remains intact. Their memory resists erasure. Their truth stands firm against denial.

But memory alone is not enough.

The world must confront the normalization of genocide. It must reject the celebration of war criminals. It must dismantle the hypocrisy that allows powerful nations to decide whose lives matter. It must reform the UN or replace it with a body capable of protecting humanity rather than merely documenting its tragedies.Because if a mass murderer can be celebrated, if genocide can be justified, if victims can be forgotten, then we have already surrendered our claim to civilization.

Enough is enough.

The world failed Bosnia. It is failing again. And unless we confront this failure with honesty and courage, the next Srebrenica is not a question of if – but when.

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Dr. Siddiqui is the author of several books including 64 Hours in Sarajevo: A journey through the historic landscape of the Balkans.

When the state becomes the darkness by Solomon Mensah

Uganda is not a dark country. It is a country being darkened by the way power is exercised. That distinction matters. Uganda has extraordinary natural beauty, resilient communities and citizens who have endured political violence, poverty, corruption and instability with remarkable patience. But patience should never be mistaken for consent. Increasingly, the country resembles a place where corruption, intimidation, political violence, superstition and impunity reinforce one another and where the state is too often part of the problem rather than the institution expected to solve it.

The most disturbing feature is not that corruption exists. Corruption exists almost everywhere. It is that corruption can become a political operating system. When access to public money, contracts, influence and protection depends upon proximity to power, corruption stops being merely criminal behaviour. It becomes patronage. It becomes a language of government.

And once that happens, accountability becomes dangerous. Uganda's political system has spent decades teaching citizens a particularly poisonous lesson: that the powerful operate according to different rules. Opposition politicians can be harassed. Journalists can be threatened. Protesters can be arrested. Critics can discover that a social-media post has suddenly become a criminal offence. Meanwhile, those with sufficient political connections can appear remarkably well insulated from consequences. The message is unmistakable: loyalty is safer than citizenship.

That is how a democracy becomes hollow without formally disappearing. The military and security agencies have increasingly occupied political space that should belong to civilian institutions. When soldiers become instruments for silencing critics, the distinction between protecting the state and protecting those who control it begins to collapse. A government that fears criticism eventually starts treating criticism as sabotage.

That is not strength. It is insecurity wearing a uniform. Then there is superstition, which becomes especially dangerous when political power learns to exploit fear. Belief itself is not the problem; societies everywhere contain traditions, spiritual practices and irrational fears. The danger comes when superstition becomes a substitute for evidence, when accusations replace investigation, and when fear of witches, curses, demons or imagined enemies becomes politically useful.

A frightened population is easier to manipulate than an informed one. Crime flourishes in precisely such an environment. When citizens lose confidence in police, courts and political institutions, they begin looking elsewhere for justice. Mob justice becomes tempting. Rumour becomes evidence. Revenge becomes justice. The state then responds with more force, creating a vicious circle in which neither law nor trust survives.

Uganda therefore faces something deeper than a corruption problem. It faces an institutional problem. The tragedy is that ordinary Ugandans pay the bill. They pay through stolen public resources, inadequate services, unemployment, fear and the exhausting knowledge that knowing the right person can matter more than doing the right thing.

Yet darkness is not destiny. Uganda can still become a country where institutions matter more than individuals, where elections are genuinely competitive, where journalists do not need courage merely to do their jobs, where soldiers return to barracks and politicians return to politics, where corruption produces prison rather than promotion, and where superstition remains a private belief rather than a political weapon.

The essential question is therefore not whether Uganda has become dark. It is whether Ugandans will allow those who benefit from the darkness to convince them that darkness is normal. If you'd like, I can also make this sharper, angrier and more devastatingly satirical, while keeping it in the same newspaper-column format.

The art of black gold by Rayyan Courbis

Oil does not merely power modern civilisation. It has colonised its imagination. For more than a century, the fossil-fuel industry has understood something that environmental politics was slow to grasp: people do not live by economics alone. They live by stories, symbols, colours, landscapes and fantasies. Oil was therefore never marketed simply as a black liquid extracted from beneath the ground. It was sold as progress, freedom, prosperity, mobility and modernity. The petrol station became a symbol of independence. The automobile became an emblem of personal liberty. The offshore platform became an icon of technological mastery. The gleaming refinery became, somehow, a monument to civilisation.

This is where petroaesthetics becomes politically interesting. It is not simply art about oil. It is the struggle over how oil is seen. The fossil-fuel industry has spent generations making its most consequential product strangely invisible. Crude oil disappears into petrol, plastics, aviation, packaging, clothing, roads and countless objects. Extraction happens somewhere else; consumption happens here. The derrick becomes picturesque, the pipeline becomes infrastructure, the petrol pump becomes convenience. The ecological and human consequences are edited out of the frame.

Art can put them back in. That does not mean producing yet another photograph of a flaming oil well and congratulating ourselves on our environmental virtue. The familiar imagery of catastrophe can become almost comforting in its predictability: black smoke, dead birds, poisoned rivers, melting ice. We have seen the apocalypse so often that even disaster has acquired an aesthetic vocabulary.

The more subversive artist asks a harder question: why did we ever find this beautiful? Consider the visual mythology surrounding the automobile. The car commercial rarely shows congestion, exhaust, mining, refineries or climate disruption. Instead, it offers the open road, mountains, freedom and an apparently infinite horizon. The machine consuming fossil energy becomes a vehicle for escaping civilisation itself. It is a remarkable cultural trick: selling dependence as independence.

Petroaesthetics can reverse that trick. Artists can place the refinery beside the suburban kitchen. They can connect the plastic toy to the chemical plant, the holiday flight to the drilling platform, the fashionable synthetic fabric to the oilfield. They can expose the hidden geography connecting comfortable lives with distant extraction. Photography, painting, sculpture, film, installation and digital art can make the invisible visible without turning the work into a sermon.

That distinction matters. Environmental art sometimes assumes that showing destruction automatically produces political enlightenment. It does not. People can look at a devastated landscape, feel momentarily horrified, and then return home in a petroleum-powered car. Shock is not necessarily transformation.

The more powerful artistic intervention is psychological. It unsettles the ordinary. A petrol station at night can be made to look less like a convenient beacon and more like a shrine. A plastic supermarket aisle can become an archaeological excavation of fossil civilisation. A glossy corporate logo can be stripped of its reassuring colours and placed beside the landscapes from which its prosperity originated.

The point is not to pretend that oil has never improved lives. That would be intellectually lazy. Fossil energy helped produce extraordinary gains in mobility, manufacturing, medicine and material abundance. The problem is that its achievements have been wrapped in a mythology of permanence.

Petroaesthetics should dismantle that mythology. Art has always been capable of doing something journalism, economics and political speeches often struggle to accomplish: changing the emotional meaning of familiar things. It can make the ordinary strange. It can make convenience uncomfortable. It can reveal the politics hiding inside beauty.

The fossil-fuel age built a civilisation around a substance that was simultaneously everywhere and almost nowhere in our consciousness. Perhaps the first step beyond it is simply to make oil visible again. Not as black gold. As history.

Trekking Chat #015 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

They trek across surreal cartoon streets, armed with quirky sarcasm
and boundless humor. They map uncharted valleys, befriend bizarre creatures
and find the real adventure in their square frames.

For more Trekking Chat, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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Myanmar’s descent into hell by Mary Long

There are moments when the language of international diplomacy becomes almost offensively inadequate. “Concern.” “Deeply troubling.” “Grave violations.” Such phrases have been repeated about Myanmar for years, as if sufficiently solemn adjectives might somehow stop bombs, halt torture or persuade armed men that civilians are human beings.

Now the United Nations says Myanmar’s human-rights situation has reached a “new low”. That should not merely produce another round of diplomatic statements. It should produce embarrassment, especially among those governments that have watched this catastrophe deepen while treating Myanmar as an unfortunate regional problem best managed at arm’s length.

The Rohingya remain at the centre of this moral failure. Nine years after hundreds of thousands were driven from their homes, their suffering has not become history. It has become a permanent condition. The remarkable cruelty is not simply that the Rohingya were persecuted; it is that persecution has become so normalised that another generation is growing up knowing displacement, discrimination and violence as ordinary facts of existence.

And the grim absurdity is that even Myanmar’s civil war has not liberated them from their old tormentors. The military has continued its brutal campaign, while the Arakan Army has also been accused of serious abuses against Rohingya communities. For civilians trapped between armed forces, ethnic militias and collapsing institutions, the distinction between liberation and oppression can become tragically theoretical.

This is what happens when the rule of law disappears. Violence stops being an aberration and becomes an economic model. Myanmar’s unregulated economy is flourishing precisely because the state has ceased to function as a state should. Illegal mining, exploitation of natural resources and other illicit businesses thrive in the vacuum. Conflict generates money; money finances conflict; and civilians pay the bill. It is a particularly ugly version of capitalism, one in which the commodity being extracted is not merely rare earths or minerals but human misery.

Meanwhile, millions are displaced and millions more face hunger. A country can survive political disagreement. It can survive economic hardship. It can even survive governments it dislikes. What it cannot easily survive is the systematic destruction of trust, law and the basic expectation that tomorrow will be safer than today.

Myanmar’s tragedy is therefore larger than the junta, larger than the Rohingya and larger than the civil war. It is the destruction of the idea of citizenship itself.

The military has repeatedly demonstrated that elections without freedom, institutions without independence and constitutions without accountability are little more than stage props. But armed opposition groups cannot escape scrutiny simply because they oppose an abhorrent regime. Human rights are not a political reward reserved for whichever side appears more sympathetic.

The international community also needs to confront an uncomfortable truth: statements are not policy. Condemnations are not protection. And remembering Myanmar only when another horrific report is published is not solidarity.

The people of Myanmar do not need another expression of “grave concern”. They need pressure on those responsible, humanitarian access, accountability, protection for minorities and sustained international attention.

Otherwise the phrase “new low” will become what diplomatic language has so often become, a temporary description of a catastrophe that everyone knows will eventually sink even lower.