The video is horrifying, though it is the kind of horror now synonymous with the behavior of Israel, its military, its armed settlers, and society that has been conditioned to see the ”other” as subhuman.

Yet, this was not the typical viral video that emerges almost daily from occupied Palestine. The victim, this time, was not a Palestinian. She was an elderly French nun.

On 1 May, footage surfaced from Jerusalem showing a 36-year-old Israeli man running behind a French nun—a researcher at the French School of Biblical and Archaeological Research—and shoving her violently to the ground.

In a chilling display of cruelty, the assailant did not simply hit and run. He walked away a few paces, then returned to the fallen woman to kick her repeatedly and mercilessly as she lay helpless.

What was most astonishing was the sense of normalcy that followed. The assailant remained on the scene, conversing with another man who appeared entirely unperturbed by what should have been a devastating event in any other context.

The video briefly imposed itself on the mainstream media scene, garnering perfunctory condemnations. Many explained the event as part of the larger landscape of Israeli violence, highlighting the ongoing genocide in Gaza as the most obvious example of this unchecked aggression.

But even the context of general violence does not fully explain why a French nun was targeted. She is not dark-skinned, she is European, she is Christian, and she holds no historical or territorial claims that would typically trigger the ”security” paranoia of the Zionist state.

Still, the incident was anything but ”isolated,” despite the rush by Israeli officials to label it a ”shameful” exception. To the contrary, the nun was attacked specifically because she is Christian.

This raises the question: why?

To answer this, we must acknowledge how Palestinian Christians have been systematically written out of the history of their own land.

Palestinian Christians are not merely present in the land; they are among the most historically rooted communities in Palestine. They are anything but ”foreigners” or ”bystanders” caught in a supposed religious conflict between Jews and Muslims.

In fact, the Christian Arab presence in Palestine predates the Islamic era by centuries. They are the descendants of historic tribes who shaped the region’s identity long before the advent of modern political labels.

The marginalization of Palestinian Christians is a relatively new phenomenon, deeply linked to Western colonialism. For centuries, European powers used the pretense of ”protecting” Christian communities to justify their own imperial interventions.

Consequently, this framed the native Christian not as a sovereign Arab with agency, but as a ward of the West—a narrative that effectively stripped them of their indigenous status and alienated them from their own national fabric in the eyes of the world.

Zionism added a lethal layer to this erasure. It has often projected itself as a ”protector” of Christians to avoid raising the ire of its Western backers.

In reality, Palestinian Christians have been subjected to the same policies of ethnic cleansing, racism, and military occupation as their Muslim brothers and sisters. How else can we explain the catastrophic dwindling of the Christian population?

Before the 1948 Nakba, Palestinian Christians made up roughly 12% of the population. Today, that number has plummeted to a mere 1%. During the Nakba alone, tens of thousands were expelled from their homes in West Jerusalem, Haifa, and Jaffa, their properties looted and their communities dismantled.

A quick look at the map of Jerusalem and Bethlehem today tells the story of an ongoing erasure. Jerusalem is being systematically emptied of its native population, both Christian and Muslim. Christian properties and houses of worship are restricted, and the ”Little Town” of Bethlehem has been swallowed by a ring of illegal settlements and an 8-meter-high Apartheid Wall that has transformed the birthplace of Christ into an open-air prison.

Yet, despite this, we rarely hear about the struggle for survival of Palestinian Christians. Instead, the world occasionally glimpses ”incidents”—like the common habit of Jewish extremists spitting on foreign pilgrims and clergy in Jerusalem. This behavior has become so normalized that Israeli ministers, such as Itamar Ben-Gvir, have previously defended the act as an ”ancient custom” that should not be criminalized.

The reason the Palestinian Christian story is rarely told is that it fails to factor neatly into the convenient narratives used by Western governments. They are keen on presenting the ”conflict” as a Jewish state fighting for its identity against a monolithic ”Islamic” threat. Israel is heavily invested in this same ”Clash of Civilizations” trope, positioning itself as the vanguard of ”Western civilization” against Arab extremism.

But some Palestinians—Muslim and Christian alike—are, to a lesser degree, also guilty of falling into this trap. The former often frame the Palestinian resistance as an exclusively Muslim struggle; meanwhile, some Christians participate in the very discourse that led to their marginalization in the first place.

The Gaza genocide, however, has proven this logic not only erroneous but unsustainable. Throughout the slaughter, Israel has destroyed over 800 mosques, but it has not spared the Christian sanctuaries.

On 19 October 2023, an Israeli airstrike targeted a building within the compound of the Church of Saint Porphyrius—one of the oldest churches in the world.

In that massacre, 18 Palestinian Christians were killed, their blood mixing with the dust of a sanctuary that had stood for 1,600 years. It was a devastating reminder that the Israeli missile does not distinguish between a mosque and a church, nor between the blood of a Muslim and a Christian.

The story of the French nun is worth every bit of the attention it received, as is the targeting of pilgrims. But as the headlines move on, we must remember that Palestinian Christians endure a suffering that is collective and rooted in the very soil of Palestine. They are now an endangered community, and Israel is the culprit. Without them, Palestine is not the same.

The Palestinian homeland is only whole when it is the cradle of religious coexistence, and Palestinian Christians sit at the very heart of that history, dating back two millennia. Their survival is not a ”minority issue”—it is the survival of Palestine itself.

Tucker Carlson, like any genius in the media world, has an uncanny knack for zeroing in on men and mice who have something “original” to contribute. His interview in late February with the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, an ex-Baptist minister and Donald Trump loyalist in the Republican Party, was one such fascinating encounter.

Amongst other things, Ambassador Huckabee, who is often perceived as “Israel’s envoy to the US,” admitted candidly, nonchalantly, that thousands of Palestinian kids were indeed killed by the Israeli forces in the Gaza war—“So, what?”—and that it is a “fair” thing if Jews went about to carve out a Greater Israel by redrawing the boundaries of the Arabian Peninsula on the lines that the Old Testament apparently prophesied. Carlson’s interview raised a political storm.

Therefore, when Huckabee disclosed on Monday that Israel secretly deployed Iron Dome missile-defence batteries and highly trained special forces to operate them in the United Arab Emirates in order to shield the Persian Gulf monarchy during the war against Iran, one could tell with fair certainty that it was what media people call a “developing story.” Indeed, it was.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office confirmed in a statement what the irrepressible Huckabee blurted out, adding that coinciding with the Israeli deployment, Netanyahu also made a secret visit to the UAE and met with President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed.

The Israeli statement claimed that Netanyahu’s trip “led to a historic breakthrough in relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.”

But Abu Dhabi is unused to such large dollops of “glasnost” and promptly ducked; the foreign ministry was simply sidetracked by claiming that the UAE’s relations with Israel are “not based on secrecy or covert arrangements.”

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal added more grist to the mill by reporting that the UAE secretly carried out multiple attacks on Iranian infrastructure and military sites throughout the war, including strikes on a refinery on Iran’s Lavan Island in early April, around the time that Trump was announcing a ceasefire and negotiations with Iran. The UAE attack was reportedly coordinated with Israel and came after a flurry of secret visits by Mossad Director David Barnea to the UAE.

To be sure, the UAE has not yet owned its attacks on Iran, let alone the secret visits by Barnea and Netanyahu. Abu Dhabi sticks to the line that it wouldn’t allow the US or Israel to use its airspace to attack Iran.

Iran insists, however, that the American jets that bombed an elementary school in Minab on the opening day of the war, killing more than 160 schoolchildren, took off from Al Dhafra Air Base in Abu Dhabi. Iran retaliated by striking Al Dhafra as well as the US infrastructure at Jebel Ali Port in Dubai.

The above string of developments brings the Persian Gulf War literally to the Arabian Sea, which washes the shores of the South Asian region.

A troika joined at the hips.

Suffice it to say, the vortex of the Persian Gulf War will henceforth be flanked by four “littoral states” with nuclear bombs: the US, Israel, India and Pakistan. The nuclear club gets bigger with the UK strengthening its military presence in the Gulf by deploying Typhoon fighter jets, autonomous mine-hunting drones, and the Type 45 air defence destroyer HMS Dragon, ostensibly designed to “secure” the Strait of Hormuz.

From Delhi’s perspective, what lends enchantment to the view is its partnership in the troika involving Israel and the UAE, which somewhat mitigates its regional isolation following the sudden death under the Trump presidency of “I2U2” (India, Israel, UAE, and the US), commonly referred to as the “West Asian Quad” or “Indo-Abrahamic alliance.”

Bereft of US participation, the I2U2 is in deep slumber, and the Israel-UAE-India troika are scrambling like headless chickens, but the latter have some staying power alright, joined at the hips with shared interests in fighting political Islam (”counterterrorism”), both internally and regionally, as a top priority in their respective national strategies. If the Palestine problem is the spectre that haunts Israel, it is the Muslim Brotherhood for the UAE and Hindu-Muslim animosity forSouth Asia.

Unlike Israel and the UAE, however, India has been a silent partner. But will it remain so if a regional conflagration gathers momentum? Fault lines are appearing for sure now that Israel and the UAE openly join hands in a common agenda to fuel the war and undermine any peace efforts to advance their dream project, namely, the destruction of Iran and its removal from the geopolitical chessboard.

“Gulf of Tears”

That said, this is an inflection point as the Israeli special forces arrive at the Strait of Hormuz. And there is also the regional backdrop of the Emirati / Israeli rift, with Riyadh deepening following the latter’s stubborn refusal to join the Abraham Accords.

Being the Custodian of the Holy Places, the Kingdom has existential concerns regarding the trajectory that Jewish supremacists are taking to ram down the throat of the Muslim Middle East their Zionist project at a juncture when Riyadh has disengaged from proxy wars and is sensitive to the anti-Israeli sentiments in the Arab street.

Riyadh senses that the UAE’s exit from OPEC aside, the recent attack on Port Sudan on 4 May by drones launched from an Emirati-Israeli base on the Red Sea with the aid of Emirati ships is a provocative move to force Saudi hands. Sudan has formally accused the UAE of providing arms and advanced weaponry and supplying drones to the Rapid Support Forces fighting the Sudanese army with Emirati-Israeli backing.

The Emirati attack came following the meeting at Jeddah on 20 April between Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Sudan’s army chief, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, where they “emphasised the importance of ensuring Sudan’s security and stability” as well as “preserving its sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity”—per Saudi readout —and also discussed the latest developments in Sudan.

What is at stake here is the strategic control of the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait (“Gate of Tears”) that connects the Red Sea on one side to the Gulf of Aden (and Arabian Sea) and on the other side would give Israeli submarines “freedom of navigation” to the Indian Ocean through waters straddling the Saudi coastline (approx. 1,760—2,600 km stretching from the Jordanian border to Yemen.)

Enter Pakistan. First of all, Indian strategists ought to put in proper perspective the first Pakistani military deployments in Saudi Arabia recently within the framework of the Saudi-Pakistani defence pact. Prudence demands that Delhi tread wearily, as variables are at work and we have no real reason to annoy the Kingdom, which hosts the single biggest concentration of NRIs in entire West Asia. Only fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

Overall, our era recalls Matthew Arnold’s famous poem “Dover Beach,” written in 1867 in an earlier era reflecting 19-century existential despair and the decline of religious faith:

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar 
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in. 

Frankly, was it really necessary in the middle of a fratricidal war for external affairs minister S. Jaishankar to travel to Abu Dhabi for a one-on-one with the sheikh on 12 April? Or for National Security Advisor Ajit Doval to follow up on 26 April? Or for PM Narendra Modi to follow through tomorrow? There are no easy answers.

For the 15th time in 18 months, tens of thousands of people demonstrated against reforms proposed by Belgium’s Arizona government seeking to reduce pension rights, introduce harsher working conditions, and cut social budgets to finance war and armament. On 12 May, “75,000 people filled the streets of Brussels: workers from the public and private sector, metalworkers, caregivers, teachers, public service employees, NGOs, cultural workers, youth, feminist, democratic and peace movements,” stated the Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB-PVDA).

“What is disputed today is not just one measure or the other,” the party added. “This is about the whole Arizona project: a model where the rights of the working class are sacrificed to give gifts to the ultra-rich and free up more and more millions for war. To this model, we oppose another choice: social justice, respect for work, solidarity and peace.”

Since coming to power, the current administration has proposed numerous measures that trade unions and progressive forces warn would harm the quality of life and working conditions of thousands of people. Among other things, the De Wever-Bouchez government pursued an increase to retirement age, penalties for workers retiring earlier than expected, and reducing protections for night work. Thanks to continuous popular mobilization, it was forced to backtrack on many of these measures—the pension reform, for one, has been postponed again recently.

“The backbone of our society has been pushing back against this government for 18 months now—and with success,” wrote Peter Mertens, PTB-PVDA General Secretary, on the day of the demonstration. “People are rediscovering their collective power. That is something you cannot undo.”

On Tuesday, he added, people were back on the streets “with a clear message to the government: nobody wants the pension reform, nobody wants the policy of working longer for less pension, nobody wants the pension penalty. Nobody wants exploding energy bills while billions flow to weapons and oil multinationals line their pockets.”

In addition to the country’s largest trade union organizations, FGTB-ABVV and ACV-CSC, mobilizations were joined by blocs from all parts of society. “Today we were at the national demonstration to demand an immediate end to measures that are making life even harder for those in the most vulnerable situations,” social services and health centers’ federations reported, echoing growing concerns about income levels and the cost of living crisis in Belgium. “Social services are facing ever-increasing demand under increasingly difficult conditions. This is unsustainable.”

Others pointed out that the erosion of workers’ rights in Belgium came hand in hand with falling possibilities of supporting popular struggles around the world. The organization Viva Salud, working in international health solidarity, wrote: “While the Arizona government is hitting people here with its attacks on our pensions, people elsewhere in the world are also suffering the consequences of cuts to international solidarity. In short, the price for this government policy is being paid by everyone, everywhere.”

The mobilization concluded with an appeal to join a new massive protest in Brussels on 14 June, focusing on resistance to European rearmament and war policies.

“Together, we’ve already forced the government to back down on several crucial issues, such as pensions and end-of-career provisions,” FGTB-ABVV wrote. “Together, we continue to make our voices heard. Together, we continue the fight. Because action pays off.”

In Podgorica, a new edition of Špiro Kulišić’s booklet On the Ethnogenesis of the Montenegrins has been published by the Dukljan Academy of Sciences and Arts. The work was first printed in Titograd in 1980 by the publishing house Pobjeda.

Kulišić was a Montenegrin ethnologist and anthropologist, born in 1908 in Perast, who spent much of his academic career working in Sarajevo and Belgrade. The very act of republishing it can hardly be regarded as surprising. For decades, the Dukljan Academy has functioned as a parallel—one might even say para-academic—institution shaped within the framework of a specific identitarian and political project of Montenegrin autochthonism, marked by a pronounced tendency to present ideological constructions about the past in the guise of scholarly revision.

Within that context, Kulišić’s work from the late twentieth century possesses an almost programmatic significance. His theses concerning a distinct ethnogenesis of the Montenegrins became one of the principal foundations upon which later autochthonist constructions were built by authors associated with that intellectual milieu, including Savo Brković, Jevrem Brković, Novak Adžić, Šerbo Rastoder, and other publicists and historians who sought to retroactively project a distinctly anti-Serbian, postmodern Montenegrin national identity deep into the early Middle Ages.

The Dissolution of Yugoslavia and the Resulting Identity Chaos

The political afterlife of such theses, however, cannot be understood apart from the crisis of the 1990s. The radicalisation of Serbian nationalism, its increasingly right-wing idiom, and the political use of “Serbdom” as an instrument of domination within the collapsing Yugoslav space gave unexpected strength to what had previously remained a relatively marginal idea: a separate Montenegrin national identity that would have to be emancipated not only politically, but also historiographically, from its Serbian historical matrix. In this sense, the Liberal Alliance of Montenegro under Slavko Perović offers a telling example. Its sovereignist and anti-war politics stood in principled opposition to Milošević’s project and to Montenegro’s subordination to Belgrade; yet, in the wider cultural field, that same struggle helped open a space in which the rejection of Greater-Serbian nationalism was gradually transformed into a more radical demand for the complete erasure of Montenegro’s historical, ecclesiastical, and cultural entanglement with the Serbian world.

Far from emancipating Montenegrin society, however, this movement was eventually absorbed by the Democratic Party of Socialists of Montenegro (DPS), the ruling political structure that emerged directly out of the old League of Communists and dominated Montenegro for decades. What made this transformation particularly paradoxical was the fact that the same political elite had, until roughly 1996, firmly occupied Serbian nationalist and chauvinistic positions, closely aligned with the politics of Slobodan Milošević during the Yugoslav wars. The subsequent ideological reversal did not produce a genuinely democratic or socially emancipatory project. Instead, it merely replaced one nationalist narrative with another, further deepening the fragmentation of Montenegrin society while overseeing its transition from socialism into a post-socialist nationalist dystopia marked by economic dependency, oligarchic privatization, and permanent identity conflict.

The emergence of a pseudoscientific pamphlet on “Montenegrin ethnogenesis” as early as the 1980s was itself one of the signals that the Montenegrin Titoist bureaucracy—much like its counterparts elsewhere in Yugoslavia—had, following the death of Marshal Josip Broz Tito, already begun preparing for the eventual dissolution of the common state, seeking to construct for the future Montenegro an identity as distinct as possible from its historical Serbian framework. None of this means that a distinct Montenegrin identity is in itself illegitimate or inherently problematic. The issue lies rather in the manner of its construction, which in this case appears not as an expression of social emancipation, but as an attempt to build, upon the ruins of socialism, a new model of exclusionary and chauvinistic nationalism.

The Reanimation of a Long-Discredited Pamphlet

But let us return to the new edition of Kulišić’s book, which appears at a moment when the technocratic government of Montenegro—the administration that replaced the decades-long rule of the nationalist Democratic Party of Socialists of Montenegro—stands on the threshold of the country’s accession to the European Union and is attempting to create a balance within a deeply divided society split between national Serbs and national Montenegrins.

What the publisher does not emphasize, however, is the fact that Kulišić’s booklet was subjected to a thorough scholarly refutation as early as the following year, in the study by Nikola Vukčević, The Ethnic Origin of the Montenegrins (Belgrade, 1981). Vukčević’s approach was neither journalistic nor pamphleteering; on the contrary, it consisted of a painstaking analysis of sources, terminology, quotations, and methodology, in which Kulišić’s text was subjected to an almost forensic reading. Already in the introductory sections of the book, Vukčević points out that Kulišić proceeds from a conclusion constructed in advance, and then selectively adapts both sources and secondary literature to fit that thesis (pp. 5—13).

A particularly devastating portion of Vukčević’s critique concerns Kulišić’s handling of Byzantine sources. Vukčević demonstrates that Kulišić treats “Nikola Akominatos” and Niketas Choniates as two separate individuals, although they are in fact one and the same Byzantine author—Niketas Choniates Akominatos (pp. 18—21). With a measure of academic irony, Vukčević remarks that “it is in poor taste to derive conclusions from Byzantine sources while simultaneously providing evidence that one has not even so much as smelled them.” More important than the error itself, however, is what it reveals. Vukčević shows that Kulišić relied largely on secondary mediation, read authors selectively, and frequently failed to understand the historiographical context of the texts he invoked. According to Vukčević, this is equally evident in Kulišić’s treatment of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, John Skylitzes, Kekaumenos, and the Chronicle of the Priest of Duklja, where vast conclusions concerning ethnogenesis are drawn from marginal or ambiguous passages (pp. 13—24).

Equally thorough is Vukčević’s dismantling of Kulišić’s treatment of ethnology and tribal tradition. Kulišić attempts to portray Jovan Erdeljanović as a representative of an “old bourgeois scholarship” that merely “classified” the Montenegrins as Serbs, yet Vukčević calmly reminds the reader that Erdeljanović was not an ideological propagandist, but an ethnologist who recorded how people described themselves (pp. 22—27). Vukčević then presents an entire series of examples drawn from oral traditions, Dubrovnik and Venetian sources, tribal chronicles, as well as the correspondence of Petar I Petrović-Njegoš and Petar II Petrović-Njegoš, in which the population of Montenegro and the Highlands is designated by the Serbian name (pp. 27—35).

Particularly significant is his analysis of the migration traditions of Montenegrin tribes—the Vasojevići, Bjelopavlići, Piperi, Kuči, and Bratonožići—where Vukčević demonstrates that these tribes traced their origins to Herzegovina, Kosovo, Metohija, and Raška (pp. 36—42). Kulišić’s attempt to explain all of this away as the result of a later “Serbianization” is judged by Vukčević to be methodologically untenable, since no primary-source foundation exists for such a sweeping claim.

Particularly striking are the chapters in which Vukčević analyzes Kulišić’s treatment of language, toponymy, and local particularities. He demonstrates that Kulišić interprets regional and tribal differences as evidence of a separate ethnic genesis, even though such internal distinctions are characteristic of virtually all European peoples (pp. 48—52). On several occasions, Vukčević also points to Kulišić’s tendency to treat the presence of Vlach, Romance, or Albanian elements in old Montenegro as automatic proof of a “non-Serbian” ethnic foundation, despite the fact that the sources themselves testify to the gradual assimilation of these groups into the dominant Slavic and Orthodox cultural framework (pp. 56—58). It is precisely in this calm, documented, and methodologically disciplined tone that the enduring strength of Vukčević’s critique resides: he does not polemicize with Kulišić on the level of political passions, but patiently confronts him with the very sources he ignored, misread, or interpreted arbitrarily.

The Borreby Nation

And it is here, in fact, that one arrives at the most intriguing part of the entire story. For after Vukčević demonstrated that Kulišić handled Byzantine sources, medieval history, and ethnographic material in a rather insecure and tendentious manner, the reader might expect the author at least to find firmer ground in the field of ethnogenetic theory itself—a discipline which, both in Europe and in the Soviet Union, had by that time already achieved considerable scholarly sophistication, including in relation to the South Slavic world. Yet it is precisely here that Kulišić collapses most dramatically—and with the almost museum-like elegance of a long-discredited European pseudoscience.

For while contemporary historiography and historical anthropology have for decades warned that medieval nations were collective confessional and eschatological categories—not modern constitutional nations, and certainly not biological “racial” designations—Kulišić grounds much of his narrative about the “ethnogenesis” of the Montenegrins in anthropological types, skull measurements, “racial” mixtures, and mystical physiognomic traits that would make even a serious reader of old issues of the Völkischer Beobachter recoil in discomfort. Thus Kulišić writes, without the slightest hesitation, that the majority of Montenegrins represent a “mixture of the Dinaric and prehistoric Borreby type, characterized by a large body, large skull, and broad face,” and that the Montenegrin “anthropological profile” displays affinities with the “Caucasian type.” From this, he proceeds to derive conclusions about a supposedly “distinct Balkan-Slavic ethnic synthesis.”

It is genuinely difficult to read such passages today without imagining some forgotten European racial theorist from the 1930s, trembling calipers in hand, wandering through the Montenegrin highlands measuring skulls in search of the metaphysical essence and biological substance of an “eternal” people. One is left with the impression that medieval men and women, instead of understanding belonging through dynasty, the concept of the “New Israel” as God’s chosen people, land, lordship, or political community—which is what the sources actually tell us—were, according to Kulišić, apparently walking about proudly displaying an awareness of their own “Borreby type” and “Caucasian” physiognomy.

The Decontextualization of Historical Identities

Particularly comical is Kulišić’s attempt to reduce the expression “the Serbian rite” (christiani di rito servo) to a mere liturgical formality, as though it were some impersonal confessional label devoid of any collective meaning. In doing so, he reveals not only a misunderstanding of the medieval concept of peoplehood, but also a complete lack of awareness of how premodern man understood belonging in the first place. In the Middle Ages, identity did not function as a modern national census category, yet neither was it an administrative inventory of “rites.” Concepts such as “the Serbian lands,” “the Serbian people,” or “the Serbian rite” belonged to a sacral-political and eschatological universe in which land, dynasty, Church, and historical mission formed a single organic whole

It is precisely for this reason that the Nemanjić dynasty and post-Nemanjić tradition developed the idea of the Serbs as an Orthodox “New Israel”—a people who understood their history and political order through a sacred role within the Christian cosmos. In that context, “the Serbian rite” did not signify merely a manner of celebrating the liturgy, but membership in an entire civilizational and historical framework. To argue otherwise would be roughly equivalent to claiming that the “Romans” (Rhomaioi) of the Byzantine Empire were merely a fiscal or ritual category, rather than a civilizational and political community.

Kulišić’s argument becomes even more absurd when confronted with concrete sources from the sixteenth century. How, then, is one to explain Božidar Vuković Podgoričanin, who in Venice wrote that he wished to print “our Serbian letters” (i naša srpska slova)? How are we to explain his son Vićenco Vuković, who requested permission to print books in lingua et caractere serviano, for the benefit of the natione et lingua serviana? Were they too, according to Kulišić’s logic, merely some faceless technicians of a “rite,” men who happened to use the adjective “Serbian” accidentally and without any awareness of the broader community to which they belonged?

The problem lies in the fact that Kulišić attempts to dissect the premodern world with modern positivist instruments. Yet the sources themselves reveal precisely the opposite: within the Orthodox Slavic world, rite, peoplehood, land, and sacred history formed inseparable components of the same eschatological order.

And it is precisely this fact that ought to be acknowledged by every inheritor of that culture, regardless of whether he is religious or not. For a believing person, it represents the continuity of an ancient Orthodox eschatology—the idea of a people as a sacred historical community. For one who is not religious, it should at the very least be recognized as a historical phase in the development of one’s own community, rather than something to be concealed in embarrassment beneath improvised constructions and an anthropological cabaret assembled from yellowing European racial manuals.

For it is truly depressing to watch part of contemporary autochthonist folklore declare as the only “fictitious” identity precisely the one that shaped the entirety of Montenegro’s literacy, spirituality, literature, statehood, and historical memory, while offering as “authentic” some phantasmagorical hybrid in the style of an ancient Matarugo-Pipero-Lužano-Vlaho-Montenegrin—a mythical creature who has apparently wandered across the Balkans for a thousand years carrying his great-grandfather’s Borreby skull in a satchel, patiently awaiting discovery by Špiro Kulišić.

Needless to say, none of this implies that the currently dominant forms of Serbian nationalism in Montenegro are in any sense “progressive”—quite the contrary. It is within that very milieu that one witnesses some of the most bizarre attempts to rehabilitate Nazi collaborators and wartime reactionaries from the Second World War, from Pavle Đurišić to the broader Ravna Gora Chetnik tradition, often under the pretext that they were “Orthodox believers” or anti-communist patriots. Đurišić’s forces, however, were deeply implicated in collaboration with Italian and German occupation structures, while the Chetnik movement as a whole was marked by terror against Muslims, Partisans, and their supporters. Yet one form of chauvinism and social decay cannot be fought with another form of chauvinism that inevitably produces its own corresponding social disintegration.

Smaller, weaker, and more internally divided

And it is here that this new edition of the booklet becomes a genuinely valuable cultural document—not about medieval Montenegro, but about a certain segment of the post-Yugoslav intellectual scene that still believes modern identities can be constructed through skulls, anthropological typologies, and romantic fantasies about “deep ethnic roots.” One almost expects some future edition to include a chapter on the mystical ethnic significance of moustache length or the angle of the cheekbone. For once history is abandoned as a scholarly discipline and replaced with the world of pseudoscientific ethnogenesis-mania, the boundary between ethnology and caricature becomes almost imperceptible.

In this sense, the Montenegrin case also invites a broader postcolonial and anti-imperialist reading. After the destruction of Yugoslavia, identity politics across the post-Yugoslav space increasingly became the cultural expression of political fragmentation and economic dispossession. The smaller, weaker, and more internally divided these societies became, the easier it was to integrate them into external systems of dependency—financial, military, diplomatic, and ideological. Fragmented identities thus ceased to be merely questions of memory or culture; they became part of a wider architecture of domination.

This is visible in Montenegro with particular clarity. Today, both the Serbian and the new Montenegrin identity are often articulated not as sovereign cultural projects, but as rival symptoms of the same broken political condition. One side frequently reduces Serbian identity to defensive resentment, clerical symbolism, and nostalgic gestures deprived of any serious social programme; the other attempts to construct a new Montenegrin identity through negation, amnesia, and anti-Serbian choreography. Meanwhile, behind this theatre of identity, economic sovereignty has been almost completely dismantled. A country without control over its resources, strategic infrastructure, labour market, banking system, and development policy can hardly produce a calm and self-possessed cultural politics. What remains is a colonial stage on which impoverished communities are invited to quarrel over symbols, while the real structures of power are quietly transferred elsewhere.

Mainstream explanations for the Iran war usually oscillate between two inadequate answers. One personalises the conflict: Donald Trump is impulsive; Benjamin Netanyahu is politically cornered; Iranian leaders are ideological and reckless. War appears as the result of unstable personalities and diplomatic miscalculation. The other treats it as ordinary geopolitics: the United States seeks to preserve hegemony; Iran seeks regional influence; Israel seeks security. This is more serious, but still leaves unanswered the deeper question: why has confrontation escalated precisely now, amid mounting global economic fragility?

The war has already entered its third month, yet its objectives remain unclear. Washington alternates between threats and hints at negotiation. Tehran promises resistance while signaling openness to indirect talks. Markets swing between panic and cautious optimism. Nobody seems able to say how long the conflict will last or how it will be regulated.

Meanwhile, the costs are spreading beyond the region. Shipping through the Gulf has become more dangerous and expensive. Energy markets remain volatile. Damaged infrastructure may take years to repair. Rising fuel and transport costs are feeding new inflationary pressures, especially in developed economies already marked by stagnant growth, debt burdens and falling living standards.

At first glance, the war appears to be in nobody’s interest. Business prefers stability, open trade routes and predictable energy prices. Consumers face higher costs. Governments fear prolonged instability in one of the world’s key energy corridors.

But capitalism has never functioned according to the interests of humanity as a whole, nor even according to the collective interests of capital in general. It operates through competition between states, blocs, corporations and different fractions of capital. What appears irrational from the standpoint of global stability may remain rational for specific actors.

The real question, therefore, is not whether the war is irrational. The question is whether such wars are becoming a structural feature of late capitalism: a system increasingly unable to reproduce profitability and hegemony without also producing conflict.

Declining profitability and the logic of crisis

To understand why wars increasingly accompany periods of economic stagnation, it is necessary to move beyond immediate political events and return to the structural dynamics of capitalism itself. Classical Marxist theorists from Karl Marx to Henryk Grossmann and Ernest Mandel argued that capitalism carries within it persistent tendencies toward crisis rooted in the very process of accumulation.

As capitalism matures, capital accumulates faster than profitable investment opportunities. Competition compels firms to increase productivity through mechanisation, technological upgrading and labor-saving innovation. Yet this process also produces a contradiction identified by Marx: the growing replacement of labour by machinery tends, over time, to reduce profitability, since surplus value ultimately derives from labour itself. The result is chronic overaccumulation: too much capital chasing too few sufficiently profitable productive investments.

Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy added an important dimension to this argument. In Monopoly Capital, they argued that advanced capitalism generates a persistent surplus absorption problem: large corporations can produce more than society can profitably consume or invest. As effective demand weakens, military expenditure becomes a key outlet for surplus capital. Unlike social spending, it does not directly empower labour; unlike civilian investment, it does not necessarily add to productive capacity and worsen overproduction. It absorbs surplus while reinforcing corporate profits, state power and imperial reach.

This is not a crude argument that wars are simply “started for profit.” Rather, wars emerge from systemic contradictions in accumulation, geopolitical rivalry and the search for renewed profitability under conditions of stagnation. Military expenditure, sanctions, energy shocks and armed conflict become mechanisms through which states reorganise markets, subsidise industries, secure strategic resources and restructure global hierarchies.

In the period after World War II, these contradictions were partially contained through expanding consumer markets, state intervention and the global expansion of capitalism. But by the late 20 and especially early 21 century, many advanced economies increasingly confronted slowing productivity growth, industrial decline, debt dependence and financial saturation. Following the 2008 global financial crisis, these tendencies became even more pronounced. Financialisation helped postpone the crisis by expanding speculative activity and credit creation, but it also deepened systemic instability and disconnected accumulation from productive investment.

For high-income economies, World Bank data show average annual GDP growth falling from about 2.5% in 2000—08 to about 1.6% in 2009—20, before recovering only unevenly in 2021—24. By 2024, high-income growth had already slowed again to 2.0%. The IMF’s April 2026 outlook projects advanced-economy growth at only 1.8% in 2026.

Under these conditions, military expenditure and geopolitical conflict acquire renewed economic significance. War destroys capital, reorganises markets, accelerates technological restructuring, expands state subsidies to strategic sectors, and enables surplus transfer through monopoly, sanctions and geopolitical control. The post-2008 world has not only seen weak growth and financial saturation, but also trade wars, sanctions regimes, industrial policy, arms production and militarised Keynesianism.

The Iran war must be understood against this broader background. It is not merely the product of irrational leaders or diplomatic failure. It is part of a global system struggling to reproduce profitability and hegemony under increasingly unstable conditions.

The irrational rationality of the Iran war

The contradiction becomes clearer when we look at the economic effects of the war. At the level of the global economy, the conflict appears deeply irrational. It disrupts trade, raises energy prices, increases transport costs, damages infrastructure and feeds new inflationary pressures into economies that had barely recovered from the shocks of the pandemic, the Ukraine war and the post-2008 stagnation.

The Strait of Hormuz is central to this problem. In 2025, about 20 million barrels a day of crude oil and petroleum products passed through the Strait, representing about 25% of global seaborne oil trade. It is also crucial for gas: Qatar and the United Arab Emirates ship most of their LNG exports through Hormuz, accounting for roughly 19% of global LNG trade. Alternative routes exist, but their capacity is limited and cannot fully replace Hormuz flows.

This means that even a partial disruption immediately becomes a global economic shock. The immediate effects have already been severe. Maritime insurance premiums for Gulf shipping have reportedly risen by more than 1000% in some cases. Reuters reported that about 1000 vessels, including roughly 500 oil and gas tankers, remained in the Gulf region, with an aggregate hull value exceeding $25 billion. At least 200 ships were reported anchored off major Gulf producers, effectively waiting for the political and military situation to become navigable again.

Aviation and logistics have also been affected. Airspace closures across the Gulf have removed large portions of air cargo capacity on Asia-Pacific, Middle East, South Asia and Europe corridors, while container shipping has faced direct threats, including strikes on vessels in or near Hormuz. The result is a wider disruption of global transport networks, not just oil shipping.

The effects therefore run through multiple channels: higher oil prices, more expensive insurance, rerouted shipping, delayed cargo, aviation disruption, pressure on fertiliser and food prices, and renewed inflation. This is why the war appears, at first sight, to be in nobody’s interest. Not only do businesses suffer, but consumers face higher prices, whereas governments confront the political danger of another cost-of-living shock.

The inflationary risk is politically explosive because households in Europe and the US have not recovered from the previous cost-of-living shock. In the euro area, annual inflation rose to 3.0% in April 2026, with energy prices up 10.9% year on year. Food inflation had eased from its 2023 peak, but the ECB notes that euro area food inflation reached 15.5% in March 2023 and remained above its pre-pandemic average through 2025. In the US, consumer prices rose 3.3% year on year in March 2026, while food prices rose 3.1% over 2025. Housing and medical care costs rose even faster than food in 2024—25, by 4.1% and 2.9% a year, respectively.

These figures matter because the new shock does not arrive on a blank slate. Real wages have only partially recovered from the post-pandemic inflation surge. The OECD reported in 2025 that real wages remained below their early-2021 level in about half of OECD countries, despite recent nominal wage growth. Thus, any renewed rise in energy, food, transport or housing costs would hit societies already marked by weakened purchasing power and political fatigue after years of inflation.

And yet the war continues.

The real question, therefore, is not simply why the war damages the global economy. That much is clear. The more important question is: if the war damages capitalism so broadly, why does it continue?

Different capitals experience the war differently

Capitalism is not a single rational subject calmly maximising the welfare of global business. It is a system divided among competing states, corporations, sectors and fractions of capital. What damages the system as a whole may still benefit particular actors within it. What appears irrational from the standpoint of global stability may be rational from the standpoint of energy companies, arms producers, security contractors, financial speculators or states seeking to reorganise regional power.

This distinction is already present in Marx’s analysis of capital. Capital does not exist only as an abstract totality; it exists concretely as many individual capitals, interacting and competing with one another. Competition is the mechanism through which the general laws of capital impose themselves, but it also means that crises never affect all capitals in the same way. Losses for some become opportunities for others.

For many sectors, the Iran war is plainly destructive. Shipping companies face soaring insurance costs and disrupted routes. Airlines pay more for fuel and lose access to major air corridors. Manufacturing industries, dependent on stable energy prices, confront rising production and transport costs. Import-dependent economies face pressure on trade balances and inflation, while workers and consumers absorb the consequences through declining real wages and rising living costs.

Other sectors, however, benefit from the same instability. Oil majors profit from rising prices and market turbulence. Reuters reported that the trading desks of BP, Shell and TotalEnergies generated at least $2.5 billion in the first quarter of 2026 amid the war-related volatility in energy markets, while Shell alone reported nearly $7 billion in quarterly profit during the conflict.

Arms producers have also benefited from the broader militarisation accompanying geopolitical fragmentation. According to SIPRI, global military expenditure reached $2.887 trillion in 2025, while European military spending surged by 14%. This boosted shares in companies such as Rheinmetall, Leonardo, Saab and BAE Systems. Rheinmetall shares rose from roughly €500 at the end of 2024 to nearly €1,900 by late 2025, while US defence companies such as Lockheed Martin, RTX and Northrop Grumman benefitted from expectations of rising Pentagon spending and sustained demand for missile systems, aircraft and munitions.

Large financial institutions have likewise profited from instability. JPMorgan’s trading division reported record revenues of $11.6 billion in the first quarter of 2026, while the six largest US banks collectively earned $47.7 billion in profits during the same period. Volatility generated by the war stimulated trading activity as investors fled riskier assets, repositioned portfolios and speculated on sharp market swings. Financialised capitalism increasingly does not merely endure instability; it increasingly monetises it.

Yet even here the picture remains contradictory. Defence and financial stocks initially surged amid expectations of permanent rearmament and heightened volatility, but by spring 2026 many had become unstable or declined significantly from their peaks. Rheinmetall shares, for example, fell from about €1,900 to approximately €1,400 as investors worried about overvaluation, production bottlenecks, political uncertainty and slowing procurement cycles.

This point is important because it avoids a simplistic “war profiteering” explanation. Wars are not merely conspiracies organised by oil companies, banks or arms manufacturers. Rather, geopolitical conflict redistributes losses and gains across different capitals under conditions of stagnation and overaccumulation. Shipping, aviation, manufacturing, labour and consumers bear much of the burden, while energy firms, defense contractors, large financial institutions and commodity traders may benefit from rising prices, speculation and state procurement.

This is the irrational rationality of war under late capitalism. At the level of society, war is destructive. At the level of particular capitals, it can remain profitable, at least temporarily.

War as an accumulation strategy

This does not mean that wars are mechanically “caused” by oil companies, banks or arms manufacturers. The stronger argument is that under conditions of stagnation and overaccumulation, war becomes one of the mechanisms through which states attempt to manage capitalism’s contradictions.

Military expenditure plays a central role in this. When private investment weakens, defence spending provides a state-driven source of demand capable of sustaining industrial production, technological development and employment. Unlike civilian welfare spending, military expenditure also reinforces state power and geopolitical influence. Baran and Sweezy identified this dynamic already in the 1960s, arguing that military spending functioned as a crucial outlet for surplus in monopoly capitalism. Mandel later incorporated militarisation into a broader theory of late capitalism, in which state intervention increasingly compensates for the declining capacity of normal market expansion to sustain accumulation.

Sanctions regimes and geopolitical fragmentation perform related functions. They reorganise trade routes, redirect investment flows and encourage the construction of new industrial and logistical networks. The freezing of assets, restrictions on technology transfer and fragmentation of energy markets all create pressures for state-supported industrial restructuring. In this sense, sanctions are not merely instruments of foreign policy; they increasingly function as tools of economic reorganisation.

This tendency has become particularly visible since 2008. Weak growth, deindustrialisation and financial dependence pushed many Western states toward more interventionist economic policies. Industrial policy, now re-legitimised by the World Bank after decades of scepticism, returned not as a rupture with neoliberalism, but increasingly through militarised forms: defence procurement, energy-security strategies, semiconductor subsidies, reshoring programs, strategic infrastructure spending and large-scale rearmament initiatives, most visibly the EU’s ReArm Europe Plan/Readiness 2030, designed to mobilise over €800 billion in defence investment.

The pattern is not new. During the Cold War, military Keynesianism helped sustain demand while anchoring US global dominance. After 2001, the “War on Terror” expanded the security state and generated vast markets for surveillance, logistics, private military contracting and reconstruction. The war in Ukraine accelerated European rearmament and energy restructuring, but it also stabilised Russian capitalism in its own distorted form: through military demand, state procurement, import substitution, intensified state-capital integration and the reorientation of trade toward China and other non-Western partners. The combined wealth of the 15 richest Russians rose from $225 billion in 2021 to $250 billion in 2025. The Iran war now extends this logic into the Gulf, where energy security, shipping control, industrial strategy and geopolitical rivalry converge.

War therefore functions not only as a geopolitical event, but increasingly as a mechanism of economic management. Under conditions of stagnation, states rely more heavily on militarisation, sanctions and strategic industrial policy to stabilise accumulation and preserve geopolitical position.

Trump is not the explanation—and neither is Netanyahu

The temptation to explain the Iran war through the personalities of Trump or Netanyahu is understandable. Trump’s political style is theatrical, impulsive and deliberately chaotic. Netanyahu’s political position is equally bound up with war, crisis management and the permanent mobilisation of security threats. Both leaders matter, but neither explains the conflict by himself.

The personalisation of politics obscures the structural continuity beneath it. It encourages the illusion that wars emerge primarily from individual madness rather than contradictions embedded in the global order. As Marx famously observed, people make their own history, but not under circumstances of their own choosing; they act within conditions inherited from the past.

Political leaders therefore shape the form, timing and rhetoric of conflict, but they do not create the underlying contradictions from nothing. The confrontation with Iran predates Trump and Netanyahu’s current political crisis. It is rooted in the long decline of US hegemony in the Middle East, Israel’s regional security doctrine, the rise of rival centres of power and the broader instability of global capitalism.

The deeper issue is the US’ changing position within the world-system. US hegemony remains enormous, but it is increasingly contested economically, technologically and geopolitically. China’s rise has challenged Western industrial supremacy in sectors ranging from manufacturing to green technologies and telecommunications. At the same time, many advanced Western economies have experienced decades of slowing productivity growth and growing dependence on finance, debt and asset inflation. Under such conditions, military superiority increasingly compensates for weakening economic dominance.

At the same time, neoliberal globalisation has entered a broader crisis of legitimacy. William Robinson argues that global capitalism is marked not only by overaccumulation, but also a political crisis of state legitimacy, capitalist hegemony and international conflict, with the global economy increasingly dependent on systems of warfare, social control and repression as means of accumulation. The promises of stable prosperity, rising living standards and expanding middle classes have weakened across much of the developed world. Political polarisation, declining trust in institutions and the growth of nationalist and authoritarian movements reflect not merely cultural conflict, but deeper material tensions within stagnating capitalist societies.

In this sense, Trumpism should not be understood simply as an aberration, but as one political expression of a broader systemic crisis. Boris Kagarlitsky argues in his analysis of Trump’s first hundred days that contemporary US politics increasingly reflects the liberal order’s fragmentation and the emergence of a more chaotic struggle between competing national capitals, political factions and geopolitical blocs. The result is not a coherent imperial strategy, but what Kagarlitsky describes as a “war of all against all” within an increasingly unstable global system.

The Iran war must therefore be understood not as the product of one leader’s irrationality, but as part of a broader historical transition in which geopolitical confrontation increasingly substitutes for the declining capacity of neoliberal capitalism to generate stable growth, legitimacy and hegemony.

War destroys and stabilises

This contradiction lies at the centre of late capitalism. War destroys infrastructure, disrupts trade, intensifies inflation and weakens the long-term conditions for productive accumulation. Yet it simultaneously boosts profits in strategic sectors, redirects public spending toward military procurement and industrial policy, disciplines labour through insecurity and nationalism, and postpones deeper crises through state-led demand and geopolitical restructuring.

This is why militarisation persists despite its destructive consequences. Mandel argued late capitalism increasingly depends on permanent militarisation and state intervention, while simultaneously undermining the material basis for stable long-term reproduction. The result is a deeply contradictory order in which war appears irrational from the standpoint of humanity and long-term development, yet functional from the standpoint of particular capitals and the short-term management of systemic crisis.

Late capitalism’s tragedy is therefore not simply that it produces war. Capitalism has always produced war. The deeper problem is that war increasingly becomes woven into the system’s normal functioning. What appears as permanent crisis is no longer an interruption of the system. It is increasingly the way the system survives.

On 8 May and 9, left and progressive movements in Europe marked Victory Day—the 81 anniversary of fascism’s defeat in World War II. “For the Left this cannot be merely an act of remembrance,” wrote the European Left Party. “It is a call to continue the struggle for a peaceful and antifascist Europe.”

Victory Day memorializes Nazi Germany’s official surrender in 1945, marking the end of war in this part of the world and the victory of partisans, national resistance movements, Red Army soldiers, and allied forces. The extreme atrocities committed by Nazis and fascists over previous years—notably mass persecution, torture, and killing of Jews, Roma, communists, and other groups—resulted in millions of deaths, with many more killed in combat and bombardments: the USSR alone lost 27 million citizens during World War II.

Events took place across the region to commemorate the anniversary. Many emphasized similarities between trends that led to the rise of fascism and today’s militarization and armament, calling for urgent action. The European Left Party echoed words of Mauthausen concentration camp survivors, who pledged after liberation: “We are determined to carry on the struggle against imperialism and nationalist hatred. The construction of a new world of peace and freedom is our goal.”

While progressives view Victory Day as a lesson for future action, many local, national, and EU bodies paid lip service to the day’s origin while erasing contributions of communist and resistance groups from official history. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and High Representative for Foreign Affairs Kaja Kallas focused exclusively on Europe Day—occurring in the same period—featuring EU flags and highlighting the bloc’s stated aims of “unity, cooperation, and democratic values.” During a press conference, Kallas stated that not all EU countries can celebrate 8 to 9 May as Victory Day because of their Soviet past—which she described as a period of “atrocities.”

Berlin authorities pursued a similar discourse, banning, once again, the display of USSR and communist symbols during celebrations traditionally held next to Soviet memorials. The ban extended to Russian Federation flags and songs like “Katyusha” and “Kalinka.” “Since according to Russian propaganda, Russian soldiers are fighting Nazis in Ukraine, there is a direct link between the victory over fascism in World War II and the Russian Federation’s current war in Ukraine,” Berlin Police wrote when announcing the ban.

“The ban,” wrote the German Communist Party (DKP), “is a slap in the face to all those who, on 8 and 9 May, pay tribute at Soviet memorials to the tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers who fell in the battle of Berlin. At the same time, it is an insult to the peoples who, as part of or alongside the Red Army, liberated Europe from fascism.”

“Despite anti-Soviet bans and restrictions, we remembered in humility the fallen soldiers of the Red Army and their families, who sacrificed everything in the fight against German fascism,” the DKP added.

In Italy, a large demonstration took place in Rome, reclaiming the narrative around World War II from revisionists. Potere al Popolo’s Marta Collot stressed the importance of ensuring solidarity with ongoing popular struggles around the world—notably in Palestine and Cuba—drawing inspiration from sacrifices made by communist movements and activists. It was largely communists and partisan fighters who gave their lives to defeat fascist forces, she emphasized, driven by a vision of a different world.

“They are the ones who have lifted millions and millions of people out of poverty,” she said. “They are the ones who believe that, in the face of barbarism, human dignity comes before any kind of profit.”

“Socialism, as well as communist men and women, remind us that there is always an alternative to barbarism; that there is—and that we need—a vision that allows us to imagine a different world so that we can build it,” Collot added. “In the face of barbarism, the only possible alternative is communism.”

Hundreds of thousands of workers took to the streets all across India on Tuesday, 12 May, in solidarity with the unorganised workers facing state repression in various parts of the country, particularly in the National Capital Regions (NCR).

A joint platform made up of the Central Trade Unions (CTUs) and several independent sectoral federations made the call for the protest, calling 12 May “National Demands Day”.

The CTUs include all major left-leaning trade union federations in the country, such as the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC), Hind Mazdoor Sabha (HMS), and Centre for Indian Trade Unions (CITU), among others, with millions of members each.

The workers staged lunch-hour protests, sit-ins, and rallies at factory gates and industrial clusters across the country, carrying banners and posters and shouting chants against “inhuman exploitation”. Slogans focused particularly on contractual and non-regular workers.

The protesters condemned the brutal police repression of the striking workers in industrial manufacturing sectors in Noida, Manesar, Gurugram and Faridabad in the National Capital Region (NCR). Workers in these areas produce mobile phones, electronic components, garments, auto parts, and medicines.

The police from the right-wing-ruled states, such as Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, have launched “a direct assault on innocent workers and people, with the state machinery acting openly in the interests of the corporates”, a statement from the CTUs issued on 6 May says.

“Over 1,000 workers were arrested, with police using raids, repression, and surveillance to create a reign of terror.” They have arrested several “trade union leaders and wrongfully framed them” as “external” or “anti-national”. Some of these leaders and activists are still in prison.

The CTU’s statement called the repression “nothing short of a state-backed corporate offensive against the democratic rights of the workers.”

The CTUs claim that this “militant upsurge of workers’ resistance” is “against the inhuman exploitation of contractual industrial workers” and a “continuation of the momentum” built during the 12 February General Strike, in which over 300 million workers from all across the country participated, demanding the withdrawal of the four new labour codes.

Central demands

Though the agitation of workers has forced the respective state governments to hurriedly revise the wages, which they had failed to do for years, such revisions have largely been termed a sham by the CTUs. Even with the hikes announced, the “wages in Uttar Pradesh and Haryana remain far below those in Delhi despite identical living costs.”

Given the inadequacy of the wage revisions and continued state repression, the National Demands Day raised the following demands:

1. Inflation-adjusted minimum wages, which should not be less than Rs 26,000 per month (approx. 270 US dollars).

2. Withdrawal of all cases against the agitating workers and immediate and unconditional release of all workers and activists.

3. Immediate withdrawal of the four new anti-worker labour codes.

4. Initiation of a tripartite dialogue with the trade unions and convening of the Indian Labour Conference.

5. Strict adherence to the 8-hour working day and double overtime wages

6. Equal pay and end of contractual work.

More agitation is coming.

The CTUs have claimed that India has seen a phenomenal rise in contractual employment, with around 42% of all employees in the manufacturing sector working on contracts in 2023-24. Most of these workers do not have any protection and are often forced to work beyond the stipulated working hours with no substantial wages.

The workers also face discrimination based on the nature of their employment and their gender, with women workers often paid less than their male counterparts and often subjected to workplace harassment.

In workplace and wage-related agitations, the governments in most of the Indian states have, instead of engaging in dialogue with the workers to provide relief, adopted the path of repression and taken the side of the management.

The state’s use of repression and smear campaigns, branding the agitating workers and their leaders as “external” or “anti-national”, is a means to delegitimise the genuine struggles, the CTU’s statement says.

It warned that the failure of the state to listen to workers’ demands and unleashing acts of repression and smear campaigns will make it impossible for India to have any “lasting industrial peace”.

The government of India, however, despite consistent protest and warnings by millions of workers for months now, has refused to listen to their concerns. On 8 May, it went ahead and notified the final rules of the four labour codes.

This has prompted the trade unions to burn the copies of the act and issue calls for further agitation in the coming days.

On 10 May, Robert Kagan, the high priest of neoconservative thought, the bell ringer for muscular interventionism and general American meddlesomeness, lamented in The Atlantic that the United States had suffered a unique defeat in its efforts to subjugate Iran. The article says much about Kagan’s own identification with the obvious, some feat given the military fancy and fantasy that continues to blot the current Trump administration.

Be that as it may, he finds the Iran War dishing out a defeat to the United States of unique quality, one that “can neither be repaired nor ignored.” No ultimate American triumph could emerge, and nothing would “undo or overcome the harm done” to “return to the status quo ante.” The Strait of Hormuz would not be “open” as it was prior to 28 February. Iran’s regional position, far from being blunted, had improved. China and Russia had been strengthened; the US “substantially diminished.” “Far from demonstrating American prowess, as supporters of the war have claimed, the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started.”

This prompting was undoubtedly due to the claim made by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on 5 May in the White House Press Briefing Room that Operation Epic Fury had concluded, though US President Donald Trump, ever keen to keep an iron in the fire, huffed that Iran had to “agree to give what has been agreed to.” (The “what” is always the problem in Trumpland.) Not doing so would result in bombing “at a much higher level and intensity than it was before.” The President had also “paused” Project Freedom, that massive prop of wishful thinking involving the use of the US military to escort commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. The pause—effectively a breezy termination—had been induced, in no small part, by the grumpiness of Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, worried that adventurism in the Strait would incite yet another round of Iranian attacks on Gulf states. To show his disapproval, the Crown Prince had refused to permit the use of the Prince Sultan Airbase for US operations.

Iran’s airstrikes had also shown far more bite than was initially reported, at least in the Western media stable. Some of this can be put down to the restrictions on the release of satellite imagery supplied by commercial providers Vantor and Planet. Both have been compliant with the Pentagon’s request to either limit, delay or indefinitely withhold the publication of timely imagery covering the region. The Iranians, through state-affiliated news outlets, felt no such restraint.

On 6 May, The Washington Post, after examining Iranian satellite imagery, reported that some 228 structures of pieces of equipment at US military sites across the Middle East since 28 February had been damaged and destroyed. Hangars, barracks, fuel depots, aircraft, vital radar, communications and air defence equipment had been struck by Iran’s forces. The dangers posed by Iranian strikes had been so formidable as to force some US bases in the region to relocate personnel out of missile range.

In its analysis, the paper claims to have verified some 109 images, aided by a comparison with lower-resolution imagery obtained from the European Union’s Copernicus satellite system, and any high-resolution images at hand from Planet. The Iranian images also confirmed previously reported damage or destruction inflicted on a number of US military assets: the radomes at Camp Arifjan and Ali al-Salem Air Base in Kuwait and at the 5 Fleet Headquarters; the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defence radars and equipment located at Jordan’s Muwaffaq Salti Air Base and two sites in the United Arab Emirates; a second satellite communications site located at al-Udeid Air Base, and an E-3 Sentry command and control aircraft and a refuelling tanker at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia.

The analysts roped in to examine the images were impressed. Mark Cancian, a former Marine Corps colonel and senior advisor to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), found the strikes to be “precise.” “There are no random craters indicating misses.” William Goodhind of the open-access research project Contested Ground, in addition to noting the destruction of equipment, fuel storage and air base infrastructure, found damage to “soft targets, such as gyms, food halls and accommodation.”

To add stinging insult to burgeoning injury, the defences used to cope with Iranian strikes proved staggeringly draining and disproportionately costly. The CSIS estimates the use of at least 190 THAAD interceptors and 1,060 Patriot interceptors between 28 February and 8 April, running down inventories of both at 53% and 43% respectively. And just to improve the mood in Washington, Tehran, according to an analysis by the US intelligence community, retains roughly 75% of its prewar inventories of mobile launchers and roughly 70% of its pre-war missile stockpile. Vague as they are, that’s another objective of Operation Epic Fury dashed.

While the childish pantomime of non-diplomacy continues (Trump rages that the ceasefire with Tehran, given the latest “piece of garbage” of a counter proposal, is on “life support”), Washington is banking on a strangulation policy through yet another project of dubious merit: Economic Fury. “As Iran’s military desperately tries to regroup, Economic Fury will continue to deprive the regime of funding for its weapons programs, terrorist proxies, and nuclear ambitions,” tooted the Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent on 11 May. “Treasury will continue to cut the Iranian regime off from the financial networks it uses to carry out terrorist acts and to destabilize the global economy.”

Economic Fury, still in its swaddled infancy, also risks early retirement. Iranian stubbornness and stout resilience continues to trouble analysts in the intelligence community. A CIA analysis circulated this month concluded that Tehran could withstand the US naval blockade for between 90 to 120 days before experiencing dramatic economic deterioration. Iran’s economy may be in a wretched state, but parochial determination has a certain staying power. Bureaucratic bickering, however, often finds its way, and a senior US intelligence official (that could be anyone) has surfaced to counter the claims of the assessment. Genuine, extensive and rapid economic damage is being inflicted. The US remains in the ascendant.

These varied intelligence assessments of decorative astrology cannot escape the dunderheaded reasoning that undergirded the war, along with the failure to appreciate the shocks caused, not merely by Iran’s closure of the Hormuz Strait but its systematic shredding of the US security guarantee for Gulf states. Unlike the fumbling, inventive antics shown prior to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the CIA and allied intelligence services were well aware that a campaign against Iran was freighted with terrible risk. Ensnared and trapped, Trump will find it hard to avoid using the good offices of China’s President Xi Jinping to lean on Beijing’s ally. If so, it is bound to come at an exacting price.

On 9 May, thousands of Malians in various cities mobilized to express their support for the national armed forces and the sovereigntist popular military government defending the country from attacks by multiple foreign-backed terror groups.​

In the capital, Bamako—one of the six cities attacked on 25 April—citizens packed the Mamadou Konaté Stadium, which has a seating capacity of 5,500, to attend a gathering themed “For a Mali standing tall, united, at peace and secure.”​

Addressing the gathering, Ibrahim Cissé, president of the National Youth Council of Mali (CNJ), called on the young Malians to join the armed forces in ever greater numbers in the fight against terror groups, insisting, “We refuse to be a youth of spectators.”​

Speaking on behalf of Malian women, “We are all soldiers,” declared Kouyaté Sissoko, representative of the Coordination of Women’s Associations and NGOs of Mali (CAFO).​

Describing the attack on 25 April as “cowardly,” government spokesperson and Minister of Territorial Administration and Decentralisation Brigadier General Issa Coulibaly said that “the Malian people have shown that they will not yield to fear or manipulation.”

About 650 km northeast of Bamako, the city of Mopti was also attacked, along with four other cities across the country, in a coordinated offensive by about 12,000 fighters of the Al-Qaeda affiliate, the JNIM, and a northern Tuareg separatist group, the MNLA.

Just over two weeks later, civil society leaders gathered at Mopti’s governorate building on 9 May. Addressing them, regional governor Brigadier General Daouda Dembélé assured that, “Mopti will remain strong and a bulwark.”​

Among the other demonstrations of support was the large public meeting, about 425 kilometers east of Bamako, at the Independence Square in the town of San, the administrative capital of the San region on the border with Burkina Faso.​

In her address to the gathering of youth, women leaders, and religious and traditional leaders, the mayor of the urban commune of San, Félicité Diarra, reiterated the support of the region’s people to the government, led by President Assimi Goïta.​

She also paid tribute to the civilians and soldiers killed on 25 April, including Defense Minister Sadio Camara, a lieutenant general posthumously elevated to General’s rank after he fell in battle. “We do not mourn our heroes, we celebrate them,” Coulibaly affirmed in an address, back in Bamako.

Within hours after its submission on Sunday, 10 May, US President Donald Trump rejected Iran’s fresh proposal for peace in the Middle East, calling it “totally unacceptable.”

The news of Trump’s rejection dashed hopes for peace in the region and intensified global economic concerns as oil prices rose further after the markets opened on Monday.

Trump’s rejection of the Iranian plan also shattered the chances of normalizing movement through the Strait of Hormuz, disrupted since the beginning of the US-Israeli war on Iran.

“I have just read the response from Iran’s so-called ‘Representatives.’ I don’t like it-Totally Unacceptable!” Trump said in a brief message on his social media post, on Sunday, 10 May.

According to reports in Iranian media, the latest Iranian peace proposal to end the US-Israeli war of aggression included most of the original demands made since the beginning of the ceasefire in April.

The Iranian demands include war reparations, recognition of its sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, the end of all US sanctions, and the release of Iranian assets frozen by the US.

Iran’s proposals were in response to US proposals submitted to it last week through Pakistani mediators.

The US proposals had included demands such as the suspension of Iran’s nuclear enrichment and the simultaneous lifting of all restrictions on movement through the Persian Gulf, in return for lifting all US sanctions and unfreezing Iranian assets.

Responding to Trump’s rejection of his country’s proposals, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said in a post on X that “dialogue or negotiations” does not mean surrender or retreat and Iran will continue to uphold its rights and defend its interests.

Concerns for wider impact

The Iranian proposal also included the end of Israeli aggression in Lebanon and sought a guarantee that there will be no attacks on the country in the future.

Esmail Baghaei, official spokesperson of Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs questioned Trump’s response to his country’s proposals on Monday, claiming there was nothing unreasonable in it, Press TV reported.

“Everything we proposed in the plan was reasonable and generous, and it is for the good of the region and the world,” Baghaei said, addressing a weekly press briefing in Tehran.

It is regrettable, Baghaei said, that the US continues to put maximalist demands under the influence of the “Israeli regime” and refuses to engage with Iran’s proposals in “good faith.”

Hours after Trump rejected the Iranian proposal, global oil prices once again crossed 100 US dollars per barrel.

The prices, which were much higher before the ceasefire was announced in the first week of April, had remained below 100 US dollars for weeks amid anticipation of a negotiated settlement.

Meanwhile, Saudi Aramco, one of the world’s largest energy companies, claimed on Sunday that the world has lost around one billion barrels of oil since the US-Israeli war on Iran began on 28 February.

Its CEO Amin Nasir warned that it will still take months for the global energy prices to normalize if the war ends now.

Impact on global economy

The continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which almost a quarter of global energy supplies pass, has created an energy crisis across the world, with countries in South and South-East Asia impacted the most.

On Sunday, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked the citizens of India to reduce their consumption of oil and imported items, citing the prolonged crisis in West Asia.

India imports more than 85% of its energy needs, mostly from countries in the Persian Gulf. The closure of the Hormuz and rise in prices have significantly impacted those supplies.

India has adopted measures such as restricting the supply of gas to industries and commercial establishments to protect the domestic supply, apart from raising the prices.

Similar measures have been adopted across the region in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Nepal, the Philippines, Vietnam, and other countries in South East Asia.

The 48 summit of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN), which concluded on Friday, 8 May, in Cebu, the Philippines decided to explore the possibility of a regional fuel stockpile and a standby mechanism for food security in the context of the ongoing crisis in West Asia.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has, apart from affecting the supply of energy products, also impacted the supply of fertilizers crucial for agriculture in the region and there is a fear that it may impact the overall production of food grains.

ASEAN countries import over 50% of their oil, 17% of their gas, and around 11% of their fertilizer needs from the Persian Gulf countries.

They make you do it—they, in this case, being the folly-fouled leaders of educational institutions—because it’s all in the name of organisational efficiency, productivity and purpose. Engage what is often erroneously called a Learning Management System (LMS), submitting personal details and papers and assessments into its maw. Instructors and academics are also made to generate intellectual profiles for subjects and courses, leaving students the false impression that what is not on the platform cannot surely exist. Should you be a conscientious objector to this hungry, data gobbling system, you are ostracised, condemned as a pencil loving Luddite.

On 30 April, Instructure, the Salt Lake City-based education technology company behind Canvas, a widely used LMS, temporarily went offline. On 1 May, the company confirmed that it had experienced a “cybersecurity incident perpetrated by a criminal threat actor.” The problems had been largely sorted by 2 May, with Instructure promising continued monitoring and an investigation into how the attack took place. Its security system had been patched, certain credentials and access tokens revoked and reissued, and API (application programming interface) keys rotated “out of an abundance of caution.” Normal operations resumed the next day.

On 3 May, the specialist extortion group ShinyHunters, which publicly emerged in January 2020, added Instructure to its Tor-based site, boasting the theft of 3.65 terabytes of data by exploiting the “Free-For-Teacher” vulnerability in the Canvas platform. Information belonging to 275 million students, teachers and other individuals to some 8,809 education institutions across the globe had featured. Instructure, while admitting the hack had secured access to personal information (names, email addresses, student ID numbers and user messages), claimed to find “no evidence that passwords, dates of birth government identifiers, or financial information were involved.”

ShinyHunters sought negotiations with Instructure, threatening to leak its pilfered trove of data by 6 May. A new deadline was issued for 8 May. Instructure, at least publicly, was not having a bar of it, using its status page to declare the incident closed. On 7 May, in extending its deadline, the group began threatening specific institutions for extortion and injected a defacement message across 330 institutional Canvas login pages. “ShinyHunters has breached Instructure (again),” crowed the note. “Instead of contacting us to resolve it they ignored us and did some ‘security patches’.”

The defacement prevented the effective use of Canvas accounts by staff and students, or any materials posted on the platform. Canvas assumed an offline maintenance status and suspended its Free-for-Teacher service. Stirrings of panic were registered through various student bodies regarding the loss of work, a disruption in exam preparation and block to the submission of research papers. A number of universities—Idaho State University and Penn State University, for instance—cancelled and postponed scheduled exams.

Instructure was then removed from ShinyHunters’ data leak portal, something the group tends to do when the target company initiates contact. The strategy for targeting individual institutions, however, was thrivingly alive, with a threat that the pinched data set would be released in the event negotiations with the group were not commenced.

The Halcyon Ransomware Research Center helpfully outlines the implications of the theft. Targeted phishing campaigns can be executed against staff, students and parents in the wake of exfiltration. “Leaked records can be used to impersonate school administrators, IT support, or financial aid offices in follow-on attacks.” Some mighty fine advice is also given. “Students, parents, and personnel at affected institutions should be considered, and institutions should issue phishing advisories and direct communications immediately.” Halcyon further recommends the deployment of “a dedicated anti-ransomware solution that detects and prevents ransomware runtime behaviour and data exfiltration attempts … and prevents tampering and network intrusion that enable propagation.”

Such detail and responsibility proved too much for many institutions to master. As the devil was to be found in the detail, detail would be spared. The best Adelaide University could do in a statement on 11 May was announce that access to Canvas had been restored, extensions to assessments granted, and encouragement to “all users to please remain alert to phishing or suspicious communications.” Students at the institution, already disgruntled by the tangles produced by the merger between the University of Adelaide and the University of South Australia, were less than impressed. Ethan Brown, a second-year mechanical engineering student, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that the university had been meagre in its communications with students. “It did take me a little while to actually find out [what happened] because I didn’t find out directly from the uni. I just heard about it from a friend and from articles online.”

Shannon Schmidt, reading for a double degree in international relations and arts, spoke of the disruption as messing “with a lot of things to do with my course material and submissions” while wondering why so many universities preferred one third-party provider. “I reckon all unis that have been affected should tighten security, if this wasn’t a wakeup call, then I don’t know what will be.”

The modern institution of learning has been long blighted by management philosophies that treasure budgets over intellectual prowess, false efficiency over the acquiring of knowledge. Dotty agreements are made with consultants who feed fetid dross to rapacious managers keen on restraining expenditure in favour of criminally inflated salaries. The response to the hacking of Canvas shows laziness, indifference and an almost tortious neglect about the welfare and privacy of students and staff.

Remarkably, these institutions refuse to consider alternative systems in the event of cyber failure, be it an indigenous platform unique to them and separate from cloud-based models, or some backup mechanism to circumvent disruptions. Then there is the heretical prospect of analogue options: the oral examination, the answer briskly penned on paper in a classroom. A sociology student interviewed by the University of Melbourne Student publication Farrago summed up matters with some crispness: “I think it works wonderfully well with the whole ‘going analogue’ vibe we’ve been cultivating as a culture this year,” she stated, sporting a Disc-man. “This should be a wake-up call to the university to invest in physical media. Get with the times!”

Unfortunately, little can be expected by way of redress. The managerial university remains a constipated entity hostile to the safety and welfare of those toilers who learn and work within it. “Platform concentration risk,” as the computer boffins like to term it, promises more mayhem, disguised as a digital nirvana.

Fiona Ben Chekroun, European co-coordinator of the BDS National Committee (BNC), recently visited Ljubljana, Rijeka and Zagreb, where she met with local Palestine solidarity groups and discussed Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaigns in Slovenia and Croatia. Peoples Dispatch spoke with Ben Chekroun about changes and breakthroughs in this arena since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza in October 2023.

For the past 20 years, people around the world have responded to the BDS call launched by Palestinians to pressure Israel to comply with international law. “For me, it has always been very important to answer a Palestinian call, and that’s where I found my legitimacy and conviction that I was going in the right direction,” Ben Chekroun contextualized the call. “Because at some point, I’m answering to something coming from those who are oppressed and fighting, calling us to stand in solidarity by cutting all forms of complicity with the system that oppresses them.”

Exponential growth of activities

Like the overall solidarity movement with Palestine in Europe—which has grown stronger and more vast over the past two and a half years—BDS activities have also expanded. Ben Chekroun refers to an “exponential growth”: meaning that not only is the BNC seeing groups take shape in places where they were not present before, but these groups are also larger in absolute numbers. While this comes with challenges, it has significantly strengthened campaigns.

This growth has led to an organic expansion of new campaigns. “The campaign on ethical tourism called ‘No room for genocide‘ is one of these examples,” Ben Chekroun says, referencing drives to deny passage to war criminals and boycott accommodation platforms that profit from Israeli occupation. “That was literally a campaign born during the genocide, with the determination to prevent war criminals from circulating and having holidays from genocide with total impunity.”

It has also led to more intersectional alliances, an aspect that Ben Chekroun emphasizes is of particular importance. “You can see more and more trade unions adopting BDS guidelines and joining calls to action, coordinating with grassroots BDS groups and partners,” she points out. The same can be said, she adds, for other justice struggles, including climate, LGBTIQI+, and peace groups. “The climate movement made the link between colonialism, climate destruction and genocide; that’s how they were able to join a campaign directly against insurance company AXA or banks with comparable links such as Barclays in Britain,” Ben Chekroun says. “And you can also see LGBTIQI+ groups marching under the slogan ‘No pride in genocide.’”

“In Spain, they’ve been able to build a very large intersectional campaign with trade unions, political parties, grassroots groups, feminist groups, queer groups, and part of the climate justice movement. It was very broad, reaching even people in villages. At one point, you had 150 cities and villages having demonstrations at the same time, bringing up the same demands. This requires not only a lot of organization and coordination, but also building trust among different components of the Spanish state, which is very challenging due to its own history.”

“BDS has become much more widely known,” she points out. “Before, it was somehow always about explaining, over and over again, to the mainstream. That’s still the case when it comes to the strategy, but the words boycott, divestment, and sanction have become more present in the mainstream. And that means we also reach some spaces we weren’t able to reach before.”

The achievements of people-power

In Europe, Ben Chekroun says, there have been numerous incremental wins—“that are maybe not full wins, but are big steps in the right direction”—thanks to intersectional alliances and a bigger presence in the mainstream. “It’s amazing to think that it’s people-power that brought us to Israeli military companies being kicked out of weapons fairs and to vessels being either denied to dock or having their cargo confiscated—like in Italy recently, with the MSC vessels transporting military-grade steel to Israel,” Ben Chekroun says. “You can see the steps happening, and that’s because of people-power.”

Incremental wins and the growth of people’s power can be observed across sectors: from academic boycott calls that led to encampments or decisions to ban Israeli participation in programs—even in non-pro-Palestinian spaces like the UK Royal College of Defence Studies—to sports, from labor to culture and energy. The list of examples Ben Chekroun outlines covers everything from an ongoing call, endorsed by thousands of musicians and artists, to boycott Eurovision over Israel’s participation, to advocacy campaigns for local administrations and companies to adopt ethical procurement policies that would prevent them from collaborating with entities complicit in human rights infringements: not only in Gaza, but across the world.

Another clear victory, she adds, has recently come when Italian energy giant ENI decided to withdraw from an Israeli gas exploration consortium. “It has never been legal, ethically, or morally grounded to invest in Israel. But now it’s also becoming financially reckless—because Israel, even if its economy had been resilient before, is now increasingly becoming what we at the BDS movement call a shutdown nation.”

“It’s important to always name Israel for what it is: an apartheid, genocidal, settler colonial regime. And today, it is increasingly perceived by the majority of the world as a rogue state. If we take a step back and look at the global picture, Israel has never been as isolated as it is today, as weak as it is today—although it might appear strong at the same time because it is still backed by US imperialism.”

“The West has shielded Israel from accountability for seven decades”

Other spaces that have come within reach over the past two and half years can also be found in institutional politics: talk of sanctions on Israel has become much more widespread, Ben Chekroun says, with Belgium, Slovenia and Spain taking steps to introduce a partial military embargo on the occupation power. Another thing the Palestine solidarity movement in Europe has been able to achieve is positioning Palestine as the center of political conversation and activity in the region.

But it goes even beyond that, according to Ben Chekroun, as colonialism has become a legitimate target too. “That’s something that Palestinians have been able to do: in resisting and surviving genocide and still being able to make sure that their narrative is pushed—and pushing the line of those very colonial racist spaces that before were just dismissing everything.”

The results of this trend have been multifold, Ben Chekroun says. The spotlighting of European complicity in the genocide has unmasked this particular brand of hypocrisy in the West, while raising awareness in the Global South that what is happening in Gaza could easily be replicated elsewhere in the world. “Colombian President Gustavo Petro said it quite early in the genocide: this is a test, and we’re next if we don’t stop it,” Ben Chekroun recalls. “We’re seeing these tactics now being used in Lebanon, and in Cuba too. I think there’s definitely a consciousness in the Global South that what’s happening in Gaza is a consequence of this deadly system of colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism at large.”

In Europe, the response has been different. On the one hand, Ben Chekroun points out, governments of the European core have been feeling the heat from solidarity movements. This pressure has pushed some countries to consider a different—tentatively more progressive—stand, as mirrored in the increased participation of countries in meetings of the Hague Group.

But this is far from a universal response. Other countries have tilted towards a more repressive tactic. “The West has shielded Israel from any form of accountability and supported the Israeli apartheid and settler colonial regime financially, economically, and diplomatically for seven decades,” she says. “In a way, we’re here today because of those policies, because the movement is responding to them. It has more space to do it [compared to other regions]—but at the same time, less and less space because the repression is growing as they see we’re able to shake the system.”

The crackdown on civil liberties we have been witnessing across Europe is a result of this, Ben Chekroun warns, adding that its impact will certainly not remain confined to Palestine solidarity.

Yet another outcome can be observed in Eastern Europe. “Sometimes people outside the region see Eastern Europe as a space where nothing can happen,” Ben Chekroun says, immediately countering that solidarity movements have been growing in this region as well. “These governments—in Hungary [PD note: the conversation took place before the inauguration of Peter Magyar’s administration], the Czech Republic, Romania, for example—are very much complicit. Elbit System, one of the biggest Israeli military companies, has settled in Romania.”

“It’s true that the context is very specific,” she adds. “The transition to capitalism has fragmented, diluted and destroyed the sense of community. Trade unions have been weakened, the politicization of people has also been weakened. So for us now it’s about how to connect these different things—the fight against corruption and democratic backsliding—with Palestine. Essentially, it’s about showing that if Elbit is coming to Romania, it’s because they’re feeling the heat in the western part of Europe, and that this company is bringing lots of corruption cases in its luggage.”

This brings the conversation back to building intersectional alliances, as Ben Chekroun emphasizes that Israeli and other complicit companies are following a well-established blueprint: they might be moving operations to avoid pressures, but they are also profiting from weaker labor protections in Eastern Europe. On top of that, governments in Eastern Europe are not losing time to emulate crackdowns on movements observed in the West. “They can also feel that movements are growing, and so we have seen recently in Poland, in Czechia, in Hungary and in Romania, a wave of repression and arrests of activists.”

Opportunities that rise amidst darkness

The system is shaken and becoming more aggressive in response, Ben Chekroun says. “It will react even more violently—that’s part of the cycle. So it’s about being able to see the opportunities that rise amidst darkness. And I think Palestinians have [been doing that]. It’s been their reality for the last 78 years: how to find opportunities and how to find ways to fuel the resistance against this system and use what’s happening for fueling popular resistance.”

“This brings us back to the discussion of how Palestine will free us all: because it’s at the center of so many oppression systems, because it’s connecting so many justice struggles. It’s become the symbol of how to shut down fascism, how to shut down capitalism, patriarchy, and all of those systems that are oppressing everyone.”

In September 2024, intermittent rainfall plunged the northern Algerian Sahara into an almost apocalyptic atmosphere. In just forty-eight hours, more rain fell than the average of an entire year and a half.

Roads collapsed, bridges were destroyed, several neighborhoods around Béchar were temporarily isolated, and families had to be evacuated. The army was deployed for assistance. Satellite images later revealed a striking phenomenon: lakes had reappeared in desert basins that had remained dry for decades.

International media coverage mainly framed the event as a climatic anomaly—a “rare deluge in the Sahara,” according to NASA.

But in a region affected by more than a decade of drought, seeing these waters flow through the Oued Saoura and eventually reach lakes located hundreds of kilometers into the desert raised a fundamental question:

How can a region that prays for rain every season allow such a quantity of water to escape without being able to retain it?

These waters passed through palm groves along the wadi, eroded fragile soils, and accelerated land degradation. Even at a young age, this phenomenon already troubled me: where does all this water go every year when it crosses our region? And why does it become increasingly destructive?

My commitment to rainwater harvesting and hydrological restoration originates from this long-standing question.

In Saharan culture, we learn that water is the source of all life. Yet over decades of urbanization, we have sought to remove water as quickly as possible: channeling it, draining it, mixing it with wastewater, expelling it from living territories.

By trying to expel water from living landscapes, we have ended up turning its return into a threat.

Droughts then became established. And when water finally returns, it violently crosses landscapes that are no longer capable of absorbing it.

This is how I gradually came to understand that drought and flooding are not opposing phenomena, but two manifestations of the same hydrological imbalance. Ethics and economics alike should have led us to preserve these gifts of the sky and to ensure the reuse of wastewater.

But on the ground, in autumn 2024, another phenomenon appeared almost immediately.

The desert began to turn green.

Vegetation emerged in areas previously considered biologically dormant. Where soils were arid, water accumulated in basins and infiltrated the ground. Floods carried eroded soils rich in organic matter.

This event revealed not only climatic vulnerability, but also a latent ecological memory. The Sahara still bears the traces of ancient hydrological and vegetative equilibria, now largely forgotten.

From this observation, this document was born.

It argues that many water crises in arid regions are not solely due to a lack of rainfall. They also result from the degradation of territories’ capacity to retain water through soils, vegetation, windbreak green belts, palm groves, wetlands, and local hydrological and ecological systems.

Modern hydraulic systems are often designed to accelerate water: to drain it, channel it, centralize it, and evacuate it—sometimes even mixing it with wastewater—a sign of a profound rupture between modern urbanization and natural water cycles.

But when territories lose their organic capacity to slow down and infiltrate rainfall, when rapid drainage becomes the dominant planning principle, floods and droughts become two expressions of the same broken cycle.

The 2024 Saharan floods therefore raise a deeper question:

What if the resilience of arid regions depends above all on our ability to retain water within territories in order to allow life to emerge, reactivate soils, and transform the desert into a living environment?

This text explores this question through what I call “Fertile Hydrology”:
an approach inspired both by contemporary ecological sciences and ancient Saharan oasis systems, which regarded water not as a resource to be quickly evacuated, but as a force to be slowed, infiltrated, and cultivated.

The document proposes a set of simple, progressive, and context-adapted solutions for arid territories: rainwater retention measures, flood slowing systems, soil infiltration techniques, vegetation cover restoration, oasis rehabilitation, phytoremediation, small-scale water retention structures, and the regeneration of local water cycles.

It is a plea for a large-scale operation of soil hydration and territorial fertilization.

Water has long crossed landscapes without being able to rest within them.

To generate life, water must meet the soil, infiltrate it, remain long enough to nourish vegetation, recharge lands, and reactivate living cycles.

We must prepare territories capable of retaining water, rather than merely suffering or evacuating it.

This text is an attempt to rethink water, deserts, and resilience in an era where climate extremes are destabilizing arid regions worldwide. It proposes a plan ready for implementation.

The facts are there. The solutions exist.

This document does not propose a distant utopia, but an operational trajectory: a set of concrete, progressive, and immediately applicable measures to rehydrate soils and restore the fertility of arid territories.

The Sahara today constitutes a full-scale laboratory of the hydrological transformations that arid regions of the world will increasingly face.

The phenomena observed in the Saoura Valley and Saharan oases may foreshadow the transformations that many semi-arid regions across the world will have to confront.

The full report with images and references can be found here.

The war against Iran that the United States and Israel launched on 28 February 2026 will likely end in an American retreat. The United States cannot continue the war without producing disastrous consequences. A renewed escalation would likely lead to the destruction of the region's oil, gas, and desalination infrastructure, causing a prolonged global catastrophe. Iran can credibly impose costs that the United States cannot bear and that the world should not suffer.

The US-Israel war plan was a decapitation strike, sold to President Donald Trump by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and David Barnea, the director of the Mossad. The premise was that an aggressive joint US-Israeli bombing campaign would so degrade the Iranian regime's command structure, nuclear programme, and IRGC senior leadership that the regime would fracture. The United States and Israel would then impose a pliable government in Tehran.

Trump seems to have been convinced that Iran would follow the same course as had occurred in Venezuela. The US operation in Venezuela in January 2026 removed Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in what appears to have been a coordinated operation between the CIA and elements inside the Venezuelan state. The US won a more pliant regime, while most of the Venezuelan power structure remained in place. Trump seems to have believed naively that the same outcome would occur in Iran.

The Iran operation, however, failed to produce a pliant regime in Tehran. Iran is not Venezuela, historically, technologically, culturally, geographically, militarily, demographically, or geopolitically. Whatever happened in Caracas had little relation to what would take place in Tehran.

The Iranian government did not fracture. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), far from being decapitated, emerged with a tightened internal command and an expanded role in the national-security architecture. The supreme leader's office held; the religious establishment closed ranks behind it; and the population rallied against external attack.

Two months on, Trump and Netanyahu have no Iranian successor government under their control, no Iranian surrender to close the war, and no military pathway whatsoever to victory. The only path, and the one the US seems to be taking, is a retreat, with Iran in charge of the Strait of Hormuz and with none of the other issues between the US and Iran settled.

Several reasons explain America's disastrous miscalculations and Iran's successes.

First, American leaders fundamentally misjudged Iran. Iran is a great civilisation with 5,000 years of history, deep culture, national resilience, and pride. The Iranian government was not going to succumb to US bullying and bombing, especially reflecting on the fact that Iranians remember how the US destroyed Iranian democracy in 1953 by overthrowing a democratically elected government and installing a police state that lasted 27 years.

Second, American leaders dramatically underestimated Iran's technological sophistication. Iran has world-class engineering and mathematics. It has built an indigenous defence industrial base, with advanced ballistic missiles, a homegrown drone industry, and indigenous orbital launch capability. Iran's record of technological development, built up despite 40 years of escalating sanctions, is a stunning national achievement.

Third, military technology has shifted in a way that favours Iran. Iran's ballistic missiles cost a small fraction of the US interceptors deployed against them. Iranian drones cost $20,000; US air-defence interceptor missiles cost $4m. Iran's antiship missiles, with costs in the low six figures, threaten US destroyers that cost $2-3bn. Iran's anti-access and area-denial network around the Gulf, layered air defence, drone and missile saturation capacity, and sea-denial capability in the strait have made the operational cost of imposing American will on Iran far higher than the United States can sustain, especially taking into account the retaliatory destruction that Iran can impose on the neighbouring countries.

Fourth, the US policy process has become irrational. The Iran war was decided by a small circle of presidential loyalists at Mar-a-Lago, with no formal interagency process and a National Security Council that had been hollowed out across the preceding year. Trump's director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent, resigned on 17 March with a public letter describing “an echo chamber” used to deceive the president. The war was the output of a decision-making system in which the deliberative apparatus had been turned off.

This was neither a war of necessity, nor a war of choice. It was a war of whim. The underlying premise was hegemony. The United States was attempting to preserve a global dominance that it no longer possesses, and Israel was trying to establish a regional dominance that it will never have.

The likely endgame, given all this, is that the war will end with a return to something close to the status quo ante, except for three new facts on the ground. First, Iran will have operational control over the Strait of Hormuz. Second, Iran's deterrent posture will be significantly raised. Third, the US long-term military presence in the Gulf will be significantly reduced. The other issues that supposedly prompted the US to attack Iran—Iran's nuclear programme, regional proxies, the missile arsenal—will most likely be left where they were at the start of the war.

Even as the US retreats, Iran will not press its advantage against its neighbours. Three reasons explain why. First, Iran has a long-term strategic interest in cooperation with its Gulf neighbours, not an ongoing war. Second, Iran will have no interest in restarting a war it has just successfully ended. Third, Iran will be restrained, if any restraint is needed, by its great-power patrons, Russia and China, who both desire a stable and prosperous region. The Iranian leadership understands this clearly, and will stop the fighting.

Trump will no doubt try to depict the coming retreat as some great military and strategic victory. No such claims will be true. The truth is that Iran is far more sophisticated than the United States understood; the decision to go to war was irrational; and the underlying technology of war has shifted against the US. The American empire cannot win the war against Iran at an acceptable financial, military, and political cost. What America can regain, however, is some measure of rationality. It's time for the US to end its regime-change operations and return to international law and diplomacy.

Being very much the all-American figure that he was, the passing of Ted Turner was bound to enliven the cliché machine with the usual, clotty descriptions: the philanthropist, the conservationist, the yachtsman, sporting proprietor, and twenty-four-hour news pioneer. “He thought big and lived large,” observed Guardian US columnist Margaret Sullivan with irritating triteness. “He was the original,” added former CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour, barely an improvement. “He made us all strive for his vision of a better world.” No doubt the hagiographers will be kept busy with words of statuary on various aspects of his life in due course.

One contribution of his should not be spared a good beating. As the man behind the first 24-hour news network, he has much explaining to do. The time when news could be rationed to times of the day did, at least, concentrate the mind on those behind producing it. Care would be taken assembling the items that would be delivered by an almost affected hauteur on air. This all changed when the news about events became news about news. Turning news into a twenty-four-hour affair had the effect of treating virtually everything before the camera into something worth mentioning and reporting about. Nothing in this world of “Chicken Noodle News” could be too trivial anymore; every item, however tedious, deserved its place in Andy Warhol's span of 15-minute fame, from inane car chases to watching paint dry.

After Turner's launching of the Cable News Network (CNN) in 1980, events of varied relevance and proportion could receive the around-the-clock exposure live coverage offered. Relentless, even ghoulish footage beamed across the network of the Space Shuttle Challenger as it exploded 73 seconds after taking off in 1986. In 1987, an 18-month-old Jessica McClure gave voyeuristic delight to viewers over 58 hours of coverage after falling into a well in Midland, Texas. Eyes were glued to screens wondering if “Baby Jessica” might be rescued. The efforts of rescuers were also the subject of interest.

The argument about cable television news ever being factual is a moot point. CNN's coverage of the 1991 Gulf War only served to illustrate how subservient a news outlet could be to official narratives. The fact that news had become a continuous and unceasing affair merely concentrated the messages of the administration of President George H. W. Bush, turning CNN into an uncritical annex of the war. Douglas Kellner's The Persian Gulf TV War is a bracing account of this fact, a polemic against media complicity with establishment drip feed.

The US military establishment had certainly learnt chastening lessons from the Vietnam War, keeping the wandering media hacks on a short lead. The unsuspecting Wolf Blitzer, who continues to labour at the network with perennial sunniness, uncritically recalls in an interview with Poynter the cultivating roles played by the panjandrums of war. “The top Pentagon leadership—Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Colin Powell and other senior leaders were quickly reaching out to me—a newcomer and relatively junior reporter at the Pentagon—to brief me on the state of the war.”

This was no time for critical analysis from news reporters. A conduit, a medium, was what was needed, and a twenty-four-hour organ was there to oblige. The likes of Cheney and Powell, accordingly, “knew that everyone around the world was watching CNN and they wanted their analysis reported.” The icing of propaganda was complete with another realisation, not that Blitzer ever clicked. “It also became very evident to me the top Pentagon brass knew that Saddam Hussein's military leaders in Baghdad were watching CNN.”

That unceasing nature of the broadcasts also turned the journalists in the war news cycle into minor celebrities offering minor contributions. CNN's Bernard Shaw was hardly doing much in the way of investigative journalism bunkered in the Al Rasheed Hotel in Baghdad as the bombs of Operation Desert Storm started falling. Limited as he was, he offered that line media watchers remember: “The skies over Baghdad have been illuminated.” The cable news coverage also served to exsanguinate the conflict, turning it into a simulation, a crude video game notoriously theorised by the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard as La guerre du Golfe n'a pas eu lieu (The Gulf War Did Not Take Place).

With CNN as pioneer, snapping upstarts were bound to follow. By January 2002, Fox News had surpassed the network in the cable news ratings despite being available in 10 million fewer homes. The news in terms of substance had ceased to exist, its undertaker being Fox CEO and chairman Roger Ailes. In its place rose the ranting hysteric and jabbering pontificator, full of what might politely be called “views.”

With constant news coverage firmly in place, the time was ripe for a figure capable of seducing and even shaping it. Donald J. Trump did so with a sinister gusto, the first politician to become the news cycle. With tacit collusion, CNN and other cognate news networks fed and oxygenated the property tycoon's fickleness, the capriciousness, the rants. Every comment, however asinine or vapid or vulgar, warrants mention, analysis, a comb through by perfumed pundits eager to pursue a “fact check.” A Stockholm Syndrome of sorts developed between the network and the reality television star turned President.

With news as surfeit and saturation, the Turner legacy is one we could have done without. With its tendency to feed us stories that are thin, uneven and occasionally interesting in continuous fashion, the twenty-four-hour news beast is limping towards the Museum of Media Relics. The studied, rationed podcast and the conspiratorial slime of social media continue to usher it along its doomed way.

There is an inimitable French expression—“ennui.” I first came across it while reading Jean-Paul Sartre as a university student in Thiruvananthapuram in the mid-sixties. It roughly translates as a feeling of listlessness, profound boredom, and dissatisfaction caused by a lack of excitement, interest, or activity. In existentialist thought, the word connotes a combination of weariness and mental tiredness often accompanied by a sense of emptiness.

To my mind, if a single factor can be attributed to the strange state assembly election results in Kerala, it must be “ennui” among the Left Front's cadres and fellow travellers. That such an incipient feeling was there below the surface was obvious to me during an extended visit to Kerala. But that it was going to erupt in such a torrential flow of alienation came as a surprise. This needs some explaining.

It was for the first time, perhaps, in Kerala politics that five years passed—actually, 10 years, if Pinarayi Vijayan's two consecutive terms as chief minister are tallied—without any major scams. That is, if one were to draw a comparison with the previous Congress rule during which one single scam alone played out for well over a year when powerful figures in the then Congress-led government literally took turns to allegedly seek gratification from an attractive influencer woman with business interests. Suffice it to say, in comparison, the Left government performed rather sedately in a composed, unhurried way that it engendered “ennui.”

The Malayali's two abiding passions in life are politics and football, and that is because they are two sides of the same coin—the entertainment they provide and the adrenaline flow that ensues. Even governments which largely performed without blemishes were vulnerable to the sense of “ennui.” (The government that Pinarayi led five years ago during the period 2016-2021 was a solitary exception.) In the normal course, voters sought change with clockwork precision every 5 years in Kerala.

Suffice it to say, there was a general appreciation, cutting across party politics, that Pinarayi's second government had acquitted itself rather well. But when one began to dig deeper, the very same people also stated their longing for “change.” Therefore, when the left government's precipitous fall comes under scrutiny in the coming days and weeks, especially in the CPM Central Committee, it is important that this cardinal truth should be borne in mind.

One major factor could be deficiencies in the working of the ruling party, which came to light when rampant disaffection/dissent surfaced in the run-up to the election, which eventually manifested as alienation, accounting for the rout of the Left candidates all across the state, including even in the Left strongholds. Why it spawned on such a massive scale all across the state and escaped notice bears scrutiny. The amazing part is that the CPM leadership ignored it. Out of hubris? The point is, democratic centralism actually worked rather well in Kerala, and its breakdown was not inevitable.

Clearly, the Congress Party, which campaigned in the election without any electrifying agenda, has been the beneficiary by default. Already, within the week of the election results, it became apparent that the Congress’ DNA has not changed from its traditional approach to politics as but a game of thrones. The sordid power play today is completely silent on what distinguishes the three front runners in the race for leadership ideologically or in terms of their political programme.

The High Command is having a hard time rationalising its final choice. Should Kerala have a chief minister who enjoys majority support of the elected MLAs? Or, should it choose a genuinely popular, charismatic figure with an unblemished track record? Or should it choose someone well-versed in the ABCs of governance?

If the Congress “high command” is capable of out-of-the-box thinking, this is an opportune moment to choose a chief minister who is a rank outsider with no involvement in factionalism and with deep experience in governance and, importantly, someone with a vision. This is an opportunity to bring in a leader who is capable of new thinking to carry forward the transformation of the state's economy from where Pinarayi left it, steer the state to a higher trajectory of growth and inspire the people to rally to the occasion.

Unless there is a clean break from the past, there is a likelihood that the mandate may be frittered away very soon. Trust the central government and the BJP to make things difficult for the new Congress-led government in Kerala from day 1. That the new government is heavily dependent on the consolidation of Muslim votes will be an eyesore for Delhi, apart from the fealty openly displayed in such ample measure to the “Gandhi family.”

The organiser has already rung the alarm bell that “The Muslim League has intensified its efforts to consolidate influence within the prospective UDF government even before the Congress finalises its decision on the chief ministerial post. League leaders are reported to have issued clear directions regarding who should lead the government.”

On the other hand, a chief minister as astute and masterly as Pinarayi only can navigate the equations with the Modi government at the centre and keep the equilibrium on an even keel in such troubled times ahead. Does the Congress have such a master tactician like Pinarayi to steer the ship? Put differently, will the Congress “high command” allow its chief minister such latitude as Pinarayi enjoyed by virtue of being a towering political figure in the Left movement?

That the BJP could not improve its vote share despite all the media hype is beside the point. The fact of the matter is that no Indian state is an island. The co-relation of forces in Kerala can potentially change in sync with the massive transformation taking place in the rest of the country. And that poses challenges to both the Left Front and the Congress once the Hindu vote gets fragmented and an erosion begins.

The bottom line is that the binary system of notation, which gave an appreciable degree of stability and predictability to state politics, is probably entering a transitional phase. It explains Rahul Gandhi's impatience with the unseemly struggle for power within the state unit of his party, oblivious of the reality that the general elections are due in less than three years from now.

In a ruthlessly crafted mission, with the Election Commission of India (ECI) and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) being close collaborators, the Trinamool Congress (TMC) government has been laid low in West Bengal.

In a shameful first, 2.7 million voters came to be disenfranchised because their “logical discrepancies”—a device never used before by the Election commission—could not be sorted out for want of time.

What that unprecedented breach of the Constitutional injunction that “free and fair” elections cannot be said to have been held should even a single eligible voter be prevented from casting her vote means for the republic order is for residual democrats to ponder.

Imagine that the total difference of votes cast for the BJP and the TMC has been three million or so.

What might have happened had the 2.7 million disenfranchised voters actually voted is for all to wonder at, especially in view of the seats that were lost or won by less than 5,000 votes.

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A travesty of an electoral process if there ever was one. The felling of the feisty Mamata Banerjee has brought cheer equally to the Left and the Right.

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Long viewed as an unpedigreed usurper who had the temerity in 2011 to rudely bring down the 34-year-old Left Front regime—high priests of theory and iron-clad organisation notwithstanding—by, of all things, mobilising the farming community against industrialists who were eyeing to acquire agricultural land to set up manufacturing units, leading to an episode of police firing on agitating peasantry with many fatalities resulting, the vandalism visited now on a statue of Lenin seems less consequential than the ignominious exit of Banerjee, the bête noire.

That Left cadres have for some time now been openly raising the slogan “pehle Ram, phir Vaam” (first the party of Ram, meaning the BJP, then the Left) is not exactly the best kept secret of recent West Bengal politics.

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Therefore, it is just as well that the Mamata party has been brought low, even if by the fascist right wing that has played the communal card to the hilt.

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Never before have Bengalis been so nakedly appeased as Hindus as during the campaign run by the Modi-Shah combine.

Even the memory of the constitutional/electoral imperative that no appeals may be made to religious or other identity markers during electoral campaigns has now been lost to the ECI, the executive, and wretchedly, vast sections of the populace as well.

Mamata, conversely, has been arraigned for mollycoddling Muslims in the name of secularism. Indeed, the erstwhile TMC leader-turned-BJP frontrunner, Suvendu Adhikari, has loudly let it be known that since only Hindus voted for him, there was no call on him to look after Muslim issues.

It is another matter that his party did not put up a single Muslim candidate.

The least attention to Muslim problems is no longer to be viewed as the State's constitutional duty to protect and preserve minority interest within a still-secular Constitution.

Indeed, the fall of West Bengal has brought nearer the coveted Sanatan goal of forging a unitary state—a sort of one-party right-wing parallel to the Chinese model, dumping the principle of federalism as anathema to national unity.

Peninsular India still remains rather cussed in its refusal to prostrate to the unitary idea, but West Bengal has shown that the captive State now has all the wherewithal to breach the Deccan in time to come.

When that happens, the argument and the ground would have been made available to formally effect the transformation of the State into a majoritarian theocracy, with civilisational oneness crushing the decrepit pluralisms of old.

There remains though one thorn in the side of this unitary project—like it or not, the Indian National Congress.

The animal refuses to embrace the extinction so often pronounced and prophesied by the loud mouths of the right wing.

Admirably, Rahul Gandhi, giving proof of a sagacious political vision, has rebuked the local unit of the party in West Bengal for their petty gloating over Mamata's defeat, rectifying some of his own negative observations of earlier days.

Conversely, Mamata has lost no time in acknowledging the gesture and reciprocating the sentiment, vowing to work to strengthen the INDIA bloc.

It is to be hoped by all those still wedded to the ideal of a pluralist, multiparty democracy, underpinned by staunchly independent institutions, that not only the TMC but other factions as well who once were part of the Indian National Congress, will see the pit that awaits Indian Constitutional democracy, and forge a new unity across the republic that may acquire the clout to build a people's movement forged not just on lung power but a deeply considered conjoint understanding of how a manifesto of a people's charter may be drawn up, and what organisational mechanisms may be conjointly put in place across northern and central India to unravel the depredations wrought by a rampaging right wing that now needs the Constitution only as a facade till brought down.

The need for a thoroughly analysed and assimilated alternate politics

Mamata and all other elements of the secular-democratic INDIA bloc will need to understand that the return to a collectivity cannot just be a Pavlovian response to political adversity, but a thoroughly analysed and assimilated alternate politics that has the substance to defeat the right wing in the hearts and minds of the common citizenry.

Now that both the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and the Left front in Kerala have also been ousted, it will be for them and parties like the Samajwadi party and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) in Bihar to hold hands with the Congress to salvage the centre before worrying about their pocket boroughs as their chief myopic concerns.

There is a new youthful generation of Indians gone quite American in foregrounding money before emancipatory or enlightened social and political ideas.

In a grand capitalist phrase, the corporate media calls them the “aspirational class.” Surely, a nation's educational system cannot be geared merely to feeding the aspiration for higher incomes to the exclusion of ethical, altruistic orientations of mind.

And surely, our pride in civilisational values can hardly square with a world view which regards the acquisition of private wealth as the acme of developmental nationalism.

Corporate media houses and the ubiquitous barrage of commercial messages, made poisonously addictive through digital instruments, are now a formidable Epsteinian reality, and the task of retrieving an ethical state and polity are stupendously intractable.

And, contrary to propagated belief, religiosity, now ubiquitous to the nth degree, does not function as antidote to this phenomenon, but as a comforting affirmation of the value of lucre.

Not until the general elections of 2029 bring about a parivartan may the least rays of light grace the realm, preceded by an electoral victory in Uttar Pradesh towards which the INDIA bloc must strain every mental and physical sinew from this day on.

And if that does not happen, it may be curtains for the republic.

The phrase “AI populism” has started doing the rounds, and as is typically the case when progressives reach for the word “populism,” they have not fully understood its true nature. The dominant framing—most clearly articulated in Jasmine Sun's recent piece “AI populism's warning shots”—defines AI populism as the worldview that AI is “an elite political project to be resisted.” Sun catalogues the early symptoms: data centre NIMBYism, AI witch-hunts among creatives, Molotov cocktails through the windows of CEOs. On the descriptive level she is right: there is a real, often nihilistic, anti-AI energy bubbling up among radicalised young people. This is becoming so mainstream that the New York Times picked the idea up.

But this is not what AI populism is going to be. Or rather, it is not what the politically consequential version is going to be. The lone twenty-year-old with a Discord account and a homemade firebomb is not a political movement: they are a symptom. The actual movement—the one that will reshape elections, win seats and rewrite legislation—will not be about resisting AI at all. It will be about deploying the subject of AI to win power.

What AI populism actually looks like

Populism, in any form worth the name, is not a stylistic flourish you can bolt onto an existing agenda. It is a politics that names a divide between ordinary people and an out-of-touch elite, and proposes to do something about it in plain language that actually lands with the mythical “ordinary person”: more than this, it is a particular vibe, aesthetic, and energy. Many progressives keep mistaking the top-level language of populism for the substance: they think calling themselves populist will make them popular; they think they can stealthily diffuse progressive ideology without anyone noticing. Regular folks are not dim, and they pick up on this immediately.

AI populism, properly understood, is the political deployment of AI-related anxiety in service of a programme that claims to defend ordinary working people against a transformation being imposed on them by elites. It is, in essence, an AI Just Transition platform with the volume turned up: with policies on retraining, redistribution of productivity gains, protection of livelihoods, scrutiny of who benefits and who pays. All with that particular vibe, aesthetic, and energy. The intellectual scaffolding for this politics already exists. What is missing is anyone willing to pick it up and run with it: typically, progressives find dwelling in the gutter—which is where populism typically resides—is just too uncomfortable for the delicate sensibilities.

This is not hypothetical. A March 2026 NBC News poll found that 57% of registered voters believe the risks of AI outweigh its benefits, against 34% who think the opposite, and that voters do not trust either major party to handle the issue. Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who ran the survey, called AI an issue “up for grabs” by either party. Politicians can read polling: the first serious figure to walk into a town hall and say “they are getting rich automating your job, and I am going to make them pay for the transition” is going to find a very large audience waiting for them, whether they come from the “left” or the “right” (and understanding that the binary does not have to hold is another key lesson to learn about contemporary populism).

Two roads, both populist

Here is where it gets interesting, and where the progressive misreading becomes dangerous. AI populism can go two ways.

The first is genuine: a politics that takes the anxiety seriously and builds an actual programme: fee-and-dividend mechanisms on AI productivity gains, sectoral transition funds, real worker voice in deployment decisions, regulation of compute and data infrastructure tied to public benefit. This version would do for the AI transition what the New Deal did for industrial capitalism. It would be uncomfortable for incumbents and deeply popular with everyone else.

The second is a scam: a politics that performs concern for ordinary people while quietly serving the interests of the same capital that is deploying the technology. This version stages the rhetoric—the rallies, the enemies-of-the-people speeches, the “I will protect your job” promises—but legislates in the opposite direction. It would convert real grievance into electoral fuel and then betray it, which is to say it would do for the AI transition what standard right-wing populism has done for almost every other issue it has touched.

Don't expect coherence

The typical progressive objection here is that right-wing populists cannot run on AI populism because the same billionaires bankrolling those movements are also the ones building the AI. This is precisely the kind of logical neatness that has caused progressives to misread the politics of the last decade.

Donald Trump, funded by oligarchs and tech executives, ran and won as the champion of the forgotten worker. Nigel Farage, a privately educated former commodities broker bankrolled by elite money, has spent his entire career as the alleged voice of the British pub. The contradiction does not matter: it does not need to make logical sense; it simply needs to resonate emotionally. Right-wing populism has demonstrated repeatedly that voters who feel unseen will accept enormous incoherence from a politician who appears to recognise them.

Expect, then, political figures who rail against “Big Tech” while taking its money, who promise protection to displaced workers while voting through tax cuts for the firms displacing them, and who deflect the real question—who shapes this transition, and in whose interests—onto a culprit that costs their backers nothing.

The cost of ceding ground

Right-wingers have made a habit of co-opting issues that progressives left lying around. Patriotism, family, community, working-class identity: each was once available to the left and has been steadily annexed because no one else was prepared to speak about it in language ordinary people recognised.

AI is sitting in exactly the same position. The technocratic centre is talking about productivity gains and responsible deployment. The activist left is focused on existential risk or on resisting AI altogether. Neither offers a populist political programme that meets people where their actual anxiety lives: in the question of whether their work, their wages and their kids’ futures will survive the next five years.

If credible actors do not enter this space soon, they will hand it to people who will use it badly. AI populism is coming. The only open question is whether it will be a politics that actually defends the people whose name it invokes, or another performance in which working people are once again the audience rather than the beneficiaries.

The window to decide is closing fast.