Reflectii

More and more people in society lately are awakening to the fact that ‘Democracy’ is not only not all its cracked up to be, but that it may infact even be unnatural. And I don’t mean that in the sense that Democracy has merely been institutionally diluted or perverted in the West by way of the various cultural erosions, political schemes, and overreaches we’re now so used to grumbling about. No, I mean that Democracy even in its purest form can be argued to make no sense for a modern world which has outgrown the scope for which the system was originally intended.

Cela fait un peu plus de deux ans que l’OTAN a officiellement relancé la guerre froide. De toute évidence, le conflit ne s’est jamais vraiment arrêté, car le cartel de racket le plus agressif du monde a continué à s’étendre vers l’est, exclusivement par le biais de mensonges et de tromperies.

L’usage journalistique et la facilité de langage conduisent souvent à accoler un suffixe en -isme au nom d’une personnalité politique pour désigner un courant politique qui s’incarnerait à travers un responsable. C’est ainsi qu’est apparu « le macronisme. » Dans une acception faible, ce serait un courant plus ou moins organisé désignant un groupe d’élus et militants, et le camp de ses soutiens électoraux. Dans un sens plus fort, cela induirait l’existence d’un corps de doctrine, une idéologie fixant un cap.

Pour le bien de la sécurité des États-Unis et de la paix mondiale, les États-Unis devraient immédiatement abandonner la quête néoconservatrice d’hégémonie en faveur de la diplomatie et de la coexistence pacifique.

As a nation, the United States, as if we did not already know, is convulsed. Paranoid and divided, giddy with conspiracy and deranged by a fear of totalitarian seizure, hyper partisan and hostile to debate and any loose definition of facts (this condition afflicts the entire political spectrum), the only thing missing so far was this: an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate.

Political challenges among NATO members, the spectre of a second Trump presidency, and a bleaker military situation in Ukraine – compared to the expectations at the 2023 Vilnius Summit for the Ukrainian counteroffensive – made Washington feel like a ‘pre-storm summit’.

In recent days, widespread protests have erupted across many Turkish-controlled towns and cities in the countryside to the north of Aleppo and around Idlib. Some protests have escalated into violence, as clashes have broken out between local armed groups and Turkish forces, resulting in multiple casualties among both protesters and Turkish soldiers. The unrest followed racist attacks against Syrians that started in the Turkish city of Kayseri on June 30, destroying several Syrians’ properties.

Haiti’s new interim government faces immense challenges, but none are as urgent as breaking the stranglehold that gangs have over the country’s capital, Port au Prince. Force alone will not bring peace, even with the arrival of the modestly-sized and Kenyan-led multinational security support mission. The country instead requires creative, whole-of-society — not just whole-of-government — mechanisms to divert gang members from crime and violence as part of a comprehensive counter-gang strategy.

What Kyiv Could Do Now for a Place in the Alliance

We know what will not happen at NATO’s 75th anniversary summit in Washington this week: Ukraine becoming the alliance’s 33rd member. U.S. officials are talking instead about giving Ukraine “a bridge to NATO,” as National Security Council Senior Director for Europe Michael Carpenter put it recently. But when it comes to membership, many of the alliance’s leaders—including the United States and Germany—remain concerned that a formal move will be impossible as long as Kyiv is at war, given the centrality of the alliance’s Article 5 guarantee that an attack against one will be considered an attack against all.

It is not only economic insecurity that helps create a mass base for fascism but also fear or the sense of physical insecurity. Practically alone among Filipino politicians in his quest for the presidency in 2016, Rodrigo Duterte appealed to “rampant criminality” as his main, indeed, only road to power. A blistering five-fold increase in reported crime and a marked decline in effective law enforcement were recorded in the years prior to the elections and a generalized sense of lawlessness took hold in the public consciousness, especially among the “aspirational middle class, who benefited from concentrated growth in the retail, real estate, and business outsourcing sectors, but now worried about their basic safety,” noted analyst Richard Heydarian.