Truth Not Myth

It began with a small sentence that should have passed without weight. Elham Kadkhodaee told the Indian news agency ANI that the agreement between the United States and Iran wasn’t a deal. It was a memorandum. A pause. I stopped at that line. It stayed with me longer than I expected. The thought that came to me was simple. My instinct had been right. The way I’d been thinking about this, that there was never going to be anything more than a memorandum, was plausible after all. Something in the plainness of her words shifted how I was reading the whole thing. Once that shift happened, the rest of the structure looked different. But that isn’t the point. The point is that the pause has been put into place because none of the actors have anywhere else to go right now. It hasn’t settled yet. It’s too new. But it’s already clear that this is the only structure that can hold, because a full peace plan is almost impossible. The Middle East has become a system held together by reversible ag...

I read something in Haaretz. Israeli soldiers. Real names hidden. Yuval. Maya. Juda. Ran. They talked about what they did in Gaza.

For three centuries Switzerland has been the quiet witness at the edge of Europe’s storms. It was born from the wreckage of the Thirty Years War and it learned early that survival required silence. Through Napoleon’s march, through the industrial killing fields of the First World War, through the nuclear standoff of the Cold War, Switzerland held its line. It guarded the wounded. It hosted the Geneva Conventions. It kept the channels open when enemies refused to speak. It behaved, in its own way, like one of Hemingway’s mountain sentinels, watching the world’s violence from a cold height, refusing to be drawn into the madness below. That long silence ended this month. The Swiss Federal Council has now said aloud what it once only whispered. In an interview with SonntagsZeitung, Defence Minister Martin Pfister stated with clinical clarity that “the Federal Council is of the opinion that the attack on Iran constitutes a violation of international law.” He went further, saying that “the A...

On 28 February 2026 the United States began a large military campaign against Iran. President Trump eventually offered four objectives. Destroy Iran’s missile capabilities . Eliminate its navy. Prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon . Cut off funding to its proxies . The list sounded decisive. It was not matched by the outcome. The strikes lasted about two weeks. The United States spent an estimated ten billion dollars on munitions and operations. American service members were killed. Hundreds of Iranian civilians died. Oil markets collapsed. The Strait of Hormuz , which carries one fifth of global oil, was effectively closed. Regional allies were hit by retaliation. The cost was immediate. The purpose was not. There was no evidence of an imminent threat to the United States. This was a war chosen in comfort and justified in hindsight. On 22 March Trump announced a five day pause. He spoke of productive conversations with Iran. Tehran denied any direct talks. The pause was present...

  The conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine have exposed deep contradictions in how the international community responds to war, human rights abuses, and violations of international law. Western governments have rushed to arm and defend Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression, while Palestinians have faced decades of occupation, siege, and military violence with little meaningful intervention. The difference in response is not incidental — it reflects a carefully structured global order where strategic interests, geopolitical power, and political influence dictate outcomes far more than moral consistency or international law. To understand why this double standard persists, we need to examine the deeper roots of these conflicts in colonialism and its enduring legacy. While formal colonialism may have ended with the collapse of European empires in the mid-20th century, the political, economic, and military structures it created have not disappeared. Colonialism has simply evolved into a m...

The Bombing Speech - read it as if a child made the speech! Judge for yourself  Four Days We’ve been bombing for four days. That’s not very long. But it’s also really long if you look at how much bombing we’ve done. So you can’t say it’s not much because it’s four days. But you also can’t say something’s gone wrong because it’s only four days. Grown ups are very good at talking so they’re always right and you’re never right. We Own the Sky We have the biggest planes. Me and my best friend Israel. We fly them over the bad guys’ houses all day. All night too. They have to look up and see us and they can’t do anything. We’ve got B 2s and B 52s and Predator drones. I don’t really know what they are but they sound cool. We say the names loudly so everyone knows we have more than them. “Death and disruption from the sky. All day long.” That’s what the grown up said. He sounded pleased. Like he was talking about ice cream. We Hit Them When They’re Down This is the impo...