In 2001, forensic artist Richard Neave and his team reconstructed a face the world thought it knew. What emerged was not the pale, European Christ of Western art, but a Middle Eastern man with dark hair, brown skin, and features shaped by the climate and culture of his time.
Browsing: Opinions
Amidst yet another year of startling declines for democracies everywhere, Hungary has seemingly defied the odds. Despite being the poster boy of the far-right populist threat to European democracies, recent elections ousted Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party from 16 years of power, effectively shifting the tide on one of the starkest democratic erosions in the European Union. And yet, Orbán’s defeat does not necessarily guarantee democratic revival for his international friends and cronies, including President Donald Trump. Today, behind this celebration in Hungary lives the looming shadow of Trump’s executive overreach in the United States, with Orban’s friendship and autocratic legacy offering a roadmap to America’s sharp democratic regression.
As another week of Trump’s war begins, it becomes ever more clear that all his presumptions about how the war would go have proven wrong. Iran’s economy has bent but not folded despite a blockade of its ports. Its ability to control the Strait of Hormuz hasn’t been eliminated. Iran still has drones and missiles for retaliatory attacks. The regime’s control of the population remains. Gas prices and the cost of oil remain high. The war goes on.
In the early hours of Thursday, April 15, Virginia’s former lieutenant governor, Justin Fairfax, shot and killed his wife of 19 years, Dr. Cerina Wanzer Fairfax, in their home before turning the gun on himself. By noon, the 47-year-old disgraced politician was being eulogized like a saint by several people who once knew him.
America does not whisper its values to the world—it declares them with thunder. Freedom. Democracy. Justice. Yet beneath those declarations lies a foreign policy record that tells a far more unsettling truth: America often exports instability while branding itself the guardian of order.
Let’s listen again to these viral words, as they hover over the planet . . . as they hover over, good God, the future. Finally, finally, the time has come for every last one of us to release the question these words force on us, from the privacy, from the cynicism, of our hearts, and collectively scream it until it begins to orbit Planet Earth: How do we transcend war?
That is why the debate over Trump’s attack on Iran should not be reduced to one man’s impulse. It was meant to deceive. On one side was a long-running campaign by Benjamin Netanyahu to frame Iran as a problem to be solved militarily, not diplomatically. On the other was an information ecosystem that tried to present military escalation as if it were a gift to the Iranian people. Even one of the key public claims used to justify confrontation looked shaky: Reuters reported that Trump’s assertion that Iran would soon have missiles capable of hitting the United States was not backed by U.S. intelligence.
With Spain and Austria refusing to allow their airspace to be used for the massive, unprovoked U.S. bombardment of Iran, there is international denunciation of this illegal action; and the initiation of the U.S. carpet bombing of Iran is clearly unlawful in view of the UN Charter, the Kellogg Briand Pact, the Geneva Protocol, and the Nuremberg Charter of 1945.
The final agreement, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was negotiated by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, Germany, and the European Union. Signed in July 2015, it granted Iran sanctions relief in exchange for significant restrictions on its nuclear program. These included Iran’s agreement to ban production of highly enriched uranium or plutonium, ensure that its key nuclear facilities pursued only civilian work, and limit the numbers and types of centrifuges that it could operate. In addition, Iran agreed to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watchdog, unfettered access to its nuclear facilities and undeclared sites.
The essay is called “A Theft of Spirit?” It was written by Christopher Shaw, some three decades ago. It addresses a matter of profound significance to me because it relates to an organization I’m part of called the ManKind Project (MKP), which holds profoundly spiritual weekends that dig deeply into the nature of our humanity. I’m not sure what the MKP weekend consists of today, but when I participated in it, some 20 years ago, it included sweat lodges and other wakeup events that borrowed significantly from Native American traditions. This included choosing a spiritual name for myself, which I still value: Heart Lion.