2025 and Other Normal Things: An Early Review of a Year When the Doomsday Clock Moved Forward

People generally write end-of-the-year reviews, but in the kind of times we are living in, who is to say we will see the end of 2025?

On January 20, the President of CAPITAL LETTERS said, “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end, and, perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”

A week later, this leader, who types in capital letters, announced tariffs. Then humiliated a wartime leader and his ally in his office. His deputy asked the wartime leader to say, "thank you."

The Europeans watched in horror. Their jaws dropped. Their ally or at least the one they had followed, breathlessly, blindly, in deep love, everywhere: in war, in being the police of the world, the guardian, the moral high ground, had turned the mirror back on them. Suddenly, they realised their place.

Someone moved the doomsday clock one second forward. (Did it even exist?)

Jaroslav Lukiv wrote in The BBC: “The Doomsday Clock symbolising how near humanity is to destruction has been moved one second forward to 89 seconds to midnight – the closest it has ever been.”

Are you surprised? I am not.

A contuniuing genocide and its televisation

In Gaza, a genocide continues. And so does the televisation of it. And in the past twenty months, it has not done much to shake the conscience of leaders who make genocide possible.

The occupier has set up an aid foundation where their forces gun down defenceless people daily. And the dead alone come in double digits.

But our human collective, scattered across this gigantic earth that spins around a massive ball of fire, seems to have lost fire. This mind-numbing death data, charred bodies of children, mass graveyard do not seem good enough. But frankly, no data seems good enough. Our hearts have turned into stones. All we see is data, a number, now a normal headline we scroll past. No human.

In a parallel world, a (news) media exists. Stories are humanised. We read that Alex was to marry Lea. And Lea was a diplomat. With dreams. With lives ahead of them. We know everything about Alex and Lea. And we must. Because humanity, after all, is what we are left with.

The same media would, however, write: “39 people seeking food packet were dead, a Hamas-run health ministry said. We cannot independently verify. For context, Hamas attacked X in the worst attack, killed 1,200, and took 250 hostage.”

This context label, this “X-run health ministry,” the number of people: I am leaving it with you. Sit with it.

There is a new Pope. Some call him first American Pope.

Francis, who once washed the feet of refugees in Lampedusa, who took 12 Syrian refugees in his plane back to Rome, he is no more. And has left behind a vast emptiness of compassion.

Politics has changed.

Not much though. Faces have changed. Instead of Olaf Scholz, you have Friedrich Merz in Germany. What could you say about change! Both are bald (no body-shaming intended), for starters. Both are old, from an age I cannot relate to (but so are all leaders around the world). Both are men. MEN. That’s important. There’s nothing more to say about them.

In Europe, the so-called light of the world, we’ve moved closer to the right, not the right-right, but the “I-hate-everyone” kind of right. The centre, which always claims “the centre will hold”, never really held. It’s basically camouflage for the right.

The Left as usual is left, divided. It’s a hammer looking for a nail. Hammers are useful, though. Like when you move to a new home, they can prove to be very helpful, otherwise, they are stored in a box in a corner in the basement.

In South America, the self-proclaimed “coolest dictator” of El Salvador is resetting a template: importing people accused of crimes, not given a fair trial. Their heads shaved. Bent. A dystopian troop of police beating them with rod-like sticks. Herding them.

Now his prison is a market for many countries to export their undertrial prisoners (I could not say this would a right term to define them.)

The story of Iraq, repeated in Iran

It is 24 June 2025. The self-styled peacemaker, the President of CAPITAL LETTERS, has joined Netanyahu and launched an illegal attack on Iran. (Silly you! What made you believe him? This is a man afflicted by a condition of absolute selfhood, where he is everything, and nothing else exists. Peace or bomb, as long as it gives him a stage, a prime-time slot, a headline, he is happy. He was not (and is not) loved much. He is making it up now.)

The news headlines, the write-ups, are no different from what a generation before me saw in 2001. And 2002. And 2003. To be honest, across timelines in history.

Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” – the politician in Europe and North America told this to their constituents, to UN Security Council, to the world. The stenographer media followed and constructed public consent.

This is Western media. I do not need to mention that. The construction was this: “we are fighting against evil.”

The evil was Iraq.

Bush and Blair, the United States and the United Kingdom were good.

Language is a beautiful thing. I, for one, have used it to send love letters. More recently, I dropped a postcard at a friend’s home, she is going to travel the world (She holds a European passport. She’ll never know what it means to queue at embassies, to gather documents, to wait, to prove your worth.)

You see, you can use language to do that – hold tenderness, longing, little acts of rebellion.

Another use of language? To wound. To dehumanise. It can hate.

I will let you read newspapers. Do your homework. You do not need an explanation of what’s happening today, in the past week, in the past 6 months, from me.

Like, I could sure tell you that some people use the phrase: “X “targeted” terrorist sites in Y.”

And the same people will write: “Y’s “regime” attacked X with a barrage of ballistic missiles. Asana, 32, who was going to her office, is injured in the attack by Y.”

Life, in general, is not fair.

Re-imagining the kind of world we want to build

People might tell you – hope, do not be pessimistic.

But how do you hope? Do you create hope? And what are the conditions that create hope?

Imagination. Shared humanity. The belief that this planet, this huge, enormous planet in this infinite universe, is unique. Just one, with a biomass of which we are a tiny, miniature part. The least we can do is – see a human as human.

So what do I leave you with? A despair. And a tinge of hope.

The world has not changed much in its core. Our savageness is alive, kicking, thriving. Colonial empires still rule. International law applies selectively. Skin is still a thing (can’t believe! Me too.).

If you are from my generation, or any, to be honest – hope. But take action.

I read a poster in a shop in Potsdam that said (in German): Hoffnung ist die sentimentale Schwester der Dummheit.

It means: hope is the sentimental sister of stupidity.

So, when you do the work of hoping – re-imagine. And take action. Re-imagine because the world does not need another “history repeats” or “rhymes” or whatever that tired line is.

We can not simply imagine and hope for the fall of this apocalyptic, un-kind world. We must re-imagine what kind of world we want to build when this heartless system does fall.

History won’t repeat or rhyme. Or whatever it does. It won’t be stupid anymore.

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