By Dr. Adnan Bouzan
Politics in this geography is no longer a rational act of managing public affairs; it has turned into organized crime, conducted with full awareness and cold blood, and marketed to peoples as an unavoidable fate or an unquestionable wisdom. What we are living through today is not a crisis of governments nor a stumble of systems, but a comprehensive collapse of the very idea of politics itself—when it is severed from ethics, stripped of any relation to the human being, and reduced to instruments of repression, mobilizing rhetoric, and mechanisms of subjugation.
A politics that does not produce justice is not politics at all, but deferred violence. A politics that does not recognize pluralism is not a state, but a latent civil war. And a politics governed by the logic of domination rather than the logic of the social contract is nothing but another form of internal occupation. In our region, meaning was destroyed before cities were, consciousness confiscated before freedoms, and patriotism redefined as blind obedience, treason as a legitimate question, and dignity as a luxury unfit for the poor and the marginalized.
Regimes did not fall merely because they were corrupt, but because they insisted on turning the state into private property, society into a herd, and history into an official bulletin. When they failed to produce legitimacy, they resorted to weapons; when they were unable to persuade, they relied on fear; and when their falsehood was exposed, they sheltered behind religion, nationalism, or the scarecrow of an external threat—as if peoples were created to live forever under a permanent state of emergency.
More dangerous than despotism itself is its normalization in public consciousness, its transformation into something ordinary—indeed, into a virtue. To convince you that security is more important than freedom, that ruin is less costly than change, and that silence is wisdom—this is the true victory of power: not through the force of repression, but through the collapse of internal resistance within the human mind.
We are not facing a passing political failure, but an entire regional system built on the production of violence, the recycling of crises, and the prevention of any possibility of building a modern state founded on citizenship, accountability, and the rule of law. Any project that does not recognize the rights of components, does not guarantee genuine representation, and does not separate power from weapons is a project destined to explode—no matter how long it lasts, and no matter how it is wrapped in slogans.
The Word of the Day is not neutrality, nor an attempt to reconcile the victim with the executioner, but a clear moral and political stance: no politics without the human being, no legitimacy without justice, and no state built upon repression, lies, and fear. Whoever believes that peoples can be defeated forever has not read history; and whoever bets on time to save them from accountability is delusional—for history does not forget, and justice may be delayed, but it does not die.
This is the moment of truth: either a politics that restores the human being as an end, not a means, or a continuation of managing ruin until total collapse. Between the two options there is neither ash nor a middle ground, but an open struggle between those who want life and those who cannot rule except while standing over corpses.