Vivek Menezes
The anguish of our moment is powerfully depicted in ‘No More Wars’ by Loretti Pinto, the heart-rendingly eloquent conté on canvas painting reproduced on this page which the acclaimed faculty member of Goa Col lege of Art posted on social media earlier this week, along with the following message: “In memory of Hind Rajab and all the chil dren who perished in wars started by war mongers.” Over the past nearly two decades, Pinto has repeat edly returned to themes of displacement and loss, while producing some of the most indelible artworks about Goa and the Goan experience in the 21st cen tury. This painting is like ly to be remembered the same way, for expressing the great global hurt of our times, as the conspicuously despicable “powers that be” appear determined to em bark on an extended war of choice that will disrupt and devastate millions of lives. What has already happened over the past month is bad enough – and would have taken years to recover from – but now it seems likely there will be no going back to anything like the previ ous “normal.” The importance of “shel tering in place” seems rel evant here, like the veteran policy maven Nitin Pai of The Takshashila Institution tweeted a few days ago, “I disagree both with New Delhi’s official tilt toward US-Israel and opposition voices who want India to support Iran, Palestine, Rus sia etc.
If you enjoyed reading this article, you can help support our journalism by adding OHeraldo as a preferred source.
My position: Don’t get involved either way. Stay Away from and Keep Away (SAKA) complex distant conflicts.” This is, of course, the same old tried-and-test ed non-alignment that has served India well for dec ades, and is likely to remain the best option in the face of new unknowns, and here Pai also tweeted some plau sible scenarios: “However the war ends, the following will be reshaped: 1. US-Isra el relations 2. GCC’s security arrangements 3. Israel-Eu rope relations 4. US-Europe relations.” Each one of these are hugely important things in the process of changing forever, but in fact there is no realistic scenario for the war ending soon. On the contrary, all signs point to an invasion attempting to subjugate Iran, in the same pattern of pure folly that tore apart Afghanistan and Iraq. As Pai put it rather pithily in yet another tweet: “I’ve never seen this level of corruption & con job in in ternational crises before.” In this regard, the new Equator.org founded by Pankaj Mishra, Jonathan Shainin and Samanth Subramanian amongst others has quickly proven invalu able.
The difference comes in its motivations, as de scribed in October 2025 on their What We Stand For page: “In the winter of 2023, watching the images coming out of Gaza, many of us felt we were going mad. Nothing, it seemed, could be done to stop the atrocity whose death toll mounted every day. Western leaders embraced the perpetrators of this unfolding genocide, while forcefully repressing their own citizens’ peaceful protests against starvation and ethnic cleansing. It was during this moment of mor al despair that a small group of writers and editors came together. We did so, initially, to preserve our own sanity by seeking a temporary ref uge from the regime of cen sorship and equivocation at so many prestigious period icals. We began to imagine a new cultural venture, one that rejects the nihilistic idea that the powerful do what they please, and suc cess is the only measure of moral virtue.”
Huge credit to Equator for following through on its promises, with brilliant, brave writing from and about Iran over the past month. Its editors called it exactly right on March 6thwith their editorial about Epic Fury: “In the days since bombing commenced, the belligerents have made lit tle attempt to produce any legal or moral justification for taking lives: put bluntly, they believe that the power to dominate confers a li cence to kill. In refusing to articulate any coherent ra tionale for launching what has now become a regional conflict, with consequencestoo vast to calculate, Trump and Netanyahu have sent a clear message: they acted because they could.” They pointed out “the at tempt to enforce American primacy by military means led to catastrophe in Hel mand and Fallujah, just as Wall Street imploded at home. What has emerged from that failure is some thing more dangerous than either the Cold War order or the unipolar moment.
The US may still be hegem onic in Europe, where obe dient satraps like Merz and von der Leyen genuflect to Washington, but for the rest of the world, America has stopped being either leader or lodestar. “The unravel ling of the neoconservative project,” Giovanni Arrighi wrote in 2009, “has for all practical purposes resulted in the terminal crisis of US hegemony – that is, in its transformation into mere domination”. Under the current regime, the US has little left to offer the world but a shameless display of coercion and destruction. Trump and his lieutenants seem intoxicated by their own impunity, indifferent to international law, unin terested in manufacturing consent, and exercising a form of political gangster ism through intimidation, kidnapping or offing rival heads of state.” It is not going to get bet ter any time soon. (Vivek Menezes is a writer and co-founder of the Goa Arts and Literature Festival)
