An early work-in-progress dedicated to helping,
circuitously, precipitate the Great Mobilisation
Dare to be wise!
Kant
Contents
author Cimino
work-in-progress published 20260715
footnoted 20260715
When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.
Chatham House Rule, The Royal Institute of International Affairs
Macron Demeaning a Great Enlightenment Leader: Last kingly occupant of the palace, Louis xvi, cold-bloodedly guillotined, would unlikely to have been impressed by these two, casual genocide enablers, two centuries on. Pictured, Donald Trump—possibly musing on how he can get his hands on Fort Knox bullion-depository gold to upgrade his gilding of the GoldWhite House—and Emmanuel Macron.
image Reuters | Anna Moneymaker
Cimino had hoped to avoid direct mention of the man or his reign of error, much less name a chapter for him. Churchill, in his pre-Poland-invasion alarm-sounding campaign, had serially failed to sufficiently convince his parliamentary colleagues of the threat of warfare planned, but had he not mentioned the name of its principal architect—Hitler—his rhetoric subsequently would not have resounded half as convincingly, in Britain’s darkest hour.
Now that Trump has demonstrated the deadliness of his criminal demagoguery at home and abroad, his immediate impeachment and successful conviction is the only measure by which the United States—the once-greatest hope for world democracy—can be redeemed. Tragically, the American empire lost its guardrails long before Trump had finally been convincedprincipally by Roger Stone he could be elected the republic’s commander-in-chief. Demonising Trump for the destruction of the briefly great us democracy is to credit him with kicking down a door that had already been unhinged by generations of chronically corrupt Democratic–Republican party representatives, lobbyists, officials and functionaries.
If either nation is to lead the beyond-urgent Great Mobilisation charge, the draining of their respective putatively-democratic representative-democracy swamps is an equally urgent imperative for Aotearoa and the United States. Hands down, to have the best chance of salvaging a survivable climate, the leading nation needs to be the United States. But that, rather than leading the building of a great, post-carbon civilisation, the world’s superpower has slide into autocracy and inexorably ceding its economic hegemony to rampantly super-developing China, represents massive momentum into a deepening, and all-too-potentially inextricable, Great 3rd Millennium Polycrisis.
Whether full-blown Trumpists, or his supporters only inasmuch as sharing—or indeed, greatly exceeding—his criticisms of contemporary Congress, much less those who abhor just about every aspect of the man’s character, politics, greed, dictatorial proclivities etcetera, disappointment probably most encompassingly describes how the fair-minded evaluate Trump 2.0, and the forever, Israeli/US-Iran War he’d plunged haplessly into. While November’s midterms are shaping up for a Republican drubbing, nor are they likely to see the principled two-thirds Senate majority necessary to remove Trump from office via impeachment and conviction. If, however, on top of a uncowed Congress, his patent lack of mental fitness and criminal commander-in-chief actions result in a 25th Amendment, Section 4 removal from office, the world might find the courage to cease grovelling before a lone madman, abolish warfare and mount the beyond-urgent Great Mobilisation.
First With the Old Enlightenment Then With the New: After abdicating all state planning to the vagaries of the market, it is beyond-urgent to begin experimenting with the best candidate strategies for mobilising a plan to address its existential consequences—fossil-fueled anthropogenic global heating. A New Enlightenment, embracing New Democracy and New Climate and Energy Science, ubiquitously practiced would inform the beyond-urgent Great Mobilisation. For New Zealanders, The Origins of an Experimental Society: New Zealand 1769–1860 —is the perfect background to how the Enlightenment, in the words of Philip Temple, “free of presentism and bias, blows a fresh wind through the clichés of our history that bedevil current discourse.” The two planned companion volumes, unpublished at the time of Erik Olssen’s death on 29 July 2026, in some form, could form part of the actual , as opposed to modello, Light the Fuse. publisher Auckland University Press | typographic compaction Mahurangi Magazine
Only months away and there being scant indication of its 2026 midterms being about to usher in a comprehensively redeemed United States, the world’s first full democracy, Aotearoa, should—even in its own entirely selfishfootnote business case for monetising interests—proceed without delay to light the fuse. Aotearoa has long had the incentive to become the land of free, fair, and frequent elections, emphatically reversing its democratic backsliding, not least of all to atone for its failure to democratically forge a constitution worthy of the hastily thrown together 1840 twin treaty-founding documents that have chronically divided, rather than united, the benighted nation. For Cimino, as a preteen schoolboy, a day was an eternity. Attempting to understand the freshly post-war world he’d been born into, he struggled most with why a tyrant on the scale of Adolph Hitler had been allowed to wage war for 2068 days, without being forcibly deprived of his command. Indeed, the most heavily sanctioned act appeared to be the forcible removal of a head of state, particularly by assassination. Surely, he thought, when a leader’s wilful actions are directly responsible for the deaths of tens of millions, he himself must be targeted. That, a lifetime later, the world order is still without a robust procedure for ensuring a rogue head of state cannot legally retain office, is an unforgivable failure of the post-World War II world order. Whether it be the International Court of Justice or its post-un equivalent, refuses to submit to arrest by the highest global authority, it is the duty of that court to convict in absentia and order his incarceration and, if that couldn’t be achieved without collateral loss of life, his in-situ incapacitation.
While the more than 100 000 Israeli and Palestinian conflict deaths since 1948 might appear relatively insignificant against the more-than 18 million to covid-19, much less the 120 million First World War and resultant 1918–1920 flu pandemic deaths. If, however, the elective, Israeli/US-Iran War proves to be the signal campaign that precipitates the unravelling of the world order such that runaway anthropogenic global heating reduces the human population to a small fraction of its projectedUniversity of Washington, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, ~9.7 billion by 2056, Trump, unwittingunwitting, might be to excuse what is probably better described as depraved indifference—to readily apprehended consequential mass downstream deathsly, will have proven to be significantly responsible for greater loss of life than Hitler—deliberately, as effective architect of the West Asia holocaust. Mark Leonard, in his erudite The Abandoned Order: Learning to Live in a Post-American World , argues doctrinairely for the end of architecture, but he does superbly summarise the comprehensive failure to acknowledge the end of the old:
…too many leaders still act as if the old order can somehow be salvaged or even perfected. The un General Assembly still meets every year, despite being increasingly sidelined from diplomatic efforts. The World Trade Organization carries on adjudicating trade disputes, despite a surge in protectionism. un climate change conferences convene to chart an increasingly hopeless path to net-zero emissions. International working groups still meet to discuss grand plans for a two-state solution, even as the Middle East burns.
Leonard is correct about the impossibility of the old order being salvaged or perfected, but limiting, in insisting that artisanship is the only or wisest solution. He also, probably rightly, judges it severely unlikely that China would choose to replace and emulate post-World War II America, as putative protector of a rules-based world order. Both, he categorises, as architecture options of his binary architecture/artisan pair of options. But the construct urgently called for is that to replace the old, nation-state-based, superpower-policed world order, with a people-based, fit-for-purpose alternative. Such should be trialled and demonstrated, rather than abandon all hope to various artisan efforts, as useful and constructive as some of those could conceivably be—others, equally could be hideous, with Iran’s drone support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine coming all-too-readily to mind. Meanwhile, as Dr Marc Lynch puts it politely in his 18 August 2026 Foreign Affairs piece:
It is difficult to imagine Trump, who vacillates wildly between strategies, designing a new regional order of any kind.
Hound of Heaven-on-Earth: Prior to his death in 1955, Lionel Curtis wouldn’t have had the slightest difficulty warning that the swamp that was, even then, the us Congress, rather than being drained, could today be the domain of gold-leafed demagoguery and crypto-fraudulent nepotism. Nonetheless, had Curtis known that the rapid unravelling of a rules-based world order played out, led by a depravedly indifferent us administration, and without American citizens fighting to return power to the people, it would surely have broken his 83-year-old heart. To that end, and until the end, Curtis hounded his fellow diplomats to seek solutions that built towards greater regional and global federalisation, to progressively deny the ilk of Netanyahu and his enablers the opportunity to wage war on neighbouring states. image Chatham House
While Trump’s successor might succeed in designing a new regional order, the core assertion of Light the Fuse is that designing new regional orders is more difficultgiven the typically multiple, intractable issue in contention than designing, trialling, and implementing a new global order. A potentially powerful strategy is to entice the protagonists to take a giant step back in order to see the big picture, visualise the necessary mobilisation, and then light the fuse. Light the Fuse is the modello for exactly the new, people-based, world order called for, if the Great 3rd Millennium Polycrisis is to play out other than horribly. And regarding whether time still remains for implementing such, at scale, compared with the three decades of performative copConference of the (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) parties parties, the change would be at warp 6—arguably the fastest and, in general terms, the only viable route to the Great Mobilisation.
Objectively, the big picture is the Great 3rd Millennium Polycrisis—Great , on account of its core, icecap-disintegration crisis. Only by apprehending the aching ephemerality of beaches, and indeed of ice ages, can a 20th century individual begin to appraise the beyond-urgent nature of the climate polycrisis, and push, even for a moment, abiding preoccupations aside sufficiently to consider a fresh, more fruitful approach. A smart-as-a-whip Trump successor would apprehend that she held all the cards necessary to offer Iran, West Asia, and the World, the deal of the 21st century. With sufficient humility, the United States could leave the region with all parties, from the river to the sea, respectively and respectfully sharing an overnight transformation from genocidal warmongering to a people-powered, nuclear-powered, nuclear-weapon-free, real-world Greater Fertile Crescent…
To be continued…
Long reign of reign-of-error While the musical comedy A Reign of Error —punning on the century-earlier Reign of Terror5 September 1793 – 27 July 1794, First French Republic—was performed on Broadway in 1899, the reign-of-error pun may well be ancient. Be that as it may, its parting-shot use by foreign affairs commentator Simon Tisdall on 17 May 2026 is particularly deft, given the subject matter: the respective last-gasp terrorising by Trump–Netanyahu–Putin. Readers of The Guardian who may have wondered at the subeditorial missed opportunity to feature the pun in the headline need, however, look no further than The Associated Press and Dr Zac Gershberg’s devastatingly presciently titled, 2 February 2017 Trump’s Reign of Error, Season 1 . And while Trump’s Reign of Error, Season 2 might have made for an even more biting and entertaining follow-up, Gershberg and Dr Sean Illing’s The Paradox of Democracy: Free Speech, Open Media, and Perilous Persuasion promises an entirely fresh perspective to the insufficiently acknowledged, Sisyphean challenge, generation by generation, for fresh, young democratic communities to be built—that atrophy is a feature of democracy, rather than a flaw. But more crucially, the freedoms democracy demands, which include the freedom for disinformation on blatant scale of Truth Social to be spread, providing the freedom for all manner of dastardly demagoguery:
What we’re witnessing is a convergence of forces unleashed by novel media and popularist rhetorical styles that implode democracy from within.
As useful as the The Paradox of Democracy might prove to be to Great 3rd Millennium Polycrisis academics and analysts, it, not surprisingly, doesn’t promise to provide the joined-up pathway audaciously proposed by Light the Fuse , from democratic fundraising through profound democratisation…
To be continued…
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New Enlightenment As ironic as it is instructive, China can lay claim to a New Enlightenment, but the West, much less the United States, cannotalthough some may claim that New Deal Progressivism is an approximation. Although the first New Enlightenment was initiated by the Chinese Communist Party in the 1930s, it was short-lived, re-emerging four decades later in the aftermath of the 1976 Tiananmen incident. That it ended badly in Tiananmen Square—synonymous in the West with the eponymous massacre, and subsequent executions, of 700–2600 people—a global New Enlightenment could nevertheless be contemplated. To be relevant, yea indispensable, it would nurture New Democracy and New Climate and Energy Science…
To be continued…
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Disclosure The author of this novel modello is no longer the secretary of Mahurangi Action Incorporated or the Mahurangi Coastal Path Trust. The content published here, however, is that of the editorially independent, independently funded Mahurangi Magazine.
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