The Daily Populous Wednesday April 8th, 2026 evening edition
Authored by inews.co.uk and submitted by theipaper

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You can feel them all going back to normal, like nothing ever happened. Like a couple the morning after a terrible row pretending they hadn’t revealed how much disdain they secretly held for one other.

In the cold light of day, under the powerful narcotic of relief, everyone goes back to their usual roles. Donald Trump acts like a used car salesman. “There will be lots of positive action!” he says. “Big money will be made.” Keir Starmer has reverted to his default position as the secretarial function of geopolitical back-up plans, trying to organise a coalition to secure the Strait of Hormuz. Nato chief Mark Rutte, the Theon Greyjoy of world politics, is jetting over to Washington to whisper obscene celebrations into Trump’s ear.

They’ll all want us to forget what was said yesterday. It will no longer be convenient to remember. If we remember it, we will have to act on it and that would be inconvenient. So we should just let our principles die with our short-term memory – enjoy the sight of stock markets resettling, petrol prices stabilising, blink up at the sun and pretend the world is better than it is.

But you can’t forget it. You mustn’t. A moral boundary was crossed on Tuesday. Something was said which changes everything. And for us to go back on it, to pretend it didn’t happen, betrays every possible value upon which our society is based.

The President of the United States threatened genocide. There are no caveats to that sentence. There are no legitimate counter-arguments, no definitional uncertainties. He did so with six words, which we must commit to never forgetting. “A whole civilisation will die tonight.”

Trump will now tell us that these words worked, that they were a bluff, a feint. That he won. His acolytes and enablers will join in, insisting that his threats are some ingenious kind of strategic gamesmanship which secured his ideal outcome.

No one has any real idea about what is being arranged here – probably including Washington and Tehran – but the initial picture does not bear out that interpretation. The Iranian account of their peace plan, which Trump accepted as a “workable” template, apparently includes a proposal for a roughly $2m (£1.5m) toll for each ship they allow to pass through the Strait.

If true, that will constitute perhaps the greatest humiliation for the US since the fall of Saigon. It will have gone to war needlessly, in the middle of negotiations, at the cost of thousands of lives, and billions in munitions. The ensuing counter-attack by Iran devastated America’s relationship with its Middle East allies. Now, the ceasefire will leave the enemy in a much stronger position than before the war, because it has discovered a devastating and viable form of geopolitical leverage.

That is a strategic blunder of historic proportions. The American empire has been shown to be vulnerable, incoherent, illogical, highly emotional and profoundly unreliable.

Yet for all the damage, nothing is as pertinent as what Trump said in those final moments.

“A whole civilisation will die tonight”. There’s no coming back from that. There is no way to incorporate it into our existing view of the world. And yet that is what world leaders have effectively done.

European leaders said nothing, did nothing, were useless. Starmer was silent. France’s Emmanuel Macron was silent. Germany’s Friedrich Merz was silent. European Council president Antonio Costa was silent. The closest thing we got from European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen was a riddle about horses. They “radiate an incredible calm and resilience, and I believe they are an ideal symbol for our tempestuous times”, she said.

Europe is the great anti-war project of the 20th century, the most determined and ambitious effort in history to make conflict impossible, built in the ashes of the last world conflict. It is now mute – utterly mute, utterly ineffectual and irrelevant – while those same conditions rise again. Hopeless.

The only world leader who behaved appropriately yesterday was the Pope. “Today, as we all know, there was this threat against the entire people of Iran, and this is truly unacceptable,” he said. “There are certainly issues ⁠here of international law, but even more than that, it is a moral question for the good of the people.”

Elsewhere there was silence. And in that silence, there was a betrayal of the promise we have told ourselves all our lives, while standing besides cenotaphs or reading history books, while listening to grandparents or visiting Holocaust museums: Never Again.

What would Never Again look like, if we really believed it rather than simply mouthing platitudes about it?

It would demand recognition and action. It would require, first of all, that we acknowledge the similarities between the world we live in now and that of the early 20th century: that there is a madman in power, motivated by grievance and conspiracy theory, issuing explicitly genocidal statements.

It would require, second of all, that we then take every action possible to isolate, ostracise and restrain this leader. We would start by cancelling the royal visit. We would continue by formulating a coherent short, medium and long-term strategy which extricates us from Washington’s defence ecosystem, no matter the cost. And we would commit, explicitly and wholeheartedly, to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s vision of flexible medium-power diplomacy outside of the traditional channels.

Everyone will want you to forget this morning. The sun’s out, the immediate threat has passed, the coming economic crisis has been potentially averted, or at least partially restrained. They will all want to pretend that those words were never uttered, that it never happened.

They were uttered. They did happen. The world cannot be the same again. And our personal moral standing, as citizens and leaders, will be based on what we do on the basis of them.

chadlumanthehuman on April 8th, 2026 at 12:19 UTC »

1.3 million people died during the Vietnam war.

Malady17 on April 8th, 2026 at 12:07 UTC »

No disrespect to the writer but I really dislike the whole “this thing is vaguely like other historic thing” analysis, it’s so lazy. No the US falling isn’t like the fall of the (Western) Roman Empire in any meaningful sense, no this Iran ceasefire isn’t like Suez, etc etc.

theipaper on April 8th, 2026 at 11:48 UTC »

You can feel them all going back to normal, like nothing ever happened. Like a couple the morning after a terrible row pretending they hadn’t revealed how much disdain they secretly held for one other.

In the cold light of day, under the powerful narcotic of relief, everyone goes back to their usual roles. Donald Trump acts like a used car salesman. “There will be lots of positive action!” he says. “Big money will be made.” Keir Starmer has reverted to his default position as the secretarial function of geopolitical back-up plans, trying to organise a coalition to secure the Strait of Hormuz. Nato chief Mark Rutte, the Theon Greyjoy of world politics, is jetting over to Washington to whisper obscene celebrations into Trump’s ear.

They’ll all want us to forget what was said yesterday. It will no longer be convenient to remember. If we remember it, we will have to act on it and that would be inconvenient. So we should just let our principles die with our short-term memory – enjoy the sight of stock markets resettling, petrol prices stabilising, blink up at the sun and pretend the world is better than it is.

But you can’t forget it. You mustn’t. A moral boundary was crossed on Tuesday. Something was said which changes everything. And for us to go back on it, to pretend it didn’t happen, betrays every possible value upon which our society is based.

The President of the United States threatened genocide. There are no caveats to that sentence. There are no legitimate counter-arguments, no definitional uncertainties. He did so with six words, which we must commit to never forgetting. “A whole civilisation will die tonight.”

Trump will now tell us that these words worked, that they were a bluff, a feint. That he won. His acolytes and enablers will join in, insisting that his threats are some ingenious kind of strategic gamesmanship which secured his ideal outcome.

No one has any real idea about what is being arranged here – probably including Washington and Tehran – but the initial picture does not bear out that interpretation. The Iranian account of their peace plan, which Trump accepted as a “workable” template, apparently includes a proposal for a roughly $2m toll for each ship they allow to pass through the Strait.

If true, that will constitute perhaps the greatest humiliation for the US since the fall of Saigon. It will have gone to war needlessly, in the middle of negotiations, at the cost of thousands of lives, and billions in munitions. The ensuing counter-attack by Iran devastated America’s relationship with its Middle East allies. Now, the ceasefire will leave the enemy in a much stronger position than before the war, because it has discovered a devastating and viable form of geopolitical leverage.

That is a strategic blunder of historic proportions. The American empire has been shown to be vulnerable, incoherent, illogical, highly emotional and profoundly unreliable.

Yet for all the damage, nothing is as pertinent as what Trump said in those final moments.

“A whole civilisation will die tonight”. There’s no coming back from that. There is no way to incorporate it into our existing view of the world. And yet that is what world leaders have effectively done.

European leaders said nothing, did nothing, were useless. Starmer was silent. France’s Emmanuel Macron was silent. Germany’s Friedrich Merz was silent. European Council president Antonio Costa was silent. The closest thing we got from European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen was a riddle about horses. They “radiate an incredible calm and resilience, and I believe they are an ideal symbol for our tempestuous times”, she said.

Europe is the great anti-war project of the 20th century, the most determined and ambitious effort in history to make conflict impossible, built in the ashes of the last world conflict. It is now mute – utterly mute, utterly ineffectual and irrelevant – while those same conditions rise again. Hopeless.

The only world leader who behaved appropriately yesterday was the Pope. “Today, as we all know, there was this threat against the entire people of Iran, and this is truly unacceptable,” he said. “There are certainly issues ⁠here of international law, but even more than that, it is a moral question for the good of the people.”

Elsewhere there was silence. And in that silence, there was a betrayal of the promise we have told ourselves all our lives, while standing besides cenotaphs or reading history books, while listening to grandparents or visiting Holocaust museums: Never Again.

What would Never Again look like, if we really believed it rather than simply mouthing platitudes about it?

It would demand recognition and action. It would require, first of all, that we acknowledge the similarities between the world we live in now and that of the early 20th century: that there is a madman in power, motivated by grievance and conspiracy theory, issuing explicitly genocidal statements.

It would require, second of all, that we then take every action possible to isolate, ostracise and restrain this leader. We would start by cancelling the royal visit. We would continue by formulating a coherent short, medium and long-term strategy which extricates us from Washington’s defence ecosystem, no matter the cost. And we would commit, explicitly and wholeheartedly, to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s vision of flexible medium-power diplomacy outside of the traditional channels.

Everyone will want you to forget this morning. The sun’s out, the immediate threat has passed, the coming economic crisis has been potentially averted, or at least partially restrained. They will all want to pretend that those words were never uttered, that it never happened.

They were uttered. They did happen. The world cannot be the same again. And our personal moral standing, as citizens and leaders, will be based on what we do on the basis of them.