A year defined by bullying power politics, media cowardice and moral failure – alongside rare but vital acts of courage that point to a different future.

Throughout 2025, nations and policies have been preoccupied with questions about how best to respond to intimidation by President Trump. The performance is nightly: intimidation by tariffs, by tearing up international treaties, by ridiculing the UN, by declaring climate change a hoax, by boasting of respect for dictators.

The public have been treated to macabre, narcissistic theatre with destructive consequences. Human rights are derided, international law treated as of no consequence, science ridiculed and trust eroded.

In response, leaders of every nation have been hurrying to Washington to praise Trump in the hope that tariff-like punishment for their country may be lessened. This unedifying spectacle reached a climax last week when the President of the International Football Association grovelled as he awarded Trump a Football Association Peace Prize, but with no mention that the peace claimed by Trump in Rwanda/Congo, via ceasefire in Gaza, via withdrawal of troops in Lebanon, with Kremlin compliant proposals to end the Ukraine war does not exist.

Who cares? Lying is the art form. Extravagant entertainment for the Trump faithful a political priority.

In this Orwellian theatre, the supporting extras have been large numbers of sycophants, standing around the president in the White House, nodding, clapping, looking for a chance to find someone to bully, as happened to Volodymyr Zelensky and Cyril Ramaphosa, President of South Africa.

A sycophant chorus has been performing not only in Washington. Religious zealots have undue influence in the Israeli cabinet. In Russia, the unedifying pictures of each Putin audience sitting silently, show an another dictator propped up by the compliance of those who know their lives would be threatened if they dared to question an all knowing, all powerful czar. It’s no surprise that Putin and Trump are supposed to be friends.

By ignoring principles of international law, the age of intimidation has spawned military thuggery as the means to achieve dominance, as in the horrendous genocide in Gaza and on the West Bank, in the horrifying epidemic of executions by Iranian clerics,  by violent discrimination against the Rohingya people of Myanmar, and by the brutality of the two warring generals in Sudan.

Displacement of millions, slaughter of tens of thousands have been described in Orwellian double speak by Israeli leaders in their justification of famine as a weapon of war, by carpet bombing as though the destruction of homes, schools, hospitals, the murder of doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers, journalists, humanitarian aid workers and tens of thousands of children would teach the unworthy a lesson they would never forget.

The cowardice of the leaders of western nations has fostered the thuggery. To stop a genocide they could have intervened. Frightened to offend Trump, fearing to be accused of anti-Semitism if they challenged Israeli policies, the leaders of these nations have been gutless.

Far worse, overwhelming evidence shows they have been complicit in a genocide, complicit by sending arms, by refusing to impose sanctions on Israel, and by allowing their citizens to enrol in an army which slaughtered children and tortured thousands of prisoners.

Let’s not mince words about 2025. If complicity in a slaughter is not acknowledged, the violence can be taken for granted, even treated as normal. In that trend, the mainstream media has colluded with politicians.

In countries such as Australia and the UK, television news readers warn their audience that certain pictures may be too awful to watch, but incisive judgement about policies which lead to violence is avoided. By contrast, corporate, political interests facilitate support for arms sales and for decades of discrimination against Palestinians and other unworthies such as asylum seekers.

In what looks like cruelty as policy, the mainstream media have been participants. In commentary on the genocide in Gaza their performance has been worse than woeful. Hopelessly biased in favour of the US/Israeli alliance, they have not known how to laugh to scorn the claims by a destructive lobby that anti-Semitism was the issue.

In their early responses to the October 2023 breakout and killing by Hamas, Australian television journalists imitated cowardice in Canberra by accepting Israeli government claims, by forbidding words such as genocide, by refusing to consider whether terrorism came only from Hamas and by an all too quick acceptance of the Israeli view that the UN Refugee Works Association (UNRWA) was staffed by Hamas operatives.

In the UK, the BBC bias has been blatant. The European Centre for Media Monitoring concluded that the BBC exhibited systematic language bias favouring Israelis. Allegations about genocide were shut down in over 100 instances. Over two years, Palestinian voices were muffled and Israeli perspectives heard eleven times more frequently.

In Australia’s media, a discerning public is overwhelmed by silence. Although hundreds of Palestinians continue to be killed, the media seems to have been intimidated by a peace-promoting US President into accepting that there is a ceasefire. Lying does not merit comment. Peace allegedly reigns in a new Syria and even in a bombed out Lebanon, so it’s wise for mainstream media to say nothing.

The very low marks given in 2025 have been nullified by examples of amazing courage. Courage can be a panacea, to be lauded, never forgotten.

In Gaza hundreds of journalists lost their lives. They had been trying to tell the world what was happening to their country, to their people. In common with medical colleagues and humanitarian aid workers, they served people fearlessly but in doing so, lost their lives. These citizens should be acknowledged and rewarded, at least posthumously.

Courageous behaviour can be moral and physical. In the Australian federal parliament, Courageous Labor members who challenged their party’s pro-Israel stance included former minister Ed Husic and MP Fatima Payman. Similar willingness to challenge conventional assumptions and alliances has been shown by Greens Senator David Shoebridge, by Independent Senator David Pocock and by Independent MP Andrew Wilkie.

The Australian Labor Party triumphed in the May 2025 general election. Grateful Prime Minister Albanese said that electors had voted for Australian values: for fairness, aspiration and opportunity, strength to show courage in adversity and kindness to those in need, sentiments which are a far cry from the intimidation, threats and bullying broadcast in Washington.

In 2026, peace with justice could be achieved if these ‘Australian values’ are implemented, if the moral failures of 2025 are heeded, if cowardice in high places is replaced by the inspiring courage of those who defended human rights, who exhibited the best of humanity but died doing so. We might even imagine that the horrors of 2025 never happened.

Such an outcome was described in his poem This World by the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. He might have been describing 2025:

“It appears it was all a misunderstanding…Old men will chase a ball, a glance in the mirror – they are children again. The dead will wake up, not comprehending. Till everything that happened has unhappened. What a relief! Breathe freely, you who suffered much.”