This week it felt like the wheels were coming off the old world, everywhere at once. From the streets of Paris to the olive groves of the West Bank to the corridors of the White House, the structures that have held things together for generations buckled, cracked and caught fire, and the people meant to be holding them up seemed to have no idea how.
In France, high school students have been marching in their tens of thousands for nearly a month over teacher shortages and crumbling, overcrowded schools, and more than 6,700 people have now been arrested, most of them children. On Saturday the students were joined by the trade unions and the yellow vests, and more than half a million people marched. Shops were looted in nine cities, the city halls in Marseille and Lille were broken into, Lyon’s tourist office was torched, and a fire all but destroyed the 140-year-old town hall in Limoges. Whole streets of Paris “have been devastated,” its mayor said. 1,200 people were arrested and 150 police officers hurt.
The same day, hundreds of thousands more marched against the cost of living in Belgium, Italy and Portugal, and in Albania, months of protests against a luxury resort being built by a firm linked to Jared Kushner turned into a student uprising against the government, with ministries set alight and 160 people detained in a single night.
In the occupied West Bank, masked Israeli settlers set on Palestinian families harvesting their olives, and beat a Washington Post photographer so badly she needed surgery. A day later settlers surrounded a convoy of diplomats from France, Belgium and Poland and smashed a car window, and a French mayor travelling with them says they kicked him to the ground and beat him with iron bars. Netanyahu suggested it was part of a “coordinated campaign to smear Israel.”
In the Middle East, the war with Iran kept spreading. Houthi missiles fired from Yemen have killed 17 people at Riyadh’s main airport since last week, and 26 ships have been attacked around the Strait of Hormuz this month alone.
In Oregon, a 16-year-old shot his way through the locked doors of Silver Rail Elementary School and killed three children, aged 5, 8 and 11, and a teacher, before a father whose own children go to the school followed him inside and shot him dead. It was America’s deadliest school shooting in two years.
With the US midterms just two weeks away, federal agents raided the home of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and seized her phone, passport and computers, hunting for evidence that her age was changed on immigration papers her late father filled out when the family arrived as refugees from Somalia in the 1990s. Omar has been an American citizen since 2000, and the Wall Street Journal reports the aim is to take that citizenship away and deport her. “I will not be silenced,” she said.
Trump’s Justice Department this week sent election officials in Los Angeles a USB drive it said held the names of noncitizens registered to vote, without saying where the names came from, then sued California to set aside the ballots of more than 20,000 “likely noncitizens.” The last time Homeland Security sent a list like this, to Nevada, every one of the 185 names on it turned out to be a citizen.
One insider said the White House is “in a state of panic,” with five senior Republicans privately admitting the House is all but lost. Trump’s new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, was gone after five days and one disastrous briefing, in which she told reporters she’d passed the bar “when I moved to China,” before admitting on Fox News that she’d never passed it at all. Kimberly Guilfoyle resigned as ambassador to Greece after reports she’d begged a donor to pay off her $100,000 credit card bill, and Politico reported Trump has been asking friends whether to replace his chief of staff, Susie Wiles. Asked about the investigations hanging over his people, Trump said he’d pardon everyone in his administration, himself included, to spare them “years of nonsense.”
The Washington Post published the list of donors paying for Trump’s new White House ballroom: 57 of them, pledging more than $330 million between them, with Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Palantir, Lockheed Martin and the Adelsons among them. One donor’s company had a federal investigation into it dropped after he pledged. Trump has said the ballroom is “paid for a hundred percent by me,” but his name isn’t on the list.
The New York Times traced $158 million of Elon Musk’s money through a Republican Senate fund and into a group backing Ken Paxton, who as Texas attorney general regulates Musk’s businesses. When a false story spread online that Paxton’s opponent had been treated in a psychiatric hospital, Musk helped it travel.
On Saturday, the No Kings movement held around 3,000 events across the country urging people to vote early, and right in the middle of it, its main Instagram account vanished. Organisers say they were locked out for hours. Meta, which paid Trump $25 million last year to settle his lawsuit over his own suspension, blamed an automated system and apologised for an action “clearly taken in error.”
As new Prime Minister Andy Burnham became the first British leader to say publicly that Russia interfered in the 2016 Brexit vote, and Pope Leo, who had part of his lung removed after a cancer diagnosis this week, called Vladimir Putin from his hospital bed to ask for a ceasefire in Ukraine, America’s king sided with the aggressor, striking a deal with the man who invaded Ukraine, announcing a ceasefire over Ukraine’s head, and stripping away the protection it depends on. Ukraine’s president called it betrayal, and twelve American senators reached for the same word.
If it feels like the world is unravelling, that’s because it is. Everything’s coming apart now, here at the juncture between worlds. But what’s falling apart is making way for something better to grow, and we’ve seen this happen before, many times throughout human history. Devastating darkness eventually gives way to light, like it did eighty years ago this week, when the world reached for justice in response to the dark.
If you’re feeling exhausted by the news or like nothing makes sense any more, or you’re worried for the future, then read on, dear friend. As always, the sky is showing us exactly what’s going on - and why - and exactly what’s coming next.
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The cosmic insights shared here are mapped to the real movements of the heavens during the past week. If you want to know more about planetary pattern recognition, read about it here
A Reckoning at Nuremberg
Eighty years ago this week, in the early hours of the morning on 16 October 1946, the men who’d led Germany into the Second World War began walking to the gallows in Nuremberg.
Hermann Göring, Hitler’s second-in-command, was meant to go first, but he cheated the rope with a cyanide capsule in his cell the night before, so the first man to hang was Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, the man whose deal-making had cleared the way for the war. Nine more followed him to the gallows before dawn.
Between them, those men had sent Germany’s armies across one border after another, claiming each time that the land was rightfully Germany’s or that the Germans living there needed protecting. They’d annexed their neighbours’ territory, bombed cities full of families, ruled the conquered lands through terror and hunger, and sent millions of people to their deaths in the Holocaust.
Ukraine knew their work as well as anywhere on earth. German troops took Kyiv in September 1941, and at the ravine of Babyn Yar they murdered 33,771 of the city’s Jews in two days. One of the men hanged that night, Alfred Rosenberg, ran the ministry that governed occupied Ukraine. Another, Fritz Sauckel, ran the programme that took more than two million people from Ukraine and shipped them to Germany as slave labour, teenagers among them.
The hangings were the least of what happened at Nuremberg, though. For almost a year before that night, the world had done something it had never done before, and put the architects of a war on trial, laying out the evidence of what they’d done for anyone to see, and writing down in law exactly what they were guilty of.
It was America that pushed hardest for the Nuremberg trial. Plenty among the victors wanted the Nazi leaders simply taken out and shot, Churchill among them, but America’s Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, argued that the world needed to see the evidence and hear a verdict. The courtroom itself sat in the American zone of a defeated Germany.
The American who opened the prosecution, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, said the victors had chosen to “stay the hand of vengeance” and submit their captive enemies “to the judgment of the law.” He called it “one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.”
When the judgment came, it named the crime at the root of all the others. To start a war of aggression, the judges wrote, “is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
So eighty years ago, the worst war the world had ever seen ended with the truth laid out, the crime named, and the world writing it down so it could never be forgotten.
And now eighty years later, Vladimir Putin is committing the crime that sent those men to the gallows, the one Nuremberg called supreme. Twice now he’s sent Russia’s armies across Ukraine’s border, in 2014 and again in 2022, claiming the land was rightfully Russia’s and the people there needed protecting. He’s annexed Ukrainian land, bombed its cities and power stations through the winters, and taken Ukrainian children from their families and shipped them into Russia.
And the country that led the charge at Nuremberg now has a president who’s siding with him, actively helping him fund an illegal war that’s already killed tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and more than 16,000 civilians, hundreds of children among them.
How far we’ve fallen in eighty years. How does the hero of Nuremberg end up on the aggressor’s side, and can it ever find its way back?
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Treachery, Broken Promises & Betrayal
Waging war is expensive. Oil and fuel have paid for Putin’s war since the day he invaded Ukraine in 2022, bringing in almost a quarter of everything Russia’s government earns, with the war now swallowing around 40% of what it spends. Since Europe banned Russian diesel back in 2023, and with America’s sanctions, Russia’s oil money has been shrinking, and with Ukraine’s drones hitting Russia’s refineries week after week through this year, so has its fuel. By July the strikes had bitten so deep that Moscow banned diesel exports altogether, and drivers across Russia were queuing for hours at the pumps. Russia can’t wage a war with no money, and oil is one of the biggest earners it has.
This week, Trump handed Putin a lifeline, announcing a deal for Russia to supply diesel to America and the world, three weeks after he signed a new law sanctioning Russia that had passed with support from both parties. The sanctions package had been named for the late Senator Lindsey Graham and written to choke off the money paying for Russia’s war, but this week Trump signed an executive order putting the whole thing on hold, telling Congress that the waiver is “in the national interests of the United States,” and that it stays on hold until he decides otherwise.
Effectively, America is now helping pump money into the machine that’s killing Ukrainians.
Twelve senators - half of them Republicans, and Mitch McConnell among them - wrote to Trump this week saying, “This deal is a gift to our adversary and a betrayal of our Allies; it should be rescinded.” In Britain, Boris Johnson, one of Ukraine’s loudest champions, called it sickening; American drivers bankrolling Putin’s slaughter to save a little at the pump.
Trump was undeterred. The day after the diesel deal, he said Ukraine should “get a new leader who can make a deal.” The day after that, out of nowhere, he announced an “ENERGY CEASEFIRE” between Russia and Ukraine, effective immediately, which came as news to Zelensky, who said he knew nothing about it but would welcome one if Putin agreed. Ukraine held off its strikes on Russia’s refineries anyway, and the next day Russia hit at least six Ukrainian energy targets. When Zelensky offered a 60-day truce so Ukraine could hold elections, the Kremlin’s spokesman turned it down flat, saying “we do not want a ceasefire.”
As Russia pummelled Kyiv and Kharkiv this week, news broke that Ukraine has almost run through its American-made Patriot interceptors, one of the very few weapons that can stop ballistic missiles. When America stopped giving Ukraine weapons directly once Trump returned to power, Europe began buying American weapons on Ukraine’s behalf, but earlier this month, according to the Financial Times, American officials rang Kyiv and capitals across Europe warning that if Ukraine kept hitting Russia’s refineries, that pipeline could be shut. Zelensky told NPR the administration had warned it could stop sharing intelligence too….over the same refineries Trump’s deal is putting back in business.
Then this week Ukraine’s military satellite links, the version of Starlink known as Starshield that guides its drones, were reportedly slowed overnight and without warning until they stopped working on anything moving faster than about 100 miles an hour, too slow for the interceptor drones that hunt Russia’s attack drones out of the night sky. Zelensky said that while the speeds were down, Ukraine couldn’t stop some of the jet-powered attack drones coming at its cities. That night, Russia fired 39 ballistic missiles at Ukraine’s power plants - one hit an apartment block, six people were killed and 25 injured, and about 600,000 were left without power.
All eyes turned immediately to Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX built Starshield for the Pentagon, and who four days earlier had tweeted that “Zelensky has gone too far.” Musk was quick to shift the blame, tweeting that Starshield is “owned and controlled by the US government,” and any limits are “decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.” Reuters traced the order to inside the White House, but by Friday the Telegraph, citing four sources, reported that it was Musk who went to Trump and proposed the cap, that Trump agreed, and that the Pentagon then put it in place. One senior source put it plainly: Musk “tweeted out that he was innocent and that it was the US administration that did it. The reality is that they were both in it.”
Trump, asked about it this week, said, “I don’t know if it was anybody, but it wasn’t me, and I don’t think it was Elon.” He doesn’t know, it wasn’t him, and he doesn’t seem interested in finding out who’s flipping switches in the White House.
It’s the third time the switch on Ukraine’s war has been in Musk’s hand. In 2022 he declined to turn Starlink on over Crimea for a strike on Russia’s fleet, and in 2023 his company moved to stop Ukraine’s drones using it at all. Reportedly, the links have now steadied, but the Pentagon still hasn’t said what the cap was for.
Laid out in sequence, it looks a lot like a protection racket. The aggressor’s fuel trade is reopened, Ukraine’s leader is told to step aside, a ceasefire is announced over its head, and the protection Ukraine depends on starts slipping away. The threat on the record is plain enough….stop hitting the refineries, or lose the intelligence and the weapons. Tommy Vietor, once the spokesman for Barack Obama’s National Security Council, reckons the diesel deal could put around $4 billion in Russia’s hands, and he put it bluntly: “Trump is de facto asking Zelensky to surrender.”
Asked this week by the British broadcaster Piers Morgan whether he felt betrayed by Trump, Zelensky said, “Really, yes….but it’s a little bit more complicated than just my emotions or my feelings….it’s painful when President Trump chooses one side, not our side.”
Betrayal is the right word, and there’s a document that says why.
When the Soviet Union fell, Ukraine was left holding around 1,900 long-range nuclear warheads, the third-largest arsenal on earth, and it gave every one of them up. It was one of the most trusting decisions any nation has ever made. In return, at a summit in Budapest in December 1994, Russia, Britain and America put their names to a promise to respect Ukraine’s independence, its sovereignty and its borders, and never to use force or economic pressure against it.
Russia broke that promise in 2014 when it took Crimea, and shattered it in 2022. America signed it. And this week America’s president told Ukraine to change its leader, while his administration threatened to cut off its intelligence and weapons unless it stopped hitting back. Who leads Ukraine, and how it defends itself, are exactly what that promise was written to protect.
There’s an older document still. The dock at Nuremberg held more than the men who waged the war. Walther Funk never fired a shot in Hitler’s war. He was Hitler’s economics minister and ran Germany’s central bank, and the judges convicted him of waging aggressive war all the same, for his part in preparing and paying for it. He served ten years in Spandau Prison before he died. The world decided then that helping fund an aggressor’s war is part of the crime.
Zelensky’s word was betrayal, and twelve senators reached for the same one. But the older word is treachery….against Ukraine, against America’s allies, and against two promises America put its own name to, one at Budapest and one at Nuremberg.
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The Sky That Made the Court
When the judges at Nuremberg delivered their verdict in the autumn of 1946, Uranus, the planet of revolution and sudden breaks with the past, was moving through Gemini, the sign of words, ideas and the written record. It was the perfect sky for what the world did that year - it broke with every war that had come before, and wrote down in law, and enforced for the first time, that starting a war of aggression is a crime.
Uranus takes 84 years to travel all the way around the sky, and this April it settled back into Gemini for the first time since the 1940s, where it stays until 2032. For the first time in most of our lifetimes we’re living under the sky that birthed the international court, as if Uranus has come back to check what we did with it.
The International Criminal Court already has a warrant out for Putin’s arrest, issued in 2023 over the children taken into Russia. But the supreme crime, the war of aggression itself, is beyond that court’s reach in Russia’s case, because it can only try aggression by a country that’s signed up to it, and Russia never did. It signed the court’s founding treaty in 2000, then withdrew its signature in 2016, days after the court described the annexation of Crimea as an occupation.
So last year Ukraine and the Council of Europe, the continent’s guardian of human rights, agreed to build a court for exactly that crime. It draws its authority from Ukraine itself, the country that was invaded. Thirty-eight countries and the European Union have said they’ll join it, its home will be The Hague, and it could begin work as early as next year. Like Nuremberg, it’s built for the people at the top, the ones who planned the war and gave the orders. A sitting head of state can’t be tried while he holds office, so Putin is shielded for as long as he’s in the Kremlin, but in the meantime the court can gather the evidence, publish the charges, and pursue the generals and officials beneath him. The day he leaves power, the protection ends, and the charges will be waiting.
A warrant bites long before a trial does. Since the ICC issued its warrant, Putin has had to think hard about where he travels, and that same year he stayed away from a summit in South Africa rather than risk arrest. Nuremberg had to wait too….its judges only sat once the regime had fallen.
The courtroom is being built under the same sky that built the first one, and the sky says the reckoning’s already moving.
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The Weighing of the Scales
As the 80th anniversary of Nuremberg was marked on the ground this week, the sky was marking it too.
Lilith, the one who keeps count, moved into Capricorn last month, the sign where the powerful are made to answer, and on the eve of the anniversary she reached the Sun in Russia’s chart, the heart of the country. Then in the small hours of 16 October, eighty years to the night after the hangings, Pluto, the planet of power and of everything buried rising to the surface, stood still and turned forward again, pressing hard on the point that was rising over Leningrad the morning Vladimir Putin was born. When Pluto turns forward, whatever it’s been digging up starts moving, and power that’s been held starts changing hands.
Putin was born with four planets in Libra, the sign of the scales of justice: his Sun, Mercury, Saturn and Neptune. And Saturn, the planet of consequence, the one that always brings the bill, has begun moving opposite them one by one.
It first faced his Sun, the heart of who he is, in the last week of June, just as Ukraine’s drones pushed Russia into its deepest fuel crisis in years. Petrol was rationed to 20 or 30 litres a car, occupied Crimea declared a state of emergency, and by July Russia’s refineries were processing less oil than at any time since 2002. When Saturn came back to his Sun at the end of August, Putin was days away from standing up at an economic forum in Vladivostok to admit that Russia had believed its refineries were off-limits. “We were mistaken,” he said, and told Russians to “be ready for anything.”
Saturn makes its final pass over his Sun in March, then works its way across the rest of his Libra planets through 2027 and 2028, until in the middle of 2028 it stands face to face with the man himself and climbs to the very top of Russia’s chart, where it sits into 2029. That’s the same stretch in which the new court could be hearing its first cases.
Saturn doesn’t hurry, and it doesn’t forget.
For the next two years, the scales in Putin’s own chart are being weighed.
And Trump is tied into this very story. He was born with Jupiter, the planet of favour and plenty, on exactly the same spot in Libra as Putin’s Saturn, the planet of power and authority, so close that the two points are all but one. Trump’s open hand sits right on Putin’s seat of power, which goes a long way to explaining why one keeps handing the other gifts. So when Saturn comes to weigh the scales in Putin’s chart, it weighs Trump’s in the very same moment. By next April it stands opposite that shared point, reaching both charts on the same day. Whatever’s been passed across that line comes due for both of them at once.
Elon Musk is on the scales too. He was born with Saturn, the planet of structure, in Gemini, the sign of the wires, and Uranus, the planet that rewires everything it touches, crossed that Saturn in May. Now it’s doubling back towards it, coming to a dead stop almost on top of it in February. Uranus on a man’s Saturn pulls the structure out from under him, and Musk’s structure is a network. The sky has its hand on his switch.
His chart is tied to Putin’s as well. Musk’s Chiron, the wound a person carries and the thing they most need to prove, sits in Aries, the sign of the pioneer, exactly opposite Putin’s Sun and America’s Saturn, which sit side by side in Libra. Every time Saturn has faced Putin’s Sun this year it’s pressed on Musk’s wound within days, and when it makes its final pass in March it weighs the aggressor’s heart, the pioneer’s wound and America’s duty in one movement.
Those same few weeks pull America in all the way. In early March, Saturn presses on the Sun at the heart of America’s own chart, the core of who the nation believes itself to be, and days later it makes its final pass over Putin’s Sun. In mid-March it reaches America’s Saturn, the planet of duty, and within days it’s back on the exact spot it held on 30 September 1938, the day Britain and France signed part of Czechoslovakia over to Hitler at Munich without letting the Czechoslovaks into the room. Czechs still call it the Munich Betrayal. It’s the oldest bargain there is, handing an aggressor a piece of someone else’s country in exchange for peace, and at Munich that peace lasted less than six months before Hitler took the rest.
So in the space of five weeks next March and April, the aggressor, the man who fuelled him, the man who holds his victim’s wire, and the nation that wrote the page at Nuremberg all meet the same reckoning, with Saturn standing where it stood at Munich. A ceasefire announced over Ukraine’s head and a demand that it find “a new leader who can make a deal” are steps down that same road.
The question Saturn puts to America is the oldest one in this story. Hand the aggressor what he’s taken and call it peace, or stand with the people he took it from and hold him to account? And a longer clock is running underneath.
Uranus takes 84 years to come back to where it stood when a nation was born, and for America that return has never been quiet. The first time, in 1861, the guns opened fire on Fort Sumter ten days after its final pass. The second time, in 1944, the Allies landed in Normandy a week after it, and eighteen months later an American judge stood up in Nuremberg to open the case against the men who’d started the war. The third time begins in late July 2027 and ends in mid-May 2028.
Every 84 years the sky asks America who it is.
Munich or Nuremberg?
Twice before, after terrible cost, it answered with its founding promise. Now the question has come round a third time, and the whole world is waiting on the answer.
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Ukraine’s Rising Star
While America wrestles with that question, Ukraine’s chart is carrying weight of its own. Saturn presses on the planet that marks its 1991 break for freedom next week and again in late January, and in February an eclipse falls on its Sun, the heart of who it is. The sky marks 2027 as the year Ukraine’s identity is forged into something hard and lasting.
But over the coming months Jupiter, the planet of hope and plenty, returns to the exact place it held on the day Ukraine declared its independence, renewing the promise the country was born with. Then at the end of next July, a few weeks before its Independence Day, Jupiter reaches Ukraine’s Sun. Jupiter on a nation’s Sun is always a time of growth and confidence, when the world sees a country clearly and its sense of itself grows stronger. For Ukraine, it lights up the promise it was born with in 1991….that Ukraine belongs to Ukrainians.
It’s a promise Ukrainians have fought for over and over. For the better part of three centuries most of Ukraine was ruled from Moscow, first by the tsars, who banned its language from print, then by the Soviets, who starved millions of Ukrainians to death in the famine of 1932 and 1933 that Ukrainians call the Holodomor, death by hunger. When the reactor at Chernobyl exploded in April 1986, Moscow let Kyiv’s May Day parade go ahead days later, with radiation drifting over the city.
Then the people began to move. In January 1990 hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians joined hands in a human chain that stretched more than 700 kilometres, from Lviv to Kyiv. That autumn students camped out on the granite of Kyiv’s central square and went on hunger strike until the head of Soviet Ukraine’s government resigned. In August 1991, days after a coup by hardliners in Moscow collapsed, Ukraine’s parliament declared independence, and on 1 December the people sealed it with a vote that finished the Soviet Union. Within a week the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus met at a hunting lodge in a Belarusian forest and declared it over, and on Christmas Day the red flag came down over the Kremlin….the very evening modern Russia’s own chart was born.
Ukraine’s freedom has only ever come from Ukrainians, and it’s coming from them again now, every night, in the dark. And the wider sky is on their side.
When Hitler was handed Czechoslovakia at Munich, Pluto, the planet of power, had just moved into Leo, the sign of the king. Today it stands in Aquarius, the sign directly opposite, the sign of the people, where it’ll stay for most of the next two decades, and this week it turned forward. It’s a sky with little time for kings who rule by force.
Power is passing from the throne to the many, and few nations know the power of the many better than one that won its freedom with a human chain and a ballot.
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The Pain That Wakes Us
The men who walked to the gallows at Nuremberg once believed they were untouchable too. Power ends, the ledger stays open, and the page Nuremberg wrote about aggressors and those who fuel them is still in the book.
But for a lot of us this week, it doesn’t feel like anyone’s keeping count. It feels like watching the wheels come off everywhere at once, while the people meant to protect us lean further and further over the edge, and we’re left wondering why on earth nobody’s stopping them. We’re aching for accountability - for someone, somewhere, to say enough and make it stick. And we’re absolutely furious.
Trump’s a traitor.
Musk’s a maniac.
Putin’s the Hitler of our age.
String them all up, and let the whole rotten thing burn.
Some version of that has been in every comments section this week, and in France this week, some of that fury stopped being words and started being actual fire. And the fury itself is right. It’s what the truth feels like when it finally arrives after years of being told to sit down. What we do with it is the question this whole week has been asking.
Underneath almost every story this week was the same story of truth being suppressed. A ballroom “paid for a hundred percent by me,” and a list of 57 donors without the mad king’s name on it. A press secretary who claimed a bar exam she’d never passed. A thumb drive full of “noncitizens” with no source, from an administration whose last list turned out to be citizens, every one. A French mayor beaten with iron bars, by his account, and a prime minister suggesting it’s all part of a campaign to smear Israel. A man with his hand on Ukraine’s wire tweeting that he’s innocent, and a president who doesn’t know if it was anybody, but knows it wasn’t him. The truth, brushed over, and everyone expected to carry on.
That’s how the old world was built to run - it smoothed the truth over, spun it, settled it out of court, pardoned it, and filed it away as an error. But since Saturn and Neptune met in the very first degree of Aries in February - the Genesis Reset - it’s been running out of places to put it. The walls the old world built to keep the truth out are coming down, and everything they held back is pouring through at once. That’s why the wheels are coming off everywhere at the same time….a machine built to run on buried truth seizes up the moment the truth starts coming up.
And truth that’s been brushed over long enough always comes back as fire. The students in France marched for a month over crumbling classrooms and missing teachers before Saturday’s fires. Albanians protested for months against a luxury resort before their ministries went up in flames. The fury in us is the same fire, looking for somewhere to land.
In America, it came one small step at a time. In 2016 a candidate stood at a podium and said, “Russia, if you’re listening.” In 2018 he stood beside Putin in Helsinki and took his word over America’s own intelligence agencies. In 2019 he held back military aid from Ukraine while asking its president for “a favor,” the same lever he’s pulling now, and was impeached for it. In 2021 a mob stormed the Capitol, and on his first day back in office he pardoned the people who did it. A few weeks later he sat Zelensky down in the Oval Office and told him he didn’t have the cards. Each step was a truth brushed over, and each time enough people shrugged to let it pass.
But it’s impossible to shrug at the wildfire it’s turned into. This week a Fox News poll put Trump’s approval at 36%, the lowest of either of his terms, with his support among Republicans at a record low. Nearly a third of the people who voted for him in 2024 now say he’s doing a bad job, and what’s turning them is the heat they can feel: prices they can’t meet, a war with Iran, the cost of filling the tank. The truth has finally reached their own kitchen tables, arriving as the same fire that filled the streets of Paris this week. The truth is rising everywhere, and where it’s been held down longest, it’s arriving in flames.
That’s how it’s always worked. For a species that refuses to feel, that smothers any truth that hurts, pain is the only thing that rouses us. The mind can explain away almost anything while the cost lands on someone else.
A family in Kyiv.
A child taken across a border.
A stranger on the other side of the world.
When we refuse to feel each other’s pain, when we shield ourselves from the truth, the truth keeps burning, quietly, until it takes the whole house. We can face a truth while it’s still a fire we can manage - it’s our avoidance, our steadfast refusal to feel it, that turns it into a blaze, the kind nobody can ignore.
The last time the world stood here, it looked away from a small fire at Munich and got the blaze: six years of war, the camps, and tens of millions dead. It was only from the bottom, staring into the face of what it had allowed, that the world turned around and built Nuremberg.
Now, out of this fire, a new Nuremberg is forming, and the first lesson the last one has to teach it is about what we do with the fire once it’s burning.
Dead Men Know Nothing
At the end of the worst war in human history, Nuremberg gave the world two things to do with its pain - reach for the rope, or write the record. In the end, both were chosen. The rope brought an end to the men who’d caused harm, but it was the record that actually held them to that harm.
The truest moment of the whole trial came a week in, on 29 November 1945. The American prosecutors dimmed the lights in the courtroom, left a row of lamps burning along the dock so the men’s faces could be watched, and played an hour of film. The men in the dock had to sit there in the light and watch what they’d done. Some of them wept, Walther Funk among them. Some turned their faces away. When the lights came up, the whole room sat in silence.
For one hour, the men who built the camps were made to hold the truth of them, and that’s what we’re really aching for when we reach for the rope. We want those who caused harm to feel the harm they caused. We want them to know, all the way down, what they’ve done to people they never had to look at.
But a dead man knows nothing. The rope is the one thing guaranteed to make sure he never has to. The rope lets a man stop being what he did. The truth makes him live as it.
The rope lets everyone else off too. Ten men hanged, and a nation that had cheered them, fed their armies, run their railways and built their camps got to tell itself the blame belonged to the men on the gallows. The rope told Germany the matter was settled, and for the best part of twenty years Germany mostly let it lie.
We’ve watched the rope settle nothing in our own lifetimes, too. Saddam Hussein went to the gallows in 2006 with his guards jeering and a mobile phone filming, and Iraq kept burning for years. Muammar Gaddafi was dragged out of a drainpipe in 2011 and shot by the men who caught him, and Libya’s been torn apart ever since. The pain gets thrown back, and it keeps moving, from one house to the next.
And this week, Trump offered the rope’s twin. Asked about the investigations circling his people, he said he’d pardon every one of them, himself included. The rope and the pardon look like opposites, but they do exactly the same job. Both close the file so the truth does not have to be held.
The rope has a cousin too, and we watched it this week in France. The students who’ve been marching for a month have every reason to be angry; they’ve sat in crumbling classrooms with no teachers while the price of everything climbs around them, and their anger is love for their own future that’s been told to sit down for far too long. But on Saturday some of that fire got thrown. In Limoges, masked protesters set alight the 140-year-old town hall, the house where the town comes together to govern itself….the town’s hearth, the place it gathers round its shared fire. Thrown fire nearly always lands closest to home, and in Limoges it burned the hearth. The morning after, the schools are just as crumbling as they were the day before.
Whatever the rope and the torch destroy, the fear underneath survives. The men hanged at Nuremberg ran on fear….a humiliated, frightened nation told who to blame for its pain….and fear can’t be hanged. It goes to ground when the man carrying it dies, and waits for the next one.
The only antidote to fear is truth, fully held.
A New Nuremberg
When Germany finally did hold the truth, it came from the Germans themselves. In the 1960s Germany’s own prosecutors put the guards of Auschwitz in the dock in Frankfurt, in front of German judges, and a generation of German children read the record and asked their parents what they’d done. The camps were kept standing so nobody could say they’d never existed, the whole truth was taught to every German child, and the salute itself was made a crime. That was the truth heard, held and felt by the people who most needed to feel it, and it held the fear down for exactly as long as the record was read.
Now a generation has come up that’s been told the record is boring, or a lie. One of the founders of a party now winning elections in Germany’s east called it a speck of bird muck on a thousand years of German history. One of its most powerful figures has twice been convicted for using a storm-trooper slogan at his rallies. On inauguration day, the man who now holds Ukraine’s wire threw a straight-armed gesture from a stage in Washington that much of the world read as that same salute. The fear comes back up out of the ground the moment we stop holding the truth of what it did last time.
That’s the kind of holding Nuremberg was reaching for, and it got halfway, but thirty years ago, another country got closer. When apartheid fell, most of the world expected the rope, and South Africa built a room instead. More than 21,000 people told what had been done to them. Around 2,000 of them did it out loud in public hearings, sometimes to the faces of the men who’d done it, with the whole country listening on the radio. The only way a perpetrator walked out of that room free was by telling the whole truth of what he’d done. People still argue it let men walk, but it ended a cycle every rope in history had failed to end. It’s the closest the world has yet come to justice written by the heart. Holding the truth is the firmest thing a people can do, because love holds a line, and it doesn’t need a rope to make it stick.
Put Frankfurt and South Africa beside Nuremberg and there’s the shape of what’s forming now. It’s a system built around the truth the way a home is built around its fire….a hearth strong enough to hold it without letting it take the house. It does what Nuremberg did for a single hour in a darkened courtroom, for as long as it takes: it requires the powerful to face the whole truth of what they’ve done, out loud, in front of the people they did it to.
That’s the new Nuremberg, and it’s already going up. The court for the supreme crime is being built in The Hague for the aggressor, the first verdict on the man who fuelled him comes at the ballot box in a little over two weeks, and every switch the man with the wire has thrown is already logged. Our part is the record….keeping it open, reading it, and refusing to let anyone call it boring or a lie. That’s love in action, holding firm boundaries, which is what love does best.
The sky that built the first court is overhead again, with Uranus back in Gemini, the sign of the written record, checking what we did with it. The last time, the heart only got to write its first draft of a kinder world in the rubble: Nuremberg, the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a health service in Britain that would turn nobody away for being too poor to pay. It put the truth at the centre of a courtroom for a year, then spent most of the next eighty keeping it polite.
The sky overhead then was Uranus crossing out of Gemini and into Cancer, the sign of home, family and care, and in 2032 it returns there with Saturn, the great builder, beside it. That’s when the second draft gets written, and this time may it be built as a hearth, with the truth burning at its centre.
Heart to Heart
So if this week’s news felt horrific, let it. Horror is what love feels like when it watches something it loves being harmed. Underneath it is love for the families in Kyiv sitting in the dark, for a people who keep choosing their own freedom, and for the promise the world made to itself at Nuremberg.
And if it made us furious, let that in too. Fury is the truth arriving, and the only question is what it’s protecting. Underneath the heat we might find something we love, and that’s the kind of fire that deserves to be spent on the truth: said plainly, marked on a ballot, kept on the record. If all we find is that we want someone to suffer, whether or not they ever understand what they did, that’s fear wearing love’s clothes, and it needs holding until it cools enough to tell us what it’s afraid of. Love wants them to know. Fear just wants them gone.
The question Saturn is putting to America is being put to each of us first, every time the news comes in. Look away and buy ourselves a little peace, or let it in and stand with the people it’s happening to. Munich or Nuremberg is decided at the kitchen table long before it’s decided at the White House.
The hardest place to hold the truth is right there, closest to home. Some of us backed Trump for years. Some of us railed against the people who did, and watched them shrug. Now the pain has reached everyone’s household, and the ones who’ve only just turned are standing beside the ones who sounded the alarm for years. The anger between us is real, and it’s right to feel it. It’s the ledger demanding to be read.
The ledger asks the same of a neighbour who’s only just turned as it asks of the men in the dock….to hold the truth of what they backed, all of it, the shrugs included. Love can stand firm right there. It can say what happened was totally unacceptable, say it plainly, and keep saying it until it’s heard.
An insult hands them a way out. It’s a small rope, and it works the same way the big one does. The moment it lands, they’ve got a fight on their hands, and a fight is far easier than facing what they backed. They stop looking at what they did and start defending themselves, and they head straight back to the voices that told them the rest of us were the enemy.
So hold the line, and leave the door open. That’s how West Germany came back. Within ten years it was standing inside NATO beside the countries it had fought, because its people were given a door, and what’s kept it there since is Germans reading that record themselves.
Here’s a small medicine for the week ahead. When the news makes the blood rise, stop. Before we scroll on, before we fire off a single word, breathe, and drop out of the noise into the deepest part of us. Then let one person from this story in.
A grandmother in a Kyiv flat with the power out and winter coming.
A soldier on a cold line in the east who hasn’t slept in days.
A child taken from Ukraine and raised in Russia, far from everyone who loves them.
A student in Limoges who only wanted a teacher, watching the town hall burn.
A voter who took a conman for a saviour, and now feels as betrayed by him as we’ve felt by them.
Let what they’re feeling be there, just for a moment, without explaining it or fixing it or railing against it. That’s empathy, feeling another’s pain as if it were our own, before it ever reaches our door. The mind keeps pain at a distance and files it under someone else’s war. The heart lets it in, and when it does, we see where we’re heading early enough to turn. It’s the very thing we’re demanding of Putin, and Trump, and Musk….to let the pain they’ve caused all the way in. A court can make them face it. Only we can choose to do it before anyone makes us.
Eighty years ago this week, the world met the darkest hours before dawn with a rope, and told itself the night was over while the pain moved on to the next house down the street. The truest light Nuremberg ever made was that row of small lamps along the dock, so that for one hour the men who’d built the camps had to sit in that light and see what they’d done.
That light is ours to hold now, and it doesn’t need a courtroom. It’s lit every time one of us lets a hard truth all the way in and keeps it there long enough to feel it….at the kitchen table, in the comments section, across the fence from a neighbour who’s only just turned, in the quiet after the news while the blood’s still up. Lilith keeps count of every one.
The night’s long this winter, in Kyiv and far beyond it, and it’ll be crossed the way every long night has been crossed….one small light, then another, then a room full of them, until the sky starts to pale.
That’s how a better world is born.
And so rises the Age of the Heart.
If you need a place to land after reading this, or if you want some support as we navigate the days ahead, come join me in the Daily Lighthouse. I’ll be there, each day with you, or if you’d rather listen to it, head over to the Resonance Room.
If anything written here has stirred something heavy in you, please reach out to someone who can sit with you in it, whether that's a person you love or a crisis line where you live. The heart can hold a lot, but it was never meant to hold it all by itself.
See you in the stillness, friends.
Onwards!
If this writing resonated with you, please share it with your friends.
You reinforce that we nurture only time and love in our toolbox. It’s a tall order with the actions of despots in these times. I’m grateful for the history of times like these and the guidance for our hearts. Understanding the Genesis Portal has been a quiet solace as I listen to the chaos blaring from people and wires. I’m hanging on, riding the storm out with you and those who understand what it is we are all here for, at this moment in time. Breathe and let go of fear. We got this…thanks Wiz:-)