If you’re anything like me and you’ve been feeling deeply rattled by world events lately – especially by the atrocities we’re all seeing unfold in Gaza, the ongoing war in Ukraine, and the treatment of immigrants in the U.S. – then perhaps it might help you, as it’s helped me a bit, to step back and take a longer, colder look at all this. I don’t have solutions, of course, but I believe facing truths head-on and putting them in context are at least first steps.

One irrefutable truth is that much of the world’s misery (as we underlings in the West view it) is being engineered primarily by three men who are drunk on power. And these three, who are old friends, have a lot in common. All three are white, in their 70s, immensely wealthy, and wicked. 

Many people might call them sociopaths because they bear most of the salient hallmarks – a pervasive disregard for others’ rights and feelings, a tendency toward deceit, a lack of empathy and remorse, and a history of rule-breaking or criminal behavior. But others have been taken in by their charms, even going so far as voting them into office. Each of these charmers has created for himself a cult of personality, as if they alone can fix their country’s (and the world’s?) problems, and millions are still believing it.

This triumvirate, as you’ve likely guessed, is comprised of U.S. President Donald Trump (79), Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (75), and Russian President Vladimir Putin (72). They’ve known each other, worked with each other, admired each other, understood each other, and likely propped each other up for years and years. Netanyahu, I just read, was even friends with Trump’s father, Fred.

These three are gripped by a similar fear, though: They would face serious prison time for their many crimes if they were to fall from their pedestals of power. So they cling tenaciously, desperately. They stomp on dissenters and silence criticism. Putin sends truth-tellers to gulags. Netanyahu bombs them to bits in their tents. Trump suffocates them by pulling the plug on their economic lifelines. It’s all driven by the same fear. 

Although these strongmen sometimes attempt to hide behind religion – Putin, Russian Orthodoxy; Netanyahu, Judaism; Trump, evangelical Christianity – they’re not believers in any good God. They break every religious rule in every holy book with impunity. They’re masters of the art of impunity. (Netanyahu’s original family name was Mileikowsky, I learned. It was later Hebraized to Netanyahu, which means “God has given.”)

All three have been married and divorced (Netanyahu and Trump have been married three times, Putin married and divorced once) and fathered a number of children, both “legitimate” and not. They see themselves as macho, HE-men, fearsome. I recall once seeing a telling pic of Putin, sitting on a high horse and looking smugly down, somewhere in the Russian countryside, bare-chested – his pale skin as smooth and soft and pink as a sow’s.

In their own ways, they’re masters of manipulation too. Prior to reaching their current respective heights of power, Putin spent years in the KGB, Netanyahu long served in the IDF, and Trump made many, many (shady) million-dollar business deals.  No one should ever doubt the depths of  their shrewdness and ruthlessness. They make sure they get what they want.

These three men don’t walk, they strut. They don’t smile, they smirk. They always appear well fed, carefully coiffed and shaved. They likely have no trouble sleeping, either, despite the mass slaughters of innocent people they’ve ordered or abetted. In their own eyes and minds, it seems, they can do no wrong.

They are wrong, of course. And they won’t last forever. There’s some small comfort in knowing that. History is shot through with cruel despots like these three, and the ends of those others weren’t pretty. (Think: Mussolini.) These three strongmen face unenviable ends too.

(Stock image)

But what do we, on the ground, do in the meantime? How do we live through this horror – feeling we’re at the mercy of these monsters — with our hearts and minds and souls intact? How do we watch young Ukrainian soldiers being buried in vast graveyards dotted with wind-whipped blue-and-yellow flags, skeletal Gazan children being systematically starved amid so much dystopian rubble, immigrants being caged in mosquito-infested swamps and treated worse than feral animals — not to mention the full list of injustices we learn of every day — without having our hearts either hardened or torn to shreds?  

Individually, we can do little. But collectively, like a groundswell, we can be seen and heard. (Think of the 300,000-or-so people in Australia who recently marched across the Sydney Harbour Bridge — in the rain — protesting the war on Gaza, half a world away.) This kind of global groundswell could well help to shake the pedestals these three strongmen stand on in their respective countries. We could live to see those pedestals, like the Berlin Wall, come tumbling down. That’s worth standing up, speaking up, and fighting for, don’t you think?