By Adel AlAdlani
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
—William Butler Yeats
These words hang in the air like a curse, or a prophecy. Too precise in their despair to be mere poetry, Yeats wrote them in the aftermath of the wreckage of the First World War, unaware they would outlive him, stalking the decades like a shadow. Now, a century later, they return to us, whispering through the smoke of collapsing sovereignties and smoldering battlefields. I first encountered them in a university classroom 20 years ago, where my professor, Shailendra Kumar Mukul, recited them like an incantation. At the time, they felt distant, a relic of another era’s dread. But history has a way of bending the past into the present, and today, Yeats’s lines coil around our throats. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” The evidence is everywhere: in the fracturing of nations, in the rebellion of the earth itself, in the quiet, creeping sense that the world is slipping from our grasp. So let us step into the gyre, that widening spiral of chaos. Let us ask, as Yeats did: When the falcon no longer hears the falconer, what then? When the threads of order snap, what remains?
The planet is a mosaic of fire. In Ukraine, the earth is scorched by artillery; in Gaza, it is salted with blood. The Sahel burns under the boots of mercenaries, while Sudan devours itself in silence. The promise of a stable, rules-based order lies in ruins, exposed as a mirage. We told ourselves history had ended, that democracy and diplomacy would temper the ambitions of power. But history was only biding its time. Europe, that old dream of unity, trembles. Russia’s war has cracked the façade of Western solidarity, Hungary’s Orbán flirts with Moscow, while NATO’s foundations strain. The Global South watches, unimpressed, its patience worn thin by decades of selective outrage. Noam Chomsky’s indictment lingers: “The general population doesn’t know what’s happening, and it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know.”
In the Middle East, the Israeli-Palestinian war has become a wound that refuses to close, spilling into the Red Sea, Lebanon, and the streets of distant capitals. Edward Said’s ghost murmurs: “Every empire tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.” Yet the bombs fall, the children die, and liberation remains a taunt. Africa, too, is a portrait of betrayal. The Sahel, once Paris’s domain, now belongs to Wagner’s thugs. In Sudan, warlords carve fiefdoms from the carcass of a nation. Frantz Fanon’s warning echoes across the years: “Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.” But the rot has metastasized.
The United Nations, once envisioned as the grand stage for the world’s collective conscience and a beacon of multilateral cooperation, now stands eerily paralyzed, like a puppet with its strings severed, its lofty ideals rendered hollow by the relentless tides of geopolitics. The International Criminal Court (ICC), tasked with upholding justice on the global stage, issues warrants that the powerful blatantly disregard, their authority mocked by nations that operate with impunity. Resolutions are drafted with solemn rhetoric, only to gather dust in the archives of diplomatic futility. Henry Kissinger’s cold, calculating cynicism echoes with grim prescience: “It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but a matter of what is perceived to be true.” And what the world perceives now is a grotesque farce, justice reduced to a rigged game, where the rules are written by those who wield unchecked power, leaving the oppressed to navigate an illusion of fairness.
Meanwhile, the foundations of global economies tremble under the weight of compounding crises. Inflation, that insidious thief, grunts at the edges of stability, eroding the purchasing power of ordinary citizens and sowing seeds of discontent. Soaring debt, like a noose tightening around the necks of developing nations, strangles aspirations of prosperity before they can take root. In Argentina, a self-styled libertarian firebrand capitalizes on the fury of a populace exhausted by economic mismanagement, his radical promises a siren call to those desperate for change, however chaotic. Across the ocean, the political resurrection of Donald Trump signals America’s deepening schism, a nation locked in a war with its own soul, torn between competing visions of identity and governance. The social contract, that sacred pact between citizens and the state, lies in ashes, its promises broken. In their hunger for order, people turn to strongmen, only to discover too late that the promised stability is a mirage, and the chaos they sought to escape has returned tenfold, fiercer and more unyielding than before. The world staggers forward, caught between disillusionment and the fading hope that another path might still exist.
Behind the grand narratives of history, the meticulously recorded treaties, the shifting alliances of nations, the carefully crafted rhetoric of leaders, lie the uncounted dead, their stories erased by the sweep of geopolitics. These are the children crushed beneath the rubble of bombed-out buildings, their laughter silenced forever; the mothers wading through icy rivers with infants clutched to their chests, their homes reduced to ash and memory. War is not some distant abstraction debated in conference rooms or reduced to statistics in news tickers. It is the deafening silence that follows an explosion, the hollow ache of an empty chair at the dinner table, the school notebooks scattered in the dust, never to be filled again. The Syrian poet Adonis, witnessing the relentless cycle of violence, once posed a piercing question: “Every time I see a war, I ask: Who is selling arms to whom?” The answer, as old as conflict itself, is a grim refrain: the merchants of death grow fat on blood and contracts, their fortunes swelling while the world starves, not just for bread, but for justice, for mercy, for a reprieve from the machinery of destruction.
And yet, even in the deepest shadows, there are those who refuse to surrender to the darkness. The journalists who risk their lives to document the unspeakable, their cameras and notebooks serving as weapons against oblivion; the activists who plant themselves between advancing tanks and trembling families, their bodies a fragile barricade of defiance; the ordinary people who fling open their doors to strangers, offering shelter, a shared meal, a moment of humanity in a world gone mad. Rebecca Solnit, writing of resilience in the face of despair, reminds us: “Hope is an embrace of the unknown.” But how much of the unknown can we endure? How many broken cities, how many graves, how many nights shattered by sirens before hope itself is ground to dust beneath the weight of relentless suffering? Yet still, against all odds, it flickers, a stubborn, unyielding light.
In his haunting vision of a world unraveling, Yeats perceived not merely the collapse of an era but the ominous emergence of something grotesque and unknown. His apocalyptic question, “What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”, lingers like a shadow over the modern age, forcing us to confront whether the chaos we witness is the final gasp of a dying order or the violent contractions of a new and terrifying birth. Yeats’s imagery of a disintegrating center, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”, suggests a fundamental instability, a rupture in the fabric of civilization that may have always been latent, hidden beneath the illusion of control. The metaphor of the falcon spiraling beyond the falconer’s call speaks to humanity’s lost connection with meaning, with authority, with the guiding principles we once took for granted. Now, as the widening gyre accelerates, the forces of disorder grow stronger, and we are left at a crossroads: do we continue spinning mindlessly in the ever-expanding chaos, or do we strain to hear, amidst the howling storm, the faint voice of the falconer, calling us back to something resembling order, purpose, or truth? The choice, Yeats implies, is ours alone, and the consequences will define what emerges from the wreckage of the old world.
