by Rafaël Newman

It’s hard to feel sanguine about the human project these days, insofar as there still is, or ever was one. Canada has been on fire, in part evidently because we have yet failed to address the dire effects of our fossil fuel use; while a Ukrainian reservoir, willfully damaged by fascist-imperialist belligerents, is threatening eco-death by flooding, and imperiling the stability of the nuclear reactor it was built to serve. The United States, in the meantime, the country in which we are to place our faith for an end to the latest European violence, is seeing the forces of reaction on the march, waging a proxy war over sexual and reproductive rights (alongside similarly regressive anti-abortion activists in Poland and Italy) to distract from economic inequity, the police murder of Black people, and a brain-eating gun lobby. And all the while, that nation’s principal transatlantic allies—France, Germany, and Britain—have been rendered sclerotic by various strains of autocracy, historical compromise, and nativism.
Nor is a rosier prospect offered by the global south and its various satellites. In Iran, women are beaten to death for sporting the wrong headgear, while in Israel/Palestine a cutting-edge military power is deployed to kill children, there too no doubt in a bid—however vain—to distract attention from government malfeasance, which in Israel’s case constitutes an attempt to refashion the judiciary after ethno-nationalist whim. Female genital mutilation continues to be practiced in Guinea-Bissau, while “gender apartheid” is again the norm in post-occupation Afghanistan. In Turkey, the laicism foundational to the republic’s modern rebirth is being further eroded, by a religious conservative whose hold on power could not be shaken even by his sluggish response to a massive natural disaster (or who perhaps took advantage of that disaster to influence the election results). Over-burdened, under-maintained rail systems bring death and destruction to India (as, of course, to North America). Sudanese civilians are dying in a pointless dispute between military factions. And people trying to reach Europe from Africa, merely to survive, continue to capsize in the Mediterranean—often because they have been repelled by the “forces of order” to face the perils of the open waters in makeshift craft.
If there is any hope for our common endeavor, it comes currently not from our “leaders” but from our streets. Black Lives Matter, Fridays For Future, Jin Jiyan Azadî, Pussy March, Stonewall Was A Riot, Get Your Laws Off My Body, Métro Boulot Tombeau: such are the latest watchwords of a global grass-roots protest movement. Read more »