Bages is the name of the county in Catalunya where I lived the longest. The name comes from Bacchus, a reference to the excellent and plentiful wines grown here when it was a Roman colony. There’s still good wine cultivated in Bages, and even more land is dedicated to olives that make an excellent oil. A little bit of wheat and other cereals, and a lot of non-native pine plantations for timber – the forest fires of the near future.

Want to play 3 T/Fs? I’ve got the new edition and the answers from last time below. And, really important: here’s a fundraiser a Palestinian friend shared with me. This goes to support two families in Gaza. One has a small baby; another child of theirs was murdered by the Israelis. The other family are living in tents after their home was destroyed by bombing.

Desertification and catastrophic fires, punctuated by torrential downpours that speed up erosion and rack up a growing death count, are the main danger the ecological crisis presents in this corner of the world. A sensible culture would take the hint to take care of its water supply and phase out industrial agriculture and forestry. There are plenty of ecological gardeners and silviculturists who would love the opportunity to spread their skills across the whole landscape, but the Romans are still in charge, commoning is illegal, blocked by powers hard and soft, so the plantations are here until they bring about their own ruin.

I wrote an article a couple years ago about how peri-urban, migrating shepherds offer one of the best solutions to the ecological crisis for the Mediterranean region. Read about it at Undisciplined Environments. (And Part 2! explores the overlap between shepherds and the anarchist guerrilla movements that crisscrossed the Pyrenees for most of the 20^th century.)

The solutions are always already all around us, but it’s not just the State and the big investors who refuse to support them. Many of us continue to put our faith in political reform or we just don’t know how to find the knowledge and courage to get started. I get it. It’s hard to do anything as alienated individuals, but our necessary first step is to honestly recognize that as a weakness and not political pragmatism.

I got to visit Catalunya again earlier this year: borders and visa regimes plus a weird job I had out that way. The apartment I squatted back in 2015 is still there, put to good use, and the little garden I nurtured out of that farmed-to-death soil is still a green jewel in a spreading desert. All it takes is compost, a good mix of crops and trees, treating the land with respect, and patience. The cherry and the plum tree I planted died in one of the droughts while I was gone, but the olive tree and almond tree are thriving. At this point the olive tree, Walter, must have a good tap root down, meaning a safer water supply for him and everyone inside his root radius.

Walk farther up the path, past olive orchards both tended and abandoned, over the dusty rocks where rosemary, thyme, and wild asparagus thrive in the margins, and all of the sudden you’re on top of the ridge. Montserrat stands breathtaking in one direction and in the other the great expanse of rocky hills and valleys that make up Bages. There’s the Pyrenees on the horizon, and closer, just below you, the Cardener where it wraps around Manresa. Past that other hill, the Llobregat flows down from Sallent, and there’s the bend that hides the town where the two rivers meet.

Mountainous country, and yet the second tallest peak in all Bages is a product of capitalism. You can see it from here, shining out like sickly gold. It’s a pile of mine tailings placed thoughtfully next to the Llobregat. That’s the reason why, from Sallent on down, all the precious waters of the Llogregat, originating as snowmelt and natural springs in the Pyrenees, are saline, too salty for human consumption or agriculture. And that—plus the worsening droughts, another product of capitalism—is the reason Barcelona has to run the largest desalinization plant in all of Europe. That’s a tremendous cost in energy, meaning fossil fuels or industrial-scale green energy that destroys the land through mining and all the stolen and poisoned surface area that’s required. Another example of how the solutions provided by capitalism and the State just make things worse because they refuse to see the root, the nature, and the dimensions of the problem.

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: all the skepticism about whether anarchists have any practical solutions to offer is bullshit because A) we do, plenty, and B) supporters of capitalism and the State do not have any practical solutions to the problems they have caused, and they are so deluded they’re not even able to engage with reality.

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It gets worse. From up here, you can see another pile of mine tailings, the one that looms over the town of Súria, right next to the Cardener. So, that river, our river, is poisoned as well. These and two other potash mines are owned by the ICL group, formerly Israel Chemicals Ltd., majority controlled by the Israel Corporation, which was founded by the Israeli government. ICL is the 6^th largest producer of potash in the world. (And, in another clear example of the merits of corporate/NGO environmentalism, the company has won awards for their “environmental stewardship.”)

What is potash? It’s a potassium salt, vital as a chemical fertilizer for industrial capitalism and also important for weapons production. ICL sells a bunch of explosives grade potassium compounds to the US military, the greatest murderer on the planet, and it supplies the Israeli military with white phosphorous. Often compared to napalm, white phosphorous burns the skin off people’s bodies while they’re still alive. It can’t be used as a precision munition, though that doesn’t matter much since the Israeli military regularly targets civilians and has burned countless families to death in Gaza over the last several years, using the white phosphorous produced by ICL.

ICL is one of the most important Israeli corporations, and it has locations in Spain, the UK, five other European countries, the US (Missouri), Brazil, China, Australia, and Ethiopia. All of these are places where its operations can be stopped. In Catalunya a couple weeks ago, people decided to do exactly that.

I’m translating here from a newsletter from my friend Ricard de Vargas. He’s an older anarchist, a participant in the guerrilla struggle under the Franco regime, and these days, pushing well past 70, he’s active in ecological and anticolonial movements and in the fight to protect our historical memory. (I interviewed him about that in my last book.)

“On the 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th of April, 4000 people gathered in Callús (Bages), convened by Revoltes de la Terra, a coalition of various ecological collectives, social movements, local platforms, and farmers, in protest of the ecocidal activity of the multinational company ICL, which operates the potash mines in the territories of Sallent, Balsareny, Súria, and Cardona.

“The participants, divided into columns, carried out four simultaneous actions: while 1000 people wound their way up the Cogulló mountain of mine tailings at Sallent (the second tallest mountain of Bages) in order to, once at the top, create a human mosaic spelling out the message, NO MORE SALT, a second column dismantled part of the train line that carries potash from Súria to the port of Barcelona. At the same time, the third column took to the highway and, marching slowly, blocked the C-16 and C-25 for a couple hours, until they arrived at the neighborhood of the old station in Sallent to pay homage to the 800 neighbors who were evicted in 2009 to make room for a mine expansion. Meanwhile, the fourth column, formed for and by the kids, carried out activities to help understand the perverse consequences of salinization.

“In Bages, the land is sickened by the chloride coming from the progressive salinization of all the rivers, wells, aquifers, waterfalls, streams, and springs, impoverishing the farmers and shepherds and leaving the population without potable water, all due to the bad mining practices of the ICL, a militarist Israeli company that is complicit in Netanyahu’s policies of extermination and genocide.”

In the days of Rome, salt was used as money, specifically, as payment to the soldiers who spread the Empire through murder, rape, occupation, and despoliation, pledging their loyalty to atrocity in exchange for a poisoned piece of the pie. Proponents of slavery, the Romans forced debtors and war captives to work in their salt mines in Tarraconensis and other corners of the Empire. In those days, they were after sodium chloride, table salt, which was useful for preserving food at a massive scale, a necessity within an imposed plantation economy where food production was no longer local and permanent armies needed portable food as a resource they could warehouse.

Nowadays, the upper layers of sodium chloride are mostly gone, but the potassium salts are used to inject artificial fertility back into the land that has been so abused, and to bomb and burn the hungry masses who have been dispossessed from their lands time and time again.

In the Bible, which would eventually be adopted as the Holy Book by the Empire, there is also a pile of salt, and in some ways it’s as big as a city. The God in this Book is capricious, moralistic, and vengeful. He has decided that certain sexualities are evil. In the story of Lot, the people of Sodom want to have sex with two men/angels-in-disguise who are guests of Lot. The righteous Lot knows that it is evil for men to have sex with men so he instead offers his daughters to the crowd, without their consent, but the evil crowd refuses. The angels warn Lot of an impending punishment and instruct him to flee with his family. As they run away, God viciously murders every man, woman, and child in Sodom, and it’s not because of their bad practices around consent. Lot’s wife, though—the Christian version of the Bible erases her name, which is preserved elsewhere as Ado or Edith—looks back on the city and in a further act of punishment God transforms her into salt.

This is a story, ultimately, about obedience and empathy. The righteous people, according to the God of the monotheists, show their goodness by obeying every order that comes from Authority, no matter how cruel or senseless. They do so without question. And if they show any empathy with those the Authority has labelled as the Enemy, if they so much as raise their eyes to look at the suffering happening around them, they deserve punishment. The Authority can torture and murder entire cities if he has decided that they are, or even just some of them are, disobedient. The greatest crime, in His eyes, is to refuse to look away.

Capitalism and the State comprise a system based on senseless, harmful rules, on absurd moral hierarchies, on obedience and apathy. Those who keep it running are not the handful of presidents, generals, and billionaires on top. It’s all the minions below them who insist on believing in obvious lies, those who refuse to see the World, to speak with it, to learn from it, those who avert their eyes from the suffering of others, who make up their own lies to justify that suffering, who invent a God or a racial science or a market theory or a nationalist history so that they can kill and profit off death and blame their victims.

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It won’t be easy, and so many of us have died or been imprisoned in this struggle already, but the Temples of Power are trembling. They have spent thousands of years running from their own mistakes, their own willful ignorance. We have the power to murder God and to cast His sycophantic servants to the four winds, to doom them to an unpredictable fortune: the kindness of strangers and the mercy of those they’ve wronged.

Below I’ve got some recommended readings related to this article. And I can’t recommend it yet, but I’m really looking forward to reading this article by Jesse Roth about Yiddish anarchism and the anti-nationalist Jews that the broader Left can learn from amidst the ongoing genocide that we all feel pretty powerless to stop. And don’t forget to support that fundraiser!

But first, 3T/Fs!

That’s right, it’s the second edition of your new favorite game, 3T/Fs! Below are three statements. They might all be true, they might all be false, they might be a mix. To play, place your answer in the comments (in the format TFF, FFF, FTF, etc.) and when I publish the next round of the game, I’ll share the answers for this round. It’s not too late to take a crack at the first edition, in the April 26 newsletter.

• For a time, the capital of the Roman Empire was at Tarraco, now the city of Tarragona, in Catalunya.

• The word “salary” shares its root with the word for salt because it was once prized as much as the metals that were used for minting coins.

• Many subjects of the Roman Empire probably never heard of Rome nor encountered anyone speaking Latin.

Okay, here are the answers from the first edition:

TTF! As of this writing, 3 people got it right. Congratulations Louis, samsteacup, and Raechel Anne Jolie! And Sue C shared some great challenges to the true/false format and that entire approach to knowledge. I appreciate it, and I also think plenty of questions can be accurately evaluated as true or false even if that binary is too simplistic for most forms of knowledge. As an anarchist, I encourage y’all to do your own research or argue if you think I got any of these wrong or if any is too complex for the binary!

Why TTF?

• The eastern coast of North America is the western shore of the Atlantic. “Coast” refers to the edge of a land mass whereas “shore” refers to the edge of a body of water, so when we have to name them with a cardinal direction, they end up being opposites, or antonyms!

• The mechanism that has spread English ivy and the plane tree across large parts of the world, especially in settler states, is not a biological mechanism (the way these two species physically reproduce is quite different). It’s a sociocultural mechanism, namely, the aesthetic values of British aristocrats and others who want to mimic them, whether it’s upper middle class North Americans or the aristocrats and bourgeoisie of southern European cultural capitals from Barcelona to Torino. They’ve both spread across the globe due to a cultural feature of European colonialism.

• False? But genes do produce more genes! Yes, they do, but that’s the observation of a function. Function is not the same as purpose. Is your purpose to metabolize oxygen and carbohydrates? No, your purpose is whatever you define your purpose to be, or what someone else defines your purpose to be if you accept their authority. Assigning a purpose to functions and beings we are not in conversation with is usually an instance of teleology, or believing that things have an intrinsic purpose or destination. Many Christians and also many Marxists are teleological. MLK’s famous quote about “the moral arc of the universe” – teleological. It’s essentially a spiritual approach to understanding the universe that either requires a Supreme Authority or hides its own spirituality by naturalizing purpose through rationalizations and dense academic lingo or alibis that hide those rationalizations. Incidentally, I’ve met a couple biologists who believe that genes have a purpose, or even that “the purpose of life is to produce DNA.” That particular scientist scoffed at philosophy. He might actually need to read up on some philosophy to understand how he is imposing a specific spiritual worldview on chemical functions in the world around him. Genes might actually have a purpose, but we would have to be able to talk with them to find out, and if that were possible, we’d probably find that they don’t all agree.

Recommended reading and listening from this issue:

“The Witch’s Child,” a bedtime tale of colonialism, here as a zine and audiobook

Whigs and Hunters, the seminal work by EP Thompson about commoning and how it was illegalized

El Comú Català by David Algarra Bascón, a rich history of the war against the commons in Catalunya. In some ways this book is even better than Whigs (though of course DAB might not have been able to conceive of his work if EPT hadn’t laid that groundwork two generations earlier). It’s in Spanish now as well as Catalan, and dear gods someone’s really got to translate it to English!

“Dams, Forest Fires, and the Hidden Commons” and “These Mountains Fight Back: Between Anarchist Commons and Fascist Environmentalism” by me.

Let’s play! Let’s thrive!

I made up a simple game called 3 T/Fs and I think you’ll find it fun! But first, here are a couple fundraisers and a couple book recommendations:

Let’s support radical fiction authors, cause we need free imaginations and smart artists, but it is f**king hard to make a living writing or to find enough free time to write a book while holding down a job and dealing with health problems and all that noise! Here are two new releases I’ve recently enjoyed, and they’re both debut novels!

Morsel, by Carter Keane

Murder Bimbo, by Rebecca Novack

Fundraisers

Got a decent paying job? Did your parents pay for college or help buy you a house? Have a trust fund or inheritance?* Throw some money this way:

Support anarchists in Sudan and the Resistance Committees they have helped to build as a form of neighborhood resistance and survival in the midst of a brutal civil war.

Support Cleveland Sex Workers Alliance as they face an increasingly hostile, dangerous environment under accelerating criminalization by Democrats and Republicans, and an unsurprising abandonment/betrayal by upper middle class/white branches of feminism.

Support people facing serious prison time for standing up against ICE in Texas.

Support a liberated social center in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. “For a decade, people and groups from Brazil and the world have been visiting Kasa Invisível, holding debates, workshops, movie screenings, concerts, courses, bookfairs and festivals. In addition to hosting events and meetings for unions and social movement groups, Kasa functions daily as a community kitchen, library, infoshop, screen printing workshop and vegan food cooperative. To keep the house open and safe, keep our mutual aid actions in the neighborhood, we invite everyone to make a donation of any amount.”

*Please forgive my gentle guilting aimed at those who have a little more money. I just find it to be true again and again that those in our movements from the poorest backgrounds are the most generous, while the wealthiest are frequently the stingiest, with comrades whose parents bought them houses calling themselves poor and trust fund kids asking comrades in poverty to do free labor for them while using their economic advantages to exercise power in their scenes. For an anticapitalist movement, we don’t talk nearly enough about our class backgrounds and present economic circumstances. No one should feel guilty for being born into one family or another, but what we do with our lives is on us. I think we can all get better at putting our communal and revolutionary ideas into daily practice.

Articles

Hanif Abdurraqib writes about a spreading nostalgia for inconvenient technologies of the past.

Elia Ayoub writes about Israel’s targeting of journalists in Lebanon, and turns to science fiction to imagine whether the occupations there might ever end.

Okay, here’s the game: 3 T/Fs !

It’s simple. Below are three statements. They might all be true, they might all be false, they might be a mix. To play, place your answer in the comments (in the format TFF, FFF, FTF, etc.) and within a month, when I publish the next round of the game, I’ll start off by sharing the answers for this round.

• “Shore” and “coast” can be considered antonyms

• Ivy (Hedera helix) and the plane tree (Platanus x hispanica) often spread through the same mechanism

• The purpose of genes is to produce more genes

Check out these assholes!

Guess what? AI is for the upper class! I was combing through the numbers in Harpers’ Index for May 2026 (they release it a little early I guess), and I saw that 46% of USians with postgraduate degrees use AI “almost constantly,” compared with only 20% of those with a high school degree or less. 19% of US corporate executives say AI saves them at least 12 hours of work a week. Only 2% of non-managerial workers say the same.

Major banks like JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, Citibank, and Bank of America credited AI with bringing them billions in additional profits while laying off 15,000 workers.

Summary: AI is most useful for the rich, it’s making some people incredibly wealthy and stealing jobs from others (like me, a former professional translator), and it relies on huge data centers, which steal unconscionable amounts of water, require huge amounts of Earth-destroying open pit mines, require so much electricity they’re pushing an increase in fossil fuel usage around the world, and they don’t even create a significant amount of jobs.

Fuck AI! Turn it off, opt out of it in your search engine, your apps, and on your phone, write your own emails, and read articles yourself instead of getting them summarized.

AI has also been falsifying the history around resistance to slavery… Check it out in this recent Scalawag article by Sherronda Brown.

In the next months, I’m hoping to write an in-depth newsletter about some of this tech.

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The FBI is investigating journalists critical of the Trump regime and the Justice Department is punishing the Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit that researches and opposes white supremacist groups. Democrats have a high chance of taking back control of the government over the next two years, but the FBI and Justice Department are overwhelmingly made up of career agents and bureaucrats rather than political appointees. Under Republican and Democratic administrations, the federal government has used antiterrorism laws to target Muslims, environmental activists, anarchists, immigrants and their supporters, antiwar activists, privacy advocates, members of Black liberation groups, and people taking to the streets against the police, all in the last 25 years.

Want to know more about how some of that repression has been showing up over the last few years? Check out this article of mine from Prism Reports, “The far-right and Trump administration are collaborating to target educators and marginalized communities.”

The Department of Homeland Security has technically faced a shutdown for over 70 days, though Trump’s advisers have found temporary funding for them, and they continue to torture and deport people, and to post neo-Nazi and other white supremacist memes online. The Republicans, meanwhile, might be angling for the Stupidest Politicians in History prize. They control all three branches of government, but they are breaking records for the fewest pieces of new legislation in decades, and Congress only has a 10% approval rating. Trump’s approval rating just fell to a new low of 32%, with 63% actively opposing him. His economic policy is only polling at 33%, and only 38% support his war against Iran.

I could not find a single poll that asked whether Americans thought the war against Iran was unethical, whether it’s wrong to try to change the governments of other countries through bombing and assassination campaigns, or whether the war was wrong for its impacts on people in Iran as a whole. Its well demonstrated that what questions are asked or not asked, and how they are phrased, affects the results of any poll. Beyond that, though, this erasure is consistent with the omnipresent media architecture that trains Americans to be good citizens of empire, to only think of their own interests, to believe in the nation-state, to believe their government is an extension of their own will and that the government is entitled to carry out regime change around the world, and to not care about noncitizens and people in other countries being killed and brutalized.

I found one poll with a single question that allowed for empathy with non-Americans, asking respondents to name their top concerns regarding the war. Out of nine options, only one was not selfishly geared towards US interests (as though the interests of the state line up with our own interests) : “it has resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians, including children.” This option ranked 4^th, at 25%, just below concern for US troops who signed up to kill people abroad (31%), and a good chunk below worries for gasoline prices and spending so much of the budget on a war (37 and 34%).

Those numbers are pretty grim. It’s even worse in Israel. After one week of the war against Iran, only 4% of Jewish Israelis opposed the war, and 93% supported it (including 76% of Israelis on the political Left). After one month, during which time more Iranian missiles started hitting home, that figure rose—but only to 11%.

(Regarding the phrase “Jewish Israelis,” unfortunately that’s the category used by Haaretz and other major media and polling organizations, not to denote practicing Jews, but to distinguish full citizens from the second class citizens or “Arab Israelis,” who are the descendants of the inhabitants of the land that settler militias were unable to expel in 1947-48.)

I want to quote at length from a report written by a progressive Jewish Israeli author for Haaretz, republished in Genocide Watch:

The survey conducted by Professor Tamir Sorek of Pennsylvania State University, published here in Haaretz together with Professor Shay Hazkani, examined what the authors called “eliminatory” attitudes among Jewish Israelis and their theological roots.

Within days I began receiving anguished inquiries about the results. Friends, colleagues, peace activists, journalists and strangers wrote in from Australia to Uruguay to down the block, asking if it could possibly be true that 82 percent of Israeli Jews support “the transfer (expulsion) of residents of the Gaza Strip to other countries?” No less than 54 percent of Jewish respondents were “very” supportive.

Other findings were grim: A majority of 56 percent of Jews supported the “transfer (forced expulsion) of Arab citizens of Israel to other countries.” And when asked directly whether they agreed with the position that the IDF, “when conquering an enemy city, should act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites acted when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, namely, to kill all its inhabitants?” nearly half, 47 percent, agreed.

The survey found a strong correlation between various indicators of religious identity and observance, and militant attitudes – a classic pattern in Israeli Jewish public opinion. But there was strikingly high support from secular Israelis for the expulsion questions too.

For more on the ongoing war, see “The Fourth Israeli War”

Israel has blown way past its norm of murdering at least 100 people for every Israeli soldier or civilian killed. This isn’t retaliation, since most of these deaths have been in wars started by Israel, and some Israeli military leaders and politicians have even explicitly advocated for this kill ratio.

Israel has murdered 2,300 people in Lebanon and is responsible for a large share of the 3,200 deaths (1,700 of them civilians) in Iran. During that time, only 23 Israelis have been killed, as of late April.

During its recent independence day celebrations, the Israeli government specifically honored a rabbi who has been calling for the military to completely “flatten” Gaza. Please remember that this is just one of literally thousands of documented examples of Israelis running the entire gamut from the highest leaders of government and military, to talk show hosts, celebrities, religious leaders, politicians in the opposition, soldiers, settlers, and regular citizens, advocating for genocide, justifying genocide, and joking about genocide. Protests against the genocide by Israelis have been few and far between, with turnouts in the low hundreds.

The civil war is heating up in Mali again, and the war in Sudan isn’t abating. Many of the wars and atrocities in this region, the Sahel, an arid part of sub-Saharan Africa, are a continuation of the conflicts that were set in stone by the drawing of borders in the decolonization process of the 20^th century, and they are being exacerbated by climate change, global mining interests and other extractive industries, and the self-interested interventions of Russia, China, and the European Union.

I’ll be writing more about that as soon as I can. Buy a subscription or Paypal me some money so I can afford a couple hours off from my landscaping job?

The word “Midwest” tells a story of settler colonialism in North America, in particular, the invasion of the territory extending from Ohio to Minnesota, and south to Iowa and Missouri. Some people, looking at a US map and realizing that every single one of these states is in the eastern half of the country, have tried to rectify this error by claiming the Dakotas and Nebraska are also part of the Midwest. Geometrically, this is a nonsense solution: Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan would have to be called the Midnortheast, or to include territory that is as close to the Pacific as Ohio is to the Atlantic, you’d have to add Idaho and Nevada and even then, if geometry were your measuring stick, you’d have a district that should just be called Center.

And yet, Chicago is the home Northwestern University, Cleveland is the home of Case Western, and at the end of the 18^th century the US Congress referred to the land today taken up by Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and a small chunk of Minnesota as the Northwest Territory. Gradually, as the frontier extended and new Wests were invaded, the Northwest became the Midwest.

What I’m getting at is that “Midwest” is a word with history. It is a history about landhungry white settlers streaming through the Cumberland Gap and over the Ohio River, then flooding in through the waterways connected to the Great Lakes, invading lands that had largely been depopulated by the English and French in the so-called Beaver Wars. One of the main reasons, in fact, that the colonists revolted against the English was because the English were trying to keep the Cumberland Gap closed in order to preserve their unequal alliances with the Native peoples who were helping them fight the French and producing beaver pelts for them (then a hot commodity in European markets, eventually leading to the near extinction of beavers in the lower 48). Also, colonial subjects beyond the Appalachians were harder for the Brits to control: they wanted orderly colonies that produced pelts, cotton, indigo, tobacco, indigo, and corn, whereas the colonial elite wanted more land. Both the European powers and the settler colonists waged campaigns of genocide and land theft, but the Europeans, operating at such distances, needed local allies and they didn’t need their own colonial subjects starting wars with those allies.

The invasion of the territory that would become the Midwest was a vital, strategic act of bloody, colonial expansion waged intentionally by the US government in the first four decades of its existence. This invasion capitalized on genocidal policies that had already been carried out by European powers, and it led to a series of wars against Tecumseh’s confederation of Shawnee and other peoples, between 1811 and 1813.

The next distinct stage of US expansionism was constituted by the Trail of Tears – the forcible expulsion of the Cherokee, Choctaw, and other peoples in the area of western Georgia, Alabama, and Arkansas; wars against all the local Indigenous peoples by the anglo extremists flooding into Texas (which was still a part of Mexico in the 1830s); and also beginning in the 1830s, the colonization of fertile valleys in Idaho and Oregon via the Oregon trail, a colonization conduit starting in western Missouri, which had already been conquered in the earlier stage.

Settler paramilitaries often constituted the unofficial frontline of each wave of invasion, but the US government was always there organizing the infrastructure, subsidizing mapping expeditions, spreading rumors of gold or fertile lands ready for the taking, and sending in the big guns when the daily violence of their settlers provoked strong counterattacks by Indigenous confederations along the frontlines. The US government also played the role of turning settler violence into law, by offering treaties to peoples facing annihilation, granting them rights to reduced territories but imposing individual allotments and private property of land, and after a few years or decades liquidating treaty and reservation lands. Frequently, the government would reward soldiers for their service by granting them plots of land along the frontline or in unceded Indigenous lands.

In conclusion, the Midwest is not the name of a region that is just west of some centerline between the East Coast and the West Coast. It is the name for the territory conquered in the second expansionist campaign of the US.

Here’s a brief list of the first stages of US expansionism. This was an expansion from the colonial base that had already been created through almost 200 years of wars and genocides waged by the English, French, and Dutch.

First stage: 1770s-1780s against the Mohawk, Seneca, Onondaga, Cayuga, Cherokee, and many others, resulting in the creation of the United States and the expulsion or pacification of Indigenous peoples from the first thirteen states.

Second stage: 1780s-1820s against the Cherokee, Choctaw, Muskogee, Chickasaw, Creeks, and Seminole in the southeast, and against the Shawnee, Delaware, Miami, Wyandot, Lenape, Ottawa, Potawatomi, Menominee, Kickapoo, and others in the Midwest, allowing for US expansion into the future states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, and Florida; and Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Michigan, and Wisconsin. In this time period, the US military also established a fort on Dakota lands where Minneapolis stands today. Many of these latter lands—the Midwest—had been nominally under control of the British, though actual settlement or occupation was concentrated in small forts and trading posts focused on the fur trade.

Third stage: 1820s-1840s, expanding the frontline of the war to the western ends of what is now Missouri, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, strengthening the settler presence in Texas to lay the groundwork for seizing it from the Indigenous inhabitants and the Spanish/Mexican colonizers, and establishing the Oregon Trail. Also in this stage, the US strengthened its military control and accelerated ethnic cleansing against Indigenous peoples in territories it already claimed nominally. The peoples targeted included the Winnebago, Sauk, Meskwaki, Kickapoo, Osage, Dakota, Creek, and Seminole. The Creek had already been living on treaty-guaranteed lands after an earlier expulsion from their ancestral lands farther east. And at this point, the Seminole were fighting a guerrilla from the Everglades. Though many were killed or captured, the Seminole as a whole were never defeated, and never surrendered.

Fourth stage: 1840s-1850s, against the Dakota, Comanche, Apache, Utes, Diné, Athabascan, Tillamook, Yakama, Skitswish, Spokane, Palouse, Paiute, Shasta, Mohave, Quechan, Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and dozens of other peoples; and also against the Spanish-speaking settler colonists of California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas.

Only after this fourth stage did US power extend “from sea to shining sea,” to quote the patriotic settler hymn, though the second president had financed an expedition in 1804 with this goal in mind, and it was enshrined in the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 and expanded on by the political/religious ideology of Manifest Destiny, which became dominant in the 1840s.

Yet, despite centuries of invasion, murder, and theft, the demolition of thousands of towns and deliberate policies of starvation and enclosure, at this point huge areas of the Great Plains, the southwestern deserts, the Rocky Mountains and Pacific Coast ranges, the islands and rain forests around the Salish Sea, the Everglades and the Great Dismal Swamp were still free. They can be free again, if we remember this history and learn to distinguish between the kind of freedom the European settlers speak of, and other kinds.

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In “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell makes the argument that authoritarians seek to control language and reduce its complexity, to limit the tools people can access to express critical thoughts and to simplify language overall, winnowing a multi-hued palette of expression down to good and evil, or in Newspeak, the fictional language he portrays in his more famous work, 1984, double plus good and double plus ungood.

Today, it is especially relevant to develop this argument further, as we are ruled by someone who can’t string a full sentence together and who is a foremost representative of the ascending idea, backed by powerful institutions, that research, accuracy, honesty, and even having a fucking clue about where we come from and where we’re going, just don’t matter.

In this three part series, I want to look at language, history, and our ability to talk about what ails us.

Part I will get into some technical linguistics. If you’re not up for that, then check out the much more meditative missives from Alex Gorrion, on “Saying Goodbye” and how it relates to a spirituality of distance, travel, and leave-taking, and “You Don’t Really Care for Music, Do Ya” on babies, music, and language-learning (anyone out there work with The Anarchist Library? these two should get uploaded!). Then tune back in for Parts II and III in the coming weeks.

Help one of my favorite radical bookstores and community spaces in the world, Firestorm Books in Asheville, North Carolina. Apart from being a cooperative that offers an excellent selection of books, Firestorm was a hub for mutual aid efforts in the aftermath of the climate storm, Hurricane Helene. You can support them through this link, or order some books off their website

I’m going to start small, seemingly petty even, with a goal of going big. But I promise I’ll do my best to facilitate a steep learning curve.

Wait, I’m going to make this harder to comprehend?

No. As those of you who are ahead of the curve know, a steep learning curve means a process that requires a small amount of effort or time to achieve the desired level of learning. How is that so? The metaphor is originally a reference to this kind of graph, which measures time, effort, energy, or some other expenditure along the X axis, against result achieved along the Y axis.

The farther you go from left to right, the more time or energy you’ve put into learning. If there’s a sudden jump from the bottom of the graph to the top of the graph—a steep learning curve—that means a small amount of effort produced a huge amount of learning. The thing was easy to learn. If instead what we see is a very gradual learning curve, that means our students have to dedicate a lot of continuous time and energy to increase that learning and get their educational results higher up.

What about “before the curve?” That’s a reference to the kind of graph that depicts a certain amount of change happening very gradually. and then all of the sudden there’s an exponential change. Imagine every tiny step up is another person figuring out a puzzle. If you’re “ahead of the curve,” that means you figured out the puzzle before this big sea change in which the majority of people, in a short period of time, figure it out. If you’re behind the curve, maybe that means you just need a different teaching style, you need more practice with puzzles, or you’re more interested in dedicating yourself to other forms of intelligence.

Whether we use our metaphors correctly or incorrectly might just come down to the teachers we’ve had, the articles we’ve read, the conversations we take part in. After all, no one knows everything and everyone makes mistakes. But the more time we spend thinking about language, what it actually signifies and where it comes from, the less likely we are to use clichés or misuse metaphors, and the more likely we are to learn about the world and the interconnectedness of so many forms of knowledge. An awareness of language helps us spot attempts at manipulation or distortion, and gives us more opportunities to create a honed, nuanced analysis of the world that is also historically rooted.

The downside is, reading the press, especially the media that consider themselves literate becomes especially frustrating. The Guardian writes Isis instead of ISIS (which sucks even more for the Nilotic goddess) and Nato instead of NATO, even though ISIS and NATO are freakin acronyms, which literally means “high name” or “name in the heights” i.e. it’s a word in all caps, made from initials. Then there’s The New York Times, the enemy of decent people everywhere: not only are they in serious need of a proofreader, they have been pushing the ridiculous convention of “well-” as in well-informed or well-educated. Though the editors at the NYT might still think that an adverb is a word that ends in ly, actually it’s a word that modifies adjectives (or verbs or other adverbs or verb participles that act as adjectives). “Well” doesn’t need a gawl-durned hyphen because its whole purpose and function is to modify adjectives. “Well-educated” shows about as much awareness of grammar as “diligently-working” or “the-overpaid-editor” for that matter. (Embarrassingly, I almost left “its” two sentences back as “it’s,” and I’m sure this newsletter has as many typos as the average NYT article, but srsly, they get paid and have a large staff. I don’t.)

This might initially-seem a stretch, but I think there is or can be a connection between a lack of awareness of the mechanics of language, and a lack of critical thinking.

This essay is about to get very technical, but I want to show how important these linguistic questions can be with a few dreamy—and saucy—examples.

As I was learning Catalan, I realized that the root meaning of the word vulture probably relates to this bird’s habit of turning lazy circles in the sky. In Catalan, voltor can also be literally translated to “one who turns.” The dominant etymological hypothesis links “vulture” to the Latin “vellere” (meaning to pluck or tear), but far more defining of a vulture is not how it plucks out an animal’s insides, the same as many other carnivores: it’s the way it flies. And the modern Catalan word is almost identical to the older Latin word, voltur. And in Latin, volvo means “to roll” and “-tor” is a common suffix for one who does something (similar to the -er in “writer,” “dancer,” “singer”).

Language histories can also tell us about social histories: in nearly every language in the world, the word for tea is very similar to either “tea” or “chai,” which reflect two paths of language transmission, both of them colonial. The Dutch spread thee from Malay, who named this leafy plant teh in accordance with the dialect (t’e) of the Chinese people who passed it on to them, whereas the Portuguese got into the chai trade through their colony on Macao, where they learned about the drink in Mandarin, ch’a. And the Chinese, for their part, probably adopted their word from a conquered and now extinguished neighboring society in the southern part of their empire.

What other controversies hide in our vocabulary… Did you know that most people in the US and the UK misuse the words “Left” (as in the political left) and “performative”? Each of those words have very specific origins, and anarchists, anticolonial freedom fighters, and radical queers in particular could really benefit from learning that history… and resisting the slippage in meaning. I’ll get back to that in Part III of this series.

Language! Who said it was boring?

Alright everybody. Recess is over. It’s time to go deep nerd. I want to cover word smooshing and transglottal redundancies… before I get to Words Killed by Capitalism and Words Lost and Stolen, which will come out as future essays.

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Transglottal redundancies

You know what? Let’s start with transglottal redundancies, since they’re easy and fun. Transglottal redundancy is a technical term which I did not invent. I swear I learned it when I was getting my Linguistics PhD at… college in… Languedoc, France.

It just means a redundancy that happens after a word is adopted into another language and then used by people who don’t know what the adopted word actually means. (Transglottal is a word I stitched together that just means “across tongues.”)

A common example of a redundancy is ATM machine. It’s redundant because you’re saying Automatic Teller Machine machine. (Teller, now there’s another endangered word with a long history, though I certainly won’t mind if banks go extinct.)

Now let’s get transglottal: chai tea, of course, is redundant, since chai means tea. By the same token, though, “Milky Way galaxy” and “pita bread” are also redundant as any Greek speaker can attest, as is “Sierra Madre mountains” or “Sierra Nevada mountains.” And let’s not forget “guerrilla warfare,” since it basically translates to warfare of asymmetric warfare. Also, “guerrilla” in English is used wrong: the word refers to the type of warfare, whereas “guerrilleros” is how you talk about the people fighting it. My proposal: let’s get Catalan and say “guerrillers,” since English already uses -er as a suffix to refer to the people who carry out a certain activity (see “tellers”).

A final example, “splitting the atom” is a bit of a paradox, since a-tom means something that cannot be cut, but I think it’s a good paradox as it conveys the impossibility of what scientists set out to do. And their particular quest is an example of how science is not politically neutral, how even progressive or antifascist scientists might end up responsible for atrocities.

Word smooshing

Word smooshing is another technical term. It describes the process by which different words get their particularity and nuance smooshed out of them until they’re not only synonyms, they’re interchangeable. The result is that words have less meaning, and we have fewer tools for constructing complex analysis.

Let’s consider the words job, work, profession, and career. Fortunately, each of these words still retain different nuances. Around when it appeared in the 1500s, “job” referred to a task or piece of work, settling definitively into a paid gig as wage labor became more widespread in the 1600s. “Work” is a fascinating one, referring to a deed or action in Old English (weorca, pre-1066), and to physical, scholarly, or artisanal labor in the 1200s. The same root can be found in the Proto-Indo-European word *werg- which goes back at least 4500 years and means “to do.”

The latter two words connote a higher income bracket, with “profession” suggesting skilled labor or the kind of white collar hustle that requires a lot of formal education, and “career” suggesting the sort of lifelong job security the poor and precarious simply don’t have access to. Both of these shades of meaning hold true to the linguistic origins of these words. A profession stems from an educational path or apprenticeship that you profess or pledge yourself to, like declaring a major in university. “Career” still retains some sense of a course, road, or race. I wonder if the generations who developed the word were also thinking about a “rat race”!

But what about vocation? Until recently, this word meant “a divine calling,” as in the purpose of your life or the talent that God, the Gods, or the spirit of the world wanted you to cultivate. (The words “vocal” and “voice” are related to vocation.) Nowadays, “vocational training” is on offer from Burger King and AT&T and almost no one thinks about a vocation as a higher calling or purpose. It’s just another job in a job market that offers employment opportunities that are generally exploitative, meaningless, and soul-destroying.

Here’s an even clearer example of how institutions and economies can destroy shades of meaning, or—to use the proper academic term—smoosh words. In Manhattan, one of the oldest surviving cities in the US, founded by Dutch colonizers in 1625, the words street and avenue have different meanings, at least minimally, because streets run east and west, and avenues run north and south.

But the urban and suburban expansion of the US economy’s profitable real estate sector—and it’s easy for them to profit when the basis of what they’re selling is legally stolen, first through colonial conquest and later through the intentional cycle of redlining and gentrification—has led to real estate developers and growth-hungry city planners naming streets according to their own simplistic whims. Nowadays in the US, street, road, avenue, lane, trail, and drive, all mean the exact same thing, whereas in the suburbs place, circle, and court are tossed about regardless of their dimensions. On any street sign, all of these denominations are interchangeable, which means they have been stripped of their specific meaning.

Living in Catalunya, this was really driven home for me. There, you have the words carrer, carretera, avinguda, ronda, rambla, passeig, via, rua, ruta, senda, camí, carreró, puig, and baixada. These are not just thirteen words for street. Of these, carrer is the most generic. If you wanted to say someone was “on the street,” you’d say they were “al carrer.” But to name a specific street, you’d only use carrer if it were a more or less urban, paved road of moderate size. If it were a higher traffic, longer road crossing multiple neighborhoods, it would probably be called an avinguda, and if it were a multi-lane road for faster traffic circumventing the denser Old Town, it would be a ronda. A carretera is a medium-sized or large rural or peri-urban road that is not as modern as an autopista (interstate in the US, motorway in the UK).

Here are three with a specificity I think you’ll love: a rambla is historically a dry or seasonally dry riverbed or irrigation runoff canal that people can walk in, with footpaths on each side. In the 19^th century, rambles became paved road-complexes where the local petit-bourgeoisie would gather and stroll, though before urbanization they would be a more common thoroughfare for farmers, shepherds, and small merchants. (A note to tourists, la Rambla del Raval in Barcelona is a false rambla, constructed in the late 20^th century to destroy poor and immigrant housing blocks and “open up” the neighborhood. Also: tourists go home, refugees welcome.)

A puig is a small street that goes up a hill and a baixada is a small street that goes down a hill. They might be so steep as to be pedestrian only. And no, they’re not one-way, and no, the Catalans are not unaware of the fact that a path that goes up a hill also comes down that hill. Here’s a hint: the reference point is the historic center of the town.

Whereas the half dozen words for “street” in American English now all mean the same thing, Catalan has at least 13 different words, synonymous but distinct, creating the possibility for a high level of architectural specificity. Calling a passeig a carreró would be like not having the words to distinguish an elephant from a mouse.

Word smooshing has political ramifications.

As far as I know, more resources have been spent disciplining the English language to restrict revolutionary possibilities than any other language, though Russian and Mandarin Chinese might also be in the running. To make matters worse, English contains several intrinsic vulnerabilities to word smooshing. For one, English is classified as an “analytic language” in terms of its grammar, which, to simplify greatly, means words are less tied in to their sentences and a priori more interchangeable. (Mandarin is also analytic, while Russian is synthetic.)

This feature is related to, and exacerbated by, the history of the language as a series of invasions: the Angles and Saxons, speaking a Germanic language, occupying a population that spoke various Celtic languages, then fighting and coexisting with Norse colonies where the ruling/military class spoke a different branch of Germanic; the Catholic invasion which brought Latin as the religious, scholarly, and legal language reserved for certain classes and spheres of life; the Normans, who spoke a langue d’oïl related to French but also inflected by some Celtic and Norse influences, taking over the tumultuous mixture already in place in Britain; further wars and occupations against the Celtic-speaking Scots and Irish. And all of this before English became one of the most prominent colonial languages that was also a site of key technological developments related to the global advance of capitalism.

English has had more practice than most languages at adopting new words. Some results of this are that English has a huge vocabulary compared to other languages, but many of these words are synonyms; English is notably polysemic; English is very open to word malleability, invention, and adoption.

Let’s unpack all that!

• synonyms: words with similar meanings that aren’t always applicable in the same situations, like “create” and “invent” or “home” and “apartment”

• polysemy: words that have multiple meanings, like “boot” as a type of shoe, the trunk of a car, or the verb for firing or expelling someone

• word malleability: a grammatical and cultural norm that allows anyone to alter and adapt the meanings of words instantaneously, creating a new meaning (polysemic) after just a few uses, like “shade” as something that can be thrown or “frame” as to falsely accuse

• invention: the practice, more normalized in English than in many other languages, of individuals or groups inventing new words like “luggage,” “twerk,” or “pwn,” that start in a subculture and may or may not become generalized

• adoption: the practice, more normalized in English than in many other languages, of individuals or groups adopting words from other languages – adoptees might have to spend a few years in italics, or an eternity if they’re PhD words or phrases like a priori, or they might be quickly integrated, like “hummus,” “crag,” “parkour,” or “robot”

I put polysemy in bold because that’s an important one: many English words have multiple meanings that need to be inferred from context. Russian, for example, is much more particular, more monosemic: there’s less flexibility, and you need to choose the right word for the specific meaning the context demands. A consequence is that you can speak decent English with a small vocabulary, whereas you need a much higher operative vocabulary to get by in Russian. A consequence of polysemy is it’s easy to be a native English speaker who has expended very little effort to do language. But this also means there’s less motivation to get really good at the language. It takes a level of effort we’re not used to to avail ourselves of analytic precision or poetic transformation. And I know this contrast is real when I think of my Russian friends, from proletarian backgrounds, all. Keeping with the tradition of offering spontaneous, lengthy toasts at birthdays and other special occasions, these folks are able to deliver up a stunning eloquence—independent of their formal education—that makes me and other wordy English-speakers I know envious.

You might say—wait for it—that English fluency has a steep learning curve, whereas English mastery has a very gradual learning curve.

To summarize, we’ve got a bunch of words in English, many of these words mean similar things, and we’re ruled by wealthy evil overlords who want us to be stupid and who have designed an intellectually stultifying hellscape for us to inhabit. It’s inevitable that we will tend to forget the particularities and histories of our words, that we will waste much of our ample vocabulary on product choices and consumer culture, and and that we’ll participate in smooshing everything else into a simplistic, easy-to-manipuluate language that might as well be Newspeak.

It’s also undeniable, on reflection, that this is a tendency we can and must overcome.

In Part II, I’m going to be discussing the kinds of language loss that provide an archaeological record for how capitalism has exterminated entire ways of life. And in Part III, I’m going to get saucy and argue how we need to fight back against the slippage and misuse that is critically changing the meaning of really important words and terms like “performative,” “liberal,” “Left,” “radical,” and “intersectional.”

What is a settler state? A settler state is a type of colony in which the colonizing country (usually based in Europe) sends a significant population to “settle” and occupy the territories of other people. All settler states are founded on genocide and to continue to exist, they maintain the results of their genocides as an active colonial force within their society.

Multiple states outside of Europe, particularly China, Japan, and Indonesia, have also engaged in forms of genocide, colonialism, and imperialism, including forms of permanent colonial occupation that could fit the definition of settler states or probably would have produced settler states given more time, before they were interrupted by the temporary reality of Western dominance. It’s important to remember that dominant state institutions around the world originated in Europe and the US, but capitalism developed globally, and there are other oppressive hubs of state development on other continents, some of them with far longer continuity and more military, economic, and—increasingly—cultural power than any European state.

Because I know far less about these other states and because the last centuries have been predominantly shaped by European colonialism, even if Europe and its settler states have lost their hegemony, I’m going to focus on them.

How did they develop?

At the bloody birth of the modern age, sea power was far more decisive than land power for expanding the dominion and wealth of the newly developing nation-states. Largely landlocked states that lacked reliable bluewater ports—namely Russia, Prussia, the Habsburg monarchy, and Poland until it was devoured by the former three—were consigned to growing by conquering neighboring territories.

Portugal and the Netherlands used their naval power primarily to capture and develop strategic trade hubs around the world, typically port cities or well positioned islands. They also established the standard sort of colony from South America to Indonesia: captured territory that would serve largely as a site for brutal resource extraction worked largely by slave labor. This form of colonization was the primary form used by countries with strong navies and also large armies, namely the dual monarchy of Castilla and Aragón (which would become “Spain” more than two centuries after the two monarchs sponsored and then organized the invasion of the Americas). France and Britain also began creating extractive/plantation colonies about a century after Castilla and Aragón. All three (France, Britain, and proto-Spain) fought over the Caribbean and North America (with the Netherlands and Sweden making minor appearances in both theaters).

Unlike the standard colony, which was essentially a distant land brutally conquered and turned into a plantation or a mine, the settler state primarily came to be inhabited by emigrants from the colonizing country and from allied, culturally similar nations. Over time they developed a more independent economy and a political class led by local elites who could develop geopolitical strategies from their own standpoint (rather than the standpoint of London, Paris, or Madrid). Sometimes they gained the independence to form a government of their own through political revolutions (rather than social revolutions), as in the case of the United States, Argentina, and Chile, or they were granted gradual independence by their colonial overlord, as in the case of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Many settler states were in some ways unsuccessful as traditional plantation colonies. To better understand this, let’s look at the competition between the French and British to colonize North America after they had shouldered out the Dutch and Swedish. What were they after? A better geopolitical position, and areas of extraction to boost their economies with prime materials stolen from the ecosystem with forced human labor. Let’s look at those in turn.

Geopolitical position

Britain and France wanted to discover a Northwest Passage, a theorized gap in North America that would allow more direct transit from Europe to the profitable colonies and trade centers in eastern and southern Asia, namely India, China, and the multiple archipelagos of the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia that geographically and culturally ignorant Europeans lumped together as the “East Indies.” After discovering that gap, they wanted to be able to occupy territory and establish ports and forts along the coastline so if it turned out to be a narrow passage, they would have military control of it. (Similar to how Iran has military control of the Strait of Hormuz, Egypt has military control of the Suez Canal but Yemen can threaten marine passage through the Red Sea and thus the Canal, the US has military control of the Panama Canal, and—the two biggest sea lanes by shipping volume—the UK and France control the English Channel, and Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand cooperate to keep open the Strait of Malacca.)

The reason a Northwest Passage would have been so important is that, at the time, all the profitable shipping of resources extracted from southern and eastern Asia had to go all the way around South Africa, or (and in this case including the gold and silver from what are today called Chile, Bolivia, and Peru) all the way around the southernmost tip of South America. And longer ocean voyages meant higher expenses, higher risk of shipwreck or piracy, and lower profits.

Back then, a Northwest Passage did not exist. The northern limits of the continent around Alaska and Nunavut extend fully to the permanently frozen northern ice cap. But as global warming causes ice around the North Pole to melt, such a passage is starting to appear, which is the reason for Trump’s claims on Greenland, Norway’s incipient militarization of Svalbard, and accelerating levels of ocean floor prospecting and fossil fuel claims around the Arctic. In other words, the same geopolitical consideration still exists today.

Areas of Extraction

From the perspective of the ruling class in Toledo, Lisboa, Amsterdam, and London, the primary purpose of a colony was to create an area for extraction where some valuable good could be produced at great quantity and low expense, in a way that devastated complex ecosystems, leaving behind wastelands that were more legible to the State (e.g. easier to surveil than an ecosystem); and in a way that devastated the Indigenous populations, enabling the exponential expansion of conquest and colonization. It was an engine for economic, military, and social power at a time of increasing competition between European states, religious strife that broke the unity of the Church, and rebellions by the peasants and urban lower classes. To those using a military lens, it was a way to promote and organize economic accumulation that could finance their growing armies and navies. To those using a mercantile lens, it was a way to increase profit margins and trade volume, to corner or monopolize the market for high value commodities, to create derivatives markets in insurance and loans, and to fuel an incipient industrialism in Europe that was based on a similar process of colonization and enclosure waged against their own peasantry.

Put simply, colonialism provided the fuel for this new engine of global domination, the capitalist state.

To do colonialism well, European elites needed to create positive feedback loops between economic accumulation and state power, a codependency we can refer to as social control.

Colonial extraction in North America focused on beaver pelts in the territory of the Huron, Erie, and Haudenosaunee; tobacco in the territory of the Tsenacommacah; indigo dye in the territory of the Catawba; cotton in the territory of the Muscogee, Choctaw, Yamasee, and Guale; and sugar cane in the territory of the Chitimacha and Choctaw. This brief summary, of course, leaves out a number of colonial exports and a great many colonized or dispossessed peoples, but a pattern that we can see, from the French colonies of Quebec and Louisiana to the thirteen British colonies that formed the United States, is a focus on raw materials for the clothing industry (pelts, dye, and cotton) and addictive products for the military and the proletariat (tobacco, and sugar cane for making distilled alcohol like rum).

The clothing industry—mainly textiles but also animal skins—was one of the first in Europe to industrialize: to move from the control of artisanal guilds or peasant women to the control of wealthy merchants, property owners, and the banks they depended on to invest in the new machines that would standardize, deskill, and speed up the production process. As for the drugs (keeping in mind that the colonizers transformed tobacco from a sacred, ritual plant into an addictive consumer product), they were like a gift from Heaven. As far as the State was concerned, addiction was a wonderful alternative to mutiny or rebellion. Remember that colonialism required constant foreign wars, resulting in hundreds of thousands of soldiers traumatized by their own brutality and dying of diseases in faraway lands, and it was integrated with the enclosure of the commons in Europe, which meant the end of the peasant class: millions of people deprived of their autonomy and a direct connection to the land, consigned to poverty, famine, and wage labor. In such conditions, addictions can flourish, and where addiction is the norm effective resistance becomes scarce.

Settler states as failed colonies

US patriots are infamous for their self-importance, but there are two things about the invention of their country that almost none of them know. And I’m not talking about facts that they pretend not to know, like how without slavery and genocide there is no US.

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Here are the two things:

1. it was primarily France and not the colonial militias (led by the richest man and largest slave owner on the continent) who won the war against the British.

2. Britain decided to give up its thirteen North American colonies to focus on protecting its Caribbean colonies, like Jamaica and Barbados, and to improve its position in the Caribbean in general. In other words, when push came to shove, the future US was a backwater and the Caribbean was far more important.

There was, however, another important factor at work in the emergence of settler colonies, and it’s one that shows the strategic superiority of decentralization even in extremely anti-anarchic circumstances like colonization. The local Euro-descended elite, who played a managerial role in the colonies, developed their own class interests and their own strategies of accumulation and social control that tended to be more effective and more intelligent, because the local elite had access to local knowledge and an on-the-ground perspective.

For the European states, the colonies were nothing but plantations and mines that existed to augment their own wealth and dominance. But in those colonies, there were intense power struggles. At the bottom there were enslaved Africans, enslaved or dispossessed Indigenous peoples, mestizos, and indentured Europeans who were a mishmash of criminals, rebels, heretics, kidnapping victims, and peasants forced into debt. All of them were fighting for their survival, their dignity, and their freedom, even the Europeans, who faced high death rates during their contractually limited period of enslavement. These peoples were most dangerous when they came together in solidarity, which is why the colonizers legislated the concept of race into existence, criminalized solidarity, engineered situations that pitted one group against another, and viciously repressed rebellion.

Over more than a century, this process led to an entirely new invention: white people, who might compete and fight against one another for influence and ranking, but apparently God or Nature had given them rights, and in exchange they had to cooperate, rich and poor, to maintain order.

In the American colonies, the local white elite enlisted the white lower classes and a substantial part of the mestizo or mixed population to defeat their European overlords and create independent governments under their own control, free to pursue more intelligent and more genocidal military and economic policies. As a function of both whiteness and this new, non-aristocratic white elite that had strong connections to the financial and mercantile sub-elite of Europe, the newly independent colonies—from Venezuela to the United States—reestablished alliances with European powers. The US only took a couple decades to get cozy again with Britain, whereas others, like Venezuela, sought support from France. And seeing which way the wind was blowing, Britain in particular began to give greater autonomy to colonies like Canada.

At this point, the divergence between settler states and ex-colonies starts to become clear. Settler states became extensions of Europe without the baggage of Europe: white societies spreading on a territory with no remaining trace of the commons, primed for industrialism, private property, and liberal democracy. To fulfill this evil dream, they needed to attract a huge volume of immigration from Europe, which also helped Europe as a technique of social control, a pressure release valve for skyrocketing populations worked to the bone, clothed by industrialism, and fed by plantation economies.

As a case study, consider the Irish. Facing genocidal campaigns by the English over the course of centuries, settler colonies gave the Irish the option of emigrating. Emigration could be an escape from the necessity of rebellion and the likelihood of famine or summary execution. Later, the Brits would use this forced emigration pipeline to colonize Australia, and the Dutch would try to do the same in South Africa.

In the end, settler colonies were those that achieved a racial hegemony that allowed whiteness to be universalized as a self-referential norm. From Buenos Aires to Boston, citizens could pretend that they lived in a white society (they would use the term “civilized”) and anyone who wasn’t white was an exception, a minority, a marginal fact that didn’t merit attention from anyone other than the police.

Ex-colonies that did not achieve this hegemony remained plantations and mines, ruled by a white elite but still dependent on outside support. This meant they were never allowed to fully develop a locally situated strategy that would optimize state power. Simultaneously, they were encouraged to see their own country as a pile of resources to plunder and their subjects as a horde of savages to exploit, kill, or starve. Settler states grew in power, but the most important colonies, those that had been valued as mines and plantations—Bolivia, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Haiti—gradually became the poorest countries in the hemisphere. (Haiti, the poorest of these, was and continues to be deliberately punished as a Black country that overthrew its European colonizer and the local white plantation owners.)

The first settler states were:

• the United States

• Argentina

• Chile

• Uruguay

The next generation of settler states were:

• Canada

• Australia

• New Zealand

Examples of failed settler states (defeated in wars waged by the colonized population or by competing colonizers) include:

• Algeria when dominated by French landowners

• South Africa under the Dutch (the VOC, the Transvaal, the Orange Free State, and the apartheid government)

Settler state invented in the 20^th century:

• Israel (explicitly modeled on white supremacist/apartheid South Africa)

• The US and Israel have killed 3,040 people in Iran, at least 1,300 of them civilians and 1,112 military personnel, as well as dozens of government leaders, and their family members, including children and spouses completely uninvolved in affairs of state (599 deaths that have not been classified might also be civilians).

• They have wounded over 10,000 people, many of whom will be disabled or in chronic pain for the rest of their lives. Their strikes, which have hit over 10,000 civilian sites including 25 hospitals, have displaced 3.2 million people from their homes.

• The US bombed a girl’s school in southern Iran, murdering between 165 and 180 civilians, at least 110 of them small children.

• Israel has launched a major invasion of Lebanon, invading the south of the country, bombing cities and towns from the capital to the Bekaa Valley to the north of the country, killing 826 people, including 106 children and 31 paramedics, while injuring around 2000, and displacing 830,000 people from their homes.

• Hezbollah, in Lebanon, has launched about 850 rockets and drones at Israel since March 2, though none of their attacks inside Israel have killed anyone.

• Hezbollah’s attack came in support of Iran and also as an act of defense after repeated Israeli violations of the ceasefire

• Israel has also taken advantage of the war to occupy more territory in southern Syria. In December 2024 and early 2025, Israel invaded and occupied the rest of the Golan Heights, a fertile and strategic 1,200 square kilometer (460 sq mile) region in southwestern Syria, an adjacent area of 500 square km, and part of Syria bordering Lebanon. Around the beginning of their new attack on Iran, Israel also began new incursions against Syria. The Israeli government has announced this land theft will be permanent.

• In just the first week of the war, Israeli settlers murdered at least 8 Palestinians in the West Bank and wounded many more, with the support of the Israeli military according to an Israeli human rights group.

• In the first two weeks of the US and Israeli attacks on Iran, the Israeli military killed at least 40 people in Gaza.

• The US has mostly knocked out Iran’s navy and air force, but Iran is still able to launch missile and drones, and still controls the vital Strait of Hormuz.

• Missile and drone attacks by Iran have killed 19 people in total—6 soldiers and 13 civilians—in the Gulf States that have been supporting the US attack. Six people were killed in Kuwait and in the UAE, three people killed in Oman, two people were killed in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. There have been injuries but no deaths in Qatar, Jordan, and Syria, in the latter case due to missiles shot down by Israel.

• Most of the civilian deaths in the Arabic countries listed above were hyperexploited “guest workers” from south and southeast Asia, as most of the Gulf States allied to the US (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait) constitute an Arabic version of white supremacist, segregated societies where labor and profits and racially divided, similar to the white supremacist apartheid system in Israel.

• 13 US soldiers have gotten themselves killed and around 150 wounded in the course of their war against Iran (the fatalities occurred in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq). Only 8 (as of five days ago) were severely wounded, and over 100 quickly returned to duty. US soldiers, like US cops, report minor injuries like sprains or bruises in conflict situations they bear the blame for, in order to present themselves as victims and to access paid time off or other forms of compensation.

• 12 people in Israel have been killed by Iranian strikes. I can’t find any info on how many were settler paramilitaries, which the media incorrectly label as civilians. Two Israeli soldiers have gotten themselves killed invading Lebanon.

• Another front of the war is opening in Iraq where 46 people have been killed, including one French and six US occupation soldiers, 35 Iraqi fighters allied with Iran, at least five Kurdish militants and a Kurdish airport guard, and a civilian in Baghdad.

• Kurdistan has been occupied by Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkiye, all of which have carried out brutal repression and genocide. Most Kurdish organizations are allied with the United States and do not openly support groups oppressed by the US or its allies. The US alternates between arming these Kurdish groups and abandoning them to major massacres. It is unclear whether the Kurds will trust this alliance again to fight for the liberation of Iranian-occupied Kurdistan.

• In the first 12 days of the offensive against Iran, the US spent around $16.5 billion. Between October 2023 and September 2025, the US has given Israel $21.7 billion in military aid. In the same time period, the US spent about $12 billion to fund its military operations against Yemen and Iran, leading to a total expenditure of around $33 billion in just two years. The US has also agreed to sell Israel tens of billions of dollars in weapons over the coming months and years.

• If similar spending levels continue, that $33 billion military budget in support of genocide would make up for 20% of the money the US government is taking out of Medicaid, depriving millions of its own citizens of healthcare even as they create health emergencies on the other side of the world, including in their attacks on Yemen, which by some measurements is the second poorest country in the world, under assault by the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf states.

• So far this century, the US has spent an estimated $5.8 trillion on its wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Iran. (Every single US president in history has invaded other countries. The US is, like Israel, Australia, Argentina… a country founded on genocide.) None of those countries attacked the US. Afghanistan harbored some people who attacked the US, but US-ally Saudi Arabia financed those people with no consequences, and in revenge for fewer than 3,000 deaths, the US directly killed 240,000 people in their invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and created conditions of poverty, disease, and famine that killed hundreds of thousands more.

• Looking at the entire US War on Terror through 2023 (before the current war), the US directly killed 940,000 people in five Muslim countries, and indirectly killed another 3.6 – 3.8 million people.

To get beyond the statistics, read this article from The Guardian, “Entire families wiped out and towns emptied as Israel’s war on Lebanon intensifies,” this one from Al Jazeera, “How Many Times Has Israel Violated the Gaza Ceasefire?” or especially this one from CrimethInc., “History Is Repeating Itself.”

In this article I’m going to be looking at:

• Antisemitism and Islamophobia

• A Fourth Israeli War?

• Geopolitics in West Asia

• Geopolitics for the Rest of the World

• Geopolitics for the US and Israel

• The Resistance

If you have a good grasp of the history of the various wars the state of Israel has participated in, feel free to jump down to the sections on geopolitics where I discuss the impacts of the ongoing war and how this might affect the world in the coming years.

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Antisemitism and Islamophobia

Since the US and Israel began the current war, there has been an increase in antisemitic attacks in Europe, North America, and Australia, such as attacks on synagogues. Conflating Jewish people everywhere and anywhere with the state of Israel is definitionally antisemitic and wrong, though it must also be said that Israel itself frequently promotes this conflation to say that it is antisemitic to criticize the genocidal policies of the Israeli state. At the same time, that state supports antisemitic but Zionist politicians and political movements, from the rightwing Viktor Orbán in Hungary to the MAGA movement in the US. Why? Because they’re settler state politicians, every bit as racist, murderous, and dishonest as the leaders of the US.

Despite the manipulations of Netanyahu and Trump, we need to be unwavering in condemning and discouraging antisemitism. But we also need to be clear that Islamophobia and anti-Arabic racism is more widespread and more underreported, from New York to Berlin. And the tiny anti-war movement in Israel, expressing solidarity with Palestinians and Iranians, faces extreme violence from police and settlers. Prison guards threatened to carve a Star of David into the face of one 19-year-old Jewish solidarity protester.

It has gone almost entirely unreported that the US and Israel chose to begin their war during Ramadan, the holiest part of the Muslim calendar. The entire war is a deliberate act of Islamophobia.

That context is important. It’s also important, for example, to know that the Lebanese-American who attacked a synagogue in Michigan on 12 March did so just one week after Israel murdered four members of his family in Lebanon: his two brothers, a niece and a nephew—children—all died when Israel bombed and destroyed their house.

Israel defended the attack saying that one of the adult brothers was a member of Hezbollah. To be crystal clear, if other people used the standards of war that are routinely employed and defended by Israel, it would be acceptable to murder every single member of the Israeli government, every single member of the IDF (past and present), every single armed settler in the West Bank or in the Negev Desert, and every single family member of theirs, from babies to great grandparents. This is why an anarchist ethics is so important: we must never, ever use the methods of those we fight against, or otherwise we become our own worst enemies.

Antisemitism is indefensible and it is a real, present form of harm in our society. However, any sincere discussion of this must also acknowledge that Zionists currently instrumentalize antisemitism to cover up or justify what is currently a far more lethal and more widespread form of hatred: Islamophobia and anti-Arabic racism.

Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Iranian state are all oppressive and brutal, but little is said about the systematic torture and sexual assault in Israeli prisons and black sites or their widespread practice of taking hostages or disappearing dissidents. When it comes to forcible evictions, land theft, and the invasion and occupation of other countries, there is no comparison: Israel is the clear aggressor. Israel’s kill count tends to be at least 100 times higher than that of Hamas or Hezbollah and they regularly kill children, shoot (Palestinian) protestors, and target hospitals and media. The whole of Israeli society is legally structured along lines of apartheid or segregation. Arabic and African Jews are second-class citizens. The relatively small number of Palestinians who attained Israeli citizenship are a third-class citizens who enjoy fewer rights and face systematic discrimination. And all the other Palestinians whose lands were stolen for the creation of the Israeli state have no rights at all. Israeli settlers and soldiers slaughter them without consequence. They kill them and laugh about it and put it on social media.

In the face of this oppression, fighting against the Israeli state is valid and necessary.

A Fourth Israeli War?

I want to put the ongoing attacks against Iran in a broader context, connected as it is to the ongoing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, to Israel’s attacks on Iran in June 2025, its attacks on Yemen and Iraq, and its ongoing invasion and occupation of southern Lebanon and Syria.

I also want to break with the colonial tradition of naming wars after the countries or peoples that are invaded or wiped out – the Arauco War, the Shawnee Wars, the Korea War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War. Those were all unprovoked wars by, in the above cases, Spain, France, or the US against the people of Arauco (the Mapuche), against the Shawnee and their allies, against Korea, against Vietnam, against Iraq. And if Spain, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, or the US end up appearing in the names of hundreds of wars, maybe it would be a little harder for people to ignore the true nature of these states.

So why name the current war after Israel when the US is the one bringing the most force to bear against Iran? Because the attacks against Iran are just one theater in a larger regional war in which Israel is the primary aggressor, and because they are a continuation of Israel’s attacks against Iran last year. Those attacks were ultimately unsuccessful, so Israel has called in its main ally, the US.

The US and Israel instrumentalize each other, neither is a puppet, both are powerful, both strategically use the other. The US is of course much more powerful on a global level, but Israel has much greater continuity of policy whereas the US has an ideological attachment to Israel that doesn’t always serve its long term strategic interests. Also, the US is currently ruled by one of the most idiotic and easy-to-manipulate presidents in modern history.

Days after I started writing this essay, US Secretary of State Rubio admitted that the US attacked Iran due to Israeli pressure rather than as its own strategic initiative, and most analysts agree the war is in Israeli interests and not in US interests.

So, if this is the Fourth Israeli war, and it combines what the media often present as separate wars and “conflicts,” since, well, they’re absolutely connected, what were the first three?

1. The first war started with the Naqba, the massive ethnic cleansing that Zionist paramilitary organizations carried out in 1947 and 1948, displacing half the Palestinian population and depopulating over 500 towns and neighborhoods, often at gunpoint. After murdering or disappearing over a thousand people in around 70 different massacres, the newly created state of Israel gained control of 78% of what had been the British colony of Mandatory Palestine. In 1917, when Britain declared its support for Zionism, only about 5% of the population was Jewish, and nearly all the rest was Muslim.

The First Israeli War continued with the Arab-Israeli war (against Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq) of 1948 when Israel created its own borders by continuing to evict most of the inhabitants of that territory and occupying substantial territory from neighboring countries. If this war had a postscript, it was the temporary invasion of Sinai (in Egypt) with secret support from UK and France in 1956, strengthening Israel’s western border and largely ending reprisal attacks from Palestinian fedayeen in exile in Egypt. The result of this war was the invention of the state of Israel on the basis of massacres, evictions, and land theft, and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, turning them and their children into permanent refugees.

2. The 2^nd Israeli War combines the Six Day War of 1967, against Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan, the low-intensity War of Attrition that continued until 1970, and the Yom Kippur War of 1973, against Egypt and Syria. These wars were sparked by growing hostilities as Israel sought to defeat the Palestine Liberation Organization, to expand beyond its 1949 borders, to seize the flow of the Jordan River in a water scarce region, and to steal strategic terrain from Syria (the Golan Heights) and Egypt (the Sinai Peninsula). Israel won, though pressure from the US and other allies eventually succeeded in forcing Israel to return the Sinai Peninsula.

3. Not content with the new 1967 boundaries which ceded most of Palestine to Israel, reserving only the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Israel began asserting increasing control over both, as well as attacking Palestinian refugees and resistance groups in southern Lebanon between 1978 and ‘86. Through intense levels of repression, Israel was able to condition and ultimately capture the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which had been a revolutionary coalition and which they later turned into a corrupt proxy that would help them manage Palestinians. During and after this time period, Mossad and the IDF also gave clandestine support to Hamas and other fundamentalist, antisemitic groups, preferring an enemy that would be less likely to win support and sympathy in the West or from the USSR.

4. The 4^th Israeli War started as a response to the Second Intifada. Sick of living under a racist regime, the gradual encroachment of Israeli settlers stealing their lands, burning their orchards, harassing or killing them, constant repression, kidnapping, torture, and killings by the Israeli military, the refusal to allow Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, the coöptation and corruption of the PLO, the political shift of neighboring states as they abandoned the Palestinians and allied with the US, and the apathy of the rest of the world to their plight, the Palestinian people rose up from 2000 to 2005, fighting primarily with rocks, with their voices, their bodies. Some actions were organized by militant groups like the al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade (associated with the leftwing secular Fatah party), but a great deal of the intifada, or uprising, was spontaneous.

In early 2006, the last time the Palestinians were allowed to hold an election, they overwhelmingly voted in favor of Hamas over the longtime ruling party of Fatah – a secular leftist party connected to Yasser Arafat and the PLO, but long since pacified and corrupted. (Here is a good article explaining the relationship between Fatah, the PLO, the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas.)

Israel, realizing that all their brutality still didn’t keep them safe from their victims, launched a series of military operations against Gaza between 2006 and 2009, and began building the Apartheid Wall, a “security measure” that formed part of a transparent policy to gradually divide, annex, and ethnically cleanse the entirety of the West Bank, with illegal settler paramilitaries, the Israeli military, and the Israeli government working in tandem. The war became hot when Hamas launched its 7 October 2023 reprisal for accelerating levels of ethnic cleansing. From there, as we know, the war spread to Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran, with multiple civil wars, bombing campaigns, and invasions.

The connecting thread between all these wars is Israel’s inability to accept any boundaries and the belief of its ruling class and most of its population—whether secular or fundamentalist—that their right to other people’s land and their right to prosperity trumps other people’s right to basic survival.

In the First Israeli War, Israel broke its 1947 borders, which it had accepted in the Israeli Declaration of Independence. In 1949, Israel signed an armistice agreement establishing new expanded borders—the Green Line—but it broke that promise in 1967 with another aggressive war. Now, in its Fourth War, Israel is openly declaring the total liquidation of Palestine, from the highest levels of government down to the heavily armed settler “civilians” doing much of the killing and land theft in the West Bank. It is also occupying more areas of Lebanon and Syria, going beyond its earlier, self-declared boundaries that were already in violation of an international agreement – an agreement that favored Israel by accepting their earlier campaigns of territorial growth through warfare (which goes blatantly against one of the basic tenets of international law).

What is the immediate background to the 4^th Israeli War?

A highly unpopular president facing corruption charges and possible prison time, in 2023 Netanyahu was a rightwing politician who allied with far Right parties to stay in power. (He also grew up in the US, and spent some years in the IDF conducting raids into Jordan and Lebanon.) In order to stay in power and avoid prison, he kept a majority by bringing together secular parties, parties representing different currents of Judaism, and even a party comprised largely of antisemitic Russians who had immigrated to improve their living conditions, taking advantage of the Israeli Birthright Program (a program designed to build up a a strong white majority by granting citizenship to anyone who could claim a Jewish grandparent). The only thing these parties had in common was their hatred of Palestinians and Muslims and their support for an aggressive Israeli nationalism.

I would not be the first person to suggest that as his legal troubles grew, Netanyahu deliberately provoked war to give Israeli citizens an external enemy. It has worked out. In the summer of 2023 or late in 2025, Netanyahu would have lost an election by a landslide. Now, two weeks into the latest phase of his war against Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Palestine, he has a 74% approval rating and pro-war Israeli patriotism is on the rise, with support for the war polling at over 80%.

Starting in June 2023, the Israeli government approved the construction of 13,000 new houses for illegal settlers in the West Bank, accelerating the ethnic cleansing. Settlements in Israel involve the military supporting heavily armed settler paramilitaries as they harass and attack Palestinians, destroying gardens, cutting down orchards, and demolishing houses. When Palestinian families finally move out, the settlers steal the land, encroaching one mile at a time, year after year. The Israeli government does not allow Palestinians to build new houses in the West Bank, and countless times they have openly declared their intentions to remove all Palestinians using any and all means.

Hamas responded by attacking Israeli military posts around the Gaza Strip and seizing as many hostages as they could from the surrounding settlements, also killing many noncombatants. As they returned to Gaza with their prisoners, the IDF opened fire in line with their policy of killing hostages and hostage-takers to deprive the enemy of leverage.

As Israel was completing its invasion and occupation of Gaza and expanding its occupations in Syria and Lebanon, it launched a major assault against Iran to try to wipe out Iran’s nuclear program. The operation set Iran back but did not fully succeed, and around the same time Israel realized that Iran’s missile capabilities were an equal or greater tactical threat, and one they would have an even harder time getting rid of. So they enlisted the US.

Israel’s constant violation of the ceasefire agreements with Hamas in Palestine, and with Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, is also necessary context and a further reason for considering this a single, continuous war. In the first four months of the ceasefire, 10 October 2024 to 10 February 2026, Israel violated the ceasefire agreement at least 1,620 times in Gaza alone, killing at least 640 Palestinians and injuring 1,730. Israel justified its continuing campaign of genocide by claiming Hamas was violating the agreement by not returning all the bodies of the last Israeli prisoners. The reason Hamas had not returned those bodies was because Israel had bombed the tunnels where they were being held, killing captors and captives, and heavy excavation equipment was required to find the bodies. In other moments, Israel has maintained its unofficial policy of murdering at least 100 Palestinians for every Israeli killed. After a small gunbattle in Rafah (Gaza) claimed the life of a single Israeli invader, Israel killed 109 people, including 52 children, which Trump subsequently justified as “retribution.”

Throughout 2025, during a ceasefire, Israeli forces were carrying out almost two attacks a day against Syria. In Lebanon, those violations were daily, with 7,500 documented airspace violations and 2,500 ground violations, a technocratic term for small scale invasions and operations against the people of Syria and Lebanon. In the first year of the ceasefire, Israel killed at least 127 civilians in Lebanon as well as many soldiers and Hezbollah fighters, despite Hezbollah disarming south of the Litani River, as agreed. Israeli attacks killed at least 13 children and injured another 146. The UN Special Rapporteur describes Israel as having a “total disregard for the ceasefire agreement.” Israel continues to hold dozens of Lebanese hostages—both civilians and fighters—and refuses to release their names, meaning they have been effectively disappeared.

Now that we have a precise view of the threads of continuity between these wars and the primary motivations of the Israeli state, let’s look at the geopolitical impacts of this war and what that means for the future.

Why should anarchists think critically about geopolitics? After all, geopolitics is the question of competing state strategies within the capitalist world system, a system that is antithetical to liberation, to the commune, to life itself.

Here are a couple examples that might show the importance of understanding our enemy.

• During and after the first Trump administration, many US anarchists spread alarmist and inaccurate warnings of an imminent fascist takeover which made it much easier for the growing wave of anti-racist, anti-police rebellions to be pacified and coöpted by the Left in 2020. In many ways this came down to a misunderstanding of fascism, of democracy, of the Left, of a democratic far Right, and of the history of leftist and particularly antifascist coalitions recuperating and pacifying rebellions.

• Anarchists in Ukraine, perceiving the likelihood of a Russian invasion in the early 2020s, gave themselves an opportunity to debate the relative merits of going into exile, shifting to a clandestine struggle under Russian occupation, or finding ways to fight off the Russian invasion, and to prepare.

• Revolutionaries elsewhere, from Sudan to Kurdistan, can and do use geopolitical analysis to understand the interests and strategies of the major powers that fund and shape the bloody conflicts they are subjected to.

Geopolitics for West Asia

I put together a chart of the 15 countries of West Asia, plus Egypt, to help us look at the global, interstate competition for power and position. Let’s start with the economies. The list below is ranked from the wealthiest countries to the poorest. To capitalist technocrats, “wealth” means the average amount of monetary value produced per person. Let’s keep in mind how pathological a notion that is, since a wealthy country like the US (#1 GDP) can be full of poor people.

To help illustrate that, on the right hand column I listed each country’s ranking in a “quality of life” index that measures 45 factors related to things like legal rights, healthcare, political and economic stability, costs vs. income, and safety. Clearly, the supposed wealth of a country often doesn’t line up with its quality of life. Israel, second on the list by GDP, is second to last for quality of life in the first tier.

What emerges from the GDP ranking is a list clearly divided into two different groups. The first tier all belong to the top third of wealthiest countries in the world. Then between Turkiye and Iraq there is an immense gap, as the GDP ranking plunges from 64^th place to 115^th place.

The middle column in my chart shows each country’s global ranking in oil production. Since natural gas makes up a smaller portion of the world energy market, I only included gas production if the country is in the top 20. A quick fact: in terms of total fossil fuel production (oil, gas, and coal) Iran is 3^rd place in the world, Qatar is 6^th, Saudi Arabia is 9^th.

see the very bottom of this essay for notes on sources and explanations of *, **, and --

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It helps to mention that Turkiye, Israel, and Iran probably have the most dynamic economies of the sixteen countries on this list, meaning they have multiple economic sectors that can generate significant revenue rather than being fully dependent on fossil fuels. Countries like the UAE, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia are doing their best to use oil profits to jumpstart a significant tech, manufacturing, or finance sector.

I put the country’s name in bold if it is an energy superpower or a significantly dynamic economy. What jumps out now? There’s only a moderate correlation here. One of the three most dynamic economies is in the bottom tier, and the greatest energy superpower is also in the bottom tier.

Guess what?

That top tier consists exclusively of US allies. Countries in the region allied with the US and non-belligerent towards Israel are the wealthiest. The countries that had an oppositional stance towards Israel until after the 2^nd Israeli War (Egypt, Iraq, Jordan), and the countries that Israel currently sees as enemies are the poorest.

Iraq might have had as dynamic an economy as Iran, but the US has waged two wars against it since 1990, heavily bombing all its cities and killing well over a million people. With control of the Suez Canal and significant oil reserves, Egypt might have good economic prospects, but it faced neocolonial invasions by Britain, France, and Israel in 1956 and has been ruled by US-backed dictators or military juntas since 1981, putting it in a perpetual state of conflict with its own population and isolating it from regional Pan-Arab networks. Lebanon was once an international tourist destination with a high standard of living and decent economic prospects, but Israel has pounded it into the dust.

This next chart is much simpler: which countries have powerful militaries capable of offensive action against other countries in the region?

1. Turkiye +

2. Israel +

3. Iran +

4. Egypt -

5. Saudi Arabia -

6. Iraq -

The + marks a country that might choose to start or expand a war because their military/political power has a relatively stable basis. Countries with a – are extremely unlikely to start a war and probably don’t want major wars anywhere near them because of a major economic vulnerability (Saudi Arabia) or because their populations are highly divided (Iraq) and/or potentially rebellious.

(My own analysis but also backed by more systematic studies like this one.)

It’s safe to say that Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia are dependent on military aid, military cooperation, and arms sales from the US (and from Germany, in the case of Israel), whereas Turkiye benefits from NATO membership, which includes access to US military technologies.

So let’s get to the point: to have a strong geopolitical position in West Asia, a ruling class needs US backing and it needs to avoid any hostilities with Israel. Any country that borders Israel is shit out of luck, since Israel will steal the territory it has a self-declared right to and then organize destabilization operations to keep that country weak.

Key questions that will impact events in West Asia over the following decade are:

• Will the government in Iran remain in power?

• Will the Erdogan government in Turkiye remain in power, and in either case, will it choose a more proactive role in the rest of West Asia that goes beyond preventing Kurdish independence and supporting fundamentalist groups from a distance?

• Will Syria or Iraq develop unified, stable governments capable of exerting pressure on the region, and if so what will the ideology and strategy of those governments be?

• Will Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or the UAE improve relations with China, allowing them to act with more independence from the US, and if so, will they stop protecting Israel?

• Will a new direction emerge in the Kurdish independence movement? What alliances will they seek?

• Will the European Union or some alliance of powerful players like Germany, France, and the UK, gain the capacity to apply unified and effective strategies on the world stage in a way that gives Israel more security but also places a limit on their genocide and aggressive actions?

For more on the calculations facing West Asian governments, read “Asia and the Iran Conflict” from the Middle East Council on Global Affairs. [And please keep in mind I will often link to or recommend articles from the enemy press, from institutions fighting to protect colonial capitalism and the State. I do so to help spread an understanding of how they are thinking and operating.]

Geopolitics for the Rest of the World

However:

Alliance with the US and complicity with Israel are also a major liability for governments beyond West Asia.

Why?

• By attacking Iran, Israel has wrecked the oil-dependent economies of its longtime enablers Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Qatar.

• North America is still the top oil and gas producing region in the world. The US doesn’t depend on West Asian oil.

• East and South Asian countries do. 80% of the oil and gas that, until February 28, shipped through the Strait of Hormuz went to countries like China, Japan, South Korea, and India.

• The Philippines, Japan, and Pakistan get over 90% of their crude oil from the so-called Middle East. For China that figure is just over 50%.

• International oil prices have been fluctuating wildly, which adds risk factors to economic investment everywhere. Crude oil prices have been staying over $100 a barrel, marking at least a 30% increase.

The US and Israel are wrecking the world economy and probably speeding up a huge global recession that has been in the forecast for a while. The top competitor to the US for the position of global leader is China. As I’ve written in several past essays, that doesn’t mean China conquers the world. It means that China plays the key role in launching a new, functional, architecture for governing global capitalism, the way the US did with the UN and IMF after WWII.

China will likely do that, and is already trying to do that, by becoming a center for investment and a chief global investor, making money and guiding capitalist development in other parts of the world, while also strengthening political and economic networks with non-aligned countries like Brazil, India, and South Africa.

How is this affected by the 4^th Israeli War? Here’s a partial list of countries that are politically, militarily, or economically dependent on the US, but are also being hurt by the war:

• Japan

• South Korea

• Taiwan

• Philippines

• Saudi Arabia

• Qatar, UAE, Bahrain…

Every single country on that list now has another reason to see US power as a liability. They may push to decrease support for Israel, to diversify their economies and energy supplies, to ease out of their dependency on the US, or to look for major investors elsewhere. All of those moves improve China’s geopolitical position relative to the US.

Countries that enjoy a medium level of power on the world stage, like Turkiye, Saudi Arabia, and Iran in West Asia, and elsewhere South Korea, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, or Brazil, will put themselves in a better position by not falling into open hostilities with the US while also not being beholden to it. Their goal, from a ruling class perspective, is to attract investments that will allow them to diversify their economies and decrease their vulnerability to rising global instability, and to become important nodes in the production or supply chains for strategic growth sectors in the economy (like processor chips, and Taiwan). Un/like Taiwan, they would also need domestic military capabilities that would dissuade any invasions or aggressive military action by neighbors, rather than relying on a powerful ally that might suddenly withdraw its guarantees of protection.

Let’s come at this another way:

With the fragmentation of NATO, chronic stupidity on the part of the US, a historical period in military technology that gives the default advantage to the defender rather than the invader, and growing Chinese power, it’s a geopolitical situation in which mid-level powers (like Saudi Arabia, as well as Turkiye, Iran, Brazil, etc.) have more options for patronage. They don’t need to make permanent pledges of allegiance to one bloc or another, as during the Cold War. Their allegiance is a more valuable commodity, they can give it and retract it on a case-by-case basis, meaning there is a much richer strategic game they can play.

In other words, the defensive advantages of current day warfare, the political fragmentation of NATO and the USSR, the emergence of China as another contender, and the shift of investment to the Global South means that “non-aligned countries” are in a much better position than they were during the Cold War. I don’t say this in any kind of romantic or optimistic way. Their chosen tools are the State and capitalism, meaning any outcome will be steeped in oppression and extraction. I also think the political and economic leaders of all these countries know and embrace that, whereas in the ‘60s and ‘70s and least some leaders—from Cuba to Ghana to Tanzania to Indonesia—truly believed in political proposals that were supposed to be emancipatory, from pan-Africanism to state socialism. These days, I think the only people who believe that the State can be a tool for good are academic Marxists, First World cults like the PSL, or people anywhere who believe someone needs to come and save them.

Geopolitics for the US and Israel

Let’s get back to Israel. Writing shortly after the beginning of the war on Gaza, I predicted that Israel’s aggressiveness and hubris would damage its own interests, leading to capital flight, war damage, and political instability. In the short-term, I was wrong: I didn’t imagine the effectiveness of Israel’s covert operations that decapitated Hezbollah, and I didn’t predict the sudden collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, followed by a new regime that has increased intra-Muslim and intra-Arabic conflict while, for now at least, enabling Israeli belligerence. Israel suddenly went from being hemmed in on all sides to having a single armed opponent: Iran.

But by trying to finish off Iran with US support, we’re again seeing the limits of Israeli power. As long as a couple bombs and missiles are still landing in Israel, it becomes a less attractive site for capitalist investment. Eventually, the US economy will collapse and eventually an administration that is not pro-Israel will win an election. I’m not optimistic enough to believe that Germany will ever stop being German (i.e. pro-Israel and pro-genocide), but sooner or later Israel is going to lose a big chunk of its military budget while it continues to make more and more enemies. Those who are shocked by torture and genocide will be concerned by the unending atrocities, whereas politicians and investors wring their hands over the destabilizing effects of Israeli government policy.

Political support for Netanyahu’s government, inside Israel, had been decreasing—not because of opposition to genocide but because of Netanyahu’s corruption and the economic costs of the war—but the assault on Iran has led to a resurgence of patriotism, signalling that the country may be locked into a geopolitical strategy that will hurt their own interests. That is a larger pattern: rightwing governments and rightwing societies, even though they wave the flag the most, tend to get confused by their own ideologies and enact strategies that actually undermine the basis of their power. It’s certainly happening to the US under Trump. And Israel’s version of white supremacy will continue to make Israel its own worst enemy. Tel Aviv needs greater regional cooperation to crowd out actual competitors like Turkiye and Iran, and it needs to put the brakes on settlers in the West Bank to attain a minimal semblance of concern for human rights and international law, but the entirety of Israeli society ensures a racist, Islamophobic, anti-Arabic government that is either Right or far Right, continuing to make enemies and destabilize the region.

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As for the US, boy oh boy. I get the feeling no one in the higher levels of the Trump administration even knew what the Strait of Hormuz was when they launched this war.

Numerous US troops have been reporting that their field commanders have been instructing them to view the current war as a religious war against Christianity’s longtime foe, Islam. Likewise, a small but significant number of US billionaires like Peter Thiel espouse Christian fundamentalist beliefs. This is bad news for the US state and capitalists. Fundamentalists usually carry too much ideological baggage to be effective state planners, and capitalists on the whole definitely prefer democracy to some kind of fascistic or religious dictatorship. Currently, there is little risk of an imminent fascist takeover in the US, but as those low and mid-level officers become high-level officers, gradually replacing the current leadership of the US military, that risk increases. It’s also bad news for Israel because the majority of Zionists are antisemitic Christians who only want a Jewish state in Jerusalem because of obscure prophecy. In their minds, as soon as Jebus returns in the Second Coming, all Jews go to hell. Not a great ally.

I’ve said it before in more detail: the US came out of World War II on top, with the strongest alliances, the best geopolitical position, the strongest economy, and having suffered the least damage. That allowed them to engineer the next world system, especially since they had the full cooperation of the UK, the architect of the world system that ended with the chaos of World War I.

After winning the Cold War, the US had the entire world on a platter to exploit or “develop” as it chose. Bush II threw the entire thing in the garbage by invading Iraq and since then every administration in the White House has contributed to the systemic chaos that is breaking apart the world system that benefited the US the most. Democrats have contributed by being mediocre intellects with no coherent strategy. Republicans and at least half of the billionaire class have accelerated it by being absolute morons and psychopaths with the egos of Gods but neither the power nor perspective to pay the piper.

This could be a good thing. Fuck all of them to hell and back. The problem is, without strong revolutionary movements, all that will happen is a new constellation of power will arise, imposing a new global architecture. And smart of stupid, to rule, one must be evil. And I don’t mean that in the Christian sense of a tainted soul. Just that they are willing to cause massive suffering to do what they want, whether they believe it’s right or they’re just looking to enrich themselves. That’s the inflexible nature of the State.

Given this total inability to develop meaningful strategy, it doesn’t make so much sense to analyze their geopolitical possibilities. What comes next will be mostly determined by the strategies and successes of China, non-aligned countries like Brazil and India, and the European Union; and by the pace and exact course of an ongoing ecosystemic breakdown which has the potential to destroy capitalism in the coming decades, but not to liberate us from the State, which is something we have to do ourselves.

The Resistance

And that is the final factor, our revolutionary movements, which currently barely appear on the map the way they did in 2020 and 2010. Our first task is to understand what happened? What were our weaknesses? What strategic mistakes did we make that caused us to lose so much collective power?

The answer will be different everywhere, and we will only find the answers by looking, reflecting, and conversing, but there will be some patterns. In many places, an answer might be that we didn’t actually have any strategy at all because we never dared get together and talk about a revolution, and we probably don’t even know how to imagine revolution outside the tired false solutions of the authoritarian or reformist Left.

Next, we need to look at the strengths we have that we might not be fully conscious of. We need to think about how to help cultivate these into tools and weapons of liberation, which means education, collective care, defending or rediscovering the commons and making ourselves a part of them, community self-defense, sabotage, hitting back, and international solidarity.

The first steps we each have to take as individuals, always, but so much of this can only be done in groups that extend beyond friendship circles, beyond single countries or demographics, and even beyond humankind.

Find your people. Not online: in the real world. Map out your battlefield. Choose your strategies. You don’t all have to agree—unity, in fact, is the enemy of freedom—but you do need to be able to give and receive critical feedback in a spirit of solidarity.

Then, go beyond who you currently trust. Invite others into this subversive conversation. Cancel your discomfort, find what might bring you together across all the differences, and go for it.

Be brave.

*in many lists of ranking by country, Palestine does not have an official ranking because it is occupied by Israel. To get around this, I list the ranking of the country that comes closest to Palestine in each particular category.

**Syria and Yemen are so poor and war-ravaged, no reliable data exists for a quality of life ranking. Instead, I have placed their global ranking for life expectancy.

-- marks the countries that have no significant fossil fuel production

Here are two pages on fossil fuel production, from this year and 2019, for comparison:

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/chart-where-the-worlds-oil-comes-from-by-region/

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2019/06/mapped-fossil-fuel-production-by-country/

-GDP per capita uses 2023 data

-quality of life from https://www.worlddata.info/quality-of-life.php World in Data

-to use another metric for comparison, the Human Development Index from 2023 ranked all the first tier countries here between 15^th best in the world (UAE) and 52^nd best (Kuwait) whereas the second tier countries in my chart are all significantly lower. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index#2023_Human_Development_Index_(2025_report)

country, gdp per capita, oil/ (gas) production rank, quality of life

Qatar 12 14 / (6) 27

Israel 17 -- 58

UAE 23 9 / (14) 13

Saudi Arabia 39 2 / (9) 49

Kuwait 43 10 53

Bahrain 46 37 48

Oman 62 20 / (18) 52

Turkiye 64 49 80

Iraq 115 7 134

Lebanon 118 -- 129

Jordan 121 -- 76

Iran 131 8 / (3) 132

Egypt 134 21 / (16) 104

Palestine* 152 125

Syria 180 48 **140

Yemen 192 54 **174

In another unprovoked war, the US and Israel attacked Iran starting in the early hours of February 28. Over two days, they have launched over thousands of missiles and bombs from jets, drones, land and naval forces, targeting civilian, military, and governmental targets in a thousand different sites across Iran, including hospitals and schools, as well as attacking several organizations in Iraq that are allied with the Iranian government.

In a precision strike at the beginning of the offensive, they killed Iran’s leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini and several of his family members, a precision strike that has dominated most media attention. Much less attention has been given to the Israeli missile attack on a girls’ school in Minab, killing around 180 young children.

Early on March 2, Hezbollah made a limited attack on an Israeli military base, and Israel responded with a massive bombardment of military and residential sites in Beirut and across Lebanon. It is important to note that Israel continues to occupy parts of southern Lebanon for the past 15 months, in violation of international law and its own ceasefire guarantees, and it carries out approximately one attack on Lebanon every day, also despite the ceasefire. Israeli strikes have impoverished southern Lebanon, destroying thousands of homes, infrastructure, orchards, and other farmland. They have killed over 4,000 people, including 316 children, 790 women, and over 200 medics, and they have wounded over 16,000 people. During the ceasefire, Israel has killed 331 people, including at least 147 civilians, according to the UN. They have displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

So far, the Iranian state has demonstrated a stable continuity of command in its counterattacks, comprising of missile and drone strikes on Israel, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain. All of these countries have been involved in the attacks on Iran, and all except Israel host US military bases (though of course the Israeli military is primarily funded and protected by the US and Germany). Unlike the US and Israel, Iran has focused its response on military facilities, which is considered legitimate under international law, since they were attacked without provocation and in the midst of peace talks.

The logic for the war is based essentially on a white supremacist double standard: the US and by extension NATO have decided that Israel may develop nuclear weapons, whereas Iran may not, and US and European governments, including Israel, are allowed to attack, invade, and carry out regime change in any non-white or historically colonized country they want.

The war is a continuation of Israel’s June 2025 attack on Iran, an offensive that did not meet Israel’s objectives of destroying Iran’s capacity to enrich uranium. The current offensive, now with massive support and leadership from the United States, has the objectives of regime change, destroying Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, and destroying Iran’s missile capabilities.

Some March 2 updates: towards the end of the second day of the war and throughout the third day, in response to continued barrages from Israel and the US, Iran shifted more attacks to energy infrastructure around the region, hitting oil refineries in Saudi Arabia and Israel, gas works in Qatar, the ports of Bahrain and Oman, and several oil tankers, effectively closing off the Strait of Hormuz, a key corridor for the global oil and gas markets. As a result, Qatar shut down its liquid natural gas production, Saudi Arabia shut down its largest oil refinery, global oil prices spiked 8% and natural gas prices in Europe went up an astounding 50% on Monday morning. The UAE announced it would close its stock exchanges for at least 2 days to prevent a panic and economic crash (keep in mind that March 2 is the first day since the beginning of the US and Israeli attacks that stock markets would open). It is extremely rare to shut down stock markets to prevent panics, and tends to lower stock values and investor confidence even when they reopen. Major stock exchanges in Europe fell between 1-3%, though energy companies were up. In the US, the Nasdaq, S&P500, and Dow Jones Industrials each opened down about 1%, though energy stocks like Chevron, security stocks like Palantir and CrowdStrike, and military contractors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin, all gained in value. (Military companies make money off of big wars, and oil companies make more money when oil prices go up even though such price increases cause an overall economic slowdown.)

Three US jets got shot down, though so far only 4 US soldiers have died. Also on March 2, Israel has accelerated its war against Lebanon, with more missile strikes, ground troops, and the forced displacement of numerous towns and villages, kicking people out of their homes on threat of death. Israel continues to strike hospitals and other civilian sites in Iran. And, British forces shot down several drones headed for a military base they hold on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. The night of March 1, the leftwing (well, Labour Party, similar to Democrats) government of the UK agreed to allow the US to use its Indian Ocean base on the colony of Diego Garcia, helping the US to kill more Iranians.

As of the late afternoon, Tehran/Riyadh time, US and Israeli forces have killed 555 people in Iran, 2 in Iraq, and 13 in Lebanon. These are confirmed deaths only, and thousands more have been injured. Many of those will die of their injuries or be disabled for life, and though limited information is available it seems that more than half of all casualties are civilians. Iranian attacks have killed 10 in Israel, 1 in Kuwait, 1 in Bahrain, 16 in Qatar, 3 in the UAE, and 1 in Oman, all of which are countries participating in the unprovoked attack on Iran.

I think it’s important to remember two things:

• The government of Iran is brutal and oppressive. The people of Iran are not free, and recently the government there murdered thousands of protesters and jailed and tortured many more.

• The US and Israel don’t give a shit for the people of Iran or Lebanon, they have done their best to impoverish those countries, they are deliberately murdering and injuring so many civilians, and those people probably won’t be better off even if they do accomplish regime change. This is an unprovoked attack for purely political reasons.

I’ll be writing more about this broader war soon, once it becomes clear whether the continuity of Iran’s current government will hold, whether the war is likely to spread, end quickly (until the next offensive), or turn into a much longer war.

In the meantime, I want to draw out some relevant threads in a few other news stories, and share my recent article on the far Right in the US: through government policy, police terror, paramilitary white supremacist groups, and huge platforms in traditional media and social media, the far Right is interconnected and in power. Their strategy is to spread conspiratorial, victimistic ideas that whites, cis men, the wealthy, citizens, Christians, Jews, and cishetero people are under attack, when in reality they have been accelerating campaigns of terror, murder, imprisonment, criminalization, deportation, harassment, censorship, immiseration, and other punishments against Muslims, latines, trans people, immigrants, Black people, pregnant people, and anyone who stands up to resist.

“The far-right and Trump administration collaborating to target educators and marginalized communities.” Check it out, spread it!

Earthshot, a major charity supported by the British monarchy, has recently been connected to billionaire rapist and investor Jeffrey Epstein. Prince William, who heads Earthshot, has not shown up in the Epstein files (unlike his uncle), but Ahmed bin Sulayem has, with one thank you email to Epstein saying he “enjoyed the torture video.” Bin Sulayem is another billionaire and the CEO of DP World, a major “port logistics” company. He’s also one of the top donors to Earthshot. This is a clear slice of the nonprofit/charity world. They are highly ineffective at protecting the environment since they prioritize initiatives that create business opportunities, and they provide an opportunity for the wealthy and powerful to rub elbows and also greenwash the basis of their wealth and power. Let’s take DP World. Port logistics means they are involved in global shipping. Enough global shipping to generate billions of dollars for their leaders and executives. Global shipping itself generates 3% of total greenhouse gas emissions – that’s more than the total emissions of Canada and the UK combined. Furthermore, shipping is integral to the globalization of industry, with the key products being shipped including monocrop food products like grains, soy, and bananas, fossil fuels like oil and coal, cars, and low-longevity electronic products like phones and laptops that require a huge amount of destructive mining.

Recent studies in the US and EU found that bird populations are falling at an accelerating rate. And the decline in bird populations is linked to the decline in insect populations (which is harder to document and quantify, since bugs are smaller, spend lots of time underground or in the water, and attract fewer enthusiasts who can help with census-taking). One of the main causes are the fertilizers, pesticides, deforestation, soil depletion, and monocrop deserts that are necessary for industrial agriculture. “What we found is that any metric of agricultural intensity was always the best predictor of acceleration of the decline” of bird populations, according to one author of the US study.

Guess what? We need to abolish industrial agriculture before it kills us. Guess what else? We can! Urban gardening is possible in many cities around the world, and is often spread or protected in lower class rebellions that may start because of police violence, racism, or economic crises but then spread to take on other issues, as insurrections often do. The transformation of farming is also possible around the world, with small scale projects that restore traditional practices or innovate new ones. Networking, such projects are already feeding significant numbers of people. With a recent project in Brazil, some friends and I have been trying to promote and spread such projects. Check out a couple of the things that came out of that project:

Truthout: The Real Models of Sustainability in Brazil

The Final Straw: Radical Ecological Struggle

We’re also hoping to put out a video in the next few months.

A January paper from the conservative Heritage Foundation, commenting on falling birthrates in the US, stated, “when a nation fails to preserve the family, the state soon fails to preserve itself.” This is part of the rationale connected to the current rightwing wars on trans people, queer people, and pregnant people, as seen in their reversal of abortion rights and growing criminalization of trans people. It’s also connected to the centrality of the nuclear family in alienating people from richer social relationships (most cultures trace family in far more complex ways than the nuclear family allows); to the patriarchy, offering men, even poor men and racialized men, access to some measure of power, and offers incentives to young people and to women to be complicit in oppression, knowing that they will gain more access to power over time if they support the institution; and to child abuse, sexual abuse, and spousal abuse.

The Right doesn’t talk very much about “domestic violence,” but they talk a whole lot about “trafficking” to justify the criminalization of sex work, and they spread conspiracy theories about pedophilia to justify the murder and criminalization of trans people or the forcible break up of families with trans children or trans parents. (They’ve also been weaponizing a few documented cases of sexual assault carried out by Hamas to justify or invisiblize far greater levels of violence, including systematic sexual assault, by Israeli soldiers.)

But the truth is, a hugely disproportionate amount of physical and sexual violence against children of any gender takes place in the family, and a hugely disproportionate amount of emotional, physical, and sexual violence against women is caused by their intimate partners. About half of women killed in the US are killed by their intimate partner (34%) or other family members (16%) (counting murder and willful manslaughter, which means intentional killing without premeditation). One of the other most frequent places children are harmed is in religious institutions kids are forced to attend, with their adults refusing to listen to their complaints, believe them, or see the warning signs. The Right almost never talks about this systematic violence. On the contrary, they make sure it keeps happening.

News all around the world is really upsetting. Here’s some photos of chipmunk, squirrel, rabbit, human, and cat tracks in the snow. I hope you find them soothing.

**

they also destroy the diversity of food systems and ecosystems! check out this episode of The Poor Prole’s Almanac, where I talk about forest gardening vs. the monocrop plantations of the modern capitalism

In a recent newsletter, my friend Ricard talked about how the French state has recently prohibited the use of the Catalan language in four different municipal governments in North Catalunya. It’s not the first effort to kill off the language, he noted. Already in 1700, Louis XIV prohibited the use of Catalan throughout his kingdom and legally required mothers to speak to their children in French. But what is North Catalunya and why do they speak Catalan there?

North Catalunya, which includes the county of Rosselló and the city of Perpinyà (Roussillon and Perpignan, in French) has been occupied by France since around 1659.

Prior to that, North Catalunya belonged to the principality of Catalunya (which was largely autonomous, but adhered to the crown of Aragón), to the Kingdom of Mallorca, and for two and a half centuries straddling the year 1000, it was ruled by the Count of Rosselló. Before that the territory was part of the Carolingian empire started by Charlemagne, King of the Franks (a partially latinized Germanic tribe). Before that it was depopulated for around half a century during wars between Visigothic warlords and the Emirate of Córdoba, and before that…

Here’s an interesting fact that might jump out: we’ve just listed all the different political authorities that have ruled a territory in the middle of Europe over the course of a thousand years, from the early medieval period well into the beginning of the modern era, and in that entire time we’ve only come across one state that is recognizable today as a country: France.

In 1659, France existed, as did England and several other entities we would refer to as countries today (Poland, Sweden...) but Spain did not exist, Germany did not exist, Italy did not exist… Certainly, an outsider in 1659 might have referred to Spaniards, Germans, and Italians, though these terms would have often had less weight for outsiders, and far less weight for insiders, than Castillian, Galician, Sevillan, Saxon, Bavarian, Hessen, Genovese, Venetian, Napolitan…

Here’s another important feature: in the thousand year summary above, very few states correspond to languages or peoples. This shouldn’t be a surprise, since a feature of modernity was the invention of nation-states – a people, ruled by a common government, speaking a common language, held together by recognized borders. Every nation-state is a fiction, but it is a fiction made real through state policy. A state or proto-state that tends to comprise a more or less stable, coherent conglomeration of military and religious hierarchies conquers the territories of their neighbors, as states do. But rather than just collecting taxes and tithes or imposing a more “productive” (exploitive and extractive) economic model to keep their state apparatus going, they also impose their language and religion, from the upper classes to the lower. Eventually, they create the false idea that the captives living within the borders created by force all share the same history. They are “a people.” (Note that this is a very different concept of people, and a different method for creating a people, than the concept common amongst Indigenous and other stateless societies, in which belonging is often voluntary, someone might belong to multiple peoples, and different peoples are not separated by borders.)

I knew all this, and still I was surprised when I did a little research into the linguistic history of “France” and found out how brazen the lie actually, how slow and incomplete the process of fabricating a national language and imposing it on an entire captive population.

The French language is a direct descendant of the dialect developed in Ile-de-France, the region containing Paris. It’s a bastard tongue cobbled together from elite Latin and vulgar Latin, the several romanized Germanic languages spoken by the Frankish tribes, and probably with some Celtic influences as well from the peoples who inhabited Gaul when the Romans colonized it. Just one of a hundred languages spoken by those who live in what we now call France.

According to the Prime Voices blog, before the revolution of 1789, French was the language of only about 10% of the population of France. The Revolution was initially tolerant towards linguistic diversity, but soon decided to:

According to another article, around 1789, 30 different patois, dialects, or completely other languages were spoken in French territory (not including overseas colonies or foreign soldiers in the French military). Nearly a quarter of the population was estimated to be completely ignorant of French and another quarter unable to hold a conversation in French.

This included one million speakers of Breton (a Gaelic language like Irish), 100,000 Basque speakers (one of the oldest language groups in Europe, completely unrelated to Indo-European languages1), 100,000 Catalan speakers, one million speakers of German (itself not yet a unified language, and most of them living in territories like, for example, Alsachsen, which has been Frenchified as “Alsace.” Such regions had changed hands after wars of conquest against different German-speaking polities (not wars against Germany, since, remember, Germany did not exist yet in the 18^th century),

The most famous Frenchman before the 20^th century, Napoleon, didn’t actually learn French until he was 15. His language was Corsican, which is much closer to Italian (which, also, is not actually a single language).

The PV blog again:

“in 1810, French was spoken in only 25 departments or territorial divisions out of a total of 130.

“By the mid-19th century, 7.5 million French people, or 20% of the population, spoke French fluently.”

“In 1864 the minister of Education found that in 18 French departments 60% of the population did not speak French.”

“despite efforts to suppress regional languages, several of them are still spoken in certain areas of France. For example, Breton is still spoken in the Brittany region, and Alsatian in the Alsace region. Corsican is spoken by more than 100,000 people on the island of Corsica. Basque or Euskera is spoken by about 50,000 people in the southwest of the country, while it is estimated that Catalan is the language of about 60,000 people in the Occitania region.”

The white spaces on this and the above map contain the territories, claimed by France, where the primary language (at least, primary until the 20th century) is Basque, Catalan, Breton, German… and all of these maps leave out other cultural/linguistic groups like the Rromani, who have lived in these territories for close to a thousand years, and large immigrant populations that include captive subjects from French colonies or refugees fleeing famine and war — in many cases famines or wars the French upper classes profited from.

Nation-states produce linguistic flattening

It’s interesting, in the history above, how democratic and anti-monarchic movements, movements that believed in progress (another bloody fiction), were instrumental in crafting systematic plans for inventing a national language and suppressing other languages. It’s also key that government repression of other languages accelerated at a time when the French colonial empire was expanding and a growing number of colonized subjects were emigrating from Africa, the Caribbean, and southeast Asia. The fiction of a national language was attached to the wars of colonization, a war waged by European nation-states against the entire planet. An official national language is a primary ingredient for the fictional nation-state, and it also lends itself to various strategies of white supremacy and racial hierarchy.

National languages are achieved through a combination of hard and soft tactics.

The hard tactics include:

• militarily defeating and conquering another population

• killing, enslaving, or forcibly displacing the speakers of another language

• forcing the speakers of another language into a lower economic class, stealing their land, etc.

• punishing those who speak the non-official language

• prohibiting the use of other languages in official setting like courts or in the media

The soft tactics include:

• creating status hierarchies and education systems that portray other languages as ignorant, backwards, lower class, or unmodern

• rewarding integration into the official language through greater access to cultural status and employment opportunities

• linking stable government jobs or higher paying jobs to the national language and linking low paying service, agricultural, and manufacturing jobs to “dialects”

• creating bureaucratic obstacles around the use of the other language in day-to-day life

• and more recently, promoting tourist economies where high income visitors are led to expect that local service workers will speak the national language and possibly also a cosmopolitan/colonial language (English, Spanish, French, Russian, Chinese)

The process is not as violent when we’re dealing with the languages of non-colonized people, people who aren’t facing genocide, conquest, or imprisonment (like the Palestinians, Ukrainians, Uighurs, and Indigenous peoples across the Americas are).

Still, even in the absence of an open war, the smothering of a language is a brutal thing. And it’s a brutality that cannot be imagined by those who only speak a language that is not in danger of disappearing, a language that thrives today because it has a powerful state that backs it, a nation-state that, in the interests of power, has destroyed a dense network of diverse languages in order to build a monoculture. Easy to rule, easier to surveil.

Linguistic oppression is real, in its own right and as a facet of colonialism, which has produced some of the most brutal oppressions in our history. So what does linguistic liberation look like?

In a future essay, I want to look at how national liberation is no solution, at what linguistic liberation could look like in a non-colonial context, and what it looks like in a colonial context.

If you want another way to support my writing work, consider gifting someone a book from an independent bookstore like Red Emma’s or Firestorm or paypal @pgelderloos

Until next time, take care of each other .

Like most of us, I’ve been getting plenty of updates from Minneapolis. Recently, a very well meaning person forwarded me someone else’s mass email, which gave recommendations for “action” after the latest murder: donating to fundraisers and maintaining nonviolent protests. The writer of the mass email made no mention of the burning barricades that went up on some Minneapolis streets, or the last time that Minneapolis stood up for its neighbors (and how that ended and who ended it). There was also no mention of the strike and school walk-outs spreading across the country, nor were there calls for the abolition of ICE or the withdrawal of ICE from states other than Minnesota.

Most distressingly, after describing ICE’s most recent murder, they claim “Many now believe they [ICE] have come here to keep assaulting innocent people again and again, until they get us to be violent so they can justify deploying the 1,500 active duty military troops they’ve put on standby to attack our city in one big spectacle meant to scare the whole rest of the country into compliance.”

The email’s author is a white citizen, a professional artist and professional “Executive Director” from a long list of Arts foundations, and was previously a “business consultant” in the “corporate sector” (quotes from their webpage).

I rarely lead with this, but I want to be clear that I’m writing this as someone who has been attacked by police, someone who experienced sexual assault and threats of rape and murder by prison guards, someone who has lost people I care about in this struggle, someone who has gone through an attempted deportation process (with white privilege on the one hand, but on the other hand specifically targeted for my beliefs and political engagement). I am someone who will never again be able to see loved ones and family members if I catch certain charges, if I end up on a certain list, or if the current border regime continues to go in the direction it’s already headed. For me this isn’t about ideology or being right or putting someone down. It’s incredibly personal and also incredibly collective. It’s about confronting the lies and myths of those who have a possibility of living in peace with the police; lies and myths that endanger us and constantly set us back in our interlinked struggles for liberation.

It is mind-bogglingly naïve to think that the Trump administration needs any kind of ‘justification’ for repression. This wasn’t even the case before Trump: this is one more manipulation from the stockpile of manipulations used by non-profit pacifists to help criminalize and delegitimize effective forms of resistance. Since police and professional militaries were founded, they have systematically attacked and even slaughtered large groups of entirely peaceful people. They would not be useful to the government if they weren’t able to murder.

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Spreading the false belief that police and military wait for justification to attack or kill people further marginalizes those who have to live with the daily reality of that unjustified violence: colonized peoples, Black people, Muslims, undocumented people, houseless people, trans people, poor people, those experiencing mental or emotional health crises, as well as people who resist and oppose such brutality. As for those of us who participate in revolutionary social movements, we also know what it means to face torture and prison, to be shot at by police, to lose friends.

The Black Lives Matter, police abolition and No Border movements were built up in tandem, over years and decades, from before the murder of Oscar Grant on New Years’ Day 2009 to its culmination in a countrywide uprising after the police murder of George Floyd in 2020. This increase in resistance was only possible because people fought back. What happened in 2020 in Minneapolis was so inspiring and it was only possible because people fought back, with stones, with fire, with everything they had. What killed that movement was not police repression and it certainly wasn’t the military—who were deployed in 2020 and in 2014 and on other occasions. It was people trusting this kind of non-profit bullcrap, trusting Democrats, trusting self-appointed community leaders.

The military was also deployed to the streets of Ferguson and St. Louis in 2014 after the police murder of Mike Brown. People continued fighting, attacking the police, even shooting at the police, and it’s no coincidence that their inspiring, brave resistance sparked the very first wave of antiracist uprisings this century that spread across the entire country, laying the groundwork for the even larger uprising of 2020.

And I call this resistance inspiring and brave without any romanticism. A friend was almost killed during the fighting, and many others faced serious prison time or were targeted by neo-Nazis. In 2014 I was on a highway bridge, helping to block it along with a crowd largely made up of some of the people most targeted by racist police violence—all of us fully aware of the multiple times cops or white supremacists without a badge attacked bridge occupations or drove their vehicles through the crowd, almost killing people.

Nonviolent nonsense is also used systematically to spread the myth of the “agent provocateur,” which is in its origins a racist trope that views “the masses” as a servile, unthinking mob who don’t make decisions for themselves. People who are singled out as provocateurs are often handed over to police to face the extreme violence of the prison system, or they are even attacked by nonviolent protesters. Yep: I’ve never seen the pacifists knock down a cop, even if it would protect someone else, but I have seen them beat up other people in the movement. And in 2020 at least two people were locked up thanks to nonviolent protesters spreading this conspiracy theory: one was a Black person in Seattle who was taking the very sensible action of setting fire to a police station where racist murderers are trained, paid, and protected; the other was a white person. She also happened to be the girlfriend of Rayshard Brooks, a houseless Black man the pigs in Atlanta had just murdered (June 2020) after some workers at a local Wendy’s snitched on him for sleeping in the parking lot. She and two Black men were arrested for setting fire to the Wendy’s after a few nonviolence advocates and online sleuths widely shared their photos in order to identify the supposed provocateurs.

In their email, this person also spread the idea that whistles were “working” and the idea that the system was getting overwhelmed by all the arrests they were carrying out, a nonviolent strategy already debunked by MLK’s failed 1961 Albany, Georgia, campaign. (To be clear, the whistles are being put to great use in Minneapolis, but more than whistling will be required to stop ICE)

Seeing all of that silenced or criminalized is upsetting. I responded to the mass email:

I want to finish with a few last points. Below that I’ve provided recommended readings and further discussion on the deployment of ICE vs. the deployment of the military.

• The discourse of “innocence” validates the kidnapping and deportation of people with criminal records, and it helps the police attack those who are fighting back. The discourse of “citizens” strengthens the border.

• A dear friend who dedicated well over a decade of their life to fighting the border with Mexico and helping migrants survive the crossing is back in Minneapolis, where they’re from. About a week ago, their four-year-old asked them, “How do we make the polices leave town if we ask them to and they don’t?” As my friend responded, oh baby, that is the question.

• We know from the history—the true history—of the Civil Rights movement that nonviolence won’t cut it. We even know that a major wave of riots and revolts that produce huge legal reforms, revolts like Birmingham in 1963 and the ones that occurred after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, are also not enough. A reform still preserves the State’s monopoly on power. Even reforms that make things a little better are temporary, as should be readily apparent in the era of Trump.

• We need to well and truly abolish the police and the border. The police cannot be reformed. Borders cannot be reformed. All states are based on coercion, and the cops and the borders are among the principal tools for that coercion.

• We need to continue to organize and support rapid response networks, legal aid for anyone kidnapped or deported, we need to protect schools, hospitals, daycare, and workplaces from the pigs, we need to do grocery runs and distros for clothing and medicine in a spirit of mutual aid. We also need to (re)learn how to barricade the streets and hold them, how to force the police out of a neighborhood and transform this liberated space so it serves the needs of the people who live there, how to force the cops out of an entire city. And then we need to learn how to keep going.

Death to the State in all its forms. For the free movement of all peoples as we move and share and migrate and adapt, as we flee and heal and rebuild in order to survive this world that is being decimated by the Rich, the Right, and their liberal lackeys.

Recommended Reading

“Rapid Response Networks in the Twin Cities: A Guide”

CrimethInc, No Wall They Can Build and as a podcast

Unfinished Acts: January Rebellions 2009, Oakland California

various authors, “Snapshots from the Uprising” (2020)

Idris Robinson, How It Might Should Be Done

NPR, “Guns Kept People Alive During the Civil Rights Movement”

Robert Williams, Negroes with Guns

Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie, No More Police: A Case for Abolition

Lorenzo Komb’oa Ervin, Anarchism and the Black Revolution

Ashanti Alston and William C. Anderson, Black Anarchist Futures

William C. Anderson and Zoey Samudzi, As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation

They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us: Forcing Nonviolence on Forgetful Movements

Fatima Insolación, “The Insurgent Southwest”

Life During Wartime

(the articles and podcasts above are free. if you don’t have the money right now to support independent bookstores and publishers, many of the books can be found for free on the internet. please don’t order from Amazon.)

A brief discussion on police vs. the military

Trump is using ICE instead of the military probably because they are the government agency most loyal to him, and they are well trained in running mobile snatch squads, beating up bystanders, and deploying general terror tactics. Unlike many people in the military, ICE agents specifically signed up as a more effective alternative to the KKK, they signed up to attack people of color and any white “liberals” supporting them. This is fun for them.

What they don’t know how to do very well is to hold their own against—not bystanders, not peaceful protests—large groups who fight back with forceful means. That is why the military is standing by: because they are far more effective than cops at dealing with a full scale urban revolt.

It’s not that the police don’t have access to military-grade weaponry (they do), but because cops tend to be stupid, prone to panic, and unversed in military tactics. Their mode is bullying, harassing, torturing, and kidnapping. They love beating a defenseless crowd (i.e. a crowd that refuses to defend itself, that ideologically romanticizes losing). They quickly get overwhelmed when more than a few dozen people start fighting back.

Many ICE pigs are military vets, which means they’re used to killing unarmed people. It does not mean that ICE as a whole will be nearly as effective at urban warfare as the actual military, since they lack the same military command structure and training-as-a-group on approaching an entire city as hostile territory. Driving around in one or two vans, for example, would be a pretty fatal mistake if ICE agents faced any real danger. And it would be no easy task for ICE or the city police, trying to take a barricade held by an angry crowd, especially if they had a good stash of rocks, baseball bats, hammers, gasoline, powerful fireworks, Molotov cocktails, cocktails version 2.0 (gas or gas and oil in a plastic bottle, sealed, with a lit firecracker taped to the side)… even more so if people make use of Minnesota’s open carry laws.

I definitely don’t recommend anyone without a lot of training bringing firearms to a situation like this, because the risks of hitting an actual person or creating an irresponsible escalation that you’re not prepared for are both high.

And I’m not advocating anyone engage in any training. In fact, I don’t advocate building barricades, setting fires, or any other illegal act. I’m just pointing out that without those and similar tactics, side by side with effective practices for strengthening neighborhood relationships and the generalized spread of revolutionary horizons, we are stuck with cops and borders forever. Or until rising seas, wildfires, and mass famine sweep us all away.

And then around the solstice, R and I did something we’ve never done the whole time we’ve been together: we relaxed! We actually took a vacation and (mostly) didn’t work! No sick beds, not a research trip for an article, no long hours spent writing or editing, just doing things that felt nice, like eating good food or hiking.

People who know me know I despise the Roman calendar: it makes my long list of Things to Abolish. But also, capitalism, the Empire, their hegemonic notion of time, all of these are things we’re forced to live under, and that power makes the fiction reality. So, if we’re gonna celebrate, let’s do it well!

To end the year with generosity, I’d like to share a few fundraisers that could really use some support. Then at the bottom, I’ve got some viewing and reading recommendations, juuuust in case anyone has a gentle hangover tomorrow or wants to take advantage of what is hopefully a day off to for some critical reflection on this world we all have to live in.

fundraiser intermission!

Please help spread these fundraisers and give some if you can! Our trans friends and family need our support more than ever.

Joan Jett Blakk is a queer anarchist drag queen and midwestern elder, who is a veteran of the gay liberation front, an OG radical faerie, and after living in Sandusky and Detroit, she moved to Chicago where she helped found the local ACT UP and Queer Nation chapters. She’s facing serious health troubles and needs support. You can help her out and also get a t-shirt for yourself or as a gift, here: https://www.willienorris.world/products/x-joan-jett-blakk-fundraiser-tee

This next one comes from a really good friend. Someone in their circles is in danger of getting evicted at the end of the month, because of a traumatizing medical crisis. Help her make rent -- Venmo and Cashapp: @catmoochie $catmoochie

Finally…

…if you tried contributing to the Firefund for Weaving Paths to Ecological Revolution and it didn’t work, or if you wanted to contribute but weren’t able before the fundraiser expired, we still need it! Unlike what it says on the Firefund page, we didn’t actually reach 137% of our goal, or 100%, because when it came time to collect, a few large donations couldn’t be charged (borders, banks, bureaucracy!). Other parts of the project really did work: strong connections and shared knowledge with amazing radical movements that can become even more effective with more access to resources. We’re getting more proposals for equipment or other expenses that will expand their reach, like travel costs for continent-wide seed sharing that will help restore traditional plants that are necessary for ecological agriculture and Indigenous spiritualities. You can send it to me via Paypal at @PGelderloos but please make sure to write “Brazil” or “Weaving Paths” in the memo line.

Please spread all three fundraisers, and if you have anything to donate, that would be a huge help!

party like there’s no tomorrow, then spend tomorrow watching TV or reading some thoughtful articles!!!

And now, here are some readings, viewings, and listenings that will help you sharpen your mind to deal with the struggles to come, or—just as valid—help you rest, help you stop the anxiety loops and endless pits of despair, without having to turn to absolute slop or addictive phone games.

Let’s start with that: media you can watch, kick your feet up, and disconnect with (or be perturbed by)

There might be close to 100 titles on my list, so please don’t feel like it’s outweighed by…

my revolutionary recommended readings, listenings, and watchings (and if not revolutionary, at least nonfiction and related to current events) :

• An episode of The Final Straw with interviews of me and Gah Te Iracema, about the ecological crisis. The page also has links to other articles and sites.

• “It’s Revolution or Death,” a three part video series from Sub.media that I got to help with, about the ecological crisis and how we can respond.

• On the death of deep literacy (i.e. people don’t read books no more, and writing has also gotten more superficial or esoteric), from The Baffler

Here’s a thought-provoking newsletter from Raechel, from earlier this year:

radical love letters

a grrrl on "Girl on Girl"

I have a lot of early memories about sex in the media. My little brain lingered when I heard something that I didn’t fully understand, while a red curiosity flushed my body. The jokes about a stain on Monica Lewinsky’s dress, the sexually-charged Drew Barrymore characters I gravitated towards, the news about Pee-wee H…

Read more

a year ago · 130 likes · 19 comments · Raechel Anne Jolie

And here’s a recent one—and a hopeful one—from Marcela from Feel the News:

Feel the News

NYC punked ICE

Hiiii, I’m telling the news live tomorrow, December 6th, at Friends and Lovers in Brooklyn. Come! The first show of my I HATE CAPITALISM tour is on December 10th also at Friends and Lovers. Come! Today I’m sharing some very good news about NYC blocking ICE from raiding Canal Street. I love this fucking CITY!! Onto the news…

Read more

5 months ago · 8 likes · 1 comment · Marcela Onyango

I got a few things published this year:

• With In These Times on February 3, “Betrayed by Green Capitalism, Here’s How We Can Build a Livable Future.”

• May 14 on Truthout, “Trump’s Censorship Campaign Draws on Decades of Infrastructure from Big Tech”

• With Prism Reports on August 9, “Colonialism and Extractivism Catch Up with the Chesapeake Bay”

• On Organise, the “Weaving Paths to Ecological Revolution” article linked above

• November 21 with In These Times, “COP30 Isn’t a Failure, It’s a Farce”

• November 21 with Truthout, “The Real Models for Sustainability in Brazil Are to Be Found Outside COP30”

plus a podcast episode with The Final Straw and an interview on the Cool Zone Media Book Club with Margaret Killjoy… aaand some talks, in person or virtual, in Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Madison, Bloomington, Madrid, Linz and probably more places I forgot! i think Chicago, Grand Rapids, and Detroit were the very end of 2024…

Finally, if I had to pick three of my own newsletters from the last year, I guess it would be these:

From February 3,

From August 20,

(if you appreciate that one, go back and read the framing in Parts I and II, published on July 18 and July 29 on Surviving Leviathan )

From October 7,

Eesh, and if I had to pick one more it would be “Non-Profits Are a Silo” from June 4.

Okay bye take care of each other!

I started out with five categories: 1. So Damn Good!, 2. Skillful or Touching, 3. Enjoyable/Fine but Unimportant, 4.High Quality, But Hurt or Ruined by the Ending or another Major Flaw, and 5. Highly Celebrated Movies that Were Actually Just Crappy or Horrific in Some Way.

But…

Two more categories insisted on being created. One is a special award that goes to Civil War, by Alex Garland. Oh Alex Garland, you beautiful airhead. Garland, despite his high budgets and clear talents, has only made one good movie on purpose (Ex Machina). Civil War is actually a really good movie, but somehow Garland, drinking the liberal Kool-Aid, thinks he has made a movie about how important journalism is to a free society. In fact, it’s a movie about how (political/conflict) journalists are actually trauma-addicted psychopaths who do absolutely nothing to make the world a better place, which is a bit harsh as a generalization but, in aggregate, tracks. So yeah, he deserves some kind of award for making a really good movie, somehow, completely by accident.

Finally, there’s the 0 category, movies and TV shows that were so freaking good, that hit me so dang hard, they needed a category above categories, because even though I have such a high opinion of everything in Category 1, these few are on a completely different plane.

If you see a movie or TV show you think should be in here, please let me know! There’s a good chance it’s one I haven’t seen yet. Also, yeah, this is an immense list, but please don’t worry about me: the last 6 years have included the pandemic with a very strict lockdown in the Spanish state, and for me some health problems that resulted in quite a few weeks mostly in bed or on the couch.

0. The Best

Sinners (I want to believe Coogler directed the highly reactionary Black Panther so he could get the money and status to direct something like this)

Come See Me in the Good Light

Aftersun

Dying for Sex

Heated Rivalry (After ep1, I thought this show was the hottest soft porn I’d seen, no more no less. By ep4, I was asking myself whether it belonged in categories 1 or 2. In ep5, that Wolf Parade finale, I was literally crying and shrieking with joy and R, next to me, was breathlessly saying, “that might have been the best TV episode of all time”)

1. So Damn Good

Coda

Tár

tick, tick… Boom

The Menu

Baby Girl

Drive My Car

Poor Things

Bottoms

Sound of Metal

Judas and the Black Messiah

Don’t Look Up

Dream Scenario

Bodies Bodies Bodies

Knives Out 1 & 3

Sentimental Value

Bogonia (I think many of the reviews of this movie really missed the mark. Lanthimos never makes prescriptive movies. He bathes us in the misery of contemporary society, and this film in particular is not just dark humor, it’s multilayered satire. (Spoiler!) By eventually treating Jesse Plemons’ absurd conspiracy theories as reality, the movie can lambast them on a far deeper level, leaving only one way out: absolute nihilism. And on the way there, we see Emma Stone’s girlboss feminism lampooned, we’re made extremely uncomfortable by the abusive impunity of the police, we see some of the ways capitalism grinds down an interracial working class, and we see how the current media landscape lends especially white men tools that make it impossible to ever engage in meaningful resistance and that instead make it easy for them to seriously harm those around them. But, since it’s Lanthimos, we’re grimacing and laughing all the way to the grave.)

Secret Agent

Bacurau (A 2019 movie, but I think it can ride Kleber Mendonça Filho’s illustrious coattails into this decade)

*** [movies above, series below]

Squid Game

Severance

Daisy Jones and the Six

Ted Lasso

The Bear

Ripley

Succession

Andor

Euphoria (Angus, we miss you)

* Award for Accidentally Really Good!

Civil War

2. Skillful or Touching

Sing Sing (really well done, but ending the story on the drive away from prison—with the protagonist getting released—and without all the trauma of living in a prison society after serving a long sentence, gives too much credence to the myth of rehabilitation: the story should have ended with the protagonist still in prison, no idea if he would ever get out, because that is the actual situation of most people in prison with long sentences, and it doesn’t give the viewer’s conscience an easy out, a comforting but they’re okay now. This sorta turns the whole movie into trauma voyeurism without demanding of the viewer, this is the society you live in, so many people are stuck in that place right now, what are you going to do about it?)

Anatomy of a Fall (I think some—primarily American—viewers completely missed the point and approached this movie with a confounding “did she do it?” mentality as though this were some pulpy What Lies Beneath)

Maestro

Anora

Barbie

Rustin

After Yang

Mickey 17

Nomadland

American Fiction

Nyad

Nightmare Alley

The Last Showgirl

Banshees of Inisherin (I’ll admit I had this in Category 1 until I heard some Irish friends from the actual “Inisherin” [which just means “the island of Ireland” but is based on an actual island which I won’t name because tourism] talking shit on it for how it exoticized particularly rural or western Irish people)

A Complete Unknown

A Real Pain

Women Talking (The parts where this movie bordered on allegory were borderline obnoxious, and it was best where the characters got to be actual people having real experiences)

Conclave

Zone of Interest

Belfast

May December

The Substance

Flow (This film was beautiful, but it’s also clinging to a bit of a life raft in order to ascend to this category)

The Friend

Materialists

Pee-wee as Himself

Mountainhead

Find Me Falling

Jules

The Iron Claw

Knives Out 2

Nosferatu (This was a really well done movie, but they missed out on the antipatriarchal ending the whole storyline was demanding, and instead favored the worst version of the Dracula myth. Did they not see it, or did the producers block it for something more conventional?)

Relay

3:10 to Yuma (What’s that you say, this movie is from 2007, a remake of a 1957 film based on a 1953 short story? Whatever, I don’t like rules, and I hadn’t ever heard of anyone talk about this one, and it’s really well done. Albeit meaningless.)

The Naked Gun (It may be strange to have such a stupid movie here, but they did a great job of resurrecting an almost forgotten sub-genre with all its now archaic archetypes. As such it was a skillful work in media history. And it felt good to laugh that much.)

One Battle After Another (It was a tough call whether to put this in Category 1 or 2. The acting is superb, it is more radical than most stuff Hollywood puts out, and it was exciting, a third of the way through, to realize it was based on a Thomas Pynchon novel (one of the greatest English-language authors of the 20^th century), but in the final analysis… (spoilers!) they really discounted and abandoned the Black women in this story, not realizing how important they were, and the conclusion was so weak, with an impossibly happy ending for the white protagonist (I’m sorry, but there’s no way Leo would have been able to go back to civilian life after all that: just look at what happened to the people in armed groups from the ‘60s and ‘70s who were involved in lethal actions. Decades later they were still being hunted, half a century later many of the survivors are still in prison.) They completely dropped the ball on the major themes Pynchon evokes in Vineland. And they’re doing cop work, for example repeating the lie about police provocateurs. The vast majority of rocks and molotovs thrown in riots are thrown by people, not by pigs; this conspiracy theory has gotten numerous rioters with legitimate reasons for rage locked up; and in no society I’m aware of do the cops need an excuse to attack a crowd. Sometimes they won’t even give an order to disperse before attacking with clubs, tear gas, rubber bullets, or even live rounds.)1

Frankenstein (Because of clumsy writing that made this movie a bit of a slog, I only bumped this movie up to Category 2 after I watched the “making of” and realized the artisanry of the sets, costume, and design (no/very little CGI!)

Jay Kelley (I mostly ignored ER, which was also biggest near the beginning of the 15 years when I watched almost no television, but since O Brother Clooney can carry me anywhere)

***

White Lotus (It would have been at the top of the list in the first category if not for that third season. The direction, pacing, and shots are still superb, but Mike White really needed other people in the writing room. It’s less beautifully chaotic, less soul-destroying, more pat. I think Mike White has just become a rich guy and he no longer has much interesting to say. Hope I’m wrong.)

Reservation Dogs

Hacks (There are parts in most seasons where it drags or demands a lot of forgiveness for the repetition of plot devices, but certain episodes, like the penultimate of Season 4, blew me away with rending combinations of humor and sadness.)

Slow Horses

Silo

True Detective

Russian Doll

The Day of the Jackal (Eddie Redmayne delivers in one of an incredibly short list of mainstream shows or movies that realistically portrays modern methods of warfare, like NATO troops slaughtering a huge group of civilians, covering it up by calling in an airstrike, and laughing about it.)

Barry

The Pitt

Only Murders in the Building (excluding Season 2, which they acknowledge in 3 was really bad)

The Diplomat

Bad Sisters

Altered Carbon

Penguin

Task (I haven’t finished this one yet. R is telling me that after the finale I might bump it up to Category 1.)

3. Enjoyable/Fine but Unimportant

The Holdovers

Wicked

The Wild Robot

Dune: Part I

Nonnas

M3gan

***

The Mandalorian

The Perfect Couple

Black Doves

Nine Perfect Strangers

Cobra Kai

Shrinking

A Man on the Inside

Dope Thief

His Dark Materials (This might surprise some people since there’s extremely clunky writing for half of it and mediocre writing for the rest, but the story, the adventure… it’s also close to an anarchist tale)

Witcher

Dune Prophecy

Wheel of Time (Okay, I’m leaving these here, but you’re not wrong if you say this one and Dune Prophecy don’t deserve to be here… I’m just starved for good fantasy)

The Old Man (This show is just entertaining trash, but I do want to mention how MAGA seemed to sneak into the writers’ room, the way they worked in a racially coded put-down of the Black Lives Matter movement and movies with Black superheroes. Are Jeff Bridges or John Lithgow white supremacist Democrats or just politically illiterate artists? Shawkat seems to have a backbone and an awareness of, for example, ongoing genocide, but I don’t think she’d have the weight Bridges or Lithgow might to lean on the script.)

4. High Quality, But Hurt or Ruined by the Ending or another Major Flaw

Triangle of Sadness (Really good movie with a poor choice of ending.)

Everything Everywhere All at Once (99% of this movie is really well done and engaging, too, but the lack of character development for the daughter wrecked the ending.)

Kinds of Kindness (Guess which of the storylines I thought hurt the movie as a whole?)

Train Dreams (A failed rendition of an interesting idea for a movie)

Heretic (A great movie with an ending that demanded too great a suspension of disbelief)

K-Pop Demon Hunters (Amazing music and choreography in a movie about healing from trauma, however, I feel like the ending totally failed that message, as well as the anti-Christian tension they were building from the beginning. In the end, this was just another story of Good vs. Evil.)

***

Station 11 (a really good series, but the ending was kind of silly, a bit of a shitshow)

Beef (This would have been such an amazing series, without those last few minutes. Just close your eyes… and fade to black.)

Poker Face (After I think episode 5, the retirement home revolutionaries, I refused to watch any more of this show because of its snitch-ass bullshit, though some of the earlier episodes were great and the premise is fun.)

The Boys (They killed off some of the more interesting characters, but this show deserves some props for quality. And, they almost almost achieve what Watchmen did. Naturally, I’m talking about one of the best graphic novels in history, not the totally distorted movie (it was like some idiot Hollywood producer read the book and thought, gee, Übermenschen are pretty cool!) and then by TV series, which takes a completely different but equally idiotic take [DEI makes fascism cool!])

5. Highly Celebrated Movies that Were Actually Just Crappy or Horrific in Some Way

JoJo Rabbit (From 2019, but I have to mention it because dear god.)

Challengers (They had a good concept for a movie, and they had two good scenes, but otherwise this was badminton with a wet turd.)

Warfare (Alex Garland, at it again…)

The Whale

The Trial of the Chicago 7

All Quiet on the Western Front (Did they not read the book? Making an antiwar novel into an action movie is the pinnacle of Hollywood horror. Did you think it was too conscientious for an action movie? Compare the endings. Case, rested.)

The Brutalist (A bad movie (in so many ways) that could have been a great movie (in so many ways), and now I also want to cancel my beloved Adrian Brody after learning what a scab he is, using AI to improve his character’s accent. Newcomer Connor Storrie should give Brody some acting lessons.)

Oppenheimer (A poorly structured narrative that totally misses fails to understand the big ethical question of the story it’s telling.)

Killers of the Flower Moon (It’s always a bad time for a story about how the FBI will keep Indigenous people safe. This is a textbook example of the self-reflection and consciousness-cleansing that helps keep a settler state running.)

And let’s not even mention the movies that were marketed or even produced to portray Israel as a heroic state, while they’re carrying out a major genocide…

Thanks!

for reading my lists!

If you want to support what I do (which, I swear, is not just lying around watching TV), share some of my writing. If you want to send me some material support, since Ss keeps most of the money—and even greater share of it since the Apple takeover—you can donate to Paypal @PGelderloos or get one of my books as a present for a friend, like Hermetica or The Solutions Are Already Here or if you know a big history nerd, Worshiping Power.

A couple weeks before the COP30 United Nations climate conference started in Belém, Brazil, police in Rio de Janeiro deliberately killed almost 130 people in a complex ambush targeting several poor neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city.

During the conference, Brazil’s progressive president, Lula da Silva, privatized three rivers in the Amazon, while a death squad probably hired by land-stealing cattle ranchers carried out a massacre against a Guarani Kaiowá community in the south of the country. Lula and the conference organizers tried to showcase Indigenous peoples as the forefront of the struggle to save the planet, even as they fail to stop extreme violence targeting Indigenous communities, and all they could offer is a relatively small investment fund, when financial investment is often a driving force of colonial violence. Additionally, very little of the money is going to Indigenous peoples. Instead, what isn’t going to business investment will be allocated to NGOs who will spend it on their behalf, continuing the mistrust and infantilization of colonialism.

And, the final statement of the COP30 didn’t even mention fossil fuels.

Nonetheless, there are so many amazing projects and struggles across Brazil that present real solutions to the ecological crisis and the many social crises enfolded within it.

I’ve been travelling for a month and I’m exhausted, but I wanted to share some initial articles. More stories are coming!

The longest article published so far is on Truthout: “The Real Models for Sustainability in Brazil Are to Be Found Outside COP30.” It’s based on several interviews Brazilian comrades and I conducted with members of the Guarani, Ka’apor, Krenak, and Kaingang people who are reclaiming and defending their lands, and interviews with community members from the Teia dos Povos network and the housing movement in Belo Horizonte. The latter is made up of 100,000 people housing themselves through direct action!

Here’s an article from In These Times, “COP30 Isn’t a Failure, It’s a Farce!” This one breaks down some of the reasons why the official climate framework, after 30 years, major regulatory changes, and huge financial commitments, still hasn’t reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Then it takes on the hypocrisy of the COP30’s supposed centering of Indigenous peoples at this year’s conference.

From The Final Straw podcast, “Voices in Brazil for Radical Ecological Struggle” features an interview with me and with Gah Te Iracema, a spiritual leader from the Kaingang people who are actively recovering their lands in the Porto Alegre region, and also helping non-Indigenous neighbors to survive climate disasters when state and capitalist infrastructures collapse. Mutual aid!

The interviews we carried out range from urban to rural settings, they deal with land reclamations, with forest gardening and other ecological food systems, with housing for the urban poor, with quilombos and Indigenous peoples recovering and defending their autonomy, and with networks of international solidarity. Taken together, these struggles show another path to confronting the ecological crisis that is far more effective than the official, green capitalist framework.

Give them a read or a listen, and then help us overcome the radio silence and marginalization being imposed by mainstream and even many progressive media, by sharing and recommending!

Share

The Brazilian comrades and I are still translating the last of the interviews we took, and there are actually another two or three interviews that couldn’t happen in November because

a) heavy rains

b) people getting sick

c) the threat of paramilitary violence

With more platforms willing to publish this critical work, we can spread full interviews and more critical analysis!

gods I wish I were a musician

this past year has been one of striving, of getting beat down and climbing back up, of learning, of bleeding, of setting fire to one I love, of being set on fire, of ripping scabs off infected wounds, pouring hydrogen peroxide all over them and watching the bubbles fizz, of seeing myself in the mirror and losing my breath to horror… of remembering flight, and deep oceans. Of being embraced with immeasurable love and realizing I didn’t need to reject it, that maybe even I… well…

this past year has been one of finding home.

This year, I had three MRIs with contrast, hoping for no growth.

This year, I found a really skilled practitioner and went through an intensive new therapy process, hoping for growth.

This year I finished an excruciating, five thousand dollar, year-long process of dentistry school fuck-ups, extracting my four front teeth, shaving down to the literal nerve the two teeth on either side, having chunks of gum cut out and bone implanted (those who speak with dentists will have a corpse in their mouth), and finally getting an 8-point-bridge as a bulwark against gum problems I’ve been having for over 20 years.

This year, like the prior two years, I wrestled with senseless bureaucracies. They were simultaneously windmills, giants, and puffs of smoke that would materialize behind you to tie your shoelaces together while you weren’t looking. I did this to get healthcare and to pay for groceries; both resources will probably be gone by the end of the year.

You don’t get any treatments for the extreme amount of anxiety these bureaucracies intentionally produce. Neither, we are told, do teeth and gums count as a part of healthcare. I suppose when we flap our jaws, that entire section flies away from us, disembodied. Dealing with the complex trauma of an abusive childhood and the survival mechanisms that have become harmful for me and those close to me – this too is something other than health.

The MRIs, at least, were paid for.

This year, I spoke with my mom. Good and truly. About how we each lived through the violence, how it repercussed in our fractured connection. It’s a raw thing to do the hard work, the blood work, the ripping and stitching. It’s a beautiful thing to cry once you can imagine what healing might feel like. It’s indescribable, to find that someone who hurt you, someone you’ve decided to trust one last time, has been doing the same work these years past.

This year, for months at a time I worked 7 days a week, accelerating from unemployment to landscaping, then freelance writing and driving an old folks’ bus. And then a surprising job that has taken me far away: a month in, it has paid nothing, and the thousands of dollars in promised reimbursements for transportation costs and a new rent has not yet materialized. But the people are heartwarming, intelligent, sincere, thorough, and I trust we’ll overcome the anonymous accounting department ensconced at some unseen distance.

This year, after decades of adaptation to scarcity, I let myself wish for abundance, and build towards it.

This year, I got to sink my hands in the earth, to plant where I trust roots may take and blossoms bloom year after year, no landlord to come by with pesticides and a weedwhacker. I got to do this because someone I love could trust I’m still growing, because she made me hear myself, because she let me help her disentangle past narratives from the new stories we were writing. Because we were true in that early feeling that we were home. We just had no idea then, the paths we’d have to walk in order to find it.

So many times this year, when I’ve been broken, when I’ve been dancing, when I’ve been crying, when I’ve been joyful, when I’ve been lucky, when I’ve wanted death to find me quicker, when I’ve felt so full of love, when I couldn’t tell what the fuck I was feeling, I wished—so fervently—that I could sing. That I could make music. What a fucking curse, to have to kick these mute words about.

In a way, these are my songs, from the year going by.

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This is not a playlist. This is a mix. Apps can’t make mixes. AI can’t make mixes. If a robot tries to give you a mix, tell it to fuck itself. Only people who remember the days of cassette tapes, of rewinding and fastforwarding, or amongst the youngers condemned to inferior technologies, those who spend days anguishing over the transition from one song to the next, who would refuse to let an algorithm make that decision for them: only we can speak of mixes.

Mixes are acts of love, of care, they are hands held out by cultural elders inviting you to a shared world, they are suggestions of, let’s be besties, they are sure signs that, oh my gosh, this might be love. (And for oversharing, ineloquent writers, they’re just a window, a better way to share, to say, this is what I’ve been feeling, in case you’ve been feeling anything similar.)

I want to share it with you. It’s on my Spotify account, AlanLea, just search for the title of this newsletter. And, if you’re able to find songs independent of that wretched corporation, here’s the track list:

Radical Face, “Welcome Home, Son”

Indigo De Souza, “How I Get Myself Killed”

Metric, “Twilight Galaxy”

Alice Boman, “Waiting”

Neko Case, “I Wish I Was the Moon”

Bob Dylan, “Girl from the North Country”

Chicho Sánchez Ferlosio, “Canción de Soldados”

John Prine, “Paradise”

St. Vincent, “Fast Slow Disco”

The Postal Service, “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight”

Mr Little Jeans, “The Suburbs”

Lorn, “Sega Sunset”

Oklou, Casey MQ, “Lurk”

Frédéric Chopin, Marizio Pollini, “Nocturne No.15 in F Minor, Op.55 No.1”

Sigrid, Four Tet, “Sucker Punch – Four Tet Remix”

Zammuto, “My Dog’s Eyes”

KNEECAP, “Sick in the Head”

James, “Laid”

Brooke Candy, Only Fire, “Yoga”

Rosalía, The Weeknd, “LA FAMA”

Cariño, “tamagotchi”

Zammuto, “It Can Feel So Good”

John Murphy, “Adagio in D Minor”

Ezra Collective, Yazmin Lacey, “God Gave Me Feet for Dancing”

Liz Phair, “Whip-Smart”

Other Lives, “As I Lay My Head Down”

This Is The Kit, “Birchwood Beaker”

Daughter, “Youth”

Hole, “Doll Parts”

The Weeknd, “The Hills”

Tegan and Sara, “Where Does the Good Go”

The Weakerthans, “Left and Leaving”

Jolie Holland, “I Wanna Die”

Labi Siffre, “Bless the Telephone”

First Aid Kit, “Emmylou”

The xx, “Angels”

Iron & Wine, “Each Coming Night”

Tim Curry, Richard O’Brien, “I’m Going Home”

Explosions In The Sky, “First Breath After Coma”

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It’s been clear that one of the major effects of the No Kings movement, at least its dominant, center-Left tendencies, is to reenergize pacifism and historical erasure. Remember how in May 2020 no one was taking nonviolence seriously? Because it’s not something to take seriously. It is discredited, debunked, disproven. And yet it keeps popping up again and again, not from people with movement experience, but from naïve progressives, online trolls, politicians, and people from the non-profit industrial complex who get paid to pacify movements.

We already learned that nonviolence doesn’t work in 2020. The learning got erased. We already learned it in 2014. Erased again. We learned it in 2009. Then lost it. Learned it in 2003. Erased. Learned it in 1991. Gone. Learned it in 1968. Erased. Learned it in 1939. See the pattern?

When I reject nonviolence, I want to be crystal clear where the criticism is aimed:

For starters, “violence” is an incredibly vague category. It inevitably has an ethical or even moralistic connotation, and yet more than any other institution mass media defines what “violence” means. That’s not the case with, say, “solidarity” or “sabotage,” which for some odd reason the media don’t talk about as much. (Eventually I’ll have another article out on word slippage and in which cases it makes sense to resist.)

Before the 20^th century, “violence” was a primarily poetic term, one that described mood or energy: it wasn’t systematically used to set ethical or strategic boundaries. And even if radical pacifists one day win their century-long crusade to define violence as something that must be directed against living beings (when the media above all want to speak of the violence of protesters who burn a Tesla or smash a bank window), the problem remains: a word that puts dropping a nuclear bomb, killing a Nazi, throwing a rock at a cop, beating up scabs, murdering a child, poisoning a river, gentrifying a neighborhood, or taking up arms against a colonial invasion all in the same box is categorically useless.

How about the person out there who says, “aha! but if works if you accept that self-defense isn’t violence!” I have heard this point made a hundred times. It is easy to take apart. In decades of debate I haven’t come across a single good response to the rebuttal, which is another illustration that nonviolence is based in ignorance, it thrives amidst historical erasure, and so many people new to social movements (or those who post about them on the internet) don’t learn much about the experiences and debates of our struggles, even in the recent past. This last problem can be viewed as a collective one, something our movements need to get better at, though the cyborgs who believe social media are just another movement space have made themselves immune to any forms of collective learning.

Here’s the rebuttal. Self-defense works to protect what you already have. Those who are lucky enough to have food, a house, bodily autonomy, healthcare, a good relationship with the land—they can use self-defense to protect what they have against any person or institution trying to take it away, and this is legitimate.

But what happens when you wake up in a world that has already been entirely invaded by colonial powers, by capitalism and the State? What happens when there’s already a gigantic economic machinery in place, slowly poisoning and killing everyone? What happens when you’ve been forced into dependence on that Machine? In that situation, no liberation, no survival, is possible without the Attack. And we’ve learned, generation after generation, that a struggle cannot be effective, it cannot thrive or succeed, if it limits itself to defense.

Please. Learn from our shared histories. Listen to our ghosts. Cut with the clichés about self-defense that have been shown, time and again, to be meritless.

Finally I want to be clear, a rejection of nonviolence is not a demand that everyone needs to be “violent,” whatever the hell that means. Nonviolence is the idea that a movement can only use nonviolent tactics, that anyone who uses methods not approved by whomever holds power over that movement can be forcefully excluded. Often this has included directly handing people over to the police, or softer tactics of repression like denouncing them in the media or trying to push them out of movement spaces.

In other words, nonviolence is intrinsically authoritarian and tends to collaborate with the police and media, though I’ve been lucky to meet many principled pacifists who are happy to talk a judge’s ear off but they would never help the cops or denounce fellow radicals. I’ve even been to jail with a couple of them, and they were among the dearest people I’ve met.

The opposite of nonviolence, at least the one I advocate, is an ecosystem of revolt in which there must be room for many different creatures, many forms of participation, and even room for different methods that are contradictory, that enter into conflict. An ecosystem of revolt has an unavoidable need for healers, for teachers or storytellers, for peacemakers and mediators, for translators and singers and builders, as much as it has need for fighters. But, listen up: in the present world, the acts of fighting, of sabotaging, of destroying, of seizing ground, have unique importance and need as much support as possible. The reason? Because an ecosystem needs room to flourish, it needs contact with the earth and the water, and that’s not possible in a world covered in concrete and sewer tunnels (both metaphorical and literal).

Another warning: one of the favorite shared projects of capitalism and the nonprofit industrial complex is to destroy subversive language. And ecosystem has all the makings of a trendy neologism. But a coalition is not an ecosystem. A corporate or nonprofit workplace is not an ecosystem. If it’s centralized, it’s not an ecosystem. An ecosystem is the organic, embodied, unboundaried, chaotic, generative space created by interdependent webs of living beings who create their conditions for life through relationship with one another. Anything that is based on control or top-down planning, anything that encloses or poisons what we need to live is antithetical to the ecosystem. It is the enemy of life.

There is no room for cops, Leninists, politicians, lobbyists for green capitalists or police reform, or dogmatic pacifists in an ecosystem.

That said, I want to name some of the clichés and falsehoods being spread by the latest iteration of nonviolence, which isn’t much different from the last iteration.

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“The Color Revolutions showed that nonviolence is effective.” Nope. They only worked where the government wasn’t willing to use full police force or the military. Some governments decided to use full repressive force independently of whether the movements there were peaceful or rioting. In cases where the government decided to step down, it didn’t seem to make a difference whether the movement stayed peaceful or started rioting. Finally, there was little revolutionary about these movements. They all had elite support, and if they succeeded it was only to create regime change favored by Western governments. The method most associated with the Color Revolutions was promoted globally by an academic supported by the CIA and other US government agencies.

“Nonviolence is proven to be effective by major studies.” Nope. The original studies (on which subsequent studies are based) were conducted by a US State Department official and a pro-US academic. They were not using a transformative or revolutionary definition of what constituted a “successful” movement. Most of these “successful” movements created changes favorable to the US, NATO allies, and major investors, but did not significantly improve conditions. Their criteria for “violent” movements basically focused on conflicts with high body counts while excluding most of the very movements that anarchists and other proponents of revolutionary struggle hold up as important, inspiring examples.

“The Civil Rights movement and Indian independence movement were successful nonviolent movements!” Nope. They had nonviolent currents (which in the US still practiced armed self-defense), and those currents tended to be more reformist and authoritarian. Each of these moments also had crucial armed components and many moments of rioting and mass revolt.

“People who are violent provoke the police. They provide an excuse for repression.” Incorrect. This misinformation is copaganda. The police frequently attack, gas, torture, and kill people with no justification or provocation whatsoever, and they rarely face consequences. Police frequently attack, beat, gas, or mass arrest protests that are completely peaceful.

“Nonviolence can work against fascism. Denmark was able to help its entire Jewish population escape without the use of armed resistance.” Nope. Denmark helped a few hundred people escape the Nazis by moving them to another state that had borders and a military, which would have been another difficult front in a growing war. Peaceful Danes couldn’t do much to protect all the other people the Nazis were targeting. The fascists were brought down by an alliance of states with huge militaries (some of these states were every bit as violent and oppressive as the fascists). However, armed partisan movements including anarchists, independent socialists and communists, and anticolonial movements also played a major role in overthrowing fascist power and facilitating the escape of tens of thousands of people from Catalunya to Grenoble, Italy to Poland, Yugoslavia to northern Africa.

“People should be able to organize a peaceful protest if they want. Those who don’t agree can organize a violent protest somewhere else.” Who owns a protest? What are the consequences for openly organizing a nonviolent-exclusive protest vs. openly organizing a protest that encourages sabotage or a diversity of tactics? Pretending there are equal conditions here is turning a blind eye on repression and helping the State marginalize “the violent ones.” I don’t know any anarchists who would go to a vigil organized by Catholic Workers and start throwing rocks. However, in a moment of great social turmoil when mass protest is inevitable (like in a wave of deportations or after a police killing), it is inevitable that people will gather wherever there is a call-out. The Democratic Party, big non-profits, or authoritarian leftists are likely to try to control such gatherings. Should we let them?

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Subscribe to my newsletter for free, and if you’ve got some extra dough make a little donation to this important project: Weaving Paths to Ecological Revolution

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Everything I’m sharing is well researched. I haven’t come across any solid rebuttals based in historical evidence. Below I’m sharing my analysis, with footnotes. All of these texts can be found for free on the internet. If you need them for free, go for it. If you’re able, buy a copy for yourself or order it to the local library. Taking on all the lies of a Machine that destroys memory is hard fucking work. Running an independent radical press or bookstore, this is also hard fucking work. We need support.

How Nonviolence Protects the State and The Failure of Nonviolence

They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us

A couple days ago in Catalunya, a close friend was one of several people beaten up and arrested at a protest attempting to blockade an event featuring a far Right Zionist who would be speaking against immigration. They’re out for now, but all charged with assaulting the cops.

Around the same time, I got a message from a friend in Chicago, telling me of the spirit of solidarity in the face of ICE terror, the alertness and willingness of strangers ready to jump out and stop the pigs at a moment’s notice to prevent their neighbors from being taken away, the tools and structures spreading spontaneously to help this work become more coordinated. Them telling me they had hope… I was breathing easier for the rest of the day.

Today I woke up from a bad dream, and spent most of the day trying not to fall into a deep pit. It means I didn’t get any work done, which I feel guilty about every time I have one of those days.

I want to focus on the good things, though.

The fundraiser is up, and spreading in multiple languages. Will you help spread it too?

https://www.firefund.net/pathstoecorevolution

I was telling a couple old friends, I don’t know how many big projects I have left in me, but this one feels important. If we could convince a big chunk of society to finally turn their backs on capitalism and all the institutions of power, to understand the ecological crisis as something that enfolds most of the social crises, that fundamentally it’s about relationships with the rest of the living world that colonialism took away from us, if we can spread anarchist and anti-state Indigenous methodologies for confronting questions of survival and revolution, there might actually be hope for these next few decades.

In the end, most people aren’t convinced by reasons or hypotheticals, but by things they see happening around them. The projects and struggles we’ll be highlighting and supporting in different territories of the Brazilian state are inspiring, and they work. We can’t copy-paste them to completely different territories with completely different histories, but we can trace patterns, see what resonates with the struggles or projects that have been the most transformative in the places where we live. And from those patterns we can learn methods of struggle that make the difference between misery and liberation.

If that sounds useful to you, help spread the fundraiser, and help spread the texts, interviews, and videos that will be coming out of this encounter over the coming months.

It’s late now, I can’t find the energy for any more writing, but here’s some pieces I can recommend.

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People have been putting on screenings of this video trilogy from sub.media (I wrote the script!) and it sounds like it’s leading to some great events. You can watch it alone if you don’t have the will to get off the couch, you could invite over some friends, maybe you could even host a public screening at a library or a social center. At the bottom of the page, the sub.media folks have included a packet with critical questions for facilitating a group discussion.

https://sub.media/its-revolution-or-death-a-three-part-series-from-submedia-and-peter-gelderloos/

Here’s a critique of the Chinese state as a continuation and perfection of all the oppressive projects launched by Western colonialism.

Alex Taek-Gwang Lee

The Repetition of China

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, China emerged in the European intellectual landscape not merely as a distant civilisation to be admired or exoticised, but as an irresistible philosophical question. Leibniz wrote that the Chinese “surpass us (though it is almost shameful to confess this) in practical philosophy, that is, in the precepts of e…

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7 months ago · 11 likes · 3 comments · Alex Taek-Gwang Lee

I haven’t gotten through the whole thing yet so I can’t say whether I agree with it all, but at the least it’s definitely intelligent.

Here’s another good one by Marcela from Feel the News, about when and how people were forced to work, “to sell or rent their bodies to access provisions for survival”. Smart, informative, searing, brutal, and lighthearted in a way that shows how people can survive this hellscape not just for another day, but for generations (which is something I think we all need to learn how to do).

Feel the News

I'm Luo, I'm here because of a hut tax

Hiii, this week’s delight is for everyone and I’ll share my thoughts about being forced to labor for our oppressors to live. If you’d like to receive all weekly delights, become a paying subscriber. Onto the delight…

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7 months ago · 12 likes · 8 comments · Feel the News

Here’s something I wrote about how the ecological crisis, connected to capitalism, white supremacy, and colonialism, are destroying a place that is very dear to me:

https://prismreports.org/2025/08/06/chesapeake-bay-real-estate-fishing-deforestation/

There’s so much more I want to write, and sometimes I don’t know if I’ll be able to. In that poll I gave y’all back in early August, I know that recommended readings and my rants were your least favorite type of post, whereas a lot more of you liked the radical histories and analysis of the present day. So I want to give you more of those things but, not coincidentally, they take a lot more time and effort.

Nonetheless, I want to:

• follow up on “The Right’s Rollercoaster to Hell” series by giving you an analysis of the Left today, and then a piece of strategic suggestions for how to best deal with this growing shitstorm;

• write about a small network of scientists and doctors who create alternative facts by publishing transphobic academic papers with ambiguous assertions that are hard to actually measure, and then others (often the students of the first group), who use these studies as footnotes for even more transphobic claims they publish in mainstream media – and then how all of them are rewarded for attacking our trans siblings with promotions in academia and the medical industry;

• get back to my Death Ethics series, exploring questions of revenge, direct action, and personhood;

• get back to my series on techno-optimism and Luddites, hopefully before AI takes over my account and starts writing all these things for me.

I feel daunted, imagining getting even half of these out by the end of the year.

Maybe you can help me out.

What are some reasons you find to hope? What are some stories of people helping each other out to survive precarity, sickness, depression, trauma, to keep putting one foot in front of the other or to know when to collapse and how to get back up again, how to get through the night and steel ourselves against the day?

Tell me in a comment, or start a blog of your own, or better yet, make it into a zine, a painting on some wall, knit it into a blanket you make for a friend. I don’t like these new technologies that have occupied all the space between bodies, but I still trust paper, paint, a thread…

Thanks for being here, despite it all.

It was the largest, most extensive process of genocide in human history. Tens of millions of people were killed. Hundreds of languages, extinguished. Countless unique cultures and ways of relating with unique territories, criminalized. Most of those peoples are still here, resisting or surviving as best they can, but the opportunity for the military, religious, and economic elite of a dozen nascent nation-states in Europe to enslave millions, to cut down forests and dig mines and start plantations to plunder and despoil two continents, the opportunity to start a transatlantic cycle of intense profit and accumulation by also enslaving millions of people from Africa, the opportunity to practice and perfect a science of social control through the conquest and rule of one society after another – all of those things together allowed these European nations and the settler states they established to dominate the whole planet and to spread capitalism and the modern State globally.

At the time of the Invasion, four of the six human-inhabited continents were mostly stateless: Australia and Oceania, South America, North America, and Africa. They weren’t stateless through ignorance. Many of them, from the Mississippi to the Amazon to the Bío Bío to the Upper Niger, had already seen states arise in their midst, and overthrew them. Afterwards they organized themselves to prevent new states and better defend themselves against neighboring states. They were post-state. Anti-state. And even in Europe and Asia, where states had been developing for four thousand years, there were still many anti-state areas and pockets of resistance that thwarted the pretensions of state control. The Invasion and the globalization of the State erased so much of this knowledge, this history.

The first few invasions were led by a Genovese slaver and merchant named Colombo. His supporters called him an explorer but there is no historical record of him doing any exploring before he took three ships west. What we know is that he made his money selling enslaved human beings and, if he could find a source, precious metals or rare spices. And his sponsors in the Invasion were two monarchies that had joined together to build more powerful states by carrying out a war of genocide across the whole of the Iberian peninsula. When they won their final battle at Granada, the place where Colombo found them and offered them a new war, they killed or enslaved all the Muslims, Arabs, and North Africans, and they killed or exiled all the Jews. Their ancestors had already killed or enslaved or converted the native Iberians who knew how to share the land, care for the forests, and worship the local spirits.

These invaders referred to themselves as Christendom, the white race, Western civilization, but they have created a life-devouring Machine that will utilize and promote anyone who agrees to serve it. The Machine can give immense power, but it is a kind of power that can only be used to dominate, to enslave, to extract, to murder, to torture, to rule.

All major states that we know of in human history caused regional ecocides, whether they worshiped a sun god, were led by warrior kings, allowed all their citizens to make decisions in assembly, or declared themselves states of the working class.

For the first time, we are facing ecocide at a global scale.

Learning from those who have been resisting for 500 years, for 1000 years, we know it is possible to survive the apocalypse. It is already too late for some of us, but even if we have to wait another two hundred years to destroy this Machine, it will not be too late for life.

But why wait? Why continue to use strategies or to trust institutions we know will betray us?

This ongoing ecocide—climate change and all the other ecological and social catastrophes that overlap with it—is already increasing misery, poverty, totalitarianism, sickness, death, and extinction around the world. It could get much much worse. Or, it could be the way the State finally commits suicide, once and for all.

Whether it goes one way or the other largely depends on us. We need to act with awareness. We need to move forward from our history. We need to listen and to speak. We need to strengthen our connections and return our bodies to the world. We need to learn the skills for struggle and for freedom. We need to know what to destroy and what to cultivate.

This November, some compas in Brazil, in a few other places, and me: we’re starting a project that we hope will push things in the other direction. Weaving paths from colonial apocalypse to ecological revolution.

We could use your support. Here’s the fundraiser:

Firefund: Paths to Ecological Revolution

As we release the articles, interviews, podcasts, and teaching materials arising from this project, I’ll be sure to post about them here and on my bluesky account!

The truth is, Israel’s war against Palestine and against Palestinians has been going on for a very long time and the action to overrun the Israeli military trapping two million people, many of them refugees, inside the tiny Gaza Strip, and to take hundreds of hostages, happened in a context of escalating Israeli violence that has the clear and explicit intention of completely annihilating Palestine.

In 2022, the year before the Hamas attack:

The Israeli military killed 182 Palestinians, and Israeli settlers killed another 5-8 (the media call them “civilians” though they are highly armed paramilitaries living on stolen land, who are given police authority to stop, harass, beat, and steal property from Palestinians on a daily basis).

According to an Israeli human rights organization, around two-thirds of the Palestinians killed were unarmed. Some of the unarmed Palestinians were throwing stones. Even in equal conditions, when one person is not an invader, someone throwing a stone is no justification to put a bullet through them. And I’m unaware of any documented instance of an Israeli soldier killed by a stone, whereas Israeli troops have murdered hundreds of Palestinian children, shooting them down with sniper rifles, for throwing stones.

Of the unarmed Palestinians killed in 2022, 60% were not engaging in any conflictual activity. They were shopping, walking down the street, or filming abuses by Israeli soldiers and settlers. 36 of the Palestinians killed were children.

During the same time period, Palestinians killed 22 Israelis. 182 vs. 22. In “peacetime,” Israelis are killing around 10 Palestinians for every Israeli killed, and at least half of those Israelis are in the military or on land where, according to international law, they’re not supposed to be.

Speaking of land seizure, in 2022 the Israeli government, Israeli military, and Israeli settlers demolished 784 homes and other structures in the West Bank alone, leaving 500 people, including 255 children, houseless. For years, now, Israeli law has forbidden new construction by Palestinians in the West Bank even as the state financially and militarily supports illegal construction by Israeli invaders. Israel is very literally an apartheid state based on explicit racism.

As for hostages, in April 2022 the Israeli state was holding 4,173 Palestinian “security” prisoners, 160 of them children, some of them for offenses as simple as raising a Palestinian flag, and 1,000 of them in indefinite imprisonment without any charges (“indefinite” means they could potentially hold them until they die). The Israelis taken by Hamas on October 7, 2023 were illegal settlers on stolen land, whereas many of the Palestinians held by Israel are there on vague accusations, held for acts of political protest, or held without any accusations at all, and yet nearly all the media say that Palestinians take “hostages” and Israelis take “prisoners.” This is yet another example of the white supremacy of the Israeli state and those who support it.

There are plenty of important criticisms to make of Hamas, but they must be made with the awareness that the Palestinian people are fighting for their survival, whereas the Israelis are fighting to steal other people’s lands. The Israelis are the invaders and the occupiers, and they are responsible for well over 90% of all the killings in the ongoing war. If it weren’t for the existence of armed resistance, there would be no Palestine, and there would be no Palestinians left in the occupied territories except for the ones the Israeli economy deemed necessary for cheap labor.

Israeli politicians from Netanyahu going back to Ben-Gurion and earlier do not hide the fact that they want nothing less than to annihilate all of Palestine, to steal every centimeter of that land. They are getting away with it, and unless people physically stop them, they will accomplish their goal.

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This article has a number of figures and links to peer-reviewed reports on the death toll: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Gaza_war

And here’s an article on “indefinite detention” by the Israelis: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67600015

And one with more historical context to the Israeli occupation, especially the parts preceding 1967: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_occupation_of_the_West_Banknews/world-middle-east-67600015

Finally, two seminal books you can get from your local bookstore, and not Amazon: The Question of Palestine by Edward Said.

And, The Hundred Years War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi

…until next time, take care of each other

Are you feeling it, things are just too heavy today? Then just scroll down, click on that link for the beautiful sub.media video or Margaret’s talented reading of some speculative fiction, and come back to the rest of this newsletter another day. It’s all good. Breathe. Feel the cool air way way above the earth.

Sorry I haven’t written anything in a while! I’ve been moving, then immediately after unpacking, packing up again for a temporary move for a temporary out-of-town job, while trying to finish the articles I did my research for this summer about the Chesapeake Bay and the lie of green growth, while going through a really intensive but oh-so-healpful cycle of therapy, and on the side, preparing for a big huge trip to Brazil to work with some comrades there – anarchists, organized workers, communities belonging to the Landless Workers Movement, and (to be clear all of these categories overlap) members of the Ka’apor and other Amazonian indigenous peoples. We’ve set our sights on the COP30, that masked ball where governments and capitalists dance around questions of climate change and ecocide while making themselves a whole bunch of money. Last year, the official conference for powerful institutions to make empty promises on climate change was in Azerbaijan, a petrostate that was at that moment actively engaged in ethnic cleansing.

Basically, me and the folks in Brazil want to take all these lies, the whole idea that states and capitalists would even be capable of addressing the causes of the ecological crisis at that mythical point in the future when they decide it’s something they want to prioritize, and blow that shit out of the water. While also highlighting all the effective, intersectional, anticolonial initiatives around the world that are restoring communities, healing ecosystems, mitigating the poisonous effects of capitalism, and making our collective survival more likely. And they do this despite few resources, marginalization by the media and academia, and police repression.

So anyways, yeah, some big things going on over here.

I remember there was a Sunday the other week when I worked 14 hours straight, cleaning and fixing things at home, dealing with stupid bureaucracies, then writing and researching and conducting an interview. That night I only slept 4 hours, mostly because of ongoing health problems. Then I got up at 6 in the morning and drove the old folks’ bus for 10 hours. Then I had dinner and did a little more writing on the couch, and reached out for more interviews for an article I hope comes out soon.

The day after that I gave an interview with Margaret Killjoy and Hazel on Cool Zone Media Book Club, wrapping up their podcast/ audio version of my sci-fi novella, Hermetica. It was really nice speaking with them (!!!)

Audio books are awesome, you should check it out from Episode 1 at this link.

Later that same day, I rushed off to the hospital for my trimesterly MRI. Which I’m not sure how I’ll pay for next time, since I’ll probably be losing Medicaid with the cutbacks. Cross your fingers for me that my tumor doesn’t start growing again!

Then, Wednesday and Thursday, back to the driving job…

So, sometimes I don’t have time for the newsletter. But I still got listening and writing to offer!

Ya want some audio, there’s the Hermetica audio book I linked above.

Ya want some video? I got some video for ya! Part III of It’s Revolution or Death dropped last month. This is a three part series of (kinda) short videos that dissect the lies, misrepresentations, and ineffective responses that are most likely to be passed off by the mainstream media and also by the mainstream climate movement (part i), that interview participants in amazing movements around the world that are stopping airports and pipelines, recovering food autonomy, and healing the land (part ii), and that look at helpful things we can do to increase everyone’s chances of survival even if we don’t live in a place with powerful anticolonial movements or there isn’t an insurrection going on anywhere within a thousand miles of us (part iii).

(By the way, insurrection and revolution aren’t things we can just wait for. For those who want to ponder this question more, here’s Anarchy and Insurrection by Alfredo Bonanno and “23 Theses Concerning Revolt” followed by “Social War, Antisocial Tension” by the Distro Josep Gardenyes. In the meantime, it’s a real thing that we also need to cultivate other skills, and figure out how to survive the despair in periods of reaction and pacification.)

I wrote the script and did some of the voiceover, R filmed the interview with me, and the absolute wizards at sub.media did the other interviews, along with all the sound mixing, image mixing, and expert editing. I felt like such a klutz working alongside them, it was such an honor. They’re so good at what they do!

Please, for the love of life on this planet, spread these radical fuckin videos everywhere you can! They’re free, they’re beautiful, they’re truthful, and they can help you and yours climb out of this pit of despair we’re all stuck in, not on the basis of false solutions but thinking about things that actually work, that are ambitious but within our means.

I think I can speak for the sub.media folks and for myself when I say, we do this work—whether it’s videos, researching, writing—out of passion, out of anger, out of crazy optimism that things might be better, out of the fierce commitment to remember our ghosts.

If you respect what we do at all, please pass it on, please spread it on social media, please print out a copy of any of the shorter texts and leave them someplace a stranger might pick them up, please recommend them to that one sibling or childhood friend who has different politics than you but still trusts you and loves you, please organize reading groups and film screenings, get this playing “accidentally” on the sound system of the coffee shop you work at, project it onto the side of a building at night.

We are outgunned a million to one. Our ideas are so much more compelling than theirs, because they’re truthful, and hopeful, and empowering, but they won’t spread all by themselves. Even a creature with wings needs a little help to take off, whether it’s the example of someone else flying, or just the faint whisper of a favorable wind.

I’m going to pass the virtual hat in a moment, because I got bills to pay and I’m getting kind of old to be driving a rickety old bus at just a little over minimum wage for much longer.

But seriously, speaking from the heart, there’s nothing more meaningful you could for me than spread my writing – if you like it. If you think it’s worthwhile.

Here’s a couple more things I’ve published in the last year or so. And if you’ve already read/watched/listened to everything I’m linking in this newsletter, lemme know in the comments and I’ll write something just for you!

Just over a year ago, I wrote “Turtle Lake” about ecology, trauma, grief, and memory, and about how all those things can live in one place, and maybe, even, heal there too. Around the same time I published an investigative article explaining how, in theory and in practice, more green energy actually leads to an increase in fossil fuel production, and how the whole idea of green growth is based on a number of omissions and lies. It’s on In These Times. I followed that up in February with, “Betrayed by Green Capitalism, Here’s How We Can Build a Livable Future,” which doesn’t give a copy-paste solution to the ecological crisis, but it does show how rooted networks can help us figure out and build the best solution for the specific conditions we face. Then in the spring, for Truthout, I tried to help us remember all the battles the far Right won over the last decade and a half to get away with the blanket censorship we’re all facing now. “Trump’s Censorship Campaign Draws on Decades of Infrastructure Build by Big Tech.”

Finally, an investigative article for Prism Reports about a place near and dear to my heart, the Chesapeake Bay: “Colonialism and extractivism catch up with the North Atlantic’s greatest estuary.”

Okay, here’s the hat: You can support my work by subscribing to this newsletter using the button at the bottom. You’re not paying for access, since I’m committed to making sure all of this writing remains available for free.

If you don’t want to support either of the corporations taking a cut, I get it. You can send me money through Paypal @PGelderloos

Crap, also an evil corporation. Almost as though there were something corrupt about banks, money, the whole system…

Here’s another option. You can buy one of my books from a local bookstore or straight from the publisher. Now, authors get 5% or less on book sales but this is still the best option since the rest of that money isn’t (better not be) going to Amazon, it’s going to independent bookstores and radical publishers, which need a lot of help.

Any other options? If you’re at a university, get me some money from the department or a student org and invite me out to speak. If you’ve got a trust fund or make six figures, slip me some cash and hell, I’ll fix up your garden for you or wash your dishes!

Anywho. Of my latest four books, two are from Pluto and two from Detritus, both great publishers to support.

The Solutions Are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below, on understanding the ecological crisis and how to abolish the forces that cause it.

They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us, on how our society is designed to erase collective memory, condemning our movements to repeat the same errors every generation.

Organization, Continuity, Community, practical theory for anarchists on how to understand organization and how to use it to build intergenerational movements and anticapitalist communities.

Hermetica, one of three and a half novels I’ve written but the only one published so far: it’s science fiction that deals with madness, surveillance, and breaking out.

And then, an older one from AK Press, another great radical publisher, Worshiping Power: An Anarchist View of Early State Formation

That’s all I’ve got for now! The sun is down and my To-Do list isn’t much shorter. I hope you found something worthwhile. And even though I’m running two weeks late for this, I want to wish you all a happy autumn equinox, or spring equinox if you’re more than five thousand kilometers to the south of where I’m writing!

Pick up a glass of your favorite drink, take a deep breath, imagine the world we’re moving towards, and give a toast: to Abundance!

Bottoms up!

All of the four Al Jazeera journalists murdered on August 10 were from Gaza, three were born in refugee camps, and at least three of them had immediate family members—mothers, fathers, and brothers—killed by Israeli forces in the ongoing war. The Israeli military admitted it intentionally targeted the journalists in order to kill Anas al-Sharif. Al-Sharif was a well known, tireless journalist, but the IDF claimed he was the leader of a Hamas brigade. They promised they had indisputable evidence of their claim. Media all over the world repeated Israel’s claim, even though no one saw the supposed evidence. And even though Israel has been caught lying on a daily basis throughout this war.

Far beyond this one war, government sources tend to be the most common sources quoted by the media. They are also frequently dishonest, inaccurate, or meaninglessly ambiguous: if government spokespeople say anything factual and true it’s when telling part of the truth happens to coincide with their interests. Governments at war see the media as a weapon and they use media to spread their propaganda.

It seems unethical, to put it lightly, for journalists to quote sources like the US or Israeli governments without letting their readers know these are not credible sources. It also seems to fly in the face of journalism’s ostensible purpose when they spread information that is demonstrably false, or spread a truth and a lie as two competing opinions, as though it were impossible to do the research and find out which version is more accurate.

Do we believe the version of the truth spread by these human rights organizations, or do we prefer the US government’s version of the truth? You choose! With the mainstream media’s approach to truth and credibility, the reality you build for yourself is just a lifestyle choice in the marketplace of ideas, slowly sliding towards a loyalty test between one mainstream political current and another.

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Is there any point to expecting journalists and the publications they work for to be ethical, honest, and diligent? In fact, I believe there is a form of journalism that is more or less redeemable, but it is getting slaughtered—sometimes literally—by mainstream journalism.

On the whole, journalism is a stupefying trade. Reporting on the stories du jour, journalism is designed to treat us to a predictable parade of formulaic narratives that—less than educate us or expand our understanding of the world around us—create an alibi for institutions of power, normalize harmful dynamics that shouldn’t be excused, falsify or erase history, and fabricate a world that, once people accept it as factual, makes them easy to rule and exploit. Journalists and their editors frame a debate that society is meant to replicate. The “two sides” in this debate are both misinformed and sociopathic, though one is from the Right and the other from the Center or Center-Left. Journalists will construct a debate between a spokesperson for a military that is actively carrying out genocide; a spokesperson for a human rights organization that is documenting the genocide without talking about any realistic responses; and a survivor of that genocide who is currently starving and whose entire family has been murdered. They give the first spokesperson about 60% of the ink, the second spokesperson about 30% of the ink, and the one person who best understands the situation a short quote buried way down in the article. In a centrist or right-leaning publication, that person wouldn’t be quoted at all.

Every now and then, progressive-leaning media will publish an investigative piece that involves months or years of research, takes on a powerful institution, and reveals real and ongoing harm. However, this is not so common, and serves mostly to boost a publication’s reputation and win them an award or two. The Boston Globe, for example, is still living off the laurels of the story it ran back in 2002 on systematic child abuse by the Catholic Church in the Boston area. News flash: everyone already knew that the Church systematically abuses children, and not just in the Boston area.

There are other exceptions. For example, in August the BBC actually provided the evidence showing that the Israeli government was lying when it claimed that the journalist Anas al-Sharif led a Hamas terror cell. It is not a coincidence, though, that the BBC used their much atrophied fact-checking muscle when it comes to journalists being killed. When it’s the rest of us who are in danger, it usually won’t even make the news. If it does, spokespeople for whatever government policy or exploitive business is screwing us over will be given a prime spot to confuse the issue and deny any wrongdoing, and if we’re lucky some scientist, maverick politician, or major charity will speak on our behalf.

In 1988, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky published Manufacturing Consent, an analysis of how the mass media manufacture consent or get the public to support or accept certain fundamental aspects of how the State and capitalism organize society. Their model is based on astute analysis and an immense amount of data, and it still holds today. Some of the following are points made by Herman and Chomsky, and others I’m drawing from other sources or they’re my own formulations.

• Profitability: mass media are private, for-profit companies owned by even larger corporations. The exceptions are state-owned, and all of them are subject to state regulation. They need to satisfy their advertisers, their parent company and its other subsidiaries, and the government in power that they are not hurting business or subverting social control. Even media that support themselves through subscriptions still depend on individuals with more money and on foundations supported by major corporations, and they still exist in a corporate media environment that conditions people’s expectations and understanding of the world. Media that distance themselves too far from the mainstream lose their financial support and their protection from government censorship or repression.

• Debate: you don’t control people by telling them what to think. You control them by posing the questions and framing the debate. A debate around “what’s better, Twinkies or Kit-Kats?” allows people to have opinions and express themselves, but by participating in the debate they naturalize the concepts of industrial food production and food as a commodity, along with all the poisonous and extractive processes that come with the package.

• Framing: if you have the power to ask the questions, you don’t need to determine the answers. You can control people’s understanding of the world while also making them feel free as they come up with their own answers. The question, “Does Israel have a right to self-defense?” obscures the history and the nature of the war. The question, “Should employers be responsible for paying for their workers’ healthcare?” naturalizes the ideas of rich and power, healthcare as a commodity, and the existence of corporations. Those who can fit their answers into the question as framed—basically, people with mainstream views, views that are validated and reinforced by mass media—will have an advantage over the rest of us who have to challenge the question and give a whole history lesson, in the process coming off as eccentric, out-of-touch, unrealistic, or extreme. What questions can you think of that the media never ask?

• Legitimation through sourcing: mass media overwhelmingly cite, quote, and interview government officials, wealthy people, technical experts, celebrities, and the representatives of major corporations, non-profits, or other institutions. We learn more about the world we live in through the views, beliefs, and assertions of those who own and control that world than through the views and experiences of people like us, or people in very different circumstances who still share with us some basic qualities: dispossession, a lack of control over our own lives.

• False objectivity: even when media quote members of the public, they are arbitrarily defining the range of what “normal people” believe. Both editors and professors of journalism will instruct up-and-coming journalists, don’t give your own opinions and characterizations. Find someone you can quote who will say it for you. In other words, they create a false illusion of objectivity.

• Stigmatization and controversy: rather than fact check claims or refuse to spread claims that cannot be verified, if an institution of power is making a claim, media will typically broadcast that claim alongside opposing claims from other institutions of power, presenting the issue as a controversy, or differing opinions. On the flipside, political actors with large platforms and access to other forms of power can delegitimize facts by disputing them, treating them as offensive allegations, and otherwise generating negative controversy to the audience is less likely to trust those inconvenient facts.

• Loyal opposition: the mass media are vital to the counterinsurgency figure of a loyal opposition. Governments can claim their subjects are free as long as there is an opposition. Only dictatorships are oppressive, right? But if that opposition is a loyal opposition, if that opposition does not question the basic foundations of oppressive power, than the criticism actually makes the State stronger. Mass media train people to frame criticism as loyal criticism. So, through the lens of mass media, the question is not, “Should we accept the existence of this hierarchical institution that is founded on genocide and that keeps invading other countries in order to project the power and increase the profits of the few?” it’s “Will the US invasion of Iraq damage our standing in the Middle East?” It’s not, “How do we win back our survival from the jaws of these greedy capitalists?” it’s “Will increasing healthcare and unemployment benefits stem the growing wave of protests?” It’s not, “Can we abolish the police and prisons without abolishing the State?” it’s “Will a shift towards mediated settlements help decrease crime?”

Al Jazeera is by no means immune to these dynamics. Artificially limited framings and historical erasure is universal to all major media, including Al Jazeera. And as they are headquartered in and partially funded by the government of Qatar, I wouldn’t trust them to investigate the systematic abuse of immigrant workers there (though I did find a few exceptions, in their English-language edition only, in the lead up to Qatar’s hosting of the 2022 World Cup, when there was increased international attention to such abuses). For what it’s worth, they outperformed Western media by several orders of magnitude in their coverage of the Arab Spring, even though the 2011 uprisings were destabilizing governments all around them, including allies, and might well have jumped the border into Qatar as well.

Whatever the case, journalists from Al Jazeera regularly put themselves in situations of extreme danger in order to report from war zones and other conflicts where people who are not supported by any major government are being severely harmed… unlike most North American and European media.

Israel is not the first country to intentionally target Al Jazeera. On 8 April, 2003, the US military bombed Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Baghdad, killing one correspondent and injuring others. The same day, the invading US military attacked two other sites associated with independent journalists, including a lethal shelling of the Palestine Hotel where 100 “unembedded” (independent) journalists were housed.

In 2001, the US bombed Al Jazeera’s offices in Kabul. The Bush II government called Al Jazeera “vicious, inaccurate, and inexcusable” to justify their murders, though Al Jazeera was infinitely more accurate and truthful in their reporting than the US government and any major US news organization. As for vicious and inexcusable, between their two wars against Iraq and their invasion of Afghanistan the US government murdered over one million people…

The second US war against Iraq killed more journalists and media workers than any other war in recorded history up to that point, over 200. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists more lost their lives in targeted killings than as bystanders or “collateral damage.” Fast forward to 2025, though, and Israel has smashed the US’ shameful record. In the current war, Israel has killed over 260 journalists in Gaza and the West Bank, and about 30 more in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, and parts of Palestine fully annexed by Israel.

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The lion’s share of targeted journalists are freelancers working on commission for international wire services, or media workers employed by non-Western companies like Al Jazeera. And yet, the much publicized, romanticized idea of journalists dying to get the story disproportionately benefits the branding of powerful publications that are literally on the other side of the battle lines.

The freelancers are forgotten, they’re precarious workers anyways, and Al Jazeera gets slandered as “terrorist” for reporting inconvenient truths, but the gold standard of journalism is a rag like the New York Times.

There isn’t really a rightwing pole for journalism anymore, unless you count more specialized publications like the Wall Street Journal, ever since Fox News tapped out after 2020 when they defended themselves from libel claims by clarifying that their major news shows were actually “entertainment” and not factual reporting.

Al Jazeera vs. the New York Times

The idea that the New York Times is considered a respectable newspaper would be hilarious if they weren’t complicit in so many atrocities. It’s hard to find an article free of misspellings or grammatical errors, and their editors demonstrate a loose grasp on the English language.

Far worse, the Times consistently provides propaganda support to the atrocities of the powerful. For a long time now, they’ve been embedded with the US military and in bed with Wall Street. While they wring their hands about Fox News spreading lies about an election, the Times intentionally spread lies to justify Bush II’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, a war that has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

The editorial desk and the international desk at the NYT have that blood on their hands, and yet not a single one of their major journalists or editors have been executed, imprisoned, ostracized, or beat up in the streets. On the contrary, they’re still given credibility even though they’re known to be professional liars.

They also continue to lie about their 2003 propaganda campaign, spinning intentional complicity in mass murder as a “mistake.” By February 2003, a full month before the US invaded, everyone with access to the internet knew that the claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction were an intentional fabrication. I remember listening to the story, and the proof, on Democracy Now! and other outlets. This article in particular gives a highly informed explanation of all the investigation and inspections that were happening from 2002 to 2003, showing that the problem was not “faulty and inadequate intelligence,” the problem was “robust and reliable intelligence information [that was intentionally being] ignored.”

As for Bush’s mudslinging that Hussein was working with al Qaida, this was nothing but a lazy, racist ploy to take advantage of the average white American’s conflation of Arabs, Muslims, and terrorists. Everyone with a minimal grasp of the politics of Hussein’s Ba’athist regime knew the idea he would support al Qaida was absurd: in fact, they were enemies, and all the evidence confirmed it. Meanwhile, there’s a good deal of evidence showing covert complicity with al Qaida and similar groups by the US, the UK, and Israel, both before and after 2001.

And yet, the NYT has the gall to keep on lying. In their supposed retraction, published over a year after the US invaded and the death toll was still climbing, the NYT offered more excuses than self-criticisms and more lies than corrections.

To give just two examples of many:

Regarding aluminum tubes the Bush administration and the Times claimed could be used to enrich uranium, the retraction from the editors claims, “Five days later [after running the story], the Times reporters learned that the tubes were in fact a subject of debate among intelligence agencies.” This is also false. There was no debate. The CIA had found that report lacking in all credibility the year before. The DOE and the IAEA—the US and the international agencies most knowledgeable about nuclear weapons production—had already concluded in the ‘90s that aluminum tubes like the ones mentioned in a report by a single CIA agent (the report his bosses discarded) could not be used to produce nuclear weapons.

The Times editors begin their fake apology saying, “In most cases, what we reported was an accurate reflection of the state of our knowledge at the time, much of it painstakingly extracted from intelligence agencies that were themselves dependent on sketchy information.” This is false. There was abundant information from the IAEA, from the CIA, and from weapons inspectors on the ground in Iraq that there were no signs of chemical or biological weapons stockpiles and no signs of a nuclear weapons program. The New York Times was not falling victim to a lack of information or to the journalistic pressures to publish more exciting headlines, as they claim: they systematically chose to give a bullhorn to select sources offering allegations that had no supporting evidence and that contradicted verifiable and credible sources. They systemically chose to ignore or downplay all the verifiable evidence contradicting these select sources. These were not random, untrustworthy sources the NYT editors were boosting. They chose only to boost sources who were supporting Bush administration talking points. The editors did so because they wanted to support the Bush administration’s push to invade Iraq.

(In the Washington Post’s retraction, also published a year and a half too late, the editors are equally dishonest: “We didn't pay enough attention to the minority,” they lament, shedding crocodile tears. Actually, what they did was to ignore the majority of credible sources and experts and instead give credence to Bush administration cronies who did not deserve a platform. They claimed their errors were only visible “in hindsight” and they deliberately gaslit and ignored the abundance of sources that could provide solid evidence.)

The Times is being a little less bombastic with their manipulations these days than they were in 2003, but in their coverage of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine, they are falling back on all the basic maneuvers for manufacturing consent.

They overwhelmingly give more credence and more room to US and Israeli officials who are either making inane PR statements or making demonstrably false claims, criticisms are presented vaguely and without all the supporting evidence, historical context is erased or falsified, and if Palestinians and other Arabs are ever quoted, they are either cast as sinister or questionable figures, or as passive victims suffering under ambiguous circumstances.

The Times and other similar publications leave themselves the room for occasionally publishing lengthy investigative pieces, and sometimes these longer articles are even good! But then, the very next day, everything that has been revealed is erased, sent down the memory hole, leaving readers in a soup of ambiguity where editors can rest assured that the status quo of implicit racism will lead most of their audience to favor Israelis over Palestinians.

For example, we know for a fact that Israel had been increasing lethal attacks and land theft against Palestinians in the years before October 2023, yet the Times systematically repeats the myth that Hamas started the war. We know for a fact that many of the 1200 Israeli settlers killed in the Hamas attack were actually killed by the Israeli military, which has a documented policy of killing hostages to prevent them from being used for leverage. We have footage of Israeli forces shooting missiles at Hamas convoys full of Israeli prisoners. And yet, the Times and most other Western media repeat the demonstrable lie that Hamas killed 1200 people that day.

These media systematically refer to this war as a war in Gaza and “against Hamas.” This is a distortion. It has been documented time and again that the war is targeting the entire population of Gaza, it is targeting Palestinians in the West Bank, it is targeting Iran and its allies in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Qatar, and it has also been used by the Israeli government to steal more land in Syria.

In tandem with the US government, these media refer to Hamas as a terrorist group, and to the PLO (which supposedly holds power in the West Bank), as the legitimate future government of Palestine, if that’s ever going to occur. And yet, it was Hamas that won the last Palestinian elections, whereas the PLO runs a proxy dictatorship for Israel as it gradually whittles away at the West Bank.

Facts as opinions: It’s not that “critics say” this “could” be a violation of international law. Intentionally evicting, dispossessing, displacing, and expelling a civilian population IS a violation of international law. Anyone who says otherwise is incorrect. A fair and accurate headline would say “Israeli government lies again about its intentional expulsion of Palestinians from their homes.”

Minimizations and euphemisms:

“Wholesale emigration” as opposed to “mass land theft and violent expulsion through an intentional campaign of murder and genocide.” A “devastated enclave,” when referring to the homes of millions of people. “Displacement camps” instead of “refugee camps.”

Repeating a zero-evidence claim, from the people doing the killing, that they’re trying not to do so much killing, and then a framing that their genocide isn’t intentional, they just aren’t doing enough to examine their failings.

And here’s the progressive Boston Globe getting in on the distortion. Studies have shown that the death toll in Gaza is well over 100,000 now. These studies use standard, accepted methodology for calculating an increase in death rates in a large population. However, major media continue to spread the much lower body count kept by the underresourced network of hospitals in Gaza (currently around 63,000 dead). However, the same doctors and medical workers who release these numbers also state that these are not complete figures: they only represent bodies that have been recovered, of people killed by bombs, gunfire, artillery, etc. The numbers leave out all the bodies that are still buried in the rubble, as well as the much greater number of people killed by sickness and malnourishment, a known and intentional consequence of the kind of warfare Israel is waging.

To be clear, I think Hamas is an oppressive, authoritarian organization, and hopefully everyone knows by now that even the worst of political parties can come to power through democratic elections. However, the Israeli government is guilty of much more extensive torture and sexual assault, and the Israeli military and paramilitary settlers have killed about a hundred times more non-combatants, elderly, children, and babies that Palestinian militant groups have. Practically every year, an Israeli politician or military leader will go on record saying some variant of “for every one of us they kill, we’ll kill fifty of them,” which is a really bad look considering which infamous 1940s government made that their explicit policy for dealing with the resistance movements in the various territories they occupied.

Sidebar: I want to quickly note, and I’ve documented this elsewhere, how not just the Times but all mainstream media consistently report false or misleading information about the ecological crisis in order to support the profitable fables that green energy, green growth, government regulation, and mysterious future technologies will somehow save us.

A: In the face of the biggest, most lethal threat humanity has ever faced, the NYT is endorsing the wishful thinking of the companies profiting off the disaster?

B: They’re ignoring the hard evidence that increasing energy efficiency has never to decreased total carbon emissions? … and also the fact that with AI’s huge demand for power, gas, oil, and even coal are back in a big way and any increase in efficiency from other power sources won’t be able to keep pace with growing demand?

Additionally, they tend not to demonstrate how rightwing discourses against trans people and immigrants are based on false affirmations. Instead, they may present these discourses as edgy or aggressive, but in the end just a different opinion.

The New York Times sets the global standard for professional journalism, whereas Al Jazeera is ignored or demonized by many of the most powerful governments in the world. And yet, the former regularly publishes demonstrably misleading or false information from the comfort and safety of distant offices, enabling genocide and mass murder, and is rewarded with wealth and prestige. The other, though it has plenty of faults and political blindspots, takes great risks to thoroughly, diligently, and accurately report on the abuses and victims of the powerful, regionally and globally.

These two models of journalism are literally at war.

…

“No, it doesn’t start raining until later,” she replied. She was looking at the forecast on her laptop. I was looking out the window.

I’ve had a near identical interaction with other people. And on a daily basis I hear people say things like, “it’s going to get up to 80 tomorrow,” or “the snow will stop around 9” or “it’s going to be cloudy all week next week.”

The salient feature here is matter-of-fact statements about the future without knocking on wood, opening the back door to uncertainty, or paying the least bit of homage to the spiraling, prediction-defying chaos that constitutes our universe. As though the future were the latest thing people could own. Or rent access to as a subscriber to this or that app.

As I began noticing this tendency more and more, I started to see how people would revise their confident descriptions of the future as their favored weather app changed its predictions, stating the new future with the same certainty, and insisting that the new forecast was the same as the old forecast, that they hadn’t changed their tune by a single note. I’ve practically gotten into duels insisting that people are editing their memory of the future. (Truth: I wish I got in more duels.)

It’s like Stalinist revisionism projected forwards. Rain? There was never any rain in the forecast. Zinoviev? Who’s Zinoviev?

Faced with this distressing trend, I did what any normal person would do: I started a file where I would record forecasts, and then when the actual, in-the-flesh weather arrived, I’d record if the forecast was accurate or inaccurate. I periodically repeated the process over the following 10 months.

And boy do I have things to share!

Weather forecasts were only accurate about 50% of the time! Now, I don’t have any degrees in statistical analysis or modelling, and only 107 data points. However, the sample was random and impartial: I randomly chose days to record forecasts and I included all my prediction/result data points. I took predictions from 3 different apps that people swore by (including the standard Apple app and Weather.com) as well as the National Weather Service.

Total nerds can get more info on the numbers at the very end of this newsletter.

So… does this mean that I’m a flat-earther who doesn’t believe in science? Let’s find out!

What the hell does any of this have to do with capitalism?

Hold your horses, we’re getting there!

The basis of weather forecasts in this day and age is meteorology, the science of studying weather systems on the basis of numerous measurements (ground temperature and temp at different altitudes, humidity, wind speed and direction, dew point, air pressure, wet bulb, dry bulb, etc.); observations of direct relationships (e.g. what happens to humidity when a hot high pressure center moves over a body of cooler water); and increasingly complex computer modelling that attempts to plug in billions of data points past and present, extrapolations of the laws of physics, and numerous long-observed patterns regarding how different elements in this complex system interact. The goal is to predict how the present conditions will change in twelve hours, twenty-four hours, two days, five days, and so on.

Before anyone carts me off to the tinfoil hat room, please let me place my hand on the good book and say “I believe in meteorology!” Contending with an immense quantity of factors in one of the most chaotic systems we can observe (the planet’s weather), meteorology and its close cousin climatology can give us insightful and accurate analysis of what the heck is going on up there. Moreover, they provide a strong basis for fairly accurate predictions of how existing conditions will change moving into the future.

Weather forecasts based in meteorology are clearly not 100% accurate. Similarly, climatologists have pretty consistently underestimated how quickly climate change and related effects will unfold. In other words, they bring useful tools to the table, but there’s still a bug or two in the machinery.

For me, these accuracies and inaccuracies bring up a number of questions.

Do these mistakes in climate forecasting have anything to do with a tendency towards false optimism shared by both scientific institutions like the IPCC and financial institutions like the WEF, which reflect the interests of those who profit off ecocide, and who have an incredibly hard time imagining that capitalism might bring about its own collapse?

What about the use of meteorology in a consumer market? Decades ago, scientific weather forecasts became, in part, a form of TV entertainment to capture people’s attention. TV stations wanted to project confidence and certainty: here are the experts, telling us what the future will bring. Producers of the capitalist forecast didn’t want to teach their viewers about probabilities and multiple possible futures.

Nowadays, the weather app is just like any other app: a tool to take advantage of and reproduce a person’s alienation from the world around them. Producers of apps are more interested in extracting active data from their users, and delivering data and users over to advertisers, then in delivering accurate data to the users. (Similar to how, say, DuoLingo is almost completely ineffective at teaching someone a language, and yet highly effective at getting users to tune in every day.)

What about weather forecasters that aren’t businesses? In my mini-study, I got more data points from the National Weather Service than from any app. And granted, the NWS presentation puts more focus on probabilities than a story of certainties, and they generally offer less information for the forecasts that are multiple days out (whereas plenty of apps will mock up an hour-by-hour forecast days into the future). Still, the NWS exists side by side with the Weather Channel and the apps that condition the expectations of the scientists who work there, and they probably also have bureaucrats whipping them on with performance indicators including website hits and other dross.

Given we live in a society of amnesia, the producers of weather forecasts are less likely to be punished if they provide an inaccurate forecast than if they provide a boring or confusing forecast.

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If we can permit ourselves a sophism, what kind of weather forecasts would a counterfactual pure science produce? Of course, there’s no such thing as pure science, since information can never exist without context, and science is inseparable from those who produce it, who are themselves inseparable from their funders, their sponsors, their institutions, their professors and ancestors…

I’ll come back to this relationship between capital and science in future essays. For now, I want to encourage people to get off their phones, go outside, and just breathe. Observe how all the creatures around you respond to changes in the weather, and wonder about what keeps humans from doing the same. What humans seem the most insulated from the real world weather? What are the causes of it?

Do any of you know anyone who is so intimately connected with a territory—maybe they’ve lived there their whole life, maybe they’re just good at paying attention—that they can tell you with high accuracy when it’s going to rain or if the clouds will break? Can you imagine what it feels like to be in that kind of relationship with the world around you?

Until next time, take care,

p

Okay you numbers nerds!

With a sample size of 107 data points (accurate/inaccurate), I found an accuracy of 53.2%. According to https://www.qualtrics.com/experience-management/research/margin-of-error/ the characteristics of my survey give it a 12.4% margin of error. Looking only at results from the National Weather Service, which potentially has access to a larger data set and better technology, there was 55.9% accuracy in a sample of 59.

Corroborating my self-evaluation that my study is low precision and decent accuracy, there is a wide margin but also a general similarity between the accuracy in the winter predictions (55.3%) and the summer predictions (51.7%).

Basically, what I’m saying is my results won’t be very precise, but in broad terms I think they should be accurate. Think of it like this: if a machine can give you the right answer 90% of the time, there’s a decent chance you could pick two random answers and get a right one and a wrong one. However, if you pick 107 random answers there would be an extremely low chance that half of them were wrong.

Does anyone out there know how to calculate how improbable it is? Leave the equation in the comments!

I’ve been looking into a number of studies that claim much higher accuracy in weather forecasts, but I’m still trying to find their original sources and see if I can understand their methodology, because from what I’ve seen I just don’t believe that 24 hour forecasts are 90% accurate and 5 day forecasts 80% accurate unless we’re using a reeeeeally gentle measure of what constitutes accurate.

Here’s the metric I used, and I think it’s pretty generous. I considered a forecast inaccurate:

- if weather predicted as sunny, partially sunny, mostly cloudy, or cloudy fits fully within a different characterization.

- if a same day temperature prediction is 3º off

- if a future day temperature prediction is 5º off

- if the probability of precipitation is given as below 20% or above 80% and it does/ does not occur

- if predicted snow turns out to be entirely rain or predicted rain turns out to be mostly snow

An easy way to notice that weather forecasts have low accuracy unless we grant them a huge margin of error: compare the predictions from a few different apps and weather stations, and throw in the NWS or some other government or scientific body as well. Most of the time, their temperature predictions will vary by a couple degrees or more, their precipitation probabilities by several percentage points, and their predictions for cloud coverage will often also vary. There’s no way that they’re all accurate unless we consider ballpark figures to be accurate.