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“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.” — Arundhati Roy
Despite our best efforts, we have not been able to skip past 2025. So we must, as we suggested in our last post, make ourselves available to history.
Karl Marx once wrote: "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce."
Our times are indeed tragic, and at times farcical. So what if we faced these tragedies as if they were a farce? This does not mean we no longer take anything seriously, but it means that instead of trying to change things with confrontation or outrage, we treat our grotesque leaders, these clowns in high positions, who only show us contempt, with ridicule.
We shall face them in crowds, laughing hysterically at any new plans they announce, at any new issue they claim to stand for. Instead of campaigns, petitions or pleas for humanity, the demagogues, warmongers and billionaires shall be pranked by hordes of laughing children every time they make an appearance in public.
But we shall take our own work – though not ourselves – very seriously indeed. However, while we may lament the absurdity that we face, we did not stumble into this world. We must go beyond simply blaming individual leaders. We must understand how we got here and how our world became morally bankrupt.
When development organisations sold you orphans that you could ‘add to basket.’
When people in the global south campaigned to stop western volunteers from working in orphanages because they fuel trafficking of children.
When travel agencies offer poverty tours to favelas or townships.
When monstrous cruise ships take people to watch glaciers melt.
When white elites are the victims of racism.
When colonised people are expected to be grateful to their colonisers.
When the grandchildren of Nazis lecture Jews about their activism.
When our governments send humanitarian aid to people while simultaneously sending bombs and bullets that will rip them to pieces while queueing for that aid.
When people take boat tours along the coast of Gaza to watch the annihilation of Palestinians.
The signs of our madness have been there for a long time, but we screen-walked ourselves into this dystopia. We are in Orwell’s 1984 where “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” The question now is: Can we survive this without turning on each other?
To answer this question, it does help to turn to literature, in particular to dystopian fiction, not to dwell, but to train our imagination and our human spirit in facing the world with courage, perseverance and creativity, no matter how burlesque or enraging it becomes.
So it is in that spirit, together with Orwell, Kafka, Butler, Le Guin and many more, that we will be exploring some of the following questions:
Can man be liberated from his persistent need to dominate?
How do we shape a culture of building, of creation, not just opposition?
Historian Vijay Prashad said that there was a decline of moral and intellectual capacity, in particular among Western leaders, yet we so desperately need political clarity. Where can we turn to for moral leadership?
When leaders and governments are no longer working for the people, but against them, can we take power away from them?
Where our governments are legislating to hide the truth about climate, genocide or dissent of any kind, how do we not just counter lies and propaganda, but make people fall in love with the truth?
Noam Chomsky said that the national interest meant the interest of the very rich and their corporations, and that the population did not determine government policy. The public, he said, was basically irrelevant “unless they forced themselves into the system by serious activism.” What is serious activism?
A 1960 UN resolution on decolonisation says “[t]he process of liberation is irresistible and irreversible” and that to “avoid serious crises, an end must be put to colonialism and all practices of segregation and discrimination.” How can we accelerate this process and move from solidarities of resistance to those of liberation, for all people?
We direct much of our attention to the people being dehumanised, and for good reason, but they shouldn’t have to prove their humanity. However, what happens to those engaging in dehumanisation, as well as those justifying or even celebrating it? How do we re-humanise them?
How do we understand the long view, through ancestors and future generations, while also responding to immediate needs of those being harmed, oppressed and exterminated?
Bayo Akomolafe suggests that the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis. What if we are not here to save the world and that our activism, our presumptive goodness, actually becomes a burden on other people?
And finally, how can we stumble into this year more lightly, more gently, and that through our work, whatever it might be, we seek to re-enchant this world of ours?
As always, we are not seeking clear definite answers to these questions, each one is an invitation to reflect, learn, change our minds, be curious, surprised and be in conversation with each other. Please join us.
And we will end as we began with the wisdom of Arundhati Roy: “The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
Words, Veronica Yates
Illustration Biel and Miriam Sugranyes.
War Talk, Arundhati Roy.
1984, George Orwell.
‘Genocide in Gaza: Western Moral Collapse in the Age of Hyper-Imperialism | Vijay Prashad.’ Palestine Deep Dive, 11 November 2024. Watch here.
‘Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples,’ General Assembly resolution 1514 (XV), 14 December 1960. Read the full text here.
‘"To Be Thy Adam": Agency, Activism & Collective Intelligence in the Ruins of the Human.’ A conversation with Dougald Hine, Catherine Keller, Alex Forrester and Bayo Akomolafe, The Schumacher Center for New Economics, 17 October 2024. Watch here.
‘Crazy Clown Time,’ David Lynch. Crazy Clown Time has been described by Lynch as "a collection of dark songs" in the style of "modern blues". The album incorporates elements of avant-garde music, including the use of feedback; noise; dissonance; and soundscapes which feature "dense layers of texture". Lynch's particular style of blues and his use of avant-garde techniques was commented on by Consequence of Sound, with writer Adam Rier saying that Lynch had "taken something very familiar to anyone who has listened to music in the Western world and turned it into something chilling, creepy [and] utterly Lynch-ian." [Source: Wikipedia]
“How Much Discomfort Is the Whole World Worth? Movement building requires a culture of listening—not mastery of the right language.” Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba, The Boston Review, 6 September 2023. Read here.
Our Earthly Community: reflections on the last utopia. Achille Mbembe.
Hospicing Modernity, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira.
The Othering and Belonging Institute: https://belonging.berkeley.edu/
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” ― Antonio Gramsci
"I’m aware, you know, that I and the people I love may perish in the morning. I know that. But there’s light on our faces now." — James Baldwin
“Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us.” ― Arundhati Roy
"We have art in order not to die from the truth." — Friedrich Nietzsche
“In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” — Albert Camus
