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Bypassing Parliament: Westminster, the Royal Prerogative and Bombing Yemen
There is something distinctly revolting and authoritarian about the royal prerogative. It reeks of clandestine assumption, unwarranted self-confidence and, most of all, a blithe indifference to accountability before elected representatives. That prerogative, in other words, is the last reminder of divine right, the fiction that a ruler can have powers vested by an unsubstantiated deity, […]
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Losing World War II

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill desperately tried to persuade United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to declare war on Germany and enter World War II. The U.S. president recognized Nazi Germany’s threat to Western civilization and U.S. interests but his intuition told him that the American people were not ready for battle. Complicating a proposed […]
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King and Douglass on What is Needed
A solution of the present crisis will not take place unless men and women work for it. Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. Even a superficial look at history reveals that no social advance rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering and struggle; the […]
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“Are We the Baddies?”
The desperate smear campaign to defend Israel’s crimes highlights the toxic brew of lies that’s been underpinning the liberal democratic order for decades. In a popular British comedy sketch set during the Second World War, a Nazi officer near the front lines turns to a fellow officer and, in a moment of sudden – and […]
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Shame, Shame: My Field’s Failure to Act on Palestine
As the leaders of this country, this settler-colonial imperialist United States of America, persist in dismissing international calls for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, I’ve been trying not to fall into utter despair, reminding myself daily despair isn’t an option. But it is difficult not to despair when during a televised genocide of […]
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We Fight with Our Eyes. We Plant Seeds with Our Hands. We Will Watch the Wheat Fill the Valley

Medu Art Ensemble (Botswana), Shades of Change, 1982. This two-man play, set in a prison cell, was written by Mongane Wally Serote. Credit: Medu Art Ensemble via Freedom Park In the ancient time of national liberation, when partisans walked among the people in rural hamlets or small towns, they carried their message forward in the […]


