Away with all your monuments. Yet today, again, we are compelled to monumentalise. It is the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Little liberation it was: of the 1.3 million Jews sent there, over a million were murdered. The…
All of capital will put on its liberal mask, and claim it is glad to be done with that man. The rich and the powerful will, for a few short weeks, pretend to rejoice with “normal folk” in their relief.…
I am glad the election is over, because through the weeks of opportunism, integrating myself into the campaign, I have watched myself getting stupider. It has felt like lopping off, day by day, each organ of perception. Sometimes the cause…
Written December 2019, soon after Sean’s death. A part of this essay was published in 2022 in Slovenian in the journal Maska, alongside Sean’s Lamentations.
A central problem of radical politics today is the confusion of oppression with persecution. Often the malign volition of the oppressor has been elevated to the highest question of why and how oppression happens. The fact that oppression operates upon…
“Prison spaces” Boris Johnson chose to announce his flagship “law and order” policies in the Mail on Sunday, a paper in which comment tends from “lock them up and throw away the key” to “bring back hanging”, with every brutal…
“Golden Age” On 25 July 2019, Johnson set out his plans in his statement on priorities for the government. The conceit of his speech was to shuttle between the pragmatics of policy and governance, via panegyrics to optimism and a…
Half the population is “fed up.” To express being “fed up” means to be a middle aged man, and to shout a lot (so lots of fed up people, who are neither men nor loud nor middle aged have no…
The Searchers by David Panos is at Hollybush Gardens, 1-2 Warner Yard London EC1R 5EY, 12 January – 9 February 2019 There is something chattering. Alongside a triptych a small screen displays the rhythmic loop of hands typing, contorting, touching,…
About two years ago I posted about how to spot “left-wing antisemitism.” I have now, after quite a lot of consideration, decided that my previous analysis was theoretically weak. So here is a reconsideration – in which I make an argument…