Alternatives International

Cockroach Democracy: Unarmed and Dangerous

Arundhati Roy — 2026-07-22T17:38:25Z

Can all the people be fooled all the time? Can a country with a population of a billion-and-a-half be dragged around like a corpse forever? It cannot. The Cockroaches are out and about.

For the first time in years, it feels wonderful to be Indian. Just when hope seemed lost, they came. Young roaches riding in on the rain. The progeny of the unholy union between a judge and a joke.

We all know the story, but here it is, for the record. In response to an arrogant, contemptuous comment by the Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant, calling some unemployed young Indians cockroaches, Abhijeet Dipke, a student living in Boston, posted a comment on Instagram: 'What if all cockroaches come together?' Millions responded. And thus was born the Cockroach Janta Party. Dipke became the Pied Piper of cockroaches. Its first demand was the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan, the education minister who sits smugly atop a corrupt, rotten ministry under which public exam papers are regularly leaked. An estimated 152 since 2014, according to opposition parties. These leaks have devastated the lives of millions of young people who spent years preparing for these exams, some of whose parents have had to sell their land or homes to support their childrenís studies and pay the fee for the right to appear for these exams. A novel form of legal extortion. After the recent leak of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) paper, 12 distressed, wrecked students died by suicide.

As Cockroach anger grew into an online tsunami, Dipke returned from Boston on June 6 and went straight from the airport to Delhiís famous protest grounds at Jantar Mantar. Sonam Wangchuk, the well-known activist and education reformer from Ladakh joined him and declared an indefinite hunger strike. Six university students, Neha Bora, Manish Kumar, Aameen Amitosh, Danish Ali, Hrishikesh and Deepak, members of the All India Students Association (AISA), the student wing of the Communist Party of India (Liberation), declared they would fast too, and took up position on an adjacent stage. Protests began in other cities. As the condition of those on fast grew critical, the young roaches who had swamped the internet began to show up at Jantar Mantar for real. The Cockroach Janata Party announced that on July 20, the day parliament was to open for its monsoon session, they would march on Parliament. Two days before the planned march, Sonam Wangchuk was snatched off the stage by the police and held in detention, first in a government hospital, and later at his wifeís insistence, in a private hospital. He still remains on fast. On the morning of July 20, the day of the march, the AISA students ended their fast.

The cockroaches took the capital city by storm. They came by train, by bus, by air, by metro, their numbers increasing by the hour. Hours before the first rays of sun lightened Delhiís monsoon skies, they began to pour into Jantar Mantar in the tens of thousands. By sunrise it was clear that a generation of desperate and furious young people who have seen their future snuffed out before their eyes, was going to reclaim what their parents and grandparentsí generations had conceded: our dignity as a people and as a country. Our rights as citizens of a democracy. The protesters exorcised the corrosive fear that has become second nature to us all with their sheer courage and grace. And humour. By the end of the day it was clear that the protest had become about something far bigger than what the protesters or their leaders were demanding. Dharmendra Pradhan is small change now. The stakes are far bigger. The rot in the whole system of governance, from top to bottom is clearly visible and has begun to stink like a decomposing corpse. Even the tiniest of the cockroaches, some no more than seven or eight years old were able to clearly articulate that.

Despite the quick and almost clandestine appointment of a new police chief days before the march, and despite worried whispers about the terrifying proficiency of our terrifying Union home minister, both the police and the home ministry completely miscalculated the scale of the tsunami that engulfed Delhi on July 20. They tried everything. They blocked buses and roads and metro stations. It didn't help. They tried to jam the internet. But the young roaches ñ creatures of the internet ñ somehow subverted that effort with a deluge of memes and videos that made you laugh and cry at once. In Delhi, of all the places in the world, young women who were part of the protest said that they felt safe in the crowd. ñ although some complained about being groped by the police. We saw Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, people belonging to every caste and class coming together, helping each other, protecting each other as they faced down the police. Instead of lecturing us, or giving us grand speeches, they showed us, demonstrated for us, the possible India, the beautiful India of our dreams.

To deal with this danger, the police welded together their yellow metal barricades, and brought their tried and tested props: trucks full of stones, and pre-damaged vehicles in the hope that they could make it look as though the young people had turned violent and the police were acting in self-defence. They brought in an army of plainclothes goons armed with batons and clubs. To prepare for action, the Rapid Action Force (RAF) removed their name-tags from their uniforms. The faithful mainstream TV channels were lined up, primed to report the lies. (Some jumped the gun and began to report things that hadn't happened yet. News in India tends to be about the future, not the present.) Nothing worked. The police and RAF swung their lathis wildly, broke childrenís heads and fractured limbs. They fired tear gas. But the young kept marching. Straight towards parliament. Straight to where they said they would go. As they approached, security forces took position, their AK47s aimed at the unarmed students. Still, the Cockroaches marched. And as they marched, they stripped away any remnants of the velvet glove that masks the governmentís iron fist and exposed the current regime for what it is and always has been. A fascist iron fist. A confederacy of brutes with no capacity to understand the history and the diversity of the country which it governs. People who only know how to hate, but have no idea how to love. Or think.

As the marchers approached, our brave, boastful prime minister was whisked away to safety. Members of Parliament were prevented from leaving the gleaming new Samvidhan Sansad building whose whole purpose seems to be to undermine the Constitution daily.

By evening the police had broken the main stage at the protest site. By night the people had reclaimed it once again. As the police withdrew for the night the Cockroaches gave them a standing ovation. For beating children. Wah Modi ji! Wah!

It's silly to expect major political change to come from this. But to dismiss it as just a heady moment would be obtuse. Itís no surprise that the wires and live-screaming TV channels are burning up with gossip and innuendo and conspiracy theories about foreign-funding and CIA plots. Speaking as a proud andolanjeevi (Modi's derisive name for people like me), I confess that when it all began, I was wary too. I worried that we were heading into another Anna Hazare moment ñ that so-called anti-corruption people's movement of 2011 - which, regardless of its early intentions, eventually gifted us three terms of being ruled by a political party that has destroyed every institution in this country, one that sees no separation between itself as a political party and the government of India, one that respects neither the country nor its citizens, and one that has shamed us internationally and brought India to its knees.

But my suspicions about the Cockroach Janata Party were allayed when I saw the hostility of the mainstream media towards them. That, to me, was the first and most reassuring sign. I was thrilled that Abhijeet Dipke was from a Dalit community, and even more thrilled that that wasnít what anybody was focused on. Everything changed for me when I heard him say, ìIf my name had been Khalid, or if I were a Muslim, I would have been in jail by now.î He had the courage to call out the vulgarity of how things actually work in India ñ the fact that in our country everything (including and especially the law) does not apply equally to everybody. Everything depends entirely on your religion, caste, class, ethnicity and gender. It was a profound observation, simply made. For him to say this publicly, when even opposition politicians will only say 'minority community' instead of 'Muslim' for fear of a 'Hindu backlash' made me head for Jantar Mantar right away. I also knew that when Dipke picked the name 'Khalid' he could well have been speaking of Umar Khalid, the JNU scholar who, along with Sharjeel Imam and many others, has been in prison without trial for close to six years now. Umar's crime? Urging protesters to remain non-violent during the 2020 protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, even while Delhi was convulsed by a spate of arson, murder and mosque-burning instigated by Hindu vigilante goons watched over by the benign, and occasionally participating police. Appeal after appeal for bail has been turned down by judges who seem to have lost the courage to do, or even understand, what is right.

As the Cockroaches marched and their numbers burgeoned, I caught myself thinking: Thank goodness they arenít mostly Muslim, or Sikh, or Christian or Adivasi. They would have been flattened, killed, shot, jailed. Thank heaven they arenít Kashmiri. They might have been blinded (although some did receive their share of pellet-like injuries). Thank goodness they are mostly Hindu. Thatís how sad this moment is in India. However, things could change in a minute. We are in what they call a ìdeveloping situationî. Reports are coming in of thousands of paramilitary troops being flown in from other states. We donít know what the coming days will bring.

Where does all this leave us? Unlike the Anna Hazare movement which had weeks of frenzied, non-stop 24x7 coverage on hundreds of hysterical, corporate owned TV channels, the Cockroach Janata Party has only itself and the internet to bank on. Unlike the Anna movement which had been penetrated and taken over by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, with the Modi-led BJP massing at the gates, fully prepared to capitalise electorally on the TV-generated frenzy, the Cockroaches have no organised opposition parties waiting in the wings, poised to take things further. The spontaneous rage we are witnessing will dissipate unless some real political work begins. Unless adults and opposition parties stop their jockeying and petty squabbling and show some solidarity. The government knows that this is unlikely. It remains unmoved because it feels that all it needs to do is wait. States have the power to wait. People don't.

At this moment the Cockroach uprising is one of several protests taking place across India. Adivasis in Madhya Pradesh are protesting the Ken-Betwa river-linking project. Villagers in Uttarakhand are protesting the mass felling of trees. People are protesting the environmental desecration of the Greater Nicobar Islands. Manipur is boiling. Jobs are disappearing. Prices are soaring. Fury is building. And the BJP-RSSís 'God' game is getting exposed for what it always has been. A hoax. A gangster-driven gold-rush. The looting of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya has given us a bad Bollywood script which is playing out before our eyes: Sleek godmen and corrupt politicians building hotels, accumulating real-estate, driving around in SUVs, fattened on the faith of the poor and unsuspecting. The tentacles of corruption and daylight robbery snaking all the way up to the top.

Can Cockroach energy pull us out of this pit? Not easy. A quick look at the outcome of peopleís movements in India is not encouraging. Itís a potted history of shrinking ambitions and broken dreams. In the sixties and seventies various movements - including the armed rebellion by the Naxalites - demanded the redistribution of wealth and land to the tiller. They were crushed. In the eighties and nineties, social movements, most famously the Narmada Bachao Andolan and later the Maoists in Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand fought against the displacement of farmers and indigenous tribespeople from their land. In other words, they were asking for what the poor still had to not be snatched away. They were crushed too. By the 2000s, they had been reduced to being grateful for the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). The right to three months' employment at minimum wages - an amount which works out to the price of a good meal at an expensive restaurant in a city. That too has been shelved by this regime, and replaced with survival level rations - bags of provisions with Modi's face on them - thrown contemptuously at people, like alms to beggars from moving cars, in return for gratitude and votes. As the economy flounders, even this is in jeopardy.

Today, in 2026, we have been reduced to fighting for our right to vote and our citizenship. The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) coupled with the National Register of Citizenship (NRC) is the Hindu Rashtra version of Nazi Germany's 1935 Nuremberg laws by which German citizens were granted citizenship by the Third Reich depending on their 'legacy papers'. (How many in India have these papers?) The anti-CAA-NRC moment faded away after the mass protests led to the murder of protesters and the incarceration of activists. But the protests caused the government to slow down the implementation of those new laws. But now, the CAA-NRC, which many correctly believed was aimed mostly at Muslims, has returned, disguised as the SIR (Special Intensive Revision) of electoral rolls. We have casually been informed that even our passports are not proof of citizenship. Millions are being struck off electoral rolls. The whole country is desperately searching for "legacy papers". We donít know where we stand. Are we legitimate? Illegitimate? Do we have rights? Which of us belongs in those massive detention centres being constructed for "doubtful citizens"? Will we spend our days running from Tribunal to Tribunal? Fascists love chaos and confusion.

Our panic and anguish may lead us to pin too much hope on the Cockroach uprising. Some have already compared it to the uprising of young people that led to regime change in Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. But India is too vast a country for that to happen. Others compare it to the movement led by Jayaprakash Narayan that toppled Indira Gandhi in 1977. These comparisons are not helpful. The Cockroach Janata Party is neither of those things. Itís a thing of its own. A unique product of its times. It is vulnerable young people up against a vicious, vindictive government that has shown itself to be merciless to those who oppose it. Revenge is surely being planned and will be visited on those it sees as the main instigators.

How does a regime which is clearly becoming hugely unpopular have the confidence to not make any concessions to the people who voted for it? Probably because it feels it has successfully gamed the election business. It has captured the machinery. The Election Commission is flawed in its very composition and can no longer be counted upon to be neutral. The EVMs (Electronic Voting Machines) have been managed, the electoral rolls now exclude millions of real people and include millions of phantom names, the bureaucracy that oversees elections have shown themselves to be utterly complicit, the courts can be depended upon to delay or turn a blind eye to egregious malpractice, the police have no idea what neutrality is, the press genuflects each time someone in power clicks their fingers at it. Constituencies are going to be re-mapped to make sure that it is always Advantage BJP. What does the ruling party have to fear? Why should it listen to anyone? It is the richest political party on earth, backed by the richest industrialists in the world. It can buy anything. And anyone. Or so it believes.

But can this game last forever? Can all the people be fooled all the time? Can a country with a population of a billion-and-a-half be dragged around like a corpse forever? It cannot. The Cockroaches are out and about. The farmers have begun marching to Delhi once more, this time to protest the Indo-US trade deal - the death warrant the government of India has slavishly agreed to sign on their behalf. The borders of the city have been sealed but that is unlikely to stop them. Perhaps the rest of us can take lessons from our farmers and our cockroaches on how to become a little dangerous. The young have given us a gift. It is up to us all, every one of us to make what they have done matter.

Once a prime minister flees physically, it can't be long before he has to flee politically.

But this regime will not go easily. It will not tolerate being humiliated on the streets of the capital. We are likely to see blood. Young tempers are fraying. How long will it be before someone in that youthful, fired-up crowd loses their cool and provides the police an excuse to open fire? They will do everything they can to break us. We must do everything we can to stop them.

Arundhati Roy is a writer.

Source: https://thewire.in/rights/cockroach-democracy-unarmed-and-dangerous

Rethinking the Left in the Twenty-First Century

Messaoud Romdhani — 2026-07-21T17:53:00Z

Between the Legacy of Struggle and the Challenge of Renewal

The crisis of the Left today is not merely a crisis of popularity, electoral performance, or organizational decline. It is, above all, a crisis of adaptation: a growing gap between its inherited frameworks and the realities of a rapidly changing world. Yesterday's answers are no longer sufficient to explain today's realities, let alone shape tomorrow's possibilities. Globalization, digital technology, financial capitalism, and new forms of work have fundamentally reshaped societies, creating inequalities and social challenges that no longer fit neatly within traditional political frameworks.

Yet the crisis is not one of principles. Freedom, social justice, equality, and human dignity remain as relevant as ever. Indeed, they have become more urgent in an age marked by growing inequality, precarious employment, the weakening of public services, and the increasing influence of financial power over democratic politics. What has lost its vitality is not the Left's moral vision, but some of the intellectual and organizational frameworks through which that vision has long been expressed.

Renewing the Left therefore does not require abandoning its ideals. It requires recovering their original spirit while freeing them from intellectual rigidity. The challenge today is not to preserve inherited formulas but to translate enduring values into practical responses to the realities of the twenty-first century.

One of the Left's greatest historical achievements was to transform many of its once-radical demands into widely accepted democratic norms. Public education, social protection, workers' rights, women's rights, progressive taxation, and the welfare state were not gifts from capitalism; they were won through decades of social struggle. Ironically, however, as many of these achievements became part of the political mainstream, left-wing parties themselves often lost their capacity to reinvent their political role.

At the same time, capitalism was undergoing a profound transformation. Industrial production gave way to globalized finance, technological innovation, and knowledge-based economies. New forms of inequality emerged alongside new social actors and aspirations. Yet parts of the Left continued to interpret these changes through intellectual frameworks shaped by an earlier era. Marxism, for some, ceased to function as a critical method of inquiry and became instead a fixed body of doctrine. The result was not fidelity to principle but an increasing difficulty in understanding a rapidly changing world.

The challenge facing the Left today is therefore not to preserve yesterday's answers but to rediscover its capacity for critical thinking, innovation, and political imagination.

This challenge is particularly evident in Tunisia. No fair assessment can ignore the historic contribution of the Tunisian Left to the struggle for national independence, democracy, trade unionism, public freedoms, and resistance to authoritarianism. Many of its activists paid a heavy personal price through imprisonment, torture and political persecution. That legacy deserves recognition and remains an important part of Tunisia's democratic history.

But history alone cannot guarantee political relevance. Every political tradition must continually renew its legitimacy by understanding social change and responding to new public expectations. Here the Tunisian Left has struggled. Despite its moral authority, it has failed to build a broad political project capable of addressing citizens' daily concerns while combining freedom, economic development, and social justice.
Too often, the Tunisian Left has excelled at criticizing existing policies without presenting a convincing social and economic alternative. Yet citizens confronting unemployment, inflation, failing public services, and widening regional inequalities are not merely seeking criticism of the status quo. They are looking for a credible development project that reconciles economic dynamism with social justice and restores confidence in the future.

Moreover, ideological polarization has at times weakened the Left's ability to define itself through its own positive agenda. Political competition increasingly became centred on opposing rivals rather than advancing coherent social and economic alternatives. Consequently, essential debates about development, education, public administration, and regional inequality were often overshadowed by ideological confrontation.

Beyond these political challenges, the Tunisian experience also reveals a broader democratic lesson. Democracy cannot be reduced to opposition to authoritarianism; it must also shape the internal culture of democratic movements and their relationship with political opponents. Democratic principles lose their credibility when they are defended selectively rather than upheld consistently.

Ultimately, remaining faithful to the Left's history does not mean preserving its inherited forms. It means safeguarding its fundamental values while continually renewing the ideas, strategies, and institutions through which they are advanced. Before it is an ideology, the Left is a moral and political commitment to freedom, equality, social justice, and human dignity.

Its greatest strength has never been a claim to possess absolute truth, but the courage to question prevailing orthodoxies, confront injustice, and imagine better alternatives. The Left honours its legacy not by defending the past, but by demonstrating that its enduring principles can still inspire solutions to the challenges of the present and the future. For the greatest betrayal of any political tradition is not to change, but to refuse to change when the world itself has already changed.

Photo credit

Messaoud Romdhani is a Tunisian Human Rights activist, former president of the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, former vice president of the Tunisian Human Rights League.

In Quebec and Everywhere, Anti-Racism is Essential to Class Politics

Richard Roys — 2026-07-21T01:05:00Z

In early 2023, Quebec's political class erupted in indignation over comments made by Amira Elghawaby, newly appointed by Ottawa as Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia. Her offense was straightforward: she suggested that many Quebecers seemed disturbingly indifferent to the rise of anti-Muslim sentiment in the province. What followed was immediate, furious, and entirely predictable.

Rather than treat her remarks as an invitation to reflect on the social reality of racism in Quebec, the political and media establishment transformed them into a national affront. The terms of the debate were rapidly reduced to an absurd binary: either one stood with Elghawaby and, by extension, with Ottawa, or one stood with Quebec. In that framework, there could be no nuance, no complexity, no space for anyone attempting to hold together two basic truths at once: that Quebec is a nation with a legitimate collective existence, and that racism, including Islamophobia, is a real and deadly force within it.

This is one of the defining operations of contemporary right-wing identitarian politics in Quebec. It transforms any criticism of racism into an attack on the nation itself. It recasts anti-racism not as a democratic necessity, but as a foreign imposition. It suggests that to name racism is to deny Quebec's dignity, rather than to insist that any society worthy of dignity must be able to confront its own injustices honestly.

The Elghawaby affair was never only about one public figure or one set of comments. It exposed the broader ideological terrain on which debates about race, secularism, identity, and belonging now take place in Quebec. On that terrain, acknowledging Islamophobia is treated as more scandalous than Islamophobia itself. Naming racism is seen as divisive, while the structures and discourse that produce exclusion are treated as expressions of collective self-affirmation.

It transforms any criticism of racism into an attack on the nation itself.

The reaction reached its apex when all parties represented in the National Assembly, including Québec solidaire, voted in favour of a motion condemning Elghawaby's remarks. At that moment, the entire parliamentary spectrum effectively closed ranks around a shared refusal to confront social and political conditions that had already produced lethal consequences. Quebec remains marked by the massacre at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City, where Muslim worshippers were murdered while at prayer in 2017. Yet even the memory of that attack has not been enough to force a sustained reckoning with the environment of normalized suspicion, resentment, and scapegoating in which anti-Muslim violence becomes more likely.

The issue is not whether Quebec is uniquely racist. Indeed, racism is a structuring reality across Canada. The issue is also not whether Quebecers have a right to self-determination – they do – although those national aspirations must be pursued in a way that respects the equal right of Indigenous nations to self-determination, rather than resting on their dispossession or marginalization.

The issue is whether the left is willing to tell the truth about the society in which it operates. And more than that: whether it is capable of understanding that the struggle against racism is not secondary to class politics, not a diversion from it, not a boutique moral concern for urban professionals, but one of the central terrains on which class domination is organized and reproduced.

The right-wing onslaught

The right-wing offensive in Quebec, much like in France and across the globe, does not operate primarily by openly defending racism in crude biological terms. It proceeds instead through euphemism, through displacement, through coded language about “integration,” “values,” “social cohesion,” “common culture,” and “secularism.” It denies the existence or prevalence of racism while constantly producing racist political meanings. It insists that the problem is not Muslims, immigrants, or racialized communities as such, but their supposed failure to adapt, their excessive visibility, their alleged refusal to conform to the norms of the host society.

This distinction is politically useful precisely because it allows a reactionary politics to present itself as universal, republican, or neutral. Exclusion is reframed as principle. Discrimination is recast as civic firmness. And those who object are portrayed not as defenders of equality, but as sectarian actors trying to import dangerous “Anglo-Saxon” obsessions with race into a supposedly colour-blind society.

This logic has become a structuring feature of public debate in Quebec. Questions that should be approached in material and democratic terms are reframed as existential threats to national identity. The debate is no longer about discrimination in hiring, housing, policing, or access to institutions. It becomes a battle over whether “they” share “our” values. It is no longer about whether Muslim women can access work, education, and civic participation on equal terms. It becomes a discussion of whether visible religiosity is compatible with Quebec modernity.

The same general mechanism has long been visible in France. The hijab, halal food, mosques, religious associations, Muslim schools, public prayer, anti-discrimination organizing – in France, all of these have been repeatedly transformed into symbols of national crisis, by the right and by large sections of the political mainstream. This constant creation of a state of crisis has little to do with concrete threats and everything to do with governing through division.

The point is not merely to stigmatize Muslims. It is to build a broader political bloc organized around resentment, fear, and a reactionary conception of national belonging. A social crisis produced by neoliberal restructuring, austerity, and democratic exhaustion is narrativized as a cultural crisis caused by migrants, racialized minorities, and the alleged collapse of authority. Instead of anger being directed upward — toward landlords, bosses, privatizers, political elites — it is redirected downward, toward those with even less power.

This is why the right's culture war is never just cultural. It has a clear social function. It disorganizes solidarity. It weakens trade-union instincts. It fragments shared grievances into competing identities. It turns workers against one another by suggesting that some are more legitimate members of the collective than others. It invites white or majority workers to see themselves not as exploited subjects with common interests alongside racialized workers, but as members of a threatened national core under siege from outsiders.

In this framework, anti-racism becomes especially dangerous to the right because it disrupts the narrative. It insists that the problem is not excessive diversity but organized inequality and oppression. It reveals that what is presented as cultural incompatibility is often just the political management of labour, status, and belonging. It points out that those cast as problems are often the very people cleaning hospitals, delivering food, staffing long-term care homes, driving buses, filling warehouses, and holding together the most fragile parts of the social order.

The right therefore requires that anti-racism appear alien, elitist, and disconnected from ordinary life. It must be presented as a discourse imported from universities, NGOs, or Ottawa – never as something emerging from the lived experience of workers subjected to discrimination and exploitation. This is one of its most effective ideological maneuvers: to treat anti-racism as foreign to the working class while simultaneously defining the working class in ways that exclude those most affected by racism.

That is not a secondary distortion. It is the heart of the strategy.

Leftist proposals that fall short of actual left politics

Faced with this sustained offensive, large parts of the left have failed to respond with clarity. Some have chosen evasion. Others have retreated into moral denunciation without strategy. Still others have accepted the right's basic framing and concluded that anti-racism, however well intentioned, has become a political liability best softened, postponed, or subordinated.

In Quebec, this problem is intensified by history. Much of the institutional left in the province emerged from a political culture shaped by national liberation, sovereignty, and the defence of Quebec's autonomy against the Canadian federal state. That history matters. It contains real emancipatory elements. But it also creates a recurring vulnerability: the accusation of siding with Ottawa can still function as a political veto. Once anti-racism is coded as federalist, moralizing, or alien to Quebec's collective experience, many on the left become cautious, defensive, and disoriented.

This helps explain the recurring temptation to return to what are often called “bread and butter” issues. The argument usually goes something like this: the left has become too preoccupied with identity, culture, and symbolic struggles; it has lost contact with working people; it needs to return to wages, inflation, housing, and healthcare; anti-racism and similar struggles are either distractions or at least should be de-emphasized in favour of more universal economic appeals.

This diagnosis is superficially attractive because it names something real: many people are suffering materially, and the left does need to speak concretely about exploitation, austerity, and redistribution. But the proposed remedy is deeply flawed. It assumes that class can be politically articulated in a way that bypasses race, religion, and immigration status. It imagines that there exists some pure social question untouched by the hierarchies that actually shape labour markets and everyday life.

When the left counterposes anti-racism to “real” class politics, it concedes the right's central premise: that issues of race are niche, divisive, or external to common material life. It ends up reproducing the fiction of an average worker who is culturally one of the majority, implicitly white, and unaffected by the forms of exclusion directed at migrants, Muslims, Black people, and other racialized groups. In other words, it speaks of universality while quietly narrowing the universe of those it imagines.

This is not merely a moral failure. It is a strategic disaster. A left that refuses to see how racism structures class relations cannot build durable majorities. It cannot organize the sectors of the working class most exposed to precarity. It cannot explain why some workers are more vulnerable to wage theft, deportability, informalization, or public exclusion than others. It cannot account for why reactionary narratives resonate where collective infrastructures have weakened. And it cannot construct solidarity if it refuses to address the fractures through which ruling classes govern.

Québec solidaire's difficulties have often been interpreted through this lens. Whenever the party is attacked for supposedly focusing too much on anti-racism, its representatives appear to feel a pressure to reassure, rebalance, depoliticize. But this defensive posture only deepens the problem. It leaves the right in command of the terms of debate. It permits the media ecosystem to define anti-racism as excess, and a focus on class politics turns into silence on racism. And it demoralizes those militants and communities who understand, from direct experience, that these questions cannot be split apart.

The same dynamic exists in many places outside Quebec. France is a notable example. Sections of the left there have long hesitated to engage directly with anti-Muslim racism for fear of appearing communautariste – that is, overly fixated on a particular community rather than the social whole – or anti-republican, or lenient when it comes to enforcing secularism. The result has often been paralysis: a left unable to respond adequately either to the far right's offensive or to the realities of postcolonial exclusion in the deprived banlieues (suburbs), schools, labour market, and the criminal justice system.

In France as in Quebec, the left is too often failing to develop a materialist politics of race. It either treats anti-racism as a moral supplement detached from economic struggle, or it abandons it altogether in the name of economic universality. Both paths are dead ends. What is needed instead is a politics that understands how racism is woven into the production, management, and fragmentation of the working class itself.

Class politics is anti-racist politics

Capitalism has never exploited a generic labour force in the abstract. It has always organized labour through difference. Colonialism, slavery, immigration regimes, legal stratification, citizenship hierarchies, and racial segmentation are not side stories to capitalism's development; they are among its principal mechanisms. The making of labour markets has always involved deciding whose work is cheapened, whose mobility is restricted, whose humanity is diminished, and whose disposability can be normalized.

Racism, then, is not simply prejudice. It is a mode of social organization. It sorts populations, allocates vulnerability, and justifies uneven treatment. It tells us who is expected to absorb risk, who is denied recognition, who can be excluded from protections, and who can be blamed when social systems fail.

This is visible everywhere. In Quebec, racialized and immigrant workers are heavily concentrated in sectors marked by low wages, difficult conditions, and weak protections: food processing, warehousing, domestic work, cleaning, care work, platform delivery, agriculture, private security, and many others. During the pandemic's emergency period, many of the workers called “essential” were precisely those treated as disposable in ordinary times. They were praised symbolically while being exposed materially.

Racism, then, is not simply prejudice. It is a mode of social organization.

You cannot make sense of this with a race-blind class politics. Why are some workers overrepresented in the hardest jobs? Why are temporary migrants often more vulnerable to abuse? Why are some workers less likely to complain about unsafe conditions? Why do some face additional barriers in accessing stable public employment? Why do credential recognition, language policy, policing, and immigration status shape bargaining power? These are not marginal questions. They are central questions of class composition.

Even debates that appear symbolic or cultural often have important material content. Consider the exclusion of Muslim women wearing religious symbols from certain forms of public employment. This is often defended as a neutral expression of secularism. But in practice it means barriers to stable jobs, pensions, career progression, and unionized workplaces. It means constraining the economic horizon of a section of the working class on explicitly ideological grounds. It means telling certain women that participation in public life is conditional on effacing themselves in ways the majority never has to contemplate. That is class politics. Or rather, that is class domination articulated through racism and gender.

The same is true in France, where anti-Muslim discourse has repeatedly been used to legitimize forms of public exclusion that have direct material effects. To talk about police harassment, discrimination in hiring, school exclusion, urban fragmentation, and stigmatization of the banlieues is not to leave class behind. It is to describe how class is lived under raced conditions in contemporary capitalism.

A serious left must therefore reject two illusions at once. The first is the liberal illusion that anti-racism can be reduced to representational diversity, symbolic recognition, or ethical sensitivity while leaving structures untouched. The second is the economistic illusion that redistribution alone can solve racism without directly confronting the political and ideological machinery that produces racial hierarchy. Both are insufficient because both separate what in reality is joined.

Anti-racist class politics means recognizing that solidarity cannot be proclaimed into existence while major sections of the working class are routinely stigmatized, policed, and excluded. It means understanding that class unity is not a starting point but a project — one that requires active struggle against the divisions through which capital and the state govern. It means refusing the fantasy that one can organize workers effectively while treating some workers' oppression as secondary, exaggerated, or politically inconvenient.

There is also a harder truth. When the left refuses anti-racism, it does not produce a more coherent class politics. It produces a more exclusionary one. It allows the rhetoric of the people, the nation, or the common good to be captured by those who would reserve those categories for some and not others. That is why anti-racism is not merely defensive. It is generative. It expands the horizon of who counts in the collective. It clarifies who the adversary is. It redirects anger away from scapegoats and toward structures. It creates the basis on which workers with different histories and positions can recognize themselves in a shared struggle without pretending they are identical. A left worthy of the name does not flatten those differences. It organizes through them.

La France Insoumise and a way forward

If Quebec illustrates the impasse, the French party La France Insoumise (LFI) offers at least a partial example of how the left can begin to move differently. Not perfectly, not without contradiction, but in a way that is strategically sound.

What has distinguished LFI, at its best, is its refusal of the false opposition between anti-racism and social struggle. In a political landscape where much of the mainstream treats anti-racist politics as suspect or divisive, LFI has insisted – unevenly but unmistakably – that “the people” must include racialized minorities, that the social question cannot be detached from the postcolonial question, and that a democratic bloc cannot be built by excluding Muslims.

This matters enormously in the French context. France has spent decades producing a specifically republican version of racial politics, in which the state claims blindness to race while managing profoundly raced inequalities in policing, schooling, housing, work, and media discourse. Under these conditions, for a left party to name Islamophobia, speak to the banlieues, oppose police violence, and link those struggles to austerity and neoliberalism is not a minor rhetorical choice. It is a strategic reorientation.

LFI has understood something that much of the traditional left in France fails to grasp: that France's contemporary working classes are not the workers of a nostalgic industrial past. They are multiethnic, urban and peri-urban, precarious, feminized in many sectors, shaped by migration and colonial histories, and often alienated not only from the market but from institutions that treat them with open suspicion. A left that does not speak to these publics is not speaking to the working class as it really exists.

What LFI has tried to do, at its strongest moments, is build a popular bloc wide enough to include both classic redistributive demands and an explicit confrontation with racism. Letting itself be influenced by progressive social movements, it has linked pension reform, wage struggles, and public services to police repression, anti-Muslim stigma, and territorial abandonment. It has refused to treat these as separate audiences or disconnected agendas.

The significance of this approach is not that it resolves every tension. LFI has faced criticism, backlash, caricature, and internal contradictions, but it has at least shown that there is political life beyond the sterile choice between moralized liberal anti-racism and reductive economism. It has demonstrated that one can speak of class without erasing race, and speak of racism without abandoning projects of economic transformation.

This is especially important for Quebec. The lesson is not that one can mechanically import the French case, or that these dynamics are disproportionately present in the francophone world. Still, though Quebec has its own history, its own national question, and its own institutional forms, the strategic lesson of La France Insoumise is transferable: a left grows stronger, not weaker, when it confronts racism as part of the general struggle against domination. It becomes more rooted in a popular base, not less, when it organizes among those most exposed to both exploitation and exclusion. It gains coherence when it stops treating anti-racism as an embarrassment to be managed and starts treating it as one of the languages through which collective emancipation must now be articulated.

What LFI points toward is a renewed universalism: not the false universalism that asks the marginalized to disappear into an abstract white, cis, documented citizen, but a concrete universalism built from below, out of the actual plurality of the people. A universalism that does not deny conflict, history, or hierarchy, but seeks to overcome them politically. That is the way forward. Not a left that chooses between class politics and anti-racism, but one that understands the former is inseparable from the latter. Not a left that clings to an imagined social subject stripped of race, migration, religion, gender, and history, but one that wants to rebuild solidarity on the basis of the working class as it actually exists. Not a left that adapts itself to reactionary nationalism's terms, but one that confronts it head on, understanding how capitalism governs through fragmentation.

The task, then, is to reunify anti-racism and class struggle intellectually, strategically, and organizationally. To show, concretely, how labour markets are raced, how exclusion weakens collective power, how scapegoating protects elites, how secularism can become a tool of class discipline, how immigration status shapes exploitation, and how racism helps govern precarious workers' lives. In other words: to tell the truth about the society we live in. Only on that basis can a left worthy of the moment be rebuilt.

Richard Roys is a grassroots labour activist and organizer hailing from Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang, unceded lands of the Haudenosaunee nation, also known as Montreal. He has been active in the struggle against racism and Islamophobia in Quebec.

Source: https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/class-domination-is-organized-and-reproduced-through-racism/

Photo credit: Red square badge Quebec student strike

Pakistani-Ruled Kashmir Is Facing a Brutal State Crackdown

Umair Khurshid, Farooq Sulehria, Harris Qadeer — 2026-07-19T16:07:00Z

The areas of Kashmir under Pakistani administration are supposed to have political autonomy, but that has long been a sham. The Pakistani authorities have responded to popular protests demanding real democracy with brutal repression.

The Pakistan-administered territory of Jammu Kashmir (PaJK) is witnessing the most extensive confrontation between the masses and the Pakistani state in decades. Between June 5 and July 27, at least forty-five people were killed as Islamabad sought to crush the movement before it could consolidate.

On July 27, security forces opened fire on thousands of unarmed protesters marching towards the town of Rawalakot, killing twenty-one people. The following day, another fourteen were gunned down in Rawalakot, Mirpur, and other towns, while two more protesters were killed on July 29, bringing the death toll from the latest crackdown to at least thirty-seven. There has been an internet shutdown in place since June 5. Cellular networks have also ceased to function. Such shutdowns routinely accompany state violence.

Sham Autonomy

The present confrontation started on June 5 and represents the third major phase of an Intifada-like uprising that has unfolded since 2023. Two previous uprisings won huge victories against the implementation of neoliberal measures: for instance, subsidies were revived while unbearably inflated utility bills were slashed.

The recent killings are not an exceptional breakdown of state authority but express the logic of a political order whose survival depends upon denying the people in PaJK any meaningful control over the conditions of their own existence. The PaJK, unlike Indian-administered Jammu Kashmir (IaJK), is not integrated into the Pakistani state and enjoys formal (though highly symbolic) autonomy. Its population of 4.3 million people is approximately one-third that of the Indian-ruled territories, and it covers less than one-quarter of their land area.

In practice, the ongoing dispute involves election manipulation, especially through so-called reserve seats. Islamabad rigs and manipulates elections to install a puppet government in PaJK.

The present uprising cannot be understood through the language of economic crisis alone. Rising electricity tariffs, soaring fuel prices, inflation, and declining living standards supplied the immediate grievances around which the movement crystallized. But these conditions were themselves products of a deeper political relationship. They reflected the organization of power in PaJK where the population bears the consequences of economic decisions over which it exercises no effective control.

The territory's constitutional framework has long separated political responsibility from political power. While elections produce governments and assemblies, decisive authority over fiscal policy, energy, natural resources, and major administrative questions remains concentrated in Islamabad. The institutions that appear to constitute self-government therefore perform a contradictory function. They are expected to absorb public anger while lacking the capacity to resolve the conditions that generate it.

The result is a colonial-style political economy in which democratic forms coexist with the systematic denial of popular sovereignty. The state appears local but governs through institutions whose ultimate authority lies elsewhere. Economic exploitation and political subordination, therefore, reinforce one another. The extraction of resources, the imposition of austerity, and the transfer of decision-making power to Islamabad are not separate processes but different expressions of the same structure of domination.

Economic hardship alone, however, does not produce mass mobilization. Similar conditions have existed elsewhere without generating a movement of comparable scale. The decisive question is how social grievances acquire organization. That process had been unfolding for years before the present uprising.

The Crisis of the Political Order

The revocation of Article 370, which granted IaJK limited autonomy, by the Indian state in August 2019 transformed political debate across the divided state of Jammu Kashmir. Although the constitutional changes were implemented in IaJK, their significance extended far beyond the Line of Control (the de facto line dividing PaJK from IaJK). They exposed the extent to which competing states claimed the authority to determine the future of Jammu Kashmir while excluding its people from that process. Questions of sovereignty, democratic power, and political representation acquired a renewed urgency throughout the territory.

The developments of 2019 also exposed the exhaustion of the dominant political parties in PaJK. For decades, they had alternated between the roles of government and opposition while operating within institutions whose purpose was not to transfer sovereignty to the people but to administer a subordinate territory.

The contradiction became increasingly difficult to sustain. The left-wing organizations, nationalist currents, student movements, and democratic activists sought to construct broader political alliances capable of challenging the existing order. Consequently, the People's National Alliance (PNA) was founded in 2019 and generated considerable enthusiasm and revealed the existence of a substantial constituency seeking political change. Yet they struggled to establish durable organizational roots because they were unable to fuse the constitutional question with the increasingly urgent material concerns of workers, students, and the urban poor.

By the early 2020s, those contradictions had begun to converge. An economic discontent merged with a growing recognition that these conditions could not be separated from the political structure through which the territory was governed. It was from this convergence of class grievances and democratic aspirations that the present movement emerged.

Building the Movement

The earliest campaigns focused on electricity tariffs, wheat prices, and the increasing cost of living. Demonstrations against inflation, symbolic burning of electricity bills, nonpayment campaigns, sit-ins, and shutter-down strikes spread through towns and villages during 2022 and 2023. What initially appeared as scattered local disputes gradually revealed a common political reality. Regardless of locality, protesters confronted the same institutions, the same administrative indifference, and ultimately the same state power standing behind every decision that shaped their lives.

This convergence was not simply geographical but reflected the gradual formation of a common political consciousness among social groups that had previously entered struggle through different experiences. Workers faced declining wages, there were shrinking opportunities for students along with phenomenal fee hikes, and small traders were struggling with falling purchasing power as well as rising operating costs. These experiences did not erase the differences between classes and social layers, but they increasingly pointed toward a common source of authority lying beyond the institutions of local government.

The city of Rawalakot, which has long served as a center of radical left politics and secular democratic activism, became one of the earliest centers of sustained mobilization. Demonstrations over wheat prices evolved into prolonged occupations that repeatedly frustrated attempts by the authorities to disperse them. The city acquired political significance because it demonstrated that disciplined mass mobilization could withstand routine police repression and maintain control of public space for extended periods. Each successful mobilization encouraged similar initiatives elsewhere, enabling participants in local struggles to recognize themselves as forming part of a wider territorial movement rather than isolated episodes of protest.

As mobilization expanded, it became increasingly clear that fragmented campaigns could not exert sufficient pressure upon a state capable of containing localized dissent. Activists, therefore, sought an organizational form capable of coordinating action across the territory while preserving the broad social coalition emerging through struggle. This process culminated in the formation of the Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC), which united local action committees into a territory-wide coordinating body in September 2023.

Women in the Struggle

One of the most important developments within the uprising has been the scale and visibility of women's participation. PaJK remains deeply shaped by patriarchal social relations that have historically confined women to the private sphere while restricting their presence in political life. Public leadership has largely remained the preserve of men, and women's political activity has frequently been treated as secondary to struggles defined and directed through male-dominated institutions.

The present movement has disrupted that order in significant ways. Women have organized demonstrations, addressed public meetings, participated in sit-ins, and marched alongside men despite the certainty of police violence and arrest. They have not appeared merely as supporters of a movement led by others but as political actors whose participation has altered the movement's social composition and expanded its democratic horizons.

This transformation carries implications extending beyond questions of representation. Patriarchal authority and colonial rule are historically distinct forms of domination, yet they reinforce one another by restricting who may legitimately exercise political agency. A population is more easily governed when political participation is confined within established hierarchies, whether those hierarchies are maintained by the state or by conservative social relations.

Women's emergence as organizers, therefore, challenges both simultaneously. Every woman who occupies political space denied to her weakens structures of authority that depend upon exclusion as a condition of their reproduction.

These developments have unfolded unevenly. Conservative tendencies within the movement have at times sought to marginalize women's leadership or limit their role in decision-making. Such contradictions reflect the movement's broad social composition rather than an external pressure imposed upon it. Yet these tensions cannot obscure the transformation already underway.

Women have stood on the front lines of demonstrations, endured arrests, faced live ammunition, and mourned those martyred in the struggle. Their participation has become part of the political memory of the uprising and whatever course the movement ultimately takes, it has already altered the social landscape from which future struggles will emerge.

The Political Stakes

For decades, the Pakistani state has sought to legitimize its authority through constitutional arrangements that preserve the appearance of self-government while concentrating decisive power elsewhere. This contradiction has become increasingly obvious and difficult to manage.

As living standards declined and democratic institutions repeatedly proved incapable of responding to popular demands, broader sections of society began to recognize that meaningful economic reform could not be secured without challenging the political framework that produced those conditions. The struggle has, therefore, moved beyond a contest over policy. It has become a confrontation over sovereignty itself.

This explains the ferocity of the state's response. The Pakistani ruling class is not merely defending a particular government or protecting a single administrative institution. It is defending an entire structure of domination whose stability depends upon preventing the people of Jammu Kashmir from exercising effective control over their political and economic future.

Every successful mobilization threatens to weaken that structure by demonstrating that collective organization can impose limits upon state power. Every concession won through struggle encourages new demands, broader participation, and greater confidence among those who have long been excluded from political decision-making.

The significance of the uprising, therefore, extends beyond the boundaries of PaJK. Across South Asia, declining living standards, deepening inequality, and increasingly authoritarian forms of rule have generated recurring waves of popular resistance. Governments have responded with familiar methods: criminalizing dissent, militarizing civilian life, restricting democratic freedoms, and presenting repression as the defense of public order. The confrontation unfolding in Rawalakot belongs to this wider historical moment, in which ruling classes increasingly rely upon coercion to preserve political arrangements that command diminishing social legitimacy.

Whatever immediate outcome emerges from the present confrontation, the uprising has transformed the relationship between the people of Jammu Kashmir and the state. A generation that has experienced its own collective strength is unlikely to return quietly to the political passivity upon which colonial-style rule depends. The question now is not whether the old order has entered into crisis. It is whether the forces that have brought it to that crisis can develop the organization, political clarity, and solidarity necessary to carry the struggle beyond resistance and toward genuine popular sovereignty.

Contributors

Umair Khurshid is editor of Azam, the organ of the Jammu Kashmir National Students Federation (JKNSF).
Farooq Sulehria teaches at Beaconhouse National University, Lahore.
Harris Qadeer is a Rawalakot-based journalist and coeditor of Jeddojehad.

Source: https://jacobin.com/2026/07/kashmir-pakistan-protests-democracy-economy

Photo credit

Gaza's Gravediggers: An Inquiry into Corruption in High Places

Alex Hall — 2026-07-19T15:12:00Z

Norman G Finkelstein, OR Books, £24.99

MORE than 20 years ago, Archbishop Desmond Tutu remarked that Israel would never achieve safety through oppression: “A true peace can ultimately be built only on justice.” For justice to be done, there must be prosecutions.

Norman G Finkelstein's latest work joins a growing shelf of recent books: Peter Oborne's Complicit, Adam H Johnson's How to Sell a Genocide, that one hopes will be well-thumbed and cross-referenced on the prosecution benches when the time comes.

In Gaza's Gravediggers, Finkelstein details those who betrayed justice: individuals with power and influence who, if not able to stop the genocide, could at least have refrained from becoming its enablers and apologists.

The epigraph references the fifth labour of Hercules: cleaning the Augean stables. It is worth recalling that Hercules accomplished this by diverting two rivers, washing away the accumulated filth in a single day. Perhaps this expresses hope for a future torrent of truth sweeping aside accumulated lies.

The prologue recounts recent history familiar to Finkelstein-watchers from the many podcasts he has joined since October 2023. He details Gaza's blockade and Hamas's political programme since its 2006 election victory, which included diplomacy with the zionist regime, appeals to international law and non-violent civil resistance — all rebuffed, often with extreme violence from Israeli forces. No option remained for the besieged and blockaded Palestinian population.

Finkelstein compares the situation to the 1831 Nat Turner revolt. Destined forever to be slaves, Turner and his confederates put 55 whites to the sword in Southampton County, Virginia, attempting to exact revenge and force a reckoning over slavery's horrors.

But in Gaza, the crisis also became an opportunity, opening the gates to extermination, ethnic cleansing and the reduction of Gaza to an uninhabitable obliterated hellscape.

With this context established, Finkelstein turns his attention to international institutions that folded to Israeli propaganda and pressure during the carnage. This includes the United Nations, judges at the International Court of Justice, and prosecutors at the International Criminal Court.

The October 7 Hamas attack was instantly mobilised by Israeli propagandists as an atrocity, with claims of mass rape as a weapon of war. Denial (or indeed, asking for evidence) was rapidly weaponised as a blood libel. Yet, as many opinion-formers should be forewarned: “Do not presume precisely what needs to be proved.” Alas, the UN's Pramila Patten report leaned to the presumption rather than the proof.

Finkelstein meticulously sifts the evidence. Despite full Israeli government co-operation, Patten failed to interview any survivor of sexual violence from October 7, yet concluded there were “reasonable grounds” to assume it had happened. The report effectively undermines itself. Multiple other reports similarly found no evidence of sexual violence — unless it was Israeli sexual violence against Palestinians.

The Independent International Commission of Inquiry, chaired by Navi Pillay, is similarly eviscerated. Through a category error that minimises Israeli crimes, Finkelstein argues: “The Commission overwhelmingly framed Gaza as a ‘war' in which Israel occasionally committed crimes, whereas in reality a ‘genocide' was unfolding in Gaza in which Israel occasionally engaged in combat.”

Both the Patten report and the Pillay Commission — from the United Nations, one of the world's highest authorities — served as justifications for Israel's ongoing genocide.

Two ICJ judges stand out as particular betrayers of truth and justice. Only one of 17 judges who determined that Israel was plausibly committing genocide submitted a dissenting opinion. Julia Sebutinde, the Ugandan judge, disagreed with nearly everything her colleagues determined, including the Israeli judge, producing an opinion that took everything Israel claimed at face value and devalued everything submitted by the South African legal team.

Finkelstein devotes many pages to dismantling her opinion in law and examining her affiliations. A 50-page appendix further details that Sebutinde was also lazy: most of her opinion was plagiarised.

Judge Joan Donahue, president of the ICJ, delivered the judgement that Israel was plausibly committing genocide and must stop. Yet in a 2024 BBC interview, she claimed, in a fairly incoherent statement, that the judgement did not really mean the claim was plausible. A verbal subterfuge (and legal nonsense) thus undermined the judgement she herself had delivered.

This bears similarity to the Goldstone report, which Finkelstein examined in his Gaza: An Inquest into its Martyrdom (University of California Press, 2021). Richard Goldstone, a respected South African jurist and self-confessed zionist, produced a report detailing Israeli crimes during 2008-9's Operation Cast Lead. After a torrent of personal abuse and threats, he recanted in a murky newspaper op-ed.

An appendix details pre-genocide malfeasance. ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda has recently suggested she was the first prosecutor to open ICC investigations into Israeli war crimes in Palestine, subjected thereafter to threats and intimidation.

Finkelstein correctly recalls, however, that Bensouda was also the prosecutor for complaints over the Mavi Marmara incident, when an aid flotilla to Gaza was boarded by Israeli forces and ten activists murdered. Like Sebutinde, Bensouda stuck to the Israeli version of events and refused to prosecute. Numerous complaints followed as the prosecutor's view defied the facts.

Finkelstein can only guess whether bribery or blackmail was at play. And only in the last three months of her term did she open the Palestinian investigation, knowing she would shortly leave office.

Finally, the UN security council's endorsement of Trump's Board of Peace plan for Gaza was simply an abandonment of international law, making the UN both complicit and irrelevant. “The council didn't just issue Gaza a death warrant; it also issued its own.”

Finkelstein's work provides voluminous detail, fastidious cross-referencing of sources, exhaustive footnoting, and precision which is at times excruciating. It benefits from stark moral clarity: human life hangs in the balance. But it is precisely this exacting approach that demonstrates the contradictions, gives the scholarship its authority, and firmly plants its intention: a draft of history, and the outlines — and much of the detail — of a concerted drive to justice.

One day, the truth will wash through the stables. These are the floodgates.

Gaza's Gravediggers is released on September 3 2026 and is available for pre-order.

Source: https://www.normanfinkelstein.com/gaza-gravediggers-great-review-from-the-comrades/

Photo credit

The Tyrant's Final Illusion: When the World No Longer Needs Him

Messaoud Romdhani — 2026-07-05T15:17:00Z

Article dedicated to all peoples who live under dictatorship, and to those in democratic societies who may one day find themselves confronting it again.

“He was depressed when he suddenly realized that everything had finally fallen into place in the world… everything except him… he alone no longer had a place.”

– Gabriel García Márquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch

This is not merely a literary moment drawn from a novel. It expresses a political and human experience that recurs throughout history: the moment when power ceases to be a function and becomes an illusion of existence.

At the moment of his fall, the tyrant - indeed, every tyrant - does not simply lose power. He is confronted with something far more unsettling: the world he believed revolved around him has continued without him. History, it turns out, was never waiting for his arrival.

This marks the final collapse of a foundational illusion: the belief that a single individual can embody an entire nation.

While these reflections emerge from the experience of authoritarian power in the Arab world, they point to a broader understanding of how tyranny operates beyond any single geography or context.

Power as a Monopoly of Meaning

Tyranny is not only the monopoly of power. It is also the monopoly of meaning.

The tyrant's way of thinking is not formed alone. It is shaped by a controlled environment: a media system that repeats and amplifies his image, an entourage that filters reality to please authority, and networks of political, economic, and personal interests that value proximity to power more than truth.

In such a system, the ruler no longer sees society as it is. He receives only a filtered version of reality and, over time, hears only the echo of his own image.

But this is not only imposed from outside. It also connects with something inside the tyrant himself: an ego built on self-importance and a strong belief in his own exceptionality and superiority. Propaganda becomes a silent agreement between what he is told and what he already wants to believe.

Over time, propaganda no longer targets society alone. It returns to its source. The ruler, surrounded by a language of “necessity” and “exception,” begins to believe it. He stops being only a political actor and becomes a kind of existential necessity: not just a ruler, but a condition for the state to exist.

At this point, a dangerous form of authoritarian thinking appears: the nation is reduced to one person, institutions to one will, and history to one biography. Thus, criticizing the ruler becomes an attack on the nation itself, because the boundary between them has disappeared.

This is the deeper meaning of “I am the state.” It is not only a historical phrase linked to Louis XIV. It expresses the moment when power closes all access to truth and becomes a mirror reflecting only itself.

The Tyrant as a Prisoner of His Own Illusion

The paradox of tyranny is that the illusion used to control society ultimately traps its creator. What begins as domination ends in confinement. Gradually, the space of truth around the ruler contracts, while fear and flattery expand. He no longer encounters an external reality; he is surrounded instead by reflections carefully adjusted to confirm him. He hears only what reassures him and sees only his own image endlessly mirrored back to him—until even reality becomes indistinguishable from his self-image.

In this way, he becomes the first victim of the system he created.

As Hannah Arendt noted, totalitarian systems do not only shape society; they also reshape the very conditions in which truth is perceived. When critical voices disappear and public space closes, the ruler is left with nothing but the echo of his own voice. When fear dominates, truth recedes behind propaganda.

The tyrant no longer lives within a real society. He inhabits an artificial world produced by power, fear, and his own reflected image. This is why collapse is so violent: it is not a simple transition from strength to weakness, but a sudden shift from certainty to exposure.

The Seizure of Time

Tyranny tries to control time itself—not only the present, but also the past and the future. History is rewritten, collective memory is reshaped, and the ruler's symbols become the starting point of national time, as if history began with him.

But time, unlike power, cannot be fully controlled. It can be distorted, but it does not, by any means, stop. When the ruler's control weakens, reality slowly returns. People resume their lives with relief, as if a heavy burden has been removed. Institutions search for balance, daily life recovers its rhythm, and even language begins to free itself from fear.

At that moment, the tyrant discovers something simple: the time he thought he owned was only an illusion. The history he tried to control continued without him, indifferent to his absence. In the end, time does not recognize those who believe they can possess it.

Tyranny as a Relationship, Not a Person

Étienne de La Boétie, in Discours sur la Servitude Volontaire, reminds us that tyranny is never a purely personal power; it is sustained by a collective habit of obedience that transforms domination into an apparent necessity.

In this sense, tyranny is not something the ruler possesses. It is produced by a structure—institutions emptied of meaning, elites who protect themselves rather than speak the truth, and a society gradually conditioned to accept obedience as normal.

When this structure weakens, what once appeared absolute is revealed as fragile. This is why the fall of tyrants often looks strikingly similar across history. What collapses is not only the individual, but the entire system of illusions that made him appear necessary.

The Shock of Aftermath

At the moment of collapse, it is not only the system that breaks. The tyrant's entire view of reality collapses.

He discovers that people never stopped living, that the country was not waiting for him, and that time was never suspended in his name.

Here lies García Márquez's insight: the tragedy is not the loss of power, but the discovery that power was never necessary for the world to exist.

The patriarch does not suffer because he loses the throne. He suffers because he realizes the throne was never the centre of the world. History, which he believed reflected him, is only a river that continues to flow without noticing anyone.

The Recurrent Illusion

What tyranny reveals most clearly is not the strength of the ruler, but the fragility of the illusion behind his power: the belief that one person can represent an entire nation.

The tyrant who sees himself as the centre of history, and a society that comes to believe it cannot exist without him, are both imprisoned by the same illusion, though from opposite sides. One inflates himself until the nation is reduced to a single body. The other diminishes its own capacity to act until the nation is reduced to that body's supposed necessity. Between these two distortions—narcissism at the top and resignation below—authoritarianism is born and endlessly reproduced.

Time eventually dissolves this shared illusion. When the dust settles, it becomes evident that the state was never a person, that history never paused for anyone, and that life continued the moment fear and illusion lost their grip.

The meaning of The Autumn of the Patriarch is this: the tragedy is not that tyrants fall, but that they realize too late that their fall was never a historic event—only a brief episode in a longer history that never required them.

But the harder lesson does not end with the fall of the tyrant; it begins after it. If the illusion survives, history does not repeat the same individual—it reproduces the same idea in another form.

Tyranny endures not because tyrants are identical, but because the illusion that sustains them is persistent.

For this reason, the liberation of the future does not begin with the removal of a regime or a leader, but with the breaking of the mental need for such authority. When societies cease to seek a figure or a system to embody the nation, they begin to recover themselves, and time regains its quiet sovereignty. Time, unlike power, does not require permission to move forward.

Messaoud Romdhani is a Tunisian Human Rights activist, former president of the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, former vice president of the Tunisian Human Rights League.

Photo credit: Yup'ik mask from the Jacobsen collection, 1883, in the Ethnological Museum, Berlin, Germany. Photography was permitted in the museum without restriction.

The Challenge in Facing 4 July in the United States

Bill Fletcher, Jr. — 2026-07-04T23:36:00Z

There has been something almost surreal in President Donald Trump's efforts to both whitewash US history as well as make 4 July a celebration of his own delusional greatness. There is little that can be done about the latter, but for all progressive forces, there is certainly something that must be done regarding the efforts towards the former.

For the purposes of this essay, we shall leave aside Trump's 3 July speech about the alleged threat of “communism.” Instead, we shall focus on the problem of history.

The challenge in the United States is that we are taught to be suspicious of history, if not hate it. Instead, we are encouraged to embrace myth. Though this may sound strange, if not implausible, it makes perfect sense when one understands the USA as having resulted from a settler-colony. Think about it for a moment. A factually accurate history of the origins of the United States would read something like this:

In 1607, a group of English colonists invaded a territory in what is now known as ‘Virginia,' a territory occupied for thousands of years by an indigenous population, and began a process of seizing land and people, spreading disease and introducing slavery.

There is nothing in that statement that can be challenged. The problem, of course, is that such a telling is not a wonderful way to start a narrative about the greatness of one's country. More importantly, the actual history of a settler-colony is one that always questions the moral legitimacy of the state established as a result of the colonization process. This challenge or question acts as a perpetual nightmare for the resulting state and those who support it, whether such support is passive or active.

Thus, “July 4th” is complicated by both the contradictory nature of the 1775-1783 war of independence, as well as due to being a part and parcel of a longer and equally contradictory history of what came to be the United States. It is this that Trump and his MAGA minions wish to suppress and, both literally and figuratively, whitewash.

The reality of US history is the actuality of contradiction. There are really two histories of the United States, each having its own respective subsets. And it is these two histories that are irreconcilable, even when they may agree on certain specific facts. There is the history of the United States from the standpoint of those who have sought to construct a capitalist state, in effect a white supremacist, male supremacist imperial state. Separately, there is the history of the USA from the standpoint of the subaltern classes and groups, a history of class struggle; a history of the struggles against white supremacist national oppression; a history of the struggles against patriarchy/male supremacy; a history of the struggles against the capitalist degradation of the environment; a history of solidarity with oppressed populations in other parts of the planet.

These irreconcilable histories—that of the ruling groups vs those of the subaltern classes—are what we find at stake when we are asked to celebrate 4 July. Do we uphold the rhetoric of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence regarding life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or do we dig deeper and unpack their attack on Native Americans and their fury with King George III for the Proclamation of 1763, halting colonial expansion beyond the Appalachian Mountain range? Do we turn a blind eye to the signatories' repudiation of the British King for attempting to turn the settlers into “slaves,” when the settlers overwhelmingly embraced slavery? Can we, in other words, remove myth, and grasp the facts and currents of history in order to understand the circumstances and actions that have led us to where we find ourselves today, both domestically and internationally? Can we utilize history, to be blunt, in order to grasp the roots of rightwing populism and neofascism in the USA and, perhaps, get a sense how to utilize the history produced by the subaltern classes against the tyrants?

Those are the questions with which I leave the reader on this, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a longtime socialist, trade unionist and international solidarity activist in the USA. He is a cofounder of standing4democracy.org and can be followed @BillFletcherJr; billfletcherjr.com.

Photo credit: Illustration from R. G. Horton's pro-Confederate propaganda "history" of the American Civil War

Trump, the Iran Memorandum, and the “World's Greatest Authority”

Bill Fletcher Jr — 2026-07-04T23:36:00Z

The announcement of the US/Iran Memorandum of Understanding allegedly ending the war between Iran and the USA/Israeli axis has brought forth more confusion than I can remember in the aftermath of any crisis. And, how can we even use the word “aftermath” when, shortly after the “signing” of the Memorandum, Israel continued its relentless war against Lebanon, and Iran–as a result–announced another blockade of the Straits of Hormuz! And then, on June 21st, Trump, once again, threatened Iran and specifically threatened to kill the Iranian negotiating team! We will get back to this in a moment. First some background.

Though the mainstream media and liberal commentators have consistently referred to the USA/Israeli assault as Trump's supposed “war of choice,” such a designation entirely misses the mark. Would one call Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939 a war of choice? Perhaps in a very technical sense since it was not a defensive war, but the reality was that it was a war of naked aggression. History has identified it as such and there has been no ambiguity, except among a certain ring of fascists.

Additionally, consider that Trump twice engaged in what were supposed to be good-faith negotiations with the Iranian government, only to launch military actions against them during the negotiations. The Japanese did exactly the same thing in the leadup to Pearl Harbor and, in fact, Japanese negotiators were in Washington, DC at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack. History has been very unkind to the Japanese for such duplicity. Why should it be anything different with Trump?

Let us be clear that this has been a war of aggression on the part of the USA and Israel, countries which had similar and different reasons to attack Iran. They carried out the attack with a high level of hubris, poor intelligence, an irrational view of air power replacing soldiers on the ground, and an overall lack of preparation. In fact, they could not even define the objectives of the war.

During the course of the war there have been liberal commentators who have criticized Trump for failing to enter the war with a set of clear objectives, including but not limited to the failure to overthrow the Iranian theocracy or definitively crippling their military. This point of view is astounding since it suggests that had Trump been clearer about destroying the Iranian military and overthrowing the Iranian regime the war might have been justified! As any student of international law can attest, an unprovoked military assault against a country that offers no evidence of an imminent attack is in violation of international law and such actions have, since World War II, been condemned, with the exception of the “pass” regularly provided to Israel.

The contempt for international law demonstrated by Trump, et al, went hand in hand with a dismissal of human rights. On the first day of the war of aggression, US aircraft killed 175 Iranian civilians, mainly children, in a missile attack on a school. The attack at first appeared inexplicable except when it was later revealed that the US intelligence assessment of that area was completely out of date. Trump's response? According to the New York Times, Trump replied most recently, “Mistakes are made. War is nasty.”

Trump's contempt for the victims of US atrocities matches his contempt for people from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean unless, of course, they are Afrikaners from South Africa. It is in Trump's contemptuous view of the global majority that we see the parallels between the Trump administration on foreign and domestic policy. The ethnic cleansing and atrocious treatment of immigrants in the USA – documented and undocumented – who have been warehoused and denied humane treatment displays the same attitude the Administration has taken towards the Iranians, including attacking civilian targets and attacking non-military Iranian targets on the high seas. The basic principle that applies is that no principle applies! This is what so many people failed to understand when they classified Trump as a supposed isolationist. He and his administration are not isolationists! Instead they are a regime that believes that no law, foreign or domestic, should constrain a US administration from undertaking policies driven by perceived self-interest, however avaricious.

The Memorandum signed by Trump is as odd as a four legged duck. Despite the denunciations of the Obama administration's Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – the Iran nuclear deal of 2015 – by Trump and MAGA and their insistence that it be obliterated, Trump has won nothing of substance for the US ruling elite. As has been acknowledged in both Left and Right circles, the Strait of Hormuz was open before the war; the price of oil was down; the global economy was not teetering on the brink of recession; billions of dollars per day were not being thrown into war; and Iranian civilians, neighboring Arabian/Persian Gulf nation-states, along with US personnel in western Asia, were not facing war and terror. Trump has won nothing for the US elite or his MAGgot millions. And, as should be obvious, the people of the United States have won nothing through the pirate assault on Iran.

How should we understand this situation? First, these are the steps of a 15 year old encased in the body of an 80 year old who displays serious cognitive issues. Second, these are the actions of a segment of the US political elite that wishes to reshape the world in the interest of transnational capital, particularly the fossil fuel and tech sectors. Third, these are the actions of an Administration that exists in both unity and tension with Israel wherein it, for ideological and strategic reasons, wishes to reinforce Israel, while at the same time Trump does not particularly value chaos in western Asia (the latter appearing to be a major objective of the Israeli government).

This war and settlement are an abomination. The entire process of engaging in this war of aggression must be denounced, if not ridiculed. The stand of people of good will must be that there was never any justification for this war and, indeed, the USA and Israel need to supply Iran with reconstruction assistance. They cannot afford to walk away and shrug.

There is one more critical lesson. Our fight against rightwing authoritarianism and neofascism at home is not now and has never been separate from our duty to oppose wars of aggression and acts of tyranny on the global stage (the latter including standing with the Iranian people not only against the USA/Israeli aggression but, separately, against the repressive Iranian theocracy). Trump and MAGA have a global vision which includes domination of the Western Hemisphere; transactional relationships with other countries insofar as it benefits transnational capital and US political elites; and strong relationships with other tyrannical powers under a 21st century version of spheres of influence. The global majority has no interest in such a vision. And such a vision will not succeed to the extent to which we succeed in taking down rightwing authoritarianism and neofascism in our respective countries.

We moved far too slowly in responding to the Iran war. We sit awaiting a possible US strike against Cuba, not to mention other possible Trump targets. Those of us standing against rightwing authoritarianism and neofascism simply cannot sit out the global struggle.

Bill Fletcher, Jr . is coordinator and cofounder of standing4democracy.org. He is a longtime trade unionist, international solidarity activist, and writer of fiction and nonfiction.

Source: https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/trump-the-iran-memorandum-and-the-worlds-greatest-authority/

Photo credit: Creative Commons Zero, Public Domain Dedication

Fútbol Belongs to the People

Taki Manolakos — 2026-07-03T21:46:00Z

Maradona, Messi, and Fifty Years of the Same Imperial Logic

In June 1978, the World Cup came to Argentina. The military junta of General Jorge Rafael Videla had seized power two years earlier, overthrowing the democratically elected government of Isabel Perón in a coup the United States quietly encouraged. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had told Argentina's foreign minister in 1976: “We want you to succeed. If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly.” Kissinger attended the 1978 World Cup as the personal guest of General Videla, watched Argentina play, and praised the regime's “outstanding job in wiping out terrorist forces.” The declassified cable from his own National Security Council staff described his praise as “the music the Argentine government was longing to hear.”

While the matches were being played, the torture was continuing. The infamous Navy Superior Mechanics School — ESMA — was a concentration camp less than a kilometer from the River Plate stadium where Argentina played its home matches. Prisoners held there could hear the roars of the crowd during games. Thirty thousand people “disappeared” during the Dirty War — kidnapped, tortured, drugged and tossed from military airplanes into the Río de la Plata to drown. Many of the victims were students, journalists, trade unionists, and anyone deemed subversive by a regime that the United States had organized, funded, and encouraged through Operation Condor — a coordinated campaign of state terror across six South American military dictatorships.

Outside the stadium, a group of women had been marching every Thursday since April 30, 1977. Fourteen mothers had gathered for the first time at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires — the large square in front of the presidential palace — to demand information about their disappeared children. Public assembly was illegal under the dictatorship, so they began walking in circles around the pyramid at the center of the plaza. They wore white headscarves made from the cloth diapers of their missing children. They embroidered the names and birth dates of the disappeared onto the fabric. They carried photographs. The military called them “las locas” — the madwomen — and were baffled about how to suppress a protest of grieving mothers without provoking a backlash. Eventually they turned their violence on the movement itself. In December 1977, one of the founders, Azucena Villaflor, was kidnapped outside her home, tortured, and thrown from a military airplane into the sea. Two other founding members were taken from a church meeting and killed in the same manner. Their deaths did not stop the march. Azucena Villaflor had told them before she was taken: “Even if I'm not around, keep going.”

The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo used the World Cup's global visibility to make the dictatorship's crimes visible to an international audience for the first time. Foreign journalists covering the tournament saw them marching. Human rights organizations in Europe and North America launched campaigns under the slogan “football yes, torture no.” Amnesty International organized letter-writing drives. In France, over two hundred local committees formed under the banner “No football in the concentration camps.” None of this stopped the tournament. Argentina won. General Videla lifted the trophy. Henry Kissinger smiled for the cameras. The torture continued.

Diego Maradona — the seventeen-year-old who would go on to become, by wide consensus, the greatest fútbol player who ever lived — was in Buenos Aires that June, and he was not on the field. Argentina was hosting the tournament, and much of the country wanted him on the roster, but the coach chose to exclude him from the squad, judging him too young to carry the pressure of a home World Cup. “I cried my eyes out when I was not considered,” Maradona said of the snub. He spent the tournament his country's dictatorship was using to launder its reputation watching from the outside — too young to play in it, but not too young to understand exactly what was happening.

This is the history that FIFA carries into every World Cup it hosts. It is the history it carried into Kansas City on June 16, 2026, when FIFA president Gianni Infantino sat in the VIP section of Arrowhead Stadium to watch Lionel Messi's Argentina defeat Algeria 3-0. Maradona had a word for this. In 2019, one year before his death, he resigned from FIFA's Legends program after concluding that the organization was going in the wrong direction. “Since Blatter and Grondona left,” he wrote in his resignation letter to Infantino, “FIFA hasn't changed a bit. No change.” He added: “They treated us as if we were little dogs that only needed to be fed and that's it. A total lack of respect.” When Maradona died in November 2020, Infantino called him “simply immense” and said fútboll owed him “eternal gratitude.”

Maradona would have laughed. Then he would have said something unprintable about Infantino, just as he had said something unprintable about George W. Bush at the 2005 Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata — where he boarded a train full of protesters alongside Hugo Chavez, wore a shirt bearing Bush's image and the words “war criminal,” and called the American president “human garbage” in front of tens of thousands of people. He said: “Argentina has dignity. Let's throw Bush out.” He meant every word.

Diego Maradona was born on October 30, 1960, and raised in a shantytown on the southern outskirts of Buenos Aires with no clean water, no paved roads, and open sewers running between houses where families survived on construction work, factory shifts, and whatever else could be found. His father left for work at 4am. His mother told the children she had already eaten so they could have larger portions. On his third birthday, an uncle brought him a worn leather ball. He slept with it under his arm.

From those streets he became what Messi himself later called the greatest player in history. “Even if I played for a million years,” Messi said, “I'd never come close to Maradona. Not that I'd want to anyway. He's the greatest there's ever been.” Maradona returned the admiration: “I have seen the player who will inherit my place in Argentine football and his name is Messi. Messi is a genius.” Between them they produced the most complete account of what a human being can do with the ball that the sport has ever seen.

But Maradona never forgot where he came from. He had Che Guevara tattooed on his right arm. He had Fidel Castro tattooed on his left leg. He called Castro “my second father” and dedicated his autobiography to him. He traveled to Venezuela to embrace Chavez at the presidential palace. At the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, coaching Argentina for the last time, he had his team display a banner on the pitch calling for the Nobel Peace Prize to be awarded to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. He said the World Cup had been stolen from the people who loved fútbol and given to corporations and politicians. He was right then and he would be unsurprised today.

In 1986, playing against England four years after Argentina's defeat in the Malvinas war — a conflict that killed approximately 900 people, most of them young Argentine conscripts, Maradona scored a goal with his hand and was not penalized. He said afterward it was scored “a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God.” He later clarified what he had really been thinking: “We knew that a lot of Argentine kids had died there, that they had killed them like little birds.” It was a goal but more importantly an act of political defiance against an imperial power.

Messi was born on June 24, 1987, in Rosario, Argentina. His father was a foreman at a pressed steel plant. His mother worked in a manufacturing workshop. He left for Barcelona at 13 when FC Barcelona offered to pay for the growth hormone treatment his family could not afford in Argentina. He became the greatest player of his generation — Maradona's own verdict confirmed it. He is also, in political terms, essentially blank. He has never said anything about anything that matters beyond the game. He has never called anyone human garbage. He has never boarded a train full of protesters. He has never had a revolutionary's face tattooed on his body.

On March 5, 2026, Messi walked into the East Room of the White House, handed Donald Trump a pink Inter Miami ball, and accepted the president's congratulations on winning the MLS Cup. Trump said: “It's my distinct privilege to say what no American president has ever had the chance to say before: ‘Welcome to the White House, Lionel Messi.'“ Fourteen months earlier, Messi had declined President Biden's invitation to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, citing schedule conflicts. He found no such conflict this time.

This is not simply a story of two men who chose differently. Messi's working-class origins were not so different from Maradona's. The difference is what happened next. Maradona stayed inside Argentine fútboll into his twenties, in a culture saturated with the politics of a nation living through dictatorship and its aftermath, before the world's biggest stages ever found him. Messi left for Barcelona at thirteen, extracted from working-class Rosario before any political consciousness could fully form, and was rebuilt inside La Masia — an elite academy engineered to produce footballers, not citizens. He came of age entirely inside the most financialized, brand-managed era the sport has ever known, a system perfected precisely to manufacture players who would never alienate the market. Maradona's class consciousness survived because the fútbol culture that raised him carried it forward. Messi's was engineered out of him by the very machine that made him great. He was not born without politics - he was made that way.

None of this makes Messi a villain. The contrast between Maradona and Messi is not about talent. Messi is a genius — Maradona said so himself. It is also not about morality. Both are human and complicated. It is about whose side you are on. Because we must all pick a side.

On June 18, 2026, two days after Gianni Infantino watched Messi score three goals at Arrowhead Stadium, the country Maradona loved more than any other outside his own faced the same imperial pressure that had crushed Argentina decades before. That day, Cuban lawmakers unanimously approved what economists described as the most profound transformation of the country's economic system since the revolution. Foreign investors would no longer be required to form joint ventures with the state. Both Cuban and foreign investors would be allowed to acquire stakes in state companies. Private banks would enter Cuba's once state-dominated finance sector. The measures came after the Trump administration cut off Cuba's oil supply in January — following the US military operation that removed Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela — reducing the island's fuel imports by an estimated 90 percent, producing nationwide blackouts of ten to twenty hours daily. Trump had said the United States would be “taking over” Cuba “almost immediately.” He had mused about an aircraft carrier stopping just outside Cuban waters. There is no appeasing fascists. The Cubans, of all people, know this. They have known it for sixty years.

The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo marched in 1977 and 1978 while Henry Kissinger praised the junta that was throwing their children from airplanes. Nearly fifty years later, the same imperial logic — applied through oil blockades and military threats — produced the privatization of the revolution Maradona loved. But the imperial logic that crushed Cuba and silenced Argentina has never gone unanswered. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo answered it by marching every Thursday for nearly fifty years. They were not politicians. They were ordinary people who refused to disappear along with their children. That tradition of refusal does not belong only to Argentina. It surfaces wherever ordinary people decide, without permission and without guarantee of safety, that our elites do not get to define what is possible.

Forty miles from Arrowhead Stadium, in Lawrence, Kansas — a college town of 96,000 people better known for the University of Kansas than for international fútbol — something happened this June that no algorithm can price. When the Algerian men's national team arrived the first weekend of June to begin their World Cup preparations, Lawrence showed up. The city had been preparing for over a year. Local restaurants updated their menus with halal-friendly options. Residents arrived at open practice sessions waving Algerian flags and wearing team scarves. Lawrence artist Stan Herd — known for his large-scale earthworks — created a giant Algerian flag made from organic materials on the grounds of the University of Kansas. The University of Kansas marching band learned and performed the Algerian national anthem as the crowd stood in reverence. The Spencer Museum of Art at KU opened an exhibition titled “Welcoming the World to Lawrence,” drawing from its permanent collection to celebrate the nations represented in the tournament.

The story of Lawrence and Algeria made headlines internationally — on Good Morning America, and across the Arab world — because it was the story of a small American city choosing, in the face of a federal government conducting immigration raids and threatening military action against Muslim-majority nations, to offer genuine and unconditional welcome. This is what Maradona recognized in every city he played in — it was another moment when the game belongs to the people. Lawrence chose to keep going. Azucena Villaflor told the Mothers before she was taken: “Even if I'm not around, keep going.” They kept going. For nearly fifty years they kept going. The junta fell. Kissinger died. Videla died. The march continued.

Maradona was not the first athlete to turn a stadium into a stage for defiance. Jesse Owens did it in 1936, winning four gold medals in track and field at the Berlin Olympics with Adolf Hitler in the stands, watching the Games he had built to prove Aryan supremacy. Muhammad Ali did it in 1967, refusing induction into the US Army during the Vietnam War and declaring he had no quarrel with the Viet Cong — a decision that cost him his title, his boxing license, and three and a half years of his prime. Tommie Smith and John Carlos did it in 1968, raising black-gloved fists on the Olympic medal stand in Mexico City, and were suspended from the team and sent home under death threat for it. None of them were rewarded. All of them were right. Maradona belongs to that lineage. And even in the face of crass commercialization, fútbol still belongs to the people.

Photo credit: Archivo Hasenberg-Quaretti, 9 December 1982
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Photo Caption: En Plaza de Mayo, el 9 y 10 de diciembre de 1982 con las consignas: "Aparición con vida de los detenidos desaparecidos; restitución de los niños a sus legítimas familias y libertad a los presos políticos"

The Colonised Feet that now carry the White World

MJ Vijayan — 2026-07-02T20:20:39Z

Look carefully. The so-called ‘white nations' of world football are no longer carried only by ‘white bodies', white histories, white churches or white bloodlines. They are carried, again and again, by the children of Africa, the Caribbean, the Arab world, Asia, Latin America – migrant neighbourhoods, refugee homes, working-class suburbs and postcolonial memory. This is the story.

What is the most striking question the FIFA World Cup throws at us today?

Not merely who scored, who topped the group, who moved to the next round. The deeper question is this: who is carrying the dreams of the old empires on their feet?

Look at France.
Look at England.
Look at Belgium, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Portugal, the United States and Canada.

Look carefully, not with the lazy eye of nationalism, but with the historical eye of politics. The so-called ‘white nations' of world football are no longer carried only by ‘white bodies', white histories, white churches or white bloodlines. They are carried, again and again, by the children of Africa, the Caribbean, the Arab world, Asia, Latin America – migrant neighbourhoods, refugee homes, working-class suburbs and postcolonial memory.

That the global North is being carried on its feet by the global South is not a small footnote to football.

This is the story.

France is the most striking example. Kylian Mbappé, born in Paris, with Cameroonian and Algerian roots, is not an exception in the French team. He is the centre of a wider truth.

Around him stand names like Ousmane Dembélé, Aurélien Tchouaméni, N'Golo Kanté, Mike Maignan, William Saliba, Ibrahima Konaté, Jules Koundé, Dayot Upamecano, Michael Olise, Rayan Cherki, Bradley Barcola, Marcus Thuram, Désiré Doué and others. They are French. They are also children of histories that France once ruled, exploited, extracted from, policed, racialised and called “outside”.

Now those “outsiders” are France's centre.

The old empire wanted labour without equality, colonies without citizenship, resources without memory, and culture without justice. Football has staged a brutal reversal. The children of the colonised now sing the Marseillaise, wear the French blue, win the trophies, take the penalties, absorb the racist abuse, and still rescue the republic from its own narrow imagination of itself.

The irony is not symbolic. It is historic.

England too is no longer explainable through the mythology of ‘island purity'. Its footballing hope now runs through Bukayo Saka, Jude Bellingham, Marcus Rashford, Eberechi Eze, Kobbie Mainoo, Noni Madueke, Marc Guéhi, Ezri Konsa, Ivan Toney, Djed Spence and others. Some are of African or Caribbean descent. Some come from immigrant families. Some carry names and histories that would have once been told to remain at the margins of ‘Englishness'.

Yet today, without them, England is not a World Cup contender. It is just nostalgia in a white shirt.

And then there is the question of faith. Europe, which still imagines itself as a Christian civilisational space, now finds its footballing future deeply shaped by Muslim, migrant and minority histories. Spain's Lamine Yamal, born in Catalonia to a Moroccan father and an Equatorial Guinean mother, is one of the most dazzling young talents in world football. His very presence unsettles the old categories.

Is he Spanish?
Yes.
Is he African in lineage?
Yes.
Is he a child of migrant struggle?
Yes.
Must he choose only one history?
No.

That is precisely what football is teaching Europe: identity is not a prison. It is a river that cannot be dammed.

Djed Spence becoming a Muslim representative in the England side is not merely a sports trivia point. It is a political image. A Muslim player in the national team of a country where Islamophobia has been normalised by tabloids, politicians and street racism. A player of minority background wearing the shirt of a country still struggling to admit what empire did to the world.

This is not token diversity.

This is the new demographic truth breaking through the old national lie.

Germany has its own version of this story. Antonio Rüdiger, Jamal Musiala, Malick Thiaw, Karim Adeyemi in earlier squads, and now Deniz Undav, the German-born player of Kurdish Yazidi heritage, show that Germany's footballing body is not the old ‘Aryan fantasy' of its darkest past.

Undav's story is particularly moving. A son of a persecuted Yazidi refugee family, he plays for Germany and becomes a symbol of dignity for a stateless and wounded people. This is football doing what parliaments often refuse to do: making the invisible visible.

Belgium's story is equally powerful. Jérémy Doku, Romelu Lukaku, Amadou Onana, Dodi Lukebakio, Youri Tielemans and others represent a country whose wealth was historically tied to the violent extraction of Congo and Africa. Today, Belgium's footballing pride is inseparable from African-origin players. The descendants of those who were once colonised or racialised now carry the flag of the country that once profited from colonial brutality.

History has a strange left foot.

The Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden and Portugal too are no longer culturally sealed European teams. They are teams of migration, empire, labour and refuge. Virgil van Dijk, Cody Gakpo, Xavi Simons, Denzel Dumfries, Manuel Akanji, Breel Embolo, Alexander Isak, Rafael Leão, Nuno Mendes, Danilo Pereira and many others are reminders that Europe's footballing quality is built not by ethnic purity but by pluralism.

North America tells the same story in a different grammar.

The United States team is not a white American story. It is Christian Pulisic, yes, but also Tim Weah, Weston McKennie, Tyler Adams, Folarin Balogun, Haji Wright, Malik Tillman, Sergiño Dest, Antonee Robinson, Chris Richards, Mark McKenzie, Miles Robinson, Auston Trusty, Ricardo Pepi and Alejandro Zendejas.

It is Black America, African migration, Caribbean routes, Latino histories, mixed families and the children of movement. In a country where racism remains structural and police violence remains political, the national team quietly displays what the republic refuses to fully become. In a nutshell, the football team of the USA at the FIFA World Cup, negates everything that Donald Trump and rusted Republican politics stand for. Literally getting beaten on the grass.

Canada too is unimaginable without the men with curls! The first country team to advance to the round of 16 in the 2026 FIFA WC, Canada is nothing without Alphonso Davies, Jonathan David, Ismaël Koné, Tajon Buchanan, Moïse Bombito, Ali Ahmed, Cyle Larin, Tani Oluwaseyi, Promise David and others. Here is a country whose footballing rise is powered by Black, Caribbean, African and migrant-origin players. The new Canada on the pitch is far ahead of the old Canada of settler innocence.

This is why football is political and is the most political sport on the map.

Not because players must issue manifestos, but because their bodies already carry history. Every sprint by Mbappé, every dribble by Yamal, every tackle by Rüdiger, every run by Saka, every burst by Doku, every save by Maignan, cheered by nationalist fans, is also a commentary on race, empire, conquests, belonging and nationhood.

It is a poetry against colonisation, written with blood and sweat.

The Far Right understands this. That is why it attacks these players the moment they miss a penalty. They are French when they score, African or Arab when they miss. English when they win, immigrant when they fail. Belgian when they dribble, Congolese when they demand respect. The racist mind wants minority bodies to produce national glory without claiming national equality.

But football is defeating that bargain. The colonised are not merely asking for entry anymore. Their children are carrying the keys. They are not guests in Europe's house. They are rebuilding the house. They are not symbols of charity. They are makers of national pride.

They are not evidence of decline, as racists claim. They are proof that pluralism works.

This World Cup is therefore not just a globalised, glamourised tournament. It is a people's census of modern history; standing tall against the ignorance of settler colonialism. It tells us that no nation is pure, no flag is innocent, no anthem belongs to one race, and no empire can forever control the descendants of those it once tried to rule.

Centuries after colonialism, the ball has rolled back. The children of the colonies, the children of migrants, the children of Muslims, Africans, Arabs, Asians, Caribbeans and refugees are now the messengers of possibility for the very countries that once treated them as inferior.

And they are not whispering. They are scoring and roaring; winning hearts for who they are.

MJ Vijayan , a football fanatic, is a socio-political analyst and writer, based in New Delhi.

Source: independentink.in

Photo credit: Team Germany players, Ecuador v Germany at 2026 Fifa World Cup by YantsImages