Progressive culture since 1954
In Israel, as in Australia, colonisation is the context without which nothing else makes sense. The Israeli state depends on the dispossession of Palestinians, and so, by its nature, will constantly create and recreate violence, just as the Australian settler state did.
As antipoverty activists, we know we must unite all low-income workers by centring the relationship between poverty and wages, and the declining wage growth this country has experienced in the past ten years. It is vital that the broad left and our movements begin to see that the rights of waged and unwaged workers are intrinsically linked.
It’s been 50 years since The Sorrow and the Pity first screened in a tiny cinema in Paris. Soon after its American release, film critic Roger Ebert described it as ‘one of the greatest documentaries ever made.’ When it was finally approved for broadcast on French television, in 1981, 10 years after its original ban, it was viewed by 20 million people – more than a third of the entire population of France.
A concept so old it comes to us in a dead language: divide et impera. The original phrase is attributed to Philip II of Macedon as he played Greek city-states off against one another in the fourth century BC. In ancient Greek, διαίρει καὶ βασίλευε; in English, divide and rule.
The scenes unfolding in the streets of Jerusalem, disturbing as they may be, should be seen and understood in context of decades of continuous dispossession and dehumanisation of Palestinians. A context marked by a violent rhetoric of displacement and replacement whereby those who are Indigenous to place and land can simply be replaced, erased, and removed without hesitation.
From Arinze Ifeakandu’s decidedly queer-centric fiction to the experimental sound of Fireboy DML’s music, young Nigerians are starting to embrace cultures that used to exist at the fringes of society. They are powered by a bohemian rush, a pressing need to skate down what Kerouac called the ‘senseless nightmare road’.
Last March, a handful of prominent Melbourne nightclubs were called out for hosting events with all-male lineups. It’s a tale as old as time itself, but it’s also 2021. This shouldn’t be happening.
The Australian anti-halal campaign, like the French one, aims at criminalising and further excluding the already marginalised Muslim minority. While racists pretend to act in the name of national unity, their words and deeds show us how food becomes a means to distinguish a superior ‘us’ from an inferior ‘them’ – the unwanted and unwelcome Arab and Muslim Other.
A new cartoon by Sam Wallman (after William Waltzman) for the Homes not Prisons campaign