Gaza’s collective sumud has proven more powerful than one of the world’s best-equipped militaries, but the change in international attitudes isn’t happening fast enough to save a starving population from Western-backed genocide, argues RAMZY BAROUD
August’s riots echo the dark history of reactionary ‘Church and King’ mobs
Socialist historian KEITH FLETT traces the parallel evolution of violent loyalist rampages and the workers' movement's peaceful democratic crowds, highlighting the stark contrast between recent far-right thuggery and mass Gaza protests
REACTIONARY RAMPAGE:
The house of radical dissenter
Joseph Priestley is destroyed
by a right-wing mob during
the 1791 Birmingham riots
Starmer sabotaged Labour with his second referendum campaign, mobilising a liberal backlash that sincerely felt progressive ideals were at stake — but the EU was then and is now an entity Britain should have nothing to do with, explains NICK WRIGHT
JOHN PERRY, BECCA RENK and ROGER D HARRIS offer a corrective to the idea that Latin America still lags far behind the West on women’s rights by looking at the region’s significant feminist gains now stretching back decades
Danni Perry’s flag display at the Royal Opera House sparked 182 performers to sign a solidarity letter that cancelled the Tel Aviv Tosca production, while Leonardo DiCaprio invests in Tel Aviv hotels, reports LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
The summer saw the co-founders of modern communism travelling from Ramsgate to Neuenahr to Scotland in search of good weather, good health and good newspapers in the reading rooms, writes KEITH FLETT
STEPHEN ARNELL casts a critical eye over the sudden rash of challenges to the two-party system on both sides of the Atlantic, noting that today’s performative populist politics sadly lacks Roosevelt’s progressive ‘Bull Moose’ vision of the early 20th century
THE fascist-inspired riots of early August raised again the question of how protest occurs and what form it takes.
Some Tory leadership contenders made entirely specious comparisons with the huge and peaceful marches on Gaza that have taken place since October 2023.
Two entirely different things were being conflated but historically that wasn’t always the case. Until the last years of the 18th century, a riot was the most common and most frequent form of protest.
Before trade unions and working-class political organisations had developed there existed, for example, collective bargaining by riot. An employer would be besieged by workers until they addressed wage demands.
More from this author
The summer saw the co-founders of modern communism travelling from Ramsgate to Neuenahr to Scotland in search of good weather, good health and good newspapers in the reading rooms, writes KEITH FLETT
KEITH FLETT looks at the long history of coercion in British employment laws
The government cracking down on something it can’t comprehend and doesn’t want to engage with is a repeating pattern of history, says KEITH FLETT
While Hardie, MacDonald and Wilson faced down war pressure from their own Establishment, today’s leadership appears to have forgotten that opposing imperial adventures has historically defined Labour’s moral authority, writes KEITH FLETT
