ANDY HEDGECOCK picks out his cultural highlights of 2025
Latest editorial
Empire is without virtue
RON JACOBS recommends an exhaustive demonstration that colonialism is insidious, pervasive, positive and negative
British Royal Marine poses with two severed heads during the Malayan Emergency. This photograph was first published on May 10 1952, by the Daily Worker (Morning Star) in a frontpage article titled "This Horror Must End".
[Public Domain]
Star cartoonist MALC MCGOOKIN finds lessons for today in the punch, and the economy of line, of an extraordinary generation of illustrators
LEO BOIX, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MARIA DUARTE review Dreamers, It Was Just An Accident, Folktales, and Eternity
JENNY MITCHELL, poetry co-editor for the Morning Star, introduces her priorities, and her first selection
HENRY BELL is sceptical of the notion that ‘progress’ is an ideology that the ruling class uses exclusively to camouflage appropriation
In search of political understanding, MATTHEW HAWKINS welcomes a critique of anti-semitism as codified by the Israeli state
BEN CHACKO welcomes a masterful analysis that puts class struggle back at the heart of our understanding of China’s revolution
Empireworld
Sathnam Sanghera, Penguin, £10.99
POET and anti-war priest Daniel Berrigan wrote in his book The Nightmare of God: “We would like to think that the empire is virtuous. Or that it can be made so, converted, so to speak, by a large dose of civic virtue.” He concludes that it is not virtuous nor can it be made so.
I agree with Daniel Berrigan — empire is intrinsically without virtue.
In his newest book titled Empireworld: How British Imperialism Has Shaped the Globe, Sathnam Sanghera considers it at best a mixed bag, with the negatives outweighing the positives.
Similar stories
RON JACOBS welcomes a survey of US punk in the era of Reagan, and sees the necessity for some of the same today
RON JACOBS salutes a magnificent narrative that demonstrates how the war replaced European colonialism with US imperialism and Soviet power
RON JACOBS welcomes the translation into English of an angry cry from the place they call the periphery
RON JACOBS recommends a timely pamphlet that provides both explanation and historical context for the fall of Assad