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“Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.” ― James Baldwin
Darkness is spreading and mad men are in charge. Cruelty is spectacle, even recreational. In these times, we must ask ourselves: are our own responses also spectacle?
To those of us able to see beyond news headlines, it’s clear that the ones in power do not represent the will or interest of the people. So why are so many of us still trying to reason with the monsters, to present facts, to ask nicely? Instead of imagining creative and bold tactics to take power away from them, we critique each other’s language, each other’s activism.
While Palestinians are being crushed by the violence of colonialism, we are imprisoned by a colonial mentality. Instead of building a thousand ships, we criticise those willing to put their bodies on the line, and we lecture oppressed people about ethical resistance.
Arundhati Roy says there has been a sort of ‘NGOisation’ of radical movements. It’s preaching nonviolence while tolerating state violence. But, Roy asks: “Can the hungry go on a hunger strike? Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation.”
Colonial mentality is preaching humanitarian aid as apolitical. It’s two-sides journalism. It’s charity over liberation. It’s philanthropy, not economic democracy. It’s female war criminals as feminism. It’s bombing in the name of liberation. It’s storytelling to humanise Palestinians and all those people othered by the war economy.
But they were never not human. Those who are no longer human, the barbarians, the uncivilised, those who have lost their humanity are those doing the slaughter, those funding it, those defending it, those okay with it, those ignoring it. Colonialism was never going to see the other as human. It can't. It would necessitate the realisation that it can no longer justify itself.
Of course, we are all entangled in this. And as long as war, militarisation and genocide are good for the economy, it will continue. Unless we, the people with a conscience are able to rise and take power away from them.
What we, as the funders, the profiteers, the children of colonialism must do is understand how we benefit from genocide, from destruction, from plunder. If our governments can continue to shamefully break international humanitarian and human rights law, then why should we obey their laws? We must find our people, stay grounded, and then, collectively, collaboratively, strategically, make ourselves available to liberation movements.
Roy says it's utterly urgent for these movements and those of us who support them to reclaim the space for civil disobedience. “To do this,” she says, “we will have to liberate ourselves from being manipulated, perverted, and headed off in the wrong direction by the desire to feed the media’s endless appetite for theater. Because that saps energy and imagination.”
Colonial mentality is deciding to only do things that might succeed, and then falling into despair when it fails. Wisdom, or a liberated mentality, is doing the work just because it’s the right thing to do. Greta Thunberg didn’t go on that boat because she thought she would succeed, but because by not even trying, we risk losing our humanity.
And “humanism,” Edward Said wrote, “is the only, and I would go so far as to say, the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.”
Like the scarlet jester in the 1965 animated film Chromophobia, where the world has been taken over by the dark legions who try to destroy colour, we must use chromatic trickery to resist getting swallowed by darkness. We must be guided, not just by moral courage, but by creative courage, in order to hold on to our humanity, to seed it, to grow it, to spread it. We must work artfully. We must be light. We must be colour. We must be poetry.
Words, Veronica Yates and illustration, Miriam Sugranyes
Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire.
‘Revolution or Resistance? Idea, Word, and Action. A conversation with Arundhati Roy.’ Critical Theory, in Barcelona, 3 March 2025. Watch/listen here.
‘The Un-victim,’ Interview with Arundhati Roy, Guernica Magazine, 15 February 2011. Read here.
My Seditious Heart, Arundhati Roy.
Orientalism, Edward Said.
Chromophobia, by Raoul Servais, 1965. Read about it here. Watch the film here.
Mutual Aid: Building solidarity during this crisis (and the next), Dean Spade.
‘Mutual Aid 101: Solidarity, Survival, and Resistance,’ Online toolkit available here.
‘Ambivalence Toward Resistance as a Human Right: Matters of Law and Policy,’ Richard Falk, 16 June 2025. Read here. This article is a foreword to Shannonbrooke Murphy, The Human Right to Resist in International and Constitutional Law, Cambridge University.
‘A world in need of poets,’ Usman Iqtidar, The New Humanitarian, 9 June 2025. Read here.
A Parent's Guide: Talking to Children About Global Conflicts, Ayako Gallagher. Go here.
“I know that the houses have fallen. We entered the world in them, wonderfully sure, that they were more durable than ourselves.” — Hannah Arendt
“Action without a name, a who attached to it, is meaningless.” — Hannah Arendt
“One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."— Martin Luther King Jr.
“Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us.” ― Arundhati Roy
