Why Trump is Going Down

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[Caption – Epstein survivors confront Pam Bondi]

JONATHAN NEALE writes

One way or another, Trump is going down. This article explains why. And at the end, I look briefly at the consequences, mainly for the United States and Israel.

Here’s one straw in the wind:

On July 18 Vice-President J. D. Vance said on Joe Rogan’s show  Jeffrey Epstein’s operation may well have been a honey trap organized for Mossad. Here’s the way the New York Times reported it:

“Most people think he was Mossad,” Mr. Rogan, a frequent promoter of conspiracy theories, said of Mr. Epstein in an episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience” released on Wednesday.

“Yeah, Mossad or C.I.A., or some other deep state, whether in America or Israel or another country,” Mr. Vance replied.

“He clearly had connections to the upper — the highest — levels of American intelligence,” the vice president added. “He clearly had connections to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence.”

Vance has also been publicly reproving Netanyahu recently. In June he said that Netanyahu better shut up and stop criticising America, because Israel was a pariah state with no friends in the world but the United States. Last week he said that Israel was still an American ally, but it was time for Israel to stop controlling American policy.

Vance wants to be President. He can see Trump is going down. So he is separating himself from Trump over both Israel and Epstein.

THE REASONS WHY

Trump’s popular support is evaporating. On top of that, he is obviously sick. For both those reasons, he now looks like a loser.

The fading popular support is the driving force. Some Americans and many foreigners find this difficult to understand because they regard Trump’s supporters as irrational, immoral, stupid bigots. They believe his base will just follow him anywhere, no matter what.

It’s turns out they won’t. They think raping children is wrong. They can no longer bear the Middle Eastern wars. And their economic lives are getting worse. We’ll explore all three issues, the Epstein files first.

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Minnesota and the Epstein Files

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Jonathan Neale

This is the first of several articles that put the protests in Minneapolis in the context of swiftly moving changes and ruptures in the global system. This article argues that the conflict over the Epstein files is the largest single confrontation so far in a long global struggle against sexual violence by the powerful. It is also a direct threat to Donald Trump personally.

By early January Trump was cornered. He embarked upon a manic Killer Klown tour that has visited grief on Venezuela, Iran, Greenland and several American cities. One reason was to distract attention from the Epstein files. The other was to display enough power and kill enough people to terrify both the Epstein survivors and their supporters.

The next article will argue that the resistance in Minnesota is the continuation of a mass confrontations between the people and the police on the streets of more than thirty countries since 2010. In Article 3 I look at the global international alliance of extreme racist movements led by Trump, Putin, Modi, Netanyahu and many more. Article 4 is about tariffs, Greenland, NATO, Ukraine and the crumbling of American imperial power.

But this article is all about the Epstein files. Here I will break two long established rules of method in the study of international relations. The first is that international politics should only be explained by international relations. “Domestic issues” are not fundamentally important in great power conflicts.

The second silly rule of method is that sexual violence is wrong, but it is not important. Or rather, of course sexual violence is important. But it is not important in the way that oil, profits, the arms trade or global financial markets are important.

In this way of thinking, paying attention to struggles over the sexual abuse of young people is not only harrowing. It’s icky. It’s about scandal. Fundamentally, there is a hierarchy of seriousness, and rape is dreadful, but it is not serious.

Now let’s transgress those two silly rules.

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The Epstein Files and Class Struggle

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Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale

One of the great class confrontations of our time is playing out in Washington DC right now – the Epstein files. We know that sounds like a really, really weird thing to say. But look at what’s happening in front of our eyes.

On September 3, 2025, roughly twenty working class women showed up to speak to the press in Washington and demand the release of the Epstein papers. Some were in their thirties, and some were in their early middle age. They were cold – winter was coming. They were survivors of Epstein’s abuse and exploitation. And they were terrified. Most did not speak, but they stood there beside those who spoke.

Julie K. Brown was the journalist hero first broke the Epstein story in the Miami Herald in 2018. Now she tweeted that she was speaking to many survivors, and they were all terrified. The obvious reason was what happened to Epstein. But also, of course, those women had known those powerful men up close and personal, their arrogance, cruelty and ruthlessness. As they took turns leaning into the microphone, shaking in their courage, they knew what they were doing.

On the other side were the legions of rich, powerful and influential men who had used them, and the greater legions of powerful men and women who had concealed and enabled the abuse. On that side stood two presidents of the United States, one former prime minister of Israel, the American architect of the Good Friday agreement in Ireland, rich and powerful lawyers, distinguished Harvard professors, the greatest linguist of his generation, the British ambassador to the United States, Bill Gates and other billionaires.

Those working class women confronted scores of men from the ruling class. That courage was in them because there were many of them, standing together. It was in them because their fight against Epstein had now lasted for years, and they had grown and changed as they stood by each other to rescue themselves.

They also found courage because they stood on the shoulders of giants. The global movement against the sexual violence of the rich and powerful has been growing for forty years. It began with women and men who had survived abuse as children.

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A Bibliography for “The Piruzai of Afghanistan”

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Jonathan writes: Nancy Lindisfarne-Tapper and Richard Tapper have just published The Piruzai of Afghanistan: A Visual Ethnography with White Horse Press. It’s a 360 page book of photographs in colour and black and white from their fieldwork with pastoral nomads in northern Afghanistan just over half a century ago. The book is a record of a way of life before 43 years of war changed everything. The photos beautiful and cumulatively very moving. My favourites are the landscapes of their astonishing trek with the flocks to the mountains in the center of the country, and the deeply humane portraits.

We have published selected photos on Anne Bonny Pirate here. And you can order the book for £40 hardback or £20 paperback from White Horse Press here.

The book promised that a comprehensive bibliography of all Nancy and Richard’s published work on Afghanistan would be published on Anne Bonny. Here it is.

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The Piruzai of Afghanistan – A Visual Ethnography

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Nancy Lindisfarne writes: In the early 1970s, Richrd Tapper and I spent a year doing anthropological fieldwork with the Piruzai, pastoralists and farmers in northern Afghanistan. Our new book, The Piruzai of Afghanistan – A Visual Ethnography, tells their story in some 380 photographs, mostly in colour.

Since the time of our fieldwork, Afghanistan has been engulfed in nearly fifty years of war. During these tragic years, the Piruzai fled from the north of Afghanistan to refugee camps in Pakistan. They then returned to the Helmand in southern Afghanistan where some of them and their descendants have been major actors in more recent events.

All too often, Afghans have been stereotyped for other people’s purposes. In a world so altered, we have looked for ways to give something back to the people who welcomed us into their lives. Richard’s recent book Afghan Village Voices (Tapper & Lindisfarne-Tapper 2020) is a remarkable compilation of stories drawn from 100 hours of tape recordings in which the Piruzai speak for themselves. This visual ethnography is a companion volume to Afghan Village Voices and a further record of the lives of admirable people in an easier time.

The Piruzai of Afghanistan – A Visual Ethnography is published in association with The White Horse Press. If you want to order the book, details are at the end of this post.

We were welcomed by Haji Tuman, the headman of one of the Piruzai villages, and joined him and his family in the spring pastures. Doing ethnographic fieldwork requires a lot of give and take, and it only works when it works. But when it does, it is a joy and an extraordinary privilege.

We loved watching Haji Tuman with his youngest daughter, Maygol. They were crazy about each other. .

The Piruzai kept two breeds of sheep, Karakuli and Arabi. Karakuli lambskins (known to furriers as Persian Lamb or Astrakhan) were the main source of cash income from pastoralism. The fat-tailed Arabi sheep were kept for milk, meat and wool.

My friend Badam managed her tent household while her husband, Khani-Agha, was away on military service. I spent many whole days with her and her three little children, Taj-Mahmad, Shiri and Lal-Mahmad. Here Badam is boiling up whey to form whey balls, krut, a prized foodstuff made into soup and stews in winter.

 Spring was also a wedding season. In our camp Magar was due to leave home and join her husband, Jomadar, a second cousin and neighbour in the village. They were madly in love, and the celebrations were lavish. Small groups of girls and women close to the couple came together to sing and dance whenever they had a moment, day and night.

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Trump is in Deep Trouble

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Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale

A 6 minute read

Trump is in deep trouble. Look at the photo. Those are the 800 generals and admirals Hegseth and Trump summoned from all over the world to meet together and be admonished. Look at their faces. They are angry.

Hegseth called them weak, unmanly and fat. He told them they would have compulsory physicals every six months and would be fired if they were overweight.

Trump spoke next. He arrived twenty minutes late and nobody clapped. He said it was the most silent room he had ever been in. He told them to applaud. No one applauded. Those senior officers sat and listened to the silence. No one applauded. They now all know where they stand.

No authoritarian right winger insults all their senior generals and admirals together. Pinochet did not do it. Putin doesn’t do it. Modi would not dream of it. Mussolini did not do it. Netanyahu hasn’t done it. Hitler never did it. It’s mad.

Trump cannot have a coup if all the generals and admirals have  learned that they all hate you. And with luck this means this road to a dictatorship is closed to Trump.

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The Destruction of Gaza is Creating a New Normal to Shame and Frighten Us All

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Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale write:

We have been watching the suffering on our phones and screens for almost two years. Now famine is here. Far from the horror, it seems obscene and unbearably self-indulgent to say that Gaza is upsetting. But certainly, many of the rich and powerful of this world seem to want us to feel that way. And perhaps the for them the real point of our distress is to make us feel helpless and fearful.

For many Israelis the point of this vast theatre of cruelty is the extermination, genocide, torture and breaking of the Palestinians. But for the powerful of the world, what matters most is the example and the creation of a new normal. They are showing all the rest of us what can be done to those of us who, even by our very presence, resist. And they think that in future they will have need of this example.

None of the cruelty is new. But easy availability of the images on our phones is new. And the direction global politics is taking is also new.

We are writing this in Massachusetts, sitting at a window looking out over a river in the dawn, safe and warm, two miles from the town of Mashpee. In 1665 the white English settlers of Massachusetts, the pilgrim fathers, went to war with the native people, the Wampanoag. They destroyed every Wampanoag community but the two bands who had converted to Christianity. Mashpee was one of those two communities, and the natives here survive, and are now proud and organized.

There is an account of the burning of a native fortress where people of the Narragansett tribe had offered refuge to fleeing Wampanoag. The white settlers set fire to the wooden fortifications and killed the people one by one as they ran from the flames. The settlers who survived remembered how they had to pray together at the top of their voices to drown out the screams of the burning natives.

Cruelty, conquest, racist wars and genocide are not new. These are old stories. We know people are saying Gaza is not a war, it’s just a one-sided massacre. But many colonial wars have been mostly one-sided massacres.

Children also died in the Nazi holocaust. Children died when the US Air Force created the firestorm over Tokyo and dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But the photos and videos we see on our phones are new.

Phones are everywhere now. In Afghanistan they say that the 5G coverage is so good that every shepherd in the mountains has a phone. Of course, they are exaggerating a bit, and many people in many countries try hard not to look at the horrors happening in real time. But in another sense, the whole world is watching Gaza now.

And one thing people in Gaza have been saying over and over is that the people of the world have deserted them.

TWO: WHO’S RESPONSIBLE?

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The Epstein Files and Me-Too

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The photo is of the heroic journalist Julie K. Brown

NANCY LINDISFARNE and JONATHAN NEALE report:

This article says four important things about the Epstein files.

First, though all the talk is about conspiracy theories, this case is of a piece with the cover-ups of the abuse of gymnasts by Larry Nasser; the cover-ups of generations of abuse in residential schools for indigenous children in Canada, the consistent cover-ups by the Catholic Church; the cover-up of the Smythe case by the Archbishop of Canterbury; and hundreds and thousands of other cover-ups by institutions all over the world. This is not some bizarre conspiracy. It is what the rich and powerful do.

Second, this is not just about Donald Trump. This cover up started way before Trump, and it goes way beyond Trump. Third, the liberal and centre mainstream media are unable to talk sensibly about any of this because the Democratic Party has been part of the cover-up. Fourth, as with almost other every abuse and Me Too case, this one came to light because brave survivors fought back.

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How Neoliberalism Transformed Sex Work in the United States

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Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale

A 16 minute read.

The sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein did fieldwork with sex workers in San Francisco between 1994 and 1998.[1] By her estimate, 20% of sex workers in the city in 1994 worked on the streets. Four years later, 2% of sex workers walked the streets and 98% worked indoors. The city had been ‘cleaned up’. But there were more sex workers, they were often well educated, they made more money, and they were providing an emotionally different kind of sex.   

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Trump is cutting HIV drugs for 20 million people. He can be stopped.

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9 minute read by Jonathan Neale.

 Since 2003, a US government program (PEPFAR) has provided free drugs that are presently keeping 20.5 million people with HIV alive. All these people are in poorer countries, and most of them in Africa. And now, President Trump has suspended the PEPFAR program for 90 days, and it looks like the closure will be made permanent. This is a death sentence for millions of people. It seems Trump is happy to let these people die.

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Jimmy Savile, Boris Johnson and the Slow Burial of the Commission of Inquiry into Sexual Abuse

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An 8 minute read by Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale.

We have recently published two posts about the wall of silence that has long protected sexual abuse in Britain. The first was about the Archbishop of Canterbury and dozens of other church officials covered up the gruesome physical and sexual abuse of many boys and young men. The second was about how Jimmy Savile’s abuse was covered up for decades. This post looks at another example of that wall of silence – the way that the Independent Commission of Inquiry into the sexual abuse of children was effectively buried. 

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Margaret Thatcher, Jimmy Saville and the Wall of Silence

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A 6 minute read by Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale. This is our second post about the wall of silence that has long protected sexual abusers in Britain. Our first post was about how the Archbishop of Canterbury and dozens of other church officials covered up gruesome physical and sexual abuse. We argued there that the protection of sexual abusers in British institutions is not a glitch in the system. It is how the system works. This post tells the story of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, several police forces and dozens of managers protected Jimmy Savile over several decades.

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FREE BOOK: Thank God We’re Secular: Gender, Islam and Turkish Republicanism

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NANCY LINDISFARNE with RICHARD TAPPER

Jonathan Writes: This is a treat. It’s the English translation of Thank God We’re Secular: Gender, Islam and Turkish Republicanism, by Nancy Lindisfarne with Richard Tapper. The book was originally published in Turkish by Iletisim in 2001. The book is in two parts. Part One, pages 1-150, has never been published in English before. Here Nancy develops an analysis of republicanism and Islamic practice in Turkey. This is, almost uniquely, an analysis that is historically grounded, fiercely feminist, solidly socialist and deeply sympathetic to the religious lives of ordinary Turks. Pages 151-400 are re-edited versions of previously published articles by Richard and Nancy that grew out of their joint fieldwork in a Turkish town in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Download the translation as a pdf here.

Climate Dispatch from Afghanistan

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Jonathan Neale writes: Earlier this month I returned to Afghanistan for the first time in 51 years. Back then I had been a young anthropology student doing fieldwork with pastoral nomads. Now I write books and articles on climate breakdown. I had been invited back to give a keynote address at the first International Climate Change Conference in the country. I’ve been to a lot of climate conferences. This one is different.

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Nothing Began in October – Humanitarianism, the Election of Hamas and the Israeli Lockdown in 2006

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Gaza in 2021

TAKIS GEROS writes: From January 2006 to January 2007, I worked for a Greek NGO which provided aid to the health sector in the Palestinian territories. The following paper was delivered to an international conference at Panteion University in Athens in November 2008. The continuities between 2006 and Biden’s “humanitarian airdrops” today are important, sobering and have a series of serious implications for the Gazan survivors in the future.

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The Meaning of Ceasefire: Gaza, Genocide, Resistance and Climate Change

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Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale write: Sooner or later, there will be a ceasefire in Gaza. When it comes, it will be a defeat for Israel. After all, the main goal of Gazans, Palestinians and the global solidarity movement has been a ceasefire. And the ceasefire will come about because of solidarity, resistance and a global mass movement from below.

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Working Class Ecosocialism

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Stopping Climate Change and Building Another World

Jonathan Neale

This article is about stopping climate change and about fighting for a world based on love and sharing. My argument is that both these projects have to go together. But for either project to work, both climate activists and socialists have to change, fundamentally and fast. And there has to be a deeper change, a change in all humanity. We may well fail. But with these ideas we have a chance.

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Nancy and Jonathan in Conversation with Miranda Melcher about Why Men?

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Miranda Melcher of the New Books Network interviewed us (Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale) about our book Why Men? A Human History of Violence and Inequality. Miranda introduced us by saying, “This book is fabulous and fascinating, and asks some really big questions, like why do we have patriarchy and warfare all over the place? And was this inevitable?”

And then the three of us are off. The podcast of the interview is one hour and thirteen minutes long, which gives you a potted version of the whole book. You can listen to it here: https://newbooksnetwork.com/why-men

Palestine and Climate Change: Greta stands with Gaza

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Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale write: Last week Greta Thunberg posted the picture above on her Twitter (X) account. Many people in the press criticized her because they themselves supported the Israeli bombing and opposed a ceasefire. Some of those people called her, ludicrously, antisemitic. There was also criticism from some climate activists in Germany, Austria and Israel. Beyond that, there was little open criticism from the climate movement, and much support on social media. This is a historic moment for the global climate movement. This article explains why.

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Demon Copperhead – Mockery, Truth Telling and Empathy

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Nancy Lindisfarne writes: It feels presumptuous to write about Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. It is a magnificent book, and as we shall see, speaks eloquently for itself.

Kingsolver writes of Appalachia and the heart-breaking truths of people many other Americans despise as red necks, hillbillies, as people so stupid they’ve been suckered in by Trump. And she goes to war on their behalf – against big pharma and their hired killer reps, against schools where bullying is the norm, against a childcare system in which foster kids can be enslaved and against a system where racism is everywhere the bottom line.

Dicken’s David Copperfield shocked, then wrung the hearts of the caring Victorians and exposed the venal and vicious class power of those other Victorians, the school masters, the factory owners, the people with money, the people who used and abused the poor.

Mockery, truth-telling and empathy were Dickens’ weapons, and they are the ones Kingsolver wields to do battle. She gives no quarter to the rich and powerful, but neither does she forgive the smug liberals and the progressive lefties for believing the suffering of Hilary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ is self-inflicted and deserved.

The sweep of the book is enormous. The whole system is its setting.

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“Even a Dog Understands No” – An Update on the Harvard Abuse Case

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Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale

Harvard students enter the classroom to protest. Notice the posters.

Last February, almost a year ago, we published a long read about the struggle of three anthropology graduate students and their union against alleged sexual harassment at Harvard by Professor John Comaroff. (You can find that article here.) This is a short update.

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Afghan Women, Universities, Hunger and Climate Change

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Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale

On Dec 19th the Taliban government announced that women would no longer be allowed to attend universities. On Dec 24th they announced that women would no longer be allowed to work for foreign funded NGOs. These are ugly developments. As so often before, both the Taliban and the Western powers are playing with women’s lives for their own political ends. This note explains how and why.

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A Poem – On Meeting a Liberal Feminist

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Nancy Lindisfarne

Thinking about Afghanistan – Nancy Lindisfarne

In the spring of 2006, I had tea with a woman I knew slightly but thought might become a friend. We sat at a low table in the Senior Common Room at SOAS. The room is attractive, curved at the far end, light and airy. A portrait of the explorer Richard Burton looked down on us.

My new acquaintance was short and dressed in beige in an academic hippy style. She began, without preamble, before we’d properly settled in: ‘I’ve travelled in the Middle East’, she said, and then, with that presumed authority some English women can manage, she let fly the racist crap.

‘I’ve seen what it’s like.’ Unstoppable, wringing her hands, she told me of her concern for Afghan women and began telling stories. Horror stories, every one.

‘Did the women themselves tell you these stories?’ I asked. ‘Well, no, not exactly.’

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Me Too: The Economists Organize

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Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale write:

This short post is to update our readers on the Me Too firestorm that is beginning in economic departments in universities in the United States. [1]

Jennifer Doleac is an associate professor of economics at Texas A&M University. That is to say, she has tenure. Which is good, because on October 20 she sent out a dynamite of a tweet:

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Defending Abortion Rights: Lessons from American History

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By NANCY LINDISFARNE and JONATHAN NEALE

May 3, 2022. The news has just leaked that the Supreme Court is planning to overturn Roe v Wade. This is appalling, and enraging, and Americans have a massive fight on their hands. This booklet looks back at abortion politics in the United States since 1964, to show how Roe v. Wade was won in the first place, and how it was defended. You can download the booklet as a pdf here.

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One Day Strikes – A lesson from history

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Jonathan Neale writes: One chapter on the 1982 hospital workers strikes in Britain from a book I wrote many years ago seems very relevant now. I hope it will be useful, in different ways, to university workers and hospital workers. You can download the chapter here.

I was an occupational therapy technician in a geriatric hospital during the 1982 strikes, and a shop steward in the National Union of Public Employees. Reading what I wrote back then, I can feel my pride in my fellow workers and my rage at the leadership of our unions. I was angry because our leaders were introducing what was then a new strategy – one day strikes, two-day strikes, five-day strikes, regional rolling strikes, and so on.

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Putin, Modi and Trump: Ukraine and Racist Right-Wing Populism

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Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale

The invasion of Ukraine is appalling. The resistance is heroic. The situation is moving fast, and each step is politically revealing. There remains a great deal of confusion about Putin and Ukraine in the United States and Britain. This long read aims to unpack some of that confusion and to explain Putin’s rise, how he fits into the global racist right, and his reasons for invading Ukraine.

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From Afghanistan to Ukraine

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Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale

Six months ago, in a post about the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, we wrote: “This is a turning point in world history. The greatest military power in the world has been defeated by the people of a small, desperately poor, country. This will weaken the power of the American empire all over the world.” The consequences of the American defeat are now playing out in Ukraine. Putin, understanding the weakness of American power, is pushing to change the balance of power further.

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Harvard, Sexual Politics, Class and Resistance

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A long read by Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale

As we write, the case of alleged sexual harassment by John Comaroff, a professor of anthropology at Harvard, is exploding. The Harvard case is particularly egregious, not least because of the elite status of the university.

In this piece we treat the Harvard case as part of a much wider set of problems concerning class, sexual politics, inequality and resistance. Our focus initially is on universities in the United States. But we need to remember that academic enterprise today is utterly international. Everywhere the industry relies on similar economic models, has similar intellectual concerns and fosters the considerable mobility of professionals and students from workplace to workplace around the globe.

We are particularly addressing anthropology and other graduate students in the United States and across the world. Our aim is to try to answer some of the difficult questions that come up again and again in online discussion of the case.

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EURIPIDES, WOMEN AND SLAVERY: GENDER TRANSGRESSION IN ANCIENT GREECE

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The Trojan Women at the Flea Theatre, New York, in 2016

Jonathan Neale writes: We start with a theatre, and two moments of astonishing gender transgression. One happened in a theatre on a hillside in the center of Athens on a spring day in late March of 431 BCE. The second happened there sixteen years later, in March of 415 BCE. Both took place as the audience watched tragedies by the poet Euripides. These plays were about gendered oppression, sexual pain, rape, slavery and the horrors of war.[1]

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Women in Afghanistan / Frauen in Afghanistan / An Interview with Nancy Lindisfarne

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Katharina Anetzberger

This interview was first published in the Austrian socialist magazine Linkswende as Frauen in Afghanistan. You can read it in German here.

LINKSWENDE: Since the Taliban regained power in Afghanistan, the situation of Afghan women has come back into focus. How does this situation look like at the moment concretely?

NANCY LINDISFARNE: I think a place to start is that we need to understand what does actually happen with the Taliban and the actual defeat of the US, militarily and politically. So we’ve got a group pf people who have fought a guerrilla war and they have actually taken over a government with the idea of continuing to be not democratic but ruling a state. And they couldn’t have done this without – nobody wins a guerrilla war, certainly not one where the two sides are so disproportionately powerful and weak – without popular support. And that means that people all over the country have decided that the Taliban are a better deal than either the occupation government or the warlords.

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Dancing in Damascus

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Katharina Anetzberger

Based on the experiences and incidents she collected during her field studies in Syria, anthropologist Nancy Lindisfarne wrote Dancing in Damascus, a collection of short stories, in the late 1980s. [This review first appeared in German here in the Austrian socialist magazine Linkswende.]

Nancy Lindisfarne actually wanted to use the visit to a fellow student in the Syrian capital Damascus as an introduction to studies on the working class there. By chance, she got caught in the middle of the marriage policy of a wavering middle class, which fluctuated between tradition and “modernization” according to the Western model. In nine short stories, she describes the everyday life of a society under dictatorship, tells of the search for identity, gender roles, and the struggles for a self-determined life.

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WHAT DO WE DO AFTER THE COP?

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kids-climate

Jonathan Neale

The COP26 United Nations climate conference in Glasgow is the third key moment in the history of the talks. At the Copenhagen COP in 2009 the movement was defeated, and we knew it. At Paris in 2015 the movement was fooled. Both COPs left the movement exhausted and demoralised. This time it is obvious going in that Glasgow will be a shitshow. So this time we need to think going in, how we can come out fighting.

My basic argument is this: the climate movement is at an impasse. The leaders of the world will not act. That means we must build mass movements from below to replace those leaders. But those mass movements will wither if they only protest. We have to fight for action that will halt climate change.

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