G&R's 2021 Retrospective: Breaking News
Even though to some it feels like a decade has passed, 2021 is almost behind us. Gods and Radicals is not a news site, but staggering events around the globe have made it difficult to avoid incorporating this ‘genre’ into our writing. Before stepping into this new Gregorian calendar year, let’s revisit some of the events we felt the need to cover and consciously decide what lessons we hope to take with us into this next phase, and what we ought to leave behind.
The Year began with a horrific earthquake in Croatia. Jere Kuzmanić, a guest writer and good friend, wrote a heartwarming piece about mutual aid, solidarity and the power of State-free community building:
MUTUAL AID AND SOLIDARITY IN THE AFTERMATH OF CROATIA’S DEVASTATING EARTHQUAKE
Hopefully, the reader can capture a very simple truth from what is presented above — Strong communities make politicians obsolete. To explain the political relevance of the scale of these spontaneous mutualist actions may seem off track from the intention of this report. Still, after a year in which the whole world was called to action and solidarity due to environmental urgencies, racial conflicts and one great health crisis, the new chapters of Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid could start to be written. The question that remains unanswered is what happens when the dust settles.
Soon after, we had the raid of the Capitol Building, covered by our dear columnist Christopher Scott Thompson:
WHO WATCHES THE WATCHMEN?
“THERE’S A COUP GOING ON IN WASHINGTON…”
I was working when I heard about it. My girlfriend came in the room with her tablet in her hand, her brow furrowed. ‘There’s a coup going on in Washington. They’re storming the Capitol building.”
I looked up from my computer screen, where I’d been focused until a moment before. I was writing something for my employer, and that’s where my mind was at when she came in.
“This says the Proud Boys are storming the Capitol Building, they’re fighting the police right now.”
I couldn’t process what she’d said at first. I blinked a few times and said, “You’re joking, right?”
The Plataforma9 collaboration mentioned below, published in English at G&R, won a Human Rights award for photojournalism in Brazil.
BRAZIL, BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH
According to Fabio Teixeira, the war on drugs is a “ridiculous chronic disease”, responsible for making working people’s lives a living nightmare inside and outside their homes. To believe these government measures of control, decrees and police operations have common people’s best interest in mind is a trap one ought not to fall into. Misery will only be exacerbated by the pandemic in Brazil, while police violence does nothing to mitigate the social ills associated with the drug trafficking industry in Rio’s marginalized communities. The virus will be subdued — and so will the stray bullets?
Unsurprisingly, a massive illegal logging operation in the Amazon region of Brazil was discovered — the largest in history. I wrote a short commentary on it:
UNDER THE BANNER OF PROGRESS: BRAZIL’S LARGEST ANTI-ILLEGAL LOGGING OPERATION
In 2015, Brazil “produced” 136 million cubic meters of logs, worth about 250 million US dollars. The Hancock Timber Resource Group described the accelerated growth of this industry between 2000 and 2012 as “development”, which decreased unemployment, increased foreign investments, and minimized deforestation through the expansion of Eucalyptus plantations. However, the country has remained in dire economic conditions despite the outpour of foreign investment nearly a decade after this report. And this year, in the largest anti-illegal logging operation in the history of the country, in the state with the highest rate of deforestation — Pará — the timber seized was of “native woods of the Amazon biome” and did not correspond with the information declared officially.
Remember the Ever Given stuck in the Suez Canal? Yeah, that happened too, and G&R’s co-founder and artist wrote about it:
THE NEEDLE AND THE DAMAGE DONE
There’s currently a shortage of garden gnomes throughout the United Kingdom. Apparently this is a big deal. Gardening is more popular than ever due to the confinement, which has greatly increased the demand for garden gnomes. The gnomes, for the most part, are manufactured in China, and make their way to the UK by way of, you guessed it, a container ship. And while the recent Suez blockage isn’t the sole reason for the shortage—a lack of raw materials and Brexit have also been blamed—the blockage is highlighted as a significant factor.
Compared to many of the other consumer items that travel by container ship, as well as many of the other consumer items that have been in short supply due to Brexit, one could argue that garden gnomes are quite far down on the list as far as “needs” go. And yet, the shortage has caused enough of a kerfuffle that the situation has been reported on by media outlets all over the world.
The US pulled out of Afghanistan, and somehow people thought that would be a tragedy for women… I wrote about that:
FEMINISM AS VEILED ISLAMOPHOBIA DOMINATES DISCOURSE ABOUT AFGHANISTAN
To wage War in the name of Human Rights is an oxymoron. Nevertheless, this is exactly how the United States, and its mass media, is diverging attention from the fact that it has just lost another war. Feminism and LGBTQ+ rights was never the motivation behind the occupation of Afghanistan. And yet, the Taliban’s treatment of women and gays seems to be at the forefront of all mediatic discussion about the pulling-out of American troops. As a woman, it’s pertinent to honestly show how uncomfortable it is to see Women’s rights being used to paint a racist imperialist regime in good light. To pair concerns for the educational future of Afghan girls with demands for the extermination of “primitive” Islamists feels like using feminism as a veil for islamophobia. Women’s rights are violated everywhere in the world, every day. Could it be that we lack perspective on the gendered violence present in the Christian world because we are submerged in it?
That same month, Emma Kathryn wrote about how this US American move in Afghanistan affected the UK, showing how geopolitical crises really affect us globally.
TO A BEAUTIFUL RESISTANCE
Earlier in the week, the local paper released a story about one of the first Afghan families that will be homed in our town. Instead of this being another reason to celebrate the kindness of the people where I live, it highlighted the racism and the real lack of empathy and care we have towards other people, those we don’t know, or who don’t speak our language. The Other. And while on Facebook this morning, I saw a post about an awful homophobic attack, a very nasty physical attack, in the town centre.
This one is fresh in our memories — Omicron. Dr. Avi, a dear G&R guest contributor, wrote about its rise and vaccine politics:
EUROPEANS AND OMICRON: THE CHILDREN OF HERCULES
In Cyprus, the island of Aphrodite, I combed through 12,000 years of evidence on how people have related to ‘Nature’. Notably, a key shift toward a binary between people and ‘Nature’ was the ‘othering’ of life outside fixed imperial settlements. Protection from the beastly Nature of ‘the other’ was provided by The Master of Animals, a statue of whom currently stands in the British Museum. Today we know this character as Hercules, the fighter of Nature and its mythical beasts.
The news of Omicron reminded me of how many people, in Europe at least, still live in these Greek Myths. Sars-Cov-2 is the mythological monster that they are told they can fight off with medical weapons. European countries wield vaccines like Hercules’ sword, chopping off the heads of the hydra to protect themselves, while new Sars-Cov-2 variants grow back. Hercules stabbed the hydra with his burly arms, people jab their arms against the surly Sars-Cov-2 beast.
Last but not least, we have another piece by Christopher Scott Thompson, about Kyle Rittenhouse and what Social Justice looks like in the realm of legal rights:
THE TROUBLE WITH RIGHTS
To hear some people talk, the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse is a matter of rights. All human beings have the natural right to self-defense; a jury of Rittenhouse’s peers decided that he was acting within that right. What else is there to say?
The trouble with rights is that they don’t always apply to everyone equally. The idea that they do is a mere fiction, and a fiction that serves the interests of the dominant classes in society. Otherwise, Chrystul Kizer would have been able to claim self-defense when she killed the man who was trafficking her. According to Kizer, she killed Randall Phillip Volar III when he pinned her down after she said no to sex. Doesn’t that sound like a case where Kizer should have been allowed to make a claim of self-defense?
For better or for worse, the internet has kept us connected. This connection, at the very least, reflects the reality of our everyday lives offline. We all live on one planet, this planet is threatened, communities all around this planet are threatened, and if there is one positive thing we can take from this is that there is a powerful bond to be formed between us. In acknowledging differences, we can also find similarities between diverse groups of people everywhere, and we can resist these threats together.
Mirna Wabi-Sabi
G&R’s site editor.