Burkini Madness
- August 25, 2016
- by
- Matt
Anyone who has travelled in France this summer will have found it difficult to ignore the state of emergency with which the French state has responded to Daesh’s savage provocations. In Banyuls-sur-Mer, we found the main road by the beach guarded by armed soldiers, presumably mindful of a repeat of the attack on Tunisia...
Oscar Martinez: A History of Violence
- July 28, 2016
- by
- Matt
Many years ago, in 1993 I visited the bombed out ruins of the town of Aguacayo, the former ‘capital’ of the FMLN-held liberated zone in Guazapa Province during much of El Salvador’s 12-year civil war. It was just only one year after the guerrillas had disarmed in the town as...
2016: The Summer of Blood
- July 27, 2016
- by
- Matt
Keep calm and carry on might seem like a rather banal piece of advice, faced with the seemingly endless and unstoppable conveyor belt of atrocities unfolding before us in Baghdad, Kabul,and Istanbul, in Florida, Nice and Germany.
Shoppers in a Baghdad shopping mall; gay and lesbian clubbers; children watching fireworks; disabled residents of a care home;...
Boris Johnson’s Big Day Out
- July 23, 2016
- by
- Matt
Politically speaking, schadenfreude tends to be a consolatory emotion, whose pleasures are generally ephemeral and often sharpened by defeat. Even so the humiliation of Boris John last week was worth the price of admission. I’m referring, of course, to the car crash press conference in which Johnson appeared alongside...
Nice and the Atrocity Factory
- July 16, 2016
- by
- Matt
Yesterday evening I was driving to play a game of tennis, when I heard the sounds of screaming people on the radio being mown down by a truck in Nice. I immediately turned it off. This isn’t because I think I have some privileged right to ignore such horrors. But I don’t need to hear...
Mayday! Mayday!
- July 15, 2016
- by
- Matt
I’ve just returned to Brexitland after a week in the Aragonese Pyrenees with my daughter. During that time we continued to follow the tumultuous events that have convulsed our tormented island: Chilcot; the PLP’s viciously inept coup; the rapid extinction of the wretched Andrea Leadsom and the coronation of Theresa May; the ongoing racism coursing...
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