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India’s Cockroach Movement Shows How to Fight Autocracy and the Testocracy
How a leaked high-stakes exam exposed capitalism’s broken promise—and why standardized testing keeps igniting struggle.
Aug 07, 2026
They called them cockroaches.
It was meant to reduce them—to make millions of young people seem small enough to squish and contemptible enough that no one would mourn their extermination.
But instead of crushing them, the insult only made them multiply.
Every blow from a police lathi—a long, heavy club used by Indian police—brought more bodies into the streets. Every attempt to scatter them revealed how many there were. What authorities dismissed as an infestation became an uprising powerful enough to drive India’s education minister from office and deliver one of the sharpest popular rebukes yet to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rule.
When the questions themselves go up for sale, it is not only the examination that is compromised. The promise collapses with it.
At the center of the revolt was a test that promised merit and delivered betrayal.
India’s National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test, or NEET, determines admission to undergraduate medical programs. More than 2 million young people took the examination, often after their families had sacrificed for years to pay for specialized coaching. The test presents itself as an impartial judge: Everyone receives the same questions, the same clock, and the same numerical verdict.
Then the questions were leaked and reportedly sold in advance.
Young people told to outstudy one another discovered that some contestants might simply have purchased the finish line. The test promised an even starting line, but the marketplace had filled some lanes with hurdles and cleared others for the wealthy.
Their fury grew into weeks of mass protest that forced Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan to resign on July 25, 2026.
The movement took its name from a remark by Chief Justice Surya Kant comparing unemployed young people to “cockroaches” and “parasites.” Abhijeet Dipke, a Dalit activist from one of India’s historically oppressed caste communities, seized the slur and sent it crawling back toward those in power. “What if all cockroaches came together?” he asked online.
From that question emerged the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)—a name that mocked Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP.
The great Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy celebrated the CJP members as “young roaches riding in on the rain,” as protesters poured into Delhi beneath the monsoon skies. Their numbers were formidable, but so was their irreverence. When police aimed water cannons at them, young people dared the officers to turn them on—then danced in the spray. The state brought water cannons into the streets to produce fear. The protesters transformed the streets into a stage and danced in the spray.
In a Democracy Now! interview, Roy described a movement alive with “mockery and humor,” “dancing,” and “singing”—a rebellion defined by “exuberance.” Protesters joked that fleeing police lathi attacks was helping them maintain their running streaks on Strava, a fitness-tracking app. They turned footage of the chases into video-game parodies and posted mock influencer-style “get ready with me” videos and “fit checks” featuring helmets, goggles, and homemade protective gear. One demonstrator held a placard declaring, “Every joke is a tiny revolution.”
That creative humor—an intelligence no standardized test could measure—was not an escape from struggle, but rather one of the movement’s weapons. They met contempt with laughter, intimidation with choreography, and isolation with an expanding circle of solidarity.
The uprising forced Modi to announce a national task force to overhaul the examination system, while the government proposed stronger penalties for exam fraud. The Cockroach Janta Party also secured commitments to compensate families of students who died by suicide amid the crisis and withdraw criminal cases against protesters.
While no single event explains a suicide, movement leaders linked the deaths to the despair produced by a system that made one examination appear capable of determining an entire life—then revealed that the exam could be bought.
Near the main protest site in New Delhi, students erupted in celebration. Dipke reportedly fell to his knees, raised his fist, and declared, “We have done it.” He called the result “a victory for the people of India” and “a defeat for the dictator.”
But the government did not accept defeat quietly. The movement called off its demonstrations after officials agreed to its central demands, including withdrawing criminal cases against protesters.
Within days, however, the Cockroach Janta Party reported that students and protesters were again being detained and arrested in several states. Movement leaders accused the government of violating the agreement and threatened to return to the streets.
The government subsequently announced that most Delhi protesters would face no further action. But organizers warned that closing proceedings was not the same as formally withdrawing the cases—and that the movement would resume if the government again broke its promises.
The government had retreated—but only far enough to gather itself for another attack. After officials agreed to withdraw cases against protesters and promised that no punitive action would follow, authorities began detaining and arresting students across several states, with Muslim and Dalit participants reportedly among those singled out. At least 100 people were arrested, many on stringent non-bailable charges, as the movement accused the government of backtracking on its agreement. By then, however, the students had done more than expose an examination leak. They had opened a crack in the façade of the system itself.
Why would a compromised examination provoke an uprising powerful enough to force out a cabinet minister—and frighten the government into trying to seal that crack through repression? Because a high-stakes test is never merely a collection of questions. It is a promise about how society works. It tells young people that wealth, caste, language, and power do not matter—that the future belongs to whoever studies hard.
When the questions themselves go up for sale, it is not only the examination that is compromised. The promise collapses with it.
Whether in India or across the world in the United States, standardized testing is one of capitalism’s most effective laundering machines. It takes a dirty hierarchy built through unequal access to wealth and education, scrubs away its history, and returns the result stamped with a single word: merit.
The Testocracy
Every high-stakes testing system tells young people some version of the same story: Work hard, follow the rules, outstudy everyone else, and a high score will make the future yours.
For the millions of students taking NEET in India, that promise carries enormous weight. The examination is presented as the great objective referee, capable of determining who deserves entry into medical school. It supposedly does not care about a student’s family income, caste, gender, language, region, or access to private coaching. Everyone receives the same questions, the same time limit, and a score that appears to settle who is prepared to advance.
But a society does not become equal merely because it administers the same test to people who have been given profoundly unequal lives.
These scandals expose corruption, but they also reveal a deeper fiction: that a standardized examination can transform unequal access to wealth, schooling, language, and preparation into a neutral ranking of merit.
Some NEET applicants attend well-funded schools and spend years in expensive private coaching programs. Others learn in overcrowded classrooms, study in regional languages, work after school, care for siblings, or worry about whether their families can afford another year of preparation. “Everywhere you look, you can see the desperation of young people in this country,” Shree Kumar Verma, a 19-year-old NEET student studying in Kota—the center of India’s exam-coaching industry—told The Guardian. “Being at Kota is either going to bring you success or totally break you down; it’s all or nothing here.” Some students enter the testing center trained specifically to defeat NEET. Others arrive carrying every burden that caste, poverty, geography, and educational inequality have already placed on their backs.
Standardized tests convert these unequal conditions into a clean numerical hierarchy and then present the result as a neutral measure of individual merit. This is the central function of what I call the testocracy: a social class of elites that uses standardized testing to make inequality appear earned.
The NEET leak laid bare the crudest form of class privilege: Students with enough money or the right connections could allegedly purchase the questions outright. It was corruption in a form no one could mistake.
The scandal has a close parallel in the United States. In 2019, federal prosecutors exposed Operation Varsity Blues, a sprawling college admissions scheme in which wealthy parents paid consultant William “Rick” Singer to fraudulently secure places for their children at selective universities. Some arranged for stand-ins to take the SAT or ACT or paid corrupt proctors to change answers after the exams. Others bribed college coaches to designate their children as recruited athletes, sometimes fabricating athletic résumés and staging photographs of students participating in sports they did not actually play.
The scandal provoked outrage because wealthy families had purchased test scores and admissions outcomes outright. But affluent families routinely buy educational advantages that remain perfectly legal: elite schools, private tutoring, test preparation, admissions consultants, and access to universities that favor donors and children of alumni.
The comparison with NEET is striking. In both scandals, public outrage erupts when wealth abandons even the pretense of fairness and simply buys access to education and opportunity.
These scandals expose corruption, but they also reveal a deeper fiction: that a standardized examination can transform unequal access to wealth, schooling, language, and preparation into a neutral ranking of merit.
Testing as a Tool of Colonialism and White Supremacy
The camouflage of inherited advantage as individual merit is not an accidental flaw. It is rooted in the white supremacist, colonial, and eugenic history of standardized testing—a system designed to translate racial and imperial hierarchies into the seemingly neutral language of scores.
British colonial rule imposed a standardized examination system on India, reorganizing education around centralized curricula, externally controlled tests, and official credentials. Historian Jana Tschurenev describes the resulting culture as centered on “memorisation, examination, and technocratic management.” British authorities expanded schooling not to achieve equality, but to prepare most colonized people for subordinate positions while opening a narrow path to government employment and elite credentials.
A decisive turn came with Thomas Babington Macaulay’s 1835 Minute on Indian Education. Macaulay admitted that he knew neither Sanskrit nor Arabic, yet declared that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” His contempt expressed the racist logic of British policy, which treated European knowledge as universal and Indian intellectual traditions as inferior. Whatever opportunities English education later offered some people excluded by India’s caste hierarchies, the colonial policy itself was designed to elevate the language and culture of the rulers. Mastery of that culture became increasingly essential to credentials, employment, and social advancement.
Wood’s Despatch of 1854 further centralized the system. The universities established in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras in 1857 were modeled after the University of London and operated largely as examining and affiliating institutions, prescribing curricula, administering tests, and conferring degrees. Teaching became organized around examinations controlled by colonial authorities.
The Indian Civil Service (ICS) examination made the colonial function of testing especially clear. Indians could formally compete to enter the elite administrative corps that governed their country, but the examination was held only in London and structured around subjects associated with elite British schooling. British officials argued that the examination should secure candidates trained in the “highest and best form of English education”—a principle they said would be sacrificed if the test were also offered in India.
The effective exclusion of most Indian candidates became an early nationalist cause. At its founding meeting in 1885, the Indian National Congress demanded that the exam also be offered in India. The dispute exposed the contradiction of colonial meritocracy: Britain proclaimed an open competition while designing it to reward those with the wealth to travel to Britain and the greatest access to the colonizer’s language, schools, and culture.
A related system of race and class sorting developed in the United States, and the use of standardized tests gave that hierarchy the appearance of objective measurement. As Rethinking Schools has written:
Standardized tests first entered the public schools in the 1920s, pushed by eugenicists whose pseudoscience promoted the "natural superiority" of wealthy, white, US-born males. High-stakes standardized tests have disguised class and race privilege as merit ever since.
Beginning during World War I, psychologists administered the Army Alpha and Beta intelligence tests to more than 1.7 million military recruits. The tests sorted soldiers and were then used to make sweeping claims about the intelligence of entire racial and national groups.
Eugenicist psychologist Carl Brigham drew on the Army test results in his 1923 book, A Study of American Intelligence, to promote the supposed superiority of “Nordic” people and the inferiority of Black people and immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Warning that “the decline of American intelligence” would accelerate “owing to the presence here of the negro,” he called for public action to prevent what he described as racial deterioration. Three years later, Brigham helped develop the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), turning a system shaped by military classification and eugenics into a gatekeeper for higher education.
By the 1920s, standardized tests were also sorting millions of children into academic, remedial, and vocational tracks. They disproportionately directed white and affluent students toward universities and professional careers while steering Black, immigrant, working-class, and disabled children toward lower-paid positions in a racially stratified economy. Testing was essential for reproducing hierarchy and making it appear deserved.
Black intellectuals organized an early counterattack against this racist testing regime. Reflecting on the rapid spread of psychological testing after World War I, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote:
It was not until I was long out of school and indeed after the [First] World War that there came the hurried use of the new technique of psychological tests, which were quickly adjusted so as to put black folk absolutely beyond the possibility of civilization.
Du Bois was part of a larger movement of Black scholars challenging the tests’ methods, assumptions, and political uses. In 1924, educator Horace Mann Bond systematically dismantled Brigham’s claims, exposing the supposed science behind intelligence testing as an instrument of “propaganda and encouragement for prejudice.” Bond urged Black intellectuals to understand how the tests were constructed and used so they could resist efforts to portray Black people as incapable of exercising the full rights of citizenship.
Du Bois and Bond understood that the tests converted the consequences of segregation, poverty, and unequal schooling into supposed evidence of Black inferiority. The state denied Black children equal resources, measured the predictable results, and then used their scores to restrict access to advanced education and professional work.
The colonial testing system in India and the eugenic testing system in the United States were not identical. But both converted the language, culture, and advantages of dominant groups into supposedly universal measures of merit.
The openly colonial and eugenic language eventually became less acceptable, but the sorting machinery survived. “Racial fitness” became “aptitude.” Assertions of British and white superiority became supposedly universal “standards.” Claims about racial differences in intelligence became claims about an “achievement gap.” This year marks the SAT’s 100th anniversary—a century after its creation by eugenicists, it is still used to rank and sort young people for unequal opportunities.
When Exams Cause Eruptions
High-stakes tests become politically explosive because they ask young people to place their faith in a promise our economic and political system cannot keep.
Capitalism produces enough wealth to house, feed, clothe, and educate everyone, but concentrates that wealth at the top. Education is celebrated as the “great equalizer,” yet schools operate within—and help reproduce—this unequal order. Education may help some individuals move within the hierarchy, but it cannot abolish a hierarchy the economy depends on. Standardized tests manage this contradiction by ranking young people, rationing scarce opportunities and presenting the results as merit rather than economic design.
When a test carrying the weight of a young person’s future is exposed as corrupt, arbitrary, or rigged, the promise of meritocracy can collapse into rebellion. In India, a leaked medical entrance examination sent masses of young people into the streets. In the United States, resistance to high-stakes testing grew into what organizers called the Education Spring. Though these movements confronted different systems, both revealed how supposedly neutral exams ration opportunity, discipline educators, and disguise inequality.
The protesters unlearned the lesson the testocracy had taught them. They had been told to view millions of other students as competitors standing between them and their futures. In struggle, they discovered one another as comrades.
I learned something about resisting the testocracy at Garfield High School in Seattle. In January 2013, teachers voted to refuse to administer the district-mandated Measures of Academic Progress test, known as the MAP. We were not opposed to assessing students. We opposed a test disconnected from much of our curriculum, costly in time and resources, and increasingly used to rank teachers rather than improve learning.
When the district threatened us with a 10-day suspension without pay, students and parents joined the struggle. Families opted out, students urged classmates to refuse the exam, and educators at other schools joined the boycott. By the end of the school year, the boycott forced the district to end the required use of the MAP in Seattle high schools.
The boycott became one of the brightest sparks of the Education Spring, the largest revolt against standardized testing in US history. The uprising carried the critique of Occupy Wall Street into public schools. Occupy had exposed how the wealthiest 1% manipulated political and economic institutions; the Education Spring challenged the use of testing, austerity, and privatization to reorganize education around corporate interests.
Across the country, hundreds of thousands of families opted out of state exams; students organized walkouts; and educators challenged testing mandates through resolutions, rallies, and boycotts. In New York alone, more than 200,000 students refused the state’s Common Core exams in 2015. The Garfield teachers did not create this movement alone, but our refusal helped spread a dangerous question: What if we simply stop cooperating?
The Education Spring and the NEET revolt both erupted because high-stakes tests compress vast social conflicts into a single score. An exam can determine whether a student graduates, enters medical school, receives a scholarship, or is shut out of a profession. It can also rank schools, punish educators, and justify closures. Resistance has since helped push a growing number of states to abandon standardized exams as high school graduation requirements.
Standardized tests become detonators because they promise fairness while making life-altering decisions among people never given equal opportunities. When that promise collapses—through leaked questions, racial disparities, corporate profiteering, or educationally useless exams—the test reveals itself as more than an assessment. It becomes a symbol of the system deciding who advances and who is left behind.
The testocracy tells young people they must defeat one another for access to a scarce future. Resistance begins when they recognize that the real obstacle is not the person sitting beside them, but the system forcing them to compete for what should be a right.
The Test We Must Pass
The Cockroach Movement did more than expose a corrupted examination. It exposed a society that tells young people their futures depend on defeating one another while the wealthy purchase every imaginable advantage—and sometimes the answers themselves.
A fairer NEET would matter. But no perfectly guarded test can make an unequal society just. India remains scarred by poverty, caste oppression, concentrated wealth, and repression. The United States is likewise defined by mass poverty amid extraordinary wealth, racial inequality, and attacks on dissent.
A fairer competition for scarcity does not end scarcity. A cleaner testocracy remains a testocracy.
The cockroaches have come together. The rest of us must decide whether we will keep competing for our assigned places in an unjust world—or join them in creating one in which every child has the chance to flourish.
But struggle is the greatest teacher. Young people who entered the streets demanding a fair exam learned that the corruption ran deeper than a leaked test. They learned how wealth and power shape the institutions governing their lives—and that institutions presented as immovable can be forced to retreat.
The Cockroach Movement did not end that repression. But it showed that even a government accustomed to surviving mass dissent can be forced to concede.
Most important, the protesters unlearned the lesson the testocracy had taught them. They had been told to view millions of other students as competitors standing between them and their futures. In struggle, they discovered one another as comrades. Their power did not come from defeating the student beside them, but from uniting in solidarity.
The government called them cockroaches because it believed they were small, disposable, and easy to crush. But cockroaches are legendary survivors, said to be capable of outliving even a nuclear apocalypse. These young people came through the monsoon rain, danced beneath the water cannons, and transformed an insult into a warning: The powerful may build the machinery of destruction, but those they despise may yet survive them.
Power wants the isolated student hunched over a standardized test, stomach knotted and nerves frayed, believing every failure belongs to them alone. It fears the moment that student looks up, sees millions carrying the same burden, and realizes that the failure belongs to the system.
The cockroaches have come together. The rest of us must decide whether we will keep competing for our assigned places in an unjust world—or join them in creating one in which every child has the chance to flourish.
That is the test our movements must pass.
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Nuclear Abolition Is Possible, and We Must Act to Make It a Reality
During this August 6-9 time, numerous events and actions are taking place across the US and worldwide calling for nuclear abolition. I hope you who read this can join in one such action where you reside.
Aug 06, 2026
“The development of nuclear weapons signifies not a country’s elevation to greatness, but its descent to the darkest depths of depravity. These weapons are not a necessary evil; they are the ultimate evil.”—A-bomb survivor Setsuko Thurlow, Nobel peace prize ceremony for ICAN, December 2017
This August 6-9 marks the 81st anniversary of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The United States is the only country to have ever used nuclear weapons, having committed the unspeakable sin and crime in 1945, thus ushering in the nuclear age.
Rather than repenting for the evil of building and using nuclear weapons, making reparations to the victims, and promising to eradicate its nuclear program, the US government has instead made nuclear weapons the cornerstone of its military policy. This policy holds that the United States must be prepared to use any military means necessary, including nuclear weapons, to protect and ensure its “vital” national security and geopolitical interests.
The US nuclear weapons program was conceived under a shroud of secrecy that continues to this day, and without the consent of the US people. Beginning with the Manhattan Project in 1940, the US has spent over $9 trillion on its nuclear weapons program.
The nuclear challenge before us is great, but not insurmountable.
To date, the US government refuses to adopt a “no first-use” nuclear policy, declaring it reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in the case of conflict. Therefore, a US president could unilaterally order a nuclear attack at any time. According to peace advocate and author Joseph Gerson, the US has prepared or threatened to use nuclear weapons against adversaries an estimated 30 times to bolster its aims.
Moreover, the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review includes planning for limited nuclear war by developing low-yield nuclear weapons to counter an adversary’s limited use of nuclear weapons in any conflict. The US government is now continuing a several decades long process to modernize its nuclear arsenal at a cost of nearly $1 trillion. Instead of funding vital human needs programs, this exorbitant expenditure (along with the $1.5 trillion 2027 military budget) constitutes a direct theft from the poor! The US, along with the eight other nuclear nations, refuse to ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) which now deems nuclear weapons illegal under international law. To date, 75 nations have ratified the TPNW.
On January 27, 2026, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reset the Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds before midnight, the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been. This is due to the existential threats of nuclear war and the climate crisis, AI, and worsening world tensions and other perils. The Ukraine war has further aggravated the nuclear threat between Russia and NATO.
The nuclear threat is further exacerbated by recent threats against Iran by President Donald Trump, including to “blast Iran into oblivion” and “back to the Stone Ages,” and his warning: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
As a leading nuclear superpower, the US practices a double standard by calling on other nations to disarm while, at the same time, it refuses to disarm and instead is rapidly expanding its own arsenal.
AI technology also increases the risk of nuclear war. A study by King’s College London published earlier this year revealed that AI models used in 21 simulated nuclear crises escalated the conflict by threatening nuclear war in 95% of 329 turns of play.
As we confront the nuclear peril today, it is imperative that we hear and heed the testimony of those who were directly impacted by nuclear weapons. Since 1945, the Hibakusha has urgently called on all the nuclear nations to abolish nuclear weapons stating that “humanity and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.” Additionally, people of faith and conscience have actively opposed and resisted nuclear war preparations, including those of blessed memory such as Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, who immediately condemned the 1945 bombing; Bishop Tom Gumbleton (first bishop president of Pax Christi USA); Fr. Daniel Berrigan, SJ; Philip Berrigan—all Pax Christi USA teachers of peace—Thomas Merton, OCSO; Sr. Anne Montgomery, RSCJ; Fr. Carl Kabat, OMI; Sr. Ardeth Platte, OP—as well as peacemakers today like Pax Christi USA teachers of peace Elizabeth McAlister and James and Shelley Douglass, plus Fr. Steve Kelly, SJ, and so many more!
Throughout the Nuclear Age, different church denominations, faith leaders, and organizations and groups, including International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Back from the Brink, and Warheads to Windmills have also called for the total elimination of nuclear weapons. And there have been countless non-violent actions for nuclear disarmament and ending war. Since 1980, plowshares peacemakers have enacted the biblical prophecy of beating swords into plowshares by hammering and using others symbols to literally begin the process of disarmament. I have been blessed to be part of two plowshares actions.
Catholic leaders have made significant statements regarding the use of nuclear weapons and present nuclear peril.
- In 1972 St. Pope Paul VI stated, “It is unthinkable that no other work can be found for hundreds of thousands of workers than the production of instruments of death.” In 1976, he described the atomic bombings of Japan as a “butchery of untold magnitude.”
- In 1976, Fr. Richard McSorley, SJ said, “It’s a sin to build a nuclear weapon.”
- In 1981, Seattle’s Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen, the 1987 Pax Christi USA teacher of peace, stated: “Trident is the Auschwitz of Puget Sound… I say with deep sorrow that our nuclear war preparations are the global crucifixion of Jesus… the final crucifixion of Jesus, in the extermination of the human family with whom he is one.”
- In 1982, Bishop Leroy Matthiesen, the 2009 Pax Christi USA teacher of peace, told Catholics in his diocese who worked at the Pantex nuclear weapons plant in Amarillo, Texas, “In the name of the God of peace, quit your jobs.” In making this appeal, he said he would try to offer financial assistance to any defense worker who would quit.
- In 2017, for the first time ever, a pope condemned the very possession of nuclear weapons as immoral. Pope Francis declared: “Nor can we fail to be genuinely concerned by the catastrophic humanitarian and environmental effects of any employment of nuclear devices. If we also take into account the risk of an accidental detonation as a result of error of any kind, the threat of their use, as well as their very possession, is to be firmly condemned. For they exist in the service of a mentality of fear that affects not only the parties in conflict but the entire human race…”
- In 2020 Pope Francis reiterated, “The use of atomic energy for purposes of war is immoral, just as the possessing of nuclear weapons is immoral, as I already said two years ago.”
- Pope Leo has since continued his predecessor’s stance of calling for nuclear disarmament.
- On January 11, 2022, Archbishop John Wester of Santa Fe, New Mexico and recipient of the 2026 Pax Christi USA Teacher of Peace award, released a landmark pastoral letter: “Living in the Light of Christ’s Peace-A Conversation Towards Nuclear Disarmament.“
- There has also been the development of a new partnership of US, Japanese, and South Korean bishops. Last year they declared: “On the solemn occasion of the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of World War II, Catholic bishops from the United States, Japan, and South Korea have come together in Hiroshima to call for a world free of nuclear weapons. Representing the Partnership for a World Free of Nuclear Weapons, the bishops joined with atomic bomb survivor organizations to honor the memory of those who perished, to stand in solidarity with survivors, and to urge the global community to reject the possession, use, and threat of nuclear arms.“
Last year, to mark the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings, more than 500 people and 60 organizations in the US signed an Apology Petition to the Japanese people calling on the US government to apologize to Japan for the atomic bombings and pledge to ratify the TPNW. The mayor’s office of Nagasaki, Nihon Hidankyo (the main Hibakusha organization and 2024 Nobel Peace Prize recipient), and Catholic clergy and religious in Japan acknowledged receiving this petition and expressed their great appreciation.
Most recently, the groundbreaking “Rome Declaration for an Unarmed and Disarming Peace in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Nuclear and Autonomous Weapons, New Digital Protocols, and Emerging Models of Digital Development,” was signed by over 200 Nobel laureates, leading AI innovators, and global academics.
Nuclear weapons are immoral and illegal, and no follower of Jesus should be involved in their production, financing, or use of them! The Catholic Church and all churches have a crucial role to play in helping to bring about a disarmed world. What if the church leadership in all denominations were to call on all Christians in the military nuclear chain of command to refuse orders to kill and use nuclear weapons, and publicly support those who do so? What if the churches could take the lead in calling for the conversion of arms industries to non-military production, while advocating for full and just protection of workers’ rights during the transition process? What if the church would provide material resources for those who quit their jobs for reasons of conscience? And what if the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and all Catholics—clergy, religious, and laity—and Christians in the US demanded that the US government ratify the TPNW? These efforts would go a long way to help create the climate necessary to bring about real disarmament.
Followers of the non-violent Jesus, who commands us to love and never to kill, cannot allow nuclear weapons, death-dealing technologies, and idols of death to ever be normalized, and must reject any ideology or theology that justifies war, genocide, and even omnicide. We need to adopt non-violent practices, as many are doing today, as a primary means to respond to conflict, to resist systemic violence and injustice, and advocating non-violent civilian defense as an alternative to militarized-based national security.
The nuclear challenge before us is great, but not insurmountable, for with God, and people acting on their faith convictions, all things are possible. History bears out this truth. I join with many peacemakers worldwide who believe that nuclear abolition can happen, and who are acting to make it a reality. During this August 6-9 time, numerous events and actions are taking place across the US and worldwide calling for nuclear abolition. I hope you who read this can join in one such action where you reside.
On September 4, 1989, six peacemakers and I participated in the Thames River Plowshares action in New London, Connecticut. We were able to swim and canoe to the docked USS Pennsylvania, the 10th Trident, and hammered and poured blood on the hull. Three of us, including myself, were able to climb on top of the submarine where we prayed for the abolition of nuclear weapons. From aboard this most destructive weapon, I believed then, as I do now, that if people have the faith to believe that disarmament is possible, and act on that faith, it can occur. Now is the time to act!
This article was first published on the Pax Christi USA web site.
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'No Vacation Nation': Analysis Shows US Workers Getting Shafted When It Comes to Paid Time Off
The US is still the only developed country that doesn't require any paid vacation time by law.
Aug 05, 2026
Though they may work in the land of the free, Americans are getting a lot less free time than their counterparts around the world.
The US is the only developed nation that doesn't require employers to grant workers any paid vacation time. And according to a report out Wednesday, the average American is receiving less time off than what many of their peers consider the bare minimum.
Twenty-five countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) require employers to grant at least 20 days of paid time off to their workers.
Workers in the UK are guaranteed at least 28 days of lounging each year by law, while those in Sweden, France, Denmark, and Austria get a minimum of 25 days off.
Americans, meanwhile, are receiving just 10 vacation days per year on average, according to the analysis, titled "No Vacation Nation," by John Schmitt, a fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
That is the bare minimum for countries ranking at the bottom of the OECD list, Japan and Canada, which each require full-time workers to get at least 10 days off.
And the Americans getting time off at all are the lucky ones. Around 43% of workers in the bottom quarter of earners don't get any paid vacation time, while just 38% of part-time workers do.
“Every other comparable country in the world guarantees workers a decent minimum amount of paid vacation. In the United States, we don’t require employers to give any,” Schmitt said. “As a result, almost a quarter of our workforce has nothing at all, and the average for those workers who do have paid vacation is near the bottom of the minimum required by law in the rest of the world’s rich countries.”
Vacation days are just one of many areas where American workers are guaranteed less than their counterparts in other wealthy nations. The US is also the only OECD country with no national requirement for paid maternity leave or sick leave.
Members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus have pushed for paid time off to be included in its "New Affordability Agenda," a package of bills focused on labor and the cost of living that they hope will pass if Democrats retake Congress this November.
They've included a bill introduced last year by Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-RI) which requires two weeks of paid vacation for full-time workers.
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A US Passport Should Not Shield Violence in the West Bank
If an American participates in organized violence against civilians abroad, that person should be investigated. If evidence supports it, they should be prosecuted under applicable US law.
Aug 04, 2026
In a rare quiet moment inside the resuscitation room at Nasser Hospital in Gaza, I stood beside a young Palestinian man helping us treat waves of wounded children. He worked with calm precision. Focused. Unflinching.
Then he told me about his brother. Beaten nearly to death by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Not once. Repeatedly. Ribs broken. Face shattered. The attacks ended only when his family fled the land they had farmed for generations.
“They wanted us gone,” he said. Some of the men who carry out this violence hold United States passports.
They live under American law. They vote in American elections. Then they travel abroad and take part in acts that, in any other context, would be recognized without hesitation: assault, arson, organized racial violence. Homes burned. Crops destroyed. Families driven off land.
An American who beats a man because of his ethnicity, drives him from his home, and destroys the means by which his family survives is not transformed into something else by crossing a border.
And then they return. They pass through US customs. They resume their lives. No charges. No investigation. No meaningful consequence.
This is not an abstraction. Human rights organizations, Israeli and international alike, have documented repeated incidents of settler violence in the West Bank: physical attacks on civilians, destruction of agricultural land, the burning of homes and olive groves, often carried out with little immediate accountability.
Some of those involved are Americans. Under US law, citizenship is extraordinarily difficult to revoke. The Supreme Court has made that clear. But citizenship is not the only instrument of accountability, and treating it as such allows something far worse to persist: impunity.
If an American participates in organized violence against civilians abroad, that person should be investigated. If evidence supports it, they should be prosecuted under applicable US law. If their actions meet the threshold of coordinated or systematic violence, then sanctions, asset restrictions, and limits on international travel should follow.
A passport should not function as a safe harbor.
In 2024, the United States took limited steps to sanction individuals and entities linked to settler violence. It was an acknowledgment, however modest, that this problem exists. In early 2025, that framework was dismantled.
The message was clear. Even minimal accountability was negotiable.
Meanwhile, the violence continues. This is where the question becomes unavoidable.
What does it mean for Israel, a country that defines itself as a democracy under law, to tolerate or fail to prevent organized violence by settlers against civilians in the West Bank?
And what does it mean for the United States to allow its own citizens to participate in that violence and return home untouched?
These are not separate questions. They are reflections of the same failure.
An American who beats a man because of his ethnicity, drives him from his home, and destroys the means by which his family survives is not transformed into something else by crossing a border. Geography does not dilute the crime. It only obscures it.
If that same act occurred in the United States, there would be no ambiguity in how it is described or prosecuted.
When it occurs in the West Bank as part of a broader pattern of displacement, it demands the same clarity.
The tools for accountability already exist. Federal statutes governing violent crime, conspiracy, and, in certain cases, war crimes. Sanctions authorities. Civil liability. Immigration and travel restrictions.
What is missing is not law. It is willingness.
Impunity is not an accident here. It is a decision, made repeatedly, on both sides of the ocean.
The man I met in Gaza was not asking for revenge. He was asking for the violence to stop. He was asking for a form of justice that does not end at a checkpoint or a border crossing.
A United States passport should carry weight. It should represent a commitment to law, not an escape from it.
Right now, in too many cases, it does the opposite. And everyone involved knows it.
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The US, Korea, and Japan Share an 80 Year Nuclear Nightmare
Over 70,000 Koreans were exposed to the two atomic bombs incinerating Hiroshima and Nagasaki, people forcibly removed from their homeland by the Japanese and sent to work in these cities.
Aug 04, 2026
On the right corner of my desk, next to my laptop and always in eyeshot, sits a metal model of an atom bomb I assembled from a kit, a model of “Little Boy,” the bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima. The model is made from aluminum alloy parts and is a one-twelfth scale of the original atom bomb, about nine inches long. The ad for the bomb contained a video with dramatic music showing the model spinning through the air as it falls toward its imagined target.
“Perfect for collectors,” the ad boasted. “A must-have for history enthusiasts. Very enjoyable assembly process.”
Toward the bottom of the ad, perhaps as an afterthought, perhaps recognizing the implications of marketing such a murderous model, was the following: “By assembling this model, you can understand the history and moral issues of nuclear weapons and trigger thoughts about the future of the world.”
The kit came with a tiny screwdriver, two dozen tiny screws, a sanding rod, glue, and decals. The aluminum alloy parts were in molded plates. The model even had a metal cart to assemble that the bomb sits on so it can be pulled around your desk, pretending you’re getting ready to load it onto the Enola Gay and extinguish a city in a flash.
The bomb wages war against the future.
On the morning of August 6, 1945, the real “Little Boy” exploded with a flash 2,000 feet above the city of Hiroshima, which sits on the Ota River delta on Hiroshima Bay. The Ota River has six channels splitting Hiroshima into islets. Bomb victims staggered toward these channels to throw themselves into the water hoping to extinguish their burning bodies. The channels became so clogged with bodies that others couldn’t squeeze in. Some people, closer to the hypocenter, were vaporized, reduced to shadows seared into stone. Temperatures on the ground reached 4,000°C.
As we once again approach that fateful day of August 6, it is important to recognize that not just the US and Japan are intertwined in a nuclear nightmare that has lasted over 80 years, but also 70,000 Koreans who were exposed to the two atomic bombs incinerating Hiroshima and Nagasaki, people forcibly removed from their homeland by the Japanese and sent to work in these cities. Japan colonized Korea in 1910 and for decades used Koreans as they saw fit, from Comfort Women to slave labor. The Koreans then became atomic bomb victims, despite their country not being at war with the United States. They are among the unintended victims, the forgotten victims.
This November in Seoul, South Korea, the surviving Korean bomb victims will testify at a People’s Tribunal holding the US accountable for war crimes. Lawyers from around the world have been preparing legal briefs and will argue the case. The US government is invited to appear as the defendant at the tribunal. The Republic of South Korea has also been asked to appear as a witness.
Once let loose, an atomic bomb keeps on killing, generation after generation, the cancers passed down to those not even born when the bombs first exploded. The Korean atomic bomb victims, as well as the Japanese, have horrific stories testifying to this. Children of the bomb. Atomic maladies. The bomb wages war against the future.
The second atomic bomb that was dropped on August 9, incinerating another Japanese city, had a different nickname. That bomb had an even bigger belly and used plutonium rather than uranium. They called it “Fat Man.” The same ad for the model of the “Little Boy” atom bomb had a second ad inducing you to buy “Fat Man.” It is another one-twelfth scale model of the original, this one weighing 6.2 pounds when completed. I declined the offer to buy and build it. One was repellent enough.
The US currently has 5,277 nuclear warheads. Russia has 5,449. China, approximately 600. France and the UK have about 250 each and Israel has about 90. India, Pakistan, and North Korea bring up the rear with a few nukes each. In total there are over 12,300 nuclear warheads spanning the globe. The Korean atomic bomb victims stand as ready reminders of what happens when these things are unleashed.
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A Semiquincentennial Declaration
Meditations and incantations on America's 250th anniversary.
Jul 30, 2026
Note: I wrote this poem as a way of reflecting on and grappling with this country's 250th anniversary and the time of existential crisis we are in, both as a nation and a species. It is a poem of rage but also of love and aspiration. It is an offering and a declaration about this country's history, our present moment, and our potential. I offer this poem-essay as part of what I hope will become a new declaration of independence and interdependence.
One
On your two hundred and fiftieth birthday, let us speak openly.
Oh, say something nice, you say.
Don’t rain on this flash-bang parade.
Some things nice:
You contain multitudes of fine, decent people.
Folks who will pick you up when you’re broken down.
Who’ll rescue you from a flood or a fire.
Who’ll give you a buck or the shirt off their back.
They’ll welcome you into their homes, share their food.
They’ll help you raise a barn or put out a fire.
Friendly, good-hearted folk.
Then there’s this land, our land, erupting in soul-stirring beauty.
Towering mountain crags thrusting into horizon-splitting skies.
Canyons painted in sediments of red, orange, sienna, and crimson.
Ancient ridges hued in purple and blue, sloping and slouching into infinity.
Oceans of grain prairies, their amber waves swaying.
A resplendent and bountiful terrain fruiting more than enough for everyone.
Come to America, its vast cornucopias will seed and feed you.
Give us your tired, your poor, and we will raise them from the floor.
Two
You told us to stand up, take off our hats, put our little right hands on our chests, and “pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America… one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
You commanded us to love the flag, the God, the country.
Broad stripes, bright stars, and perilous fights.
You insisted we are free and brave, uniquely blessed with happiness and liberty.
Bombs bursting in air from dawn’s early light to twilight’s last gleaming.
We are the best, the greatest, the most exceptional, you said.
We are blessed and fortunate to be Americans, you said.
Nobody is like us. Everybody wants to be like us.
Three
You speak of freedom. Of liberty.
Are we free yet?
Are we free of wars, of racism, of sexism, and homophobia?
Are we freed by your bombs bursting across the world’s airs?
Does that star-spangled flag wave proudly for all your global slaying?
Did America become free and brave by decimating Vietnam?
Did we become liberated by eviscerating Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran?
Have your unrivaled invasions and coups set us free?
Or maybe liberty arrived back in 1776 like you keep reminding us,
When we were free at last, thank god almighty, from kings and colonizers,
All those liberating muskets, canons, and armies powered by genocide and slavery.
America, your gold and your flag are soaked in centuries of blood.
In 1852, Frederick Douglass asked, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” He answered: “a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”
Four
America, how many victims will you claim in your fraudulent name?
How many victims does it take to purchase our “freedom”?
Did your endless wars buy freedom for all of us?
This truth is self-evident: Not all freedoms are created equal.
Our freedoms are separate and unequal.
Our ballots and dollars germinated by bullets and bombs.
We are free to speak, shout, howl, or wail into the wind.
We are free to buy whatever we can afford.
We are free to vote at the polls and with your dollars.
Billionaires and millionaires are free to buy the votes.
Dollars are people, too, they say.
Those dollars have purchased our democracy and sold it
down the river flowing with ancestral bones and tears.
Five
The "America" I love is the land of dissenters, resisters, and persisters
The nation I love is in a perilous fight for justice and equality.
The America I love is the country of Martin Luther King, Jr., country of Malcolm X, of Shirley Chisolm, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Jesse Jackson; country of farmworkers marching, of Chicano rights and Brown Power; nation of women’s liberation and rights and rising power; of queer rights and queer love and queer existence; I love the land of Black Power, Black Joy, and Black resilience; country of the American Indian Movement, Indigenous rights and justice; land of all the unnamed nurses, teachers, farmers, janitors, garbage workers, tenants’ rights activists, all the unnamed soldiers for peace who never fired a bullet, all the unnamed marchers and masses of protesters, all the unnamed, unaccounted lovers and tenders of beauty, all the stewards and shepherds of this land, our land.
I love all the unnamed, unaccounted souls who are brave enough to care for other souls.
America, this misnamed and misguided land, contains multitudes of soulful, spirited love in spite of itself.
Six
On your 250th birthday, it is long past time
For a new declaration of independence and interdependence.
A declaration of love and mutual care and respect over hatred, fear, and division.
Maybe it begins, simply:
We declare our steadfast and fierce independence
From racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, imperialism, colonialism, settler colonialism, neoliberalism, and endlessly voracious and avaricious capitalism.
We declare our loving, passionate, unwavering commitment to a society based on care, mutual aid, and interdependence.
We declare that all living beings have those inalienable rights you spoke of so long ago—every living thing.
We have the right to freedom and liberation.
We have the right to housing, food, water, education, and healthcare.
We have the right to a decent and dignified existence in a world defined by humanity and mutual respect.
We declare our steadfast and unapologetic love for diversity, equity, and inclusion.
We have the right to not be replaced, displaced, or eradicated by deified digitized beasts and virtual machines.
We declare the right to be and love whomever we damn well please.
We declare the right to love and care for and tend the Earth, this planet that makes us and everything possible.
At last, we declare, simply:
We will love and care for one another.
We will put love and care before everything else.
We will empower joy and beauty across this land, our land.
We will build a society based on love, care, and respect for all living beings.
We will not stop loving. And love will win. And you, America, will love it.
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Trump Is Rolling Back So Many Workers' Rights, He's Placed the US on a Watchlist
The inclusion of the United States on the International Trade Union Confederation's Watchlist serves as a troubling indicator of the country’s current state of affairs.
Jul 29, 2026
For generations, the United States has been a global advocate for freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. Today, however, the world is calling on the United States to uphold those same principles at home.
Last month, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), representing over 200 million workers through 340 national affiliates in 169 countries, ranked the United States among countries with “systemic violations of worker rights.” The ITUC’s Global Rights Index assesses over 150 countries based on 97 indicators drawn from international standards and jurisprudence.
Given the measurable increase in violations since last year, the United States was also placed on the report’s “Watchlist,” alongside Guinea-Bissau, Israel, Liberia, Moldova, the Philippines, and Zimbabwe.
The inclusion of the United States on the ITUC’s Watchlist is based on the pattern of backsliding of fundamental rights over the past year and serves as a troubling indicator of the country’s current state of affairs. The report notes that, in the United States:
- More than 1 million federal workers have lost their right to collective bargaining.
- The National Labor Relations Board has been left unable to fulfill its essential role of protecting workers’ rights.
- Tens of thousands of immigrant union members have been stripped of their status and rights through the unlawful termination of various forms of rights-based protections and programs.
- Immigration enforcement is being used as a tool to suppress the exercise of freedom of expression, assembly, and association by detaining or revoking the visas of workers who take action or express views contrary to that of the government.
These actions by the Trump administration are intended to undermine workers’ rights to join a union, bargain collectively, and speak freely, but their impacts extend far beyond the workplace.
When workers exercise their rights at work, they are not only better equipped to advocate for better working conditions, they are also better able to engage democratically in their communities. It is often through a union at work that people first vote and run in elections. Currently, there are 564 union and household members who are endorsed to run for office in the midterm elections in the United States, a number that is expected to rise as the elections draw close later this year.
The actions taken by the Trump administration therefore not only threaten working conditions across the country but also debilitate people’s ability to civically engage. As a result, communities will be less prepared to resist other issues they face like corruption, abusive use of technology, and corporate greed.
The weakening of rights in the United States set a dangerous precedent for the world. Governments, employers, and investors across the world are observing and some will feel encouraged to follow.
The good news is that this story is not over.
Across the United States, workers continue to organize. They continue to win union recognition, negotiate better conditions, and build power across industries and communities. Their determination reminds the world that democracy is not sustained by institutions alone, it depends on people who are prepared to defend it every day.
When American workers fight back for their rights, they strengthen democracy not only at home, but around the world.
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Is the US Ready for Radical Change?
Political scientist, political economist, author, and journalist C. J. Polychroniou believes that radical change is difficult but still possible in today's United States, even though he realizes there is a strong anti-democratic tradition standing in the way.
Jul 28, 2026
The US is the richest country in the world, yet an international outlier on many measures. Among industrialized nations, the US spends a lower percentage of its GDP on public social expenditure, has no universal healthcare system, union density is at an all-time low, and the average American's standard of living is in decline, as "nearly half of US households can't make ends meet." Of course, delusional President Donald Trump continues to say that the US is the "hottest country in the world." Is the US, however, ready for radical change? After all, isn't there evidence that Americans are losing faith in capitalism and that socialism is gaining ground among voters?
Political scientist, political economist, author, and journalist C. J. Polychroniou shares provocative thoughts on these issues in an interview with the French-Greek writer and journalist Alexandra Boutri. Polychroniou believes that radical change is difficult but still possible in today's United States, even though he realizes there is a strong anti-democratic tradition standing in the way and regards the Democratic Party itself as the graveyard of radical change undertakings.
Alexandra Boutri: Recent polls indicate that capitalism is in trouble in the US, as there is a growing loss of faith in the system, apparently even among Republicans, while socialism is gaining mainstream appeal. So, I want to start this interview by inquiring about your own impression regarding political and ideological trends in the United States. Indeed, is the country on the verge of radical change?
C. J. Polychroniou: I am now old enough to take any talk of radical political change with a grain of salt. That being said, there is no doubt that the US version of capitalism has been an utter failure for the majority of Americans. In contrast to European or Asian versions of capitalism, capitalism in the US has always been structured around what we might call the Sopranos version of doing business, which is the Trump administration’s way of actually running the whole country today. But Trump aside, what kind of civilized society denies its citizens access to universal healthcare, tuition-free higher education, guaranteed long-term parental leave, 4-6 weeks of guaranteed paid vacation, and robust unemployment benefits? The US does!
Only the pathetic leadership of the Democratic Party stands in the way of Trump’s inevitable fall and disgrace.
The younger generations in the US seem to have awakened to the realization that the US economic system is brutal and thus detrimental to their well-being, even if they may not have an alternative socioeconomic system in mind that they would like to see instituted. They have indeed taken notice of the fact that the US is the only industrialized nation in the world without a universal healthcare system and that the standard of living has declined to the level of developing countries. Truth be told, even if North America remains the wealthiest on average, the quality of life in many European countries, which are, of course, still fully capitalistic, is superior to the US. There are stronger social safety nets and greater work-life balance in capitalist Europe than there are in the capitalist United States of America.
Which countries are best on women’s well-being? According to the latest Women, Peace and Security Index, European countries occupy all nine of the top positions while the US ranks 31st, below countries like Serbia and Malta. So, we do need to take into account different versions of capitalism. In that context, it is safe to say that many Americans have finally awakened to the realization that the US version of capitalism sucks! Anything more than that, however, is open to speculation. Socialism is gaining ground, but the challenges of building a unified socialist movement on a national scale and having a socialist political party that can contest power at the federal level are enormous in the United States of America.
Alexandra Boutri: Is the rise of socialism in the US the reason why Trump is reviving the boogeyman of communism?
C. J. Polychroniou: Absolutely. However much of a shallow man Trump happens to be, he is nonetheless a mastermind politician who has the pulse of today’s Republican voters. He is the greatest bullshitter of the modern age, but that’s only because of his audience. He knows how to stir fear. He also knows that he can normalize cruelty because his fanatical and racist fanbase simply loves it. Have his policies worsened economic conditions in the country to the point that even some of his own followers are beginning to doubt him? He only has to raise the volume on culture wars and then becomes again, in the eyes of his own supporters, the nation’s savior. Of course, such tactics have an expiration date even for the most popular authoritarian leaders. Look, for example, at what happened to Viktor Orbán in Hungary. After 16 years in power, even his own core supporters grew tired of his cronyism and corruption. I believe we will see something similar happen to Donald Trump and to the Republican Party, perhaps as soon as this coming November, in spite of how deeply the anti-democratic tradition has entrenched itself in all branches of government. In the end, only the pathetic leadership of the Democratic Party stands in the way of Trump’s inevitable fall and disgrace.
Alexandra Boutri: Are you also saying that the Democrats have been responsible for Trump’s rise to power?
C J. Polychroniou: Of course, and it was the Democrats, with their ability to destroy trust in government by siding themselves utterly and shamelessly with major corporate and financial interests, that rolled out the red carpet for Trump’s arrival on the nation’s political scene. The country had been moving further and further to the right since the early 1980s. In fact, the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as moderates had been declining since the Clinton years. Democrats still talk about Bill Clinton’s achievements, such as turning deficits into surpluses and making the economy more globalized, but his policies ushered in a new era of inequality while he transformed the welfare state by ending social policy. Essentially, the welfare state was dismantled under the Clinton presidency and was largely replaced in turn by volunteerism.
Neoliberalism (embraced by both parties in the US) and cultural relativism (a late obsession of liberals and segments of the left) have been at the core of the political turn to the far right in the US. The main point, though, is that the Democrats failed to advance a meaningful alternative whenever they found themselves in power. The Obama administration also had the chance to make a meaningful impact on the future of the country but opted, instead, to align itself with the status quo on all major issues, both on the domestic and foreign front. The Biden administration did make some progress on economic policy, mainly thanks to pressures from the progressive wing of the party, but failed miserably on foreign policy. As to why Kamala Harris lost to Trump, that's an issue that will forever be debated.
Alexandra Boutri: In a recent campaign speech in Michigan, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said that the Trump administration is “hellbent on tearing down in four years what it took this country 250 years to build.” What did she mean by that, and how likely is it that she will be the Democratic 2028 nominee?
C. J. Polychroniou: Naturally, the country has made progress over the past 250 years. Don’t you think it would have been unnatural if it hadn’t done so? But how do we measure progress? Wars existed in the past, and it appears that war will never end. By the same token, we have taken major steps toward protecting individuals against discrimination on the basis of sex or gender, but economic inequality is greater today than it has ever been in the modern era, while women, people of color, and minorities continue to face economic disadvantages. In any case, it is beyond dispute that Trump is destroying whatever social and economic progress has been made so far. He is a wrecking ball, an unhinged sociopath, but one who is still being treated as America's savior by something like close to 40% of voters. That’s simply mind-boggling, but it says something noteworthy about the persistence of a particular component of American political culture—one that rests on possessive individualism, anti-intellectualism, and the paranoid style. Richard Hofstadter addressed some of those aspects of American political life long before the rise of Trumpism. But we need to add racism, as it also remains a profound component of American political culture.
If popular struggles succeeded in introducing a universal healthcare system in the US, well, that would definitely constitute radical change in terms of how the nation has decided to deal with the well-being of its citizens.
I don’t know if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will decide to run for president in 2028. I hope she does. Recent polls indicate that she is more popular with Democratic voters than the likes of Pete Buttigieg, Gavin Newsom, and Kamala Harris, none of whom offers hope for a brighter future, although any one of them would be an improvement over Trump. What I do know, though, is that if AOC does decide to run for president in 2028, not only will she have at least half of the country react with extreme fear and paranoia attacks, but she will encounter massive opposition from the Democratic establishment itself. In 2016, the Democratic National Committee derided the Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) campaign. I expect something similar will happen to AOC. The current leadership of the Democratic Party is the graveyard of radical change in the US.
Alexandra Boutri: What would constitute radical change in today’s United States?
C. J. Polychroniou: That’s a very important question, and I’m glad you raised it. Political, economic, and even sociocultural settings must be taken into account whenever we speak of demands for radical change. Take something like universal healthcare. Almost every country in Europe has universal coverage, and it can also be found in many countries around the world. But in the US there has always been staunch opposition to universal healthcare policies by powerful private entities like the health and insurance industries. If popular struggles succeeded in introducing a universal healthcare system in the US, well, that would definitely constitute radical change in terms of how the nation has decided to deal with the well-being of its citizens. No question about it. Radical change should not imply the transformation of a country’s entire system of government. That would constitute a revolution. Even then, we would need to distinguish between a political revolution and a social revolution. For instance, the American Revolution was a political, not social revolution. It did not alter the fabric of society; it did not change wealth distribution and left the class system intact. On the other hand, the French Revolution that began in 1789 and the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia were truly social revolutions in that they transformed property relations and changed radically the class systems in both countries.
Alexandra Boutri: Today’s left focuses too much on cultural issues without really challenging capitalism. Indeed, in the recent past, issues like multiculturalism and even certain variants of feminism have functioned like ideologies of capitalism. In addition, some segments of the left have a knack for spreading ideas that are either not well thought out or simply impractical. For instance, and I believe this also captures your own sentiments, I find talk about “degrowth” and “wealth tax” schemes that fail to address the dynamics of unfettered capital accumulation while making in addition ludicrous claims that their implementation would solve the climate crisis as rather wishy-washy responses to capitalist crises and thus by no means game-changing strategies. My question then is this: What sort of new ideas would qualify, in your view, as game changers for the contemporary capitalist environment in the United States?
C. J. Polychroniou: I have already mentioned universal healthcare. In any case, it would be rather easy for anyone, I think, to simply suggest ideas to improve the state of the US economy and to create a better society but that would be meaningless if the ideas themselves weren't accompanied by concrete steps and specific policy proposals on how to erect alternative socioeconomic arrangements. But we need expertise for that to happen. That being said, a new project has been launched by the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst called Game Changers: Economic Policies for a Working America. It’s a project that was conceived of and is being directed by Gerald Epstein, a world-leading progressive economist who also happens to be PERI’s co-director. The issues addressed range from health and the environment to trade and finance. The policy briefs produced by different economists contain the sort of policy proposals that are desperately needed for rewriting the rules of the US economy in a manner that caters first and foremost to the needs and interests of American workers. I recommend everyone interested in progressive ideas on how to create a fairer, greener, and sustainable US economy to study some of the policy briefs that have been posted on PERI's website.
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'Justice Has Failed Us Here in Guatemala': A Family Fights for Accountability
More than 44 years have now passed since Guatemalan state forces abducted Luz Leticia; every day since, her sisters have fought to preserve the truth and dignity of her life while demanding answers.
Jul 12, 2026
Under the beating sun on the morning of June 21, Mirtala del Rosario Hernández Agustín joins families of the disappeared and members of organizations including the Association of Family Members of the Detained and Disappeared in Guatemala, or FAMDEGUA, and Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice against Oblivion and Silence, or HIJOS, in Guatemala City’s Plaza de la Constitución to commemorate the National Day Against Enforced Disappearances.
“We dream of a different Guatemala, and we fight for it. We cannot sit back and cross our arms. We have a person detained and disappeared.” Mirtala’s voice carries across the plaza. Behind her sit more than 400 empty chairs, each bearing the portrait of someone forcibly disappeared during Guatemala’s 36-year internal armed conflict. “I am the sister of Luz Leticia Hernández Agustín,” she continues. “To have peace in my heart, to be able to say we’ve been heard, we need my sister's remains returned.”
More than 44 years have now passed since Guatemalan state forces abducted Luz Leticia on November 22, 1982. It was her 25th birthday. And it was the last time she was seen.
Yet her sisters, Marta and Mirtala, refused to let her vanish completely. Every day since, they have fought to preserve the truth and dignity of Luz Leticia’s life while demanding answers not only for her, but for the tens of thousands who were disappeared, tortured, and killed during Guatemala’s US-backed campaign of state terror and genocide.
No amount of political power can permanently shield perpetrators from the demands for truth and justice made by the people they sought, and ultimately failed, to erase.
Now, their case is finally being heard in court. Three days a week, the Hernández Agustín sisters climb the stairs to the fifth floor of Guatemala City’s Palace of Justice. They sit through hours of testimony and legal argument, filling notebooks with observations and listening for the answers that have eluded their family for decades. Some days sting with the reopening of old wounds. Others dissolve into procedural delays, technical difficulties, and bureaucratic legal wrangling. They often leave frustrated and exhausted.
Still, they return. They do so because this case is about more than one family’s pursuit of justice. At a time when the United States is escalating violence at home and abroad, and governments like Guatemala’s continue to subordinate themselves to the imperatives of that long-standing imperial project, this trial carries particular significance. Most recently, this has included expanded military cooperation with Washington targeting alleged drug cartels in the country, a justification the US has invoked to extrajudicially kill more than 210 people over the past nine months.
The trial has therefore become a testament to all those who refused the silence imposed upon them. It is proof that those marked for erasure can reclaim their place in history. Above all, it is a reminder that no amount of political power can permanently shield perpetrators from the demands for truth and justice made by the people they sought, and ultimately failed, to erase.
The Long Shadow of Empire in Guatemala
The Guatemala into which the Hernández Agustín sisters were born bore the unmistakable imprint of empire. It was a country of staggering inequality, where generations inherited the desiccated remains of a nation picked clean by the vultures of foreign capital. The promise of reform had long since been extinguished. Gone was the Democratic Spring, the brief decade from 1944 to 1954 when popularly elected governments sought to expand democracy and direct the country’s wealth toward its people rather than multinational corporations and the landed oligarchy.
That dream was crushed with the 1954 CIA-backed overthrow of President Jacobo Árbenz. The coup sought not simply to remove a government but to restore the deeply unequal social order whose foundations had been laid under the dictatorship of Jorge Ubico. A pliant strongman who willingly auctioned off his country’s future to the highest bidder, Ubico granted sweeping concessions to US corporations while enriching himself. Under his rule, the Boston-based United Fruit Company became Guatemala’s largest landholder, acquiring more than 40% of its arable land and near-monopolistic control over not only its lucrative banana exports but also critical infrastructure, including the country's railroads and electrical network.
The threat posed by the Democratic Spring was not simply that it had challenged landowners and foreign corporations. It had shown workers, peasants, and Indigenous communities that collective action could transform society.
Ubico’s regime collapsed in 1944 with a popular uprising. Under elected Presidents Juan José Arévalo and then Árbenz, Guatemala embarked on an ambitious reform program. Building on Arévalo’s efforts, Árbenz expanded labor protections, social security, and universal suffrage while pursuing economic modernization that sought to transform Guatemala from what he referred to as “a semi-colonial dependency into an independent nation” and “a predominantly feudal economy into a modern capitalist state.”
It was this challenge to entrenched economic power that placed Árbenz in the crosshairs of both Washington and Wall Street. The flash point was Decree 900, his sweeping agrarian reform. The measure authorized the expropriation of uncultivated large estates, including United Fruit’s vast holdings, for redistribution to hundreds of thousands of peasants. Remuneration would be based on the value the company itself had declared, a figure it had deliberately undervalued to reduce its tax burden. While the reform was rooted in economic nationalism and guaranteed compensation for the land, officials in Washington cast it as evidence of communist subversion.
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Director Allen Dulles, both closely tied to United Fruit, orchestrated Árbenz’s overthrow. The coup ended Guatemala’s democratic experiment and ushered in decades of military rule, repression, and civil war.
A State Built on Terror
The dictatorship that emerged in the wake of the coup gave rise to a popular insurgency determined to reclaim the democratic aspirations that had been violently swept aside. It also ushered in a new era of repression. For Guatemala’s military rulers, the objective was to preserve their power. For their patrons in Washington, Guatemala became a Cold War proving ground, meant to demonstrate the consequences of challenging US political and economic power.
The threat posed by the Democratic Spring was not simply that it had challenged landowners and foreign corporations. It had shown workers, peasants, and Indigenous communities that collective action could transform society. That lesson had to be unlearned. In its place, they sought to teach another: that any attempt to remake Guatemala would be met with overwhelming violence. Terror became the principal pedagogy of the state.
From 1960 to 1996, Guatemala’s internal armed conflict claimed roughly 200,000 lives and left another 45,000 disappeared.
Repression failed to extinguish resistance. In 1960, dissident military officers launched an uprising against the regime. After it was crushed, many of its survivors retreated to the countryside, where they helped form the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR), the first of several guerrilla organizations. The state responded with a brutal, US-backed counterinsurgency waged through roving death squads, systematic torture, forced disappearances, and indiscriminate targeting of suspected dissidents.
Rather than destroying the insurgency, the violence pushed it deeper into rural Guatemala, where Indigenous Maya communities and peasant organizers assumed an increasingly central role in new guerrilla organizations. By the late 1970s, the military had embraced a genocidal scorched-earth campaign, particularly against the Ixil Maya. Entire communities were treated as inherently subversive. The objective was no longer simply to defeat guerrillas but to destroy the social fabric that sustained Indigenous life.
Villages were razed. Thousands were massacred. Survivors were displaced or forced into tightly controlled “model villages” under a policy known as Palestinianization, where military authorities sought to erase Indigenous languages, traditions, religious practices, and communal life in the name of anti-communist pacification and national modernization.
From 1960 to 1996, Guatemala’s internal armed conflict claimed roughly 200,000 lives and left another 45,000 disappeared. The bloodiest paroxysm of violence came between 1981 and 1983, when security forces killed an estimated 100,000 people, overwhelmingly Indigenous Maya, in a genocidal campaign that journalist Vincent Bevins has referred to as “the largest bloodbath unleashed by the Cold War in the Western Hemisphere.” The atrocities unfolded with US training and the material and diplomatic backing of the Reagan administration, which viewed Guatemala as a critical front in its campaign against leftist movements across Latin America, alongside its support for the Contras in Nicaragua and allied security forces in El Salvador and Honduras.
The Disappearance of Luz Leticia
Luz Leticia Hernández Agustín, or Leti, as her sisters call her, was one of the many lives cut short by the Guatemalan state during this period of extreme violence. As the eldest sibling, she occupied an outsized place in her family’s life. Marta and Mirtala remember her as hardworking, intelligent, and deeply compassionate. In a household, and community, marked by intense economic precarity and hardship, she assumed responsibilities well beyond her years, helping care for her younger siblings and easing whatever burdens she could.
This experience shaped Leti’s politics. She came to understand that centuries of colonial conquest had produced enduring systems of racism, dispossession, and exploitation that were still being felt. “Leti could see all of that,” Marta explains. “All the deep-seated wrongs that have persisted for so long.” She imagined a different Guatemala, one where those structures no longer defined people's lives and where everyone, regardless of ethnicity or social standing, could live with dignity.
Leti’s sisters have never abandoned their search for truth and justice, nor their determination to affirm their sister’s existence.
Her commitment extended beyond her immediate family. As Mirtala recalled, Leti was motivated certainly “by her own experiences, and the way our parents lived,” but equally “by the suffering she witnessed among our people.” Despite all the evidence seemingly to the contrary, she never surrendered her belief that Guatemala could become a more just society. That conviction would draw her into the resistance. She joined Nuestro Movimiento (“Our Movement”), an underground organization affiliated with the Organization of People in Arms (ORPA).
In late 1982, Leti became involved in an effort to secure the release of a comrade, Ileana del Rosario Solares Castillo, who was illegally detained by the regime. On October 14, members of Nuestro Movimiento abducted Jorge Mario Ríos Muñoz, the nephew of General Efraín Ríos Montt, Guatemala’s de facto president who presided over the bloodiest phase of the genocide, for which he was convicted in 2013. The operation sought to force a prisoner exchange. Jorge Mario remained captive until November 21, when an intelligence unit, working alongside Israeli advisors, rescued him. In the process, Luz Leticia, Ana María López Rodríguez, María Cruz López Rodríguez, and Leandro Gabriel Calate Temu were all captured.
In that moment, Leti entered the opaque machinery of forced disappearance. She was taken into a clandestine detention system notorious for torture, sexual violence, and the systematic degradation of prisoners. Her family never saw or heard from her again.
The Struggle for Justice
Leti’s sisters have never abandoned their search for truth and justice, nor their determination to affirm their sister’s existence. In 2001, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH) concluded that the Guatemalan state had violated the rights to life, liberty, humane treatment, judicial protection, and a fair trial of Ileana, Luz Leticia, and Ana María. It recommended that Guatemala locate the women’s remains, compensate their families, and identify and prosecute those responsible.
Five years later, the Guatemalan government offered the Hernández Agustín family an “amicable settlement agreement,” consisting of financial compensation without accountability and without the return of Luz Leticia's remains. They refused on principle.
In 2023, prosecutors indicted Juan Francisco Cifuentes Cano, the former commander of the National Police’s Fifth Corps Special Operations Reaction Battalion (BROE), on charges of crimes against humanity and enforced disappearance. After years of defense appeals aimed at delaying or derailing the proceedings, the long-awaited trial finally began on May 5.
Will we accept a world in which some have the right to kill and others the right to die, or insist on one governed by justice and accountability?
Justice, for them, means a broader reckoning with the collective trauma inflicted by enforced disappearance. The crime was designed to leave families trapped in cycles of hope and grief, producing what Marta described as the “strange sensation” that “[Leti] had died, yet was somehow still alive,” condemning them to “so much uncertainty, anxiety, and immense, constant stress.”
For Mirtala, that torment was central to the crime itself. “Enforced disappearance,” she explained, “is an act committed by the state against its own citizens, often in collusion with the very groups meant to guarantee the population's safety.” It extends far beyond the individual. “They don't just make the person disappear,” she said. “They do so in a way that instills terror and fear, and that is precisely what they have sought to do: to plunge us and our entire family into that terror.”
“It is a crime, an undeniable crime, but one committed in a sophisticated manner against our humanity,” she continued. The violence is directed not only at the disappeared but those left behind, condemning families to live with uncertainty while knowing their loved one is in the hands of the state. “It's agonizing to know that she's with these people.” “It’s powerlessness,” Mirtala said, “unable to do anything to pull [the disappeared] out of that cycle of violence and cruelty.”
Yet they have found meaning in the struggle. Their search for Leti has become inseparable from a broader fight over historical memory and for accountability. As Mirtala put it, it is a “story that reflects everything fractured in our country, all the underlying tensions and societal pain, and the struggles being waged on various fronts everywhere.”
Still, they approach that work with humility, believing that lasting change is built through small acts of collective resistance. “We are like an ant carrying a single grain of salt,” Mirtala explained. Yet she sees power even in the smallest acts. “This is how dust turns into sand, then into a gust of wind, and finally into a storm. We believe it will change many people’s perceptions.”
But this is not merely a struggle over memory. It is also a struggle over the present, over the ways impunity continues to shape Guatemala. In the decades since Leti’s disappearance, Guatemala has remained marked by stark inequality, corruption, violence, and rights abuses. The state continues to repress dissent, fueling recurring political crises rooted in its failure to meet the needs of its people. Mirtala sees in today’s situation the echoes of the violence that took her sister. “All these things,” she said, “they weigh on you, drop by drop, little by little.”
That is why pursuing Leti’s case has become about far more than one family’s search for justice. It is an act of resistance, a “vindication,” against a state that, as Mirtala put it, “has turned against its own people. Those who take power rob and take money from the people to enrich themselves" while the people “lack education, healthcare, food, and the chance for decent housing.” “To me,” she said, “it is a slap in the face, a punch to the gut of the state.”
The struggle has not been without risks. As documentary filmmaker Nancy Peckenham observed, “In Guatemala, to remember is dangerous.” Yet Mirtala and her sister remain resolute. “Sometimes I think about the risks,” Mirtala reflected, “but then I remember this isn’t just about asserting my sister’s rights. It is about the rights of thousands of people, both within Guatemala and abroad, because this is something suffered by all of us who lack power.”
Ultimately, she said, “that is what this has meant for us. It is a collective struggle.”
The case will continue through July. Its verdict will test not only Guatemala, but also whether we are doomed to live in a world, as the Trump administration architect of the United States’ ongoing nativist assault Stephen Miller put it, “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” Will we accept a world in which some have the right to kill and others the right to die, or insist on one governed by justice and accountability? The trial is one link in this broader struggle over whether a better world is possible: one free from the violence of impunity and imperialism, sustained by the conviction that those who commit atrocities will one day be held to account, from Guatemala to Venezuela, Palestine to Iran, and here in the United States.
All quotes from Marta and Mirtala Hernández Agustín are from a June 2026 speech and interview conducted by the authors and translated from Spanish.
Correction: The name of General Efraín Ríos Montt's nephew was Jorge Mario Ríos Muñoz, not Mario Ríos Montt. The piece has been updated to reflect this.
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US Revolutionaries Had 1 Huge Advantage: They Didn’t Have to Fight Off the US
Time and again revolutions, independence movements, and reformist democratic governments have been so harshly attacked and manhandled by the US that the likelihood of the regime emerging from it being what was originally desired was rendered almost nil.
Jul 05, 2026
More than any revolutionaries in history, America's revolutionaries got what they wanted. The government the United States ended up creating and sustaining was, adjusting for 250 years of changes, very similar to the government that the American revolutionaries had sought to create.
Why? What was it that led to Americans getting the government they had fought for, when so many other revolutionaries and independence movements, both historical and more recent, did not?
The common answer is to attribute this success to the wisdom of America’s Founding Fathers, and there’s certainly some truth to that. But for the past century, the biggest reason revolutionaries in foreign countries didn’t get what they fought for, as the Americans did, has been… the Americans.
Time and again revolutions, independence movements, and reformist democratic governments have been so harshly attacked and manhandled by the US that the likelihood of the regime emerging from it being what was originally desired was rendered almost nil.
The phenomenon of a revolution, even a very democratic-spirited one, ending in dictatorship after harsh foreign intervention predates both communism and American interventionism.
In China, Nicaragua, Cuba, and others, the US armed opponents of the new revolutionary regimes, imposed economic embargoes, and more in attempts to strangle them.
After General MacArthur had provoked China into the Korean War, China lost over 200,000 men fighting the US. Nicaragua faced US-created and armed terrorists and saboteurs—the contras—who operated from safe havens in nearby Honduras. Cuba’s revolutionary government faced a US-backed invasion, numerous terrorist attacks, assassination attempts, as well as widespread economic damage from America’s Operation Mongoose sabotage campaign.
In Vietnam and Korea, the US waged wars against communist-led independence movements. Devastating bombing killed millions of civilians and laid waste to both countries. During the Korean War, US Air Force General Curtis LeMay explained, “[W]e killed off…20% of the population… We… burned down every town in North Korea.”
After the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917, the US joined Britain, France, and nearly a dozen others in invading the newly-formed Soviet Union and aiding the White Armies against the Reds (Bolsheviks) during the Russian Civil War. This was what influential British leader Winston Churchill, then the British secretary of state for war and air, called "strangl[ing] Bolshevism in its cradle."
By the time the Reds had won, Russia had been at war for eight years, and the country the communists inherited was so poor, wrecked, and starved that cannibalism was widespread. According to United Nations data, in 1920 Russian life expectancy was a mere 20.5 years, as compared with 55.4 years in the US.
In other cases, the US targeted socialists or reformers who had gained power and sought egalitarian change through democratic systems. In Chile, Guatemala, and Iran, the US instigated and backed coups which overthrew democratically elected leaders—Salvador Allende in Chile, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran—and installed murderous dictatorships.
In Indonesia, the US conspired to overthrow President Sukarno, who had led Indonesia to independence, and eliminate his communist supporters. In The Jakarta Method…the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World, journalist Vincent Bevins explains:
In 1965, the Indonesian military killed as many as 1 million of their own countrymen, destroying the third-largest communist party in the world and taking with it pretty much anyone seen as having left-wing tendencies (as well as hundreds of thousands who had nothing to do with anything).
The US Embassy prepared lists of the names of thousands of communists and suspected communists, and, Bevins says, “handed them over to the army, so that these people could be murdered and ‘checked off’ the list.”
The phenomenon of a revolution, even a very democratic-spirited one, ending in dictatorship after harsh foreign intervention predates both communism and American interventionism. For example, after the French Revolution in 1789, armies from Great Britain, Austria, Prussia, Russia, and others, aided by a revolt in Western France led by the Catholic Church, fought to destroy the revolutionary government and reinstitute the monarchy.
With the support of and extreme sacrifices from the French people, the Revolutionaries managed to beat all of them back, but were unable to return to the democratic system the Revolution had originally established. The Revolution ended with Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1799 coup, establishing a dictatorship.
America’s Founding Fathers were brilliant, but in establishing a new government they had a huge advantage that few revolutionaries of the past century have had—they didn’t have to fight America’s attempts to destroy it.
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