Savage Minds

Ricardo Gómez-Carrera, a research economist at the World Inequality Lab and co-editor of the 2026 World Inequality Report, discusses his research on the benefits of early schooling and how early human capital investment closes the “inequality gap” and the effects of such research within current Mexican educational policy. Focusing on the finding of this year’s World Inequality Report, Gómez-Carrera elaborates on the increasing wealth disparities on a global scale such that wealth is becoming even more concentrated, as demonstrated by the fact that the top 10% earn 53% of the global income, “the top 10% own three-quarters of global wealth, while the bottom half holds only 2%,” and, for the top .001%, the distribution of wealth growth is as high as 8% per year. Gómez-Carrera argues that if we don’t address inequality, only the privileged will have rights, opportunities, assets, and control over politics. Ultimately, even if 90% or 99% of the population are paying their taxes and contributing to society, the top 1% maintain a disproportionate influence over politics and access to opportunities, which in turn influences the decisions that ensure they maintain their privilege. While power, as Gómez-Carrera clarifies, is becoming more and more concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the negative effects of such power, such as ecological damage, will be felt disproportionately by the poor, as they are more vulnerable to the impacts of global warming, despite their contributing less to this damage. Examining one of the more surprising aspects of the 2016 World Inequality Report, he notes how the top .001% increased in their charitable donations since 1960, a gesture which moves the wealthy beyond strictly economic realms of power. Noting how the economic patterns suggest a rising top-end inequality, Gómez-Carrera claims that this not only translates into ideological capture and unequal influence over philanthropy and politics, but it invariably translates into public policy, law, campaigning, and, invariably, political choices, or lack thereof. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Almut Rochowanski, a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, critiques the “NGO-industrial complex,” particularly concerning the impact of foreign funding on civil society development within new democracies. Covering her testimony at the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission in the US Congress, on the topic of “Laws Regulating Foreign NGOs: Human Rights Implications,” Rochowanski draws from her experience with NGOs in former Soviet states, including Russia and Ukraine, and discusses the structural realities of foreign-funded NGOs at the intersection of class, education, nepotism, and accountability failures. Rochowanski highlights the complex relationships between foreign donors, governments, and NGOs, stressing how the actual beneficiaries often become secondary to donor agendas. She argues that foreign funding cannot be neutral, as it embeds donor priorities into recipient countries, corrupting local policies and necessitating NGOs to align more with Western mandates than local needs. This tendency results in NGOs, widely deemed “foreign agents” by domestic authorities and citizens, undermining local governance and democratic sovereignty, ultimately harming the societies they aim to assist by displacing state roles in service provision and policy development, while these bodies often encroach on democratic sovereignty. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Volodymyr Ishchenko, currently at the Institute for East European Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, discusses his latest book, Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War (Verso, 2024) and forthcoming paper “Post-Soviet vicious circle: revolution as a reproduction of a crisis of hegemony” (co-authored with Oleg Zhuravlev). Historicising how post-Soviet revolutions in Ukraine have functioned, Ishchenko considers how the 2014 Euromaidan revolution produced a weaker state whose fate, instead of being decided by Moscow, has been directed by Washington or Brussels. Delineating how the 2022 war is, in part, the culmination of Ukraine’s history in relationship to Russia, where cross-national capital allied itself with the local professional middle classes and where anti-nationalist arguments clashed with the tendency to understand the war within the context of Ukraine’s perceived colonial struggle, Ishchenko observes how these primordial, ethno-nationalist readings lend themselves to a larger teleology. Detailing how the war in 2022 becomes the culmination of this story, a sort of parable of the struggling, emerging nation, Ishchenko explores how the narrative construction of Ukrainian nationhood mirrors the creation of the nation-state, like many countries from the 19th century onward. He also interrogates the various theories that proffer origins of the war as being rooted in the Russia-NATO conflict, as maintained by Jeffrey Sachs and John Mearsheimer. Instead, Ishchenko considers an alternative reading of this history, positing that the war in Ukraine has little to do with the inclusion of Ukraine within NATO, nor is it about NATO's inclusion of neighbouring countries. Instead, Ishchenko contends that the 2022 war is a culmination of Russia’s exclusion from the process and dialogues by and around NATO. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Fabio Vighi, Professor of Critical Theory and Italian at Cardiff University, discusses dominant themes from latest books, Emergency Capitalism: Financial Hubris, Economic Collapse, and Systemic Manipulation (2024) and Unworkable: Delusions of an Imploding Civilization (2022), that address the “age of crisis capitalism” and the post-productive hyper-financialised stage of capitalism that is driven by debt and the loss of work society. Relating how the acceleration of the emergency paradigm is maintained by a constant flux of “states of exception” that exclude people while also allowing for the creation of credit and debt which have become the prime motors of capitalism today, Vighi narrates how just before the pandemic in 2019, we were already approaching a gigantic financial crisis, observing, “The system needed what then Covid allowed the system to have, which means massive injections of credit.” Vighi historicises the acceleration of the emergency paradigm over the past decade, which is fundamentally connected to debt and the creation of credit “out of thin air” to balance a system that is both inherently inflationary and increasingly “imbalanced and out of control.” Noting how the release of emergencies has become the mechanism to balance the economy—first with the pandemic in 2020 and then immediately thereafter with the war in Ukraine—Vighi characterises what is happening today as an “apocalyptic, eschatological type of mood where war is always immanent…and therefore that justifies the rearmament of entire continents like Europe,” while underscoring how modern wars have always been mechanisms for creating credit while also the vehicles for connecting the arms and financial sectors. Criticising the perception management systems that are more focused on the personalisation of struggles rather than critiquing systemic structures, Vighi scrutinises how, as a result, we are incentivised into very simplistic polarisations and conflicts that are, in themselves, ideological forms of destruction, distracting us from examining the deeper causes of conflict. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Hala Shoman, a Palestinian PhD researcher in Sociology at Newcastle University, discusses her life in Gaza before 7 October 2023, the conditions under which Gazans have been living since, and the physical and political realities on the ground for Palestinians today. Shoman elaborates how Israel’s violence since 2023 has left Palestinian society shattered, since the aggressions are so vast and profound that, unlike previous decades of aggressions that did not wipe out entire neighbourhoods and communities, the current genocide has left few able-bodied bodies alive who are can help their communities after each attack. Observing the harsh reality for Gazans today under the daily threat of murder, Shoman appraises how not only does every Palestinian personally know hundreds of people murdered over the past two years, but Israel’s aggressions and control over every aspect of Palestinian life—their access to food, water and vaccines—have become so intensified that Palestinian infants are dying from the lack of drinking water necessary for baby formula. Confirming the direct links between Israel’s violence and the increase in domestic violence in Gaza, Shoman recounts how the structural violence of colonialism and genocide has been reproduced: from the Israeli theatre of occupation and murder to the intimate space of family life within Palestinian communities. Expounding upon Israel’s pathological desire to control Palestine, Shoman remarks that the very war criminals directing this genocide are the same individuals who are asked to lead Palestine in what is this latest farce of a “peace plan.” Shoman also elaborates her academic research that explores decolonial feminist frameworks and the concept of reprocide while also distinguishing between adapting to the horrors of this genocide and surviving it. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Rebecca Ruth Gould, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Poetics and Global Politics, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and author of Erasing Palestine: Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom (Verso, 2020), discusses the political reframing of “antisemitism” by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) which tailored a new definition designed specifically to silence criticism of both Zionism and the state of Israel. Recalling how she was caught within the radar of the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism in 2017 while an academic at the University of Bristol for a short article she had written years earlier, Gould analyses how the IHRA definition has very clear implications far beyond Israel and Palestine, even to the extent that it exists as a quasi-law that is treated as law while never having gone through any kind of democratic parliamentary vetting process. Moreover, Gould observes how the IHRA definition of antisemitism basically set out to define what we can and cannot say about Israel while also serving to foreshadow how free speech on Palestine would be persecuted for the following decade. Considering the language of mass starvation and famine within the media, Gould confirms how the famine of the Holodomor, in a 1933 New York Times piece, was narrated in an eerily similar way to how the famine in Gaza is currently represented. Articulating how “Never again” has never really been true, given the numerous genocides since the Holocaust, Gould describes how older generations have internalised the state-based nationalist “Holocaust memories” which have blinded them from seeing, much less understanding, that Israel is currently carrying out a genocide of Palestinians. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Dario Guarascio, Associate Professor of Economic Policy at the Department of Economics and Law at the Sapienza University of Rome, discusses two articles he co-authored with Andrea Coveri and Claudio Cozza, “Big Tech and the US Digital-Military-Industrial Complex” and “Monopoly Capital in the time of digital platforms: A radical approach to the Amazon case.” Coveri examines the power of digital platforms whose systemic size rivals that of nation-states, positioning them as counterparts to national authorities. Revisiting social sciences history, especially economic and imperialism theories, Guarascio highlights John Hobson’s contributions that illustrate the reliance of large capital and financial corporations on new markets as national markets become saturated. He details how the intertwining needs of states and monopolies drive a strategic internationalisation essential for competitiveness, a concept reflected in Vladimir Lenin’s work influenced by Hobson, which connects international competition with states’ imperialistic strategies aimed at expanding trade routes and eliminating competitors. Guarascio posits that amidst economic strains, military means have historically facilitated market penetration, forcing foreign governments to capitulate to external capital while obstructing competitors. He draws parallels between the intense competition for market dominance leading to the world wars and present dynamics characterised by monopoly capitalism and the dominance of multinational corporations that now dictate economic policies, thus transforming states into instruments of corporate interests. Furthermore, Guarascio argues that contemporary corporate imperialism promotes capital internationalisation and fosters economic dependencies, while militarisation becomes integral to these economic narratives. This relationship outlines a modern imperialism defined by collusion among the state, military, and multinational corporations, particularly between the US and China, alongside Big Tech’s growing influence and strategic military affiliations. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Penny Arcade—poet, actress, essayist, spoken word, video and theatre maker—discusses her trajectory from an immigrant family, originally from Basilicata, Italy, to her upbringing in a working-class Connecticut town to her entry into the art world of New York’s East Village. Looking back on her life as a homeless teen in the Village, her discovery by Jamie Andrews who introduced her to John Vaccaro’s Playhouse of The Ridiculous, becoming a Warhol Factory Superstar, and her departure to Amsterdam, Arcade narrates the story of how she set off for Formentera, in Spain’s Balearic Islands, where she started a school for children there, some of whom were children of drug smugglers. Recounting her return to New York City in 1981 and her split from Vaccaro, which marked the beginning of her independent work, Arcade recollects the state of the various art scenes in New York City during the Reagan era, the loss of friends to AIDS, and the censorship of the era. She vituperates the class divisions within the art world and the Manhattan Downtown art scene into which she never fit neatly, while underscoring her desire to “create theatre for people who had no theatre,” a fact which made her extremely unpopular within academia and among arts administrators because her work challenges these very elite systems. Pondering the values she espouses in her art and the fact that her audience has always been unique in maintaining a shared investment in her performances, Arcade considers how the catharsis in reaction to her art takes place well beyond the theatre hall. As an outsider to the art scene, noting how she hasn’t received institutional support and has operated without funding, legacy media coverage, or any form of academic sponsorship, Arcade criticises the state of art funding from even before the 1980s, when the Moral Majority took aim at the art world and at the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) funding structures. Calling out the academic art world as a “pyramid scheme,” Arcade observes how the academic-produced genre of “emerging arts” has become a way for the elite class to ensure that their children would have a guaranteed “entry level position” post-graduation in the arts akin to the professional tracks for finance and law, proclaiming: “Art is not a profession—it’s a vocation.” She also delves into the problems of identity politics that have permeated into arts funding and the art world and culture at large, remarking how these institutions recycle not only the same personas and narratives, ultimately limiting the “professionalised” scope of art. Responding to the recent “queering” of Marsha P Johnson, Arcade argues that Johnson was not transgender but was a drag queen, contending that the only reason why Johnson was recategorised as “trans” is because “Marsha is dead and black.” Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Haim Bresheeth, filmmaker and historian, discusses the growing trend in Britain and the West to curtail free speech concerning criticisms of Israel and Zionism as he details his arrest in London for protesting against the genocide in Gaza. Declaring that the freedom of expression, ostensibly guaranteed in Western democracies, no longer exists, Bresheeth observes how criticism of Gaza is being silenced through changes in the laws regarding the demonstrations and reporting on the current genocide perpetuated by Israel. He notes the irony in how today it is perfectly acceptable for Israel to commit genocide, killing tens of thousands of children, but it is not acceptable to criticise the crime of genocide as such criticism has been criminalised. Declaiming that there is “nothing Jewish” about genocide, settler colonialism, or killing children, he notes the paradox of how Israel has weaponised the Holocaust and Jewish identity to support its current genocide while besmirching anyone who disagrees with claims of “antisemitism.” Historicising Europe’s role in genocides and colonialism for centuries, Bresheeth compares this genocide to that of the Nazis and considers the role of the 300,000 Israeli citizens who have been drafted in order to carry out this genocide and the social psychosis that enables them to do so. Considering the role Islamophobia plays in the genocide of Palestinians, he discusses the historical importance of the convivencia, when Muslims and Jews co-existed in harmony in Andalusia. Bresheeth observes how Europeans would never have had their Renaissance without the rich cultural, artistic, and scientific heritage of Arabo-Muslim societies which preserved and translated Western literature and scientific texts due to the widespread burning of these texts by Western churches. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Boaventura de Sousa ​Santos, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Coimbra, discusses his professional training from law, to the philosophy of law and then to sociology, covering his time studying in Cold War Berlin, then Yale in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and his eventual involvement with the World Social Forum and his efforts to densify class struggle. Bouncing off his recent article on cancel culture, de Sousa Santos analyses the “narcissism of belongingness” and how identity politics is sabotaging the left, where the connection to the political economy is lost to the language of inclusion. Analysing the weaponisation of victimhood and lies that are used to create narratives that uniquely rely upon the perverse assumption of female innocence and male guilt, de Sousa Santos observes the current social discourse and protofascistic regimes of our times, where the Inquisition of the Dark Ages has returned. Noting the rise of social fascism, which he believes may potentially slide into political fascism, de Sousa Santos argues that the proliferation of victimhood narratives creates the subject as a type of inert res extensa, in Cartesian terms, that simultaneously negates the Spinozean notion of human potentia, something he believes will ultimately kill the feminist movement. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

In questa puntata, Olivia Guaraldo, professoressa ordinaria di filosofia politica presso il Dipartimento di Scienze Umane all’Università di Verona, discute il libro scritto in collaborazione con Adriana Cavarero, Donna si nasce (2024), che offre uno sguardo al femminismo e ai concetti di “donna” e “gender” da Simone de Beauvoir ai giorni nostri. Guaraldo storicizza concetti come “patriarcato” e “differenza sessuale”, soffermandosi su come queste valenze siano state mutuate dall’antropologia culturale, assorbite dal femminismo e poi complicate con l’introduzione dell’“identità di gender” nei paesi prevalentemente anglofoni. Analizzando il discorso dei “diritti” in Occidente a partire dalla Rivoluzione francese, Guaraldo discute di come il pensiero moderno sia stato plasmato da un orizzonte simbolico in cui i soggetti maschili erano di fatto soggetti di “liberazione”, mentre le donne venivano invariabilmente eclissate. Approfondendo il paradosso secondo cui i diritti “universali” concessi nel corso del XVIII e XIX secolo erano specificamente rivolti agli uomini, mai all’altra metà della popolazione umana, dove gli uomini erano “la misura dell’umano”, Guaraldo evidenzia anche alcune delle differenze tra il femminismo italiano e francese e il femminismo anglo-americano, dove il primo presenta un femminismo della differenza e il secondo un femminismo dell’“uguaglianza”, e dove i diritti conquistati sono invariabilmente pagati con il prezzo dell’“assimilazione” postulata all’interno di un “modello neutro” in cui i diritti della persona vengono assunti sul corpo (ad esempio, diritti riproduttivi, accesso all’aborto, ecc.) e dove le conquiste sono sempre parziali. Guaraldo sottolinea anche l’attuale paradosso socio-politico in cui il linguaggio della differenza e del gender, così come inscritto dal poststrutturalismo francese nella seconda metà del XX secolo, ha portato a un nuovo dogmatismo e a una rigidità sociale tale per cui le giovani generazioni di donne si stanno opponendo al definirsi “donne” a causa della deliberata diluizione del significato del linguaggio. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Diego Sequera, award winning journalist and writer based in Caracas, Venezuela, discusses the recent kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife and former member of the National Assembly, Cilia Flores, delving into Venezuela’s complex historical landscape. He begins with the Caracazo uprising of 1989, which revealed deep socioeconomic inequalities while uniting the working class against President Carlos Andrés Pérez’s austerity measures. Sequera notes that this context set the stage for the rise of Chavismo, notably through Hugo Chávez’s transformation from a coup leader to an elected president by 1999. Sequera critiques the neoliberal policies, growing foreign debt, and the resulting polarization exacerbated by anti-Communist sentiments while linking Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution to contemporary global conflicts, scrutinizing political figures like Maria Corina Machado for their role in societal divisions. Furthermore, he addresses the role of US foreign policy, detailing the sanctions imposed, starting with the Venezuela Defense of Human Rights and Civil Society Act of 2014 and culminating in the 2015 “Obama decree” ((Executive Order 13692), which targeted the Venezuelan oil industry ultimately aiming to destabilise the country both economically and politically. Sequera critically analyzes the rhetoric of US politicians who categorize Venezuela as a “narco-state” and suggest foreign interference in the 2020 US elections, as he draws parallels between Venezuela, Iran, and Gaza in critiquing the selective moral blindness of Western nations towards their participation in human rights abuses and loss of life in these regions, reflecting on the broader implications of foreign policy decisions on Venezuela's plight. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Vivek Chibber, Professor of Sociology at New York University, discusses neocolonial history and the formation of anti-colonial movements, which effectively began as an elite-dominated push for power, to widen the colonial apparatus for more participation by wealthy Indians. Historicising how anti-colonial, national liberation movements only took off when the internal agendas of national liberation struggles were set as the people unified their narrow struggles to join the mass struggle, Chibber notes that the modern identitarian left has failed in assessing and addressing class struggle. Moving between decolonising countries and the United States, Chibber tells the story of how, in the neoliberal era, as all the institutions of ordinary people were dismantled—bowling alleys, civics centres and neighbourhood organisations—there is no longer a sense of a collective endeavour. As a result, the groups best positioned to get something for themselves were all upper-middle-class and upper-class citizens who sought positions in the halls of power. Chibber narrates how these groups, having abandoned collective struggles, chose to access social power through a language that drew upon identity—gender and race—cashing in on identity while parsing out the universe into smaller and smaller slices, with each group staking claims to being “the most oppressed.” Appraising how such a tiny, minoritarian movement like the transgender movement was given such an enormous amount of power in the United States by the Democrats, Chibber maintains that this adornment of power from above immediately absolved that lobby of the responsibility or necessity of having to seek alliances, thus leading to a toxic political culture of calumniation and slurs.  Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Marta Havryshko, a historian specializing in Holocaust Pedagogy and Antisemitism Studies at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, examines Ukraine's ethno-nationalist legacy and its anti-Semitic past. She highlights instances of anti-Jewish violence and pogroms, noting that many Ukrainians, including prisoners of war, collaborated with German auxiliary units during World War II, particularly in the formation of a Ukrainian SS battalion within the Waffen-SS. Havryshko points out a significant gap in the national memory of Ukraine, where the suffering of Jewish individuals is acknowledged only superficially, while Ukrainian involvement in pogroms remains largely unrecognized. She critiques the portrayal of Ukrainian nationalist heroes—freedom fighters who often engaged in ethnic cleansing—as central figures in history, with their narrative overshadowing the suffering they inflicted on others, thus creating a hierarchy of suffering in the retelling of Ukraine's past. Havryshko traces the revival of historical celebrations of ethno-nationalists, such as Stepan Bandera, while noting the reluctance of contemporary Ukrainian leaders to confront the existence of neo-Nazi elements within the military. Referencing her research on the Waffen-SS Galicia Division, Havryshko discusses how Ukraine's neo-Nazi groups have historically found support in the West, largely due to their value as intelligence sources during the Cold War, despite being specifically labeled as “fascists” and “murderers” in CIA reports. Similarly today, Havryshko notes how the mythology of the Ukraine hero continues within the current war with Russia, as the stories of the sexual violence perpetrated by Ukraine forces are elided, not least because the victims of sexual violence in this conflict are primarily men and boys. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Nidhi Srinivas, Professor of Management at the New School, discusses his latest book, Against NGOs: A Critical Perspective on Civil Society, Management, and Development (Cambridge University Press, 2025), which brings together management and development studies to offer a critical perspective on NGOs, describing how they emerged as key agents of development. Analysing the historical and shifting roles that NGOs play as agents of development and disseminators of management doctrines, Srinivas elaborates how these organisations function in this current epoch of capitalist crisis, where universities today retain direct links to NGO managerialism and policy creation. He reviews the current age where we are on the verge of another global recession and world war while relying on Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks as a beacon for reading how we might see the world “differently” which he views as a political task, stating: “I would argue that the problem today is that a lot of education and the spheres of civil society where NGOs are based are not actually eager to offer that kind of a critique.” Observing how NGOs are often intimately connected to the system of power and delineating how the earliest definition of an NGO had nothing whatsoever to do with international development, Srinivas examines the mechanisms between governments, international agencies and civil society interrogating the relationship each holds to power, shying away from simplifying the role of NGOs as merely bad actors or glorifying the role of civil society. Srinivas emphasises the importance of critical theory and the Frankfurt School in his analysis of NGOs, confirming how ideas are shaped by history and that, in order to tackle the stages of capitalism, it is incumbent upon us to interrogate capitalism’s commitment to wealth, inequality, and how these ideas work within our souls. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Alison Gaffney, a mother of two from Corby, Northamptonshire, discusses how she and her partner, Andy Hinde, learned in 2018 that their seventeen-month-old son was diagnosed with a rare cancer, which they believe was caused by the botched disposal of millions of tonnes of contaminated waste after the closure of Europe’s largest steelworks in Corby, Northamptonshire, in 1980. While a 2009 civil case linked the council’s negligent clean-up of the site to a cluster of birth defects in local children in the 1980s and 1990s, dramatised earlier this year in the Netflix series Toxic Town, Gaffney tells a different part of this story which addresses the environmental contamination in Corby and those who have experienced childhood cancer dating back to 1984. Now, leading a campaign which represents approximately 50 families, Gaffney recounts the group’s struggle to access environmental information and how recently these families have been denied valuable data by the council after requesting a list of sites in Corby that were potentially contaminated following the steelworks’ closure in 1980, through the reclamation of the steelworks that began in 1984 and continued through the 1990s. Expounding the group’s ongoing struggle to have the local council cooperate with the parents’ request to reveal the areas of contaminated land in and around Corby, to test for contamination, and for the government to create a national registry that records the precise locations of environmental damage as per Zane’s Law, Gaffney maintains that her mission is to ensure that there will never again be cases of childhood cancer due to preventable ecological damage such as that which occurred in Corby. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Maung Zarni, UK-exiled Burmese dissident, scholar, rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, discusses his role within the Jury in the Permanent Peoples Tribunal on Sri Lanka, observing the similarities between the use of starvation perpetrated in Sri Lanka against the Tamil minority and the exercise of starvation used against Palestinians in Gaza. Zarni also discusses his participation in two separate delegations to Gaza and the West Bank (August 2024 and January 2025) witnessing first-hand Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine, as he elaborates the freedom he and other members of the delegation had to roam and to discover—unscheduled and unchoregraphed visits—the reality of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza and of Israelis living in Israel. Zarni describes the myriad human rights violations, starvation, and conditions of genocide in Gaza, in addition to attesting to the violent attacks by settlers and the threat of genocide already in vigour in the West Bank. Interrogating a vast system of colonial occupation and repression exercised by the state of Israel against Palestinians for the past 78 years, Zarni notes how this is a “collective genocide” whereby many countries and their politicians are “directly participating in Israel’s genocide” through political, military, and economic contributions. Zarni discusses how people need to be educated about genocide, especially “when it is done by our own country, in our own name,” as he connects his work in educating the Cambodians about the “Killing Fields” and their own history of genocide at the hands of the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. Maintaining that this genocide is “far worse than what was happening in Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe,” Zarni remarks how “the entire ecosystem of corporate and public legacy media is performing” what the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels did to create the political ethos to destroy European Jewry. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Catherine Liu, Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine, discusses her forthcoming book, Traumatized: The New Politics of Suffering (Verso, 2026), wherein she elucidates the emergence of trauma culture, tracing it back to psychoanalysis and the reification of mental health in post-war America. Analysing the fetishisation and recognition of feelings, Liu historicises the explosion of psychoanalysis in the United States in the 1950s and the rise of New Left in the 1960s, which advanced “the personal is political,” an idea quickly adopted by second-wave feminists. Observing how the discourse of trauma has permeated all areas of society, such that feelings have been prioritised over knowledge and “centering feelings” has replaced scientific inquiry, Liu critiques how the professional managerial class thrives on rebranding, promoting credentials, and creating new identities, all in order to advance the collapse of the separation between work and leisure. Noting how workers have fought for years to maintain a separation of work from leisure time, Liu muses on the invasive, destructive force of the Silicon Valley New Left and professional middle-class feminists who have driven the insistence of a non-differentiated space where “we are always at work”, therefore our private lives are expected to be “on display through our performance virtue.” She examines the dynamics of how anti-normativity and transgression function within the writings of Michel Foucault, since they invariably strengthen normativity. Nonetheless, Liu vituperates the bastardisation of these valences under the scope of identity politics, which forces the merging of one’s personal life, politics, and intellectual practices. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation and Research Professor at the Fletcher School, Tufts University, historicises the way “famine” in the postcolonial era was an extremely emotional word for which, fifty years ago, there were no appropriate structures nor any objective scientific metric for understanding where or when famine was occurring. By 1984-1985, however, the neoliberal governments of Thatcher and Reagan became deeply embarrassed by the famine in Ethiopia, de Waal narrates. From this embarrassment, an industry of refining the metrics of understanding what counted as famine, and what did not, was born, and from this, the IPC, or Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, was developed as the standardised UN system used to classify the severity of food insecurity and malnutrition in a specific area. De Waal discusses how the international aid system has been shackled into into viewing famine in a very apolitical way, refusing to exam the structural causes driving famine largely because international NGOs steered away from criticising governments in order to maintain cooperation for their relief work and that Western publics give assistance to victims of natural disasters as part of the “white saviour” theatre which depends upon eliding the political causes. Declaiming the importance of photography in chronicling the history of famine—from the Warsaw Ghetto, to the famine in Ethiopia (1983-1985), and Gaza—de Waal observes the dual role of these photos: first, that the perpetrator of famine was not only absent from the frame, but was often the person taking the photo; and second, that because the perpetrator was rarely within the frame, the subjects of these photos were often blamed as the true perpetrators of famine, such that Jews attempting to preserve a “veneer of normality” in the Warsaw Ghetto or Palestinians in Gaza who are more portly, were ultimatley inculpated as the cause of the famine. Considering the merits of Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET), he notes that it lacks the key element of examining the policies and intention of those doing the starvation. De Waal underscores that “to starve” does not just refer to the experience of people starving, but it also means the act of starving people, as he goes on to describe how the East India Company, through onerous taxation from 1769 to 1770, created a famine in Bihar and Bengal, ultimately killing one-third of the population. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Celine-Marie Pascale, professor emerita of sociology at American University, discusses her book Living on the Edge (2021), wherein she details her research into the struggling communities across the United States—from Appalachia to the Standing Rock and Wind River reservations to Oakland, California—who face the hardships of stagnant wages and rising costs of living. Analysing the experiences of people emanating from communities that deal with systemic, entrenched levels of poverty, Pascale uncovers the “social organisation of power relations that keep people submerged in poverty, that actually make poverty profitable,” calls out the “American dream” as much more of a myth than a reality, similar to the adjacent myth of “class mobility.” Considering how “capitalism depends upon a large, poorly paid workforce,” Pascale observes that in order to maintain the workforce without rebellion, these myths are turned against the workers and the poor, essentially telling workers that if they are struggling to put food on the table or take care of their families, that the fault lies with the worker and not with the system, not with capitalism. Historicising the lack of class consciousness in the United States, she notes how workers are cannibalised by capitalism while advanced capitalism, Pascale contends, “cannibalises itself.” Pascale critiques the federal measure of poverty, narrating how such standardisation for the cost of living is “untethered from reality” since it makes no distinction for food or rent costs in areas where food is imported (eg, Alaska and Hawaii) or where rent is extremely high (eg, San Francisco and New York). Covering her work on the violence against Native American women, Pascale assesses the high rates of violence and sex trafficking networks which fuel “man camps”—temporary housing facilities for a large workforce, typically in isolated areas where men are recruited to work on resource extraction or construction projects (eg, oil, gas or mining)—that have a documented correlation with increased rates of sexual assault, violence, and sex trafficking. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe