A decade ago, Brand was a figure beloved by the left in the UK, someone who – quite rightly in my view – challenged the stagnation and decadence of a parliamentary democracy in which the popular vote had ceased to have any significant meaning; both major parties at that time following the ‘austerity’ line that emboldened the rich and crippled the poor.  To the outrage of nice middle-class liberals, Brand averred that casting a vote was a waste of time – voting in itself was not the issue, what we had to ask ourselves was why there was no one worth voting for!

On December 21, 1919, the US military ship the USAT Buford set sail for the new nation formed in revolution the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). On board were two hundred forty nine anarchists, syndicalists and other so-called undesirable aliens, including anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. The Buford had a history as a troop carrier; it had carried US troops to the Caribbean and to the Philippines during and not long after the Spanish-American war. This mass deportation was part of a decades long campaign by the US government and the business interests it serves to destroy the revolutionary labor movement in the United States.

What Americans are witnessing in Gaza is a reiteration of our own history in real-time: Dispossess indigenous people, violently crush their resistance, blame any retaliatory “massacres" as an excuse to use overwhelming military power to wipe out their entire populations, confine the survivors to “reservations" on marginal sites, then invade even that land when gold, timber, oil or water is found, justifying the theft by citing your own stature as a superior society, which will put the looted land and resources to the highest use possible...

When Cyprus was illegally invaded by the Turkish Armed Forces in the summer of 1974, the international community took notice. Condemnations were issued. There were reports about the Cypriots who were killed, the women raped, the families separated, those who went missing (many still unaccounted for), the displaced refugees. We would only later come to find out the true depth of the atrocities committed or hear about the mass graves into which Cypriot bodies were indiscriminately tossed to quickly dispose evidence of the massacres. But if you are reading this, you likely don’t know much about Cyprus, you may have not even heard the country’s name, let alone understand much about its past. If so, you are in a solid majority. In fact, I wrote this piece to explain why Cyprus and its history is unfamiliar to many and how this relates to what’s unfolding in Palestine and Israel right now.