ANTHONY WATKINS – Tallahassee, Florida, USA

In a world where inhumanity has been the norm for millennia, it is easy to look at one group or person and think they have brought us to a new evil. The truth is, both in the west and elsewhere, The Trumps, the Netanyahus, the Modis, the Sunaks, and a dozen or so others are simply playing to the worst of who we have always been.

The west has always used genocide, ethnic cleansing, enslavement, theft of natural resources and knowledge as a way of building great empires, from the Greeks and Romans to the Spanish, French, German, British, and American empires, and the east is no better with the Chinese and Indians, and Africa and South America have not been spared from internal and external exploitation. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and hundreds of smaller “native” religions  have more often been used as tools to harm others than to bring us to some sort of utopian paradise.

The truth is, the coming revolution will probably not change life for the better, as historically, revolutions, though often fired by the passions against the injustice of the rulers, have given a new set of unjust rulers, but only after the poor have become poorer and many are slaughtered in the service of the two sets of oligarchs until one set overthrows the other and resumes the oppression of the many.

Today, in America and in the UK, we are given, at the ballot box a choice between pure fascism of the TORIES/GOP and the pro genocidal “kinder, gentler” Dems/Labour.

Neither side has begun to address a real civil society, a society which has been the clarion call for over a century, and most recently by the USA civil rights movement that called for Universal Justice (both social and economic), a Universal Basic Income, Universal Suffrage, to which succeeding generations have added a Higher Ed to anyone who wants it, at no cost to the student, and a Universal Healthcare System (of which the NHS is not a bad start, but is currently being de-assembled by the Tories)

And now we are seeing a serious call to return the stolen wealth from the countries and indigenous groups robbed by colonial empires, a call for reparations to peoples who have been enslaved and oppressed by these same colonial forces.

Of course a civil society does not support genocide, nor an illegal taking of lands by force, of course we do not yet live in a civil society.

The thing is, the truth of the matter is, that making the changes to create a world where there is no poverty, there is no exploitation, where ALL people are given a basic income, and opportunity, not based on geography or skin color or religion would lead to both a massive bonus of productivity, not in making more trinkets of capitalism, but in making real change in the lives of the whole world, in a sustainable way that slows and reverses the effects of our pollution of the earth. It would create a peacetime dividend if we all worked to make earth a fairer and better place instead of spending trillions in some sick race between the nations.

To expect a coming civil society requires such an act of faith, of hope in something that has NEVER happened before as to almost seem insane. Yet, we could do it. We must do it. But how and when we will do it? In this generation? In this century? In this millennia?