On December 26, 2025, Democracy Now aired an interview with Arundhati Roy:
Look at the psychology that is being forced upon us. We are, all of us, able to reach at night for an image of a child starving or a person being blown up in Gaza easier than reaching for a glass of water. And we are helpless. We are able to do nothing more than keep speaking about it.
I’ve come to a stage where I feel humiliated to have to discuss it, because what is there to discuss? What is there to discuss when you’re murdering children, destroying hospitals, destroying universities, murdering journalists, and boasting about it, boasting about it?
I think there are surveys that say that almost 90% of the population of the world wants this to stop, but there is no connection between democratically elected governments and the will of the people. It’s ended.
So the whole charade of Western liberal democracy is as much of a corpse under the rubble as the tens of thousands of Palestinians.
One of my books of essays has been dedicated to those who have learned to divorce reason from hope. And we have to hope. We have to be unreasonable, and we have to hope, and we have to do what we have to do.
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“Behaving magnificently in defiance of all that is bad around us”
We share again these reflections from Howard Zinn:
To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places - and there are so many - where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."
(“You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train”)
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We thank again countless people across the U.S. and Canada, and north-south-east-west on our one and only planet. People who, when “the charade of Western liberal democracy is as much of a corpse under the rubble as the tens of thousands of Palestinians”, continue to ‘be unreasonable, who have hope, and who do what we have to do’.
People who give us strength and inspiration to continue our work “in however small a way, in defiance of all that is bad around us”.
Grahame Russell
Camila Rich
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Year-end newsletters
