by Bill Weinberg, Skunk

This brief memoir of CounterVortex editor Bill Weinberg's days as a young neo-Yippie in the 1980s first appeared in Canada's Skunk magazine in winter 2012-13. 

On Nov. 14, I went back to 9 Bleecker Street for the 63rd birthday bash of Aron Kay, the famous Yippie Pie-Man.

Aron is something of a legend in activist and radical circles in New York City. Of impressive girth and walking with a cane, he still sports beard and tie-dyed t-shirt, and is viewed as a kind of an elder statesman by some of the Occupy Wall Street crowd. Although his physical condition no longer allows him to engage in the daring tactic that won him notoriety, he has more than earned his sobriquet. Across his career, he has wafted pies into the faces of (in chronological order) right-wing pundit William F. Buckley, New York’s Senator Patrick Moynihan, Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt, anti-feminist mouthpiece Phyllis Schlafly, New York City Mayor Abe Beame, Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy, CIA chief William Colby, Studio 54 empresario Steve Rubell, California governor Jerry Brown, Vietnam-era National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, H-bomb mastermind Edward Teller (who got a special mushroom pie—get it?) and anti-abortion crusader Randall Terry.

by Uri Gordon, Freedom

Last week the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) released a declaration, setting out a new decentralized structure for the autonomous indigenous communities in Mexico's southern state of Chiapas. To get more insight into this change and its significance, Freedom spoke to Bill Weinberg, a longtime journalist and anarchist in New York City. His book about the Zapatistas, Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico, was published by Verso in 2000. He spent much time in Chiapas and elsewhere in Mexico during the 1990s, covering the indigenous movements there, prominently including the Zapatistas. In recent decades he has been spending more time in South America and is now completing a book about indigenous struggles in the Andes, particularly Peru. He continues to follow the Zapatistas and Chiapas very closely, and covers world autonomy movements on his website CounterVortex.org.

by Mariia Lazareva and Erik Kucherenko, Jurist

On August 21, 2023, Ukraine's capital of Kyiv hosted a large international conference entitled Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine: Justice to be Served. The conference was aimed at reinvigorating global efforts to prosecute the crime of aggression against Ukraine—a crime which cannot be prosecuted under the current jurisdictional regime of the International Criminal Court. The conference was especially relevant given that, despite optimistic expectations at the beginning of the year, disagreements between Ukraine and its allies have left some wondering: in the end, will justice be served?