by Henry "Chip" Carey and Jennifer McCoy, Jurist

Americans were shocked by the January 6 storming of the US Capitol by the Proud Boys and other right-wing mobs and militia. International observers and some US politicians began referring to the country as a "banana republic"—a derogatory statement referring to banana-producing countries in Central America with histories of unstable and corrupt governments. Latin Americans generally have had more experience with and can more easily recognize thuggish behavior and its danger right away, be it from the left or the right. They therefore have been at the forefront in taking multilateral and region-wide action to promote and protect democracy.

The Western hemisphere in fact designed a process to collectively defend against threats to democracy like the one just faced by the US: the Inter-American Democratic Charter. This Charter could be invoked now to warn about the dangerous precedent set by an elected president refusing to accept the results of an electoral defeat and inciting violence to distort or prevent a peaceful transfer of power.

Seventy-five years after Japan atomic bombings, a nuclear weapons ban treaty is finally realized

by Gwyn McClelland, The Conversation

The UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons will finally come into force after the 50th country (Honduras) ratified it October 25. The treaty will make the development, testing, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons illegal for those countries that have signed it.

This is an extraordinary achievement for those who have suffered the most from these weapons—including the hibakusha (survivors) of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the islanders who lived through nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific.

Since 1956, the hibakusha in Japan, South Korea, Brazil and elsewhere have been some of the most strident campaigners against the use of these weapons. Among them is a group of Japanese Catholics from Nagasaki whom I interviewed as part of my research collecting the oral histories of atomic bomb survivors.

Both the COVID-19 'New Normal' and Trump Exploitation of the Backlash Pose Grave Threats to Freedom

by Bill Weinberg, Fifth Estate

Around Lower Manhattan, storefronts have been boarded up with plywood since the looting of early June. The plywood has now all been covered with murals and graffiti art on the theme of Black Lives Matter. Throughout June, angry protests were a daily affair, as in cities across the country, and continue intermittently as I write.

There is a sense that the United States is poised at a razor's edge. The moment is ripe with potential for long overdue leaps of social progress—perhaps even a truly revolutionary situation. Anarchist ideas like abolishing the police are entering mainstream discourse with astonishing rapidity.

But as with gains for anarchist forces in Italy in the early 1920s, there is also the potential for a ultra-reactionary backlash—a descent into some kind of updated American variant of fascism.