14 years ago, when Julian Assange leaked US army intelligence documents about the Baghdad airstrikes on Wikileaks — and then more incriminating documents, including Baghdad and Afghanistan war logs — we thought: “Now we’re getting somewhere ... now our political system will heave.”

It didn’t.

But now we know what happens to whistleblowers when they stick their neck out.

So it takes incredible courage. But here’s the thing: it shouldn't be up to some brave individual to step up and illuminate systemic institutional violence. Those secrets should never be kept.

Secret-keepers should feel shame — crippling embarrassment.

This is what we holler from the rooftops — until keeping secrets becomes unconscionable: #MakeSecrecyTaboo

Step 1: We change the way we talk about secrecy. We start talking about it the way we talk about germs, viruses, bribery, insider trading — inherently filthy, something that needs to be excised from the body politic.

Step 2: We embark on an all-out fight to get rid of secrecy at all levels of our democratic system.

No more hush hush stuff at city hall! No more hidden police videos. No more closed-door trade deals. Or in-camera grand jury deliberations. Or secret presidential liaisons with foreign leaders.

We mandate jail-time for politicians and CEOs who do secret things. We shame them the way we shame people who lie, pay bribes, commit sexual harassment.

We ridicule and punish government departments that issue redacted documents. We jump on secrecy whenever and wherever we see it starting to build, from City Hall to the CIA.

If we can get this done, get transparency enshrined, then total openness can become a critical part of the mythology of the 21st century.

The stakes are huge. As long as elites and powerful forces are able to concoct wars and geopolitics in secret, we the people will never see a single day of peace on Earth. Not a single minute. Hatred, greed, jealousy, fear may be the ingredients of war, but secrecy is the heat that it needs to rise ... So long as secrecy prevails, peace, unity and brotherhood will always remain dreams.

But the truth shall set us free.

He couldn't stand straight lines and right angles, which aren't much found in nature. Things not made by us mostly curve. Nothing worthwhile is plum, level or square.

So observed Gaetano Pesce, the great Italian designer, who died at age 84.

From this man's brow burst organic, protoplasmic designs for things like bookcases and sofas, blazing with intense, saturated color.

One of them went supernova: the zaftig UP5 armchair, dubbed La Mama, was a shout-out to feminism. Women, he felt, are "victims of male prejudices and fears and stupidity." (As a young macho guy, he too was guilty of that same pig-headedness, he admitted, before he got knocked off that horse by a woman he adored.)

He kicked against a world the rest of us live in without giving it a second thought.

The design of modern cities appalled him. He chided the architects: what you've built is "the very image of non-freedom." In an exhibit for the Louvre, he made office towers out of meat, which gradually rotted until the stench became overpowering.

He started out nonlinear and just got gooier, until by the time he was in his eighties he was pretty much just liquid. "As liquid as time," he said.

Maybe every generation feels confronted by some crisis that will determine the fate of the planet. But unless your head is buried in the sand, it’s not possible to be ignorant of the extraordinary planetary crisis that confronts all of us today. Environmental collapse no longer merely threatens: we are well into it and it’s already apparent that civilization as we know it is going to be transformed in some very uncomfortable ways by the mutually-reinforcing breakdown of ecological systems, especially global climate change, ozone depletion, rapid disappearance of many species, and various types of pollution, including some we don’t know about yet.

Although our globalizing economic system is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the biosphere, the ceos who direct this system (as much as anyone controls it) can’t plan much further than the next quarterly report, anymore than politicians can think further than the next election. Overpopulation, pandemics, and the increasing deprivation of basic necessities for vast numbers of people threaten social breakdown, while the media – profit-making enterprises whose primary focus is the bottom-line, rather than investigating and revealing the truth – distract us with infotainment and assurances that the solution is “more of the same”: keep the faith, hang in there long enough and eventually technological development and economic growth, more consumerism and greater GNP will resolve our problems.

As if that were not enough, our ignorant, corrupt and arrogant leaders, or rather rulers, have shown themselves to be inept at everything except lying and gaining power. Now that their deceit and incompetence are coming back to haunt them, their popularity has been plummeting – but at the same time they have been consolidating their power. The faces will change, while the power structure remains much the same, unless we find ways to do something about it.

At the most precise moment in history when it seemed a completely mechanical, vertical and isolated form of existence, the Gaza genocide has sparked a long-forgotten truth: that we (the people) are creatures of community; that we only find true joy and meaning in connecting with other people. That we cannot be happy when others around us suffer. Palestine is an actual and concrete struggle but it is also, and crucially so, an instrument of philosophical liberation of universal importance.

And these kids are holding onto it as a buoy, so as not to drown in an ocean of cold and meaningless rituals that have no resonance with the human soul: be born, learn a craft, accumulate material things, obey the system, have a family, die. They don’t want it. They looked into their screens and there they found life, and what it really means. They want Palestinians to stop being mass murdered, displaced, and dehumanized, and they want the same thing for themselves. They want to feel human, and they reject the system that tries so desperately to humiliate, denigrate, and dismantle them. The Palestinian Revolution may yet prove to be more consequential than the French one.

— Alon Mizrahi

When you immigrated to the holy land, when you were just a tiny fraction of the people there, you could have come with an open hand, ready to share the land with the indigenous people there.

But no. You came with a closed fist.

Yes it was a tough neighborhood; you were not welcome; wars were launched against you. But even still, you could have done it differently. In those all-important early days, when trust is forged or fractured, you drove Palestinians out of their villages, massacring many. That was your original sin — your Nakba.

And then in the years that followed, you closed borders, built walls, expanded settlements, set up two-tiered land and water and justice systems. You persecuted and jailed those who resisted ... “mowed the grass” in Gaza whenever it grew too high. You ignored international law, the Geneva convention and UN Security Council resolutions. And you refused to ever consider the right of refugees to return.

Admit it, O people of Israel: you failed to respect the humanity and dignity of generations of Palestinians. You treated them like subservient, second-class citizens — never as equals.

With the insight of a people persecuted for millennia, exterminated in pogroms and mass-murdered in a Holocaust, you could have found, in your wise rabbinic tradition, a way for Arabs and Jews to live together. But you didn’t want to share the land. You wanted it all. And in the process, you turned your Zionist project into a nightmare; the West Bank into a patchwork of disconnected enclaves surrounded by your settlements; Gaza into an open-air prison — and now a killing field.

It’s too late to rewrite history. But you can change the script you’re holding in your hands.

Show us. The world waits for you to conquer your fears and, in the years to come, emerge as a shining example of peaceful coexistence for the people of the 21st century to emulate.

O People of Israel, the time has come to loosen up and play some jazz.

— Kalle Lasn

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Hamas, at heart, are freedom fighters.

There, I said it. And now I'll probably pay for it.

Because there are boundaries around how we can talk about Oct 7. You can support the Palestinians: yes. But showing any sympathy at all for Hamas, is beyond the pale — you'll get doxxed, cancelled, vilified as an antisemite and worse.

But fuck it, I'll say it anyway: They're freedom fighters!‍

What these young men actually did on Oct 7 was brutal and barbaric and in many cases impossible to defend. But why they did it, that's easier to understand. When you put a certain kind of person in a chokehold for long enough, they go off in ways you're not going to like. Imagine you — and your people — are fenced in, caged up in an open-air prison for sixteen years. You have no hope, no dignity, no future. You're mowed down by remote-control machine guns if you wander too close to the razor-wire fence. Your daily caloric intake is restricted to near-starvation levels. Your children routinely have suicidal thoughts. And there's no light at the end of this — you're trapped like an animal.

So what do you do? You burst out of your cage with feral ferocity — you're a barbaric terrorist yes, yes, yes — but fuck it, you're a freedom fighter too.

— Kalle Lasn

I am four. A man who is supposed to take care of me touches me in a way that I know is wrong, even when I don't have the vocabulary to explain it.

When my mother, white with rage, complains to my family, she is told off.

In Kerala there is a saying: whether the leaf encroaches on the thorn or the thorn encroaches on the leaf, it's the leaf that tears. In other words, it is not their job to protect the girl; it is the mothers' responsibility to protect her daughter.

I hear what's said about me: Too bossy. Talks too much. Doesn't have enough girlfriends. Doesn't help out in the kitchen.

At a family vacation, a man six times my age puts his disgusting mouth on mine without my consent. My aunts and uncles are in the room just next door.

Many years later, recounting this story to my mother, I realize the violence I experienced was a mere slight compared to what she and her mother and her grandmother were subjected to.

Injustice is passed on generation to generation. If you're lucky, the violence gets diluted a little.