What Would the Red Ponchos Do?

by C. A. Matthews

A few years ago, there was a fad to wear a bracelet with the letters “WWJD?” inscribed on it. In times of doubt and uncertainty, one was to contemplate what the person whose name in English begins with “J” would do in that particular situation. The “What Would J Do?” method helped a person to confidently take action and not become paralyzed with fear or indecision.

It worked. It was an effective means to an end, because if J wouldn’t be afraid to take action, then you shouldn’t be afraid, either. So, you followed J’s example and carried on boldly without hesitation, trusting that things would work out for the best. The WWJD bracelet wasn’t a magic amulet, but it could indeed work wonders.

The time has come again for a useful aid to help activists who are being overwhelmed with self-doubt and self-recrimination. I’ve read one too many comments online recently that go along the lines of “Why don’t you do something? I don’t know what to do. Nobody seems to know what to do, but somebody has got to do something to make things better, right?”

This sentiment could also be phrased as “We need a revolution to end this corrupt system, but apparently no one is going to lead us, so we might as well stay home.”

The paralysis of not knowing what to do is what the oligarchy depends upon to keep us working class peons in our place. They’ve kept us overwhelmed with one distressing event after another on purpose from the start of the year...

We haven’t been given a moment’s rest from the sensory overload. It’s just too much. We long for a respite from the capitalists’ constant nastiness and relentless stress. Why can’t our side celebrate a victory now and then? If only we had someone fighting against the system to look up to, somebody to emulate, then we’d get off our backsides and start fighting back.

But why are we waiting on a “hero” to lead us into battle? History is full of examples—Gandhi, MLK Jr., Malcolm X—that we could follow. Recent history is providing us with even more.

My suggestion is to pick a person or group with experience you admire and follow their example. Do what they’re doing/have done with maybe a few tweaks for your particular situation and culture. If “plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery,” then why not flatter those we look up to by copying their tactics and methods until we come up with some of our own?

 

To discover a couple of excellent examples of activists to plagiarize, please copy or click on the following link: 

https://therevolutioncontinues.substack.com

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In a sane and compassionate world, would American veterans be imprisoned and tortured (and ignored by their own government) for attempting to deliver food and medicines to starving people? First, a press conference for returned Global Sumud Flotilla hero Phil Tottenham, then a look a current events and how they tie together...

Read more about Phil's experience on this week's Substack post. Also, coming soon to Toledo, To Kill A War Machine, a UK documentary about Palestine Action. Details on Substack.

In a Sane and Compassionate World…

by C.A. Matthews

In a sane and compassionate world… one wouldn’t expect a Nobel Peace Prize winner to be actively working against her own people’s peace and her nation’s sovereignty. One wouldn’t expect a Nobel Peace winner to cooperate with a foreign plot to overthrow a popularly-elected president or cheer on an imperialist power happily bombing the boats of poor fishermen off her country’s coast in a lame attempt to steal what is the world’s largest reserve of oil. What’s world peace got to do with the massive petroleum reserves off the coast of Venezuela anyway?

But this is 2025, and if Donald Trump can’t win a peace prize for funding a genocide in Gaza one day while pretending to set up a permanent ceasefire there the next, then Maria Corina Machado is the Nobel committee’s next best choice. Because everybody loves a class traitor and opportunist like Maria, don’t they?

Read about Maria and her “peace making” at https://www.codepink.org/nobel_peace_prize_peace_has_lost_its_meaning

Sane? Compassionate? You decide.

In a sane and compassionate society… one wouldn’t have to spend billions of dollars on an outlandish propaganda campaign in order to convince the majority of the public that mass murdering innocent civilians (especially women and children) is “okay.” But this is 2025, and the apartheid state of Israel is paying upwards of $7,000 per post (not per day, week, or month but per post) to high-flying online influencers to convince their followers that the genocide of Palestinians is the best thing to happen since TikTok was invented...

 

To read the rest of the article and see how these current events tie together (along with photos from the press conference) please copy or click on the following link: 

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This article is the 541st blog posting of The Revolution Continues. We began in June 2015, and we're still going strong. Please keep reading, sharing, and subscribing to help TRC continue for another ten years. 

You can make a donation at https://paypal.me/camatthews or Buy Me a Coffee or Ko-fi. Every little bit helps since this is my only source of income. Thank you.

 

The Stain Remains

by C. A. Matthews

The graffiti artist Banksy honored the Royal Courts of Justice in London recently with a great original artwork. Its subject caught the public’s eye immediately. The spray-painted scene showed a judge, complete in black gown and white wig, using his gavel to pummel a protester to the ground. The protester is attempting to hold up a protest sign splattered in his own blood. After the recent “I support Palestine Action” protests and massive arrests of people of all ages and conditions, what image of violent censorship by the state could be more appropriate?

According to Novara Media:

The arrests included Steve, a disabled RAF veteran using a walker, Mike Higgins, a 62-year-old blind and disabled man who was previously arrested on 9 August, an NHS midwife, a retired doctor in her 80s, two mental health nurses and 83-year-old Anglican priest Reverend Sue Parfitt.

Of course, this was to be the only Banksy artwork that couldn’t remain so the British people could enjoy its message for years to come. (There’s actually an earlier Banksy decorating a London police box, so his paintings are usually left alone.) The court had the image of the abusive judge and the downtrodden protester scrubbed from the wall outside the courthouse’s entrance within days. Only an ominous dark shadow of the aggressive judge and the beaten protester remains.

If this dark shadow doesn’t tell the story of our times, I don’t know what does. As someone said after the artwork was washed off the courts’ wall: The stain remains.

The powers-that-be can scrub away a Banksy image, censor and arrest us all they like for protesting against the genocide of the Palestinian people, but the stain of the colonizers’ actions toward the ordinary people will never fade away. As the Irish-speaking group Kneecap said in an X post: “You can’t wash away genocide… Your complicity will always remain.”

There is bright red blood splatter on the protester’s placard in the original image, the protester’s own blood shed because of the judge’s evil actions. In the same manner, no matter how hard the Royal Courts of Justice (Ha!) tries to cover for the UK’s support of genocide, blood stains from the ethnically cleansed victims of Gaza will remain on their hands. No amount of “scrubbing” (censoring) or “whitewashing” (using propaganda/hasbara to cover up lies) will ever wipe away the people’s memory of how red those blood stains were.

It’s time for us all in the West to give up trying to lie our way out of our war crimes. The stain remains no matter how violently a country acts toward their own people who courageously keep pointing out the stain of genocide. Trying to shut down mass protests by censoring an organization such as Palestine Action and proscribing it as a “terrorist group” does nothing to hide the UK government’s past or present war crimes. In fact, it only adds to the government’s growing list of crimes against humanity...

 

To read more about how we as activists can help remove the stain of genocide from our world, please copy or click on this link: 

https://therevolutioncontinues.substack.com

There you'll see related article and video links, all the graphics, and be able to leave comments. You can become a free or paid subscriber and receive weekly posts in your email box, along with occasional special articles just for paid subscribers, too.

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This article is the 537th blog posting of The Revolution Continues. We began in June 2015, and we're still going strong. Please keep reading, sharing, and subscribing to help TRC continue for another ten years. 

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Unite for Peace! (Or Die)

by C. A. Matthews

Last September, the United Nations gave the apartheid state of Israel one year to comply with the rulings of the International Court of Justice to end the genocide in Gaza or face the consequences.

That year ends on September 18, 2025. It’s high time for the war criminals’ day of reckoning!

On September 18 (or even before), the United Nations can start imposing serious sanctions on Israel. This include a military embargo as well as establishing a war crimes tribunal. Israel can also be stripped of its credentials as a member state in the General Assembly. The UN then can send in a protective force to distribute food and medical aid and protect Palestinian civilians from further harm at the hands of genocidal Zionists. More than two-thirds of the General Assembly supports creating such measures—it was more than a ten to one ratio for the September 2024 vote—and there’s nothing the US, even with its Security Council veto, can do about these measures.

So, what’s stopping this overwhelming majority of member nations in the United Nations from ending the genocide of the Palestinian people today? The US can’t stop the General Assembly vote or prevent sanctions against Israel from taking effect. Israel can’t prevent itself from being kicked out of the UN if enough member states vote to do so. The time to take decisive action to end this ethnic cleansing is now.

But let’s say that Canada feels pressured by the US not to vote yes on the UN’s Uniting for Peace process. Are there other countries so terrified of the US that they’d be willing to ignore the vast majority of their own people who want to stop the genocide in Gaza? Could the oligarchs of other colonizing countries in particular want to keep their ties with the US and its corporate oligarchs intact? Could they instruct their UN representatives to vote no or abstain on the initiative? Could US allies such as the UK, Germany, France, Canada, or Australia actually vote against Uniting for Peace?

Unfortunately, the answer is yes. But it’s still worth a shot even if there’s only a remote possibility to save lives, right? (...)

 

To read more about how we can start the Uniting for Peace process and how to become a part of the Lifeline for Palestine, please copy or click on this link: 

https://therevolutioncontinues.substack.com

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And watch this video for a short explanation of Uniting for Peace:  https://youtu.be/79m9MSYH3kU 

This article is the 536th blog posting of The Revolution Continues. We began in June 2015, and we're still going strong. Please keep reading, sharing, and subscribing to help TRC continue for another ten years. 

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The People Take Action

 

Listen to Greta speak before the launch of the Global Sumud Flotilla.

The People Take Action

by C. A. Matthews

I’m tired of people whining. It’s not that I don’t whine myself, because we all do from time to time, but some folks’ incessant whining about how terrible things are and how they can’t do anything about them drives me up the wall. If I were a protagonist in a 1940s movie, I’d take the whiners by the shoulders and shake them hard and then slap them across the face to make them stop whining.

I know. I’d get into a helluva big mess if I resorted to physical violence to get the whiners’ attention nowadays. So, I’m left with using only non-violent means, such as writing, to get them to snap out of their whining tirades. So, here goes.

Things are terrible in 2025, but you can do something about them beside whining. You can take action.

The following are examples of people from all over the world who didn’t sit and whine about how terrible things are. They’ve stood up and started moving. They know their actions could make them lose their livelihoods or get them hurt. They realize they could be risking their lives and their reputations by taking action, but they feel it’s worth it. The ends justify the means—and any cost to themselves personally.

First example: American IT workers were willing to risk losing their jobs, their careers and professional reputations in order to make a bold statement protesting Israel’s actions in Palestine and their company’s association with the genocidaires. This is the story of what four former employees of Microsoft did recently ...

Our second example of people taking action instead of whining is global in its importance. From People’s Dispatch:

In July 2025, a new international maritime initiative was launched: the Global Sumud Flotilla. It was formed by four major coalitions: the Global Campaign to Return to Palestine, the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, the Maghreb Sumud Convoy, and the Southeast Asian Nusantara Sumud Initiative. The Global Sumud Flotilla is set to depart on August 31, 2025. Its goal is clear: to break Israel’s illegal blockade on Gaza, to deliver urgent humanitarian aid, and to expose the genocidal war waged on Palestinians.

The flotilla is composed of dozens of small civilian vessels carrying activists, parliamentarians, doctors, and trade unionists, alongside humanitarian cargo. More than 39 national delegations have pledged participation, making this the largest people-led maritime effort in solidarity with Gaza since the 2010 “Mavi Marmara”...

 

And be sure to register now for the webinar to learn how to become a part of the Lifeline for Palestine. https://lifelineforpalestine.com/

 

To read more about how and why we should take action (and not just sit around and whine), please copy or click on this link: 

https://therevolutioncontinues.substack.com

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Subscribe to The Revolution Continues on Substack today. Power to the people!  

 And also watch https://youtu.be/CtUGZXM_-Lc

 

This article is the 535th blog posting of The Revolution Continues. We began in June 2015, and we're still going strong. Please keep reading, sharing, and subscribing to help TRC continue for another ten years. 

You can make a donation at https://paypal.me/camatthews or Buy Me a Coffee or Ko-fi. Every little bit helps since this is my only source of income. Thank you.