Podcast: I Discuss the Shameful State of the World, and Resistance and Hope in 2025 with Andy Bungay for Riverside Radio

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If you have the time and the inclination, please check out my latest interview with my colleague Andy Bungay, posted below as a YouTube podcast, and originally broadcast, as the latest in an ongoing series of monthly interviews, during Andy’s shows last Saturday and Sunday on Riverside Radio, a community radio station in Wandsworth, in south west London, and subsequently made available on his Mixcloud page here and here. I’m pleased to note that Andy also played the latest live recordings by my band The Four Fathers, as well as ‘They Don’t Care’, the latest online single by my son Tyler, the beatboxer and singer known as The Wiz-RD.

In a freewheeling 80-minute discussion, we focused on some of the many profoundly dispiriting events dominating our lives as 2024 draws to a close — the imminent return as the US president of Donald Trump, the ongoing genocidal carnage being inflicted by Israel on the trapped Palestinian civilian population of the Gaza Strip, and the growing menace of catastrophic climate change.

All are thoroughly depressing topics, of course, but unlike last month, when my discussion with Andy, available here as ‘World on Fire: Gaza, Climate Collapse and the Collective Derangement of Western Politicians’, was rather dark (almost certainly because of the intensity of Israel’s “genocide within a genocide” in northern Gaza), this month’s conversation was threaded through with resistance and hope.

Please feel free to listen, via YouTube, to the podcast below:

Perhaps it’s naive of me, but I do genuinely think that all of the horrendous problems that we discussed are reaching tipping points, which may, against all the odds, lead to movements of resistance on a scale that we cannot currently imagine.

Trump, of course, is the face of a far-right cult that cannot possibly provide the antidote that people need for the failures of the Democrats to deliver much beyond support for endless war and genocide and the ruinous policies of neoliberalism that have dominated our economies for the last 40 years, because, despite the populist racism of today’s far-right Republican Party, and their claims that they will prioritize ‘America First’, they are, pretty much, as neoliberal and warmongering as the Party they are replacing.

In addition, on climate collapse, the gravest threat any of us have ever known, Trump and the Republicans will be even worse than the Democrats, and will be exposed as charlatans, as climate-related destruction gets worse, because it will, and as their empty and cynical climate change denial, in the service of the oil and gas companies, becomes ever more apparent.

Climate change denial is also going to keep hitting the buffers everywhere around the world, but perhaps especially in other countries in the west, whose populations are perhaps most able to shake off their torpor as their homes and their livelihoods are destroyed, but they discover that no one in power is interested in helping them.

Another potential tipping point involves Israel’s genocide in Gaza, thoroughly and shamefully endorsed by almost all the governments of the west, and their mainstream media, because it has revealed, more starkly than ever before, how, beneath their civilized veneer, those with power and influence maintain a colonial mindset, and are, apparently, completely happy to support the kind of genocidal violence that was routine when “we” were invading and conquering the world, in those centuries of relentless violence, subjugation and exploitation when our global empires were established.

Perhaps I’ll be proven wrong, but it does seem to me that, when the genocidal colonial mask has slipped so prominently with regard to Gaza, there is no way that any of those with power and influence can put it back on, and that, in addition, as the impacts of climate collapse also become more severe, and our leaders yet again fail to take any of the necessary action to tackle its causes, or to care for those affected, unrest will increase, perhaps exponentially, until there is either significant political change, or the leaders of our corrupt and broken political parties find that they can no longer rely on us for support.

POSTSCRIPT: On December 23, The Prisma, a UK-based online “multicultural newspaper”, published ‘Parallels between the imprisonment of Gazans and Guantánamo’, an article by Andy Bungay promoting his new monthly focus, on his radio show, on “voices of resistance and for change”, and welcoming my contributions.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s new Substack account, set up in November 2024, where he’ll be sending out a weekly newsletter, or his RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.