The genocide in Gaza is the moment of moral conscience for this generation, as Vietnam was in the 1960s. As Derek Sayer writes, Israel’s violence and the repression on American university campuses are intimately connected. It is time we lifted our heads from our everyday evasions and diversions, our compromises and complicities, and started to listen to the kids.

The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, The Long Retreat: Strategies to Reverse the Decline of the Left, by sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky. As well as bringing Russian and Western thinkers into dialogue, Kagarlitsky draws upon his experiences as a Russian dissident since the latter days of the Soviet Union in this encyclopaedic analysis of leftist strategy.

Over the past six months, newspapers and television shows in the US have generally written about Israel’s genocidal violence using passive voice. Even on social media, the ax fell on key phrases; for instance, despite his professions of commitment to free speech, Elon Musk said that terms such as “decolonization” and phrases such as “from the river to the sea” would be banned on X.

The 2024 budget does not get us anywhere near the kind of public leadership that we need. But the increase to capital gains taxes is an important, if minor, reversal of tax cuts that increased the wealth and power of the richest families at the expense of everyone else. That increase needs to be defended against the vested interests that will refuse any challenge to their power.

We are seeing opposing world views play out in clashes between police and professors and their students across American college campuses. It is a harbinger of encampments that have already started to sprout here. Let us hope that authorities and institutions do not see fit to trample upon free speech and academic freedom, mistaking a call for life for its opposite.

Israel’s Western backers know they are losing. They know that, despite the carnage the Israeli military is unleashing on Gaza, it is not any closer to defeating Hamas. They know that Israel is quickly becoming a pariah state, and as its global reputation sinks like an anchor, it’s dragging down Western credibility with it.

There are many shameful periods in American history. The genocide we carried out against Indigenous peoples. Slavery. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya. The genocide in Gaza, which we fund and support, is of such monstrous proportions that it will achieve a prominent place in this pantheon of crimes. History will not be kind to most of us. But it will bless and revere these students.

The modern anti-war movement is gaining steam once again in the context of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. Yet, for its part the climate movement has largely ignored a growing body of evidence showing that militarism is, as sociologist Prof Kenneth Gould describes, “the single most ecologically destructive human endeavour.” Now is the time for that to change.

Cory Doctorow’s The Internet Con explains how the promise of a free and open internet was lost to predatory business practices and the rush to commodify our lives. In this excerpt, he explains how the history of technology is one long guerrilla fight where the giants wield network effects against scrappy upstarts whose asymmetrical warfare weapon of choice is low switching costs.

Budget 2024 took a significant step towards tax fairness by increasing the capital gains inclusion rate on Canada’s richest individuals and corporations. Tellingly, a measure designed to tax the rich to fund crucial public investments has caused a wave of outrage amongst a very vocal minority. Muneeb Javaid of Canadians for Tax Fairness explains.