ashley thomas

Chris Hedges

Jan 24, 2026

The murders of unarmed civilians on the streets of Minneapolis, including the killing today of the intensive-care nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti, would not come as a shock to Iraqis in Fallujah or Afghans in Helmand province. They were terrorized by heavily armed American execution squads for decades. It would not come as a shock to any of the students I teach in prison. Militarized police in poor urban neighborhoods kick down doors without warrants and kill with the same impunity and lack of accountability. What the rest of us are facing now, is what Aimé Césaire called imperial boomerang. Empires, when they decay, employ the savage forms of control on those they subjugate abroad, or those demonized by the wider society in the name of law and order, on the homeland. The tyranny Athens imposed on others, Thucydides noted, it finally, with the collapse of Athenian democracy, imposed on itself. But before we became the victims of state terror, we were accomplices. Before we expressed moral outrage at the indiscriminate taking of innocent lives, we tolerated, and often celebrated, the same Gestapo tactics, as long as they were directed at those who lived in the nations we occupied or poor people of color. We sowed the wind, now we will reap the whirlwind. The machinery of terror, perfected on those we abandoned and betrayed, including the Palestinians in Gaza, is ready for us.

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Was It An Angel Or Adrenaline?

36 pages. Edition of 50. With contributing artist writings by Pearl Abbassinezhad, Loring Baker, Jessica Bardsley, Brit Barton, Andrienne Grennblatt, Lauren Moya Ford, Barbara Tharas, and Tamara Valdez

new drawing

CREATURE COMFORTS a film by NICK PARK. 1989. UK. 5 min. Animals speak out about living in a zoo in this short animated classic from the creator of Wallace & Gromit. LE PETIT CINÉMA CLUB

Working on an animation...