Rumours of war
News from JAH, 16: 2 February 2026
War in the East, War in the West,
War down South, War up North
Bob Marley, War, Rastaman Vibration, 1976
Soul Rebels,
It’s 85 seconds to midnight. Wars are coming.
As a teenager I was frightened of nuclear war.
I still remember words I came across by Bertolt Brecht, in his play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941):
Don’t yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!
Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,
The bitch that bore him is in heat again.
Today, the bitch that bore him is indeed in heat again.
In 1984 George Orwell imagined a time of perpetual war over “disputed territories,” between great regional blocks, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia.
Sounds like the world that is being born?
A new arms race is on:
Global military spending has topped THREE TRILLION DOLLARS per annum - twelve times more than Overseas Development Assistance. In real terms global military spending has risen by 37% in the last decade.
Militaries are turbocharging the climate crisis. The US military is the largest institutional carbon emitter in the world. Worldwide, carbon emissions from the military place them among the top four emitters if they were countries.
It’s a very, very mad world: confirming an age-old symptom of capitalism in crisis, the New York Times talks about “the new economics of war”: where “Drones worth hundreds or thousands of dollars must be shot down by missiles that cost millions to protect tanks and ships that cost even more.”
Read: In Ukraine, an Arsenal of Killer A.I. Drones Is Being Born in War Against Russia
New Orwellian terms are entering our language: ‘“fire and forget” loitering munitions’; ‘drone-swarms’; ‘AI-assisted killing’; and ‘kill chains’.
AI is the great war-enabler. I prompted ChaptGPT to explain AI’s implications for modern warfare. It told me that it would:
bring frontlines closer to civilian areas;
make wars longer and surrender more difficult;
reduce the ‘cost of entry’ into wars;
increase risks of accidental war or rapid escalation.
The elites will wage war over water, ice, rare minerals, and agricultural land. But they will also wage wars against their own people. Witness Russia/Ukraine (now close to two million dead) Iran (up to 5,000 protestors shot), the continuing genocide against Palestinians, Venezuela, the UAE, Sudan, the USA.
As Pankaj Mishra has pointed out in The World After Gaza, the live streamed genocide in Gaza is just warming us up for the future.
Stop Killer Robots: The implications of AI-assisted killing and surveillance for social justice activism is something activists need to campaign on.
Please, give peace a chance:
War has always been stupid.
Listen to Boy George, Frankie Goes to Hollywood or Bob Dylan damning the masters of war.
If we ever needed a mass, global peace movement it’s now.
Read: Right Makes Might: A Declaration of Moral Power.
Thumbs Up:
One of the most effective grassroots campaigns going on in SA at the moment is being led by a coalition including Real Reform for Early Childhood Development (ECD), Ilifa Labantwana, the Equality Collective and others.
Mobilisation is getting results.
In the contested 2025 budget ECD was allocated R10 billion. Late in 2025 the Cabinet approved the National Action Plan to Accelerate Action for Children, which includes specific proposals to guarantee access to basic nutrition (an immediately realizable constitutional right) for young children.
At a Department of Basic Education lekgotla in January President Ramaphosa told activists that he regretted that he had ‘only lately woken up to the full potential of early learning.’ He also committed to extending the National School Nutrition Programme to all children in ECD centres, whilst recognising that all children have a right to nutritional support.
Of course, politicians are full of promises. We must hold them to their words.
More good news:
In December last year SECTION27 won an important judgment on the duty of the state to remove barriers in access to health care services. Read about it here: Clinic blockades: It is the state’s obligation to remove every barrier to health services
In late January the state finally did what it ought to have done long ago and charged xenophobes blocking access to a school in Durban with public violence: Read March and March, MK Party and Operation Dudula charged over Addington Primary school clashes
Thumbs down:
Whilst South Africa’s GNU (Government of National Unity) undoubtedly has a handful of hard working cabinet ministers, it also has some outright crooks. Patriotic Front leader Gayton McKenzie is a prime example.
This gung-ho, spendthrift, populist is doing great damage to South Africa’s arts sector. The most recent shame led to a letter from the Campaign for Free Expression and a group of civil society organisations to the President. So far the letter has not even been acknowledged.
Activists bookshelf:
In 2016 Indian writer Amtiv Ghosh lamented in his little book, Uncanny and Improbable Events, that the climate crisis had not yet entered into fiction.
That era is over.
Some of the most beautiful literary meditations now have the climate crisis at their heart.
Think of Samantha Harvey’s Orbital.
Think Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know.
I’ve just finished reading another. Helm by Sarah Hall.
Helm is the wind. Not any wind, but a particular wind – Helm – that has blown off a hill named Cross Fell in the Pennines, a range of hills up the back of England, for the whole of the Holocene.
But today “Helm isn’t feeling Helmself, actually. A bit off colour, a bit under the weather.” Today Helm is threatened by accelerating ecological breakdown and atmospheric changes brought on by global heating.
I won’t describe Helm: it’s too rich in its descriptions, too innovative in its structure, too jovial with its word play, too layered, too poetic …
It ends with a great cathartic exhale:
“Helm doesn’t know when Helm will die.
If it will be soon, in a while, or aeons.
If it will happen suddenly, quietly, or violently.
Whether Helm will simply cease one day, or fail slowly, blow by blow on the mountain….”
The novel took Sarah Hall 20 years to breathe, mold, wrestle to life. After the novel’s last word, “Helm”, there is a blank page. Then on the following page Hall has created a ‘maker’s mark’ that kind of sums it up.
Updates from afar:
The Palestinian Action in England hunger strikers have called off their hunger after winning some concessions.
Fuck Off Trump: The Michigan autoworker who heckled Trump gets and was suspended from his job has received an outpouring of donations.
The on the ground resistance to Donald Trump and ICE is growing and evolving its methods. A General Strike in Minnesota was followed last week by strikes and protests across the USA.
Diving for pearls
I don’t know about you, but I started the year weary. A deep fatigue of the heart.
My friend, Alfred Sibanda was murdered on New Year’s eve. For many years Alfred was a kind face serving behind the bar at the Radium Beer Hall in Orange Grove, Johannesburg (read my 2021 celebration of the Radium here). Support his family here.
Then brave cancer activist Thato Moncho died on January 2nd. I spoke at her funeral. I’d made her a promise I didn’t have time to keep.
It felt like the type of open funeral we used to hold in the darkest days of the HIV epidemic. Open to break the stigma. Solidarity from comrades and cancer survivors.
Crocodile tears from the people who contributed to her death.
It’s dis-spiriting.
At times I doubt my will to keep fighting
Then, out of the blue (or rather out of the algorithm) this article by activist Sipho Mthathi, popped up and put things back in perspective.
Read: Moral injury in an age of unravelling — the challenges facing social justice work
I’m sorry if this newsletter has been heavy. As a salve for your soul, let me leave you with a beautiful anti-war song – Shipbuilding – by Elvis Costello.
It’s a song about rearmament, written in 1982 when Margaret Thatcher decided to go to war against Argentina over islands at the opposite end of the world – the Falklands.
907 young people died.
Listen to it. The melody is haunting. The trumpet is mournful. Build it into your morning meditation.
Then finally back to Brecht:
If we could learn to look instead of gawking,
We’d see the horror in the heart of the farce,
If only we could act instead of talking,
We wouldn’t always end up on our arse.
Until next time.
Love and Peace,
Mark
Heywood
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