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The siege of Gaza is crushing the people who live under it, and it is crushing all of our imaginations.

The essays compiled in this special issue of Key Words address the theme of crisis. But which crisis?

In June it was finally settled, the short-term detention centers run by the U.S. Border Patrol were—quite technically—concentration camps. While they are not the extermination camps of the Holocaust, the rounding up and mass incarceration of people who haven’t seen a judge fits the definition exactly, according to expert Andrea Pitzer. The legal definition of concentration camps are “places of forced relocation of civilians into detention on the basis of group identity.”

Why is war, or the threat of it, a permanent feature of our society? The most common answers point to contingencies–the psychology of particular world leaders, for example, or the specific gains to a company to be made from a conflict. Alternatively, they rely on universal claims that religion causes eternal strife or that conflict is part of our human nature.

We cannot win a currency war by competitive currency devaluations that trigger a “race to the bottom,” and we cannot win a trade war by competitive trade barriers that simply cut us off from the benefits of cooperative trade. More favorable to our interests and values than warring with our trading partners would be to cooperate in sharing solutions, including banking and credit solutions.

The partisan condemnation of white supremacy that has taken shape during the Trump era has reduced anti-racist critique to political theater.

The ship was seized in the Panama canal according to the Venezuela government.

It is often claimed that disabled persons are invisible, disregarded by mainstream society, and irrelevant to the workings of society.

U.S. police agencies, including the FBI, are incapable of mounting an effective offensive against their soul mates in the armed white right.

The latest report about kidnappings, rendition, ‘black sites’ and torture is a remarkable piece of investigative work. It provides us with nothing less than a litany of shocking evidence and testimony and at 403 pages it makes for truly grim reading. This article is made up of a very brief set of extracts from the just-released  CIA Torture Unredacted report.

On 6 August 1945, the United States military dropped a bomb that contained 64kg of uranium-235 over the city of Hiroshima (Japan). The bomb took just over 44 seconds to fall from 9,400 metres and detonated 580 metres above the Shima Surgical Clinic. Over 80,000 people died instantly. This was the first use of the nuclear bomb.

The Corriente Revolucionaria Bolívar y Zamora interviewed Ángel Prado, the spokesperson of the Socialist Commune El Maizal, a campesino organization dedicated to building socialism at the grassroots level in Venezuela.

The Reagan administration in 1982 coerced National Public Radio (NPR) to cover more favorably the U.S. terrorist war then being waged against Nicaragua.

In the past couple weeks, President Trump has gone on a racist, red-baiting rampage against four congresswomen elected in 2018. The four women of color–Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley–are now collectively known in the media as the “squad.”

Both mainstream Jewish institutions and non-Jewish liberal and conservative commentators took it upon themselves to censure Ocasio-Cortez’s use of “concentration camps,” with Rep. Liz Cheney accusing the freshman representative of “demean[ing]” the memory of those who died in the Holocaust.

A PRINCIPAL GOAL of the Trump administration’s policy at the U.S.-Mexico border —and in Central America, considered of late only in relation to that border-has been to get other governments to handle the increase in migrants seeking to enter the United States.

Fifty years after it was published, The State in Capitalist Society remains indispensable for any socialist movement with ambitions of government.

On August 2, the withdrawal of the U.S. from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was formalized. The treaty signed in 1987 had led to the destruction of over 2,600 missiles by the U.S. and Russia

Here’s a sentence for you: The Arctic is burning. Yes, that Arctic—the traditionally cold and wet one, large swaths of which are being consumed by an astonishing number of wildfires, from Russia to Greenland to Alaska.

The New Deal has recently become a touchstone for many progressive efforts, illustrated by Bernie Sanders’ recent embrace of its aims and accomplishments and the popularity of calls for a Green New Deal.