105: June 2025

Hello, welcome to Border Crossing issue one hundred and five, I hope you’re well, and thank you for reading.

If you’re new, a very warm welcome onboard, thank you very much for signing up and supporting my writing. It means a lot. A big nod of gratitude to new subscriber Karren, with two ‘r’s, your lovely message came at exactly the right moment.

This issue, I’ll waffle at length about… how the ‘Star Wars’ TV show Andor sent me back to classic ‘revolution literature’, Che Guevara’s failed guerrilla rebellion in Bolivia, and more broadly on how we think and talk about political violence today. I started off mainly thinking about manifestos but that got a bit lost along the way.

Right, on we roll. xx

fantasy premier league

Congratumalations Rosie Arnold (Slaney FC) for winning the Border Crossing FPL 2024/2025 season with a solid 2,428 points. Funnily enough, I suspect Rosie doesn’t even read this newsletter, so I’ll have to email her. Here’s the top five. Great work Jamie, Sarah, Phil and Daniel, cheekily slipping into the top five on the final week. I came a disappointing tenth, despite doing great up until February.

local log roll

• Local podcast plug: here in Sussex, we’re getting a fast-tracked local government ‘devolution’ (of sorts) that will re-define our corner of southern England in complex ways — with an elected mayor too, for better or worse. It’s coming so quickly that many people down here aren’t even aware of it yet. This month a new podcast series launched to discuss these changes: Sussex And The City is presented by Richard Freeman and I’m onboard for editing, sound design, music and some sexy voiceover advert stuff. It’s business-oriented and sits in the political centre-ground (goes for a kind of optimistic, thoughtful neutrality) and it’s well worth checking out, if Brighton/Sussex devolution may affect you.

• My wife Rifa just announced she’s running an in-person Claim Your Vision workshop this autumn, on a ‘pay what you can’ basis. It’s on Sat 25th October at Brighton Friends Meeting House. It’s women-only (of course trans and non binary inclusive).

gems

1

Wonderful recent episode of BBC Radio 4’s Arts & Ideas about wolves.

2

Sarah Stein Lubrano in The Guardian summarises how argument and sharing opinion doesn’t change minds, where compassionate familiarity and socialising do.

3

I’m blown away by Shon Faye’s new book Love In Exile (purchased after her author event with Torrey Peters at Brighton Festival). This may be a modern classic.

4

Brian Davids of Hollywood Reporter had one of the first interviews with Andor breakout star Elizabeth Dulau, whose first professional role, straight out of RADA, was her mesmerising, intense performance as Kleya Marki.

5

Mike Berbiglia interviews Nikki Glaser on his Working It Out podcast.

6

London sex writer Girl On The Net just ran a fascinating guest blog by Komplicated Kitty, about her ‘collaring’ ceremony with her husband, years after they were first married. Note: this piece isn’t ‘porn’ per se but a lot of Girl On The Net’s content could be defined that way, the site is definitely NSFW, so click only if you won’t be offended by (or get in trouble for looking at) adult content.

7

I’ve resisted banging on about it, so I’ll allow myself this heartwarming personal angle from the Crystal Palace FA Cup triumph: Adam Crafton’s interview for The Athletic with Carrie and Ken, parents of American defender Chris Richards. He became only the third ever American to win the cup. Next summer, Richards could easily become a global superstar, he has a great shot at making the USA first team at their ‘home’ World Cup.

potato gems

In another vaguely football-related moment, I celebrated Friday’s International Day of Potato by travelling to Milan in Italy* to eat at Botinero, the restaurant owned by Inter legend Javier Zanetti (who these days is Vice President of the club) where they offer a remarkably reasonable starter (mentioned this week on Totally Football Show podcast) —

•

Rebellion rhetoric: what Andor understands about political violence

Lonni Jung —
And what do you sacrifice?

Luthen Rael —
Calm. Kindness. Kinship. Love. I’ve given up all chance at inner peace, I made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote fifteen years ago, to which there’s only one conclusion: I’m damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight: they’ve set me on a path from which there’s no escape. I yearned to be a saviour against injustice without contemplating the cost and by the time I look down, there’s no longer any ground beneath my feet.

What is my sacrifice? I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see. And the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror, an audience, or the light of gratitude.

So what do I sacrifice? Everything!

•

Some threads of thinking that I spun off into — some rabbit holes I fell down — watching (twice) the astonishingly good ‘Star Wars’ TV series Andor, were various, classic, rebellion texts and revolution literature that I grew up with. Take the French leftist writer and philosopher Regis Debray. I still have a battered pocket hard-back copy of his translated essay collection, Strategy For Revolution that I read as a pre-teen. It has ‘old book’ smell, unopened for a long time.

These incendiary essays from the early sixties get Debray arrested, tortured and imprisoned in 1967 by the US-backed military junta in Bolivia, when he’s caught hanging out with Che Guevara at that great, crucial moment of revolutionary failure.

These are unabashedly tactical, unflinching works — absolutely comfortable with political violence, framed in the binary manner (‘our’ violence, opposed to ‘their’ violence) — yet essays gathered, translated into English and published at that time by (the not-exactly-anarchist!) Penguin Books.

We live in such a different era, in terms of the freedom to express dangerous ideas, at least of (what remains of) the left.

Debray’s Bolivian arrest — on trumped up charges of being actively participating in Che’s group, when he was in fact there as a journalist, brings his writing quickly to international fame. This collection climaxes with his infamous, ringing (and yes, courageous) statement to the kangaroo court, after he’s been found guilty and sentenced to thirty years: ‘I Regret I Am Innocent’. By this point, Che and the rebels are dead, the wheels fallen off the Bolivian uprising, with (surprise) the C.I.A. deeply involved on behalf of the crushing dictatorship it helped install, just a few years before. The USA is still reeling and livid from losing Cuba as a luxury resort. Here is a key front-line in the Cold War. During Debray’s interrogation, there are quiet Americans at the back of the cell, asking some of the questions, doing none of the beating.

In the essay ‘I Regret That I Am Innocent’ Debray manages to thread the needle of passionately stating his intellectual support for Che’s revolution, while at the same time evidencing that he’s had nothing physical or illegal to contribute, and was only useful as a writer.

(I’m going to try not to make this all about Gaza but, as I type, so far over 180 journalists and media workers have been killed there, with dozens more injured and several still missing.)

As the sixties end, a vocal international campaign on Regis Debray’s behalf quickly grows, including interventions by Pope Paul VI and Jean-Paul Sartre. Most usefully, in 1970, Charles de Gaulle makes a phone call and Debray gets released, after three years in captivity. A personal connection swung it more than anything, apparently: Debray’s Grandmother is an old friend of the Mayor of Calais, who puts in a word with de Gaulle. It probably helps that, by then, Bolivia’s dictator René Barrientos has himself been killed in a helicopter ‘accident’, so the junta is at that moment a bit of a headless chicken. If Che had been more patient, or luckier, survived the decade, perhaps he might have won the day in Bolivia.

It’s all so much luck and chance. Another thing Andor impactfully foregrounds in the ‘Star Wars’ mythos.

Between 1970 and 1973, Debray spends time with Allende in Chile, until Pinochet’s (yup, American-backed) troops roll in on the 11th September and that far-right capitalist dictatorship is established, to last through the eighties and kill tens of thousands. Debray goes home to France, goes legit, and over coming decades will be gradually assimilated into the liberal establishment.

Before Andor, I last remembered the existence of Regis Debray when one of his books popped up in a John le Carré TV adaptation. Here’s young Florence Pugh, le Carré’s ‘little drummer girl’, sitting on the beach in Italy (Italy?) ostentatiously reading Debray, about to get seduced by hunky Alexander Skarsgård. I think the book being there is intended to signal naive, middle-class myopic leftist romanticism, except hardly anyone watching this spy thriller in the UK would’ve picked up the reference. Like countless great figures of the hard left, through this era of robust capitalist stewardship of history, Debray is forgotten outside France. His later life of mainstream political success and influence gives him a longer story at home, but internationally, I don’t know how any of that stuff is remembered at all.

I read Debray the first time as an eleven year old child, thrilled and inspired by his heady guerrilla rhetoric and — alongside a precious paperback biography of Ho Chi Minh, alongside Ivan Illich’s gentler but no less radical Deschooling Society — Debray became a backbone of my earliest global awareness beyond the grey domestic drudgery of the miner’s strike and CND and Thatcher being a vicious cunt. This was the exoticism of the righteous forest dweller. Another ‘Star Wars' reference: Ewoks, occupied by Empire, in Return Of The Jedi. Rebellion as mass marketed merchandising opportunity. Che Guevara, iconic on t-shirts throughout the eighties and nineties, ubiquitous as Bob Marley and then Kurt Cobain and now Frida Kahlo.

Cringy, naive but well-held: my taste grew for social justice (and Marxism) with south-east Asian and Latin American flavours to counterpoint the obviously horrifying corruption of the Soviet regime. I began to self-describe as a ‘communist’ with just enough vocab to sound like I knew what that meant. I wrote Amnesty International ‘Urgent Action’ letters to Pinochet’s Chile and Apartheid South Africa. I moved my Barclays account to a different bank and boycotted Nestlé. Codgity old “just say no!” Reagan was my fucking Satan. So it goes.

Fourteen years later, I went back to Debray, same book — mid-twenties, full-time office job, turn of the millennium, after Britpop but before (the other) 9/11 and long before the 2008 financial crash — and now it felt anachronistic and old-fashioned, too male and certain of itself, and I found its singularity of vision and that first-hand comfort with violence quite unsettling.

Today though, 2025, skimming these fierce, intense old passages (ha, literally written in tents) my gut reaction feels closer to the eleven-year-old me, than the twenty-four-year-old me. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the recent shape of the world and our shared, sometimes overwhelming, sense of powerlessness.

Reflected in today’s black mirror, such dangerous starting points fill these pages —

Intellectuals should not plead their own case. Unless an intellectual has really participated in armed struggle, with the risks and danger which this entails, all his answers … could easily become a pretentious comedy.

Or, say —

Armed struggle understood as an art is meaningless except in the framework of politics understood as a science.

Because, what Regis Debray is — really — is an unwavering Lenin-like thinker on the technicalities and administrative requirements of revolution: the strategy, the action plan, far moreso than the ethics. This is how it gets high risk: he leans hard into the ‘how to’ aspect. The campaign is a task to be broken down into smaller tasks. Rebellion thinking as project management. He wants them to win, rather than messing about with complex arguments of meaning and morality. Or at least, save those until afterwards, when you’re building your afterwards.

He still romanticises rural guerrilla warfare, even as others in the same struggle worry that it’s out-of-date. Like, when Che came back defeated from The Congo, he was warned not to go to Bolivia and told he’d be killed, but he insisted. Che was actually unwilling to come home from that African conflict, at first preferring to fight personally to the death, alone if he had to, even knowing the cause was lost, simply for the worldwide signal it would send and for what it would leave behind. He understood his own iconoclasm. Castro talked him out of it.

This is precisely how characters in Andor, ‘Klaya Marki’ (Elizabeth Dulau) and ‘Luthen Rael’ (Stellan Skarsgård, neat coincidence) are working. As such, written as well as it is written, by the great showrunner Tony Gilroy, it makes for utterly majestic television fiction. They don’t need to reiterate or re-litigate underlying premises, yet the moral compromises all around them are all the more vivid.

With some shame, I’ve been overly-influenced by that ‘tactics’ angle, while sliding chaotically around the deeper arguments. For example, despite having Quakerism-derived pacifism as a personal moral baseline (so actual violence against people for any cause has long felt of the question) — still I flirt in creative work and thought with that kind of imagery and narrative. Whole albums of the stuff. In private conversation, wrestling with notions that bounce around the utilisation (or not) of violence, until friends say — wait, for fuck’s sake can we just put our smartphones in the next room? I quickly deem hypocritical those who espouse (or simply permit the idea of) violence for one cause, while angrily rejecting it on moral grounds for another.

Today’s progressive UK protest movements, even the ‘extreme’ ones who get arrested for disrupting stuff, are resolutely, passionately anti-violence. The centre-ground weaponises fear of, and disgust at, violence as a kind of catch-all condemnation package to hobble the whole enterprise. Meanwhile it simultaneously (aggressively, deliberately) overlooks, ignores, and re-writes the actual, constant, relentless, top-down violence, used by the powerful to maintain the status quo. Sometimes this aspect of the discourse genuinely feels like brainwashing in action.

And of course, actually the weight of individual political violence we see is via the radical far-right, even as the self-victimising rhetoric of a threatened centrist establishment tends to more quickly call the moderate left ‘hateful’. False equivalency holds sway.

Liverpool FC just had their parade attacked by a right-wing man, deeply in the intellectual pocket of Reform, Farage, Tice, Musk, Andrew Tate. Yet our press so clearly wanted this to be an Islamic extremist. Soon as it wasn’t, they began aggressively spinning the bloke’s back story, family man, ex military, to play down his far-right conservatism and his allegiance to their own false national narratives as driving force.

Suddenly, I remember Norwegian fascist mass murderer Anders Breivik fanboying extremist writer Melanie Phillips, and it harming her career not one iota.

In Gaza, we saw actual insurrectionist violence take place and we recoiled, sharp-ish. Sincerely disgusted by real death and pain and also, some of us, too easily sucked into exaggerations, un-evidenced hyperbole, outright lies about what happened. Mostly, rhetorically, October 2023 was painted falsely as a ‘starting point’. Even as we loudly empathised with the civilian population, still we were super-careful to qualify everything with our plain disgust at Hamas. Many people still slip (even now, tens of thousands of dead children later) into stronger, more passionate flourishes of language to describe Hamas’ actions, than they’d ever use about the IDF under Netanyahu’s government.

Roll back through history, turn to a different conflict, with different in-built allegiances, and our language around — our underlying attitude towards — political violence rapidly shifts again. The valorisation of Ukrainian resistance to Russia is so profoundly different. Even when on-the-ground behaviours can be similar. This tone shift is a powerful cognitive dissonance for all who sees through it. Never mind the World Wars and a hundred years later trying to qualify what ‘our side’ did, with anything approaching realism.

The suffragettes succeeded where suffragists before them failed, at least in part because they were more comfortable inflicting violence.

American comic Bill Burr chimes when he argues, in his latest special The Drop Dead Years, for laughs but still: that modern liberal America is fucked until it embraces gun ownership like the conservative right.

Liberals, you gotta get over your fear of the gun, that’s what gonna turn this country around. You’ve got to embrace guns. Okay? They’re not going anywhere. You’d have a better chance of getting rid of cheeseburgers.

Here in the UK, obviously, almost none of us at all have guns, which means vastly fewer day-to-day dead, thank god, and has prevented (or at least slowed) the militarisation of our police force, thank god. However, if and when our state does collapse, in these coming ecological, economic and geo-political struggles, in a techno-fascist diaspora, we will be far more easily cowed and ruled, enslaved even, by petty local despots with just a modest amount of weaponry. That will be: cops, soldiers, occasional wealthy landowner huntsmen. And business leaders who buy those people’s loyalty. It will be far, far harder for leaders to emerge from out of the general civilian population, who want to serve that population. Probably some people think that’s a good thing.

Where so many were frustrated with the sheer disruption of Just Stop Oil, I found myself more discombobulated that they relentlessly allowed themselves to be captured. Surely, getting caught on purpose is the opposite of a rebellion? A key result of theirs (and others’) highly visible, modestly effective ’non-violent direct action’ in Britain has been the (borderline fascist) criminalisation of even peaceful protest, across the board. In the 2020s (under a ‘Labour’ government, at least in name) we put pacifist eco-activists in prison for going on Zoom calls, and we give them longer sentences than Putin’s Russia gave Pussy Riot. Other thinkers and organisations, including progressive activist ones, distance themselves and condemn and obfuscate. Because, like, they annoyed people, so lock them up.

(perhaps Just Stop Oil’s chosen audience is in the future)

Britain instantly stopped valorising Greta Thunberg, pulled away her media platform and status as fast as it could, the moment she made the inevitable intersectional connection between her environmental activism and the need for de-colonisation, and maintaining simple humanity — the need to speak out for the people of Gaza and others.

•

Memorable manifestos come bloodstained. The unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s quasi-academic techno-isolationist ‘Industrial Society And Its Future’ is actually rather ideologically centrist, in modern terms, rejecting hard left and hard right ideals and strategies. It’s essentially just good old Luddite anti-industrialisation. It’s about what we now understand to be ‘ecocide’ (he was ahead of his time, there at least) and, like reading Regis Debray in 2025, it makes more sense now, in the shadow of Bezos and Musk, than it did when the Washington Post published it in the autumn of 1995.

We’d just got email at my university. I’ve probably already told you this before: borrowing an unused account, I emailed a copy of ‘Industrial Society And Its Future’, the Unabomber’s manifesto, to every address at my small Yorkshire arts college. Unfortunately this was too much information for the brand new email system and collapsed it for several hours. I didn’t get caught but to be fair, they didn’t look that hard. I wish I could say it was a glamorous outcry, but nobody seemed bothered.

Last week the US dissident journalist Ken Klippenstein was visited by the FBI, for publishing (via Substack) the short manifesto of Elias Rodriguez. Rodriguez is the man charged with shooting dead Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, two Israeli Embassy staff workers, in Washington, DC. Klippenstein has since published the eleven questions he was asked by the FBI, who reassured him he ‘was not in trouble’. The US has those firm freedom of speech protections built into the Constitution, which we lack in the UK.

Here, in October 2024, there was virtually zero mainstream media coverage of the police raid and arrest of journalist Asa Winstanley, for his coverage of Gaza. Eventually, last month, the Central Criminal Court ruled his arrest ‘unlawful’. This was a British journalist, directly, aggressively impeded by the British state, his livelihood and liberty threatened, his electronic equipment stolen. And almost nobody here knows anything about it.

Andor also contains its own written manifesto that I suspect will hold resonance for people in the real world, fighting oppression, in the future, as powerfully as it holds that resonance within the universe of the show. That’s what great TV writing can do. Show-runner Tony Gilroy allows this manifesto to ripple outward, and long outlast its author, the young rebel Karis Nemik (Alex Lawther) who takes part in a rural guerrilla-style heist to steal a repository of wealth from an Imperial base, on the planet of Aldhani.

Nemik’s manifesto is stirring stuff, beautiful prose (which presumably Tony Gilroy himself actually wrote, although I’m not 100% sure) and, after Nemik’s death, nominally titled ‘The Trail Of Political Consciousness’ it spreads, including in audio form, in Nemik’s own voice —

Remember this: freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they've already enlisted in the cause.

Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.

And then remember this: the Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire's authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this. Try.

Terrific writing.

In case you missed it:

Andor is a direct prequel to the 2016 movie Rogue One, itself a direct prequel to the original 1977 ‘Star Wars’ film, Episode IV: A New Hope. Chronologically, these shows slide right into each-other without stopping for a breath, which makes binge-viewing exciting. Where Rogue One won praise for ‘improving’ A New Hope, fixing plot holes in the original movie and making its villains feel more authentic and scary in context; now Andor has in turn done the same thing for Rogue One, beautifully enriching its characters and back story, until you’re more invested in people’s fates and — crucially — the forward value of their sacrifice, after they perish. Lots of them perish.

I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see.

It wholly upends that final scene from the original A New Hope, where Luke, Han and Chewie receive medals from Leia in an opulent ceremony, in front of everyone. You now understand (vividly, brutally) that there are many anonymous people who’ve done more, sacrificed far more. A medal ceremony is a publicity stunt and these are just three knobheads who got lucky. Albeit one has the Force in his corner.

Andor offers a fully realised portrayal of what it might actually be like to attempt to live a ‘normal’ life under this kind of Empire regime (both privileged and impoverished lives are shown, people at the edge of its grasp, and those caught deeply inside it) and it also gives a vivid portrait of what it might take, from so many disparate groups of people, with so many different (sometimes conflicting) goals and purposes — and moralities — to gather and coalesce into any kind of viable military opposition.

Andor never ducks those moral greys.

It’s been the most universally acclaimed and beloved ‘Star Wars’ product for years, both by mainstream critics and the franchise’s infamously difficult fanbase. Specifically, I can't think of a better, more nuanced, human portrayal of that nascent stage of revolution in contemporary film or TV, in any genre. More than anything, it’s a show about what the notion of ‘sacrifice’ for a ‘cause’ actually means.

As I type this, Regis Debray is still alive. His later life was successful and more comfortable, working in the French government, often advising on overseas affairs, always trying to push France in a left-progressive direction. In the twenty-first century he framed “the left of the left” as a response to the centrism that he called ‘anti-politics’. Part of his criticism of the modern diaspora seems to be simply about how boring it is. Hard to argue, looking at Starmer and Biden.

Today, Debray is eighty-four years old, living in Paris. He has a daughter my age, who went to LSE.

I wonder what he’s like.

I wonder if he’s heard Kneecap.

Kind of makes me want to write a whole book about Star Wars and the ethics of armed struggle.

get in touch

email: chris@christt.com
Instagram: @cjthorpetracey

always there

Try my other newsletter Double Chorus which is what I think about, when I think about music.

Check out the Border Crossing Press shop.

Check out my Creativity Counselling service. A quick note on appointments this Summer: I have a few slots available while I’m travelling. So if you’d like a face-to-face creativity counselling session and you’re near one of these locations, please get in touch —

• early June: BARCELONA (two left)
• late June: GLASTONBURY FESTIVAL (I’m on-site from Weds)
• mid Sept: MANCHESTER / LAKE DISTRICT
• late Sept: GLASGOW / EDINBURGH

My Pact Coffee discount code is CHRIS-A8UKQG. Sign up for coffee bean delivery, use this code, you get £5 off and I get £5 off a bag.

Thanks again. Look after yourself and your people.

All my love,
Chris
x

*not really. Partly that’s too far to travel for spud porn, partly that restaurant is mainly a beef place, with not great veggie options.