To the esteemed cabinet executives of the BRICS nations, a clarion call resounds: humanity stands at the cusp of a transformative epoch, and your leadership can steer the course. The First Industrial Revolution of the Mind—an intellectual and entrepreneurial awakening—is unfolding, propelled by artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and the irrepressible human spirit

Egypt and India have set an ambitious target to increase bilateral trade from $4.2bn in 2024 to $12bn over the next five years. This goal was outlined during a meeting between Egypt’s Minister of Investment and Foreign Trade, Hassan El-Khatib, and India’s Minister of Commerce and Industry, Piyush Goyal

In recent years, the BRICS group—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—has risen as a formidable player in global affairs, positioning itself as an alternative to the Western-dominated geopolitical order

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which began 82 years ago today, is now universally hailed as a bold act of Jewish resistance against the Nazis. But at the time, many Poles watched — or cheered — as the ghetto burned. The parallels with Gaza are hard to ignore.

During the months of April and May 1943, a celebratory atmosphere took hold outside the Warsaw Ghetto’s walls. Children whirled around carousels, giddy crowds converged to holler at the explosive spectacle, and friends watched the pyrotechnics show from front-row rooftops. One onlooker described the streets of Warsaw as a “never-ending parade.”

Within the Ghetto walls, cries were not of laughter and wonder but of terror and anguish. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising — the largest Jewish-led armed resistance to the Holocaust — prompted Nazi occupiers in Warsaw to raze the entire urban area. The open-air prison where 450,000 Jewish people had once dwelled suddenly ceased to exist.

Today the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is universally commended in Poland and around the world as a bold act of resistance, but this was far from the case when it occurred. In the streets of Warsaw, many non-Jewish Poles rejoiced as their neighbors burned.

On the eighty-second anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, another population is burning. Israel’s ongoing genocide has devastated Gaza, damaging or destroying over 90 percent of its housing, displacing nearly two million Palestinians, and killing over sixty thousand, including around eighteen thousand children. Israelis have mostly expressed support for this calamity in a rhetorical landscape shockingly reminiscent of Warsaw 1943.

For many Jews, including descendants of Holocaust survivors like myself, it is agonizing that this violence is committed under the false pretext of Jewish safety. Some have forgotten the lessons of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

The Uprising

In October 1940, about one year after invading Poland, Nazi Germany established a ghetto in the Jewish sector of Warsaw, erecting an eighteen-kilometer wall to separate Jewish from Catholic Poles. Within the walls, Jews suffered from starvation rations, deteriorating sanitation infrastructure, and squalid living conditions. Between 1940 and 1942, eighty-three thousand died of starvation and disease.

In July 1942, the Nazis ramped up the pace of genocide, relocating 265,000 Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka death camp over the course of three months. When people in the Ghetto discovered that “relocation” was a euphemism for murder, Jewish militants, many of whom belonged to socialist political organizations, founded the Jewish Fighting Organization (ŻOB) to coordinate an armed resistance.

A second round of deportations, begun on April 19, 1943, the day before Passover, sparked the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Approximately 650 Jewish fighters, most of whom were untrained, staged their defense against over two thousand Nazi soldiers backed by tanks and heavy artillery. On the first day of the uprising, insurgents pelted two Nazi tanks with Molotov cocktails, successfully destroying one of them. The uprising, which leveraged guerrilla tactics to strike unexpecting Nazi forces with grenades and pistol fire before retreating to hideouts, lasted twenty-seven days.

The Nazis responded by razing the entire Warsaw Ghetto, destroying buildings block by block until there was nowhere left for fighters to coordinate their resistance. By May 16, 1943, with the bombing of the Great Synagogue, every building in the Jewish sector of Warsaw had been destroyed, and all captives were deported to death camps.

Today the city of Warsaw is strewn with plaques and monuments to the Holocaust. Preserved fragments of the ghetto wall mark the boundaries where it once stood; the POLIN Museum tells the thousand-year history of Polish Jews; and a commemorative grave marks the exact location where uprising commanders took their own lives, refusing to die at the hands of their enemies. The countless memorials scattered across Warsaw today celebrate the uprising, but the Polish reaction to the Jewish resistance when it occurred was distinct.

A Sinister Spectacle

Firsthand accounts collected in a POLIN Museum exhibit titled Around Us a Sea of Fire, many of which come from Jewish Poles hiding outside the Ghetto, piece together a vivid picture of how non-Jewish Warsaw reacted to the Nazis quelling the uprising. Overwhelmingly, at least in public, the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, when not regarded with indifference, was considered a spectacle for onlookers to enjoy.

Henryk Rudnicki, witnessing the destruction of the Ghetto, wrote,

The first thing to catch my attention were the merry-go-rounds, jammed with people. Yes, the carousels were spinning round in the thick clouds of smoke from the tenement houses burning next to them. Few metres away people are being burnt alive, but the show must go on. The crowds, bubbling with excitement, rushed from all corners of the city to watch the burning quarter.

Part of this attitude was apathy toward the suffering of Jews. Aleksandra Sołowiejczyk-Guter, a Jewish woman hiding in Warsaw, wrote in her diary that “the vast majority responded to the fighting in the ghetto as if they were responding to a struggle of a faraway, unknown tribe on another hemisphere.” Perhaps this false sense of distance came from a sense of relief that it wasn’t they who were targeted. But attributing the celebratory atmosphere to mere apathy is insufficient. Sołowiejczyk-Guter writes, “Alas, there were some Poles who, having hitherto resented the Jews for allowing themselves to be led like lambs to slaughter, now resented them for defending themselves.”

This resentment revealed itself in the form of antisemitic disdain, which was present in prewar Polish society and frequently expressed by the Roman Catholic Church and Polish nationalists.

Bluma Altmed, a Polish Jew disguised as a Gentile outside the ghetto, recalled a conversation with a Catholic woman who was upset with Jewish resistance fighters for disturbing her sleep: “I have a constant headache because I can’t sleep in such conditions. All night long, I hear machine guns. . . . The explosions and shootings never end. What are those Yids thinking, anyway? They have to die, one way or the other. The least they could do is to give up.”

The streets were rife with familiar antisemitic tropes. Emanuel Ringleblum, who founded a clandestine organization in the Warsaw Ghetto that provided a meticulous record of events in German-occupied Poland, documented public statements like “Little Yids are burning alive, but Big Yids are in power in America and they will rule us once the war has ended” and “Jews have been sucking our blood.” Prominent among these stereotypes were the comparisons of Jews to bed bugs, vermin, rats, and cannibals.

Not everybody reacted with such vitriol. Many non-Jewish Poles privately expressed empathy for Jews in the Ghetto. Some families even took great risk in helping Jews escape the ghetto and hide in the non-Jewish sector of Warsaw. Later in the war, Jewish survivors and non-Jewish Poles joined forces in a subsequent citywide uprising against the Nazis. But at the time of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, solidarity and compassion were mostly contained to the privacy of homes. In the streets, dehumanization reigned supreme.

Decades of Dehumanization

As Israel continues its onslaught on Gaza, indiscriminately killing men, women, and children, many are appalled by the indifference or support from Israeli society. An October 2024 poll shows that the majority of Israeli Jews either think the war in Gaza should continue or feel indifferent. Among those who think the war should end, only 6 percent cite “great cost in human life” as the primary motivator; instead, the majority are concerned with the twenty-four remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza. Furthermore, despite ample documentation of war crimes and the International Criminal Court’s issuing of a warrant for the arrest of Israel’s top leaders, 83 percent of Israeli Jews believe the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has conducted itself with “good or excellent ethical conduct during the war.”

The attitudes reflected in this poll have been expressed by Israeli leaders, soldiers, journalists, and citizens. Former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant — who was eventually fired for being too moderate — declared Israel that was “fighting human animals” in announcing a complete siege on Gaza. IDF soldiers have posted videos of themselves on social media celebrating the destruction of Gaza, mocking Palestinian captives. Avi Rabina, journalist with the Jerusalem-based show Radio Kol-Chai, tweeted, “Erase Gaza! Erase Gaza! Erase Gaza! Erase Gaza! Erase Gaza! Erase Gaza!” Erytan Weinstein, host of the longest standing Israeli podcast broadcasted in English, said, “If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza, every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow, I would press it in a second.” At the annual Jerusalem Day march, crowds erupted chanting, “Death to Arabs! May your village burn!”

Just as antisemitism existed in Polish society before the Holocaust, anti-Palestinian dehumanization is not a new phenomenon. Indeed, it goes back to the very founding of Israel. During the 1947–48 Nakba, Zionist leaders manipulated trauma from the Holocaust by comparing their Palestinian adversaries to Nazis. This instilled the idea that Palestinians defending their homes were motivated by a wicked antisemitic hatred, thereby justifying their ethnic cleansing. In 1969, former prime minister Golda Meir, regarded by many as a liberal Israeli hero, declared, “There was no such thing as Palestinians.” As Israel bombed Gaza in 2014, Israelis gathered in the border town of Sderot to celebrate the spectacle. Locals and visitors from Tel Aviv pulled out lawn chairs and couches, clinked beers, and took selfies with the backdrop of Gaza on fire — an updated version of festivities from Warsaw.

As in Poland in 1943, attitudes are not monolithic in Israeli society. Some Israelis refuse mandatory military conscription, subjecting themselves to prison sentences. Activists protest illegal settlements in the West Bank. Recent rallies in Tel Aviv garnered crowds of hundreds demanding an immediate cease-fire. These acts should not be diminished, but they are not representative of a society that overwhelmingly supports the subjugation of Palestinians.

Of course, the circumstances that underlie these attitudes are distinct from those in Warsaw in 1943. For one, Israel is the result of a decades-long colonial project that dispossessed Palestinians of their land, whereas no equivalent colonial history was perpetrated by Poland. Palestinian resistance to this colonialism has at times inflicted violence against Israelis, including on October 7, 2023, when Hamas fighters killed 1,181 people, among them 736 Israeli civilians. (At least fourteen Israelis were also killed by the IDF’s use of the Hannibal Directive.) Conversely, Jewish resistance during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was against Germans soldiers, not Catholic Poles, who were most often onlookers. Poles also suffered at the hands of the Nazis, facing deportations to concentration camps and brutal bombing campaigns, and many supported Jewish resistance to the German occupation forces.

Some might argue that the dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli society stems from a legitimate fear of violent retaliation and thus cannot be compared to Warsaw 1943. It is true that the antisemitism outside of the burning ghetto was generally rooted in conspiratorial tropes resembling The Protocols of the Elders of Zion rather than any threat that Jews posed to Gentile Poles. However, Israeli political leaders, now and historically, also distort reality to manufacture fear and hatred toward Palestinians. As Israel’s response to the Great March of Return at the Gaza border in 2018–19 shows, even peaceful Palestinian protest is met with devastating Israeli violence and public demonization.

What Will We Remember?

It is tempting to believe that the memorials to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising represent an idealized arc of history that bends toward justice. But while the official Polish narrative does indeed honor the uprising as a bold and principled act of resistance, it also shirks the responsibility of Polish society for the atrocities of the Holocaust. Missing from the narrative is the elation of the “never-ending parade,” the Poles who blackmailed Jews escaping the Ghetto, and those who collaborated directly with the Nazis.

When Polish historian Barbara Endelking curated the POLIN exhibit exploring common Polish attitudes to the uprising, she was met with tremendous backlash. In 2023, the Institute of National Remembrance, the Polish institution responsible for overseeing Holocaust memorials in Warsaw, published an open letter condemning Endelking for statements she made on television about Polish-Jewish relations. This letter followed a 2018 law passed by Polish Parliament that criminalizes speech claiming that Poland was complicit in the crimes of the Holocaust.

Memorials exist to shape the future. On the eighty-second anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the ongoing genocide in Gaza reveals that the world has failed to heed its lessons. When the dust settles in Gaza, what will we remember?

Liberal pundits are urging Democrats not to talk about Trump’s illegal moves to disappear people to a Salvadoran dungeon. Not only is that wrong on principle, it doesn’t make political sense.

The Donald Trump administration is currently in the middle of what might be the gravest federal government overreach seen this century at least, asserting unprecedented repressive powers against even US citizens, defying a Supreme Court order to rectify one of its unlawful deportations, and thumbing its nose at core principles like the rule of law and separation of powers that American democracy was founded on. Challenging this loudly and fiercely should be a basic, commonsense position for anyone who believes in these things, and especially for an opposition party that has spent years screaming that Trump was a dictator in waiting.

Yet the response from a shocking number of voices who should know better is that those appalled by this authoritarian overreach should meekly avoid the issue. They’re acting like the Trump administration is enjoying the kind of broad public support for its radical actions that George W. Bush did after September 11 — even as the record shows this is not remotely the case.

The Power to Disappear

Let’s take stock of what the Trump administration has actually done. The slippery slope Trump’s critics warned about when he started targeting visa holders and even permanent residents with deportation quickly became a landslide when, less than a week later, he invoked the centuries-old Alien Enemies Act to deport hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members to a notoriously dangerous and abuse-ridden prison in El Salvador, whose self-proclaimed “dictator” he’s paying to keep these people imprisoned.

Except that’s not quite what happened. Because we very soon found out that at least dozens of these men were not only legally in the country through asylum claims but weren’t gang members at all or didn’t even have criminal records besides a few low-level offenses. One is a gay makeup artist who loves theater. Another is a nineteen-year-old whom Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents acknowledged was not the person they were looking for as they arrested him. Another is married to a US citizen and has three citizen children.

They were snatched and shipped away to a prison, then packed onto a plane and condemned to a living nightmare in the city of San Salvador for entirely fraudulent reasons: on the unproven accusation of a disgraced former police officer; because they had tattoos paying tribute to autism, their favorite soccer team, or their parents; for wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie; or simply for having happened to be there. The Trump administration itself has openly admitted in court that it deported one of the men by mistake.

All the while, the Trump administration has been pushing against the limits of the law and basic decency to not just keep being able to carry out these kinds of disappearances but do them to more people. When a federal judge ordered a halt to the deportations, the administration first argued he had no jurisdiction because the planes were already over international waters, and the president has since called for the judge’s impeachment and removal from the case. The White House has then asserted, in both court and public comments, that having thrown these men into hell, the whole thing is now out of its hands, even as Salvadoran authorities recently indicated to a visiting US senator that it is Trump who is calling the shots on what happens to them.

The administration is now all but outright refusing to abide by a unanimous Supreme Court decision ordering it to bring one of the men back, and two judges are weighing holding Trump officials in criminal contempt for ignoring the courts. Meanwhile, the president was caught saying, and has since officially confirmed, that he is now trying to find a legal rationale to do this to not just immigrants but American citizens, as El Salvador’s leader works to double the size of the prison at Trump’s urging.

This should all be deeply disturbing, whether you’re a Democrat, Republican, or independent, conservative, centrist, liberal, or socialist. It’s why even the most conservative Supreme Court in generations — six of whose members were appointed by Republican presidents, three of them by Trump himself — ruled 9–0 against him, why a federal judge appointed by Ronald Reagan called it “shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”

Which is why it’s stunning to find commentators urging people not to criticize or talk about any of this.

Wrong on Principle

Trump was “setting a trap for the Democrats, and like usual we’re falling for it,” one House Democrat told Axios anonymously, complaining that “rather than talking about the tariff policy and the economy . . . the thing where his numbers are tanking, we’re going to go take the bait for one hairdresser.” On Twitter/X, CNN commentator Chris Cillizza made a similar “case for why Democrats should *not* keep talking so much about Kilmar Abrego García,” one of the men disappeared in El Salvador, asking readers to think about “which issue is better, politically, for Democrats: Immigration or tariffs?”

“Everyone should think about which topics they want to raise the salience of and why,” tweeted influential liberal pundit Matthew Yglesias, paired with a chart showing immigration to be Trump’s strongest issue.

This is mistaken on multiple levels. On principle, it’s not an exaggeration to say that if the administration’s actions here are allowed to stand, both Trump and any future president will have the power to banish anyone they want to a foreign torture dungeon, US citizens included. The administration is trying to prove that as long as it accuses anyone, however spuriously, of whatever crime might justify this, and manages to stick them onto a plane over the ocean before a judge has time to rule on it, the White House can cheerfully admit it made a mistake — or simply keep lying about the person in public — and there will be no consequences.

You can imagine this or a future administration making that mistake again. You can imagine them making it over and over, and even conveniently doing so with people they consider political enemies.

Consider two things that happened just this week. In Florida, ICE arrested a Georgia-born man who crossed state lines, and though the judge acknowledged the birth certificate she had been shown was genuine, she said she was unable to release him because ICE wanted him held (he was eventually released). And in at least two different states, multiple US citizens, two of them immigration lawyers, received out of nowhere a Department of Homeland Security notice to leave the country. There seem to be a lot of mistakes happening right now.

There’s also the fact that the administration is making all of this deliberate policy. That the president says the only US citizens he would deport are the “violent” and “really bad people” shouldn’t be reassuring. His deportation program was originally sold as prioritizing violent criminals, and the reality has proven to be completely different. Meanwhile, he and his officials are rapidly broadening the kinds of Americans they lump under the label of one type of violent criminal, a terrorist: vandals, protesters, or anyone who criticizes the administration’s immigration policies.

This is by almost anyone’s standards a major and very dangerous overreach. You cannot say you’re deathly afraid for democracy and the Constitution, then turn around and demand silence about the president flouting court orders and asserting the right to disappear whomever he wants.

Wrong on the Politics

Put aside the principle. It’s not even clear that Democrats challenging the administration on this are on shaky political ground in the first place.

A Quinnipiac poll taken just before this controversy exploded found that Trump is underwater in public approval for both his handling of both deportations (42–53) and immigration issues more broadly (45–50). Other recent, better polls for Trump on this issue only put the public at more or less an even split, though these were all conducted before the El Salvador controversy came to dominate the headlines. Even one survey that recorded a particularly strong approval rating for him on the issue also found that approval had markedly declined over the past month.

When polling questions drill down into specifics, it’s clear the administration is on much shakier ground. Majorities oppose deporting visa holders and permanent residents for pro-Palestinian views. Nearly 60 percent think the government needs to provide evidence and a hearing before trying to deport an undocumented immigrant, and often sizable majorities of every group, including Republicans, say visa and green card holders should get the right to a fair trial, to present a defense, and to appeal.

There is a good chance, in other words, that as the press and national politicians focus attention on the administration’s excesses here — and the public realizes that Trump is using deportation powers to target not violent criminals, as he said he would, but law-abiding legal residents, political opponents, and even American citizens — people will sour further on his overall handling of immigration.

And whatever advantage Trump may or may not have on the issue, it’s nothing like that which George W. Bush enjoyed after the September 11 attacks, when he pushed some of the most aggressive, civil liberties–shredding proposals of his presidency. Bush’s approval ratings were in the seventies and eighties for months after the terrorist attacks and only started consistently dipping below 60 percent by late 2003, nearly two years later.

Even better for him, various polls over the course of months showed huge majorities of Americans — as high as 66 percent in the immediate aftermath of the attack — supporting sacrificing their civil liberties for safety. Similarly big majorities backed measures like trying suspected terrorists in military tribunals (six in ten), rounding up and interviewing Middle Eastern visa holders (79 percent) and detaining those who had violated immigration laws (nearly nine in ten), wiretapping suspects’ conversations with their lawyers (nearly three in four), indefinite detention of dangerous noncitizens (nearly eight in ten), and drastically heightened government surveillance (ranging from the fifties to the eighties and nineties, depending on the poll and idea — with support as high as 95 percent).

By September 2003, a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found only 22 percent of Americans thought Bush had gone “too far” on this front (though that same poll also found the previous year that the public’s support for putting safety above civil liberties had drastically fallen from an even split to a minority view).

Mind you, none of this stopped then Democratic senator Patrick Leahy from challenging the administration on proposals like the military tribunals, efforts in which growing numbers of Democrats began joining him after a period of cowed assent. By early 2003, even as polls still showed majorities broadly in support of Bush’s anti-terrorism policies, Democrats rose up against and beat back Bush’s hyper-surveillance proposal, the Total Information Awareness program, and defeated his push to radically expand the powers of the Patriot Act.

From that year on, as the party picked a presidential candidate and campaigned to beat Bush at the ballot box, criticism of Bush’s disregard for civil rights and liberties became a regular part of Democrats’ rhetoric.

Trump today is in a very different position from where Bush was when all this happened. He is historically unpopular and only getting more so, and Trump has only had a net positive approval rating twice ever in his time as president, both at the very start of his terms, when presidents typically enjoy their best numbers. And as we’ve seen, even the best poll measurements of public approval for Trump’s immigration policies are on a knife’s edge, while others show them markedly out of step with US opinion. So there is no real argument that anyone alarmed by or opposed to what is happening should stay quiet as Trump takes far more extreme and unconstitutional measures than Bush did, while in a far more precarious political position to do it. If you feel the need to speak out against this, you’re on solid ground — morally and politically.

There is no doubt that the “worker-to-worker organizing” model outlined by Eric Blanc in his new book, We Are the Union, is key to union organizing success. Since 2018, my organizing mentor Richard Bensinger, the former AFL-CIO organizing director who has since helped workers organize at companies ranging from Starbucks to Canada Goose, has been […]

The federal government under President Joe Biden prosecuted fewer corporate crime cases than at any point in the last three decades. White-collar criminal prosecutions hit a thirty-year low in recent years, according to data shared exclusively with the Lever. A new report by consumer advocacy group Public Citizen shows that under President Joe Biden, the […]

The empty tomb of Easter Sunday answers the betrayal of Jesus on the cross with humanity’s completely restored understanding that God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit remain one in essence, unity and purpose.  The divine dissolution which seemed possible is now revealed to be untrue; the Triune God remains undivided and now triumphant, and in unending relationship with humanity.  If Golgotha indicates the greatest expression of moral injury in history, then the mysterious and inhumanly supernatural resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is conversely the greatest expression of moral restoration in history.  As Good Friday left us with the tension that humanity might have ultimately betrayed God, Easter Sunday resolves that tension with the assurance that this betrayal was only penultimate, and that not only did the Triune God remain indissoluble, but also that same God turned humanity’s betrayal on its head.  Indeed, God through the empty tomb existentially restores the rupture begun in Eden, fully reconciling humanity to Himself and restoring the possibility for each person to realize an eternal, salvific relationship with God that offers identity, meaning, and hope.

However, and analogous to the moral injury of the cross, the moral restoration of the tomb is iterative, coming in ever-expanding, concentric revelation and effect.  The greatest and first of these realized effects is, as previously mentioned, the persons and work of the Triune God in achieving the resurrection of Christ Jesus from the dead.  Again, while the cross seemed to indicate that humanity’s betrayal of Jesus through both the people of Jerusalem and His disciples may have imperiled the Holy Trinity, the empty tomb testifies that what appeared to be this possibility was never so, let alone an existential reality.  Rather and in a climactic example of martyrion, just as it was God the Father’s will for the Christ to suffer and die an atoning death on the cross, so it was always the Father’s plan for Jesus’ suffering and death to never be an end unto itself but rather a means to an end of the Christ’s triumphant resurrection.  In the face of such a mystery, we can only join ours with the voices of saints militant and triumphant in acclaiming the truth that in this three days, Christ Jesus descended to the dead, extending the power of God to the lowest depth of hell.  Thus, even there, the vilest demon of Hades must now know the ontological truth that the Son of God is alive to continue the salvific work of the Father, still more so as the Holy Spirit will now be the agent through which Christ Jesus returns to humanity, very much alive forevermore.  

The second expression of moral restoration must, of needs, come next with the disciples.  The previously faithless and frightened cohort of Jesus’ closest followers, who abandoned Him at not only His greatest hour of need but also at the climax of His messianic mission, now must become the first witnesses to His completed resurrection.  Here, and perhaps now fearfully living in the wake of their filial abandonment prior to the cross, the women of Jesus’ earthly apostolic cohort become the first human witnesses of His new life, but then call both Peter and John to come view the empty tomb.  Nonetheless, it falls to the eleven remaining disciples to begin the extension of the mysterious witness of Christ Jesus’ resurrection to the extent of the Roman Empire.  Moreover, it will be their testimony of that atoning death, resurrection and future ascension of Christ Jesus that will form the kerygmatic core of apostolic preaching to the world.  Indeed, and in future partnership with both Paul and other missionaries, and in obedience to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, those same apostles will further testify to the complete synchronicity of the Triune God working in perfect unity, essence, and purpose towards achieving God’s salvific plan for humanity and the redemption of creation.  In short and in the greatest of ironies, the last earthly people to fail Jesus will be the first earthly people to witness the risen Christ to the world, thereby participating in the divine outworking of the Triune God and creating a model for the continuing task and purpose of the Church.

The third expression of moral restoration, of course, is to, in, and through the people of God.  The Gospel writers take pains to note that there were certainly miraculous supernatural events that occurred across Jerusalem during the crucifixion which bore witness to the pre-resurrected Jesus as the Christ of God.  However, post-resurrection, the Gospel writers take further pains to testify that it is to the people of God that Christ Jesus appears after the disciples to demonstrate His triumph over sin, death, and hell.  Again, and in a mark of existential irony, these same earthly citizens who had just a few days hence called for a criminal’s death for Jesus of Nazareth become the next cohort to whom the risen Christ of God appears in power and glory.  Beyond now any earthly misapprehensions of a messiah oriented towards countering Roman martial and political power, the resurrected Christ Jesus appears to His disciples and then God’s people to inaugurate a Kingdom that will historically subsume Rome and transcend all earthly human structures of power and governance for the remainder of time.  In doing so, Christ foreshadows the power of God the Father indwelling God’s faithful people at Jerusalem during Pentecost to go beyond even the earthly limits of the apostles, extending the reach of the resurrected Triune God to now the full extent of earth.

Here, then, is a signal contribution from the Church, the people of God, to current secular understandings of moral injury.  In that specific context, the scholarly and public discourse about the possibility for recovery from moral injury has been centered on an almost solely clinical and academic construct of post-traumatic growth.  While not disdaining the possibility of the real efficacy of such a construct to guide healing modalities, the construct of post-traumatic growth remains mired in an assumption that moral injury, and thus healing from it, remains tethered only to one’s self.  The Gospel narratives of the moral injury of the cross and the moral restoration of the tomb rest on a different assumption, that such injury and healing are never confined solely to one but always in relationship to another.  Further, from it the Church can proclaim a deeper identity to this injury and healing by locating its own culpability and restoration only through Jesus, the Christ.  Additionally, the Church can faithfully proclaim that in an augmentation of its Christology, Jesus can further identify with those suffering from moral injury because He completely understands what it means to suffer both real and apparent betrayal by His people, His disciples, and even His Father.  However, He also offers then in His resurrection a restoration of our understanding of the Trinity, and from this, an expanding and real existential restoration of God’s relationship to His disciples, His people, and ultimately to the world.  If the cross is the penultimate expression of moral injury on a relational level, the empty tomb is the ultimate expression of moral restoration on a similar relational level, but with ever-expanding effects reaching across time and the second coming of the triumphant, returning Christ.  

Last Sunday’s local and regional elections in Finland saw a big defeat for the hard-right Finns Party. Its leader called the gains for left-wing parties a “red wave” — but it’s less clear that this will halt the government’s austerity agenda.

Finland is widely seen in Western Europe and the United States as a progressive paradise. In truth, its center-right-led coalition government in office since June 2023 has presided over far-reaching austerity measures, leading to rising homelessness and cuts in local health provisions. Yet there are also signs that this period may finally be coming to an end.

The coalition government, led by Petteri Orpo’s pro-business National Coalition Party, has seemingly been weakened by the collapse in the vote share of its main partner, the harder right Finns Party, in municipal and regional elections held on April 13. This signals the probability of a government led by the center-left Social Democratic Party (SDP) following the next general election, to be held by spring 2027 at the latest.

Chair of the right-wing populist Finns Party Riikka Purra admitted defeat on results night, describing a “red wave” sweeping Finland. Overall, the Finns Party (formerly “True Finns”) was down 6.8 percent compared to the 2021 municipal elections, while the Social Democratic Party (headed by Antti Lindtman, who replaced outgoing premier Sanna Marin in 2023) made gains of 5.3 percent and had the highest vote share overall. Meanwhile, the democratic socialist Left Alliance boosted its vote by 1.3 percent, overtaking the Finns Party and sitting just behind the Green League, with which it often forms a red-green pact. Crucially, while the SDP increased its percentage share, the red-greens did not suffer as a result, as in previous elections. This time, the SDP took votes from the Finns Party after making the local elections a kind of referendum on the coalition government’s austerity measures.

Still, this has its limits. The SDP has moved further toward the center since 2021, when Marin was prime minister, during which time she gave members of the Left Alliance and the Green League important cabinet positions. In contrast, Lindtman’s Social Democrats approved several of the government’s social-security cuts in their alternative budget and have signaled openness to forming a future coalition with the center right.

This places Left Alliance as the genuine left opposition, who must perform well in the next general election to gain any leverage over the center. I emailed a handful of politicians from the party to see what currents they picked up on the local campaign trail, to better understand how they might move forward.

Olli Kohonen, a mental health nurse based in the Northern city of Oulu, who won both regional and municipal seats, cites mental health, waiting times, and eldercare as important campaign themes: “Basic issues that are really close to everyday life.”

Ville Kellokumpu, a postdoctoral researcher who also ran in Oulu, says, “The current coalition has been very austerity-minded, hawkishly demanding quickly balanced budgets from the regions [responsible] for welfare, which has led to a deterioration of especially health and social security services. The poll gains for the Left Alliance are a response to that.”

Seemingly, the Left has made advances by simply pledging support for working people and functioning services. Former Left Alliance leader and current member of the European Parliament Li Andersson argues that while the Finns Party promised that it would not cut services — in this, claiming to stand up for the Finnish working class — once in government it supported a slash-and-burn policy. “The Finns Party have been trying to present themselves as a kind of voice of the working people. And I think we now see a huge contrast between what they’ve said and what they’ve actually done,” she comments. Andersson sees these elections as a “vote of no confidence in the right-wing government.”

So did they lose that confidence vote? The Finns Party was rejected. Yet the main ruling party, National Coalition, will more likely feel that its austerity approach has been exonerated: indeed, Prime Minister Orpo’s party increased its municipal vote share by 1.2 percent, even though this only placed it second overall. Further, while many expect an SDP-led government sooner or later, it is not clear if it will lean toward left-wing parties or the center right. Meanwhile, even though the Finns Party is in decline, it should also be recognized that its voters generally turn out in higher numbers for general elections (turnout this week was just 54 percent for the municipal vote and 51 percent for the regionals). In these results, contradictions and uncertainties outnumber clear rules.

The best path for the Left Alliance may be to continue to build bridges with workers, with simple messages to bring working Finns to the Left: “You want affordable, prompt health care? So do we,” “You want a secure future for your family? So do we,” and so on.

As Left Alliance leader Minja Koskela told me in email, “many are fed up, and rightly so, with their material conditions noticeably worsening. The hardest hit are those with already low incomes, working-class people, students, single-parent families, disabled people, and elderly people with low pensions.”

If bridges can be built with the oppressed and disaffected, perhaps Finland can become the beacon of hope that many in the West imagine it is — with the Left Alliance once again playing a key role in government. Koskela’s party seems to be going some way to achieving this, building upon Andersson’s work in Marin’s coalition. Not for the first time, the women leading the Finnish left are bringing hope.

Trump’s trade war has set off economic chaos around the world. But simply going back to the “good old days” of free trade is no solution.

Donald Trump’s trade war has triggered panic in global markets, sending economic shockwaves through international supply chains. Stock markets are in free fall, growth forecasts have been sharply revised downward, and an economic recession with rising unemployment looms. This has led many to long for the more orderly times before Trump — nostalgia for the liberal globalization of the 2000s, with unimpeded global free trade and a world economy governed by predictable rules. Ian Bremmer confidently states that “globalization helped make the United States the most prosperous country in history,” and in the New York Times Thomas Friedman writes that our time has been “one of the most relatively peaceful and prosperous in history . . . because of a tightening web of globalization and trade.”

On the face of it, this reaction is understandable. And there are many reasons why Trump’s tariff war is counterproductive. Tariffs are a form of tax largely paid by consumers. They are a flat tax, which hits the poorest hardest, as they spend a larger share of their income on everyday goods that are subject to the new tariffs. If Trump follows through on his promise to use the revenue to fund tax cuts for the wealthy, this could be one of the most regressive tax reforms in US history.

But nostalgia for the free trade era is not a way forward, regardless of what one thinks of Trump and his agenda. The wave of discontent that first brought Trump to victory is intimately related to the tensions unleashed by economic globalization. The neoliberal world order, dominant since the collapse of the Soviet Union, combined free trade and financial deregulation, leading to increased inequality, deindustrialization, and job losses. It should be no surprise, then, that it was working-class voters in the hardest-hit areas of the American Midwest who tipped the 2016 election to Trump, as he promised to challenge globalization and the free trade agreements that had cost them their jobs and devastated their communities.

The path forward from the current trade war should not simply be a return to “business as usual” — that’s what got us here in the first place.

The Problems of Free Trade

When we talk about global free trade, it’s important to understand that free trade is not the natural result of market forces. On the contrary, the global trade regime is the result of active state policies shaped by the world’s most powerful players. In the nineteenth century, Britain opened markets around the world with gunboats. In China, European empires fought two bloody wars — known as the Opium Wars — to prevent the Chinese from stopping the free export of opium across its borders.

The current trade regime was shaped during the so-called Uruguay Rounds in the 1980s, culminating in the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995. It is a product of American unipolar dominance after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This regime has focused on lowering tariffs but also on preventing countries from implementing other forms of regulation — so-called technical trade barriers, like environmental standards or labor conditions. Trade unions in the West have warned since the 1990s about threats to domestic jobs while developing countries have warned against being denied the protective measures that today’s wealthy nations used in their own early developmental stages.

It’s this regime that, for the past forty years, has overwhelmingly benefited large corporations in the United States and the West, which could save on wages and avoid regulations by moving production to countries in the Global South. Some Asian countries have used the globalization of production chains to strengthen their own industrial sectors and achieve economic development. In the 2000s, China especially combined strong state planning with free trade rules and managed to climb up the global value chain toward more advanced, higher-value technological production.

Comparative Advantages

The theory behind the benefits of free trade goes back to nineteenth-century economist David Ricardo, whose theory of comparative advantage still dominates mainstream thinking about trade. The idea is that countries — regardless of economic development — can benefit from specializing in the things they’re relatively best at. This means that Country A, poorer and excelling only in a small handful of sectors, can still benefit from trade with the much richer Country B, even if B is more competitive in all sectors.

But the idea of win-win mostly only ever existed on paper. In practice, specialization in immediate comparative advantages meant peripheral countries were kept in a dependence on production of volatile commodities. The economist Ha-Joon Chang has demonstrated that countries that succeeded in using trade to drive economic development — such as his native South Korea — actively used state intervention to change their comparative advantages. Had South Korea followed Ricardo’s theory dogmatically, today it wouldn’t have industrial giants like Samsung and Hyundai. Instead, its economy would still be dominated by rice and fish.

But with financial globalization, any policy that challenged powerful capital interests was punished instantly by the market. This led to wage competition among workers, as companies could easily relocate to lower-wage regions. It also led to tax competition, with countries slashing taxes to attract investment. The results are clear: growing inequality worldwide, as wages lose out to capital. In rich countries, outsourcing hit the working class hardest, and in developing countries like China and India, the benefits of high growth mainly went to business owners. This race to the bottom in taxation has also strained public welfare systems globally.

The Real Stakes of Global Trade

For the Left, the key issue in the politics of trade is not the movement of goods across borders but the unrestricted mobility of capital. Since the 1980s, the liberalization of financial flows and production networks has allowed firms to relocate with ease, using the threat of exit to discipline labor and constrain democratic decision-making. This mobility has become a structural feature of the global economy, one that skews power relations decisively in favor of capital.

Trade, in this context, has served a disciplinary function. It has not merely facilitated exchange; it has reshaped the terrain of domestic politics by limiting the space in which states can act. The fear of capital flight has undermined collective bargaining, eroded tax bases, and forced states into a race to the bottom in wages, regulation, and social provision. The rhetoric of competitiveness has substituted for questions of justice, and economic policy has been narrowed to what is tolerable to markets.

What often goes unacknowledged in calls to “bring back” industry is that the social gains of mid-century industrial economies were the result of strong labor institutions, not merely industrial activity. Without high levels of unionization and political organization, the return of manufacturing is unlikely to deliver improved working-class conditions.

The real challenge is neither to restore a lost era of globalization nor to retreat behind national borders. A serious discussion on global trade on the Left must instead start with the ambition to transform the global rules so that trade no longer serves as a mechanism of coercion for capital.