‘And this,’ our guide said, ‘is where Colonel Piroth committed suicide.’ We were standing by a fenced-off scrap of wasteland on the edge of a busy market. The only evidence that anything of significance happened there is a white cement block carved with an image of two artillery pieces and an almost illegible inscription in Vietnamese. The entrance to Piroth’s bunker, if it still exists, is overgrown and filled with rubble. Piroth was the deputy commander of French forces at Dien Bien Phu, a one-armed war hero and gunnery expert who had boasted that ‘no Viet Minh cannon will be able to fire three rounds before being destroyed by my artillery.’ In fact the Viet Minh made short work of the French artillery. ‘I have been dishonoured,’ Piroth said. Soon afterwards, using his teeth, he pulled the safety pin out of a grenade and blew himself to pieces.
On 25 April, a large group of students at the University of California, Los Angeles, set up an encampment on the main quadrangle of their campus. Flanked on all sides by plywood barricades, the Palestine Solidarity Encampment included smaller tents for sleeping as well as larger enclosures for food, first aid, electronics (phone chargers, batteries), musical instruments and art supplies. There was also a library, which a paper sign taped to a tree designated the Refaat Alareer Memorial Library, in honour of the Palestinian writer and teacher who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in December 2023.
Last November, I wrote of waiting for the grey ticks to double up and go blue when sending WhatsApp messages to my friend Ghassan Abu Sittah, who in October had narrowly missed being killed in the bombing of al-Ahli Arab and al-Shifa Hospitals in Gaza, where he had travelled from London to work as a surgeon. He survived and was inaugurated as the rector of Glasgow University, with 80 per cent of the student vote, on 11 April. He has set up a fund for Palestinian children, planning ‘for the day after’, and is speaking tirelessly to the media and audiences across the world.
Witnessing the scores of militarised police being deployed to round up student protesters, many people in the United States and across the world may be wondering what the difference is between supposedly progressive, liberal government and authoritarian, reactionary leaders like Donald Trump. The latter are certainly worse, but liberalism’s failures mean that the threat of authoritarianism is a less terrifying spectre than it ought to be.
Argentina’s interannual inflation rate is 250 per cent – only Zimbabwe’s is higher – while subway fares have risen sevenfold since January, and the public hospitals administered by the University of Buenos Aires are in danger of closing because the university can’t pay its electricity bill. The UBA, which is consistently ranked among the best universities in Latin America, could shut down in May. With the budget frozen at 2023 levels, in real terms universities are broke.
The Mykhailo Boychuk Kyiv State Academy of Decorative and Applied Arts and Design was bombed in a Russian attack on 25 March. When I visited not long afterwards, a group of students were sitting on a grass verge, sketching what remained of their art school. ‘They’re destroying us, but we’re still drawing nevertheless,’ one of the teachers, Volodymyr Pryadka, said with a laugh.
‘Why are you crying, habibi?’ Mansoor Adayfi asked the elephant. He had got into the habit of talking to animals at Guantánamo Bay. Held in solitary confinement for years, he talked to the feral cats who prowled around his cage.