Subscriber It has been a bleak year. Unfortunately, this has become a recurring sentiment for our yearly review. In many ways, 2023 has felt like an escalation of the attacks by the powerful on marginalised and working people. We enter the fourth month of devastation and genocide in Palestine, and the third year of the invasion of Ukraine. myriad more atrocities are taking place in Armenia, Kurdistan, Congo and Sudan. Many countries in Europe are willingly choosing to reject the consequences of the displacement and migration that their own policies continue to cause. The far right gains even more political power, as shown most recently in the Netherlands, in Argentina, and in Germany.

Here in the UK we’ve been living under a far right government for several years now, and the consequences are becoming all too plain. Human rights are under attack - the rights of trans people in particular have been reduced to a divisive talking point. Meanwhile, protesting against these changes and those who enforce them (or the ‘opposition’ who fail to meaningfully oppose them) is all but illegal. Any action that might further upset the fragile status quo is considered an offence, while the actual offending parties keep lining their pockets, accruing more power, and preparing to leave us all behind.

And yet. 

And yet we have not given up. We have not discarded hope, we have not stopped organising, and marching, and protesting, and gathering to show those supposed to represent us what we need, what we want, who we are and who we can be. As individuals, yes, but also as collectives, as communities, as a society. One of the stronger pieces of writing we encountered this year, Kaba and Hayes’ Let This Radicalize You, puts it exceedingly well in its introduction:
"Making positive change is difficult. Uprooting oppression is the work of many lifetimes. There are some terrific highs, but they are mixed with many setbacks.

"Yet, I have learned over these many years of organizing that the most important thing you can do to transform the world is to act. Taking action is a practice of hope. Experience and meaning are derived from doing. To transform the condition of our oppression(s), we can only do what we can today, where we are, in the best way that we know. We can only survive together." In last year’s review, we noted the same thing. We acknowledged how, in spite and in the face of destructive circumstances, we stood together. We stood united, against those who would want us to become hopeless, despairing, isolated individuals. It is hard to find hope when everything is getting worse every day. Sometimes the only thing we seem capable of doing is to point out how and where things are wrong. But hey - that’s a solid starting point. In fact, as Rebecca Solnit pointed out in the aptly titled Hope in the Dark (2015 edition), it can be foundational: "Making an injury visible and public is often the first step in remedying it, and political change often follows culture, as what was long tolerated is seen to be intolerable, or what was overlooked becomes obvious. Which means that every conflict is in part a battle over the story we tell, or who tells and who is heard." In our small way, we choose to tell the stories of how we will not only survive, but live - thrive in communities that put care, respect and accountability at the centre of human experience. We encourage you to keep seeking out those stories and building those communities as we move into another year.

Educate. Agitate. Organise. And stay Radical.

In Solidarity,
Alex Valente & Rowan Gavin
Co-Editors
The Norwich Radical

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TOP 5 ARTICLES PUBLISHED IN 2023

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By Jonathan Lee

In the first twelve days after the Russian invasion, Romani neighbourhoods emptied of people as Romani families left to join more than 2 million other Ukrainian citizens leaving the country as refugees. Unlike their compatriots, Romani Ukrainians were met with hostility, prejudice, and outright discrimination by receiving countries. European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC) monitoring missions in the countries bordering Ukraine detailed numerous cases of segregation, violent attacks, ethnic profiling, and discrimination against Romani refugees. Rather than bringing about a moment of solidarity for the plight of all people fleeing war, the conflict in Ukraine only exacerbated the everyday antigypsyism which Romani people are already so accustomed to.

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