Peter Bach

Thank you for reading this on Ai Weiwei.

"...Ai Weiwei’s relationship with censorship shapes his work, his movements, even the limits imposed on his body. Censorship is the force he pushes against, and the material he works with..."

Peter Bach @lyst.bsky.social reminds us why the work — and presence — of artist Ai Weiwei matters.

Megaphones Made of Silence: Ai Weiwei at Odds With Power In response to Ai Weiwei’s art, the Chinese authorities censored his exhibitions, erased his online presence, demolished his studio, confiscated his passport for years, and detained him. Attempts to m...

"...the Chinese authorities censored his exhibitions, erased his online presence, demolished his studio, confiscated his passport for years, and detained him...As the artist has said himself: “Censorship is saying: ‘I’m the one who says the last sentence. Whatever you say, the conclusion is mine.’”

Exquisite work by Finn O’Hanlon. Patient. Atmospheric. Loaded. Refreshing.

Megaphones Made of Silence: Ai Weiwei at Odds With Power In response to Ai Weiwei’s art, the Chinese authorities censored his exhibitions, erased his online presence, demolished his studio, confiscated his passport for years, and detained him. Attempts to m...

A reminder that volume is not the same as force—and that sometimes the most subversive act is simply to speak, and to keep speaking, where history and the bully expect silence. www.counterpunch.org/2026/02/11/m...

In other words, we are both looking for a 'home' without any sense of place, or belonging.

[from the latest update to @liznangel3.bsky.social's long-running @gofundme.com appeal for us, soon to close]

www.gofundme.com/f/a-voyage-i...

A Wave of Defections On Thursday 26 February 2026, the Gorton and Denton by-election could introduce to UK politics a register of despair not heard in Manchester since Joy

On Thursday 26 February 2026, the Gorton and Denton by-election could introduce to UK politics a register of despair not heard in Manchester since Joy Division first turned urban dislocation into sound. www.counterpunch.org/2026/02/04/a...

"The time has come to stop, to stay in one place: if not a home, then at least a long-term refuge or bolt-hole, and shape a different sort of life — no longer peripatetic but persistently still."

Our latest update to @liznangel3.bsky.social's long-running appeal.

www.gofundme.com/f/a-voyage-i...

Diary of Mechanical Benediction When I was a child, the world felt vast enough to resist you. Things didn’t always work because you needed them to, and sometimes they refused. I caught

Every so often a bright orange fish would leap clear of the glass, flapping in front of us with its fake aches and pains. Horror is the genre everyone is producing. www.counterpunch.org/2026/02/02/d...

Britain’s Unions Are Back, Just Not the Way You Expected The scale of industrial disputes currently taking place across the UK suggests a trade-union landscape in motion. Unions are depicted as more confident

Sophisticated employers are increasingly turning to technology and analytics to shape negotiations over pay and conditions—confirming Michel Foucault’s warning that power often operates most effectively when it is quiet, technical, and difficult to see. www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/29/b...

Adorable film. #NouvelleVague

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste,
An' weary winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell -
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell.

— Robert Burns

Thanks for reading.

Diary of Conversations at Altitude I have a friend drawn to mountains. When he isn’t in the UK, he’s usually somewhere in the Nordic region or the Himalayas, where he is now. It’s not that

“There is no peace, I’m sorry to say. We find it. We lose it. We find it again. We lose it again.”

– Kurt Vonnegut

Quoted by a weary Peter Bach, @lyst.bsky.social, at the end of another week of Europe and UK trying to reconcile their corroded realpolitik with a mad king's ravings and incontinence.

Diary of Conversations at Altitude I have a friend drawn to mountains. When he isn’t in the UK, he’s usually somewhere in the Nordic region or the Himalayas, where he is now. It’s not that

Here’s Thomas Wolfe on mountains: “They were the cup of reality, beyond growth, beyond struggle and death. They were his absolute unity in the midst of eternal change.” www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/23/d...

South Sudan After the Pilgrimage: When Moral Attention Isn’t Enough Nearly two years after Pope Francis’s unprecedented ecumenical pilgrimage to South Sudan, the country is once again sliding towards violence, underscoring

"The danger appears not that South Sudan has been forgotten because no one cares. It is that care was never properly organised into pressure. South Sudan’s tragedy is not invisibility so much as displacement."

– Peter Bach @lyst.bsky.social

[via @counterpunchmedia.bsky.social]

South Sudan After the Pilgrimage: When Moral Attention Isn’t Enough Nearly two years after Pope Francis’s unprecedented ecumenical pilgrimage to South Sudan, the country is once again sliding towards violence, underscoring

As one expert on the region told me only last week, “It is time we help deliver the promises of independence to the people of South Sudan.” www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/21/s...

Numbering the platform getting a bit carried away.

Diary of Unexpected Continuities I have written before about my yoga teaching friend, someone with whom I have experienced more altered perceptions and distorted senses of time than with

"At the end of the day, this is not about bacteria, it is about whether the basic assumptions of modern life can still be trusted... I wish we all knew when to trust the intelligence that remains, even as the systems around us fray."

– Peter Bach, @lyst.bsky.social, on our muliplying uncertainties.

Diary of Unexpected Continuities I have written before about my yoga teaching friend, someone with whom I have experienced more altered perceptions and distorted senses of time than with

PTSD entered the medical lexicon in 1980, though the condition long preceded it. From Vietnam came post-Vietnam syndrome. Earlier still, combat fatigue, battle exhaustion, shell shock. I once saw a young soldier medivacked with it out of Helmand Province. www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/16/d...

Protest, Pressure, and the Risk of Misreading Iran Reza Pahlavi, the crown prince of Iran, released a video in Farsi last week calling on Iranians to go outside on Thursday and Friday evenings at 8pm. He

"Surveys suggested a significant minority in Iran preferred Western powers not intervene at all, seeing the movement as an internal struggle. Some also noted the irony of American authorities shooting their own citizens while condemning Iran for doing likewise."

– Peter Bach, @lyst.bsky.social

Protest, Pressure, and the Risk of Misreading Iran Reza Pahlavi, the crown prince of Iran, released a video in Farsi last week calling on Iranians to go outside on Thursday and Friday evenings at 8pm. He

www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/14/p...

Is Greenland Next? In the recent Atlantic interview, Donald Trump reiterated that the United States “absolutely needs Greenland,” effectively renewing his push for American

Do not expect a celebratory shot of Aalborg Akvavit at the meeting. Danish officials see the move as further erosion of respect for sovereignty and it is unlikely to unfold in a convivial spirit. www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/07/i...

We are all victims of the imagination in this country. The American Dream may sometimes seem like a dirty joke these days, but it was internalized long ago by our fevered little minds and it remains to haunt us as we fumble with the unglamorous pennies of life during the illusionless middle years. At 51, believe it or not, or believe it and pity me if you are young and swift, I still don’t know truly “what I want to be.” I’ve published several serious books. I rate an inch in Who's Who in America. I teach at a so-called respected university. But in that profuse upstairs delicatessen of mine I’m as open to every wild possibility as I was at 13, although even I know that the chances of acting them out diminish with each heartbeat. One life was never quite enough for what I had in mind.

"One life was never quite enough for what I had in mind."

Every artist — in every medium — should read Seymour Krim's extraordinary essay, To My Brothers And Sisters In The Failure Business.

And if you don't know who he was, change that.

[scroll down to p. 577]

archive.org/stream/Phill...

The Abbey and the Airbase The first thing you notice when you exit London is the silence. The city’s noise becomes an abstract memory. “In silence there is eloquence,” wrote Rumi.

"At what point, in such strained circumstances, does an American military presence here risk being misread by a minority as a form of occupation?"

Peter Bach's weekly column for @counterpunchmedia.bsky.social has become something of a personal diary of these strange, dangerous, topsy-turvy times.

The Abbey and the Airbase The first thing you notice when you exit London is the silence. The city’s noise becomes an abstract memory. “In silence there is eloquence,” wrote Rumi.

The first thing you notice when you exit London is the silence. The city’s noise becomes an abstract memory. www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/01/t...

Good to hear. 😌

The Stranger Who Didn’t Do Christmas The lonely figure trudged across the frozen, bare field. The soil was rock hard. The wind bit at his face, too cold even for the geese cutting across the

Merry Christmas. www.counterpunch.org/2025/12/25/t...

War and Peace in a Post-European America The strained smiles and fixed expressions of European and Ukrainian leaders in London recently told their own story. President Zelenskyy met with Keir

This one behind a paywall. www.counterpunch.org/2025/12/21/w...

Melancholia in the Bloodstream: Europe, America, and the Weight of Misunderstanding I have been thinking about what non-sensational facts about Europe may be overlooked in Washington—particularly as recent reporting suggests that Donald

Many Europeans are now cancelling trips altogether amid growing talk of having to surrender years of digital history before entering the so-called Land of the Free. www.counterpunch.org/2025/12/17/m...