The persistence of memory: the latest global vigils for Guantánamo’s closure

Photos from the monthly global vigils for the closure of Guantánamo on June 3, 2026. Clockwise, from top left: London, New York, Brussels and San Francisco.

My new article on my website, The Persistence of Memory: The 41st Monthly Global Vigils for the Closure of Guantánamo, June 3, 2026, features 21 photos from, and my report about the 41st monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, which took place across the US and around the world on and around June 3, 2026.

In the text accompanying the article, I discuss the importance of remembering Guantánamo (which is so largely forgotten) via my interpretation of a well-known quote — “In a time of universal deceit, even the act of remembering is a revolutionary act.”

As I state, “Guantánamo has long been engulfed in a kind of collective amnesia, barely mentioned by US lawmakers, and largely ignored by the mainstream media, which is why our monthly ‘First Wednesday’ vigils, though small in number, continue to be important. If a grave and ongoing injustice isn’t even mentioned, or marked with people in orange jumpsuits bearing witness to it as an internationally significant ongoing crime scene, how is anyone supposed to even remember that it still exists?”

I also discuss how the original quote, apparently mistakenly attributed to George Orwell — “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act” — is also extremely relevant these days, perhaps more so than at any other time in most of our lifetimes, with a US president who dismisses the truth as “fake news”, and with western governments and mainstream media outlets insisting that a genocide is “self-defense” and that those undertaking it are the “children of light” fighting the “children of darkness.”

As I write:

“Telling the truth, in this context, can mean losing your job, being sanctioned, being imprisoned, or facing deportation simply for exercising your right to free speech under the First Amendment. In the UK, climate activists, whose message to governments and the media, to ‘tell the truth’ about climate change, have found themselves imprisoned for even mild forms of disruption to the ‘status quo’, while, in the courts, the principle of ‘jury equity’ — allowing defendants to tell the truth about why they undertook the actions they did, so that juries can refuse to convict them on the basis of actions undertaken through an exercise of the conscience — has been quashed by right-wing activist judges, not only in relation to climate protests, but also in relation to direct action undertaken to prevent a genocide, undertaken at the factories of Elbit Systems, Israel’s biggest arms manufacturer.

“When the Israeli-owned British government proscribed a direct action group, Palestine Action, as a terrorist organization, those supporting them, telling the truth by peacefully holding up hand-written signs declaring, ‘I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action’, have been arrested in their thousands.

“While telling the truth has become more dangerous than at any other time in living memory, in countries that claim to respect the rule of law, Guantánamo remains a stark example of how telling the truth isn’t even regarded as revolutionary, because almost no one cares, transporting it, instead, into the realm I identified above, in which even the act of remembering is revolutionary.

“It won’t get us arrested, because, to reiterate, almost no one cares, and the forces of darkness only mobilize malevolently when they are faced with mass dissent, but it is revolutionary in the sense that indefinite detention without charge or trial — over a period, now of over 24 years — and fruitless but ongoing attempts to prosecute individuals subjected to sickening torture over many years in ‘black site’ torture prisons run by the CIA has been officially forgotten, papered over like a politically-charged mural, or erased like an inconvenient social media channel amplifying voices that the establishment doesn’t want heard.”

I hope you have time to read the whole article here, and to see the inspiring photos of activists around the world, refusing to give in to amnesia.

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