1441

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The Rainbow Coalition Remaster

The renowned civil rights activist Jesse Jackson died on February 17 2026.

When I learned of his passing, I immediately felt compelled to put out some sort of tribute to his life and work — something with a little more substance than just a short social media post about the event.

The closest that I ever got in person to the man was standing in the audience in London’s Hyde Park, at the culmination of the biggest march against the then-pending Iraq War, on February 15 2003. Listening to him address the huge crowd assembled in the park felt a little to me like what I imagined it might have been like to listen to a public address by Martin Luther King. As Jackson was a protege of King’s, there was a direct line that could be traced between the two men.

Although that march did not stop the war, it nevertheless sent a powerful message that it was not being done in the name of millions of ordinary people around the world.

I made some field recordings of the march at the time, including of Jackson’s speech, and ultimately worked them into an audio collage that was included as the final track on my first (home-pressed) album of electronic music. When I later reworked that album for a public release online, I removed the full recording of his speech in favour of a different version of that track.

The original version of the track ‘1441’ has therefore remained unreleased online, until now. Although that version is presented in the soundtrack to this film as it was originally produced, I have remastered it for issue today, naming the remaster after Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition.

The experimental-style short film at the top of this post includes the original version of ‘1441’ as soundtrack. It also showcases a book (‘2/15’) that was made of several of the other actions being taken around the world on the same day as the London march that Jackson spoke at. It is also the 15th short film I have produced under the umbrella of Globalism Films, the first in almost ten years.

11 days after Jackson died, the US and Israel started a new war on Iran. This war was relatively sudden, and so had none of the attempts at ‘making the case’ for it before being enacted. George W. Bush had at least tried to get an endorsement from the United Nations Security Council (via resolution 1441) to give him cover for the war that he initiated in 2003. No such attempts this time around.

The conditions are different today from those in 2003 that saw the emergence of the biggest protest march in human history in opposition to the starting of a war, and it remains to be seen how global publics will respond to this new war. It appears to have started as an unpopular misadventure and wars that begin as unpopular rarely go in the opposite direction as they carry on.

It is hard to see how this latest American foray in the Middle East will play out. Current discourse includes an array of different scenarios, from Trump going nuclear and the collapse of the American Empire to a worldwide economic recession and a global acceleration of the transition of our energy systems towards renewables and electrification.

However, as Jackson said in Hyde Park in 2003, it gets dark sometimes, but morning comes. We must therefore also keep hope alive.

RIP Rev. Jackson.