David Rankin

'Good God, if our civilisation were to sober up for a couple of days it'd die of remorse on the third.'

[Thomas Fazi @battleforeurope]

I’ve written for @unherd about how Hungary’s new government is doing everything Orbán was accused of — and getting rewarded by Brussels for it.

The new Hungarian PM Péter Magyar calls it “Operation Purgatory”: a sweeping constitutional and administrative offensive designed to destroy the Orbán system — and ensure it can never return to power.

The 16th Amendment imposes a retroactive lifetime term limit of eight years on the prime minister, barring Orbán — who has served for 20 years — from ever holding office again. No wonder critics have dubbed it the “Lex Orbán”. Virtually no parliamentary democracy imposes term limits of this kind. The 17th Amendment also sets a 12-year limit for MPs: conveniently, no sitting Tisza MP is affected — only the opposition, wiping out Fidesz’s entire senior cadre.

Then there’s the president. Rather than pursue impeachment — the only removal mechanism the constitution provides — Magyar simply inserted a line into an amendment declaring that the incumbent president’s term "terminates today". Removal by legislative fiat. Even Amnesty International Hungary called it a constitutional coup. Add to this a purge of the Constitutional Court via a new retirement age, a special body tasked with investigating one party only — the old ruling party Fidesz — the shutdown of public media news output, the closure of Fidesz-aligned institutions and a judicial raid that took the party’s website offline.

These measures are clearly aimed at destroying the opposition outright, at making sure Fidesz can never return and thereby locking in Hungary’s EU-dictated agenda forever: dismantling Orbán’s heterodox economic model, phasing out Russian energy whatever the cost and full alignment on Ukraine.

Beyond the policy questions here, there is simply no way this brazen attack on the opposition can be defended on democratic grounds — and indeed Orbán himself, for all the EU establishment’s claims about the allegedly autocratic nature of his government, never dared to legislate his opponents out of existence. Yet the EU establishment, which spent fifteen years branding Orbán a proto-dictator, has responded by unblocking €10 billion in frozen funds. We saw the same film in Tusk’s Poland.

The lesson is clear: “democracy” and the “rule of law” function above all as pretexts for disciplining governments that resist the EU’s expanding authority. Indeed, when it comes to supporting its own emissaries, there is apparently no red line the EU will not cross — up to and including greenlighting the outright annulment of entire elections when they go the wrong way, as we saw in Romania in 2024.

As for Hungary, the strategy seems clear: the EU is bent on punishing the rebellious colony — by making sure it can’t rebel ever again.

Read the article here: https://t.co/w4AxoN7ffe

[Carlos @agent_of_change]

What breaking out of underdevelopment actually looks like

Earlier this year, Zimbabwe did something that developing countries are usually punished for: it banned the export of raw minerals and lithium concentrates outright, and told the mining companies operating there that if they wanted Zimbabwean lithium they would have to process it in Zimbabwe.

The economics driving that decision aren’t difficult to understand. Raw lithium concentrate fetches somewhere around $570 a ton. Battery-grade lithium carbonate sells for roughly $7,000, meaning that the refined product is worth 12 times the value of the unrefined rock.

Africa holds an enormous share of the minerals on which the global energy transition depends, but in the prevailing imperialist system it has been assigned the role of digging them up and shipping them out, while the value is captured elsewhere. This is a colonial division of labour, still running, with lithium substituted for copper and rubber. Zimbabwe refuses to play along.

Historically, “resource nationalism” in the Global South has been punished with coups, sanctions and structural adjustment. Iran nationalised its oil and Mossadegh was overthrown. Chile nationalised copper and Allende was overthrown. Indeed Zimbabwe, let’s not forget, has been under Western sanctions for decades on account of its unwillingness to play along with the global extractive order.

How are China’s companies responding to the new policy? By investing in Zimbabwe, building refineries and processing plants, and complying with the government’s requirement that they add value locally.

Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, through its subsidiary Prospect Lithium Zimbabwe, has constructed the country’s first lithium sulphate plant at Goromonzi in Mashonaland East. In April it shipped Zimbabwe’s first-ever export of domestically produced lithium sulphate. Sinomine’s Bikita Minerals is building a second plant in Masvingo. Once both are running, as President Mnangagwa noted this week, Zimbabwe will be the only country in Africa hosting multiple lithium-processing operations.

Instead of Zimbabwean rock being shipped to a refinery in China, the refinery is being built in Zimbabwe – with the jobs, the skills, the tax base and the higher-value export revenue staying in the country. Huayou paid $422 million for the Arcadia project in 2021; it is now investing further to comply with a policy that reduces its own margins in favour of its host.

By contrast, the US Minerals Security Partnership exists to secure supply chains for US industry, not to build African ones. Washington’s recent minerals dealmaking in the DRC is about access, not beneficiation. Nobody in Brussels or Washington is financing lithium refineries in Masvingo.

The West is trying to keep Africa at the bottom of the value chain. China is helping it move up.

[Max Blumenthal @MaxBlumenthal]

These leaks demonstrate how on the most consequential national security issues, the British government is run in secret by MI5

The MI5 director privately acknowledged labeling IRGC as a terrorist group would have little "operational benefit," and was a "difficult choice"

But the listing was rammed through to justify the spy agency's budget and a growing crackdown on domestic dissidents

[Anti-Imperialist History, Economics, Geopolitics @prisonerroom101]

https://t.co/LoIQ5yLTZ3

[Iskra Books @iskrabooks]

🚨🧨🚨Iskra Books author Torkil Lauesen has a new article!! Torkil charts "the Chinese experience through the shifting principal contradictions of the last century” link below 👇

[Iskra Books @iskrabooks]

https://t.co/7GAFzvav00

[GB Politics @GBPolitcs]

🚨NEW: Former Lib Dem leader, Nick Clegg, warns there's now "almost no party that appears viscerally on the side of wealth creators"

[Rania Khalek @RaniaKhalek]

BreakThrough News is under attack

Republican lawmakers are claiming our political views and @BTnewsroom reporting are part of some foreign plot.

The MAGA-dominated House Ways and Means Committee has issued us a subpoena – demanding internal communications, financial records and more. This is a flagrant abuse of power, and a direct attack on our work as journalists and on the First Amendment generally.

Add your name to our petition, defend independent media!

https://t.co/GSkDGtfQj7

[Ben Norton @BenjaminNorton]

This is false and ridiculous.

This propaganda spread by the US government (which supports actual dictatorships around the world) has been widely regurgitated by the corporate media.

But they are all taking out of context comments made by Nicaragua's Co-President Daniel Ortega.

Below I have posted a screenshot of the official transcript of the speech given by Ortega on 19 July 2026, alongside my translation. (This is link to the official transcript: https://t.co/9x3oIbipC4)

The full context clearly shows that Ortega was discussing the history of US interference in Nicaragua, and how the US government funds right-wing political parties to try to overthrow the Sandinista Front. (This should not come as a surprise to anyone who knows the basic history of Nicaragua and the CIA's Contra terror war in the 1980s.)

In 2018, the US government sponsored a very violent coup attempt in Nicaragua, which was extremely traumatic for the population.

Ortega was saying that "there will be no more elections" for these coup-plotting right-wing political parties that are funded by the US government.

Nicaragua is defending its sovereignty and preventing the US empire from installing another puppet regime like the corrupt Somoza dictatorship, which Washington propped up for decades, on the corpses of countless Nicaraguans.

The US empire has invaded Nicaragua multiple times, militarily occupied the country, waged a terror war, imposed sanctions, funded the opposition, and meddled nonstop in its elections. The Sandinista government is saying that that history of foreign interference is over. No more.

[The Grayzone @TheGrayzoneNews]

Piers Morgan invited Max Blumenthal on to discuss his Iran reporting and the illegal seizure of his devices by the US govt, but spent much of his time questioning Blumenthal's "impartiality"

"I'm absolutely not impartial," Blumenthal explained. "I am not objective, and the concept of objectivity, as we understand it, is set out by the corporate media according to the parameters devised for them by their militant Zionist ruling class owners, who literally own the networks that you appear on."

Blumenthal then illustrated how Morgan manufactured consent for the US-Israeli war on Iran by promoting inflated death tolls and a false narrative of the Israeli and US-sponsored regime change riots that rocked Iran in January

[Double Down News @DoubleDownNews]

Shabana Mahmood just proscribed the IRGC, bowing to the Israel lobby.

It’s part of a National Security Bill that could jail journalists for 14 years just for doing their jobs.

This is the most authoritarian UK government in modern history, shredding our rights at the behest of a foreign state.

They’ll come for your thoughts and opinions next @lornahosford

[David Miller @Tracking_Power]

Important detail in the new National Security Act.

I see the government is to designate the IRGC as an organisation under the new National Security (State Threats) Act 2026. The designation notice has not yet been published but will be shortly. They are not proscribing the IRGC as a "terrorist" group. Instead in the new legislation they are using language similar to that found in the Terrorism Act 2000. Here is (S17a) of the new legislation

(1) A person commits an offence if the person—
(a)invites support for, or expresses an opinion or belief that is supportive of, a designated body, and
(b)does so for a prohibited purpose.

This contrasts with the Terrorism Act 2000 which said:

A person commits an offence if—
(a)he invites support for a proscribed organisation.

This was extended by the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019 by adding the following language:

1A)A person commits an offence if the person—
(a)expresses an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation.

The "supportive" language was added because it was so difficult to gain successful convictions with the tighter language. Thus we see this opaque and frankly risible "supportive". How is that defined? Take the statement "The IRGC was successful in hitting all of its targets last night." Is that "supportive" even if true?

Note also that there also provisions in 17(b) on "assisting" a designated body. This included:

Conduct that may be likely to materially assist a designated body includes providing, or providing access to, information, goods, services or financial benefits (whether directly or indirectly).

And in 19(c) on "Obtaining etc material benefits from a designated body", there is the following language, which on the face of it is the most worrying:

(2)A person commits an offence if—
(a)the person agrees to accept—
(i)a material benefit

and:

(3)Material benefits may include financial benefits, anything which has the potential to result in a financial benefit, and information.

The inclusion of information here is the critical thing. Reporting a statement by a designated body could fall foul of this, regardless if it was true or false.

There are, however, two defences worth noting. In relation to information : "it is a defence to show that the person had a reasonable excuse for that conduct." One would imagine that journalism is a reasonable excuse, but let us see.

A second defence is that:

(4)A material benefit is an excluded benefit if—
(a)it is provided as reasonable consideration for the provision of goods or services, and
(b)the provision of those goods or services does not constitute an offence.

So, presumably, providing goods and services to the designated body is not forbidden?

There are other defences available but these are to my mind the most important.

[Links to legislation in replies]

[Carlos @agent_of_change]

The Labour government has announced that it will designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – a central branch of the Iranian armed forces – as a terrorist organisation, making it a criminal offence to support it “in any way”.

It should be pointed out that the IRGC is not some shadowy militia; it is part of the regular military of a sovereign state – a state that is being subjected to a flagrantly criminal war of aggression by the US and Israel; its schools, hospitals and oil depots bombed; its scientists, political leaders and head of state assassinated.

Britain now proposes to brand the armed forces of the victim of that aggression as “terrorists”, while the governments that actually launched the attack, and the state currently perpetrating a genocide in Gaza, enjoy Britain’s active support.

What is being criminalised is not violence or “terrorism” but a political position: solidarity with a country under attack. It is a serious crackdown on the anti-war and anti-imperialist movements, and a message to the working class movement in general about where the lines of acceptability lie.

Interestingly, the Tories, for all their faults, repeatedly declined to proscribe the IRGC, precisely because designating a foreign state’s military as a terrorist entity is a reckless and legally dubious act. It has taken a Labour government to do it.

This comes hot on the heels of Labour’s proscription of Palestine Action – a direct-action protest group that has never taken a life, whose “crimes” consist of spray paint and damage to arms factories complicit in genocide.

So this “progressive” Labour government, elected on a promise of change, is proving more repressive and authoritarian than the Tory administration it replaced. It’s expanding the definition of terrorism to encompass protest and dissent at home, and legitimate resistance to imperial aggression abroad.

As the empire’s power wanes and its crimes multiply, it criminalises those who have the temerity to oppose them. The task for the left is not to flinch, but to say plainly what is happening – and to defend, without apology, the right to oppose war and genocide.

[Glenn Diesen @Glenn_Diesen]

Lindsey Graham and John McCain pushing their proxy army to war: "2017 will be the year of offense

[Nel B. @noirnen]

The Changing Face of Fascism in Latin America: From the General's Silence to the Showman's Scream

I've been watching two extraordinary analyses from Mexican historians and Latin American specialists—Christian Nader on Retrovisor and the panel on Contralínea's América Insumisa—and I wanted to share some reflections on what they reveal about the evolving nature of right-wing politics in the region, and how it connects to the broader strategic logic of the US-led empire that I have been mapping under the concept of the Bunker State.

The recent electoral shifts in South America—the razor-thin victories of the right in Peru, the rise of figures like Javier Milei in Argentina, the persistent strength of Bolsonarismo in Brazil—are often read as national phenomena. But we should understand these developments as a mutation in the very form of fascism, shaped by the changing strategic needs of the empire and the new terrain of cognitive warfare.

The Cold War Dictator: Austerity as the Aesthetic of Pure Coercion

Christian Nader makes an excellent observation about the aesthetic shift between twentieth-century and twenty-first-century Latin American fascism. The dictators of the Cold War era—Pinochet, Videla, Stroessner, Somoza—were defined by what he calls "Spartan sobriety." They wore crisp military uniforms and dark glasses. They presented themselves as stoic, disciplined, and severe. Their coups were announced in formal, static environments, backed by the institutional weight of the military triumvirate (including capital and the clergy).

During the Cold War, the US-led empire faced an existential threat: an organized, armed, ideologically coherent revolutionary left, backed by a rival superpower. Therefore the response was kinetic: coups, death squads, disappearances, Operation Condor. The goal was to crush the left entirely through state terror.

The theater was minimal because the violence was maximal. The performance was the violent repression itself. The austere, military aesthetic communicated that the “chaos” of socialism is over. “Order” has been restored.

The Post-Cold War Shift: From Suppression to Managed Demobilization

After the Soviet Union collapsed, the strategic calculus changed. The revolutionary left, as an organized armed force, was largely defeated or transformed into electoral movements. The threat now was democracy itself: the possibility that popular movements, now operating through electoral channels, might win power and use it to challenge the neoliberal order.

In this scenario, the old methods—coups, death squads, open military rule—had become materially costly. They destabilized investment climates. And, crucially, they could reignite the very resistance they were meant to extinguish. The memory of the 1960s and 1970s—of the Sandinistas, the FMLN, the Tupamaros, of a continent in flames—is still alive in Latin America.

So what replaces the coup? A more sophisticated, multi-layered strategy of demobilization. The Bunker State does not want to create martyrs. It does not want to unify the opposition. It does not want to push people toward armed resistance. It wants to manage dissent, fragment it, and channel it into forms that cannot threaten the core hierarchies of the world-system.

As a recent US Army War College report states with candor: "The anti-US governments of Venezuela, Cuba, and, to a degree, Nicaragua are under considerable US pressure, which minimizes their willingness and ability to work actively against US interests." This is the logic of calibrated pressure: enough to disable, not enough to martyr. Enough to demobilize, not enough to radicalize.

The New Right Aesthetic: Theater as Cognitive Warfare

This is where the histrionic, dramatic, violent-in-rhetoric style of the new Latin American right becomes legible. Nader contrasts the "Spartan sobriety" of the old dictators with the "high histrionics" of figures like Milei, Bolsonaro, and their imitators. A stoic general in a uniform cannot capture the populist imagination. But a chainsaw-wielding showman can. The new aesthetic is still a reflection of fascism into a form adapted to the current strategic environment.

It “wins” elections. The new right wins it, or appears to win it, through elections. This provides a veneer of democratic legitimacy that makes it harder for the opposition to mobilize. A coup can be resisted with a general strike (even though Bolivia for its own societal structure seems to reist this logic). An elected demagogue is more complicated.

It demobilizes through spectacle. The constant theater keeps the public in a state of emotional arousal. It saturates the information environment. It makes it nearly impossible for a coherent, class-based opposition to form, because everyone is too busy reacting to the latest outrage.

It channels discontent into cultural war. The new right redirects popular anger. It takes the legitimate grievances of people immiserated by neoliberalism and gives them a target that is not the ruling class: the "globalist elite," the "cultural Marxists," the "gender ideology." The theater provides an emotional outlet without ever threatening the material structures of power.

It avoids the martyr effect. The new histrionic right creates chaos. It is far harder to organize a revolutionary movement against a shape-shifting performer who claims victimhood even as he wields power.

The Gramscian Inversion: Why the Cities Vote Right

The América Insumisa panel offers a complementary insight. They note a complete inversion of Gramsci's classic analysis. In early twentieth-century Italy, the industrial North was progressive and open to change, while the rural South was conservative. In Latin America today, the exact opposite holds: the rural periphery votes left, while the "developed" urban centers are bastions of the far right.

But, why? Urban populations are saturated with corporate media, algorithmic manipulation, and a constant bombardment of disinformation on platforms like X and Facebook, as well as radio stations and TV channels. The far right invests "boatloads of money" to promote these lies, saturating the "advanced" urban zones with neoliberal common sense. By contrast, rural areas still maintain an existing community fabric. They rely on alternative, localized communication exchanges, such as community radio stations. This surviving social infrastructure acts as a shield against digital disinformation.

In other words, the most "connected" populations are the most captured. The most "developed" zones are the most vulnerable to fascist capture. And the periphery, precisely because it has been excluded from the digital infrastructure of empire, retains a capacity for independent thought and collective action.

Why This Matters: The Strategic Logic of Managed Chaos

The empire wants weak, fragmented, perpetually crisis-ridden states that are incapable of pursuing autonomous development. The theatrical fascism of the new right serves this purpose perfectly. It keeps the region in permanent political turmoil, prevents the consolidation of any genuinely anti-imperialist project, and does so without triggering the kind of mass armed resistance that the old dictators provoked.

The Cold War was a period of open class war, and the right's methods reflected that: direct, military, existential. Today, in the interregnum, the war continues by other means. The theater is not a distraction from politics. It is the politics—a politics designed to keep you watching, reacting, and exhaustedly passive.

And yet, as a recent War College report itself acknowledges, this configuration is fragile. It depends on the absence of a unified, organized, defiant left, both within Latin America and across the Global South. The lack of regional unity, the absence of collective defense mechanisms, and the fragmentation of the multipolar space all create an opening that the empire exploits. But that opening is not permanent. "If cooperative governments do not increase citizen security and prosperity, or if changes in internal US politics—or the international situation—cause currently silent governments to decrease their fear of US retribution," the entire strategic configuration could shift.

The silence of the general has been replaced by the scream of the showman. But the silence of the masses is what makes both possible. And breaking that silence—through organization, through alternative media, through the slow rebuilding of the community fabric—remains a genuine path forward.

Ultimately, we have to see:
- how electoral software, telecommunication platforms, media, sanctions, and data flows plug into a multilayered cage managed by the imperial core;
- how new fascist leaders are products designed for that cage;
- and how the memory of the old resistance shapes what kinds of repression the empire now avoids.

The choice of style is a signal about how power plans to rule, and how it plans to prevent the return of the armed, organized, transnational resistance that once made Latin America the beating heart of anti‑imperialism.

[Jason Hickel @jasonhickel]

Seven years ago a representative from Google reached out to me in an official capacity to discuss the company's energy use. I told them it would become necessary for major firms in core economies to reduce energy use in order to enable Paris-compliant decarbonisation.

They assured me that their new AI tools were already helping them identify ways to improve the company's energy efficiency, so they weren't worried. They insisted this would soon yield radical efficiency improvements, and lead to energy use reduction without any change to their production activities. "Just wait, you'll see!" they told me, full of confidence.

I told them that's not how it works. In growth-oriented capitalist firms, savings from efficiency improvements are generally leveraged to expand production. I predicted that even if their AI found ways to improve efficiency, Google's energy use would go up, not down. Seven years later and this is where we're at:

[Matt Kennard @kennardmatt]

"I don't back away from the original decision. I think it gave 20 or so million people in Iraq hope of a better life and you just cannot walk away from that truth"

—Andy Burnham in 2010

By this time, a million Iraqis had been killed by the criminal British invasion he supported

"I'd be proud to follow Tony Blair's lead," he continued

Psychopath

[Seyed Abbas Araghchi @araghchi]

This is not a rant by a random genocidal lunatic. It's a public post by the national security minister of the Israeli regime.

The genocidal death cult headquartered in Tel Aviv is a threat to all of humanity. It threatens all humans. Its only interest is permanent war.

[The Crispin Flintoff Show @CrispinShow]

Starmer Arson Trial - BBC story is threadbare. And what’s with the rush to put out a Panorama suggesting Russian involvement- the day after the oil tanker stunt that was exposed so well by @CraigMurrayOrg?

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

BREAKING: The Court of Appeal has backed the government's appeal against the High Court and reinstated the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation.

As I've been noting for some time, this was always going to happen.

The police ignored the High Court's ruling of proscription as unlawful and continued arresting people as terrorists for holding placards stating: "I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action."

On Friday, Judge Johnson upgraded the criminal damage convictions of the Filton Four to terrorism offences in his sentencing, even though at the time of sentencing Palestine Action was not, in the eyes of the courts, considered a terrorist organisation.

It was as though the High Court decision never happened.

We have been subjected to legal threatre to make it look as if the judiciary have carefully weighed our most cherished and basic rights against the interests of the British state in continuing its complicity in the Gaza genocide.

This has all been a stitch-up to keep the focus on the faux-illegality of opposing a genocide rather than the very real illegality of the British state colluding in atrocities that have killed many tens of thousands – and more likely, hundreds of thousands – of civilians in Gaza.

Anyone who has supported this dangerous farce should hang their heads in shame.