Biker13

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

"What radicalized you?"

I dunno man maybe it was all the wars based on lies or the corporate ecocide or the live-streamed genocide or the people sleeping on sidewalks while billionaires become trillionaires or the plundering of the global south or the mass surveillance or the police drones or the Israeli torture prisons or the IDF rape dogs or the starvation sanctions or the proxy wars or the acts of nuclear brinkmanship or the encircling of our planet with hundreds of US military bases or the CIA black sites or the Epstein files or the government secrecy or the increasing persecution of journalists and whistleblowers or the fact that the US just openly assassinates and kidnaps the leaders of sovereign nations or the internet censorship or the way all western media and all Silicon Valley tech platforms operate as propaganda services for the US empire or the aggressive push to outlaw pro-Palestine demonstrations or the legalized corruption of western governments or the way AI is being shoved down our throats while data centers choke our ecosystem or the thinly disguised rush to develop militarized robots for domestic use or the glaring plot holes in the official 9/11 story or the glaring plot holes in the official October 7 story or the complete impotence of electoral politics in an oligarchy where the rich get everything they want or the vanishing ice caps or the vanishing rainforests or the vanishing wildlife or the plummeting insect population or the ocean desertification or the giant continent of plastic in the North Atlantic or the microplastics in our brains and in our blood or the fact that we live under a globe-spanning empire that cannot exist without mass-scale violence and exploitation or the fact that younger generations are economically far worse off than their parents and grandparents or the fact that ordinary people are having to work harder and harder as everything gets more and more expensive while the capitalist class reaps record profits?

At this point "What radicalized you?" is a much less interesting question to ask people than "Why aren't you radicalized yet? Seriously, how is that possible? How have you successfully managed to avoid conversion to a radical political worldview despite everything you are seeing right in front of your eyes?"

Because to the rest of us, that shit looks like a goddamn magic trick. It looks like a superhuman feat of willpower to continue believing everything's basically okay and our leaders will sort this all out for us if we just vote for the correct plutocratic meat puppet in the next election. You're just chilling out while everything burns, like that Buddhist monk sitting calmly in meditation after setting himself on fire. How are you even doing that?

[Li Zexin 李泽欣 @XH_Lee23]

China is reclaiming narrative power! A Chinese substitution app for YouTube is coming live!

Here's the full substitution list of Chinese apps vs US apps.

[Robert John @bobby_jags]

I wrote a too long Substack about this and how Michael Hudson proved that St Augustine changed the Christian religion to the point none of what we recognise as Christianity today is not Christianity. That Christ and Christianity was originally a solidarity movement against…1

[Mel @Villgecrazylady]

“I’m not talking because every time I talk, blood comes out of my mouth and makes my dress dirty, and I don’t want my mom to have to clean it.”

Hind Rajab’s last words to the paramedics she was on the phone with before Israeli soldiers pumped 355 bullets into the car she was in.

[Biker13 @jfe09]

@equalityAlec Thanks, I don't read Jacobin regularly but I will pass along this info. There does seem to be a default opinion that we should support police without ever looking deeper into what they do. It's a very high wall

[Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec]

There are people writing in Jacobin magazine who are telling socialists not to oppose police contracts for stuff like this giving money to people like this.

[Zachary Foster @_ZachFoster]

Apartheid Israel ranks #1 in the world in using human shields. A sampling, from 2000-present:

June 2025: A 63-Year-Old Medical Worker Spent 3 Months as a Human Shield for Israeli Brigades in Gaza “They dressed me in military uniform, and asked me to search in homes for explosives.” https://t.co/Mlkp8H5gb7

May 2025: Senior Israeli officers instructed soldiers to use Palestinians as human shields, and in some cases ordered them to do so when they tried to refuse: “orders often came from the top, and at times nearly every platoon used a Palestinian to clear locations, said an Israeli officer, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal… one soldier told the AP his unit tried to refuse to use human shields in mid-2024 but were told they had no choice, with a high-ranking officer saying they shouldn’t worry about international humanitarian law.” https://t.co/nxReflb9yW

February 2025: Israeli soldiers used an 80-year-old Gazan as a human shield. Soldiers put an explosive cord around the man's neck and forced him to scout buildings for eight hours. After his release, another division shot him dead. https://t.co/u1gKi2Nj2p

October 2024: A 17-year-old Palestinian student who was used as a human shield in Gaza told @nytimes “The soldiers sent me like a dog to a booby-trapped apartment… I thought these would be the last moments of my life.” https://t.co/zd3P43nVwb

October 2024: the Israeli army published a video (and then deleted it) of the Israeli army using a Palestinian civilian as a human shield during a raid on Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza https://t.co/ZycDT7uv3x

August 2024: @Haaretz published a long report detailing the Israeli Army's systematic use of Palestinian civilians as human shields. The tagline reads: "'Our lives are more important than their lives': Gazans not suspected of terrorism are detained and sent as human shields to search tunnels and houses before IDF soldiers enter, with the full knowledge of senior Israeli officers, several sources say." They write: "Most of the 'recruited' are older men...in some cases boys or very old people were also used...". Palestinian victims are: "dressed in an IDF uniform, his hands are handcuffed behind his back, a camera attached to his body." More reporting: “Today, almost every platoon keeps a ‘shawish’ and no infantry force enters a house before a ‘shawish’ clears it. This means there are four ‘shawishes’ in a company, twelve in a battalion, and at least 36 in a brigade. We operate a sub-army of slaves.” https://t.co/2MXmjMadjZ

July 2024, Al-Jazeera published footage of Palestinian prisoners appearing as human shields for Israeli soldiers in Gaza, including Palestinian prisoners forced to search destroyed buildings in Gaza while being monitored by cameras & drones. Al-Jazeera has also published footage of a Palestinian man forced by Israeli soldiers to search an abandoned UNRWA school in Gaza City, also while being monitored by Israeli drones. https://t.co/Na7QXDwvqd & https://t.co/FjJ6waMjEq

June 2024: Israeli soldiers used an aid truck perfidiously as a humanitarian shield to enter central Gaza, killing 276 Palestinians & releasing 4 hostages. A survivor of the massacre reported: the aid truck stopped in Nuseirat, Israeli soldiers got out of the truck & sprayed him w/3 bullets. https://t.co/6GfPUDraH1

May 2024: the Israeli military used an elderly man in Shuja'iyya, Gaza as a human shield, forcing him to inspect buildings with two (likely explosive) drones on top of his head ready to kill him at any second. https://t.co/zQSVAALOLr

Jan. 2024: the Israeli military used a civilian as a human shield in clashes today in Hebron, West Bank. https://t.co/qL1xBRQgUq

Jan 2024: Israeli gunmen dressed as hospital staff and Arab civilians raided a hospital in the West Bank city of Jenin, killing 3 Palestinians. https://t.co/Ka9bQ4JdU8

January 2024: the Israeli army used a Jerusalemite as a human shield in its invasion of the Qalandia refugee camp. The Israel soldier holding him is careful to keep the Palestinian detainee in front of him as they point their weapons upwards. https://t.co/6ZJLZq7LCO

December 2023: "Testimony of those arrested by the Israeli army (in Gaza): They provided vests packed w/ explosives to the detainees & put them in a tunnel as human shields. If anyone resisted, the army would blow up the detainee booby-trapped in the tunnel!"

10 Nov 2023: A video shows Israeli soldiers using a blindfolded Palestinian detainee as a human shield in the West Bank. He is seated on the ground w/ vehicles behind him using him as a shield as an Israeli soldier aim his rifle towards Palestinians https://t.co/UZ9WlBz3vB

Oct. 7, 2023-present: Israeli forces systematically using Palestinians as human shields. "The practice was reportedly so common in the Israeli military that it had a name: “mosquito protocol.” https://t.co/keUHhqxqjx

"the mosquito procedure...refers to Palestinians being detained [& used as human shields] we heard from one of the soldiers... why do I need to push a human being into a tunnel & their officer said, too many dogs in the IDF dog unit died." @NBCNews journalist: "So Palestinian men are replacing animals?" @weimanadav "yes" https://t.co/ZFGheXSc0z

May 2023: Israeli soldiers forced Nidal, 9, Karam, 11, Ahmad, 2 & Mohammad, 2 to stand in front of Israeli military vehicles while Israeli forces fired tear gas canisters, stun grenades & live ammunition at Palestinians confronting the soldiers in Ramallah https://t.co/dKD35stTZz

March 2023: Anas al-Khalili from Nablus. “I was used as a human shield by Israeli forces. They handcuffed me & started shooting from behind me. While I was handcuffed, they pushed me down the stairs, they stayed behind me & were shooting at the men… https://t.co/Slg2O4XsTe

May 2022: Israeli occupation soldiers used a 16-year-old Palestinian girl as a human shield in front of an Israeli military vehicle during an Israeli military attack on the northern occupied West Bank city of Jenin https://t.co/t2oXgF9Jd4

March 2018 Israel soldiers detained ‘Abd a-Rahim Gheith in Jericho & ordered him out the car, handcuffed him & made him sit on the road for 2hrs. Gheith was then used as a human shied, & was hit by stones thrown at the soldiers. Video evidence: https://t.co/XA9WT3Tq0T

July-Aug 2014: “Israeli soldiers handcuffed & blindfolded us...they made us stand by the windows as protective shields for them. There was gunfire all around us. They made us stand by the window for 9 hours. We were their shields.” - Ramadan Qudeih https://t.co/XA9WT3Tq0T

July-August 2014: “They refused to let us out….I asked for am ambulance for my sister, who fainted, they refused. They held us to protect themselves. -Nazeeha al-Najjar (7:30) https://t.co/XA9WT3Tq0T

July-August 2014: "I was taken prisoner, handcuffed & walked almost at gun point…he made me walk forward and he was protected by me…if any shots had been fired, they’d have hit me. He [the israeli soldier] was right behind me.https://t.co/IIPiJBCW08

2013: Israeli forces use 17-year-old Palestinian teenager as human shield while trying to disperse a protest in Abu Dis in the West Bank https://t.co/bAEd1v5FaT

2011: two dozen former Israeli soldiers came forward providing eyewitness accounts(this link opens in a new window) of the abuse of Palestinian civilians by the Israel military, including the use of adults and children as human shields. https://t.co/oOISwZnuOy

2010-2013: "The Committee on the Rights of the Child express deep concern about the continuous use of Palestinian children as human shields and informants. 14 such cases have been reported from January 2010 to 31 March 2013 only." https://t.co/XA9WT3Tq0T

2008-9: Israeli military used Palestinians as human shields in the 2008-9 war on Gaza, including Majdi Abd Rabbo, Abbas Ahmad Ibrahim Halawa, Mahmoud Abd Rabbo al-Ajrami and others. See p. 218-230 of the UN's Goldstone Report: https://t.co/NKAGUYxIux

2009: the Israeli army used Magdy Rabbo as a human shield: “the officers said I wouldn’t see my family unless i did it…he pushed me w/his weapon, held me by my neck & said go." [He had to go back & forth between Israeli soldiers & hamas fighers]. https://t.co/eaKOn6nYB2

2009: “The Israelis would send us ahead...they made me dig holes in the wall & in the houses first to check in case they were booby trapped. We were put in front so in case there was gunfire, we would be [hit].” -Rabbi Abde Rabi, Gaza resident https://t.co/nhjiEkmf5j

2007: Israeli rights group B’Tselem and Defense for Children International - Palestine documented at least 16 cases in which Israeli soldiers used Palestinian civilians - including six children as young as 11-years-old - as human shields during the course of the year. In one case, a 14-year-old girl was shot and severely wounded while Israeli soldiers used her as a human shield in Gaza. https://t.co/Ne14isr0f1

2000-5: the Israeli military used Palestinians as human shields on 1,200 occasions from 2000-5, according to Israeli officials. https://t.co/xUDtcU0GkM

2002: IDF forced Palestinians to walk thru buildings suspected to be booby-trapped. it ordered them to enter certain areas before the combat forces...the army used residents as a “human shield” to serve as a shield against attack on those forces (p.230) https://t.co/mBSnNe5wV2

May 2001: the Israeli army took over Hussein Aladi’s home, established an Israeli military base on the roof. For 3 months, they fired every day from there. The army insisted family always remain in the house, to protect the Israeli soldiers in it. https://t.co/tnyLjOK4Tu

[Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec]

Private prisons making $1.4 billion charging corrupt ICE bureaucracy $307,000 “per bed” as top 15 cops in San Francisco make average of $700,000 is why shifting resources from systems of incarceration to systems of care is one of the most popular policies in 40 years of polling.

[Robert John @bobby_jags]

Yes it’s hard to disagree with this but few question schools as institutions themselves as the problem and I cannot recommend De Schooling society by Ivan Ilich enough on this. One of the main problems he recognises is that schools develop corrosive cultures for learning. 1

[Daniel Mayakovski @DaniMayakovski]

Un 15 de agosto de 1939, 3 semanas antes del estallido de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, la URSS propuso una alianza anti-nazi a EEUU, Francia, Polonia y Reino Unido, ofreciendo 1 millón de tropas del Ejército Rojo listas para intervenir en Alemania.

La oferta soviética, realizada por el ministro de guerra Marshall Kliment Voroshilov y el jefe del estado mayor general del Ejército Rojo, Boris Shaposhnikov, ofreció hasta 120 divisiones de infantería (cada una con unos 19.000 soldados), 16 divisiones de caballería, 5.000 piezas de artillería pesada, 9.500 tanques y más de 5.500 aviones de combate y bombarderos en las fronteras de Alemania.

"Si los británicos, franceses y polacos, además de EEUU, hubieran tomado en serio esta oferta, juntos podríamos haber puesto unas 300 o más divisiones en el campo en dos frentes contra Alemania, el doble del número que tenía Hitler en ese momento. Esta era una oportunidad para salvar el mundo o al menos detener al lobo en su camino". ", dijo el general soviético Sotskov.

No solo EEUU, Francia, Polonia y Reino Unido lo rechazaron, se dedicaron a ocultarlo en toda la prensa occidental de la época, como afirma el historiador y profesor británico Donald Cameron Watt, "esta proposición no se mencionó en ninguno de los diarios contemporáneos, en ninguno de los dos grandes diarios británicos y en el principal francés".

Poco antes también de esta proposición, los británicos y los franceses firmaron el Acuerdo de Munich de 1938, en el que Neville Chamberlain y Édouard Daladier, primer ministro británico y francés respectivamente, entregaron los Sudetes de Checoslovaquia al régimen nazi, colaborando de facto con Hitler en su invasión a Europa.

Esta fue la TERCERA VEZ que la URSS proponía una alianza antifascista a los países occidentales y la tercera vez que era RECHAZADA, la primera en 1937 y la segunda en 1938, lo cual obligó a la URSS a firmar un pacto de no agresión (es decir, de no matarse mutuamente) con Alemania al encontrarse sola contra el fascismo, un contexto CLAVE que jamas te cuentan.

Los documentos de la proposición anti-nazi se mantuvieron en secreto durante casi 70 años y todavía siguen ocultándose en Occidente todo lo que se puede.

"Estaba claro que la Unión Soviética estaba sola y tenía que recurrir a Alemania y firmar un pacto de no agresión para ganar algo de tiempo, para prepararnos para el conflicto a gran escala que claramente se avecinaba contra nuestro pais", afirmó el general soviético Sotskov.

Tras la negativa de Reino Unido, Francia, Polonia y Estados Unidos a parar a Hitler, tres semanas después los nazis comenzarían una Segunda Guerra Mundial, ocupando algunos de esos países que se negaron a colaborar con la URSS y terminaría con la muerte de mas de 50 millones de personas, la mayoria soviéticos y chinos.

Esta es la verdadera historia de los "aliados" y no la que cuentan sus "documentales" de propaganda en Occidente.

[Carlos @agent_of_change]

Well this is awkward. Everything you’ve been told about the Belt and Road Initiative being a “debt trap” is provably wrong.

A new study from Nanjing University, published in the peer-reviewed Quarterly Journal of International Politics, has run the numbers on the Belt and Road Initiative across 197 countries and regions over 2000 to 2023 – including the 146 countries that have signed BRI agreements and the 135 where projects have been launched or completed.

The headline finding: there is no evidence that BRI participation increased financial vulnerability. Quite the opposite. Debt levels fell in participating countries, and the more infrastructure was built, the more debt fell.

The team also found improvements in corruption control, government effectiveness and quality of governance among recipient countries.

Study lead Mao Weizhun noted: the debt trap “lacks empirical support”, and the limited cases of genuine debt distress “were not caused by the Belt and Road Initiative or infrastructure construction, but by long-term structural economic problems accumulated by participating countries”.

The mechanism is not complicated. The investment paid for productive assets – ports, railways, power networks, communications. Those expand logistics capacity, industrial activity and the tax base, which is how a country repays a loan. This is the opposite of borrowing to service previous borrowing, which is what a great deal of Global South sovereign debt actually funds.

Somebody will point out that this is a study in a Chinese journal. Sure. But its findings are entirely consistent with what Western researchers found when they bothered to look. Chatham House demolished the debt trap thesis in 2020. Deborah Brautigam at Johns Hopkins has spent years documenting that Chinese lending to Africa is overwhelmingly infrastructure finance – around 40 percent to power generation and transmission, another 30 percent to transport – on a continent where over 600 million people have no electricity.

Over three-quarters of Global South external sovereign debt is owed not to states but to private Western financial institutions, which have no obligation to consider anybody’s development needs and every incentive to extract the maximum. As Tim Jones of Debt Justice UK has put it, Western leaders blame China for Africa’s debt crises, but their own banks, asset managers and oil traders are far more responsible; he further notes that China took part in the G20 debt suspension scheme during the pandemic while private lenders did not.

The debt trap is real enough, but it’s been set by Western financial institutions and their governments, not by China. The BRI is a South-South cooperation initiative that helps countries build productive capacity, and all serious analysis indicates that it’s strengthening rather than weakening the countries that participate.

[Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec]

Moreover, it is vital for anyone who cares about progressive social change to understand that the repressive bureaucracies of the state--working with organized sociopathic aggregations of wealth--have tried to crush every major progressive movement in modern U.S. history.

[Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec]

THREAD. It is disappointing to see progressive publications like The American Prospect exhibit such a failure to understand how things work. Some aspects of its election analysis--just like MSNBC, NYT, and Jacobin--are ignorant and dangerous.

[Policy Tensor @policytensor]

Read this by @ripplebrain. A devastating indictment.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Here is what American exceptionalism requires you to believe simultaneously:

That the government is so wise and so good that its military interventions abroad should be trusted even when the evidence is contested.

And that the government is so corrupt and so incompetent that it cannot be trusted to administer healthcare, or build infrastructure, or regulate the financial sector.

Brilliant abroad. Helpless at home.

Competent when killing. Useless when healing.

This is not a coherent political philosophy.

It is a permission structure.

It permits the endless funding of the military, because the government is wise and good when it comes to that.

And it prevents any expansion of the social contract, because the government is corrupt and incompetent when it comes to that.

The inconsistency is the point.

The inconsistency ensures that the money flows in one direction: toward the things that project power, and away from the things that would make ordinary people less desperate and therefore less controllable.

A population with guaranteed healthcare, free education, affordable housing, and genuine economic security is a population that can afford to say no.

To bad jobs.
To bad wars.
To bad politicians.

Desperation is a labor discipline tool. It is a political discipline tool.

It is how you maintain, in the wealthiest country in human history, a population that cannot afford to make demands.

Keep them sick. Keep them in debt. Keep them one emergency from catastrophe.

And they will accept almost anything that doesn't also take away the story.

[Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec]

THREAD. You should ask yourself who at the New York Times made the editorial decision to use the term "moderates" to describe a group of people who have some of the most factually indefensible and extreme position in the history of post World War II politics. And then ask why.

[Matt Bracken @Matt_Bracken48]

Joe, I was in Beirut in 1983. I led the NavSpecWarDet from MARG 1-83. A SEAL Platoon, a 35' Seafox boat and crew, and an SDV (mini sub) and crew. To call the bombing of the Marine "barracks" an act of terrorism is incorrect.

Scroll halfway down this page to see some pictures etc.
https://t.co/N5TATSzdfY

First, it was not "a barracks," not ever. This is the accepted cover story for a total and fatal breakdown in USMC military discipline. I was there in the spring of 83, not the fall, but I was in that BLT HQ building 100 times. It was NEVER a "barracks." The troops should have been dispersed out in their 20-man GP tents. The fact that Marine officers looked the other way as cold rainy Autumn weather came in, and let their troops slip into the BLT HQ building, is on the Marines. There should have been no more than 20 or 30 on "duty sections" manning comms etc. over night in that building.

We went into Beirut as part of the Multi-National Peacekeeping Force. We went as "neutral referees." This was after Israel drove tanks up to the Beirut suburbs, and their proxy Christian phalangist militias went into the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, and slaughtered 100s of women and children, with Israeli air and artillery cover.
https://t.co/Ht6jvTBGT7

Wiki, top up front:
"From 16 to 18 September 1982, between 1,300 and 3,500 civilians—mostly Palestinians and Lebanese Shias—were killed in Beirut's Sabra neighborhood and the adjacent Shatila refugee camp by the Lebanese Forces, one of the main Christian militias in Lebanon, with the support of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)"

The world was horrified. This was when CNN was brand new with 24 hour news coverage. It took years for the My Lai massacre in Vietnam to be exposed. It took hours for the Sabra and Shatila massacres to be seen around the world, while the bodies were still bleeding and warm.

Reagan said ENOUGH, and told Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon (defense minister) to back off, or not another dollar from America. And he sent in the U.S. Marines, joined by Brits, French and Italians. But we went in as neutrals, to keep the sides apart. Umpires. Referees. Neutrals. The PLO were put on USN ships and carried to Tunisia. That was the mission.

But, inevitably, "friction happens" when combatants are using the same roads and living space. We call it "clearing lanes of fire for our defense," they call it "chopping down our trees and tearing down some homes and businesses." One thing led to another, and by the Autumn of 83, we had USMC snipers trading shots with the proto-Hezbollah (they did not formally exist yet) shooters. Then came mortars. Both ways. Then artillery. Both ways. Then the battleship New Jersey was firing 16" shells deep into Lebanon.

Our status as "neutral umpires" was over and done. We were combatants. The Seabees used backhoes to dig big holes for the Marines' 20-man GP tents, to put them below ground level, due to the threat of mortars and arty. And then it began to rain, cold rain, and the holes filled with water. Wood pallets were the floors, you know the deal. The troops, on cots, were below ground level, but it sucked. So they began to slip into the BLT HQ building, with their fart sacks and ground pads. Cozy, compared to tents in the rain and mud.

Until 100s of Marines were bunched up in that building, nice and dry. But making a big fat juicy target. This is while the New Jersey was firing 16" shells inland, and our snipers and mortar teams were trading shots with theirs.

And the big target incorrectly known to history as "the Marine Barracks" was hit with a truck bomb, that drove straight into the open foyer of the building.

The Marine sentries were not allowed to have magazines in their rifles without getting permission from an officer. No vehicle barricades had been built. It was about a block and a half from the busy wide-open main Beirut airport road to the front of the building. The rest is history.

But this was 100% a military action against a military target, a military that was engaged in warfare. It was not terrorism. They were, by October of 83, combatants. And they were killed as much by that fatal lapse in USMC military discipline, by letting them bunch up in the BLT HQ building over night, as they were by the truck bomb.

And they were certainly not 168 grade school girls, killed by Tomahawk missiles during a sneak-attack assassination missile strike. During negotiations.

[WW2 The Eastern Front @ShoahUkraine]

No. And the reason this argument keeps coming back isn't that it's clever. It's that it's useful.

Start with what you left out. On 1 May 1933 the Nazis threw a festival for the German worker. On 2 May the SA went through the door of every trade union building in the country. Funds seized, organisations dissolved, leadership arrested. Most of them went to Dachau, where the first inmates were communists and social democrats, because that is who the camps were built for before they were built for anyone else. SPD banned in June. KPD broken in February. When the Enabling Act came to a vote, the Social Democrats were the only party that voted against it, and the Communists couldn't vote because they were already in cells. Four months. That's how long it took your socialist regime to physically destroy every organisation of the German working class.

Now the money.

There were no nationalisations.

Almost none in the entire Third Reich, hardly any new state firms, private companies keeping real discretion over what they produced and where they invested, no central planning of investment, and the state negotiating war contracts rather than dictating them. Their explanation for why is the part that should stop you. The regime believed private ownership produced better incentives. It thought capitalists worked harder when they owned the thing.

Nazi Germany was the only country in the Western world running a systematic reprivatisation programme in the 1930s, while every other capitalist state was moving toward more public ownership. Weimar had taken the big banks and a major industrial concern in the crash of 1931. The Nazis handed them back. Steel, shipping, banking. They also pioneered contracting out public services to private firms. The English word privatisation comes from the German Reprivatisierung, and it comes from them.

And you forgot the biggest property transfer in Europe before the war. Aryanisation. A hundred thousand Jewish businesses, plus the homes, the accounts, the paintings. Handed to whom? Not the state. To private German owners, with Deutsche Bank and Dresdner taking a broker's cut. Find me the socialism in that.

Then read the Law for the Ordering of National Labour, January 1934, which wrote the Führerprinzip into the factory. The employer is designated the leader of the plant. The workers are designated his followers. In law. Hold that sentence next to the word socialism and see which one survives.

Schacht, a conservative banker, ran the economy. Feder, the only man who meant the anti-capitalist rhetoric, was squeezed out by the end of 1934.

Gregor Strasser, who led the party's left, was shot on 30 June 1934. The anti-capitalist wing of Nazism was real. Hitler killed it in year two, to reassure the army and heavy industry, and it worked.

Because of course they paid for him. Düsseldorf, January 1932: Hitler in front of the Ruhr, telling them property and unequal reward are natural and will be defended. Göring's residence, February 1933: Krupp and IG Farben putting up three million marks. They weren't confused about what they were buying. They were buying the end of the unions. They kept getting it until 1944, when millions of forced labourers and camp prisoners were working inside Krupp, IG Farben, Siemens and Volkswagen, and the profits stayed with the shareholders. Slave labour captured privately. There is no socialism in any language that looks like that.

And the axis you think was rigged comes from a seating plan in 1789. Right side, the king and the order of ranks. Left side, equality. It has never measured the size of the state. If it did, Colbert is a Marxist, and so is Franco with his INI, and so is Mussolini, whose IRI gave Italy the largest state-owned sector in Europe outside the USSR. Nobody moves Franco leftward for it. The axis measures whether you think human inequality is natural in the blood. Nazism said yes, loudly, in print, for twenty years.

[Kshama Sawant @cmkshama]

Our campaign was by far the strongest ever by an openly Marxist candidate for the U.S. Congress.

We've so far won a historic 16.9 percent of the vote in a five-way race, in Washington’s sprawling Ninth Congressional District, which spans suburban areas with a significant proportion of Republican voters in addition to large parts of the major urban areas of Seattle and Bellevue.

We ran on electrifying demands like free healthcare for all funded by taxing the rich, ending all military aid to Israel and a permanent arms embargo on Israel, and national rent control. All of these are extremely popular among the working class in this district and nationally.

We achieved this result despite the many obstacles we faced.

Both the Democratic and Republican parties maneuvered by running candidates specifically to block our campaign from getting into the November election, which would have resulted in a head-to-head battle between our campaign and genocidal Democrat Adam Smith.

We faced a corporate media blackout, and hostility and outright attacks from DSA leaders and many "progressive" podcasters.

Many labor leaders shamelessly endorsed Adam Smith, while others remained silent, effectively supporting Smith.

All of these obstacles were predictable. Our decade on the Seattle City Council showed what a threat we are to the political establishment and those who give them cover. We used our decade on the Seattle City Council to relentlessly build working-class movements, winning four elections and unparalleled victories such as the nation's highest minimum wage, which also led to substantive raises for tens of millions of workers across the United States, defeating Jeff Bezos to win the Amazon Tax, and repeatedly beating corporate landlords to win unprecedented renters' rights.

Despite not making it into the November election, we've provided a powerful example of what's possible by running an openly Marxist independent campaign based on class struggle rather than making peace with the political establishment or its legions of gatekeepers.

The DSA strategy of appeasing and, worse, rehabilitating the discredited Democratic leadership and their rotten party is a dead end. In this age of imperialist war, genocide, and climate catastrophe, we simply have no time to fuck around.

We urgently need militant movements of the working class and a new mass party that can defeat the billionaires and both their parties. And we need revolutionary socialist campaigns like mine that don't try to join the establishment and help administer the capitalist system, but instead fight to overthrow it.