This day, 3 January, in 1925 Benito Mussolini assumed all responsibility for the murder of Giacomo Matteotti, an important Socialist Party politician who had been kidnapped months earlier and found those days in a wood, where he had been stabbed to death. This act is the birth of the fascist dictatorship, because that day fascism showed its true face, the face of someone willing to eliminate anyone in front of him to stay in power. Today it seems absurd to us that a politician would come out and essentially declare that he was a murderer, but that day Mussolini was applauded by everyone: it was the point of no return.

EDIT: oh and here's another reminder (the image ends in 2012, it's even worse now) for y'all who like to talk a lot about shit y'all don't understand.

For all you doomers out there, if this doesn't inspire you, nothing will. Palestinians are some of the bravest people on the planet and it's incredible that they managed to organize this, something that will have lasting effects! (as explained further on)

WAY too much talk about (especially as news keep rolling in), but I personally don't have too much time (due to work...), so I'll just link some a few Twitter posts that have media sources and great commentary:

-To start off, here's a video where thousands of Israeli colonizers are seen running away from Gaza.

-Some context about Sderot, the town that Hamas took back (all of it? I'm not 100% sure) from the colonizers:

Sderot, under Hamas attacks today, was built on the ruins on the Palestinian village Huj that the IDF looted; blew up to pieces; & put its people on trucks to Gaza 2 weeks after Israel's founding!

It's also home to the Israelis who cheerfully watched bombs being dropped on Gaza.

-Video of Palestinians breaking into separation fence w/Israel with some commentary:

Palestinians break into separation fence w/Israel, dozens of Israelis captured and brought into Gaza...** In 2011, Israel released 1,027 prisoners for an Israeli soldier, many here see this as a rare chance for +550 Palestinians sentenced to life to be released in a similar deal**.

-Video of an Israeli tank getting blown up.

-Video of Hamas fighters using hang gliders to fly into occupied territory.

-Ali Abunimah's (one of the best people to follow for everything Palestine-related) excellent comment on what we can expect from western reaction to this story:

There will be horror all over the "West" at Israelis experiencing a fraction of the violence Palestinians suffer every single day. The persecution, terrorizing and murder of Palestinians by Israel is just background noise for them. Only when settlers suffer is there outrage.

-More commentary by Ali Abunimah (+Sami Hermez) on how this will have long-lasting effects, even if Israel manages to re-occupy the liberated town:

"This is the first time in the history of this struggle that Palestinians have retaken a town from settlers, even if for a brief moment and even if they don't ultimately hold onto it. This is a significant moment in the psychological war".

Indeed. Even if the “IDF” terrorists re-occupy the areas liberated by the resistance how many colonists will return there?

-Great comment by Yanis Varoufakis (former Minister of Finance of Greece) on how "to end the violence":

The path to ending the tragic loss of innocent lives – both Palestinian and Israeli – begins with one crucial first step: the end of the Israeli occupation and apartheid.

-Unprecedented (AFAIK) statement by the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs of condemnation of... Israel! (a reminder for those who don't know, until very recently Saudi Arabia was best buds with the US and Israel, before China brokered a peace deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran):

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia holds Israel responsible for what happened due to its repeated provocations and deprivation of rights of Palestinians.

-Since the news only reports on settler casualties:

200+ Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza today, thousands injured so far—and surely more to come. @DCIPalestine will share information on Palestinian child fatalities and injuries as we are able to document them.

-And here's a bit of a reminder for the liberals in this sub that "peaceful resistance" (a laughable idea in the face of the extreme violence of Israeli colonizers), was already tried and this is what happened:

Just a reminder that in 2018, Palestinians in Gaza mounted the Great March of Return to show the world their plight. Day after day, they walked, unarmed, to Israel's military fences around Gaza. Israel shot 8,000 with live ammunition, killed 220 Palestinians. 36,143 total injured.

Finally, reminder that

this is a developing story

So try to follow the news for more (or even for possible corrections on these early reports). I'm unfortunately very busy with work this weekend, so I won't have time to keep this post updated with whatever else comes out, but I had to share the great news, since I know a lot of y'all are only gonna hear about this from capitalist media (that's gonna try to portray this as some horror story).

this classmate of mine has been a satanist and an atheist for a while now but recently just a few months ago he’s been telling everybody that he’s christian and has been hanging out with fascist people 2-3 years older than him. We were friends before he became a nazi and insulted my dead relative and after that i just thought that blocking him and ignoring him would be the best option. since then he’s been trying to get on my good side, basically licking out my ass. A couple of times i’ve confronted him about it, calling him a fascist c##t etc. he’s also showing obvious signs of racism, homophobia, transphobia and antisemitism, but denies everything. he’s also been seen making swastika graffities and telling our classmates how much he hates gay and jewish people.he recently just told my friend that me and him have made peace, which is not true. Should i confront him about it or should i continue ignoring him? edit: thank you very much to everyone who liked and forwarded my post and most of all thank you to everyone who wrote about the topic in the comments, everyone helped with various solutions. I was able to talk to very nice, helpful and understanding people!

The Allies failed to denazify Europe by failing to dismantle the political foundations their own nations shared with the Nazi regime. Europeans need not repeat that mistake. An article by Alain Alameddine and Nira Iny on Mondoweiss.

Germany’s firm stance in support of genocide in Palestine raises the question: How come the country best known for its supposed reckoning with guilt for its past genocide is repeating such similar mistakes? Understanding what Nazism is — not the crimes it committed, but its very nature as a sociopolitical vision — helps us understand how and why the Allies deliberately failed to denazify Germany and why the specter of fascism continues to haunt Palestine, Europe, and the world today. It also helps us understand how the solution is in our hands.

Understanding the foundational pillars of the Nazi political project

Nazism is not an apolitical criminal impulse, but a criminal political project built on three foundational pillars: the politicization of identity, colonialism, and capitalism.

All states make a distinction between citizens and non-citizens. Nazism, however, constructed a separation between insiders and outsiders on the basis of identity, excluding German citizens from identities it considered undesirable. Interestingly, in formulating their political program, Nazi leaders referenced American segregation law. Books such as the National Socialist Handbook for Law and Legislation of 1934-1935 and Heinrich Krieger’s Race Law in the United States of 1936 drew heavily on American precedent, finding no other nation with comparable templates for racial legislation. Krieger’s research inspired the Nuremberg Laws, which brought into force the early Nazi Party’s discrimination against Jewish, Romani, and Black Germans. 

Nazism’s politicization of identity also expressed itself in a colonialist way, drawing, again, direct inspiration from American westward expansion when strategizing its conquest of Poland and its Slavic neighbors. Hitler himself carefully studied American eugenics and adopted similar propaganda to justify his party’s genocides. Indeed, Nazi expansionism and ethnic cleansing were nothing new to European nations, the difference being that others such as Italy, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and the UK colonized, enslaved, and orchestrated genocides primarily outside of Europe. In European eyes, Nazi Germany’s sin seems not to have been its colonial project itself but where and on whom it was imposed.

Nationalsozialismus, “national socialism”, was no socialism at all; rather, it was profoundly and essentially capitalist. Capitalism played a direct role in Hitler’s ascent to power. Europe’s Great War had ended in heavy restrictions on Germany’s control of its coal and on the size of its army, heavily impacting its industry. It was in industrial capitalists’ interest to support the Nazi political program that promised to defy these restrictions and also to protect them from the growing communist “threat” to their private ownership of the means of industrial production. They funded the Nazi party’s propaganda and political campaigns, pressured President Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as Chancellor, and approved the “Enabling Act” that cemented Hitler’s dictatorship. Not coincidentally, German industrial capitalists enjoyed a close relationship with the U.S., not only before the War (over a hundred U.S. corporations had interests in Germany, including its rearmament efforts) but also during it (U.S. companies such as IBM continued supporting Germany’s war production, which actually expanded under Allied bombing, and which U.S. Treasury Secretary Morgenthau noted largely spared German factories) and after it (German industrialists who had heavily invested in the Nazi régime and used the concentration camps’ slave labor received no more than a slap on the wrist).

Did the Allies denazify Germany?

The Allies’ victory over the Nazis led to the question of how to denazify Germany. Instead of recognizing the identitarian, colonial, and capitalist relations of power that had enabled Nazism, and implementing a political program that sought to dismantle these relations, they chose to focus on the crimes that had resulted from them.

This was necessary for self-preservation since, as we have seen, the Allies were essentially guilty of the same forms of political violence. To quote Ugandan academic, author, and political commentator Mahmoud Mamdani on the issue: “By interpreting Nazism narrowly as a set of crimes committed by Germans rather than as an expression of nationalism, the Allied Powers protected themselves and their citizens from scrutiny…lest they be forced to account for their own nationalist violence at home and in their colonies… …by limiting culpability to Germans, the Allies spared their own nationals who collaborated with Nazis. Had Nazism instead been understood as a political project, all of these uncomfortable — but vital — truths would have been on the table, potentially leading to a revolutionary reimagining of modern political organization.”

The failure to denazify and its effects on Europe and Palestine

The smokescreen of the Allies’ nominal denazification program preserved and deepened the normalization of capitalist and colonialist assumptions in the broader European sociopolitical consciousness. Choosing to hold Germany responsible as a country and people instead of Nazism as a political program (that was opposed by some Germans and supported by some non-Germans) was in itself an identitarian repeat. The politicization of identity, the central tool colonialism uses to fragment societies, became entrenched in Europe to its own detriment.

This entrenchment of identitarian mindsets is among the factors animating the recent rise of Europe’s far-right today. For example, the Sweden Democrats (a far-right party) observe a higher crime rate in neighborhoods populated by more recent immigrants. The true reason for this higher crime rate may be the lower quality of social services in these neighborhoods, but instead, the immigrants’ identity is blamed. On the other hand, the European Left often falls for the same trap, throwing unquestioning support behind marginalized identity groups instead of tackling the political roots of the problems they face. In other words, this trap turns “us versus them” into “us with them,” reinforcing the tribal divide of “us and them.”

The failure to depoliticize identity in Europe has also enabled wars, including civil wars, based on the assumption that identity should determine what borders one lives in, meaning that states and societies should ideally be monoethnic. The fragmentation of Cyprus along ethnic lines or that of Yugoslavia into Muslim Kosovo, Catholic Croatia, and Orthodox Serbia are salient examples. More recently, Russia invoked East Ukrainians’ ethnicity to justify its war there.

Europe’s support for Zionism is also an identitarian repeat. Instead of offering compensation for all of Nazism’s actual victims, including, of course, the European Jews it harmed, and breaking free from Nazism’s singling out of Jews, Europe accepted Nazism’s premises and compensated the Zionist movement that claimed to represent the will of all Jews in the world, materialized in Israel, the so-called “nation-state of the Jewish People [where] the realization of the right to national self-determination is exclusive to the Jewish People.” And so Europe enabled, even caused, the partition and ethnic cleansing of Palestine, down to today’s holocaust. The fact that antisemites share Zionism’s sectarian vision of Jewish identity sheds light on why Herzl said that “antisemites are Zionism’s allies.” Is there any fundamental difference whether it is Hitler, Netanyahu, or the Paris Grand Synagogue rabbi saying that “Jews have no future in Europe”?

Germany’s support of the genocide in Gaza thus shares the same sociopolitical roots as support for other genocides perpetrated by the “West” throughout its history. The Allies failed to denazify Europe by failing to dismantle the political foundations their own nations shared with the Nazi régime. Europeans need not repeat that mistake. Denazifying Europe today means establishing states that are functional tools to administer the affairs of society rather than states that weaponize identities, inwardly or outwardly. This can only be accomplished by political movements that do not merely seek to treat the symptoms of unethical statecraft, but that recognize the politicization of identity, colonialism, and capitalism as the underlying maladies. Such movements must strive for nothing less than the complete upheaval of the past hundreds of years of European history — an endeavor that will make possible a free Europe, a free Palestine, and a free world.

I realized I was a socialist

I already thought of myself as an anarchist, but this solidifies it for me. I realized my errors as a liberal

I voted for harris hoping for change, and partly so I might be safe if trump won (aged like milk) but now I see that even if biden did some good stuff, under harris or Trump that we were going to go down hill either way. Writing stories about anarchists and standing up to dictators should have made me realize this a long time ago. I went through the stages of grief pretty quickly, for a moment I thought it was rigged, for a second I wanted our country to burn. But now, I see what it all is now. What looked like a campaign of positivity and promise wasn't enough, and we lost as a result.

I realized voting for harris won't make a difference in the years to come, things would likely just get worse in one thing for another, I was naive to that fact since I first said who I was voting for. I thought that harris had a strong campaign and only voted out of fear. I am still fearful of what is to come.