What is fascism, how do we fight it, and is it a threat today? In this episode of the Spectre of Communism podcast, we discuss the history of fascism’s rise to power in the 1930s, to learn the lessons for our movement.
Conscience with solidarity banners. Photo: Ann Wright
I am in Malta with the group ready to board the Gaza flotilla ship “Conscience” which was bombed by Israel yesterday. As one of the organizers of the US Boats to Gaza and the Gaza Freedom Flotilla coalition, we have been working for months to bring activists from 22 countries to board the next ship to challenge the Israeli genocide of Gaza and break the illegal Israeli Siege of Gaza.
As VE Day approaches, Western officials, pundits and journalists are widely seeking to exploit the 80th anniversary of Nazism’s defeat for political purposes. European leaders have threatened state attendees of Russia’s grand May 9th victory parade with adverse consequences. Meanwhile, countless sources draw historical comparisons between appeasement of Nazi Germany throughout the 1930s, and the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to strike a deal with Moscow to end the Ukraine proxy conflict.
President Donald Trump’s call to permit the free passage of American ships through Egypt’s Suez Canal has sparked public outrage across a nation already in steep economic decline. While Washington appears to feel entitled to Cairo’s trade route, U.S. policies have long contributed to Egypt’s financial crisis.
The U.S. increases pressure on Burkina Faso through military propaganda, as Africans rise to protect the developing project.
On April 3, US Africa Command (AFRICOM) Commander Michael Langley testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee during an excruciating two hours obsessively devoted to the ill-fated project of preserving US hegemony. Langley’s testimony was all about stopping Russia and China’s advances on the continent. Some Senators expressed concern that Trump had dispensed with the soft power—their term—projected by USAID and worried that China is stepping in to fill the breach.
During Pepe’s talks about his recent time in China he mentioned this interview on several occasions, yet it never surfaced on any Chinese media platform. Finally, one of Guancha’s subsidiaries, Observer.com, published it and gave it this title: “Trump’s crazy policies can only lead to “trade suicide”, a big experiment that will affect the world is coming.” Those reading the Gym arre likely to have read Pepe’s articles during his recent China stay and will thus know that it took place about ten days ago. In the interim, little has changed. The transcript leads with an editor’s note before the interview begins: (more…)
China has quietly won the trade war and is now reshaping global leadership—not through force, but through strategy, stability, and vision. It’s time for the West to learn, adapt, and embrace a shared future led by a preponderant China.
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
—Vladimir Lenin
The posturing continues and the lies abound, but the confidence is shrinking and the reputation faltering. That sums up President Trump’s first 100 days in office. Only pain no gain. A storm is brewing.
The tariff war is ongoing with the Whitehouse declaring that trade deals are imminent as countries queue up in front of the Whitehouse gate. Despite this, no major deal has been announced to date. On Thursday the Chinese authorities indicated they were willing to consider overtures from Washington. Not so much the Chinese going to Washington as much as the Yanks coming to the Forbidden City in Beijing. But one thing is for sure, unless the Yanks are serious about de-escalation, the Chinese aren’t interested.
Kit Klarenberg exposes how recent US Navy failures, including the loss of a $60M jet, reveal the crumbling facade of Washington’s war on Yemen, as Ansar Allah’s resistance outpaces the US’ billion-dollar military efforts.
Popular resistance to the Trump administration’s erratic, anti-people, and dangerous domestic and foreign policies is growing every day as seen with the massive demonstrations held throughout the country on and after April 5. We welcome these protests and the popular demands raised by them, but we must criticize significant flaws that block the political changes we desperately need.
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs is a world-renowned economics professor, a bestselling author, an innovative educator, and a global leader in sustainable development. Prof. Sachs discusses the wider historical meaning of the current economic war between the US and China, which represents the end of centuries of a Western-centric world. Prof. Sachs also discusses how and why the Western geopolitical mindset is distinctively different from that of China.
Even as the US poses as seeking “peace” between Russia and Ukraine, the ongoing conflict is in actuality a US war on Russia simply using Ukraine as an intermediary.
US media has revealed in recent years that US generals serve at the top of Ukraine’s chain of command and that the CIA reorganized and directs Ukrainian intelligence, including units carrying out armed attacks inside Russia and Russian-held territory.
Among these US-trained operators is Kyrylo Budanov who has admitted Ukrainian intelligence has killed Russian journalists and commanding officers in Russia. Thus, as US envoys talk with Russia, US-trained and directed Ukrainian operators are killing Russian generals in the streets of Moscow.
Louis Theroux shines a light on the extreme settler mentality (Al Mayadeen: Illustration by Zeinab al-Hajj)
By Siraj Ghassani
Louis Theroux’s documentary, The Settlers, exposes the violent truth behind “Israel’s” settler movement, land theft, armed ideology, and silenced Palestinian voices.
The Trump administration’s April 2 “emergency” executive order reveals that military readiness and defense industrial capability — not merely economic protectionism — are the primary objectives. The administration has explicitly positioned these policies as necessary to rebuild U.S. manufacturing capacity for war.
Home secretary Yvette Cooper’s shameless decision, in the run-up to the May local elections, to publish statistics on the nationalities of foreign offenders and their crimes, and her amendment to the Borders Security Bill to bar all foreign nationals on the sex offenders’ register from making asylum claims, haven’t gained Labour votes, but have added fuel to a racist feeding frenzy of the kind that led to the far-right riots last summer.
Twenty-five years ago, Norman Finkelstein detailed how Hitler’s destruction of European Jewry was weaponized against Palestinians. In his 2000 book The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, Finkelstein, whose grandparents perished in Nazi death camps, argued the US Jewish establishment exploited the memory of the Nazi Holocaust for economic and political gain and to further the interests of Israel. Since the book was written, Israel lobbyists’ reliance on antisemitism/Nazi Holocaust claims to undermine Palestine solidarity has grown substantially.
Amnesty International speaks up against the UK governments weaponisation of anti-terror legislation against Palestine Action
The international human rights groups stated that this is the second instance they have monitored where the UK government has misused and abused its broad Terrorism laws against Palestine Action.