The Left Berlin News & Comment

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Month: May 2025

The Left Berlin Film Club

Monthly film and discussion – now in a larger venue


28/05/2025

The Left Berlin Film Club aims to foster community connections through the collective viewing and critical engagement with political films.

Once a month, we invite a filmmaker for an extended dialogue, or curate a film program that resonates with ongoing concerns and topics of collective inquiry. Our goal is to activate alternative forms of a critical pedagogy and to contribute to an evolving ecology of practices that, as a whole, help us better understand and reflect on our sociopolitical realities.

In this sense, the TLB Film Club is not just another cultural event or a typical art-space screening. Rather, it is a space for engaged learning and for sparking complex dialogues —conversations that have been sidelined, abandoned, or cancelled in mainstream venues.

By embracing the power of images and cinematic forms, we seek to foster a collective critical consciousness from which we can think, imagine, process, and propose together alternative ways of world-making.

Starting in May, The Left Berlin Film Club is moving to a larger venue—Panke Culture in Wedding. The first Event, on Friday 30th May, will include a discussion with a film maker in the West Bank, and show film taken there.

“Fairness, aspiration and opportunity for all”

Australians tired of Labour’s empty mantra


27/05/2025

The Australian federal election took place on Saturday 3rd May, and, while many Australlians felt a momentary sense of relief, they didn’t end up with Peter Dutton—sometimes likened to Voldemort from Harry Potter—as Prime Minister, they are quickly reminded that the one elected, Anthony Albanese, is not much better. 

Several notable events occurred in the wake of the recent election. The Australian Labor Party (ALP) won its largest-ever majority with 97 seats out of 150, and Anthony Albanese is the first Prime Minister to regain his position since 2004. Despite Peter Dutton’s feeble attempt in his last week of campaigning to wage culture wars, the Coalition (the Liberal and National Party) scored their lowest vote in the party’s history. Peter Dutton became the first opposition leader to lose his seat.

The Greens came into the election with four seats in the House of Representatives, but, despite receiving their highest number of votes nationally, retained only one. Adam Bandt, former leader of the Greens, conceded defeat in his electorate of Melbourne where he was the member since 2010. 

Bandt attributes this loss to the massive swing away from the Liberal party due to the “Trump effect”: Dutton positioned himself as part of the populist right associated with Trump, pushing voters away from the Liberal party. 

What does this have to do with the Greens losing seats? Many former Liberal voters are more likely to shift their vote to the ALP than the Greens; and under Australia’s preferential voting system, a Liberal supporter is unlikely to rank the Greens second. So, the ALP’s monumental win wasn’t due to their strength, but rather the laughably bad campaign of the Liberal party, which included promises to establish nuclear power in Australia and sack thousands of public servants. 

Despite the left’s criticisms of the Greens party, their loss in the House of Representatives is a setback for Australians who support the Palestinian movement. The Greens continuously called for an end to the occupation in Palestine, Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and for Australia to place sanctions on Israel.

The ALP, on the other hand, has continued to endorse Israel as an ally. Under Anthony Albanese, the government froze $6 million in funding to the UN aid agency in Gaza, and approved military exports to Israel. They have also attempted to delegitimise pro-Palestinian protests by labelling them as violent and antisemitic.

Additionally, when Fatima Payman, former ALP Senator, argued for sanctions against Israell, she was met with criticism from the ALP and was labelled as antisemitic for saying:  “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. 

When Payman crossed the floor (voting against a party’s position) on a motion stating the urgent “need for the Senate to recognise the state of Palestine”, she was told not to join caucus meetings for two weeks. 

Albanese suspended Payman indefinitely after she told ABC Insiders she would cross the floor again. The ALP once celebrated Senator Payman as the first hijab-wearing Muslim woman in the Senate. This pride disappeared when Payman challenged the party line. 

The ALP’s claims to value diversity aren’t the only lies they’ve been dishing out. On the night of the election, Albanese said in his speech: “Today, the Australian people have voted for Australian values, for fairness, aspiration and opportunity for all.” But where exactly what the ALP claims to stand for? 

Is it “fair” that the number of women killed in gender-based violence has been increasing under the Albanese government? Is it “aspirational” that between 2002 and 2024, the house price-to-income ratio almost doubled, and homelessness increased by 25% in the last five years? Is it “opportunity for all” that First Nations people are significantly overrepresented in the prison system? From June 2023 to 30 June 2024, the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners increased by 15%, now accounting for 36% of total prisoners, despite only representing 3.8% of the population. 

Aside from these horrific numbers, Australia has the largest proportion of inmates in for-profit prisons globally, meaning that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are being incarcerated for profit. 

This doesn’t sound very “fairness, aspiration, and opportunity for all” of Australia. 

Sadly, it isn’t surprising that the ALP exchanges lives for profit. 

Notwithstanding the number of homes and habitats in Australia that have been ravaged by drought, fires and floods in recent years, the ALP ignores the climate crisis and actively contributes to the destruction of Australia’s environment. According to government data, Australia exported 57 million tonnes of coal between October and December 2024, marking the highest-ever coal export recorded for a three-month period.

Not only has the ALP approved over 28 new coal and gas projects, they have also scaled back Australia’s environmental laws, despite promising to improve them, limiting the government’s ability to reconsider environmental approvals when an activity is harming the environment. 

Then again, why dwell on the past when the ALP has made new promises they can backpedal on in their next term? Australians can look forward to (if we’re lucky!) the ALP putting $8.5 billion into Medicare, allowing access to 5 percent deposits for first-home buyers, and outlawing supermarket price gouging, delivering a small tax cut that, by its second year, should save taxpayers a whopping $10 a week, and taking 20 percent off all HECS debts (student loans).

But how much will these promises change the lives of everyday Australians? 

Is offering a 5% percent deposit on homes going to combat Australia’s dire housing crisis and end homelessness? Everybody’s Home, a coalition of housing, homelessness and welfare organisations, argues that Australia’s social housing growth is failing to meet demand. The government’s five-year target of 1.2 million homes, according to spokesperson Ms Azize, will still result in a shortfall of 640,000 homes. 

Can outlawing price gouging really do much to alleviate the strain of the cost of living crisis? Price gouging is already outlawed in other parts of the world, including the European Union, which prohibits “imposing unfair purchase or selling prices” (the definition of which is rather murky). And despite the ban, actual enforcement is rare, and, as we can see in Germany, the cost of living is still rising and, for many of us, unaffordable. 

As the ALP continues to ignore the causes of the diminishing living standards, namely the transfer of wealth to the rich, their policies will do little to improve people’s lives. They’ve prioritised profit over people while claiming to be the lesser evil. Everyone deserves affordable housing, healthcare, and education, yet the ALP hands these out in scraps.

But our industry, education, housing, and healthcare system shouldn’t exist to benefit the rich. 

This is what newcomer-party Victorian Socialists (VS) claim to be fighting for. Established in 2018 as a collaboration between the Socialist Alliance and Socialist Alternative, the VS declared to push back against the war waged against workers and the lie that both the ALP and the Liberals perpetuate: that there is no alternative to capitalism. 

The main goal of the party is to abolish capitalism in Australia, which, according to the party’s aims, must be achieved through workplace, community and political organisation. 

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) candidate, Morgen Peach, has criticised the VS, labelling them as a “pseudo-left” party that promotes the Greens as allies that instead of mobilising workers, attempts to appeal to the powers that exist within the framework of capitalism. 

However, others have argued differently. Gary Pearce writes that an important part of VS’s strategy is “not to seek to represent a largely passive constituency in government, but to fight alongside different communities”. The party has involved themselves in and organised protests opposing wage theft, public housing sell-offs, and Israel’s occupation of and genocide in Palestine.

And while the Victorian Socialist party does commend the Greens party on being one mainstream party that offers a “left alternative”, they denounce the Green’s focus on “gentrified inner city seats” and their unwillingness to campaign and immerse themselves amongst working-class migrant communities. 

Australia’s desire for a left-alternative is evident in the election results in Thomastown, Epping Views and Campbellfield, where the VS saw a vote share increase of 15 to 20 percent. For that reason, the VS, on 11 May 2025, decided to expand the project across Australia. James Plested, VS communications manager, writes: “Where socialists can run a decent campaign, we can gain a hearing and often win people away from voting for the faux anti-establishment parties of the far right.” 

The party aims to build branches in every state and territory, and eventually, every city and town in Australia, claiming that “The more of us there are coming together across Australia to fight the rotten status quo of capitalist politics, the more powerful our movement will become.” 

While the VS are expanding nationally and provide a left alternative, Australians have a responsibility to do more than simply wait for the next election to vote. Because, in the end, what is important is not an extra seat in the Senate or House of Representatives, but actively working and organising to achieve a better world where equality, freedom and justice apply to everyone. 

Keir Starmer: Clickbait Politics, Real-World Harm

An opinion on the prime minister’s disappointing at best, dangerous at worst political strategy—or lackthereof


26/05/2025

It’s hard to explain the feeling UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer gives me, but here goes.

For me, Keir Starmer is less a politician and more a mid-Ryanair-flight scratch card. A laminated ‘‘Live, Laugh, Love’’ quote blu-tacked to the wall of a Jobcentre. A “conscious” tech company’s big picture mission statement. Or a softly whispered ‘‘you got this’’, delivered with a slow, pitying pat on the back.

If you’re not following: he’s like something supposed to give you a bit of hope, but that leaves you feeling even more bleak and directionless than before. That’s Starmer. A semi-deflated, grey balloon at a resignation party and the UK’s very own numero uno.

Too harsh? I think too kind. Scratch cards, pitying pats on the back, and laminated quotes in Comic Sans are harmless, cringeworthy artefacts of modern life. Keir Starmer’s recent policy swings are harmful and so far, the harm has been aimed at the most vulnerable.

Just last week, Starmer reached a new low, declaring that the UK has become “an island of strangers.” A line so soaked in dog-whistle nationalism it could’ve been ghostwritten by The Sun and premiered on GB News. Which, in a sense, it was. 

GB News was the only broadcaster granted access to the press conference where Starmer unveiled his new immigration white paper. Not the BBC. Not ITV. Not even Sky News. Just GB News, a channel where facts go to be softly strangled by bigoted opinions dressed in Union Jack onesies. Fittingly, the white paper itself reportedly reads like Reform UK fanfiction, just with cleaner formatting and no typos.

In its new Labour font, the paper takes a sledgehammer to legal migration: longer waits for settlement, stricter visa rules, reduced access to family reunification, and tougher language requirements. Starmer frames it as fairness—a way to reduce exploitation, boost British wages, and encourage integration—but in reality, it’s theatre. A crackdown crafted for clickbait headlines, not human lives. And the people who bear the consequences—migrants, workers, families trying to build a life—are left in greater precarity than ever.

It’s a clumsy attempt to peel off Reform UK voters by mimicking their language and posture. The problem is, the act doesn’t land. It’s like watching someone attempt to speak fluent populism after skim-reading a scribbled summary of Nigel Farage’s greatest hits off the wall of a pub toilet. The sentiment is borrowed, the delivery is lifeless, and the result is a favourability score continuing to nosedive across almost all party lines: too hardline for the left, too weak for the right, and too obviously rehearsed for anyone to respect. 

But the failure of this performance isn’t the real danger, it’s what it enables. When the language of the far right becomes the language of power, hate is legitimised, and cruelty gets policy teeth. It doesn’t win over voters. It shifts the centre of gravity, with the cost most felt by those already living at the edge of safety and recognition.

Depressingly, Starmer’s record makes this shift feel less like a miscalculation and more like a pattern. 

On trans rights, he also folded. He once supported gender self-identification but now he backs a legal definition designed to exclude trans women from recognition and protection. It’s not clarity, it’s cowardice, and a deliberate decision to appease a hostile conservative press obsessed with culture war. 

A similar evasiveness defines Starmer’s stance on Gaza. Despite the murmurings of restraint and carefully worded appeals for calm, Labour has overseen an increase in UK arms sales to Israel—a quiet but bloodsoaked complicity that renders its appeals for de-escalation, or talk of trade pauses, entirely meaningless.

And even more revealing of Starmer’s character is the bizarre way he speaks about Israel: consistently gendered, imbued with vulnerability, he talks of “her right to feel safe, her need to defend herself.” In contrast, trans women, Palestinians, and asylum seekers, receive no such empathy. A nuclear-armed, genocidal state is granted personhood; real people are denied it, along with their safety, their dignity, and their lives.


For the record, I was never under the illusion that Starmer would return Labour to the Left. The man’s not exactly a Trojan horse for socialism, he’s a former cop in a suit. But there was, perhaps naively, a hope that he wouldn’t bend so completely to the altar of the right-wing press. That he might follow through on his own meagre promise of “evidence-led” policy making. That he’d show a shred of moral backbone or at the very least, behave like someone who understands what’s at stake.

Instead, he thinks the Daily Mail might warm to him if he clicks his heels and whispers “secure borders” three times. And to top it off, he’s not even good at it. He’s doing it with the conviction of a man so unsure of his own message, he could be replaced mid-sentence by a pop-up ad for tax-relief on pensions and no one would notice.

But all jokes aside: the result is politics that are not only empty and embarrassing, but dangerous and inhumane.

We need New Strategies

Speech at the Palivision concert, 17th May 2025


24/05/2025

Ladies and Gentlemen, Friends and Comrades,

We are living through a turning point in global history –  a moment of unbearable horror, but also of enormous possibility.

Right now, Gaza is being starved, bombed, and buried alive. Over 54,000 people have been killed. Israel calls this new phase of atrocity Operation Gideon’s Chariots. That name says it all. A chariot isn’t just a weapon –  it’s a symbol of empire. It’s what Pharaohs rode into battle. It’s what Gideon rode in the Bible – a divine machine of conquest. This isn’t just militarism. It’s mythology. It’s theology turned into airstrikes. A fantasy of domination dressed up as defense.

Israel’s goal: to crush the Palestinian resistance against the genocide, to cut Hamas off from a prisoners deal, to seize the land. They have already started to expand the buffer zones – areas they won’t return. They are trying to break gaza into isolated pieces. Palestinians are once again pushed to the South, their movement is restricted, Aid is conditional and hunger is the settlers most powerful weapon. They are encouraging what the settlers are calling “voluntary emigration”. We all know it is ethnic cleansing. This is Israel’s blueprint: 77 years of ongoing Nakba. 

And like every empire before it, Israel believes it can crush a people’s will — to live, to fight, to dream. But Gaza has not been defeated nor can it ever be defeated.

That is the contradiction at the heart of this moment. After nineteen months of total war, Israel has not disarmed Hamas. It hasn’t broken the resistance. it has lost in ront of the eyes of the whole world. It hasn’t even secured its own soldiers.

If they invade Gaza again, they’ll meet what they met in Rafah, Shuja’iyya, Khan Younis, Beit Hanoun: organized, armed, living resistance. 

The misbelief that through absolute destruction and death, resistance will end. But every bomb creates more resistance.

And the cracks are spreading far beyond Gaza.

The Arab regimes that normalized with Israel – the same ones Trump paraded around under the so-called Abraham Accords – are exposed. Their people are in revolt. Protests in Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, Bahrain – not just against Israel, but against the regimes that collaborate with it. And let us not forget Yemen’s friendship and resistance next to Gaza. 

Even Netanyahu’s strongest allies are showing strain. The Trump administration is back – louder, crueler, and openly aligned with Israeli apartheid. This is the man who moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, normalized ethnic cleansing, deports Palstinian Students and now dreams of turning Gaza into a “freedom zone” – a casino economy built on genocide – while floating plans to deport Palestinians to Libya.

European leaders hedge. They talk peace while signing weapons contracts. We demand liberation while organizing against militarization and fascism. And even the western media, after decades of painting Palestinians as terrorists, is slowly but finally showing the truth: massacres, famine, ethnic cleansing, genocide.

But don’t be fooled. This didn’t come from journalistic integrity. It came from the streets of this world. From the student occupations. From striking dock workers. From migrant protests. From you. From us. From below.

Because Gaza bleeds, Israel imposes a hunger blockade. Starvation is being used as a weapon. Children are dying not just from bombs — but from thirst, from a lack of insulin, from bread that never arrives. This is not a natural disaster. It is a calculated system of extermination. And the world watches as Israel tries to find its very own final solution. 

And what do we get from our governments? In Germany, we get bans on protest and special treatments by cops, we get riot police in university halls, we get defamation. You know of all this that is happening.

But let me be clear: We don’t need their permission. We don’t need different slogans. We need new networks. New alliances. New strategies.

We need mass-based, revolutionary, anti-imperialist organizing — not hashtags, not managed grief. But real internationalism from below:

From workers who can shut down weapons shipments.

From students who can occupy the institutions of war.

From tenants, migrants, and the unemployed who can’t be co-opted or bought off.

Because this system that starves Gaza, it can starve all of us. If it can bomb Rafah, it can bomb Khartoum. If it can lie about Palestine, it can lie about all of us.

We need more than protests. We need coordination:

Demonstrate in a connectable way. 

Blockade the weapons factories.

Strike the supply chains.

Occupy the offices of war profiteers.

Refuse to let the state define what solidarity means.

Our solidarity must be loud, determined and unapologetic.

And let me say something personal here. For me, Palestine was never just a political issue. It was the place where I first saw and understood empire – and resistance.

Let Palestine not be a victim. Palestine is a teacher. A school of revolution. Gaza is showing the world that even when starved, people fight. Even when buried, they speak. Even the many who are dying – they will live. Through Gaza. Through the child pulling rubble off a sibling. Through the poem smuggled out in the margins of a notebook. Through the fighter who won’t surrender. Through the chant echoing from the streets to campus walls to refugee camps. Gaza is not only where they fall. It is where they rise. Not just in memory – but in our movement. So let us at least bring them honour and glory.

The future will ask us: Where were you when Gaza was burning? Let our answer not be  silence. Not a thought. Not a tweet. Not a hashtag.

Let it be a movement.

Free Palestine – from the river to the sea – not in theory, not in words, but in struggle.

Thank you.

German Border Closures for LGBTIQ+ Refugees: A Death Sentence and the End of Salvation

Statement by the Rainbow Afghanistan Organisation on the government decision to stop admission of refugees from Afghanistan


The Rainbow Afghanistan Organisation condemns the governing coalition’s decision to end the humanitarian admission programme, especially the United Nations Resettlement programme which supports people in acute danger. This decision not only invites a humanitarian catastrophe, but also imposes a collective death sentence on thousands of members of the LGBTIQ+ community. 

On April 9, 2025, the CDU/CSU and SPD adopted the closure of German borders for many refugees as part of their new coalition agreement. This policy constitutes a humanitarian tragedy in particular for those who are fleeing states which criminalise gender identity and sexual orientation with punishment by death, torture, stoning or long prison sentences. 

Thousands of LGBTIQ+ individuals are at present forced to travel via life-threateningly dangerous and illegal routes, not because they have commit a crime, but in order to save themselves. They are threatened by human traffickers, rape, sexual violence, homelessness, illness, and death—through mountain passes and deserts, in overcrowded, sinking boats on the sea, through dark forests and unsafe camps. With no safe and legal means of applying for asylum, these individuals are forced to choose between certain death and risking death. 

With this deciscion, the Germna government sends these people the message, ‘’Either you will die, or be subjected to this danger—if you survive, maybe we will listen’’.

The Bundesaufnahmeprogramm f[r Afghanistan [National Admission Programme for Afghanistan] (BAP), realised in 2023, had already promised rescue to to hundreds of LGBTIQ+ Afghanistanis by admission to germany under the previous coalition. This programme was one of the few hopes for those hundreds, still living under threat of extreme danger in Afghanistan. This hope has now been shattered. People in danger who are in need of international protection now more than ever have been abandoned.

We ask the German government: Do you know who the victims of this policy will be? Do you understand that this policy means you have capitulated to the Taliban, to Iran, and to other repressive regimes?

Your decisions are not only a threat to the lives of thousands but also seriously call into question the worldwide credibility of Germany as defender of human rights. 

The Rainbow Afghanistan Organisation warns that silence and apathy toward this circumstance constitute partaking in a humanitarian catastrophy. We demand an immediate review of this policy, the reopening of legal pathways to safety and effective protection for endangered LGBTIQ+ refugees and migrants,

Rainbow Afghanistan Organisation

Berlin, April 10th, 2025

For more information and to keep up with Rainbow Afghanistan Organisation’s activities, you can follow them on instagram here. 

This statement was originally written in German and translated to English by Shav McKay.