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Fascism is colonialism coming home

The dehumanization of immigrants in the E.U.

Alexandra Rybova
16/09/2025

For the hope of better opportunities, you travel thousands of kilometres. Everything you once knew, you leave behind. Your mother waves goodbye as you leave a trail of dust behind. You dare not prolong the goodbye; it’s too painful. Inside your chest something is already missing although you have barely even left. The car ride is silent; the radio is off. You could turn it on, but you wouldn’t focus anyway. You drive past signs, perhaps the last ones you’re familiar with. Your car slips into an old pothole. You’ve slipped into it many times. This time it isn’t an annoyance; it too says its farewell. You’re on your own, driving into strange smooth roads, without potholes.

A paper, a uniform, a gun, barbed wire. It’s for border security, they say. The paper with the cold short notice ‘entry denied.’ The uniformed man is once again following orders. He doesn’t see the immigrant as human, but rather as a problem to be managed. A little of his own humanity got lost with years of holding the baton. Trained for years to be numb towards the violence he inflicts. Told that the immigrant is alien, illegal, dangerous. A life to be disregarded and dealt with.

In today’s age where ethnonationalism and fascism is on the rise across the world, immigrants, especially refugees, are among the most vulnerable of marginalized groups. Lacking legal representation, financial means, and the seeking of safety politicized, the mistreatment of immigrants is more often than not systematically condoned and perpetuated. The history of colonialism and its effects cannot simply be ignored while it echoes through in today’s dehumanization of immigrants. Criticism of this rhetoric is crucial to challenge the systems that benefit from the suffering of the marginalized.

Social identity and prejudice

A myriad of scholars, academics, and ordinary people alike have grappled with the question of how humans are capable of inflicting extreme violence on one another while simultaneously using weaponizing language in the media to gain consent from the public.

How is dehumanization justified? The social identity theory and “Cognitive aspects of prejudice” by Henri Tajfel, tackles the sociopsychological roots of dehumanizing behaviour. His main focus lay in understanding how the ‘ordinary’ people of Germany in the 1930s became complicit in the Holocaust. He argued that it does not take a tyrant to commit horrific acts of violence. Rather, the core of the matter lies in categorization of people. “The social world is not just a collection of individuals; it is a collection of groups”. The categorization of people is numerous, including race, nationality, ethnicity, etc. He adds that, once established, the differences of categories are magnified. Simultaneously, the similarities of the same category are exaggerated.

Discrimination and prejudice thrive on the exacerbation of differences. In the context of immigration, the categories are the citizen and immigrant. The former is characterized as orderly, lawful, working, ordinary, etc. While the latter is unruly, criminal, unemployed, illegal, etc. A CNN quote about Denmark’s new housing law states: “A new law aims to force changes in 15 housing estates across the country that the government calls ‘hard ghettos'”, makes use of the word ghetto, a term that carries with it associations of seclusion, crime and danger. Such language shapes the perception of the public, enforces harmful prejudices and normalizes poor living conditions of immigrants.

The categorization of peoples and colonialism

The categorization of people is tightly intertwined with the history of colonialism. The process wasn’t merely psychological but deeply political. Throughout history, beginning as early as classical Greece, notable figures like Aristotle held the belief that non-Greek speaking people were ‘barbarians’. In the Middle Ages, Christians in Europe categorized Muslims and Jews as spiritually inferior. Resulting in numerous expulsions of Jews across Europe. During the 14th century, the slave trade and colonization of Africa and Asia by the Spanish and Portuguese, the sense of superiority over people who were considered to be subordinate people became more and more systematic. This wasn’t an accident. The colonizer, enacting violence on a scale, larger than ever seen before, needed a justification. Views of racial inferiority wasn’t just an opinion, it became law in order to continue the exploitation of resources and slave labour, most notably through the transatlantic slave trade.

Renowned scholar, Edward Said who extensively wrote about the process and impacts of colonialism, particularly in West Asia and North Africa, published his book Orientalism in 1978. Orientalism is defined in several ways. Including, firstly, as a study compiled of a large body of colonial writings. Secondly, as an invented dichotomy between the ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’. A worldview entirely Eurocentric, existing as a kind of academic weapon to dominate and uphold the established colonial structures. European colonizers sought not only to subject the land but also its people. As a result, they had no interest in interacting in a respectful manner or getting to know the local population accurately. Instead, they prescribed traits at best at random, at worst through a racist and prejudiced lens. Common ways of describing the ‘Oriental’ were savage, lazy, irrational, uncivilized, and mystic. Using circular logic, the colonizer justified why the people of the ‘Orient’ could not in any way self-govern; that the European is far more suited for this task.

Similar Orientalist tropes can be seen in the ‘post-colonial’ world today. Immigrants and refugees are subjected to a similar dynamic to the colonized in the past. Perhaps one of the most harmful perceptions about immigrants is the normalization of their suffering. This was grossly evident in the reports of the Ukraine-Russia war, with a reporter from CBS stating: “This is not a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European city.” This reflects not only hypocritical reporting but also the extent to which the suffering of the global majority has become a mundane and inevitable occurrence. The West both perpetuates the cause of suffering while at the same time normalizing and legitimizing it. Through constant destabilization and occupation of West Asia, Syria, Palestine, Iraq and others or meddling in political processes of various African countries.

When migrants and refugees attempt to seek refuge in Europe, they are often met with no better fate. Arriving at Europe’s borders, they are immediately met with dehumanizing tropes of ‘swarming’ or ‘invading’, a rhetoric often amplified by media and political figures. This discourse was starkly evident when European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stood at the Polish-Belarusian border, praising Poland’s “successful defence” with a 5.5-meter-high steel wall against ‘irregular migrants’.

This Eurocentric narrative consistently undermines the human need for safety, prioritizing perceived threats over humanitarian obligations. Such rhetoric results in countless human rights abuses, including illegal pushbacks, which have been systematically documented. For instance, on the Polish-Belarusian border, an aid group reported that in 2024 at least 3,183 pushbacks occurred, a practice the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights has called to stop. This is made worse by the criminalization of providing aid, as seen in the trial of the ‘Hajnowka Five’ in Poland where aid workers are facing prison for providing “emergency assistance to an Iraqi-Kurdish family with seven children” found “in catastrophic health” in a freezing border forest. One defendant, Ewa Moroz-Kaczynska stated, “If we are found guilty of this, it also means that human decency is a criminal offence”.

In othering another person or group, it may at first glance seem like the one inflicting ‘the othering’ has won. But the moment he inflicts dehumanization he arguably loses his own humanity. He has at that point lost the ability to connect and empathize. He also confirms that were he in the weaker position, others would be permitted to see him as no longer human. Victor Frankl, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, observing the Nazis brutalizing prisoners in the camps, dehumanized themselves too by losing their empathy not only to others but to themselves alike.

While migrants suffer physical and psychological injury, Europe suffers a moral one. Described most notably by Cesaire, in his famous essay “Discourse on Colonialism”, Cesaire interprets the fascism of the 1930s and 40s as an ‘imperial boomerang’. He points out that the mass deaths of the Holocaust were not at all exceptional as it had been happening across all the colonized territories. Fascism is colonialism coming home.

Today, each pushback, imprisonment, and erasure of migrants deepens the contradiction of the EU being a place of freedom of movement. Every media statement dehumanizing a migrant reinforces the concept of conditional humanity. Safety is not guaranteed because one is a human being, only if it serves the profit of corporations trading lives for dollars. And, although Europe now exists in relative safety, who will hold out their hand in a future catastrophe after years of complacent silence? Perhaps it is only a matter of time before the uniformed guard, too, has to say farewell to something familiar and beloved to him. Maybe then he can relate to leaving behind what he once held so dear.

Sources:

Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism.

Tajfel, Henri. Social Identity Theory.

Said, Edward. Orientalism.

“Top EU court adviser finds Denmark’s ‘ghetto law’ is direct discrimination” The Guardian

“Reporter apologises after calling Ukraine ‘relatively civilised’.” The Guardian.

“Poland accused of brutality as Belarus border crackdown escalates” Politico.

“Poland: Aid workers on trial for helping migrants at Belarus border.” InfoMigrants.

Frankl, Viktor. Man’s Search for Meaning.

Largest Fascist-organised Street mobilisation in British history

Eye-witness report and photos from the fascist and anti-fascist demos in London,

Guy Smallman

Saturday saw the biggest fascist organised street mobilisation in British political history. Around 100,000 attended, which is at least five times bigger than anything seen before.

It was clear from the beginning that this was going to be huge. The internet was flooded with paid adverts on every platform and in a rare show of unity it was backed by pretty much every strand of the hard right except Farage and the Tories. Walking around the area in Whitehall set aside for Tommy Robinson’s rally, the amount of private funding available was clear to see. The stage, security, portaloos, production team, sound system and giant plasma screens would have cost tens of thousands just for the day, begging the question: who is paying for all of this?

It was clear from previous experience that it was never going to remain peaceful. Tommy’s fanbase are not renowned for their attention spans, so it didn’t take long for attendees to leave the sites of the speeches in large groups to take swings at their political opponents.

The counter protest, which was bigger than expected, was still less than a fifth of the size of the racist mob. When it reached Trafalgar Square, thousands of fash (many of them drunk) were waiting. The cops were outnumbered and soon found themselves under sustained attack as they protected representatives from Stand Up To Racism and other such estblishments from the racists assembling at the top of Whitehall.

It’s strange how resources to clamp down and control peaceful (and generally far bigger) protests for Palestine seem almost unlimited. Yet a mobilisation made up of people with a long track record for drinking and violence seems to be beyond the ability of the state to manage? The riot plods raised their batons to threaten the fash, but seldom used them, despite coming under a constant barrage of missiles including rocks and glass bottles for several hours. Very few arrests were made. Had their attackers been on the left, or people of colour, it would likely have been a very different scene.

To their absolute credit the anti-fascists stood firm and worked together (for once) to keep their people safe from the attacks that were occurring around Trafalgar Square. One unfortunate group found themselves stuck on the wrong side of the lines for a considerable time but eventually managed to rejoin the main protest unharmed. There was at least one extremely sickening racist attack on a young black man by a mob of violent thugs. He had to be rescued by riot cops.

There is no single component behind this frightening shit show. A range of factors are to blame.

Firstly, history tells us that liberal centrism has achieved little but opening the door to far right rhetoric since the 1920s. Then, as now, the ruling elite are bankrolling fascism to protect their wealth in an uncertain world that is falling apart around them. There are very obvious parallels between what is happening today and Henry Ford funding the Nazis in the 1930s.

GB News is the £500 million pet project of a single individual and remains privately funded to spread its bile – despite making an annual loss. White supremacist Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion to turn it into (another loss making) racist cesspool. Mail Online, owned by the tax dodging Rothermere family, spews racist clickbait on a minute-by-minute basis. The list is endless.

These people have the money and influence to peddle whatever (racist) distraction from their parasitic greed that suits them, be it ‘small boats’, ‘grooming gangs’ or ‘money laundering barber shops’. I’m old enough to remember when ‘Jamaican yardies’ were the existential threat to our society back in the 1990s.

Meanwhile, more mainstream media has played its part with a consistently anti-working class, pro-establishment narrative; we have seen the BBC as an example of such, gifting the likes of Farage with what amounts to a season ticket for shows like Question Time.

Most of all there is the total incompetence and dishonesty of the worst Labour government in history. Starmer is the greatest giveaway to the far right of all time. Completely wedded to the establishment, he endlessly betrays an electorate screaming for transformative change. This is matched only by his ability to be the most unlikable politician ever. To make matters worse he panders to the narrative of REFORM instead of challenging it. In a deluded belief that he can beat Farage at his own game.

His dehumanisation of the Palestinian people as the UK remains an active player in the ongoing genocide also helps fascists smell victory like nothing else. He posts his public condolences after the murder of racist lunatic Charlie Kirk but refuses to have an opinion when the Yemeni Prime Minister Ahmed Ghaleb Nasser al-Rahawi and many others were slaughtered in an air strike. Such double standards send a very clear message.

On Saturday Robinson made the idiotic claim that his demo actually comprised 3 million attendees. While this over-excited Nazi goblin basks in the glory of his big day out, it is worth remembering that the UK has a trade union membership of over 6 million.

If the left are to adequately respond to what is now the most urgent internal fascist threat that we’ve ever seen, the unions will have to play a key role in not just mobilising their members but also providing hope for workers in the face of government sell outs. The same anger being exploited by Farage and Robinson can also work for us.

The unions also need to urgently realise that the scenes on the streets can be played out at the ballot box, as they have done in the USA. An inevitable collapse in support for Starmer could lead to a Tory/Reform coalition where Farage could be king maker. This would not just mean more repressive anti-union legislation but a fundamental threat to their very existence.

Meanwhile the radical anti-fascist left needs to do something that I’ve yet to witness in 30 years of involvement in this scene. They need to start concentrating on what they have in common rather than what they disagree about. Time is fast running out.

All photos: Guy Smallman: www.guysmallman.com.

“This is beyond complicity. It is the direct empowerment of genocide”

Interview with an activist from Shut Elbit Down Berlin

Phil Butland

Thanks for talking to us. Could you start by introducing yourself?

I’m an activist who is involved in the Berlin group of the Shut Elbit Down campaign. Elbit Systems is the largest private Israeli arms manufacturer, a company that boasts of enabling the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) to carry out all of its war crimes and genocidal actions in Gaza, Occupied Palestine.

Shut Elbit Down is a global campaign, active in countries all around the world. In Germany, we’re also active in Frankfurt, Munich and in Ulm, campaigning and taking action to shut down Elbit offices in Berlin and Koblenz, as well as their production site and office in Ulm.

How big is the Berlin branch, and what have you been doing?

I would say it’s pretty sizable, we have members from across the political spectrum and a wide variety of backgrounds. We’ve been organizing rallies and info-stands outside Elbit’s office. We organized a fundraiser recently. We’re currently about to launch our camp in Ulm to protest outside the largest Elbit offices in Europe. That is our main focus right now.

We have also organised an E-Mail template for an Anzeige – a criminal complaint – that members of the public can file. You can file this legal complaint against the mayor of Ulm via E-mail for allowing this genocidal company to be present in the city from our linktree. It takes less than a minute, the text is prewritten, you just need to enter your personal details to file the complaint.

We also have a petition to evict Elbit from their office in Berlin. It also takes just a few seconds and helps us build pressure against this genocidal company on yet another front.

Additionally, we have also drafted an E-mail template to the security company who guards Elbit’s office. Pressure on them can really damage the security situation for Elbit Systems Germany – security they do not deserve to have while the people of Gaza endure endless suffering.

These digital actions, that really can be done by anybody, help us apply pressure on the companies and individuals who’s complicity enables genocide to be produced in Germany and sent to Palestine.

Do these Anzeigen have to be in German, or can people write in English as well?

The prewritten templates are in German, but they can be sent by anybody if they just fill in the empty fields with their personal details.

Could you explain a bit more specifically what the problem is with Elbit?

Elbit Systems is a company that prides itself on enabling war, suffering, and the general destabilization of the world through war. They manufacture drones and other military technologies that are used in Gaza. We know that approximately 20% of all of the military components and weapons that they produce in Germany are used in Gaza to commit atrocities that words cannot describe.

They’re also complicit in human rights violations all around the world. They make the technology that enables the militarisation of the US-Mexico border, where we know there is a huge variety of human rights abuses taking place. They also armed the Turkish state in the past, as well as the Indian state, and the Moroccan state, which directly enables these countries to violently occupy Kurdistan, the Western Sahara and Kashmir.

There is a huge, broad range of human rights violations in which Elbit is beyond complicit. We are focused on the genocide in Gaza, however Elbit’s involvement in these other human abuses show that our struggles are connected. That is what has brought us here. We see the unity between all antiimperialistic struggles, and that Elbit is arming multiple authoritarian regimes around the world, upholding the systems of imperialism and colonialism.

Elbit makes weapons intended to kill, to maim, and to traumatize. They make drones that can drop explosives on hospitals, nurseries, and refugee camps. The drone is unmanned as explosives are dropped, adding to the dystopic nature of modern warfare they enable. This has led to whole battalions of IOF soldiers who play with these remote aircraft like toys as they unleash terror on the captive Palestinian population in Gaza. The drones can play sounds of pregnant women begging for food or babies crying in distress, baiting victims, exploiting the humanity of those who are targeted and killed, tricked by cries for help.

These are incomprehensible levels of direct complicity from Elbit Systems. Producing these murderous technologies is something upon which Elbit prides itself, and we see that as intolerable genocidal terrorism.

We are showing that this isn’t just us who find this unacceptable, we are many, prodominantly in our communities in Berlin and in Ulm, who are resisting the fact that their neighbours are producing genocide. This is beyond complicity. It Is the direct empowerment of genocide.

Do you see a potential danger that concentrating on Elbit leaves other arms manufacturers like Rheinmetall off the hook?

I think that right now Rheinmetall is also really in the spotlight due to the amazing direct actions and large-scale protests of Rheinmetall Entwaffnen in Cologne.

I do think that it’s most important that we focus on our targets. There are so many companies whose profits are soaked in the blood of the Palestinians – as well as the people of Congo, Sudan, Yemen, and so many more. If we focus on all of them, it gets very difficult to be effective.

The more you target one specific company, the more you can make that one company lose lots of money. We can see that in the UK where four of Elbit’s six factories have been closed down, causing severe financial losses and irreparable damage to their reputation. We know that targeting Elbit works, we know that we can and we will shut Elbit down.

Protesting against every weapons manufacturer dilutes the cause, as it spreads our capacities more thinly, I would argue. We believe that targeting Elbit specifically is really important, the same way that Rheinmetall is a specific target of the Rheinmetall Entwaffnen campaign, neither they or we are losing focus.

The closure of the Bristol factory happened just weeks ago. What was it that led to this?

We know that we can create a lot of change, but often it doesn’t happen as quickly as we want it. In Bristol, it was years of prolonged action, both protests and property destruction, that led to this victory. People broke into the factories. Israeli dissidents, who are still yet to have their trial, flew in from Germany and Portugal, and took action in England. This is how we know that when our solidarity goes beyond borders, we can really hit Elbit where it hurts.

This involved property damage, and serious protests, but it was also the support of the community. It was people joining protests outside occupied factories, especially in Leicester. We know that it is prolonged and steadily maintained action that allows us to shut these companies down.

It is about staying targeted and very focused, as Palestine Action UK were in Bristol. In the end, a broad range of protest tactics made it too expensive for Elbit to keep this site open. It affected their profitability. So they decided that it wasn’t financially viable for them to manufacture genocide from Bristol.

That is what is going to happen to all of their other sites in Germany. We know that it’s going to happen. It’s a matter of time, because the movement is growing. People don’t want genocidal neighbours. People don’t want their colleagues or people they share buildings with to be producing arms to be used in genocide.

In Britain, Palestine Action has just been banned and the government says that it is as dangerous as the Islamic State for very similar actions to the ones you just described. Do you think that this is going to put more pressure on Shut Elbit Down, either in the UK or here in Germany?

I can only talk about our campaign against Elbit in Germany, we will not bow to any pressure like that. We do not fear the repression of the German State. The Shut Elbit campaign does not endorse property damage or illegalactivity.

We understand that the campaign exists on a broad spectrum when it comes to legality, and Shut Elbit Down works without destroying property, as Palestine Action are alleged to have done. But we understand that there are a huge range of actions that can and likely will be taken by other autonomous groups. In the case of this genocide being live-streamed straight from Palestine to our phones, we know there millions of people globally who are becoming enraged to take action against the zionist war machine. We are one group in the campaign, other groups can carry out different types of action.

We all know that there are certain difficulties about organizing for Palestine in Germany. Do you think it’s possible for Shut Elbit Down to have the same effect in Germany that it has in Britain?

We acknowledge that the movement is younger in Germany. Palestine Action was founded in 2020, much before the recent escalation of the current genocide in Gaza. Shut Elbit Down was founded in December 2023, so we acknowledge that we are behind in that way.

Right now, Germany isn’t near the level of having pro-Palestinian groups proscribed to the terror watch lists, but we do see the increasing authoritarianism of the German government, whether it’s trying to ban the Rheinmetall Entwaffnen camp or attacking the camps protesters and kettling them for 12 hours in Cologne.

These different authoritarian techniques do not intimidate us at all. Whatever they do, we’ll come back even stronger. Solidarity is not terrorism. Resisting genocide is not terrorism. There’s no way that anybody who seriously critically engages with the media they consume can believe that red paint is terrorism, compared to actual terrorist attacks carried out by the Islamic State like the Ariana Grande Manchester concert bombing for instance.

I think there was a really serious disconnect here, and people are beginning to see it. People are seeing through the lies and the authoritarian tendencies to paint solidarity with Palestine as terrorism. It’s as old as colonialism itself. Portraying the oppressed as animalistic and uncivilized and terroristic isn’t working anymore. People see past that, and we will not be intimated.

What’s the relationship between what you’re doing and other actions for Palestine?

I think all of these actions help to progress the anti-militaristic and decolonial cause. We are in solidarity with Rheinmetall Entwaffnen. We were present at their camp, we stand in solidarity with each other. We’re fighting the same fight. We also know that we scare these companies. These companies have not experienced these levels of severe protests in a long time.

It is because we see what’s happening in countries across the global south. We see the apocalyptic scenes in Gaza. We see the immense trauma that people are experiencing, seemingly with no end. We know what we can do to take action and stop this imperialist machine, and we’re doing it.

Our camp on the 17th-21st September is being organised together with a plethora of groups. We won’t be divided, and we will be staying united for the liberation of Palestine, and for concrete policies like a weapons embargo on Israel by the German state, a policy we know that Germany will at some point have to implement. There is no escaping that.

Maybe you can explain a little bit more what’s going to be happening at your camp. Last week, there was the Rheinmetall Entwaffnen camp in Cologne, and now you’re organising something in Ulm?

I wasn’t present at Rheinmetall Entwaffnen camp myself, so I can’t say what direct similarities there might be. We have multiple events happening, including many cultural events. We have Dabke, clothes printing workshops, educational workshops about Elbit and the history of Palestine. We have other groups bringing their campaigns, where we can all work together.

We also have protests registered during the camp, protesting outside the office of the company we know that is driving the genocide. We’ll be bringing a wave of pro Palestinian sentiment into the city of Ulm to remind people they need to take a stand against their genocidal neighbours, and that every single person who stands up matters.

We are growing, and we are going to send a really strong message from Ulm to Elbit Systems, that they are not welcome in this city, and that nobody wants genocidal neighbours. Our camp will be directly outside the main Elbit office.

One of the difficulties of campaigns like Rheinmetall Entwaffnen is approaching workers in the factories who are worried about their jobs. Have you made any attempts to link up with people working for Elbit?

We’re still making those links. We are open for anybody to contact us and get involved. We haven’t had any large scale discussions with workers so far. We understand it’s very difficult to lead these discussions, but we are ready for that challenge.

But you do have contact with people living next door to the factory

Yes. We have already had contact with the neighbours. We’ve received communication from neighbours who stand in solidarity and the general public in Ulm. We felt a lot of support during demonstrations that have been going on against Elbit systems for over a year. We’ve been in the press countless times in Ulm, bringing the cause of Palestinian liberation to this small city in Baaden-Württemberg

The camp is going to be for five days. Most people reading this interview live in Berlin. How can they get to the camp?

We want this camp to be accessible to people Germany-wide, even beyond Germany. So we have a solidarity bus that is travelling on Wednesday 17^th September from Berlin through Leipzig and Nuremberg to Ulm. There will also be a bus travelling from Freiburg, Karlsruhe and Stuttgart.

You can find more information on our Instagram in German and English. It’s also on our Telegram channel, which you can get through the linktree on our Instagram page. There is a recommended donation of €25 for the buses, but people who don’t have the financial ability to contribute are still more than welcome to join us. The buses return on Sunday 21st September . We want the buses to be as full as possible to justify the long journey.

We need to be taking serious action against Israeli arms manufacturers that are working within Germany. You can find out more about the protests on our social media. But we really need people to make a big decision and take a long trip down to the South of Germany to Ulm in Baden-Württemberg.

What about people who work or can’t make it to Ulm? What can they do?

Comrades in Berlin who were unable to travel will still be protesting against Elbit systems. If you would like to be involved in that, please DM us on Instagram.

Have you got any further actions already planned?

We’re still discussing. we know that as long as the violence continnues, we shall continue. There is not going to be a peaceful moment for Elbit systems as they continue to operate in Germany. They may think that Germany is a safe country for them to operate in due to the German State’s endorsement of the genocide in Gaza, but there is no way that they’re going to continue to fuel genocide from within our cities and towns in the long term. Their end is near.

And the camp provides an ideal opportunity to plan future actions?

Yes. Please come to the camp, and social events and networking events. We can further unite our causes through other anti-imperialist movements, against the occupation of Kashmir, Western Sahara, Kurdistan, or the militarized and US American Mexican border. We can and will take action to bring us closer to liberation.

Is there anything else you’d like to say is anything we’ve not covered?

Our linktree contains many digital actions for people to get involved. It can really make a difference if we overwhelm the mayor of Ulm with criminal complaints and we get thousands of people signing a petition to evict Elbit from their Berlin office.

20 September 1973 – Billie Jean King defeats Bobby Riggs

This week in working class history

Phil Butland

What was the most viewed tennis match ever? Given the increased influence of social media, you might think that this would be a fairly recent game. But a survey in 2024, updated in April this year, showed that the most watched game by a country mile was between a 55-year-old sexist, and a 29-year-old who was yet to come out, and to become an icon of the women’s movement. In September 1973, 50 million live viewers in the US and over 90 million on international TV watched Billie Jean King defeat Bobby Riggs.

Bobby Riggs had won Wimbledon in 1939. By 1973, he was a sexist provocateur, claiming that “women belong in the bedroom and kitchen, in that order”, and that women’s tennis “stinks…. you can see some pretty legs but it’s night and day compared to the men’s game.” He challenged the leading women’s tennis star Billie Jean King to a game, saying: “I’ll tell you why I’ll win. She’s a woman, and they don’t have the emotional stability.”

King was highly politicised, and would come out as a lesbian in 1981. She initially ignored Riggs’ bluster, but then said: “I thought it would set us back 50 years if I didn’t win that match. It would ruin the women’s [tennis] tour and affect all women’s self-esteem.” She won the game in straight sets. Shortly afterwards, the U.S. Open offered equal prize money to its men’s and women’s champions. Other tournaments followed, the last being Wimbledon in 2007.

King’s victory was as much a sign of what was happening outside tennis as on the court. At the beginning of the same year, Roe v. Wade had finally legalised abortion in the USA. In the previous year, the Title IX law was passed, which said that “no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program.” Title IX was impossible without a radical street movement for women’s and other rights.

King’s stance against sexism is part of a proud tradition of political athletes from Muhammad Ali refusing to fight in the Vietnam War to Colin Kaepernick taking a knee. To those who say we should not mix sport and politics, sport has always been political. King proudly revealed that she had undergone an abortion, and found it degrading that the procedure was only possible with her husband’s approval. We should celebrate her, and other athletes who made it clear that sport is part of our society and requires the same resistance.

Gaza and the logic of biopower

When the state of exception becomes the norm—who gets to be human?

Sascha Cornejo P
15/09/2025

As contemporaries of a live-streamed genocide in Gaza, we are urgently challenged by new definitions of sovereignty and power over life and death. The philosopher Achille Mbembe wrote in his book Necropolitics, ‘Sovereignty consists in exercising control over mortality and defining life as the deployment and manifestation of power.’ In this work, two seemingly disparate paths intersect: postcolonial criticism and the biopolitical framework of Foucauldian criticism, which focuses primarily on the history of European modernity.

Although Michel Foucault never systematically formulated a theory of biopower, he developed the genealogical principles for understanding the evolution of power in the classical era. At the beginning of the modern era, power was reconfigured under the figure of disciplinary power developed in Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish. The evolution of power to biopower obeys the development of knowledge over bodies and biological species. In his History of Sexuality Vol. 1, Foucault wrote: ‘… focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a biopolitics of the population.’ (p. 139) For Foucault, the era of biopower is constituted by the invention of biological species and statistics, as expressed in the theories of biological determinism and eugenics.

Philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben have placed special emphasis on investigating bare life, that is, when life is in that liminal state between life and death, between human and animal life. In Homo Sacer III, Agamben develops a detailed analysis of the psychological annihilation of the so-called ‘Muselmänner’, as those ‘living dead’ in Nazi concentration camps were contemptuously called. Muselmänner reflects the link between ‘voluntary’ psychological breakdown as a kind of defense mechanism for self-preservation in a system based on extreme dehumanisation. This case compels us to think about biopower concerning a policy of dehumanisation and the resulting fragile division between human life, naked ‘bare life’, and animal life. Because dehumanisation became a state project, scholars investigate both the Holocaust (in Agamben) and racial theory and eugenics (in Roberto Esposito) through the lens of biopolitics and biopower. Today the reality in Gaza increasingly resembles that state of exception, which brings us back to the horrors of a liminal state that hangs between human life and animal life—a state of exception that dangerously becomes the norm, as Walter Benjamin once wrote.

The reality of Palestinian suffering in the Gaza Strip compels us to continue the work of academics such as Rodrigo Karmy Bolten and Mauricio Amar Díaz and unify both currents of thought to understand our present: the decolonial critique and the biopolitical genealogy, These scholars have made a detailed historical-sociological analysis of Israel’s colonial occupation of Palestinian land, showing that sovereignty, imperial law, and power are closely tied to the exercise of biopower, which encompasses optimisation, control, and definition over life, drawing dividing lines between the ontological spaces of humanity, subhumanity, and animality. These definitions are an intrinsic part of the surveillance, apartheid, and genocide as the technologies of death inscribed within the colonial biopolitical project of messianic Zionism, each of which illuminates certain aspects of control over these ‘subhuman animals’. In Gaza, nobody is safe, nobody is innocent. Sadly, all the horrific dehumanising metaphors once used by the Nazis are now being applied with ferocity and impunity to the Palestinian population. We are witnessing such an application of power and violence that the distinction between life and death becomes irrelevant. Mohammed El-Kurd wrote in the first pages of his book Perfect Victims:

‘We die a lot. We die in fleeting headlines, in between breaths. Our death is so quotidian that journalists report it as though they’re reporting the weather: Cloudy skies, light showers, and 3,000 Palestinians dead in the past ten days. Much like the weather, only God is responsible—not armed settlers, not targeted drone strikes.’

And let’s have a look at the lucid reflection on systematic dehumanisation by Lebanese writer Lina Mounzer in the piece A Year of War Without End:

‘It’s that some of us are so deliberately dehumanized that no description of the barbaric manner of our suffering or deaths could suffice to prove our humanity. In fact, the greater the barbarism, the more insistent the gleeful assertion that we deserved it. The West seeks to preserve the image of its own humanity at the complete erasure of ours. How can they be guilty of murder when those they kill are merely “terrorists” or “human animals”? In fact, not only are they not guilty of murder, they are heroes, cleansing the world.’

Despite these overwhelming displays of power and cruelty, of declared indifference to the lives and deaths of these old figures of ‘colonised subjects’, ‘Arabs’, ‘Muslims’, or ‘terrorists’, the concept of the ‘West and the rest’ takes on a new meaning when it comes to evaluating which lives deserve preservation and which do not. Despite the forces that drive these lines between ‘humanity’ and ‘subhumanity’, the Palestinian population refuses to surrender to this process of total dehumanisation. They resist even while witnessing and filming their own process of annihilation; even when death seems a thousand times better than the suffering their life represents. They show the world the true face of this war of extermination waged against them.

But the desire for control that emanates from this imperial and colonial project focuses above all on the way in which these systematically dehumanised bodies are portrayed. This is where the struggle for definitions and narratives becomes pivotal. Despite efforts to shield, defend and justify the genocide in Gaza at any cost, the meanings of sovereign power, and its war and media machine—coined the ‘Military-Industrial-Media & Academic Complex’ (MIMAC) by peace researcher Jan Oberg—are shattered into a thousand pieces by the growing resistance of the millions of witnesses across the world, those among the civilian population who refuse to be seduced by this constant show of systematic dehumanisation. Actions such as the numerous protests around the world and the Global Sumud Flotilla are perhaps the best example that, in times of genocide as a systemic project, people still have some dignity left. Not the governments, not the media, not the academia, but people.

We need to be aware of the civilisational breakdown that Gaza exposes—the crossroads of sovereign biopower, laid bare as the ultimate power over life and death. Moreover, Gaza represents the ultimate crisis of Western liberalism and its entire discursive apparatus. Here, it is worth recalling the words of Aimé Césaire, who in 1950 said in Discourse on Colonialism, ‘Europe is morally and spiritually indefensible.’ Césaire already knew that so-called European humanism—now perfectly equated with so-called ‘Western liberalism’—has always been selective in considering to whom to apply its humanist recipes. The colonial subject was kept outside the threshold that defined the consecration of human life to which all the appellations of human rights apply. What songs would they sing about ‘democracy’ and Western-style ‘human rights’ in Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, Venezuela, or Palestine?

Today, this same recipe of ontological selection and separation, of who enters the sphere of the human—according to the European and North American imagination—expects us to swallow those pills that would help us to digest the genocide in Gaza as morally acceptable. We are witnessing how dehumanising figures are beginning to be projected onto various groups that those in power have declared to be less than human and are willing to sacrifice in the name of security and perpetual war: from ‘Palestinians’ to ‘immigrants’, from ‘left-wing dissidents’ to those defined as ‘antisemites’ (anti-Zionist jews included). Currently, we observe how different quotas of state violence are applied to each of them. Meanwhile, the European MIMAC is striving to justify this horror, to make us look away and to accept the annihilation of the Palestinian people in the name of Western civilisation. It shows us without a doubt that Césaire was always right: Europe remains the cradle of racism and ontological differentiation through the colour line.

Césaire´s reflections may seem extravagant, but they confront us today with the reality of accepting the suffering of others simply because they do not belong to the same racial divide. Would these governments allow something like Gaza to happen to European citizens? This goes beyond simple hypocrisy; it reflects the deep racism that slumbers in all those consciences that still defend Israel. And let us not fool ourselves that at this stage of the genocide, repeating the zionist talking points of the ‘terror of Hamas’ and the ‘self-defence of Israel’ means defending a genocide.

Suppose we remain silent now that we see this horror unfolding, what will we do when necropolitics and biopolitics are once again reversed, becoming part of the domain of ‘Western democracies’? Who will we turn to for help when the figures of the ‘subhuman’ are applied to us, while our own silence has contributed so much to accepting the dehumanisation of the Other? Let’s never forget the most important anthropological and ethical precept: the Other is me.

Here too the words of Lina Mounzer are powerful:

‘… at this point in the genocide, it has become clear that we aren’t appealing to human beings but to systems. You cannot plead with a system. You must topple it.’