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30 January 1968: Tet Offensive

This week in working class history


27/01/2026

By early 1968, more than 500,000 U.S. troops were deployed in Vietnam, with bombing levels eventually surpassing three times the total of World War II. Forty thousand Americans were dead, hundreds of thousands wounded, and Vietnamese casualties were exponentially higher. Though opposition to the war existed from the start, it was the Tet Offensive that turned simmering dissent into mass resistance. On January 30 and 31, North Vietnamese People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) and its Viet Cong (VC) launched coordinated surprise attacks on more than 100 towns and cities across South Vietnam during the Lunar New Year (Tết Nguyên Đán). The campaign intended to trigger political instability, defections, and rebellions across South Vietnam. Over 80,000 fighters took part in the largest offensive of the war to date. However, militarily, Tet failed to spark the mass uprising and collapse of the South Vietnamese government that Hanoi had hoped for. Politically, however, Tet was decisive.

From 1964 to 1972, the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world unleashed nearly its entire military arsenal—short of the atomic bomb—against a tiny, peasant country already decades into its struggle against imperial domination. After a successful Communist revolution in 1945 led by Ho Chi Minh, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam was established and briefly united from North to South. Promised self-determination under the Atlantic Charter, Ho Chi Minh appealed directly to U.S. President Harry Truman for aid to stave off postwar famine. His letters went unanswered. Vietnam, having already resisted colonial France, fascist Japan, Nationalist China, and the British Empire, now faced the rising power of U.S. capitalism.

Post WWII, the United States financed and armed France’s attempt to reclaim its colony from Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh. Publicly, this was framed as a necessary stand against Communism in Asia. China’s 1949 revolution and the Korean War soon followed, feeding Washington’s fears of a collapsing Pacific order. If Vietnam fell, the “domino theory” warned, Laos, Cambodia, and beyond would follow. As usual, ideology masked material reality: land and resources—rice, rubber, coal, iron ore—were at stake. When France failed to suppress the overwhelmingly popular movement, a peace agreement and withdrawal were reached in 1954.

The United States moved quickly to block Vietnamese reunification, backing the “democratic” Ngo Dinh Diem’s repressive and deeply unpopular puppet government regime in the South. Presidents Kennedy and later Johnson sold this intervention as a defense of “freedom” and a fight against Communism. After the assassinations of Diem and Kennedy, Johnson escalated dramatically to quell growing Northern support, using the fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident to justify open war. As with Cuba just years earlier, the U.S. government lied to its public to manufacture consent—or at least indifference—for imperial violence.

The Tet Offensive shattered the carefully cultivated myth that U.S. victory was near. The scale of the offensive exposed official lies and shocked the American public, accelerating the collapse of support for the war as casualties mounted and draft calls expanded. Peace negotiations and troop withdrawals soon followed. The streets filled with protesters. “LBJ, LBJ, how many children have you killed today?” echoed across the United States. Tet marked the moment when millions saw through the war’s justifications—and when organized people, proved they could resist, and ultimately defeat, an organized war machine.

How equipped is a film backed by Hollywood royalty to speak up for Gaza?

Film Review: The Voice of Hind Rajab


26/01/2026

Opening titles inform us that in Gaza on January 29th, 2024, the Israeli Army ordered the evacuation of the Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood, and that this dramatisation is based on real events and emergency calls recorded that day. We see a graphical reproduction of a recorded message, then intrude on the Palestine Red Crescent Society office in Ramallah. Some people are on the phone telling the person on the other end to stop the blood. Others are playing rock paper scissors as a way of releasing the tension.

The phone rings. It is a 15-year-old girl begging for help. She says she is in a car and a tank is approaching. “They’re shooting at us,” she screams. We hear the sign of gunfire, then nothing more. Omar, who answered the call, is asked if he is ok. He is given a piece of paper with an anonymous face on it, which he should hang by his desk. When they identify who has just been killed, they will find a photograph of her and display it much larger on the office wall.

The phone rings again. This time the call is from Germany. It is a Palestinian man who says that his six-year-old niece Hind Rajab is trapped in a car, sharing the space with the corpses of her aunt, uncle, and cousins. The car is trapped in a battle zone, that is, a group of civilians were driving in an area chosen by the Israel Defense Forces for random military action. Omar’s colleague Rana tells him to return to the phone. “You were trained for this,” Rana says.

Omar reaches Hind by phone. She pleads for help, but there is only so much that Omar can offer. The Red Crescent offices have been forced to move out of Gaza, and now they are 83 kilometres away in the West Bank. There is one remaining Red Crescent ambulance in Northern Gaza, and amazingly, it is only eight minutes away from Hind’s car. But it is unable to move without fulfilling an elaborate protocol including liaising with the Red Cross and gaining a green light from the Israeli army—the same people who are shooting at Hind.

Charities have bosses too

One unexpected lesson from the film is that management hierarchies exist even in non-governmental organisations, where the work is mainly voluntary. No-one is in it for the money, but there are clear power structures at play. This means that while Omar wants them to use any means to save Hind—proper and improper—his boss Mahdi wants to play by the book. There is no exchange or dialogue. Mahdi gives the orders, causing Omar to shout out in frustration: “It’s because of people like you we’re occupied!”

I’m not saying that Mahdi necessarily makes the wrong decision, in this situation at least. He has seen too many of his colleagues die to act recklessly. He knows that if he sends an ambulance to save Hind without the cooperation of the Israeli security forces, he is effectively signing the death warrants of those health workers. We are not invited to agree or disagree with Mahdi’s decisions—only to understand that he is onto a hiding to nothing whatever he chooses.

At the same time, we can absolutely understand Omar’s frustration. Not just because he is unable to save a six-year-old girl when an ambulance is just minutes away, but also because he is unable to affect any of the decisions being made. At this point, he is not a humanitarian volunteer, he is a cog in the wheel driven by the Israeli occupation forces. He is trying to protect the most desperate victims of Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) violence, while having to play according to IDF rules.

While all this is happening, we hear the voice of Hind, saying that everyone in the car is covered in blood, trying to reassure herself that they are sleeping. But she eventually concedes that they are all dead. In a pleading voice, she cries out: “I’m so scared, please come.” Members of the Red Crescent team take it in turns to try and reassure Hind, asking her to tell her personal history (ironically she goes to a kindergarten called A Happy Childhood), or telling her to imagine that she’s at the beach. It is heartrending. 

The team members who are not on the phone discuss strategy. Should they endanger further lives by trying to rescue this one? Should they try other tactics, like releasing Hind’s message on social media? Maybe this would shame the Israelis into letting the ambulance through. But do the Israeli occupying forces have any shame? We hear different opinions, but the people behind the voices are united in their frustration and impotence. The audience is invited to actively participate in the drama.

It sounds surprising at first, but one of the film’s strengths is that it largely concentrates on office bureaucracy. There is little exploitative concentration on a young girl’s mortifying experience. Eventually, we see some scenes of violence, but these are largely blurred. We later hear that 355 bullets riddled Hind’s car, but ultimately this is just a number. The Voice of Hind Rajab does not just tell us that what happened to Hind was an atrocity. It allows us to feel her tragedy.

The contradictory involvement of Hollywood royalty

Judged by Hollywood standards, The Voice of Hind Rajab is already a success. It has been nominated for an Oscar, and it won the Silver Lion Prize at the Venice Film Festival, where it received a standing ovation of a record 23 minutes. Its executive producers include Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Jonathan Glazer, Alfonso Cuarón, Mark Ruffalo, Spike Lee, Michael Moore, and Jemima Khan. If it means that more people go and see this essential film, then this support from Hollywood figures is on balance a good thing. 

It is not, however, an entirely good thing. Firstly, a room full of people applauding the documentation of the murder of a six-year-old girl feels icky. Secondly, there is a danger that, through no fault of its own, the film becomes a mainstream “issues” film on the festival circuit, which is detached from the real life events that it depicts (which are ongoing). People like Glazer and Ruffalo have consistently spoken up for Gaza, but it is likely that other producers may just be chasing the next hot film.

I am reminded of 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen’s excellent film about slavery. This film was also co-produced by Pitt, who had an acting role as a troubled white liberal. For me at least, Pitt’s role was the least convincing part of the film. Moreover, a film that was to be mainly about Black liberation was slightly hijacked by a narrative about how slavery made some white people sad. Orville Lloyd Douglas responded to the film: “As a black person, I can honestly say I am exhausted and bored with these kinds of ‘dramatic race’ films.”

Such criticism is justified, and if The Voice of Hind Rajab becomes the same sort of global phenomenon as Steve McQueen’s masterpiece, then we should be aware of which story is being told, and whose story is not being told. In this case, I believe that the ends justify the means. If the involvement of well-to-do Hollywood stars means that more people learn about a tragic case which was insufficiently covered by the world media, then this is a good thing whatever the motivations of the stars themselves.

This reminds me of a discussion that we had before the demonstration for Gaza on September 27th, 2025—the largest Germany has ever seen. Some activists were justifiably annoyed that NGOs and leaders of Die Linke, who had thus far been silent on Gaza, suddenly wanted to get involved with a growing movement. And yet despite their hypocrisy, it is their involvement that meant that we got our point across to a much larger audience and were able to mobilise way beyond our previous ranks.

To plot spoil or not to plot spoil?

All of this makes The Voice of Hind Rajab different from most other films. Although it is exceedingly well made, the whole point of this film is the content, not the form. Its success should be judged not by Oscar wins, or the length of an ovation at a festival, or even by the number of people who go and see it. If it does not inform people, change minds, and force them into action to stop further massacres in Gaza, then it could be judged as a failure.

Very few critics have hated The Voice of Hind Rajab, but there is a marked difference between those who applaud a well-made film (and this film is very well made) and those who have been obviously moved by a gut-wrenching account of an epochal event that should have an important part in all future history books. In case it is not already clear, I am very much of the second bond of opinion. The murder of Hind Rajab was a monumental occasion and should be commemorated as such.

There is a reasonable case to be made that, due to the exceptional nature of the film, a review should include plot spoilers. How can you review a film like this while staying silent about its barbaric content? In the face of something so horrific, how important are the sensitivities of readers who don’t want to know what happens next? You may feel slightly inconvenienced by being told what’s going to happen, but you need to know what happened. More importantly you need to know why it happened.

Nonetheless, this review contains only spoilers that are absolutely necessary. The story of what happened is so alarming that maybe it is better experienced by an audience that is unprepared for what it is about to see. Either way, this is compulsory viewing, especially for those who do not know every last detail. And if you don’t know the details before watching, it is your job to find out exactly what happened, and why Hind’s murder was not exceptional, but standard Israeli procedure in Gaza. 

Some people who do know the story may be reluctant to visit the film. I have friends who have committed themselves to Hind—some for years. Some of those friends can’t bring themselves to watch this film. They don’t need to inflict another round of misery upon themselves. I understand this reaction fully. This is a film that is not just for Palestine activists, not even primarily for activists. It is for those who looked away. And, as the film argues, after the murder of a six-year-old child, looking away is no longer an option.

This is a righteous piece of proselytism which is aimed at changing hearts and minds. We should be encouraging people to go and see a film that documents nothing less than a war crime—one of many such crimes that have been committed in Gaza. But watching the film is not the end of the discussion. We also need to find the people who have seen the film—even those who were at star-spangled festivals—and ask them what they thought about it, and more urgently, what are they going to do about it?

This article is an extended version of a review that originally appeared on the Cinephil Berliner Film Blog. Thanks to Inês Colaço for their feedback, which led to some extra analysis on the film’s production and distribution.

Denmark’s Atlanticist chickens

Danish politics amidst the wane of the world order


25/01/2026

On the 13th of December, 2025, a small group of antifascist demonstrators met at the Triangeln metro station in Copenhagen’s chic Østerbro district. Winding their way down Dag Hammarskjölds Allé—named after the Swedish Peace Prize laureate, who was likely assassinated by a Belgian breakaway colonial state in the Congo—the protestors, bearing ACAB banners and Palestinian flags, ended up at the American embassy in short order.

Shortly thereafter, the police escort informed demonstrators that they were to stop chanting into megaphones, and to move off the cordoned-off section of the street, and onto the pavement. Some demonstrators refused. In response, the boys in blue—upstanding, professional representatives of the state’s monopoly on violence—readied their batons, bruised and bloodied several protestors, and forced the demonstration to a close. 

High above this well-rehearsed choreography, catching the last of the afternoon sun, proudly bearing witness to the brutality of Copenhagen’s constabulary on this wintry afternoon, fluttered a single, lonely star-spangled banner.

***

It is difficult to overstate the Ameriphilia that suffuses daily Danish urban life. Most (white) Danes speak English with the comfort and fluency of an Englishman in New York. Affluent hipsters, dressed in Carhartt hoodies and baseball caps, spend their evenings frequenting the diners (“The Midwestern”) and hamburger chains (“Gasoline Grill”) dotted all over the city, ending their nights discussing the latest season of Pluribus at one of the city’s many microbreweries that serve endless insipid iterations of New England IPAs. 

This superstructure goes hand-in-hand with the base: with pragmatic, material reality. Denmark goes above and beyond the “standard” Atlanticist rhetoric in Europe that rambles on about support for NATO and free trade at annual conferences, and modern Danish history has been characterised by full-throated, unquestioning support for American foreign policy as a core tenet. Thus did Denmark distinguish itself among nations, by being one of the earliest and most vocal members of the coalition of the willing that led the invasion of Iraq. The (centre-left) Danish government has also stood out from its counterparts in Norway and Sweden, through its consistent economic and rhetorical support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, prompting rare critique from Norwegian political parties. Closer to home, Danish intelligence, supremely unconcerned with such petty issues as neighbourly ties, spent a solid two years wiretapping politicians in Sweden, Norway, France and Germany—including Angela Merkel and Frank-Walter Steinmeier—together with the NSA. And in Greenland itself, Denmark signed away the right to construct and maintain military bases to the United States back in 1951.

This uncritical “super-Atlanticism” goes hand-in-hand with some of the most unsavoury aspects of Danish domestic policy. The Euro-American love story—built upon a legacy of racism, colonialism, and genocide—has long relied upon the reification and constant reinforcement of the idea of a white, Western, Christian civilisation, constantly threatened by the barbarians at the gates; a motley crew of conniving Chinamen, scheming Russians, and the miscellaneous racialised migrant hordes looking to plunder and pillage this veritable garden of Eden. These sweeping civilisational narratives see shocking legitimacy in liberal Danish circles, well eclipsing how acceptable they would be in the United States or Britain.

Indeed, Denmark has been rather ahead of the curve as far as racism goes. The Danish state has been rather successful in its efforts to legally entrench and reify the statistical categories of “Western” and “non-Western” as stand-ins for racial markers; and as if this racial binary were insufficient, it has spent years attempting to create a separate category for Muslims, the prime victims of Danish foreign policy. The related “ghetto laws” passed by a recent Danish centre-left coalition were recently ruled potentially illegal by the European Court of Justice; these laws would also, in principle, explicitly infringe upon the Civil Rights Act in the United States. And the extreme precarity that Danish citizenship laws subject migrants to makes it far riskier to organise than nearly anywhere else in Western Europe.

All of this makes the events of the past few weeks particularly tragic for the diverse assortment of bien pensant academics, journalists, tech workers, policy wonks, and miscellaneous experts that collectively shape Danish discourse. Few amongst this class possess the intellectual honesty to own up to the fact that the events of the past year are Denmark’s chickens coming home to roost; discourse has rather remained every bit as delusional and chauvinistic as it has ever been.

To curb America’s worst impulses, Danish politicians have spent the past year pulling a number of tricks out of their hat. They have attempted to use international law as a shield, only a year after the Prime Minister declined to answer whether she would respect the ICC’s arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu. They have attempted to display their unwavering commitment to Atlanticism by granting the American military access to its airbases. They have attempted to appeal to America’s moral fibre, pointing to how many Danish soldiers were killed fighting America’s wars (of lesser import, no doubt, are the lives of the Iraqis and Afghans that the Danish military helped slaughter). They have claimed that comparisons to Venezuela could never be drawn, since Denmark is a plucky Gryffindor, and not some Latin American Hezbollah-adjacent communist shithole. And finally, unable to temper their cartoonish worldview, they have defaulted to informing Trump that these petty squabbles between white countries are beneath him, and that they ought to join hands and focus on the Russians and the immigrants instead. 

***

Rapid developments have taken place over the past few days at Davos. A compromise has been reached, between NATO’s General Secretary Mark Rutte, and the man that he once called daddy. Trump is as capricious as a politician can get, and changes his mind based on the last person that he talks to; Rutte is as bland and ineffectual a politician as ever set foot into European politics. From what we know of it, their agreement appears to grant Americans sovereignty over “some parts” of Greenland. Discourse has settled, with remarkable alacrity, upon two framings of this. Europeans concerned about ceding ever-larger chunks of sovereignty to the United States frame this as a cheap surrender on part of NATO; while market liberals, immersed in their warm, comfortable, nostalgic Atlanticist baths exchange knowing smiles, reassuring one another that Trump always chickens out. 

Both these framings—not to mention all the “poor Denmark” consolations—miss the real detail here. For the people of Greenland, this backroom deal between the United States and an assortment of middling European powers to carve up their home is a gigantic step backwards. Greenland’s journey from being a formal Danish colony, to today’s partial sovereignty has been arduous. This deal marks a reversion to a darker era of unbridled imperialism.

There is no doubt that we live in a time of crisis, which brings with it certain opportunities. Indeed, the waning of Pax Americana appears to be a near certainty. As Mark Carney—the last realistic liberal—pointed out at Davos, the capitalist compromise at the end of history was a fiction, which worked because everyone played along. Describing with uncharacteristic honesty the one-sided nature of this system, Carney admitted that Canada bought into this fiction because American hegemony “helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and a framework for resolving disputes”. His speech, now viral all over the internet, featured very little by way of acknowledgement—let alone sympathy—for the victims of American hegemony.

Europe today faces three choices. The first is to continue to cede the last dregs of national sovereignty to the United States, to continue to cling onto the material benefits of the U.S. military’s dominance over the planet. The second (Carney’s vision, no doubt) is to come to terms with reality, and to tighten the screws and re-enter the race to the bottom that is global capitalism; to keep European economies “competitive” by shredding what is left of labour movements, dismantling the welfare state, and subjecting Europeans to increasingly harsh austerity measures. 

The final path is to acknowledge that Europe no longer possesses the unilateral ability to force the entire planet into subjugation to stop domestic capitalism from running out of steam; and that perhaps this may not be such a terrible thing after all. Perhaps we once again find ourselves confronted with the same binary choice that we were a century ago, on the eve of Europe going up in flames: socialism or barbarism?

Photo Gallery – Palestine and Germany: Where do we stand now?

Collaboration between The Left Berlin and Corner Späti in Cafe Engles, 22 January 2026


23/01/2026

All photos: Cherry Adam

Palestine Kurdistan, Intifada Serhildan!

Speech from the demonstration: “In Solidarity with the People of Iran”, Sunday 18th February, Berlin


21/01/2026

In Solidarity with the People of Iran

My friends, 

I stand here as the daughter of an Iranian communist. My mother, a revolutionary, fought to bring down the Shah in 1979. She was one of the first, along with my aunt, to take to the streets in the historic mass demonstration against the new regime on March 8th 1979. My mother has fought relentlessly against the bloody regime for 46 years, and she has paid a heavy price for it: life underground, imprisonment, having to flee, and the trauma of these experiences. In 1988 she survived Saddam Hussein’s mustard gas attack on the Kurdish city of Halabja, which was made possible by German weapons. Her then husband, the love of her life, did not survive the armed resistance in the mountains. I’ve never even been able to visit my parent’s homeland. Our lives, our stories, are defined by this socialist fight against the regime and for a better world.

In the last 3 weeks we have seen, once again, how people take to the streets to protest the regime–millions of people are out there! It is the biggest revolution in the history of the Islamic Republic! These protestors have our full solidarity! We recognise ourselves in their struggle for freedom and equality, for a life of self-determination and dignity. We see that the struggles in Iran, Kurdistan, and Palestine, and the struggles here in Germany against war, rearmament, welfare cuts, racism, and genocide are one and the same fight!

A worker in Iran who can no longer afford potatoes has more in common with a worker here, who has to choose between paying for heating or food in the winter. We can’t sit idly by, watching our siblings in Iran, in Gaza, in Kurdistan, being massacred. It’s also not enough to simply commend the bravery of Iranians who risk their lives to fight the system: we must be ready to take up this struggle against our ruling classes! For this, we need revolutionary leadership, a socialism from below!

We say clearly: no to regime change! No to Pahlavi, a billionaire’s son who has never had to work a day in his life. They are not our allies, they are our class enemies! They promise freedom, but what they really mean is freedom for the rich to exploit the people of Iran as THEY see fit–the turban will be replaced by the crown and by the tie. We reject that completely! We don’t trust Pahlavi, Trump, or Netanyahu–we see their so-called democracy in Palestine! We explicitly reject Zionist “dirty work” in Iran–we say no to bombs, no to sanctions, liberation comes from below, not outside!

We fight for a free Iran, for an Iran controlled by the working classes themselves! The people whose labour power keeps society going should be able to freely and autonomously make decisions about their collective lives. The rich who profit from their labour shouldn’t be making these decisions! In Iran, there is a long tradition of workers’ councils. Time and again we see the power of the working people: in 1979 it was the workers in the oil industry who brought the Shah down. Therefore we also fully back the Tehran bus drivers’ statement, which clearly calls for an anti-capitalist alternative and stands against foreign intervention, and the Haft Tapeh workers, who demanded workers’ councils and the confiscation of state property back in 2017. Down with capitalist barbarism, long live socialism!

The workers united will never be defeated! Jin Jiyan Azadi! Marg bar dictator! Palestine Kurdistan, Intifada Serhildan!

Translated by Ciara Bowen