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Are we really  experiencing a surge in Left Wing Violence?

Why the Linke leadership’s latest statement is playing into the hands of the right wing


11/01/2026

Consider two recent incidents in Germany. The first was on 3rd January, when a fire broke out in Lichtenfelde, Berlin. Even the British Guardian reported it: “German leftwing militants protesting over the climate crisis and AI have claimed responsibility for an arson attack that cut power to tens of thousands of households in Berlin”, and “In a 2,500-word pamphlet seen by the Guardian which a police spokesperson called ‘credible’, the group said it had aimed to ‘cut the juice to the ruling class’.”

Right wing politicians and media reacted hysterically. Berlin mayor Kai Wegner (CDU), who couldn’t break off from a tennis game to visit the victims, told die Welt: “we have been struck by a left wing terrorist attack”, and “left wing extremism is at the moment a high threat to Berlin. Left extreme terror is back in Germany”. Meanwhile CSU Leader Markus Söder said: “left wing terrorism is back stronger than we could imagine, and with fundamental implications.”

Three days later, the Linke Party leaders Ines Schwerdtner and Jan van Aken issued a statement on another incident – “An attack on one of us is an attack on us all.” The statement starts: “We are deeply concerned to see that some of our comrades are currently being massively attacked and in some cases subjected to full-blown campaigns.” It goes on to strongly imply that the Left was responsible for an arson attack on Brandenburg’s antisemitism ‘Tsar’ Andreas Büttner (a Linke member and friend of Israel).

Schwerdtner and van Aken’s statement argued: “Solidarity means engaging in debate with one another – without violence, intimidation, denigration, or insults. Instead, it means using words that strive for understanding. Even if we may hold a different position on the issue, it is our collective responsibility to reject these attacks, wherever and whenever they occur.”

What should the Left say?

Two stories of apparent “left wing terror.” One was criticised by the Right, the other by left wing leaders. Just what is going on here, and how should the radical Left react? One reaction would be to say that the Left has always criticised individual acts of terror. Lenin argued strongly with his brother, who was a Narodnik and attempted to assassinate the Tsar in 1887. 

Trotsky wrote an article “Why Marxists Oppose Individual Terrorism” in which he argued: “the killing of an employer, a threat to set fire to a factory or a death threat to its owner, an assassination attempt, with revolver in hand, against a government minister—all these are terrorist acts in the full and authentic sense. However, anyone who has an idea of the true nature of international Social Democracy [ie socialists like Trotsky] ought to know that it has always opposed this kind of terrorism and does so in the most irreconcilable way.”

This opposition to individual terrorism is strategic, not moralistic. To gain our aims, we need a mass movement, not individuals acting on our behalf. By the very nature of their acts, terrorists need to hide their identity and are cut off from the people they want to represent. Having said all this, I think something else is going on here. A lot of people are jumping to conclusions and finding explanations which suit their political project. 

It was the Wulkangruppe, which claimed responsibility for the Lichterfelde arson attack. Nathaniel Flakin has already argued on this website: “Was this a left-wing group? As of yet, Berlin police have presented zero evidence … While the statement uses phrases from the German autonomist scene, we know that Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) has written and published texts just like this.”

Nathaniel went on to argue: “If it is indeed a left-wing group, it is just as astounding that they have no periphery at all—not a single left-wing sympathizer defending their actions.” To recap, there is absolutely no evidence that the Wulkangruppe is left wing at all, and even if it is, on the Left scene it represents no-one but itself.

The case of a demonstration in Leipzig and Jule Nagel

Let’s now look more closely at the claims made by Schwerdtner and van Aken. Here, in their attempt to prove their claim that political opponents on the Left refuse to enter a political discussion, they appear to be conflating three different cases. Let’s look at them in turn.

They first raise the case of Jule Nagel, parliamentary representative for die Linke in Saxony. They say they are appalled that the group Handala “discredits the work of Jule under the motto ‘Antifa means Free Palestine’ and is calling for a demonstration on 17th January in the district of Connewitz. The focus is on Jule and also the project LinXXnet and the youth centre Conne Island in Leipzig”. 

The demonstration was called after a number of recorded attacks on Palestinians and their supporters in Connewitz by so-called Antideutsche. The call to the demonstration states: “in Conne Island, in linXXnet and in the streets of the districts, US flags celebrated the bombs which imperialism dropped on Iraq and Afghanistan which turned the population into refugees. Israel flags were omnipresent on demos”.

Jule Nagel also has a long history of support for Israel. Because she is not the main focus of this article, I’ll restrict myself to this forensic article by Jüdisch-Israelischer Dissens Leipzig (Jewish Israeli Dissense Leipzig, JID) on the inconsistencies of her thought process. 

The case of Bodo Ramelow

The second case which has given Schwerdtner and van Aken so much grief is the “massive hounding” of Bodo Ramelow. the Vice President of die Linke and former president of Thüringen. This hounding, they claim, consists of “put-downs, insults, and downright lies”.

For anyone who is unaware of Ramelow’s body of work, here are some of his Greatest Hits. When he was Thüringen president, he was deporter-in-chief. He campaigned for faster deportation procedures. Already in 2016, Fascist AfD MP Beatrix von Storch celebrated Ramelow’s attacks on migrants, tweeting: “Ramelow is right. Antifa has not understood democracy.”

That’s not all. When the president of the German parliament Julia Klöckner banned the queer rainbow flag from the Bundestag, Ramelow wrote an article saying “I stand behind Julia Klöckner’s decision”, in which he said that protests by MPs “weren’t necessary at all. Of course, we discussed her decisions in the executive committee, but she explained them very well, and we could all understand them.”

And then we come to Ramelow’s position on Palestine. In the debate on Klöckner, Ramelow said, unnecessarily: “The Bundestag can’t raise the flags of the demonstrating groups at every large demonstration in Berlin, since there’s a large demonstration here almost every week. She asked me if we should then raise the Palestinian flag at every pro-Palestinian demonstration in Neukölln in the future. I could only say no.”

This answer, at least, came as no surprise. On Nakba Day 2025, Ramelow celebrated “60 years of German-Israeli relationships.” In September of the same year, Ramelow dismissed talk of dead Palestinian children as “Hamas shit,” arguing that opposing the Israeli genocide was “on the way to saying” Nazi slogans like “Jews eat children.”

Die Linke should not be criticising demonstrations against Nagel and Ramelow – they should be actively supporting them. Any half-way left-wing party should make a clear stand against supporters of deportation and genocide, not make unconvincing arguments in their defence. 

The case of a bomb attack on Andreas Büttner

And so we come to the bomb attack on Andreas Büttner. This attack has been formulated by Schwerdtner and van Aken as just another bullet point in a list. Schwerdtner and van Aken list three cases, Two of them are peaceful protests, the third an arson attack. The inference is that these events are equivalent and that anyone who supports one bears responsibility for them all.

But what is the evidence? That when Büttner’s Summer House was attacked, it was daubed with a red “Hamas triangle” – you know, the triangle which has been banned for alleged antisemitic content. Besides this circumstantial evidence, do we know that the people who attacked Büttner were Leftists,  or indeed Hamas supporters? We do not. 

We are back in the territory of the Wulkangruppe debate. Because politicians, and the media, have deemed it useful that this attack is the result of “left wing terrorism”, whatever that means, there is no need for any further investigations.

The Left has no need to defend Büttner who tweeted support for the Berlin police when they were attacking pro-Palestine demonstrators, and who believes that the Golan Heights are part of Israel. I, for one, understand the frustration of those watching Büttner’s political rise in a so-called “left” party – which is perfectly happy to accommodate his racism. But the accusations that we are to blame for any of the physical attacks against him are baseless.

What is die Linke leadership defending?

The statement from Schwerdtner and van Aken came on the very same day that The Left Berlin published an article which I wrote arguing “Schwerdtner’s change of heart [in which she apologised for previous mistakes made by the Party on Palestine] was the result of pressure from new members, who are serious about fighting for Palestine …. I fully support the newly formed BAG Palästinasolidarität, but here [in believing that the Party leadership has fundamentally changed its position on Palestine] I believe that they are being naive.”

Die Linke has tried to put itself at the front of a movement which it did not create. It is now trying to throw its members who built this movement under the bus. Just as it was quite prepared to expel Ramsy Kilani, it will do nothing against party members like Nagel, Ramelow, and Büttner, who vocally support imperialism and genocide.

This is not an article about political violence. Capitalism is a brutal system, and we may need to exercise some brutality to get rid of it. But here I am talking about the defamation of an entire movement with insinuations of violence, and an attempt to divide us between “good”, peaceful, demonstrators, and “bad” militants.

This divide and rule is a right wing strategy. We saw it recently when ICE forces murdered Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis. Despite widespread video evidence to the contrary, Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin tweeted: “rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.” 

As the state resorts to increasingly violent methods to maintain control (we only need to think of the violent policing of recent Palestine demos in Berlin), it increasingly tries to shift the blame onto someone else. The question is whether we oppose them or deploy the same tactics. 

We should keep this in mind when we witness Schwerdtener’s and Van Aken’s hand wringing. It is not just the blatant hypocrisy of supporters of genocide suddenly discovering that violence is bad. By contributing to the myth of left wing terror, they strengthen the ability of the state to impose further repression. The Left deserves better than that.

THE LAST NORMAL DAY

What I was doing on October 6th, 2023 (and why it matters)


10/01/2026

Collage of Nabil and his friends and family, titled "Before the war."

I was planning a birthday party.

My daughter Leen was turning nine in two weeks, and she’d been asking for months if we could finally do “the big one”—you know, the kind with a real cake, balloons, and all her cousins. The kind of party that makes a kid feel like the center of the universe for exactly one day.

I told her yes. Of course, yes.

I was working late that night—October 6th—trying to finish a project so I’d have time to focus on party planning. My wife Doaa was already asleep. The house was quiet except for the sound of my keyboard and the occasional car passing outside.

I remember thinking: Life is finally stable.

I had no idea I was living the last normal hour of my life.

By sunrise, normal would become a word I couldn’t even remember the meaning of.

The man I was (before)

Let me tell you who I was on October 6th.

I was a 33-year-old computer engineer. I have three children: Leen, Moein, and Rima, who was born in the first week of the Gaza war. I’d built a small company called Lord Group—nothing fancy, just me and a team I’d trained myself, working from home, taking on projects, slowly building something real.

We weren’t rich. But we were comfortable. My children went to school. My wife didn’t have to worry about groceries. We had a home. We had plans.

I used to stay up late working on projects—websites, systems, automation tools—the kind of work that feels like solving puzzles. I loved it. I was good at it. And more importantly, it let me provide for my family.

That was my definition of success: being able to say “yes” to my daughter’s birthday party without checking my bank account first.

Simple, right?

That’s all I wanted. A simple, stable life where my kids could be kids and I could be the kind of father who didn’t have to disappoint them.

I had that life for exactly one more night.

October 7th, 6:47 AM

I woke up to explosions.

Not the distant kind you hear on the news. The kind that shake your walls. The kind that make your heart stop before your brain even understands what is happening.

I ran to my children’s room. They were already awake, crying, asking me what was happening.

I didn’t know.

By noon, we knew we had to leave. By evening, our home was gone. By the next week, everything I’d spent 11 years building—my company, my work, every single project, every client, every plan—was rubble.

And Leen’s birthday party?

We spent it in a tent.

No cake. No balloons. No cousins.

Just my wife, our three children, and the sound of drones overhead.

Happy birthday, sweetheart.

The questions children ask

My youngest daughter, Rima, was born six days into the war.

October 13th, 2023.

She has never lived in a house. Never had a bedroom. Never experienced falling asleep without the sound of explosions in the distance.

When she’s old enough to ask questions, what will I tell her?

How do I explain that she was born into a world where safety is a luxury we can’t afford?

But it’s my older children who break my heart the most.

Baba, when can we go back to our house?

I don’t know how to tell her there’s no house to go back to.

Baba, why did this happen to us?

I don’t have an answer that makes sense.

Rima doesn’t ask questions yet. She just cries when she’s hungry. Which is often.

And I sit there, in a tent, with three beautiful children who deserve so much more than this, and I wonder: How did this become our life?

The new math

I used to solve problems with code. Now I solve them with survival.

Here’s what a day looks like now:

6:00 AM — Wake up. Check if everyone’s still here. Relief.

7:00 AM — Start the walk to get water. 1.8 kilometers. Carry 40 liters back. My spine screams. I ignore it.

9:00 AM — Try to find food. Sometimes there’s bread. Sometimes there isn’t.

11:00 AM — Sit in the tent. Try to keep the kids entertained. Fail.

2:00 PM — Walk for water again. My neck is damaged now—herniated disc, spinal issues from months of this. I can’t afford treatment. I can’t afford to stop.

5:00 PM — Ration whatever food we have. Make it last. Pretend it’s enough.

8:00 PM — Try to get the kids to sleep. They’re scared. I’m scared. I lie and tell them everything’s okay.

10:00 PM — Lie awake. Think about everything we lost. Everything I can’t give them. Everything I’m failing to protect them from.

Repeat.

This is my life now.

Not coding. Not building. Not planning birthday parties.

Just surviving.

What war actually steals

People think war steals your home, your safety, your possessions.

It does.

But that’s not the worst part.

The worst part is what it steals from the people you love.

It stole my daughter’s ninth birthday.

It stole my newborn’s first year in a real home.

It stole my wife’s peace of mind.

It stole my ability to be the father I promised I’d be.

I used to be able to fix things. To solve problems. To provide.

Now I can’t even give my children a decent meal.

That’s what war steals. It steals your ability to protect the people you love. And then it makes you watch them suffer anyway.

The hardest part

You know what the hardest part is?

It’s not the hunger. It’s not the fear. It’s not even the physical pain.

It’s the hope.

Every single day, I wake up and I have to choose: Do I keep hoping? Do I keep fighting? Do I keep believing that somehow, some way, we’ll get out of this?

Or do I give up?

And every single day, I look at my children, and I know I can’t give up.

Not because I’m strong. Not because I’m brave.

But because they’re watching me.

If I give up, what does that teach them? That the world is too cruel? That hope is pointless? That survival is the best we can aim for?

No.

I want them to see that even when everything falls apart, you keep fighting. You keep hoping. You keep building, even if all you’re building is one more day of survival.

That’s what fathers do.

Even when it’s impossible.

What I miss most

People ask me what I miss most about my old life.

They expect me to say my home. My company. My career.

And yes, I miss those things.

But what I miss most are the small, boring, beautiful moments that I used to take for granted.

I miss my children running through the house, laughing, making noise, being kids.

I miss my wife cooking in a real kitchen, complaining about groceries, planning dinners.

I miss bedtime stories in an actual bed, not on the floor of a tent.

I miss being able to tell my kids “yes” without calculating whether we can afford it.

I miss feeling like the future was something to plan for, not something to survive.

I miss being a father who could protect his children, not just a father who’s trying his best and failing anyway.

I miss normal.

And I’m starting to forget what normal even felt like.

What I’m fighting for

I’m not fighting to go back to who I was.

That person is gone. That life is gone. That version of normal doesn’t exist anymore.

I’m fighting for something new.

I’m fighting to get my family somewhere safe. Somewhere my children can go to school instead of hiding in a tent. Somewhere my wife doesn’t have to ration water. Somewhere I can work again, not because I need to prove anything, but because I miss feeling useful.

I’m fighting for a future where Rima’s second birthday isn’t in a tent.

Where Leen gets the birthday party she deserves—even if it’s three years late.

Where my children don’t have to ask, “Baba, why did this happen to us?” because it’ll finally be over.

That’s what I’m fighting for.

Not the life I had. But a life worth living.

What I’m asking you for

I’m not asking you to fix everything.

I’m not asking you to understand what this feels like. (I hope you never do.)

I’m asking for something simpler:

See us.

Know that we exist. Know that behind the headlines and the statistics, there’s a father who just wants his children to be safe. A wife who just wants to cook in a real kitchen again. Children who just want to be children.

We’re not asking for luxury. We’re asking for normal.

And if you can help—through our fundraising campaign, or even just by sharing our story—you’re not just helping my family.

You’re teaching my children that the world still has kindness in it. That humanity still exists. That hope isn’t stupid.

That’s worth more than you know.

The promise I made

On October 6th, 2023, I promised my daughter a birthday party.

I couldn’t keep that promise.

But I’m making a new one:

I promise to get my family out of this tent.

I promise to find a place where they’re safe.

I promise to rebuild—not what we lost, but something new.

I promise to keep fighting until my children don’t have to ask, “Baba, when will this end?”

And I promise that one day—maybe not soon, maybe not easily, but one day—Leen will get that birthday party.

With a real cake. Real balloons. All her cousins.

The kind that makes a kid feel like the center of the universe for exactly one day.

She deserves that.

And I’m going to give it to her.

Even if it takes everything I have left.

How you can help

Our fundraising campaign is here: chuffed.org/project/nabil

If you can donate, thank you. If you can’t, please share this story. Your voice might reach someone who can help.

Other ways to support:

Verified by: Aral Balkan and Molly Shah

This is real. We are real. And we’re running out of time.

One last thing

If you’re reading this, thank you.

I know your time is valuable. I know there are a million other things you could be doing right now.

But you’re here. You read this far. You saw us.

That matters.

Maybe you’ll donate. Maybe you’ll share this. Maybe you’ll just remember that somewhere in Gaza, there’s a father trying to give his children a future.

Whatever you do, it’s more than we had yesterday.

And sometimes, that’s enough to keep going.

Nabil Zaqout is a 34-year-old computer engineer, father of three, and survivor currently living in Khan Younis, Gaza. He used to build websites. Now he’s trying to build a future. He still remembers what his children’s laughter sounded like when they weren’t scared.

“I don’t need you to save us. I just need you to see us. The rest, we’ll figure out together.”

Support Nabil’s family:

Campaign: chuffed.org/project/nabil

Contact: +970 599 011 300

Links: link.me/engnab

The Iraqi Left at a crossroads: Renewal, unity, and reclaiming grassroots action.

The Iraqi Left needs unity and flexibility to transform ideals into tangible social change


09/01/2026

The Iraqi Left: A crisis of tools, not a crisis of values

This article comes at a critical moment that the Iraqi Left is experiencing. The results of the recent elections in November 2025 cannot be seen as merely a passing electoral loss or as a direct result of the unfair electoral law and the dominance of political money. While these external factors are valid and influential, they are compounded by even more grueling challenges of systemic restrictions and structural corruption. However, focusing on external influences alone overlooks the essence of the problem.

What happened is a concentrated expression of a deeper crisis affecting the organization, methods, and discourse within the Iraqi Left. It reflects a dysfunctional relationship between valid ideas and ineffective tools, as well as between radical transformative discourse and its presentation in a complex and harsh political environment. Despite this decline, the Iraqi Left remains a genuine hope and the most serious alternative for social change.

Given this dual diagnosis, the critical question arises: Why, despite the dire conditions faced by the masses and the power of corrupt cliques, has social change not emerged as a clear and convincing popular choice? Why has the Left’s project remained fragmented and inconsistent, with similar slogans but differing approaches, preventing the masses from seeing a coherent alternative?

Do we benefit from the Capitalist Methodology?

To understand this defect, it is necessary to examine the issue from an unconventional angle. The logic of capitalism, grounded in science and measurement rather than ideology, offers a strict practical model for addressing decline and weakness. The crisis facing the Iraqi Left can be seen as a failure of a promising transformative “product,” characterized by theoretically sound policies that lack optimal methods for practical implementation and require improved management and marketing. This occurs within a political market that faces significant competition from religious, nationalist, and bourgeois forces. Capitalism treats society as a market and ideas as commodities. When a group of “companies” with similar names enters the market to sell a singular product—social change—without harmony or coordination, the quality itself becomes problematic.

This reflects what happened to the Iraqi Left in the recent elections. Not only was it organizationally scattered, but it was also politically divided between participation and boycott. There was no unified position, clear discourse, or understood collective tactic. The masses did not perceive a single “product” with distinct features, but rather a series of similar products competing against each other instead of confronting real competitors. In such a scenario, the market punishes inconsistent products. Chaotic plurality, conflicting discourse, and confusion erode mass confidence, not because they reject the idea of change, but because it reaches them in a fragmented, elitist manner that is difficult to grasp in relation to societal development and daily needs.

The Left and addressing decline and weakness

Upon facing decline and weakness, a fundamental difference emerges between the logic of capitalism and that of many forces on the Left. Capitalism does not revisit its classical theorists at every crisis to determine if their texts were fully applied. As a practical system, it treats decline as a measurable and addressable technical signal. It quickly alters tools, discourse, facades, and work mechanisms without guilt or reverence for names and history. Capitalism employs scientific research: it collects data, analyzes numbers, studies behavior, and utilizes advanced technologies and artificial intelligence to test hypotheses. It asks simply and directly: Why did the product not succeed? Based on the answers, it rebuilds its policies.

In contrast, some forces on the Left tend to return to their classical theorists for answers during periods of decline, looking back to the celebrated history of their parties. However, the real question should be: Why did our message not resonate today? The issue isn’t the return to leftist heritage as a living critical method, but when this heritage and old organizational mechanisms become rigid standards that overshadow reality.

We reclaim the Scientific Method, which was always the essence of Leftist thought

The lesson here is not to glorify capitalism or adopt its values, but to benefit from its scientific method. The fundamental challenge lies in how to “borrow the tool” (the scientific methodology) while rejecting the “spirit” (individual profit and class dominance).

The Iraqi Left now needs this type of evaluation and scientific rigor. It must conduct real surveys in popular neighborhoods and among female and male workers, not to concede its class horizon, but to understand how its message is received, how it is interpreted, and where it falters. It needs to study and measure the impact of its policies, assess its presence both on the ground and in digital spaces, and evaluate the language of its discourse. It should ask directly: Why do we not reach our audience? And why do we not influence? Only then can bold political and organizational decisions be made based on the results.

The Left in the age of the Digital Revolution

In the context of the digital revolution, this need increases in urgency and in an unprecedented way. We live in a time where ideas are no longer measured by the soundness of their theoretical starting point only, but by their ability to reach, influence, interact, and transform into a tangible collective action, which are criteria that young generations understand and deal with daily in their digital and social lives. The young generation of female and male workers of hand and thought does not receive politics through long speeches nor through heavy theoretical texts, but through digital platforms, short videos, open discussions, fast solidarity campaigns, and forms of flexible horizontal organization that allow direct participation and decision-making from the bottom to the top. Ignoring these transformations does not mean neutrality, but leaving this space entirely to the Left’s opponents who are more organized and capable of investing in digital tools.

From here, dealing with the digital space as a real arena of class struggle becomes a political and organizational necessity, not a secondary technical or media matter. For organization, mobilization, building trust, formulating discourse, and measuring impact, have all come today to pass through this space as much as they pass through the street and workplaces. And without the Left possessing the tools of organization, mobilization, and scientific evaluation in this field, it is unable to transform wide social anger into an organized force capable of continuity and influence. The contemporary Left is that which is capable of linking the justice of its social project with a conscious and systematic use of the tools of the age, allowing it to reclaim its role as a real force of change in a society that is changing rapidly.

Why do we need a broad and unified Leftist framework?

The Iraqi Left has played an important historical role in the struggle for the rights of female and male workers. However, this honorable history brings with it a greater responsibility: not to content ourselves with celebrating the past, but to confront reality as it is. The Iraqi Left is currently facing a challenging situation characterized by continuous decline, increasing popular isolation, and a notable distance from younger generations. The average age of current leadership mostly ranges between sixty and seventy, which, while acknowledging their significant contributions and sacrifices, highlights the need to create space for the energies of younger generations who navigate a different reality.

In light of this reality, it is no longer sufficient to merely diagnose the crisis. If our class opponents continually rebuild themselves through analysis, experimentation, and correction, then our scattered nature and adherence to old forms diminish our chances of influence. Thus, discussing a broad and unified leftist framework becomes both a practical response to this crisis and a historical necessity.

Lessons of unity and frontal work: How did global Leftist forces reclaim their effectiveness?

In many experiences worldwide, leftist forces have shown that overcoming marginalization and decline is not achieved by clinging to old organizational forms, but rather through unity, collaboration, and building flexible frameworks capable of embracing plurality. In Portugal, the Left Bloc serves as a leading model, merging several leftist currents within a framework that respects pluralism. This approach enabled it to become a significant player in forming governments and possessing negotiating power that individual parties lacked. In Chile, the “Approve Dignity” alliance formed between the Communist Party and youth organizations led wide protests and brought Gabriel Boric to the presidency as the youngest leader in 2021. Despite setbacks in the 2025 elections, the alliance remained steadfast as an organized opposition bloc, preventing the fragmentation of the forces for change.

In Denmark, the merger of three small Marxist parties into the multi-platform Red-Green Alliance transitioned the Left from the margins to a political force that garnered 7.1% of the votes in the 2025 elections, emerging as a major municipal presence in the capital. In Colombia, the Historic Pact succeeded as a coalition that included Marxists, environmentalists, and feminists, breaking the traditional monopoly on power and bringing Gustavo Petro to the presidency in 2022 through a radical pragmatic discourse that resonated with people’s daily lives. In Germany, the unification of leftist currents from the East and West in the Die Linke party created a strong framework that represented the social and electoral Left for years, despite intellectual variations. In Spain, Podemos utilized horizontal organization and digital tools to shift the Left from protest squares to the heart of Parliament in record time, challenging traditional party structures. In Brazil, the “Front of Hope” reclaimed power in 2022 through broad alliances that transcended narrow ideological slogans, employing digital tools effectively to confront the dominance of the far-right.

What unifies these modern experiences, despite differing contexts, is the recognition that the Left can no longer operate effectively as closed individual parties; instead, it must form wide, flexible, multi-platform alliances that manage differences and link politics to immediate social demands. These lessons may not transfer directly to Iraq, but they provide a practical horizon for considering the establishment of a broad and unified Iraqi leftist framework capable of overcoming fragmentation and transforming the justice of the leftist project into an organized and effective social force.

Foundations and mechanisms of the unified Leftist framework

A roadmap can be put forward for establishing a unified Iraqi leftist framework, based on gathering all leftist and progressive forces on points of meeting and an agreed-upon minimum program, through:

  1. Holding a general conference for all factions and figures of the Iraqi and Kurdish Left, discussing the building of a unified multi-platform organizational framework, including parties, currents, unions, and syndicates, and allowing the joining of individuals from female and male activists.
  2. Formulating a unified minimum program centered on what is possible to achieve in the near term; a short, clear, and direct program focusing on the interests of female and male workers of hand and thought, and the development of basic services, social justice, and providing job opportunities. The program adopts the issues of full women’s rights, neutralizing religion from the state, and protecting freedoms. This program is formulated in a modern, understood, and practical language, away from ideological complexities.
  3. Choosing a simple name like “Bread and Freedom Alliance or Union,” away from traditional leftist naming.
  4. The framework is based on a rotational collective leadership, and on flexible organizational rules, and different and flexible forms of membership. Most importantly, the founding leftist entities must be ready to restructure their frameworks and ease traditional party centralism.
  5. Focusing on broad decentralization according to provinces and regions, so that each unit becomes capable of leading its work effectively within a unified general political line.
  6. The active use of modern sciences in leadership, management, organization, media, and digitization, and in evaluating policies periodically, with the adoption of feedback from the masses as a basic mechanism.
  7. Strengthening the role of youth in leadership through binding organizational rules, such as representation rates for youth and women in leadership bodies with real powers.
  8. Building an effective digital policy that deals with the digital space as a real arena of class struggle, including multiple media platforms, digital training programs, the use of artificial intelligence, and actual scientific measurement tools.

The decisive condition is that the unified framework be capable of working according to points of meeting and the agreed program and containing the difference positively without turning into an arena of conflicts.

Will we continue to interpret the world while our enemies continue to change It?

The pivotal question today is not about intentions but about action: Does the Left propose alternatives based on what is socially and class-wise possible and achievable within the current balances, adhering to the logic of cumulative gradual change? Or is it content with raising slogans without fostering any actual, tangible change in the lives of the masses?

In conclusion, the crisis of the Iraqi Left is not one of sincerity or history, but rather a crisis of tools and methods. Scientific advancements and digital transformations have reshaped the spaces of influence, and those who ignore them will automatically exit the equation. We need a Left that is not only new in its values but also innovative in its discourse, action, and organizational mechanisms; a Left that translates ideas into tangible changes on the ground without abandoning the essence of its socialist project.

From this perspective, the boldness required today is the courage to dismantle rigid structures and abandon narrow centralism in favor of a broad and flexible framework that accommodates everyone and reconnects organization with living reality. We face two choices and no third option: to pursue renewal and practical unity to reclaim our role as a real force for change, or to remain on our current path and risk being bypassed by the march of history. Global experiences clearly demonstrate that unity is not only possible but also feasible, even under the harshest conditions.

Additional information:

  • The Iraqi Left is composed of a group of parties and organizations, the most prominent of which are: the Iraqi Communist Party, the Kurdistan Communist Party, the Worker-communist Party of Iraq, the Worker-communist Party of Kurdistan, the Communist Alternative Organization, the Communist Left Party, in addition to other organizations.
  • All leftist and progressive lists in Iraq that participated in the elections did not obtain any seat in the Iraqi Parliament in the November 2025 elections.

Understanding Gaza

After-Savagery-Review


07/01/2026

Hamid Dabashi’s After Savagery is a book written with smoke still hanging over Gaza. There is no retrospective calm here, no archival distance to dilute the immediacy of horror. The prose feels as though it was typed between air raid sirens and casualty updates, in the blue light of screens that will not stop showing the same craters, the same small bodies, the same parents howling over the remains. This is not simply a work about Gaza, but one written from the perspective of Gaza, asking a question that refuses to go away: What does it mean for the world’s self-appointed custodians of “civilization” to watch a genocide unfold—and to arm, fund, and rationalize it in the name of their values?

From the outset, Dabashi strips Gaza of the language that has caged it: “conflict,” “escalation,” “cycle of violence.” Gaza is not a humanitarian crisis to be “managed”; it is the concentrated truth of what calls itself “Western civilization.” One statement becomes the conceptual fulcrum of the book: “Israel is the microcosm of the West—doing in Palestine what the West has done to the world.” The force of this assertion lies in its refusal of exception. Israel is not an unfortunate deviation from Western ideals, he suggests, but their most distilled form.

Yet After Savagery begins from an even more fragile position: the difficulty of writing in the middle of a genocide. Dabashi insists that it is morally imperative to think and write about Gaza; silence is one more layer of rubble. At the same time, he is honest about how easily language buckles under a daily roll call of massacres, amputations, and mass graves. One aim of Israeli violence, he argues, is precisely this: to produce so much horror relentlessly that the global public drifts from shock into indifference. “Shock and awe” is not merely a military doctrine; it is a strategy of perception. After Savagery is an attempt to keep perception alive.

To keep looking, however, is to confront something searing about the world that claims to be looking back. The genocide in Gaza, Dabashi writes, will be remembered as one of the darkest episodes in modern history. But what makes it historically decisive is not only its brutality; it is the way it exposes the entire self-image of “the West.” This is a civilization that has spent centuries narrating itself as the pinnacle of philosophy, art, democracy, and human rights. In Gaza, that same civilization is exposed as a history of conquest, slavery, and extermination, now live-streamed as policy. It is not that genocide has returned to a previously peaceful order, it is that the genocidal architecture of that order has finally lost its alibi.

To make that case, Dabashi turns to the archive. He places on his desk Sven Lindqvist’s Exterminate All the Brutes, Arendt’s reflections on imperialism and totalitarianism, and Aimé Césaire’s insistence that Europeans only discovered the horror of their own violence when it recoiled upon Europeans themselves. The trail is brutally clear. Before Auschwitz, there was the Congo. Before the crematoria, there were plantations, slave forts, forced famines, and “civilizing” massacres in Algeria and across the Global South. The Nazi Holocaust is not denied its singularity, but it is refused its isolation. When Dabashi writes that “the two atrocities are interrelated as the two sides of the same coin of European genocidal practices,” he folds the camps back into the colonial world that enabled them.

From there, the line to Gaza is not a rhetorical leap but a structural continuation. Zionism, in Dabashi’s reading, is not an aberration in European political thought. It emerges from the same climatic zone as antisemitism and colonialism: a world of racial hierarchies, of chosen and expendable peoples, of “empty lands” and surplus populations. Israel, then, is not an external solution to European crimes; it is one of their afterlives. The siege, starvation, and carpet bombing of Gaza are read not as failures of policy but as the logical continuation of a project that has always required the elimination or containment of those it marks as native. In this sense, Gaza becomes, for Dabashi, a new moral and philosophical ground zero. The metaphors we habitually use—“cradle of civilization,” “Enlightenment,” “liberal order”—disintegrate once we place Gaza at their center. If Gaza is what “civilization” looks like when its weapons and doctrines are fully deployed, then the term has rotted from within. Any serious attempt to think about ethics, politics, or liberation today, he insists, must begin from Gaza’s ruins, rather than from European abstractions that have never considered Palestinians fully human.

That question—who counts as human?—pulses through the book like an open wound. Dabashi asks, bluntly: “Are we non-Europeans, Palestinians or otherwise, even human beings in the enduring philosophical traditions of what calls itself ‘the West’?” The answer, he suggests, is inscribed in both policy and prose. On one side, Israeli ministers describe Palestinians as “human animals,” a phrase that drifts effortlessly into military directives. On the other side, Immanuel Kant treats the Blackness of an African man as “proof” of stupidity, or entire continents as incapable of “great” achievements. These are not accidental slips; they are symptoms of an epistemic order in which non-Europeans appear, in Dabashi’s phrase, as “a metaphysical menace … a racialised noise that must be quieted, conquered, and pacified.”

Here, After Savagery makes one of its starkest claims: that what Europe calls a “metaphysics of morals” has historically functioned as a metaphysics of barbarism. Grand ideas of duty, rights, and rational agency stand atop a world constructed by enslaved, colonized, and dispossessed people whose lives did not count as fully human in those systems. When those same concepts are invoked today to explain away Gaza—when “self-defense,” “security,” and “the rule of law” become the vocabulary of mass killing—they expose themselves, in Dabashi’s hands, not as neutral tools but as weapons with a very specific lineage.

The media, in this narrative, are not innocent bystanders. One of the most compelling threads in the book is Dabashi’s analysis of Western news outlets as part of the machinery that renders genocide palatable. He is not interested in easy language like “fake news.” He speaks instead of “processed speech,” a diet of language engineered to keep the killing machine well-oiled. In this lexicon, airstrikes “hit targets,” civilians “perish,” and Gaza “teeters on the brink” of famine long after famine has been deliberately manufactured. Numbers—of the dead, the displaced, the amputated—are recited without ceremony, flattened into background noise.

Dabashi’s counsel is to read these reports contrapuntally, to listen for what they cannot say. When an anchor intones that “both sides have suffered losses,” what structures of power and race make that sentence possible? When a think-tank analyst speaks of “mowing the lawn,” what histories of colonial agriculture and extermination are being repackaged as common sense? If we follow his lead, the nightly news becomes a ritual of the empire, carefully updated for the age of high-definition atrocity.

And yet, for all its exposure, After Savagery is not primarily a voyeuristic catalogue of horrors. It is also a book about resistance—intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual. Mahmoud Darwish becomes one of Dabashi’s central companions. “Darwish has, in short, become synonymous with his poetry, and his poetry with his occupied and stolen homeland,” he writes. The now-iconic imperative—“Write it down!”—echoes throughout the text as both command and accusation. To write is to refuse erasure. To write from Palestine is to insist that those the world treats as expendable have a history, a future, and a name.

For Dabashi, this is what “poetry after genocide” must mean. Against Adorno’s anguished claim that poetry after Auschwitz might be barbaric, he suggests that for those who have always lived “after” one genocide or another, poetry is among the few remaining acts of civilization. It is not consolation; it is not ornament. It is sumud: steadfastness in the face of a world built to unhouse you. He finds this poetics not only in Darwish but in Ghassan Kanafani, in The Little Lantern, in the work of filmmakers who move through the camps with their cameras and unarmored hearts. A kindergarten in a refugee camp becomes an ark of memory; a lantern carried by a child becomes a theory of shared light.

If poetry and film carry forward the work that “Western philosophy” abandoned, After Savagery also gestures toward a different theological horizon. Dabashi sketches, briefly but suggestively, a Palestinian liberation theology that cuts across confessional lines—Muslim, Christian, and secular—grounded not in chosenness but in justice. In the same horizon, he discerns the faint outlines of a post-Zionist Jewish liberation theology, one that would free Jewish thought from entanglement with a state that demands supremacy in one place while Jewish voices demand equality in another. Zionism, he argues, has colonized both Judaism and Palestine. Genuine decolonization would have to liberate both.

The book’s later pages widen further without losing the centre. Dabashi writes with James Baldwin on his desk and Gaza on his screen. Baldwin’s words, he admits, have accompanied him ever since he arrived in the United States in the 1970s; now, in the shadow of Gaza, they offer urgent companionship. Like Baldwin, he is skeptical of any civilization that asks its victims for patience. Like Baldwin, he insists that the fire next time will not be a metaphor.

It is in this spirit that Dabashi takes seriously comparisons that defenders of Israel find intolerable. When Burmese genocide scholar Maung Zarni says that “what we are seeing in Gaza is a repeat of Auschwitz” and calls it “a collective white imperialist man’s genocide,” Dabashi does not retreat. Committed to the historical reality of the Jewish Holocaust, he finds something “profoundly liberating” in bringing that suffering “out into the open, into the fold of humanity, where it rightly belongs,” rather than incarcerating it inside a garrison state. The point is not to compete over victimhood but to refuse the monopolization of grief in service of the empire.

The book’s conclusion returns to the term that has hovered over it all: “the West.” For Dabashi, Gaza signals the end of that illusion. “The myth and the illusion of the West,” he writes, have ended “in ignominy, buried forever under the rubble of Gaza.” The West was never a geographic fact; it was an ideological construct of global capitalism, an identity that depended on casting everyone else as “the Rest.” What Gaza has done, he suggests, is to strip that myth of its last moral cover. A civilization that can watch, excuse, and underwrite what is happening there cannot credibly claim to be the yardstick of the human.

Where, then, do we begin instead? Dabashi’s answer is modest and uncompromising: “We need to begin with the most brutalized facts on the ground—the Palestinians, the Jews, the Native Americans, all those who have been displaced, all those who are the wretched of the earth.” From that premise, he believes, “a new moral intuition emerges,” a philosophy and political prose that “embrace us all and are reducible to none.” It will not resemble what passes today for “Western philosophy,” nor will it simply invert the hierarchy of West and Rest. It will be written from Gaza and places like it, by people who were never meant to survive the world that now calls itself civilized.

After Savagery does not claim to have completed this task. It offers neither a neat theory nor a finished map. It is closer to what Baldwin once called a record of how it felt to be alive at a particular historical moment. It records the insomnia of watching a genocide unfold while universities debate “civility” and newspapers editorialize about “both sides.” It registers the fury of reading Kant while children starve in a besieged strip of land his categories cannot see. It records, too, the stubbornness of those who keep banging on the walls of the tank.

Ultimately, Dabashi’s book is not simply something to agree or disagree with; it is a demand that we choose where we stand when we say “we.” Do we continue to think with the old words—civilization, security, democracy—as if Gaza has not exposed what they are doing in the world? Or do we accept his proposition that Gaza is now the measure, the new categorical imperative: if a principle justifies Gaza, it is not moral; if a civilization requires Gaza, it is not civilization.

To read After Savagery is to lose the luxury of innocence. It is also, in a strange way, to recover a kind of hope—not the hope that “the West” will redeem itself, but the hope that another moral imagination is already being born in the places it has tried hardest to erase. Gaza, in this book, is not only the world’s wound; it is also its compass.

AFTER SAVAGERY: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization by Hamid Debashi, 218 pp. Haymarket Books, 2025, $19.95

Red Flag: Power outage in Berlin — was this far-left terrorism?

In his weekly column, Nathaniel Flakin looks at the sabotage action claimed by the Volcano Group.


Top_of_power_line_pole_-_east_side

As I write these lines, tens of thousands of Berlin households are without electricity. In the early hours of Saturday, a power cable over the Teltow canal—leading from the combined heat and power plant Lichterfelde to the small garden colony Zukunft—was blown up. The attack didn’t just knock out lights and communications for people in Zehlendorf, Dahlem, and other neighborhoods. Without electricity, most heating systems don’t work—during the coldest week of the year. Nursing homes are running with emergency generators, while many residents have been put in school gymnasiums.

The first thing we should ask: Why will it take until Thursday to repair basic infrastructure? Why couldn’t people without power be moved into hotels? The Senate announced a cumbersome program for residents to book hotel rooms for 70 euros a night—and after criticism, announced that this will be reimbursed at some point. Obviously, it is the people most in need of help who don’t benefit from this kind of expensive bureaucratic nightmare.

The real story here is German austerity: as they spend hundreds of billions on new weapons, the ruling class is letting infrastructure decay. Across the country, all kinds of pipes and cables are decades past their lifespans, and exposed to vandalism—look at these fiberglass cables next to train tracks, for example. Personnel for repairs has been cut to the bone for efficiency. If anyone is responsible for the power outage, it is the government.

Obviously left-wing extremists?

On Sunday at noon, Berlin’s far-right mayor Kai Wegner proclaimed that this was “obviously left-wing extremists”—the next day at a press conference he added: “this must be called terrorism.”

At 14:01 on Sunday, a “Volcano Group” published a letter claiming responsibility on the left-wing portal Indymedia: “Shutting down fossil fuel power plants is manual work,” they wrote, describing the sabotage, primarily directed at “owners of villas in these neighborhoods,” as an “act of self-defense” against fossil fuel companies and the “imperial mode of living.”

Was this a left-wing group? As of yet, Berlin police have presented zero evidence. Berlin has seen numerous sabotage actions claimed by a Vulkangruppe going all the way back to 2011—the name was originally in reference to Icelandic volcanoes whose eruptions suspended European air travel. As recently as 2024, the group claimed responsibility for an attack on an electricity pylon leading to the Tesla factory.

While the statement uses phrases from the German autonomist scene, we know that Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) has written and published texts just like this: officers signed articles as “the two from the Muppet Show” in underground left-wing magazines in their pursuit of the “militant group” in the mid-2000s. Looking at the enormous resources the state mobilized to pursue the old mg, it is astounding that we have no information about the Volcano Group after almost 15 years. If it is indeed a left-wing group, it is just as astounding that they have no periphery at all—not a single left-wing sympathizer defending their actions.

Some people have pointed to perplexing spelling and syntax in the German text. Why is the U.S. vice president’s name spelled “Vans” (instead of Vance), while Berlin’s vice mayor is “Giffay” (instead of Giffey)? If the Volcano Group is unsurpassed in precision strikes, such misspellings pose a conundrum. Could this be a product of transliterating to Russian and back? There are numerous strange formulations that ring of AI—no German speaker refers to wealthy countries as “Metropolenländer,” for example. An SPD politician has also wondered about the “insider information” that the attackers have used—these are not anarchists setting random transformers on fire.

It’s certainly possible that a conspiracy is afoot. There have been attempts by Russian intelligence services to organize vandalism in the name of environmental activists. People on social media are pointing to parliamentary inquiries by the AfD about the electricity network in south-west Berlin. Finally, someone claiming to be the Volcano Group of 2011 published a statement on Indymedia condemning the attack in Lichterfelde.

Nonsensical

But it’s also possible that the Volcano Group is a genuine left-wing group. There is a section of the climate movement that calls for sabotaging the infrastructure of fossil capital: Andreas Malm made a very popular book and a motion picture about how to blow up pipelines.

Tadzio Müller, Berlin’s most eccentric climate activist, did not condone this attack, but told the taz newspaper that similar actions “could be necessary and legitimate under certain circumstances” as long as they did not endanger human lives.

Yet even the most successful sabotage—an ideal job that somehow manages to be extremely disruptive without endangering or even inconveniencing normal people—is never politically useful for the Left. Our project is one of universal human self-emancipation: billions of people will have to struggle to break the power of the capitalists and reorganize the planet.

Such a mass struggle cannot be replaced by clandestine groups. From the Russian Narodniks to the West German RAF, guerrilleros might believe that armed actions will electrify and inspire the otherwise passive masses. But after several centuries of attempts, we can say that this “propaganda of the deed” has failed. 

It is workers—the billions of people who keep all of society running—who have the power to shut down fossil capital. Even mass sabotage events like those of Ende Gelände, where thousands of activists occupied coal mines and power plants, were not able to replace the potential of just a handful of workers going on strike.

At the moment, we don’t have enough information to say who is responsible for the power outage—it could be state agents but also extremely confused lefties. Back in 2017, I described attacks against train infrastructure, in protest against the G20 summit, as “the most nonsensical action of the year.”  If we want direct action to stop the direction of our planet, there is no other way than organizing workers. 

Red Flag is a weekly opinion column on Berlin politics that Nathaniel has been writing since 2020. After moving through different homes, it now appears at The Left Berlin.