The Left Berlin News & Comment

This is the archive template

Category: Articles

An idyll disturbed

Analysing the 2025 Norwegian elections


13/09/2025

Shadows over the fjord

I spoke to the journalist Marie Le Conte about two weeks before the Norwegian Stortingsvalg (parliamentary election), and we both agreed that the country is rather oppressively good. We did not have time to discuss the dangers that lurk behind the picturesque exterior, always waiting in the shadows to envelope this charmed land with malice. That same week, an Ethiopian Muslim woman named Tamima Nibras Juhar was murdered by an 18 year-old German-Serbian who was known to have held right-wing extremist views. A few weeks prior, Lena Kotré of the Brandenburg AfD had attempted to attend a conference at the heart of Oslo’s multicultural hub of Grønland, organised by Norgesdemokratene (the Norwegian Democrats), a truly extremist party that promotes the idea of remigration. 

Fortunately, she was sent packing by an angry crowd that blocked the way. She tried to do another activity with the same party earlier this week, but was met yet again by a thousand counter-protestors, dressed up as clowns to mock the fascists. To try to raise this rabble with the wounds of a racially motivated terrorist attack is provocative to say the least. Yet the Norwegian public admirably rose to the occasion, while the Norwegian police escorted the provocateurs away rather than attacking the protestors, as is wont in Germany. Yet, these events may portend a slow shifting of the sands in Norwegian politics.

Election autopsy

I wrote about the Norwegian parliamentary elections in early August at the start of the campaigning period. I predicted that the unpopularity of the odious Sylvi Listhaug, leader of Fremskrittspartiet (the Progress Party, FrP), would serve to drive voters into the arms of Jonas Gahr Støre, the current prime minister and leader of the Labour Party. This has proven correct. Arbeiderpartiet (the Labour Party, Ap) managed to increase its vote share by 1.7% to 28%, gaining 5 more seats compared to the previous election. Yet the rise of FrP to second place with 23.8% of the vote is nothing short of a political earthquake. Within four years, the party has more than doubled its support, rising from 21 to 47 mandates, and displacing the dominant party of the centre-right, Høyre (“Right”, H). The electoral shrapnel from FrP’s ascent fatally wounded the other historic party of the Norwegian bourgeoisie, Venstre (“Left”, V), which fell below the electoral threshold of 4% and lost 5 of its 8 parliamentarians. There is something amusing about a populist-right party named “Progress” so badly damaging parties to its left, named “Right” and “Left”. 

The damage was not limited solely to the right, however. The true story of this election, one that is glossed over across Norwegian media, is the collapse of the agrarian-centrist Senterpartiet (the Centre Party, Sp),  which within four years fell from 13.5% to 5.6%, losing more than half its support—almost exclusively to FrP, although this is based on simple mathematics and not confirmed polling. The story of Høyre leader Erna Solberg’s fall from grace after leading the party for 21 years (8 as Prime Minister) captivated the electorate. It was easy to pit these two leading women of Norwegian politics, with little love lost between them, against the grandfatherly figure of Støre. It could just as easily have been a narrative of chaos with Støre, who now has to negotiate with three parties to his left, and one party to his right, a party that collapsed his government in January. Yet, disunity on the right, and Listhaug’s refusal to rule herself out as a candidate for prime minister led to a campaign where Høyre seemed to fight more with FrP than Ap, while Støre’s own alliance remained disciplined in attacking the sore exposed by Listhaug. Norwegians magically forgot the strife that had dominated Støre only a year prior.

Yet it is the behaviour of a much enfeebled Sp that will now determine the success or failure of this administration. Four years of deadlock will guarantee a Listhaug government in four years no matter how polarising she is—Norwegian voters seldom grant a party a third consecutive term in government in any case. The problem with borrowing votes is that you eventually have to return them and get your own. 

The battle for the Sperregrense

I had not predicted that the election would centre so sharply around the battle at the margins. The chief instigator of the failure of this prediction is the psephology industrial complex. Polling predicted a razor sharp election, with the electoral threshold (called Sperregrense) changing the colour of government despite small movements in the overall distributions of vote shares. The sudden rise of the Kristelig Folkepartiet (Christian People’s Party, KrF)—a Christian democratic party that underwent a rebrand to become more homophobic, more natalist, and more Zionist under Dag Inge Ulstein—further embellished the spectre.

The near-certainty of a right wing led by Listhaug—who insisted throughout that the leader of the largest party ought to nominate the prime minister—calcified all the respective voting blocs in their positions. Consequently, the national debate only seemed to pretend to talk about politics, when the central question became whether Jonas Gahr Støre (with Jens Stoltenberg by his side) would lead Norway, or whether it would be Sylvi Listhaug. On this point, the Norwegian electorate was firm—nearly two thirds of voters preferred Støre while only over a quarter preferred Listhaug. The overwhelming salience of this issue meant that there were precious few voters that could actually be convinced to change sides. 

Venstre voters, representing the most Europhilic and bourgeois strand of Norwegian society, were in a bind. The party presents itself as a climate champion, unreserved supporter of Ukraine, strong supporter of Palestine, while also being in favour of neoliberal economic orthodoxy: something evident in its evangelical support for EU membership. For perspective, their closest German equivalent is the FDP, with both parties being members of the European ALDE party. FrP, on the other hand, are unabashedly Zionist, used “drill, baby drill” as a campaign slogan, and nearly as Eurosceptic as the socialist Rødt (Red, R). Expecting an FrP avalanche, about a fifth of Rødt’s voters abandoned ship, many loaning their votes to the Miljøpartiet De Grønne (the Greens, MDG). MDG were flying high in the polls, threatening to take fourth place behind the parties of government; in the end, they came 7th, at 4.8%. A full third of their voters reportedly said they voted for the party tactically, to push it above the vital 4% mark. 

It is all the more remarkable therefore, that Rødt managed to gain 0.6% of the national vote share, an increase of 12% over the previous election. Though the party somewhat underperformed its polling over the campaign period—at times, they polled over 6% and vied for fourth place—the result can reasonably be interpreted as a success for three reasons. First, the party grew its support organically, without being loaned votes from anyone, despite being the focus of red-scare campaign tactics funded by corporate interests supporting the right. Second, it did so against the grain of prevailing political winds, through its impressive organisation. Third, its 9 seats are now indispensable for a left majority to pass legislation. 

A point of contrast is the fate of the Sosialistisk Venstreparti (Socialist Left Party, SV), which shed 2% and four seats, representing over a quarter of its base. Indeed, only 0.3% separates 4th from 6th, and in terms of parliamentary representation, Rødt is equal to SV and Sp. This is momentous for a party contesting only its 5th election against parties that have been represented in Stortinget since 1973 and 1921 respectively. With a membership of 14,000 and growing, the party is now leading the vanguard of progress by mobilising segments of Norway that feel neglected. In this sense, the party is the only force capable of stemming the loss of voters with lower education and incomes to FrP—an understudied phenomenon within Norwegian national discourse.

The storm on the horizon

The re-election of a social democratic party in open collaboration with the radical left and the Greens goes against prevailing global political currents. Anything I write that contradicts this story of boring predictability and stable social-democratic hegemony will sound like scaremongering. Norwegians saw the danger and promptly organised to head off the threat. The country remains, in my eyes, number one. 

Yet, KrF did cross the electoral threshold on a campaign centred around getting the birth-rate up and vilifying pride parades, while studiously refusing to call out the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Maintaining Norway’s position as a bastion of social democracy in Europe requires unceasing diligence, and the threat of a far-right bloom remains. Racism and ethno-nationalism are real and present dangers stalking the Norwegian body politic. Listhaug has established her party as the flag-bearer of the right through a deft campaign of finely tuned dog whistles and appeals to individualism that launched her political idol, Margaret Thatcher, to political hegemony in the United Kingdom. 

At the funeral of Tamima Nibras Juhar, the Prime Minister addressed the mourners gathered, flanked by several ministers. Erna Solberg was also in attendance; notably Sylvi Listhaug was not. Later that week, a rally against hate was organised on Youngstorget in Oslo city centre where Støre declared that “there is no such thing as a white, proud Norway. That is racism.” I am inclined to trumpet the praises of such a societal response up to the high heavens, yet it is easy to overlook that this ought to be the standard response: it feels remarkable only because the rest of the world has sunk into a nihilistic pit of ethnonationalist hatred.

Sylvi Listhaug has marshalled approximately a quarter of the Norwegian electorate around her brand of Thatcherite politics with a Trumpian sprinkle. She has displaced Høyre as the pre-eminent party of the right, and this may lead Høyre to break with a decades long social-democratic and anti-racist consensus in Norwegian politics. In turn, this might break the resolve of the Labour Party and draw it into the gutter. Such heel turns, sudden as they are, are not uncommon—just look at what the former human rights lawyer turned genocide-enabling authoritarian Keir Starmer is up to. The climate crisis and Norway’s role as a chief profiteer of enabling it remains a glaring hypocrisy, and simultaneously the material basis for continued social democratic hegemony. The contradictions will at some point begin to unravel, and in that moment Norway’s idyll might indeed shatter. 

For now, the country remains resolutely anti-racist and egalitarian. Rødt, SV, and (I hope) MDG will become the sentinels at the gate, blocking the advance of fascist forces from polluting this pinko paradise. Jonas Gahr Støre would do well to accept the intellectual vigour these parties are injecting into a social democratic orthodoxy that is susceptible to hubris and complacency. Compromise and idealisation of bipartisanship consensus are simply not viable strategies to govern in turbulent times. Listhaug, with the serendipity afforded to broken clocks, was at least correct in demanding that Norway change course. Now, Støre must steer the ship in the correct direction—the diametric opposite of Listhaug’s. 

Voices from Gaza: Poetry

Poems of war and exile—where grief speaks, and survival itself becomes a miracle


12/09/2025

Dried Flowers on Top of Paper

The third instalment in our creative writing series—this time, poetry from Gaza’s voices.

Between two bullets


By the sea,

upon burning sands,

beside torn limbs

and the scent of death

before the first death,

and the final torment

I laid myself down to rest.

A weary rest,

a heart worn thin.

In my hands,

a lonely book,

a dry piece of bread,

an empty bottle of water,

and my tears.


I had forgotten love.

I remembered it

after the poem

I cast it into my heart

and fell asleep.


I awoke between two bullets.

Smoke. Fire.

The hiss of lead,

a mother’s wail,

and ululations.

Two martyrs

a father and a groom

laughing.

The sea wept.

So I wept.


Where are my old shoes?

The earth wounds my heart.

My feet smile.

Blood is an epic.

And I understood

the shoes weren’t stolen.

The ground here rejects them.

There are sacred remains

on sacred soil.

No shoes


I will run

When the war is over—
I will run.
I do not know where to.
Perhaps into the open arms of the city,
Or back to my long-lost solitude,
Or toward the sun,
I cannot say—
Only that I must arrive
At a place quiet enough
To let me cry.

I will run—
To a saint’s refuge,
Or the sanctum of lovers,
To a prayer mat and two bowed rak’ahs,
To my mother’s whispered prayers,
And my father’s steady shoulder.
I will run—
To unknown places:
The echo of the heavens,
A dim island,
The call to prayer,
Or church bells.
I will run
To wounded spaces
That honor the sanctity of tears.

I will run—
To funeral processions,
To martyrs’ graves,
To the weeping of widows
And children’s cries,
To the city turned to ash,
To leaning walls,
To carts of roaming vendors,
To the rose farms—now empty,
To the chipped vessels
And places soaked in sorrow.
I will run—
To the land of mourning,
And I will weep.
Weep—
Until I am full.


The supermarket


In the supermarket,
I heard someone beside me say,
“The war will end soon.”
He held his phone—
wedged between shoulder and ear—
while placing his chosen items into a basket.
He smiled.

I asked him,
“Will the war really end soon, as you believe?”
He left me there,
laughing like a madman.

When I asked the shopkeeper why,
he told me:

He comes here every day.
Buys the same biscuits—
his late daughter’s favorite—
and tells her the war will end.

He believes it will end.
He believes
she will come back.


Life in Gaza is a miracle


What you do without thinking
requires a miracle for us in Gaza.

As you browse a menu to choose your daily meal,
remember:
we spend long hours just to know
if we will eat at all.

When your food arrives within minutes,
remember:
it takes us endless hours to prepare a single meal
seasoned with smoke and dust.
We buy firewood by a miracle,
we light the fire by a miracle,
and we find bread by a miracle.

As you sip your sweet tea,
remember:
ours tastes bitter—
sugar has vanished from our city.

As you ride in comfort,
remember:
some of our wounded die waiting
for an ambulance that never comes.

As you prepare to make your sacrifice in a few days,
remember:
some in Gaza have already given
all their children.

As you retreat from the sun
into the cool of your air-conditioned room,
remember:
the sun sits with us
inside the tent.

And as you read these simple words,
remember:
we walked miles
so you could know our truth.

We ask only this:
that you respect our patience
or our anger
or even our exhaustion,
should we one day be too tired to speak.

We want to live with dignity,
or die with respect.

And never forget this:
Life in Gaza is a miracle.
Because we were left alone
with all this grief.


No one died

No one died,

only seventy thousand—and one thousand more.

Half of them from thirst,

the other half from hunger,

some were asleep—

except a thousand,

who died of speaking.

No one died,

only seventy thousand—and one thousand more.

Men and old men,

grandmothers and young girls,

the wealthy and the poor—

except a thousand,

who were killed by forgetting.

No one died,

only seventy thousand—and one thousand more.

A teacher, a doctor,

a candy seller,

and many women and children—

except a thousand,

who slipped quietly

through the evening news.


American violence

The two killings that catalyzed far-right rage


Please note that many of the linked X (Twitter) posts and threads contain graphic depictions of violence.

Before his appearance at Utah Valley University, Charlie Kirk was doing what he always used to do: stoking the fire of the culture-war moral panic of the day. First, he shared a still from a CCTV footage of a young white woman sitting in a bus, looking up with a terrified glance at a Black man moments before being murdered. His caption: “America will never be the same.” A few hours later, he tweeted again, laying out his program: “it’s 100% necessary to politicize the senseless murder of Iryna Zarutska.”

The latter was his last tweet. A few hours later, he was shot by a sniper while speaking to a crowd of students, the first event in his planned “Prove Me Wrong” tour. Everyone with an internet connection has, by now, heard about his assassination and seen the pictures or the reactions. Which is quite normal–Kirk was a prominent conservative public figure in the US, what one may call a MAGA ideologue.

What is perhaps not so normal is that everyone who is connected, willingly or unwillingly, to the right-wing news and media ecosystem has also heard about the murder of Iryna Zarutska. Homicide rates in the US have been decreasing since the height of the pandemic, but they are still extremely high in international comparison. There were 17,000 homicides reported in 2024, and even if the figure for 2025 will probably be lower, it will still be high. Each of these deaths is, of course, a tragedy. Only some of them are, as Kirk said, politicized.

And this is the case with Iryna Zarutska, whose image has filled the internet. After Kirk’s death, far-right influencers started sharing Zarutska’s photo next to his, with ominous messages:

Each of these tweets, and tens of thousands of others, is an encapsulation of current American politics: an appeal to righteousness and victimhood that defines an in-group and an out-group and transmits an increasingly explicit threat towards the latter.

Innocence

The protection of white women from men of color, especially Black men, by white men is one of the founding myths of American history and national identity. It reached its pinnacle with the thousands of gruesome lynchings justified through flimsy accusations of sexual violence, or more often simply perceived inappropriate behavior toward a white woman. Later, when George H. W. Bush used the picture of Willie Horton in his campaign, he made it clear what values he was running on: the role of the president is to protect white Americans from racialized threats. Trump made it similarly clear long before he was anywhere near the White House, when he called for the death of the “Central Park Five.”

Like many other aspects of American white supremacism, MAGA did not invent the demonization of Black men and the victimization of white women. It simply made them explicit again in Trump’s second term. When a young Ukrainian woman who fled the Russian invasion was killed in North Carolina by a Black man with a history of arrests and mental issues, and all was caught on camera, it was the perfect case to be mobilized for propaganda.

Major conservative names wasted no time in weaponizing the murder to raise hell about how unsafe it is to just exist in US cities because of liberal policies–despite the decrease in the number of homicides. Kirk himself tweeted Zarutska’s name 11 times in three days before his death, and the issue was quickly taken up all over the X cesspool and in conservative media. It helped that the murder took place on a bus: using public transport occupies a special place in the American right-wing imagination as a practice that puts white lives in danger every day through exposure, as Elon Musk put it, to “a bunch of random strangers.”

It also helped that Zarutska was Ukrainian. One can say with certainty, without falling into the liberal habit of externalizing America’s problems to Putin, that MAGA and a lot of the American new right have Russian sympathies. The same people, however, including Kirk, were quick to abuse the tragedy of a young woman who flees a war zone only to be murdered in an American city.

A young white woman, of course. In the Western imagination, Eastern Europe is a repository of a still innocent whiteness, one that has not been touched by wokeness and therefore is a model to be followed. Online discourses about Zarutska played this up. When the pictures of Zarutska used were not taken from the video of her murder, they were selfies or studio photos juxtaposed with her murderer’s mugshot, creating a literal contrast between white innocence and Black threat.

Responsibility

Even this innocence, however, had its limits. Some online users chose to focus not on Zarutska’s selfies, but on a picture taken in her bedroom that also shows a Black Lives Matter poster. The posters took her from an innocent victim to a naive one, or even to a complicit liberal who contributed to her own murder. This simple, private gesture of sympathy with a movement for racial justice made Zarutska an endorser of crime who got hoisted by her own petard.

Compare this with the discourse surrounding Kirk’s death. After the news broke, many referred back to his infamous claim that “it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.” Kirk’s literal acceptance of gun deaths certainly implicates him in the circumstances of his own death, the argument goes–a logic stronger than Zarutska’s complicity due to a BLM poster. According to conservative vox populi, however, such an argument is “disgusting” and “mentally disturbed.”

His unqualified support for the Second Amendment is just one of the many, many repulsive views that Kirk held and proselytized. His whole career, public persona, and political appeal were built on speaking supposed truth to supposed power, often in people’s faces. As the founder of Turning Point USA, Kirk was the quintessential debate-me bro, who made a living out of owning libs.

Should being a conservative gadfly get you killed? It should not, regardless of precedent. But, despite his image as a paragon of measured debate across party lines, Kirk was a purveyor of violence. His views were not only broadcasted to the public, but influenced and legitimized the MAGA program, justifying the abuse against and deaths of Black Americans, of women, of Palestinians. This should surely feature in the political reactions to his killing.

For some, on the left, it did, and they refused to refrain from speaking ill of the dead. But the majority of mainstream reactions, from Obama to Starmer, ignored his opinions and political role. Even those who were not beholden to propriety by political offices rushed to remember Kirk fondly. Ezra Klein, the envisioner of abundance, called Kirk’s vitirolic attacks on all vulnerable categories of Americans “the right way” to do politics. Klein and Kirk were simply “on different sides of most political arguments.” Jacobin also quickly published an article presenting Kirk “steering clear of cheap gotchas” as an invitation to open discussion.

But while liberals and some leftists buy into the virtue of politely debating calls to violence and threats to millions of people, Kirk’s comrades continue to simply act on them. Donald Trump also eulogized Kirk’s commitment to “open” and “good-faith debate.” But he quickly moved on to blaming his murder on those who compared Kirk “to Nazis,” and his diatribe against political violence contained the threat that the “administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity.” For Trump, debate has limits: each and every one of those who criticized the fascist politics espoused by Kirk is responsible for his death.

Revenge

We can be sure that Trump means it. His second term has so far been marked by lifting the veil of liberal civility and soft power that has covered US violence so far. Trump mocks and directly threatens those who are against him, while Democratic lawmakers are (also) murdered. Trans people are demonized, pushed out, and soon might be even left without the right to bear arms, at the mercy of the state. Deportations are taking place en masse, without the flimsiest excuses or minimal plans, and Trump uses the specter of urban crime to bring the National Guard to D.C. and to threaten Chicago with “Chipocalypse.”

In other words, the violence is already here, and it comes from Kirk’s side. While the US is aiding the genocide in Gaza and bombing foreign boats, ICE has become a domestic goon squad, getting closer to receiving a carte blanche to arrest whoever they want in American cities. And the violence is not only perpetuated by the state. American streets become more and more dangerous for anyone who might be perceived as an immigrant, threatened with “arrests” by thugs posing as federal agents.

The two killings made the calls to violence even more strident. Posting a picture of Zarutska, JD Vance, like many other right-wingers, referred to Daniel Penny, the man who killed a supposedly threatening homeless Black man in a New York City subway train. And while the Wall Street Journal hurried to publish claims that the assassin’s bullets were “engraved with transgender, antifascist ideology,” whatever that means, Deputy Secretary of State Cristopher Landau threatened to deport foreigners found “praising, rationalizing, or making light” of Kirk’s assassination. 

The fascistic blurring of the lines between vigilantism and state violence makes it obvious: when right-wingers on the internet say that they have been radicalized, that they are angry, that they are at war, we should believe them. Zarutska’s murder is being weaponized by the far-right against racialized threats. Kirk’s assassination is being weaponized against political opponents, understood in the broadest sense. American violence now has an added justification. As if it needed it. 

This might end with a bang or with a whimper, but what is clearly not happening is a debate. It does not matter how the left reacts to the killings, and it will not matter what political orientation Kirk’s assassin has. The two murders have already taken their place in the existing narratives and justifications of violence. The American right has used them to reinforce the divide between friends and enemies and to remind the latter that they are under threat.

There are still words

A tribute to Mohamed Al-Zaqzooq


10/09/2025

Mohamed Al-Zaqzooq is writer in Gaza who, like everyone else in the strip, is being tormented by the ongoing genocide. This essay is a tribute to him. It is a meditation on the use of words—in literature alongside as other forms—in conditions as catastrophic as in Gaza. It is also an exercise of generating hope and reigning in the agony and the despair that the genocide creates.

I first encountered Mohamed Al-Zaqzooq, a 35-year-old writer from Khan-Younis, in October 2024 at the Palestinian liberatory bookfair in Frankfurt am Main on a screen in a pre-recorded interview. The interview was conducted in Arabic by a Palestinian diasporic activist named Batool. I followed it through the English subtitles.

The conversation starts with Batool expressing an insecurity: “I stayed up all night to figure out how to start the conversation. I thought I should ask, ‘How are you?’ But it is not even appropriate to ask someone in Gaza such a question.” Mohamed responds: “I totally understand this confusion. This confusion also exists among us, for the people experiencing the war here, inside Gaza. We don’t even know how to ask each other, ‘How are you doing?’” He then affirms that he is very glad about the ability to have a conversation.

The conversation that follows is indeed one of the most remarkable ones that I have witnessed. It moves swiftly between practical considerations of survival in the genocide and theoretical discussions of literature, consciousness and pain. Mohamed explains that his mission is to write stories of the everyday struggles of the people. His writing is “biased towards the people and their daily suffering, their relationships and the meanings they create…Their life, their concerns, their thoughts and fears”. He clarifies that this bias includes himself, as he is also part of the people, their suffering, their fear. The stories are full of important details that are important to the stories’ protagonists. He argues that such stories are no less significant in conveying the truth of what is happening than the aggregate summaries and news reports.

A great example of his literature is his short story Burning Books in Gaza, which was published in The Berlin Review in December 2024 in English and German. It is a bitter but sweet story about a father in hunger-ridden Gaza who, having managed to secure a bag of flour, contemplates burning a few of his treasured books to make fire in a clay oven to bake bread, because there are no other means by which to do so. He finally decides against it and, despite many odds, he finds some cardboard to make fire. The story has a happy ending, in the limited and grim scope that one day’s struggle to provide food for a family is successful.

The grimness of this story’s happy ending is haunted by later texts that Mohamed wrote when Israel’s starvation efforts had taken even fuller force. He published the following on July 24, 2025 as an update on his GoFundMe page:

Hunger is not simply the absence of food. It is a brutal sensation that gnaws at the body slowly, consuming the soul as it does the flesh. It begins as a small emptiness in the stomach—a fleeting cramp one can tolerate—but gradually, it transforms into an inner beast that growls in the chest and pounds mercilessly at the walls of the stomach. In the long hours of hunger, the stomach begins to contract, curling in on itself. A constant wave of nausea sets in, accompanied by a dull, heavy pain that pulls at you from the inside. Your head spins, your limbs tremble, and everything around you becomes dull, distant, and unimportant. Thoughts blur together. Concentration becomes a lost luxury. Hunger is not a single pain—it is a chain of suffering: headaches, dizziness, loss of speech, mood swings, and then emotional numbness. You feel your body betray you, abandoning you piece by piece, while your heart swings between fear for your loved ones and the helplessness of not being able to give them what they need. It is a slow death. There is no blood, no noise—but it is devastating. Heavy. It feels as though you are being erased from life in silence, left only to gaze into the faces of your hungry children, unable to break this deadly stillness. Hunger is not just deprivation—it is the stripping away of dignity, the unraveling of a person from within. Nothing lays you bare like hunger does.

What cruelty to inflict this to someone on purpose. What cruelty upon cruelty upon cruelty with yet no end in sight!

In his interview with Batool, Mohamed explains that writing the stories of the everyday struggles is important because it gives form to the loss, the emotions and the sufferings of the people.

Why is focusing on the numerical facts a bad thing? Because it can also be transmitted to the consciousness of the people of Gaza. And that’s what’s even more painful than the meaning of the numbers. My biggest concern is that the Gazans also listen to the news, just like you all. Imagine, when 30 people get murdered in a day, we say: “Thank God, today there are practically no martyrs, that’s nothing.” And that is disastrous and outrageous, and it creeps into people’s consciousness. That’s why it’s crucial that we keep trying to pay attention to these details. To take note of our narrative, to be careful in our dialogue, and how we hold on to our ability to feel the pain, how we process the pain and that the depth of the pain and the successive hits don’t weaken us and make us lose this feeling, because once we do, we lose a crucial feature of our relationship with life. And this loss affects how we express ourselves and intensifies the continuous agony that we experience.

These ideas influenced me in how I spoke and wrote about the genocide. They affirmed and developed my belief that writing stories, crafting speeches, and ordinary acts of speaking truthfully to one another are important forms of struggle against the numbness, the isolation and the disablement of agonizing despair.

It took me six months to have the good sense to let Mohamed know what his interview meant to me. Through his GoFundMe page, I found a way to contact him. Contrary to all the false whispers (“I cannot fathom what he is living through, so what could I have to say to him?” and “He is an accomplished writer, I am a Nobody from the audience, so what could I have to say to him?”), he responded with happiness, gratitude and a memory from Berlin. He had visited Berlin in September 2022, and getting mail from Berlin brought back the memory of this visit. An invitation and acceptance of a friendship ensued and materialized in an ongoing e-mail exchange.

Mohamed wrote to me in August 2025: “There is one thing I’m still holding on to: the ability to write. I believe it’s the only existential reason I have — to keep writing, and to give this hard, painful story to the world and to the generations yet to c ome.” I told him how generous I found his concerns for the world and for generations yet to come. I added that I understood that this generosity is bound up with this thing called hope. Mohamed replied: “Yes—writing is my lifeline. It gives me hope and turns the struggle into something with meaning. Writing explains the pain and helps me understand what I am living.”

At the end of August, I was slouching on the couch, phone in hand, and began to write an e-mail to Mohamed. But my mind was blank when I tried to think of something to write that would be even in the slightest bit comforting. So I read through Mohamed’s old messages and looked at his pictures from his visit to Berlin again. I noticed that in his picture in front of the Reichstag, he is standing just at the place where Palestine protest camps have set up tents. I shared this observation with him. The next day I read his reply:

Reading your message brought back my memories from about three years ago, in those places and in the moment when the photo was taken. It was a moment of wonder, and maybe also shock, for a young man leaving Gaza for the first time after thirty years of never going out, to see the big open world full of colors.

I remember I was amazed, happy, and afraid at the same time. Now, as I read your words, I don’t think it is just a coincidence that today there is solidarity and human action in the same place where I once stood.

Now I am in the peak of despair, searching again for a place, while options are disappearing and the geography becomes narrower day by day.

This essay is for you, dear Mohamed. May your imagination be nourished when you experience that there are more readers here in Berlin and elsewhere who engage with your stories. May this essay prepare a welcoming community for your next visit. May the truthfulness and the clarity of your words embolden and inspire those here who fight for Germany to finally quit arming and otherwise bolstering  Israel. And if some of the readers of this article can support Mohamed and his family financially, this would be highly appreciated too.

Red Flag:  No, East Germany wasn’t socialist—and neither is “democratic socialism”

In his weekly column, Nathaniel Flakin critiques controversial statement by Die Linke’s Heidi Reichinnek


A mural depicting a socialist utopia: two smiling people with symbols of science and advancement swirling around them.

Heidi Reichinnek of Die Linke is more popular among people under 45 than chancellor Friedrich Merz. Admittedly, that’s a low bar to clear—but the 37-year-old politician with the Rosa Luxemburg tattoo, co-chair of the Left Party’s parliamentary group, rocks Tiktok with passionate speeches against the Far Right.

What kind of system does she want? In an interview with Stern magazine, she was asked about the German Democratic Republic, better known as East Germany, and answered:  “What we had in the GDR wasn’t socialism. At least not the kind my party envisions.”

Every single right-wing influencer in Germany responded:  socialism can only mean a repressive dictatorship. Following a famous method, let’s define what socialism is not, in order to figure out what it is. 

Definitely not socialism

Reichinnek says she is for “democratic socialism.” She calls that a “utopia” (literally:  a non-place), but a “first step” would be “to bring public services back into public ownership,” including “housing, transportation, health care, and education,” alongside a “redistribution of wealth.” She does not mention what any further steps would be, but she explicitly rejects “nationalizing everything.”

What Reichinnek is describing is more or less what West German capitalism looked like in the 1970s, before the neoliberal offensive. Prior to the age of privatizations, public services were mostly run by the state. Reichinnek simultaneously defends the Basic Law, which guarantees private property. So even in the golden age of the “social market economy,” the means of production were still monopolized by a handful of Nazi billionaires. 

Just like “democratic socialists” Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the other side of the Atlantic, Die Linke envisions “socialism” as capitalism with more protections for workers. The problem is that such a regulated capitalism is inherently precarious—it’s only possible when capitalism is growing and the ruling class is forced to make concessions.

As we’ve seen for the last 50 years, competition between nation-states forces them to claw these concessions back. The only way to win lasting improvements for working people is to break out of this system by expropriating the bourgeoisie. Society’s wealth should be under democratic control—not the exclusive property of a few oligarchs who inherited billions from war criminals. Anything less is not democratic and not socialist. As Rosa Luxemburg put it:

“What was considered equality and democracy until now:  parliaments, national assemblies, equal ballots, was a pack of lies! Full power in the hands of the working masses, as a weapon for smashing capitalism to pieces — this is the only true equality, this is the only true democracy!”

Also not socialism

The GDR, in contrast, did nationalize just about everything. So was it socialist? Also not. Because socialism—which Marx described as a “first” or “lower” phase of communism—is not simply about state ownership. Socialism refers to a society in which the working class holds political power; as workers increasingly administer their own lives and society as a whole, class divisions and the state wither away.

The GDR existed for just over 40 years, and in that time, the state did anything but wither; the Ministry for State Security grew incessantly, and surveilled, harassed, and imprisoned workers and young people they considered to be “enemy-negative forces.” This wasn’t just an insult to human dignity—it was also an enormous waste of resources.

With a planned economy, and without the need to constantly generate profits, the GDR made accomplishments that sound fantastical today. They completely eliminated homelessness and allowed 90 percent of women to join the work force:  the highest rate recorded by any country ever. They came up with innovations like near-unbreakable glasses and hyperefficient prefab concrete housing. Yet a privileged bureaucracy, obsessed with control, produced constant inefficiencies and alienated workers from what was supposed to be “their” system.

In a recent video, the YouTuber Fabian Lehr rebuts Reichinnek and argues that the GDR was socialism, because despite any and all shortcomings, East Germany’s economic base was socialist. The history of German capitalism shows that the very same bourgeoisie can rule via an imperial monarchy, a bourgeois democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a different bourgeois democracy. But this is because capitalism needs a state with a certain autonomy.

Under a planned economy, no division exists between the political and economic spheres. “The economy” does not act like a mythical force hovering above society—it is subject to conscious planning. So decisions about who will produce what for whom are directly political. That’s why it is no secondary question if the working class is directly exercising power or not.

Lehr points to the GDR’s accomplishments, but offers no explanation for why millions of people wanted to leave this supposedly socialist society—or more generally, why productivity growth remained far lower than in the West. As Leon Trotsky argued in the 1930s, socialism must increase human productivity, or it has no historical justification. And one irony seems to escape him:  due to his long association with Trotskyism, comrade Lehr could have easily faced a long prison sentence in the GDR, as did many communists with similarly “problematic” backgrounds. This does not speak for a particularly civilized society. 

Real socialism

Socialism is fundamentally different from both Die Linke’s magically reformed capitalism, but also different from the GDR’s bureaucratically planned economy. A society can only be described as socialist if it meets Marx’s criteria of evolving towards the abolition of classes and the state. It’s a dialectical category defined not by an abstract checklist, but development and contradictions.

A planned economy needs broad, constant democracy to function. There is no other way to accurately judge what producers can do and what consumers need. By suppressing all criticism, Stalinist states like the GDR denied themselves the possibility of good planning.

There is a lot more in Reichinnek’s interview to criticize. As a “small step,” she thinks Die Linke should form coalition governments alongside the SPD and the Greens, “to achieve what is achievable at a given point in time.” In Berlin, we have seen what this looks like:  “left-wing” ministers privatizing public housing, deporting thousands of immigrants, and cutting wages for public sector workers. Small steps indeed! Recently, we saw leading members of Die Linke voting to give €500 billion to the German army.

Rosa Luxemburg, whose face is tattooed on Reichinnek’s arm, rejected the idea that reforms to capitalism were the “first steps” toward socialism:

“[P]eople who pronounce themselves in favour of the method of legislative reform in place and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal.”

And while Reichinnek emphasizes her goal of joining government coalitions, Rosa Luxemburg took the opposite view:

“[T]he role of [a socialist party] in bourgeois society is essentially that of an opposition party. It can only enter on scene as a government party on the ruins of bourgeois society.”

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.