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Between sovereignty and submission

Latin America’s fate under US imperial power


03/11/2025

Gustavo Petro has a meeting in Caracas with the President of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro.

The new phase of imperial aggression is the result of Washington’s interpretation of the ‘multipolar world’. It is not that every country in the world is free to do business with whomever it wants—as seems to emanate from the BRICS philosophy—but quite the opposite. So-called ‘multipolarity’ in the imperial interpretation is the exercise of the most cruel and violent imperialism, without hindrance or restraint, in the empire’s ‘sphere of influence’. Washington’s interpretation once again focuses on Latin America. We are facing a situation in which unfounded accusations against inconvenient leaders will justify any barbarity and violence.

Trump’s accusations against the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, and the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, of being leaders of ‘narco-terrorist’ groups that threaten the security of the United States appear to be part of a new imperial strategy to combat those who refuse to align themselves with Washington’s imperatives. These recent threats were followed by a series of extrajudicial killings of Colombian fishermen who were accused without any evidence of being drug traffickers. This appears to be merely an extension of the empire’s right to impose its laws on other nations. Meanwhile, the corporate media will propagate these lies without question, and Western governments—until recently supposedly still concerned with human rights and international law—remain silent and obey.

In the imperial interpretation of the multipolar world, the countries of the Global South must submit to the US empire’s sphere of influence. This interpretation is not only wrong but disastrous for everyone except those in the United States, with even worse outcomes for countries that cling to their right to exercise sovereignty by resisting such attacks. It is to be expected that the ridiculous accusations of ‘narco-terrorism’ now levelled at the leaders of Venezuela and Colombia will also be hurled at leaders who attempt to exercise sovereignty.

Latin America finds itself between two antagonistic blocs—China and the United States—both of which are important trading partners for the region. As the United States intensifies its attacks on the sovereignty of Latin American countries, they will increasingly find themselves in the middle of a geopolitical dispute over natural resources. It must be understood that Trump’s openly aggressive stance is part of a geopolitical calculation that makes sense in light of his interest in Venezuelan oil, Argentine and Bolivian lithium, and rare earths in Greenland and Ukraine.

It appears that the United States and its great ally, Israel, have opened Pandora’s box by committing and justifying a genocide that could be replicated in other parts of the world. The era of soft power through colour revolutions is over. What counts today is force and submission to power without ifs or buts. The efforts to bring regime change in Venezuela and Cuba are nothing new. But today the imperial power is no longer interested in holding an image of respecting human rights and other countries’ sovereignty. The message is clear: submit to our designs or we will ruin your economy and create the conditions for regime change. Moreover, the anti-communist power of the United States has no shortage of allies among Latin American oligarchies, as seen in the recent case of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado, who has openly called for US military intervention in her own country, Venezuela. Of course, the United States knows all about peace and pacification, as it has demonstrated in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and Yemen—places destroyed after so many promises to bring them the long-awaited ‘democracy’.

Many analysts see this desperate attempt to impose its interests on its sphere of influence as another sign of imperial decline. Latin America is not alone in this game; Europe shows increasing willingness to sacrifice itself for its ally. We are reminded of Henry Kissinger’s phrase, ‘It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.’ We know that in Latin America, there will always be leaders willing to ‘kiss the dirty boot that insults them’, as Chilean songwriter and poet Patricio Manns sang, a recent example of this being the humiliating obeisance that the president of Argentina, Javier Milei, paid to Washington to obtain a financial lifeline that will once again leave all Argentines in debt.

Meanwhile, we are witnessing the slow collapse of the Latin American countries that have opted for new neoliberal recipes. In Peru, Ecuador, and Argentina—countries among the empire’s staunchest allies—the social, political, and economic crises are worsening. Given the geopolitical and regional context ahead of Chile’s upcoming presidential elections, we can only fear the worst if the far-right candidate José Antonio Kast from the Republican Party becomes president. In the case that the left manages to prevail with Jeannette Jara from the Communist Party of Chile, we cannot rule out the possibility that Washington will do everything in its power to destabilise her government, just as it did 50 years ago with Salvador Allende. As the saying goes, ‘History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.’

If in the past the empire still operated with covert CIA operations to bring about regime change, today there seems to be no need to hide anything. The end justifies the means, even if it means breaking a country and its people. Thus, we are witnessing a Monroe Doctrine 2.0: ‘America for Americans’—but on steroids. There is no longer any international law that matters, just ask the Palestinians. As Naomi Klein pointed out, we are witnessing the apocalyptic phase of the extreme right, marked by ‘war abroad and fascism at home’. Such a phase raises concerns about the role that Latin America will play within this imperial and geopolitical constellation. 

Germany’s dangerous political calculation

An essay on new German victimhood, Holocaust remembrance, and genocide deniers


College anti-Nazi activist Sophie Scholl and classmates (black and white)

With Germany being one of the countries that continues to provide military support for the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, it is difficult not to feel the irony when contemplating the German moral superiority complex based on the idea that they “have learned from their history.” But it takes some intellectual effort to understand the position of the German authorities, who, through repeated acts of mental gymnastics, still seek to convince their citizens that supporting Israel—at this stage of the genocide—remains morally acceptable. However, recent polls show that the German population increasingly rejects the German government’s actions and expects that the government’s attitude toward its unconditional support for Israel begin to change. It seems that German Staatsräson is clashing with the people’s will. This article will delve into the relation of three related aspects that could help understand this situation: the instrumentalization of the culture of remembrance as a top-down endeavor, the reversal of the role of victim and perpetrator in German’s historical consciousness, and the persecution of dissenting voices based on the instrumentalization of that culture of remembrance.

Remembrance and victimhood: Were Germans the first victims of Nazism?

The culture of remembrance is a complex issue because it involves nothing less than the construction of postwar German identity. There has been careful construction of a discourse that speaks to the thriving culture of remembrance: various monuments and commemorative plaques scattered throughout Berlin attest to the reality of a discourse that seems to have resonated with part of the German population. Beyond commemorating the crimes committed by the Nazis against the Jewish, Sinti and Roma, communists, socialists, homosexuals, disabled people, and many other victims, it seeks to raise awareness of the danger of such fascist ideologies. In this sense, there is a clear message about the horror of these crimes and the importance of ensuring that they are never repeated. But remembrance in Germany is not limited to monuments; we will see how stories can change the most fundamental content, and that what the German state wants Germans to think about their past does not correspond to what people actually think.

Much of this culture attracts large numbers of tourists every year, drawn not only by the scars of war but also by the countless places commemorating the crimes committed by the Nazis. In this way, not only has the image of a completely “denazified” Germany emerged, but it has also served as one of the many elements of the tourism industry that offer the culture of remembrance as another attraction, valuing the work of memory that has been done in this country and showing how Germans have definitely left their nazi past behind.

However, the discourse driven and promoted by the German state since the Second World War, has been filled with a sense of blame projected to the whole German population (including future generations) for the crimes of the Nazis. This blame game has shaped the so-called raison d’état, which states that Germany, according to the moral dictates of its historical guilt, has a special debt to the Jewish people that translates into unrestricted support for the state of Israel. It is interesting to note that this discourse only works if the role of the perpetrator is accepted unconditionally, which apparently is not so obvious. We will show, with specific examples, that over the decades, something seems to be happening regarding the assumption of the role of perpetrator or the descendant of a perpetrator. 

In a 2022 program, German comedian Jan Bömermann presented the case of an Instagram campaign called “I am Sofie Scholl,” in which a German influencer reconstructed the story of the leader of the student resistance group “White Rose” during the Nazi regime. Sofie Scholl was arrested and later executed by the regime after distributing pamphlets at her university denouncing Nazi propaganda. The White Rose is one of the few known cases of student resistance during that period.

The German government funded the project to bring history closer to young people through a more “fresh” perspective, using a series of media devices, mainly short day-in-the-life videos posted by an actress from Sophie Scholl’s point of view. It should be noted that this resistance movement consisted of only a handful of people, that is, very few in relation to the vast majority of students who were either supporters of the regime or silent spectators. But as the German state is well aware, some things are worth remembering and others that are less so.

But what is really interesting is that many people came to the Sophie Scholl project’s interactive chat to recount stories of their grandparents––who were Nazis or fought on the front––as “victims of war.” With his characteristic irony, Bömermann presented these comments as a clear case of historical distortion that twists the relationship between victim and perpetrator. The comedian remarked, not without irony, “We, the perpetrators, were also victims in a way, and in the resistance. Deep down, we were all like Sophie Scholl” (17:00-17:07). He criticized the project for its historical inconsistencies, as its creators seem to have emphasized the digestibility of the story at the expense of the historical accuracy. By recreating situations that never existed, Boemermann notes, “Sophie Scholl on Instagram finally gives us—the grandchildren of war criminals—the chance to feel like we are part of the resistance” (19:21-19:26).

These distortions of family memory are undoubtedly problematic, especially when confronted with the “official” discourse on the Holocaust, which was established in the country as a way of critically confronting its own past and presenting Germany as having truly learned the moral lessons of its history. This may be a symptom of the fact that post-war Germans were not allowed to mourn their dead—precisely because many of them were war criminals. 

Where are the perpetrators?

In his book The Disappearance of the Perpetrators, German author Hannes Heer examines how the crimes of the Wehrmacht were presented in German memory. He points out: “By silencing the crimes known to all and reinterpreting its own history, the German collective attempted after 1945 to ensure continuity and, at the same time, to create an identity that conformed to the norms of the time and guaranteed a positive image of itself.” His research describes a process of exoneration concerning historical and family memory and the narrative that began to establish itself as “truth” during the Cold War.

The Cold War and the state doctrine of anti-communism did the rest, even giving the appearance of retrospective justification for the crimes of the Wehrmacht in Poland, the Soviet Union, and the Balkans. In general, the traces of the Nazi era and its crimes were so thoroughly erased and eliminated that one could have the impression that the Nazis and National Socialism had never existed in Germany.

The Disappearance of the Perpetrators, Hannes Heer, p. 26

This passage does not refer to a general trend in the country, but rather to the specific way that the crimes of the German army were treated in the public sphere in the context of denazification. Over time, the narrative of the crimes themselves began to change, with family stories finding interpretive space within official history.

The description of this shifting narrative is consistent with another study from the early 2000s entitled “My Grandfather Was Not a Nazi,” which presents several cases of conversations with Germans of all ages about the Holocaust and family histories associated with that period. In that study, many of the participants demonstrated extensive knowledge of history. Still, they showed particular difficulty relating these events to the real lives of their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, and to the specific roles they played in them. Despite demonstrating quite extensive “theoretical” knowledge about the crimes of Nazism, in their accounts and family stories, they exonerated their ancestors, even though they were soldiers and more than a few were fervent Nazis. The authors point out: “A total of 2,435 stories are told in these conversations. Quite a few of them change from generation to generation, so that anti-Semites become members of the resistance and Gestapo officials become protectors of the Jews.” The study does not seek to provide a psychological explanation for this phenomenon, but rather to describe how the German public handled a culture of remembrance and how collective memory has been formed by selectively incorporating historical facts and family stories, creating some sort of living memory that overshadows the existence of perpetrators who were their own relatives.

This form of historical distortion, coupled with the reworking of family stories, reinterprets the soldiers of the German Wehrmacht or Nazis as victims rather than perpetrators. This type of narrative and historical distortion, which takes place at the level of family memory, also seems to be operating in other elements related to guilt, historical responsibility, and remembrance, such as the notion of antisemitism. An article published in 2018 in the German newspaper Welt was already showing signs of a shift in self-perception regarding antisemitism among the German population. The article pointed out that “According to a representative survey, one in five people believe that their ancestors helped Jews or other persecuted people during the Third Reich.” The text has the title: “How today’s Germans whitewash the Nazi era.”

While Germany´s support for the genocide in Gaza happens with the diplomatic and military cover of Israel, we hear repeatedly how the accusation of antisemitism is made above all against the immigrant Arab population living in Germany through the notion of “imported antisemitism” as if anti-Semitic sentiment among the German population is not a problem at all. This trend is worrying as it adds another aspect to the dehumanization of the Other that now pervades European societies themselves, including the chancellor, who, with clear racist rhetoric, is labeling immigrants and the Arab population as threats to European culture. 

We want to highlight the importance of this trend towards a change in Germans’ self-perception of their past and the repeated exercise of a “hegemonic” state-directed narrative. Clearly, the German state has led a process of commemorating the Holocaust as a symbol and civilizational rebirth, but with content that seems to be less about the Jewish descendants of Holocaust victims and more about the State of Israel.

The civilized post-war Germany is now falling apart

Hans Kundnani wrote in an article in 2024: “The memory of the Holocaust did not take root in the political class of the Federal Republic until the 1980s. Over the past two decades, this culture of remembrance has receded, as Germany has abandoned the belief that the Holocaust conferred a responsibility toward humanity and replaced it with an exclusive responsibility toward Israel.”

This new responsibility of the German state towards the ideology of Zionism has already been analyzed in recent articles and books. Kundnani summarized Germany’s stance toward Israel as with the phrase “Zionism above all,” referring to the words from the German anthem popularized by the Nazis. This ongoing logic of equating Israel and “all Jews” and the criticism of Israel as antisemitism makes it very difficult to have a fair debate based on historical facts about this issue. This is because too many talking points emanating from the Israeli hasbara machine are taken at face value by the German media.

The fact is that both movements described above—the shift from a discourse of perpetrator to one of victim, and its fervent anti-antisemitism (or philosemitism) adopting the slogans of Zionist propaganda—seem to form a strange historical notion of the new German identity. A problematic identity driven by the German state, media, and academia, whose Zionism is cloaked in uncritical philosemitism and pro-NATO, pro-war tendencies, and Russophobia. A renewed identity that is not only absolved of the crimes of its ancestors but, given its support for Israel’s biopolitical/thanatopolitical project as a colonial state, is sold as being “on the right side of history” while repeatedly denying that genocide is taking place in Gaza. This, incidentally, generates a double erasure of Palestinian life, since on the one hand it supports their annihilation, while at the same time denying that this process of annihilation—genocide—is actually happening. Again, the German position concerning Israel within this geopolitical chessboard is sadly summed up in the idea of “Drecksarbeit” as expressed by the current chancellor in reference to Israel’s actions in the Middle East, by attacking all of its neighbors, provoking a situation of endless wars. In this relationship between the “West/Israel and the Rest,” we have returned to the darkest moments of European colonialism. The only good thing about the clumsiness of Donald Trump or Friedrich Merz is that they are brutally honest in what they say.

Recent essays by Hans Kundnani and Leandro Fischer have developed the history of the new civilizational order of the West in the post-World War and Cold War era, which required a spectacular confrontation with the nazi past. Spectacular in the literal sense, because it was based on a performance that led to the development of a sophisticated culture of remembrance which selectively proposes what should be remembered and what should not. Meanwhile the so-called process of denazification was never real, but rather a gigantic process of image cleansing, coupled with a growing commitment to the State of Israel, which sealed the political pact between these two nations, whose historical basis is the Holocaust.

Authors such as Norman Finkelstein have shown how, in the United States, the repeated use of the memory of the Holocaust served clear political purposes at a time when Israeli politics was shifting to the right. Israel and the Holocaust only began to be taken into consideration in the US as a symbolic and political project after the 1967 war. Neither Finkelstein nor we deny the horrific reality of the Holocaust, but instead critically point out its political and media use during the Cold War, which was the result of political calculation.

Today, this political calculation, following Finkenstein’s reasoning, is evident in the repeated use of the Staatsräson narrative and the guilt complex, which is supposed to rally all Germans behind Israel regardless of what its government does. This still seems to work with the older generations, who are perhaps more exposed to continuous pro-Zionist brainwashing. Still, it works less well with young people, who seem to be more capable of recognizing genocide when they see it on screen every day. How else can we explain the Zionists’ desperation to control TikTok and X in favor of pro-Israel algorithms?

We have to fight against Zionist authoritarianism

Today in Germany, we are witnessing the development of a full-fledged police state to discipline internal dissent, mainly racialized populations, immigrants, and leftists who have come out to protest against the genocide in Gaza, denouncing the German state’s complicity in the ongoing genocide. This occurs not only through the excessive but also politically irresponsible use of accusations of antisemitism based on the IHRA, which is an imprecise definition whereby any criticism of the genocide and the state of Israel can be labeled as such.

Even more shameful is the use of the memory of the Holocaust to defend a state that has committed repeated crimes against the Arab population in the Middle East, while the police and juridical power in Berlin are persecuting protesters and activists who are supposed defenders of terrorism. This teaches us that we can no longer be ignorant of the pro-Zionist narratives that the German state tries to instill in its population, especially when it comes to evoking its “historical responsibility.”  Because if we talk about historical responsibility towards the Jewish people, it does them no favor to equate them with Israel, a state that is hated throughout the world because of its brutality and countless crimes. Moreover, Israel’s criminal actions will probably increase the trend of real antisemitism, that is, the rejection and persecution of Jews for being Jews, because of Israel´s government’s claim to kill Palestinians to defend Jewish life.   

Germany has failed to set a moral standard regarding the lessons of its past. And I believe that the world, the global South, will take note of this and will not forgive it so easily. There are already people in Germany who know that the crime against the Palestinians is a crime against all of humanity, regardless of whether the politicians in power, with their racist, selective humanism, are unwilling to see the Palestinians as human beings. What else could it be but plain and simple racism masquerading under these assumptions of selective humanism?Let us hope that the German people rise against the dictates of their own state and government that have not only openly supported another genocide, but also defended it in the name of “Western civilization,” as war criminal “Bibi” Netanyahu likes to say. Germans now have the responsibility to confront their own past more genuinely and less under the direction of state institutions that have dictated, from the top down, how people should think and act about it. Because now it is clear that Germany’s debt is not to Israel, but to Palestinians. Otherwise, we could find ourselves with a worrying trend towards historical revisionism where the “perpetrators” effectively become “victims” and the “liberators of yesteryear” become “eternal enemies.” This trend, which would reverse key historical facts, is a sign of the alarming pro-war and Zionist tendency in Germany. We must resist it at all costs.

Dutch elections: Wilders stumbles, but the far right marches on

PVV slips, yet the far right stays powerful amid a fading left.


31/10/2025

Dutch Election Results

The victory of Geert Wilders’ extreme right PVV did not materialise as expected. With the neoliberal-pragmatist D66 party winning in much of the urban and well off suburban areas, Wilders now shares first place in a head-to-head race that remains undecided as of yet. The other main winner of the election, the Christian democrat CDA, comes back to life after the implosion of Pieter Omtzigt’s NSC, a recent split from the Christian Democrats that decimated the party at the last election.

The extreme right, however, did not lose the election as a block. The fascist FvD, and especially the “respectable” racist split from the FvD, JA21, profited from the PVV’s losses and gained 12 seats between them. The far right in total—to which I would add the farmer/agrobusiness right BBB and the Christian fundamentalist SGP—retain a third of parliamentary seats.

The Dutch left is in an even more disastrous state than it was at the previous election. The centre-left party GLPVDA (a merger from the Dutch Labour party and the Dutch Greens) as well as the left populists SP—which has shown racist tendencies—fail to convince swathes of working class voters and lose again to a total of 13% or 20 seats for GLPVDA and 2% or 3 seats for the SP. The strategy of the greens and social democrats to join forces to be able to come out ahead in the election falls flat on its face, leaving them in fourth place and without much of a recognisable profile or convincing narrative.

The SPs economistic focus on “bread and butter issues”, opposition to the defense spending hike combined with opportunistic support for racist scapegoating of refugees and migrants leaves them in total limbo, following a consistent downward trend since 2006, when the SP still managed to gain 17% of the vote. The animal rights party PVDD, seen by many as the party with the most solid left positions, retains 2% of the vote. The party I voted for, the new but conflict ridden left and anti-racist party Bij1, unfortunately failed to gain a seat in parliament.

The silver lining I can see is that Wilders cannot claim to have won the election and that the vote for D66 expresses a need to return to “normalcy” in the face of creeping fascisation of national politics. However, the economic platform of D66 and their potential governmental partners, like the hard right liberals of the VVD, the CDA and even of GLPVDA, who have also agreed to spend 3,5 % of GDP on the military, will do nothing to solve deep seated social problems like the chronic housing shortage for working people or the decimation of public services. There is therefore all the more reason to worry that the extreme right will grow even more in the coming years, absent a groundswell of authentic and self-confident left movement from below.

Why a legal response to the genocide in Gaza is necessary but insufficient

Takeaways from Berlin’s Gaza Tribunal


29/10/2025

This weekend, I attended the Gaza Tribunal, not the international event in Istanbul, but a conference in Berlin with the same name and held on the same weekend.

This tribunal was organised by Deutsche JuristInnen für das Völkerrecht (German Lawyers for Human Rights). With the subtitle “German Responsibility in the Light of Human Rights,” it heard expert reports on developments in Gaza, German Staatsräson, international perspectives, the role of the media, obligations under international law, legal consequences for Germany, and possible ways forward.

The tribunal largely focused on the legal aspects of the genocide. As a result, it was informative, often distressing, but also at times frustrating. Talking to a Palestinian friend afterwards, we both felt that it sometimes seemed more like a theoretical exercise for lawyers—more concerned with interpreting what has happened than with actively attempting to stop the genocide.

The tribunal followed South Africa’s attempt to prosecute Israel and Nicaragua’s case against Germany, both of which have been taken to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Israel is being prosecuted for carrying out genocide, and Germany for “facilitating the commission” of that genocide. A related case—Gambia’s prosecution of Myanmar for genocide in the same court—was also frequently cited.

The case against Myanmar is due to be heard soon, with a ruling expected by late 2026 or early 2027. If Gambia wins, this will increase the likelihood of South Africa’s success. Even if Myanmar loses, the cases against Israel and Germany remain strong.

Genocide in Gaza. Repression in Germany

Various speakers painstakingly made the case for the prosecution. A recent UN report estimated that 680,000 people—29.5% of Gaza’s population—have died in the last two years. This figure includes both direct deaths caused by bombings and indirect deaths from disease and starvation. Diabetes, for instance, has now become a fatal condition in Gaza.

Eighteen thousand seven hundred Gazans have been kidnapped. These are not political prisoners who have languished in Israeli jails for years, but people captured since 7 October 2023.

The case against Germany rests on the fact that the German government continued to supply Israel with armaments despite a series of statements by Israeli politicians after 7 October that dehumanised Palestinians and threatened revenge on the population—indicating that genocide was a likely outcome.

Germany has also intensified its repression of supporters of Palestine, with 11,000 people charged in Berlin alone. Lawyer Alexander Gorski argued that this is part of a deliberate strategy to overwhelm protesters and wear them down.

Gorski described the case of his client, Hüseyin Doğru of red.media (whom The Left Berlin interviewed earlier this year). The German government has enabled the EU prosecution of Doğru because he spoke to all involved parties in his reporting on Gaza. Hüseyin interviewed and asked difficult questions of the PFLP and Hamas. This is the bare minimum we should expect of journalists. He is now not even allowed to hold a bank account.

The legal case

Canadian genocide expert Professor William Schabas gave a fascinating account of the history of genocide law, which Nicaragua, South Africa, and Gambia are using in their respective cases. The law was introduced in 1948 as an attempt to improve on the legal framework used in the Nuremberg trials.

The Nuremberg laws applied explicitly to racially motivated crimes committed during wartime. Nothing the Nazis did before September 1939 could be prosecuted. There was a good reason for this: with its history of slavery and segregation, the United States—backed by other countries with similar pasts—did not want to make itself liable to prosecution.

The new law was proposed by the United States’ nemesis, Cuba. It has only been ratified by around 70 countries—less than half of the world’s governments—and can only be implemented if both the prosecuting and prosecuted states are signatories. Both Germany and Nicaragua are among those 70, so a prosecution of Germany is possible.

Nicaragua argues that Germany is violating its own obligations to prevent genocide under international humanitarian law and the Genocide Convention. Its deposition demands the immediate cessation of actions facilitating the ethnic extermination of the Palestinian people.

Concretely, Nicaragua is asking the court to order Germany to halt all exports to Israel. This primarily affects weapons deliveries but could also include other forms of aid. Prosecution could have financial implications: when the Democratic Republic of Congo successfully prosecuted Uganda, Uganda was ordered to pay $325 million in reparations.

Is the legal system neutral?

All this sounds great, and we should welcome every instance where our side gains ground over theirs. But excuse my cynicism: I don’t believe the ICJ would be able to impose the same penalties on Germany and Israel that it did on Uganda even if it wanted to.

Professor Schabas himself conceded this point, noting that it is not within the ICJ’s remit to impose measures such as reparations or the ceding of territory. Such decisions are referred to the UN Security Council, which, as Schabas acknowledged, is effectively controlled by the US veto. And even if the ICJ were to rule in Nicaragua’s favour, Germany—backed by the United States—may simply choose to ignore the ruling.

The main open question, however, was how much we can expect change from within the system. Several speakers appeared to insist that our focus should remain on winning the ICJ cases. If we can prove Israel and Germany guilty, then we’ve won, right?

We need lawyers and mass movements

Let me make an analogy. Someone kills his wife and is taken to court. The court finds both him and his friend, who gave him the gun, guilty, but they are not punished and are not sent to jail. So, his friend gives him another gun, and he kills the rest of his family.

They are sent to court again. Once more, they are found guilty. Once more, they escape punishment. This might make it harder for them to get a bank loan, but it does nothing for the man’s wife and family—nor for anyone else he might kill after his friend provides him with a third gun.

A court victory means little in and of itself. Professor Schabas rightly pointed out that the recent UN ruling that Israel is carrying out genocide has made it easier for journalists to use the word genocide. This is true, as far as it goes, and it could play a small part in boosting the self-confidence of Palestinians and their supporters. But it misses the fact that the main reason journalists felt able to speak out was the mass movement on the streets.

Earlier in the day, Alexander Gorski noted that on 27 September, all of a sudden, the chant “From the river to the sea” became legal because so many people were shouting it. Gorski also said that he doesn’t trust the state or the legal system, and that all legal changes are the result of social movements.

The final statement at the Gaza Tribunal was made by Palestinian lawyer Nadija Samour. Nadija said, “Human rights are not a harmless instrument. We must put them under pressure. Demo bans were beaten not by lawyers but by street mobilisations.” She pointed out that during the Gulf War, British activists were prosecuted for destroying weapons and won their case.

Nadija praised the Shut Elbit Down activists in Ulm who took matters into their own hands and shut down a weapons factory. At the same time, though, she pointed out that Ulm is not London, where the existence of a mass movement meant that when Palestine Action was criminalised, thousands of people were arrested in solidarity.

Conclusion

Legal challenges are an important part of our struggle for justice in Palestine, but they are not the only part. Essential court work has a dialectical relationship with street movements, as each complements the other. Our side is more likely to win a favourable court ruling if we have a vibrant and active movement on the streets—but that movement can also draw strength and energy from victories in the courts.

This relationship was recognised by several speakers at the Tribunal, most notably Alexander Gorski and all the participants of the final session, where Nadija was joined by Nahed Samour and Professor Dr. Isabel Feichtner. These were the most vibrant parts of the day, which at other times was bogged down in legal wrangling.

Court victories are not irrelevant, but they must be understood within the wider context of collective resistance. We all have our part to play in building a movement so large and determined that we can win—both on the streets and in the courts.

The Deutsche JuristInnen für das Völkerrecht have promised to release a report of the Tribunal soon. Notwithstanding any weaknesses, it will be an interesting read.

The past misses you: the dangers and radical potential of nostalgia  

How the right is weaponizing nostalgia and why the left should be more nostalgic


28/10/2025

Recently, a new type of AI-generated video has been making the rounds. The clips usually follow the same format. A group of (almost always white) teens talk directly to the viewer, reminding them of all the cool things they were doing in the 1980s, 1990s, or early 2000s. Set in colorful environments reminiscent of shows like Stranger Things, these teens hang out in parking lots after dark, wander through cozy-looking malls, or cruise around immaculate suburbia in their vintage cars. The twin towers of the World Trade Center make regular appearances, still standing tall in all their glory. The fake AI-teens all convey a similar message: the past misses you. While you have been lost in a world of phones and social media, “back here” things are still real, kids are still talking to each other and summers never end. You should “just come back”. The teens are blissfully unaware of the realities of those decades: Chernobyl, the AIDS epidemic, the Iraq War or the damage wrought by neoliberalism.

These videos seem to be created mostly by AI content farms or hustle-bros trying to monetize nostalgia. They’re not the product of sincere longing, but a means to boost engagement and make money.

The use of AI to milk nostalgia for attention and clicks feels inevitable. Generative AI is, by definition, a regurgitative technology — it can’t truly invent anything new. It is always rooted in reinterpretations of the past, remixing information that already exists: recomposed, maybe, but never legitimately unique. 

As such, AI and large language models are the logical continuation of decades of technologies that have exploited our appetite for nostalgia to harvest data and keep us engaged.

Social media and algorithmic nostalgia

Social media platforms and their algorithms are designed to function as perfectly optimized nostalgia-production machines. Recommender systems work by suggesting content similar to what a viewer has already liked, with the ultimate goal of keeping the user engaged.

Nostalgia triggers a powerful emotional response, which correlates with high engagement (clicks, likes, and shares). It also helps algorithms infer a user’s supposed tastes. If a user likes 1960s psychedelic rock, for example, they will get more of the same style, along with some early-2010s revival of ’60s music, and — why not — an entire AI-generated band of the same genre.

The end goal of this strategy — what nostalgia researcher Grafton Tanner calls retrobait — is to use the lure of nostalgia to persuade users to give up their data. 

On the other side of the culture-production machine, artists will create more work that they know might perform better (such as 60s psych rock in this example), thus creating a sort of cultural feedback loop. 

The weaponization of nostalgia by Big Tech doesn’t just mine the past—it also actively blurs and distorts it, reshaping history into a perfectly cozy, sellable simulacrum of itself.

This folding of time in on itself is most visible in cinema, with its endless avalanche of remakes, reboots, and sequels to long-dormant “IPs” (in 2024, not a single original film broke the box-office top ten). But the trend has long infected every corner of the culture industry, down to your local rock band trying to make it on Spotify.

Nostalgia in politics

In politics, nostalgia has been a feature of right-wing conservatism for what feels like forever. Nazism was rooted in the Völkisch movement, which was itself trying to oppose modernity by going back to a mythical German past, untainted by the ills of christianity or technological progress. 

More recent political phenomena — from Brexit to Trump’s “Make America Great Again”, or the AfD’s Deutschland. Aber normal.— all seem driven by a longing for a long-lost, idealized past.

It has now almost become a meme to call AI the new aesthetic of fascism. Nostalgia has been the aesthetic of fascism for way longer: from the Nazi’s back-to-nature romanticism, to the “Trad Wife” lifestyle; from the 1970s “Hitler-Wave” in Germany, to the AfD-youth considering a Nazi-like eagle for its new logo. 

Yet, the leftist critique of nostalgia is too often a shortcut — a simple way to make the other side look like backward idiots, without engaging with the real struggles that animate them.

Nostalgia is a way to declare someone non-contemporaneous, to say that someone—or their ideas, attitudes—belongs to the past. This is what makes the nostalgia charge so suitable for political rhetoric and, by the same token, so bad for political analysis which tends to merely reproduce one’s own political bias.

Tobias Becker, The Politics of Nostalgia

Instead, it’s more helpful to see nostalgia as a valid articulation of loss: our way of emotionally expressing that something is wrong. Of course, this feeling can easily be exploited by nefarious forces, but it can also be harnessed for revolutionary aims.

Is nostalgia really all that bad?

The term nostalgia was first coined by Johannes Hofer in the seventeenth century to describe the symptoms of Swiss mercenaries stationed far from home who were suffering from a mysterious illness. The word comes from the Greek nostos and algia — meaning “homecoming” and “ache”. Before it became associated with time, nostalgia was understood as a yearning to return home.

At first, nostalgia was regarded as pathological, a new disease for a new world. It was also closely linked to war: during the American Civil War and World War I, nostalgia was frequently diagnosed among soldiers. For a time, the powers that emerged from the Industrial Revolution viewed nostalgia with suspicion. It was seen as a threat to progress—a backward impulse incompatible with the capitalist ethos of endless growth. Later, once it became clear that no one was actually dying from nostalgia, capitalism realized it could be used to sell. Nostalgia soon became a prominent feature of marketing campaigns around the world. 

Psychologists mostly agree that nostalgia is a bittersweet — but predominantly positive — emotion that arises when people feel a lack of meaning, when they are displaced and lost. It often accompanies periods of rapid social change. In a capitalist society, where change seems less like a smooth flow and more like a constant, battering storm, nostalgia is ever-present.

Nostalgia is both an unavoidable emotional reaction to the reckless missions of capitalism and an emotion often induced to justify them. 

Grafton Tanner, The Hours Have Lost Their Clock

But are we too hard on nostalgia? The left has historically viewed nostalgia as an inherently conservative — and therefore right-wing — impulse: the opposite of radicalism. This presents a paradox, as the left has often longed for a time before, sometimes naively, and occasionally in racist terms: before money, before urbanization, before hierarchy, before “civilization.”

Although nostalgia has largely been antagonized by the mainstream left, it has assumed a far more significant role for activist groups seeking to reclaim their cultural identity from colonial domination. Here, nostalgia is not an empty, AI-generated husk draped in stylish ’80s cool; it is a powerful tool used by activists to relocate and revive a culture that was violently taken from them. Nostalgia points to what has been lost: communal bonds, rootedness, and shared history. Recognizing these losses strengthens critiques of capitalism and modern alienation.

Taken in this way, nostalgia can be a powerful instrument for anti-capitalist struggles. It can be used to remember elements of the past that are genuinely worth being nostalgic about — such as a functioning social safety net, a rich local culture, or a time when capitalism didn’t seem like the only available option. Nostalgia, then, can be used to weave a new narrative that counters the “official” storytelling of capital. 

The breakdown of narrativity in a culture, group, or social class is a symptom of its having entered into a state of crisis. For with any weakening of narrativizing capacity, the group loses its power to locate itself in history, to come to grips with the necessity that its past represents for it, and to imagine a creative, if only provisional, transcendence of its ‘fate’.

Hayden White, Getting out of History

In his latest book, Foreversim, Grafton Tanner takes something of a U-turn from his previous works about the weaponization of nostalgia. He argues that what we are seeing is not a world gorging on nostalgia, but a system still pathologizing it. In this reading, what Disney, Trump or the AfD are doing is not serving us more nostalgia, but trying to alleviate the nostalgic “disease” altogether by offering a constant presentism. After all, how can we be truly nostalgic for Star Wars if a new Star Wars movie comes out every year?

Whatever we think of the current use of nostalgia by capitalists — whether as a numbing agent for the masses or as a disease to be fought — there is no doubt that a certain form of nostalgia can be restorative.

The past has to be continually re-narrated, and the political point of reactionary narratives is to suppress the potentials which still await, ready to be re-awakened, in older moments.

Mark Fisher, Acid Communism

The question, then, is how to incorporate nostalgia into leftist thinking. On the one hand, it seems vital to resist being numbed by the consumerist, racist nostalgia weaponized by social media algorithms, AI companies, and fascists. On the other hand, there may be much to gain from embracing a form of progressive nostalgia — one that helps us value past struggles, question the illusion of capitalism as the inevitable outcome of history, and remember that it is still possible to forge new paths informed by the potential of the past.