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Red Flag: Is This Fascism? Not Yet

This week in ‘Red Flag’, Nathaniel Flakin’s column for The Left Berlin: What fascism is—and how to stop it


21/04/2025

It’s a constant drumbeat on social media; an image of police repression is followed by the comment: “This is fascism.” Is it, though?

The sentiment is easy to understand. In the United States, we see the Trump administration breaking laws and defying courts to send immigrants to a concentration camp in El Salvador. People are getting fired, assaulted, and even deported for voicing opposition to the genocide in Gaza. The same thing is happening in Germany.

Clearly, these are attacks on democratic rights. And isn’t fascism the opposite of democracy?

To start, we should be clear about what “democracy” is. We could also refer to it as the democratic form of a bourgeoisie dictatorship. Even if most people get to vote, society’s wealth remains in the hands of an infinitesimally small minority—the capitalist class. Every capitalist state exists to protect the bourgeoisie’s interests, using a plethora of tools. From police to media to schools, every state employs some mixture of consent and violence. 

In other words, every bourgeois state, even the most democratic one, relies on repression. The term fascism refers to something very specific—it’s not a catch-all term for every right-wing, authoritarian government.

Trotsky’s Definitions

I am in a reading group that has been discussing a 1932 pamphlet by Leon Trotsky: What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat. Trotsky highlights that fascism is based on mass mobilization of the middle classes against the working class: “At the moment that the ‘normal’ police and military resources of the bourgeois dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium—the turn of the fascist regime arrives. Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses of the crazed petty bourgeoisie and the bands of declassed and demoralized lumpenproletariat—all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy.”

In other words, fascism relies on paramilitary forces that supplement the “normal” violence of the bourgeois state by terrorizing workers and oppressed people. The goal is the complete annihilation of any form of working-class self-organization, and the atomization of the oppressed. To once more quote Trotsky, “After fascism is victorious, finance capital gathers into its hands […] all the organs and institutions of sovereignty, the executive, administrative, and educational powers of the state: […] When a state turns fascist, […] it means, primarily and above all, that the workers’ organizations are annihilated; that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state.”

This distinction is important, as Trotsky continues, “Fascism is not merely a system of reprisals, of brutal force, and of police terror. Fascism is a particular governmental system based on the uprooting of all elements of proletarian democracy within bourgeois society.”

There are fascist gangs in the U.S., and they are growing, as there are in Germany. These gangs are part of Trump’s coalition, just as Germany’s far-right party AfD has myriad links to Nazis. Yet the Far Right internationally is building its power primarily via electoral parties, mobilizing supporters as voters, not as soldiers of counter-revolution.

The current situation, with Trump in the U.S. and the new right-wing chancellor Friedrich Merz in Germany, cannot really be compared to fascism as it was established in 1933. It has a lot more in common with the “presidential cabinets” that ruled Germany from 1930 to 1933. The right-wing chancellors that preceded Hitler—Brüning, Papen, and Schleicher—circumvented parliament to apply brutal austerity measures combined with equally brutal repression. They paved the way for Hitler—but relied on the capitalist state apparatus to implement their policies, and not on fascist private armies. 

Fascism is not the bourgeoisie’s preferred form of government—a parliament or a congress are genuinely useful tools for the capitalists to hash out the differences among themselves, and an all-powerful Führer is usually too erratic. It’s only when the bourgeoisie faces a truly existential crisis that it is willing to consider handing over power to fascist thugs. For one final quote from Trotsky: “The big bourgeoisie likes fascism as little as a man with aching molars likes to have his teeth pulled.”

Why It Matters

Some might find this whole column pedantic. Who cares if we are under fascism proper, or under governments paving the way for fascists?

We should care, because the establishment of fascist dictatorships by paramilitary gangs would be a crushing defeat. It would make it impossible for us to discuss and organize openly—this website would not exist openly, nor would Marxist reading groups.

But we haven’t been defeated yet. To claim that we have lost the battle before the fighting has really gotten going can only disorient and demoralize us. A misdiagnosis makes it impossible to treat a disease.

This happened Back in the early 1930s, when the Stalinist leadership of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) declared that fascism was already in power. What difference would it make if Brüning’s fascism was replaced by Hitler’s fascism, they asked, as both stood for starvation and unemployment.

This prevented the KPD from developing a strategy to stop the Nazis’ rise — and it turned out that it made a huge difference whether the KPD could work with certain legal rights under a bourgeois-democratic system, or whether the Nazis imprisoned all communists in concentration camps.

Centrists Help the Right

Today, the excessive use of the term fascism is often a justification for an alliance with a supposedly “anti-fascist” wing of the bourgeoisie. We are told to vote for the Democrats (or for the conservative CDU in Germany) because, despite their right-wing policies, they are at least not fascist.

This lesser-evilism ignores the fact that the Dems (and the CDU) have already adopted and implemented many of Trump’s (and the AfD’s) policies. It was centrists like Obama who built up the deportation machine that Trump is using.

Leftists, including politicians like Bernie and AOC, who campaign for status quo in order to “stop fascism,” end up justifying racist policies and austerity measures. This ultimately drives even more people into the arms of the Far Right, since the Right appears to be the only alternative to a hated neoliberal establishment.

Finally, if we are already living under fascism, it means that all workers’ organizations have become fascist as well. We see the millionaire bureaucrats that run our unions failing to stand up for the interests of our class—which means opposing every deportation and the entire far-right agenda. Yet despite their bureaucratic leaderships, unions still form a foundation of working-class power, and a potential starting point for real struggles. Fascism would aim to destroy unions—and we need to fight to mobilize unions against the Right, instead of writing them off.

Right-wing governments and fascist gangs are a concrete threat to immigrants, queer folks, and other oppressed groups. We need organized self-defense against this terror. Just like in the 1930s, we cannot rely on bourgeois courts or police. 

To really stop fascism in its tracks, though, we need all working-class organizations to form a united front. This must start with a defense of democratic and social rights, but cannot stop there. We need to fight against the capitalist system with its inevitable crises, which forms the social basis of fascism. This means fighting for a program to guarantee jobs, housing, healthcare, and education for all, regardless of their “legal” status.

Fascism remains a mortal threat as capitalism slides ever deeper into crisis. But we cannot confront that threat if we don’t have a scientific understanding of it. If we define Trump or Merz as fascist, we would need to apply the same label to their predecessors, Biden and Scholz, who ruled under the same bourgeois-democratic regimes and were equally eager to repress and deport people. If they are also fascists, then every capitalist government in history would be fascist as well. And that would rob the term of any meaning, and us of any clarity about the situation we face.

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

What difference are tariffs going to make?

Part two of Rob Hoveman’s article about Trump’s tariffs.


20/04/2025

You can read part one of this article here.

There is a basic tension in the role that tariffs are supposed to play. On the one hand, Trump is claiming that a host of countries are placing unfair tariff and non-tariff blocks on American exports to those countries, giving them their trade surplus. This is somewhat inconsistent with the blanket 10% tariff imposed, whether or not the country has a trade surplus, and whether that trade surplus is the product of tariff barriers, or non-tariff ones. But this is where Trump’s claim that countries are willing to do a deal comes in. Some have claimed that the outcome of this deal-making process will end up being lower trade barriers worldwide, making the tariffs only temporary.

There are two more justification for tariffs, however, which suggest they will be more permanent. The first is that they are essential to encourage inward investment, and to discourage investment from leaving the U.S. This is bound up with propaganda about making America great again by restoring its manufacturing base, an idea that also appeals to former manufacturing areas, like the so-called Rust Belt. But it also has a strong national security angle. Tariffs are justified by claiming that the US cannot be dependent on raw materials or vital areas of manufacturing on potentially hostile countries — in particular China, which has been an obsession of Trump’s (and, indeed, of every U.S. administration since Obama).

On top of that, Trump wants tariffs to raise money to enable him to continue cutting taxes for the rich. He has claimed that tariffs are already bringing in two billion dollars a day. We can take this claim with a pinch of salt; in any case, the tax take from tariffs will decline if the tariffs do their job of choking off imports. But Trump certainly needs to increase his tax take from somewhere if he is to keep or extend the tax cuts for the rich. The federal deficit is currently running at $1.9 trillion a year, or some 6.4% of total annual gross domestic product (GDP). And that is adding to American national debt, now at a staggering $36 trillion, or 120% of GDP.

Tariffs are a tax on imports. The intention of a tariff is to raise the price of the good and reduce demand for it as a consequence. If it doesn’t raise the price and reduce demand, it isn’t doing its job except as a money-raiser for the government. In raising the price and reducing demand, tariffs are therefore both potentially inflationary, raising the general price level, a phenomenon that will be more likely the more widespread the tariffs are. And they are also potentially recessionary, or bad for economic growth — by reducing demand for the goods of the exporting country, but also for the country imposing the tariffs, as rising import price inflation spreads through the economy. In other words, Trump’s tariffs portend a combination of the two — “stagflation”, or even “slumpflation”.

It might be hoped that tariffs would encourage inward investment, and discourage outward investment, and by doing so would boost the domestic economy, which could then start producing goods to substitute for what are now much more expensive imports. The problem with this is that it takes time to relocate production. The current globalised supply lines have been in the making for the past 80 years, in particular over the past 40 years of neoliberalism. They cannot be undone overnight. Further, companies like Apple depend on a highly skilled workforce. Such skilled workers are abundant in China and increasingly in India but not in the United States.

Moreover, investors — i.e., the rich — are now wary of the uncertainty that has been injected into the economy, both by the tariffs themselves and by Trump’s volatility. The rich don’t like this kind of uncertainty, and will therefore be more likely to hold off ploughing funds into long-term projects. The wealthiest 10% now also account for 50% of consumer spending in the United States, up from 36% thirty years ago. This is indicative of the fact that the rich have gotten much richer over the past 30 years, whilst incomes for many in the U.S. have stagnated or declined. The rich feel much richer when the shares in which they have invested rise in value. This wealth effect encourages them to spend. But the opposite happens when share prices fall. The reverse wealth effect curtails their consumption spending — meaning, of course, less demand in the economy, and less economic growth.

Those tens of millions of far less well-off Americans — whose spending makes up the other 50% of consumer spending in the United States — now face huge price rises in the goods that they have been purchasing from China (if they’re able to obtain them at all), and a loss of confidence in economic prospects. Those who can afford to put money into a savings account for a future pension have also been spooked by the loss of value in their pension pots, which have been heavily invested in the stock market. Add to this the effects of the sacking of tens of thousands of government employees by Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, and the deportation of undocumented migrants who contribute to the US economy — which, if successful, would lead to massive economic contraction.

What irks Trump, and those amongst his advisors who see neoliberalism as having been a disaster, is the phenomenal Chinese growth over the past 25 years, since China’s admission to the World Trade Organisation. That economic growth now threatens US imperial hegemony. It is ironic that Communist China is now the most enthusiastic defender of the virtues of “free trade” — and Capitalist Trump the most opposed to it!

China is certainly going to take a hit from the swinging tariffs Trump has imposed, but it seems to hold perhaps more cards than Trump does. U.S. agriculture is dependent on exports to China, and Chinese tech and rare-earth minerals remain vital to the U.S. China can switch exports to other markets — it is now the biggest player in international trade, with the U.S. considerably smaller. U.S. exports account for only 14% of total Chinese exports. On the other hand, the United States has itself become more dependent upon international trade, which comprises 14% of the U.S. economy.

The likelihood of a recession in the United States has very substantially increased, as the investment bank Goldman Sachs confirms. In such circumstances, the state has two weapons to try to improve the economic situation. The first of these involves spending more and taxing less. This is a fiscal stimulus. The other involves the central bank lowering interest rates, thus reducing borrowing costs. This is a monetary stimulus.

There are two problems though in trying to mobilise these weapons to counter recession. The first is with a possible fiscal stimulus. The United States federal deficit stands at 6.4% of GDP and the total federal debt is 120% of GDP. This is twice the size of the fiscal deficit and national debt that was laid down as a European target in the EU Stability and Growth Pact, as long ago as 1997. It is also predicted to carry on rising, unless drastic action is taken. The danger is that if Trump decides to cut taxes and possibly increase spending, the financial markets may take fright again — bond prices may fall, and interest rates rise. That in itself may negate the effects of the fiscal stimulus. But it might also threaten a financial crash.

The safe haven status of US government bonds means a lower interest rate can still attract wealthy buyers. A loss of confidence in those bonds as a safe haven would almost certainly entail higher interest rates to the detriment of the US economy.Given the reaction of the bond markets to Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs, the Trump administration should be concerned that deciding to deliberately expand the fiscal deficit could lead to another bond rout — pushing up interest rates and exacerbating the recessionary forces.

That leaves the U.S. central bank — the Federal Reserve — as a potential source of monetary stimulus, through interest rate cuts. However, the Federal Reserve is committed to maintaining monetary stability. Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve whom Trump appointed in his first term, is clearly currently very cautious about reducing interest rates, as he believes that the sheer scale of tariffs threatens a revival of inflation. Trump has now publicly demanded that interest rates be cut, and has said that Powell’s “termination” cannot come fast enough, exploring the possibility of sacking him. But any appearance that the Federal Reserve is coming under political control may yet again badly spook the financial markets. Central banks have generally acquired greater independence in the neoliberal era, precisely to reassure the markets that there is an unelected pro-banking authority at the heart of monetary policy.

The U.S. economy therefore seems caught between a rock and a hard place. There are both recessionary and inflationary pressures rising from Trump’s tariff fetish, and limited means with which the government or the Federal Reserve can avoid both recession and inflation.

The enormous U.S. fiscal deficit and accumulating national debt are themselves a symptom of a much wider debt problem in the world economy. The era of neoliberalism, with money free to chase profit wherever it could be obtained, and barriers to trade and the globalisation of production coming down, was supposed to produce higher levels of economic efficiency and growth. Debt was a crucial ingredient in promoting this globalisation, and can be benign, if growth is sufficient to ensure that debt obligations are met and repaid.

The problem was and is that growth has been inadequate to stop the burden of debt growing. There simply hasn’t been enough profit in the system, relative to investment, to generate the growth necessary to stabilise and manage the level of debt. Economic growth continued in the era of neoliberalism but only with ever increasing amounts of government, corporate and consumer debt. The overall level of debt across the world economy now stands at more than three times the total annual value of world production.

Not only has growth been too slow, but it has also been punctuated by serious financial crises — of which the worst so far was the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008, followed by the Covid crisis. After the GFC, central banks sought to introduce rules and regulations — for example on reserve requirements — to try to prevent another seizing up of the financial system, as after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The regulated bank sector may be more secure as a result. But half of the money circulating in the financial markets is now handled by the so-called shadow banking sector, which lies outside the regulatory regime imposed upon registered banks.

Private equity companies, in particular, have been in the lead in growing the U.S. economy in the past few years, when it boasted significantly higher levels of growth than were being managed by the laggardly European Union. But that growth has been generated by a plethora of high-tech startups, and, it is suspected, loading companies with ultimately unsustainable debt, in order to make short-term profits for those private equity companies. As things stand, some 20% of companies in the United States have zombie status, barely able to cover their existing debts, but unable to take on new debt to expand their operations even if they wished to.

Trump will have been in office just 100 days as the 47th President of the United States on the 30th of April, the day before International Workers’ Day. In those hundred days, he has almost single-handedly delivered a series of profound shocks to an already fragile U.S. and world economy. Trump’s trade war with China is increasingly being posed as a military contest by the Trump administration. Tensions are likely to rise over access to rare earth minerals — for example in the Congo — and other areas such as Taiwan, which produces advanced semiconductor chip, with the possibility of trade war leading to real war.

We live in turbulent and dangerous times. Never has there been a greater need for a genuinely socialist alternative to this endemically crisis-ridden and exploitative capitalist world economy.

Trump, tariffs, trade wars and economic chaos

Part one: Has the United States been “ripped off”?


19/04/2025

It’s a topsy turvy world, or at least it is with Trump in the White House.

Wednesday 2nd April—a day designated by Donald Trump as “Liberation Day”, the day on which the United States would begin to get back its independence—he announced a basic 10% import tariff, a tax on all goods being imported into the United States. On top of that, additional tariffs were imposed on countries with a trade surplus with the US, calculated by a weird algorithm.

Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize-winning establishment economist, described Trump’s imposition of so-called “reciprocal tariffs” as the greatest shock to international trade in world history. The Economist, a right-wing British weekly magazine, admittedly with a long history of supporting “free trade”, dubbed liberation day “ruination day”. And billionaire, Trump-supporting hedge-fund trader Bill Ackman claimed that Trump’s tariffs portended an economic nuclear winter.

Over the next few days, stock markets in the U.S. and elsewhere across the world tanked. Big companies issue shares to raise money. The purchaser of a share is buying a part ownership of that company. A dividend will be paid on that share, usually annually, reflecting the profitability of the company. Shares can be traded in the secondary market, and if the company is doing well, or if there is general optimism about economic prospects, the price of the shares may rise. But shares will be sold, and share values tumble if the apparent prospects for that company (and the economy more generally) take a tumble. That’s what happened in the wake of the tariff announcement.

More than nine trillion dollars came off the value of companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), with the big seven tech companies some of the biggest losers. Trump’s new best friend Elon Musk saw the value of Tesla halved. But Trump was not for turning, contrary to the assumption of many Trump-watchers who had assumed he would change course if the stock markets appeared to be turning against him. If there’s no pain, there will be no gain, Trump opined, although he implied that the pain would be relatively short-lived.

However, a week later Trump blinked and suspended the additional tariffs on all countries except China for 90 days, since China had had the temerity to announce retaliatory tariffs. The reason was the rout in the bond market. Bonds are issued when money is lent to a company or government. They are certificates representing a debt rather than ownership. Typically, bonds have a maturation date when the debt represented by the bond is repaid. In the interim, typically, a certain rate of interest will be paid on the bond. This is why bonds are called a fixed income asset. 

But like shares, there is a secondary market in bonds. Bond prices can and do rise and fall in that secondary market, just as they can and do in the market for shares. If there is a rise in the price of bonds, the effective interest or yield being paid on the current value of the bond will be proportionately less, and if bond prices fall, then interest or yield will rise. The state of the bond market therefore has an effect on market interest rates more generally.

The U.S. bond market rout wasn’t supposed to happen. U.S. government bonds, currently worth some 36 trillion dollars, have been seen as a very safe asset. They have anchored the world’s financial system acting as safe collateral for loans across the world. When the U.S. and other stock markets are spooked, and there is a sell-off of shares, it would normally be expected that the money realised from those sales would be ploughed into U.S. government bonds, thus bringing interest rates down. This might even be seen as a self-correcting mechanism—if interest rates fall, lower borrowing costs should be a boost to a faltering economy.

However, instead of a flight to this traditional safe haven, it seems that there was a sell-off of bonds too, thus pushing up interest rates at the same time that the stock market was falling. There is some speculation as to why this happened. It seems that hedge funds found themselves over-borrowed, in the face of some panic that Trump’s tariffs would bring both inflation and recession. Overseas holders of bonds sold off some of their holdings. Japan is the biggest overseas U.S. bond holder. Alongside China, they hold about 25% of U.S. bonds. It is thought that Japanese bondholders, rather than Chinese, were the most likely to have sold bonds, both out of concern about the future value of those bonds, and potentially to pressure Trump to reverse course. China holds some $750 billion of U.S. bonds, which may be a problem for the U.S. further down the road if Trump persists with his desire to decouple from and isolate China.

If Trump could stomach a drop of more than 10% on the NYSE, he clearly couldn’t stomach that in combination with rising interest rates. So he partially reversed course, and suspended the additional reciprocal tariffs over the basic universal 10% tariff for 90 days.

In response, the stock market bounced back and the price of bonds recovered, but not fully—and both markets continue to show volatility. Worries remained that the U.S. economy—and much of the rest of the world with it—was headed for both higher inflation and economic stagnation, or worse—“stagflation”, as it was called back in the 1970s. And despite the 90-day suspension on the additional reciprocal tariffs produced by that arcane algorithm, there are still many tariffs in place, and more in the pipeline. There are punitive tariffs on Mexico for not doing enough to stop illegal migration across the Mexican/American border. Illegal migration across that border is of course born of desperation, given the economic circumstances in countries to the South—some of which are the direct result of U.S. policies. And if Trump were to succeed in expelling 11 million undocumented migrants, the U.S. economy is likely to shrink a staggering 7%—because (no surprises here surely) migrants work and produce and help grow the economy just as they do in Europe.

There are also punitive tariffs on Mexico and Canada for not doing enough to stop the flow of fentanyl constituents into the U.S., fuelling the opioid crisis. But that crisis is the product of the aggressive marketing of big U.S. pharmaceutical companies, not the people of either Mexico or Canada. There are also secondary tariffs on countries buying oil from Venezuela, because Trump and his far-right entourage don’t like the government of Venezuela. There are also 25% tariffs on steel, aluminium, cars and car parts. And there are the 145% tariffs on all exports coming from China. Calculations show that the effective overall U.S. tariff rate is a whopping 27%—even after the 90-day suspension.

Trump has since retreated further and fully exempted smartphones, computers and other personal electronics. Apple produces most of its smartphones in China, and was facing a devastating hit to its profits. But there are semiconductor tariffs coming down the track, which will once again raise the price of smartphones and computers. And, of course, there is no guarantee that higher reciprocal tariffs won’t be restored when the 90-day suspension lapses.

Rarely, if ever, have the actions of just one man had such a dramatic effect on financial markets, and economic sentiment more generally. What lies behind Trump’s decision to impose these unprecedented tariffs.

In Trump’s fantasy world, the United States has been ripped off by friend and foe alike for the past 50 years. His evidence for this alleged rip-off is that the United States has been running an enormous trade deficit in goods for many years. Of this, there is no doubt. The U.S. balance of payments current account deficit in 2024 was over $1.13 trillion, or 3.9% of the total annual value of goods and services produced in the United States (U.S. gross domestic product, or GDP).

But in what conceivable sense is this a rip-off? The idea that the United States, still the richest country in the world by a considerable measure, has been ripped off because it imports more goods than it exports, is ludicrous.

First, this entirely ignores the international trade in services (and particularly financial services) on which the U.S. runs a trade surplus. The EU is more or less in balance with the U.S. if payments for financial and other services are taken into account.

Secondly, insofar as the American manufacturing industry has been hollowed out, this is in large part because U.S.-based companies like Apple have located or relocated production to lower-cost countries, in order to make bigger profits for themselves. When they haven’t relocated to other countries, they have sometimes relocated (or used the threat of relocation) to non-trade union states, to overcome trade union resistance. It’s not that the United States that is being ripped off by other countries, it’s the workers in both the U.S. and lower-paid countries that are being ripped off, usually by U.S.-based companies.

Thirdly, according to conventional economic wisdom, if a country runs a systemic balance of payments deficit, then the rate of exchange between the currency of that country and the currencies of other countries with a trade surplus should decline. In other words, in the case of the dollar, it should have lost value relative to the yen and other currencies.

The devaluation of the dollar relative to other currencies (if it happens) makes imports to the U.S. more expensive and exports from the U.S. cheaper. Prior to the collapse of the fixed exchange-rate system in the early 1970s, currencies like the British pound sterling and the U.S. dollar could become overvalued. But currencies have floated freely against one another since the 1970s.

However, the dollar has an exceptional status in the world. It is the international reserve currency, with most of the world’s international trade priced in dollars. This has meant that the demand for—and therefore the price of—the dollar, relative to other currencies, has remained relatively high. Higher, in fact, than would be needed to adjust the balance of payments deficit. Some in the Trump administration add this overvaluation to their list of ills to rectify. There has even been talk of a Mar-a-Lago Accord to try and lower the value of the dollar.

But the reserve currency status of the dollar, in fact, gives the United States two huge advantages. First of all, it allows the United States to import vast amounts of goods simply by issuing paper. This, of course, has been increasingly to the benefit of the rich, who account for a very high proportion of consumer spending in the United States today. And it certainly refutes the idea that there has been a rip-off by other countries. If anything, they are the ones potentially being ripped off, if there is a significant devaluation of the dollars that have been used to pay for those exports to the United States.

Secondly, a strong dollar has in fact been a policy pursued by successive administrations. The strong dollar and its reserve currency status has enabled the United States to exercise imperialist power over other countries, by cutting them off from the international financial system. This politicisation of the use of the dollar has become increasingly popular with both Republican and Democrat presidents in recent years.

U.S. imperialism is yet another reason why the idea that they have been ripped off is just about the very opposite of the truth. U.S. imperialism hasn’t generally operated through the colonisation of other countries. It has operated instead through its economic, political and military dominance, over the course of which profits have been extracted—i.e. ripped off—from, in particular, poorer countries

The second part of this article will appear on theleftberlin.com tomorrow (Sunday, 20th April)

Latest Tourist Trap in the United States: ICE Detention Centers

Visitors held and detained at US borders due to increased anti-immigration enforcement overwhelming detention system


18/04/2025

In March, Rebecca Burke’s trip to the United States and Canada took a dark turn. The Welsh artist planned to travel in the northwest USA and Canada for less through Workaway, a site which pairs volunteers with organizations and private individuals offering lodging. When Burke arrived at the Canadian border with her tourism visa, officials determined that her volunteer activities constituted housing in exchange for labor. They sent her back to the US saying that she must apply for a working visa there. Back in the US, she was labelled an illegal alien and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Burke had not been closely following US immigration politics before her trip, but since seeing the inside of a detention center, she is committed to sharing the stories of the many who are still detained. Human rights organizations have decried the mistreatment and living conditions of detainees since the inception of ICE in the 2000s. However, due to new detention and deportation enforcement goals set by the Trump administration, ICE has expanded their criteria for whom to detain. Instead of searching for and arresting individuals with criminal records or non-legal immigration status––which could require up to 6 officers to carry out––ICE is now detaining anyone without permanent US citizenship and asking questions later. Their methods include racially profiling potential immigrants on the street, denying visa renewals and immediately detaining the applicants, and questioning arriving travellers at airport customs. The result is a higher rate of detentions and packed detention centers.

This new process has consequences for many demographics, from asylum seekers to current green card and visa holders. It also seems to be affecting even those who have no intentions of staying: tourists. In the cases where reasons for detention were given, these reasons vary, although some emerging trends for why someone might be flagged as suspicious include political dissent, previous visa or legal problems (even those that have been resolved), crossing of the Mexican or Canadian border, and perceived intent to work on the wrong visa. In some cases the visitors were simply detained for 24 hours. Others, who were not so luckily, were imediately detained in ICE detention centers without opportunity to speak to a lawyer or buy a flight home

Further details on several prominent cases:

Case: Political dissent; time detained 24 hours. On March 9th, a french space researcher (who prefers to remain anonymous) arrived in Houston, Texas to attend a scientific conference. His personal phone and computer were searched and then confiscated at US customs. The scientist was critiqued for having messages “that convey hatred towards Trump and can be described as terrorism,” and even threatened with an FBI investigation, according to the l’Agence France-Presse (AFP). He was then banned from entering the United States and sent home the next day. The spokesperson for the US Department of Homeland Security denies that the researcher’s removal was related to political beliefs. According to her, the scientist had confidential information from Los Alamos National Laboratory on his device. The case has made international news and garnered strong critique from French government officials and educational insitutions. Several scientific institutions in France now recommend that researchers only travel to the US with devices that have been wiped of personal information.

Case: travel across Mexico border; time detained 16 days. Lucas Sielaff, a German tourist, was visiting his fiancée in California. The couple crossed the border to Mexico in order to treat their sick dog at a cheaper vet. Upon their return, a border guard became suspicious that Sielaff was intending to live illegally in the US despite him still being within the 30 days of his allowed stay. He was detained for almost 2 weeks in a detention cell with 128 other men before being allowed to buy a flight home.

Case: perceived intent to work; time detained 6 weeks. On January 15th, German tattoo artist Jessica Bröche was detained at the US-Mexico border because she mentioned that she would give her friend a tattoo upon arriving in California. The border guards interpreted this as intent to work on a tourist visa. Her friend maintains that it was meant to be an artistic exchange. Despite her case making international headlines she was not allowed to return to Germany until mid-March. Her detention included 8 days of solitary confinement.

These are only a few of the cases which made the news. Other stories of detentions and 24 hour holds include that of Fabian Schmidt, Celine Flad (Germany), Jasmine Mooney (Canada), and Rebecca Burke.

Both Burke and Mooney experienced unnanounced periods of waiting; stays in prison-style holding cells with more than 10 other detainees; questionable sanitation standards; and inadequate provisions for comfort, including lack of pillows and sheets, meager food, and constant fluorescent lighting. Neither was given the option to consult a lawyer, buy a flight, or receive answers as to how long they would stay in detainment.

Mooney emphasized at the end of her interview with the Guardian that she is against illegal immigration, but believes that the ICE detention system should be more fair to people who actually want to leave the country or to stay in the country lawfully. At the same time, Mooney points out the connection to the profit motives behind the detention centers. While ICE is a government agency, the detention centers used by ICE are in fact run by private companies, and receives government funding based on number of detainees. Thus, the companies lobby the government for harsher immigration laws. Not only does this reinforce a vicious cycle, but it would seem to also be overwhelming the system itself.

Even if ICE detention centers were not morally compromised by profit, is there a way that immigration detentions could be more “fair”––i.e., not affect legal immigrants and tourists? According to the ACLU, US citizens and permanent residents do not legally have to answer questions about religion or politics or provide passwords for personal devices in order to enter the country. However non-US citizens do not have this right. Thus, it is completely legal for ICE to detain anyone who is not a US citizen or permanent resident without giving a reason. In a system where any non-US citizen or permanent resident is potentially an illegal immigrant, illegal immigration could be immigration without the right papers, immigration with the wrong information on your phone, immigration with an unconventional itinerary, or even immigration while trans, nonbinary, or intersex.

Most of the tourists mentioned in this article are home now. Most were only detained a few weeks thanks to making national headlines in their home countries. The day after Burke’s father told her story on a news show in the UK, an ICE agent approached her to inform her that she was now being prioritized for being processed. She was released and sent home 4 days later. However, most detainees are not tourists and do not receive nationwide attention. Many could not afford a lawyer or do not qualify for the pro-bono lawyers who only represent asylum seekers. Some have been waiting for months or years in temporary holding facilities. The horrid conditions at ICE detention centers are old news in the US and around the world. But now, with renewed interest from the tourist cases, perhaps it will become more apparent that an injustice for some will sooner or later affect us all.

Further reading:

Irish citizen detained by Berliner Polizei outside Irish Embassy for speaking Irish

Statement by the Irish Bloc


17/04/2025

Irish Embassy Berlin, Jägerstraße 51, 10117 Berlin

On the morning of Wednesday the 16th of April, 2025, from 11:00 to 13:00, a group of protesters—primarily made up of Irish citizens living in Berlin—gathered outside the Embassy of Ireland, Berlin, to hold a registered protest.

The demonstration, titled ‘Ireland’s Complicit!’, was purposed to, among other things, demand the passing of the Occupied Territories Bill in Ireland and a stop to the use of Shannon Airport and Irish airspace for the transport of munitions to Israel for use in the genocide in Palestine, and to decry both the Irish state and the Embassy’s lack of support for the two Irish citizens being deported from Germany for their solidarity with Palestine.

The demonstration, attended by some 30 to 40 people, had been registered with the Berliner Polizei three days prior, as is standard practice for Berlin demonstrations. The organisers of the demonstration informed the Polizei that the demonstration would be held partially in Irish.

The Polizei have, over the past eighteen months of genocide, repeatedly banned the Arabic language, and other languages, from being spoken at demonstrations in Berlin, home to the largest Palestinian diaspora in Europe. Hence, it has become de facto necessary to confirm with Polizei which languages may be used at demonstrations. The Polizei instructed that a decision on the permissibility of the Irish language would be included within upcoming documentation.

On Tuesday the 15th of April, the demonstration’s official Auflage—a document describing the demonstration’s nature and any related restrictions—was issued to the person who registered the demonstration. No mention of the Irish language, or of other languages, was made—normally meaning Irish and other languages would be permitted.

On the day of the demonstration, at 10:45, just as the demonstration was about to begin, the Polizei verbally informed the demonstration organisers that the Irish language would be banned until the Polizei could find an interpreter of the language​​​​​​​.

Learning this, the demonstration organisers cancelled a planned Irish-language speech. The Polizei also later insisted that they needed to see the demonstration’s music playlist so to inspect their lyrics. It was verbally stated that Arabic music would not be allowed to be played. It was further stated that the lyrics of the songs would have to be inspected for references to bodies of water.

The demonstration began at 11:00. Throughout, casual and colloquial use of the Irish language was naturally present in the speech patterns of the attending Irish protesters, who nevertheless were still speaking in English. Members of the Polizei approached protesters on several occasions and informed the speakers that the Irish language was not allowed to be spoken during the demonstration.

At 12:00, with no interpreter having been found by the Polizei, the demonstration organisers requested written confirmation of the language ban, so that legal objections could be raised to the arbitrary ban. Written confirmation was denied to them. At 12:30, organisers spoke to the director of the unit present at the demonstration, who admitted that there was a failure in communication on the side of the Polizei. When organisers asked what they could have done differently, to avoid this from happening again, she replied that there was nothing they could have done differently. Regardless, the language ban was upheld.

Two of the protestors that had gathered signatures on a letter addressed to the Irish Ambassador to Germany, Maeve Collins, were initially denied entry to the Embassy by the Berliner Polizei. The letter detailed a list of demands to the Irish government, including the following:

  • Stop selling Israeli war bonds via the Central Bank of Ireland.
  • End dual-use military trade with Israel.
  • Stop the illegal use of Irish airspace and Shannon Airport as a waypoint for arms trafficking from the US and other allies of Israel, including Germany. This is in violation of EU laws, the Chicago Convention and Ireland’s own domestic laws.
  • Pass the Occupied Territories Bill immediately, in its full and original form.
  • Reject the IHRA definition of antisemitism, shamefully adopted by Ireland in January, in favour of the definition outlined in the Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism.
  • Stop the police brutality against protestors. Immediately conduct an investigation into An Garda Síochána for racialised, gendered and sexual abuse.
  • Intervene in Germany’s deportation of Irish citizens.

One of the Polizei agreed to ask the Embassy if they would send somebody outside to collect the letter. The Embassy refused.  

An organiser of the demonstration then made a phone call to the Embassy, and they, after some time, agreed that two protesters could enter and hand-deliver the letter. This prioritisation of the Berliner Polizei over the Irish Embassy’s own citizens is contrary to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. At 12:45, the two Irish citizens were escorted by two members of the Polizei to hand the letter to the receptionist of the Embassy.

Speeches, songs, and chants continued in English. Finally, at 13:00 just as the demonstration was ending, an Irish citizen leading English-language chants gave a coda with the phrases ‘Lámha as an Phalastín’ (Hands off Palestine) and ‘Saoirse don Phalastín’ (Freedom for Palestine).

At this, several police approached and arrested the individual. The individual was charged with “Verstoß Versammlungsgesetzwhich means “Violation of the assembly law”, in this case being the fact that the person spoke Irish.

This arrest was not an isolated or random incident. Later on in the afternoon, students occupied Humboldt University in protest of Germany’s increasing weaponisation of deportations, particularly against Palestinians and those who support Palestinian liberation, including the Berlin4. Some of the same members of the Polizei​​​​​​​ who were on duty at the protest at the​​​​​​​ Irish Embassy, and who had at the embassy taken a hands-off approach for once, could later be seen on video beating and brutalising the people standing outside the occupied lecture hall in support of those inside. Arabic was banned at this student protest.

The same afternoon, in Leipzig, the German Federal Administrative Court ruled against stopping deportations to Greece. This decision sets an extremely frightening precedent in Germany, which many expect will result in the mass deportation of asylum seekers and refugees. Deportations to Greece from Germany have been largely halted since 2011 due to inhumane living conditions there for deportees.

Last Friday, the Berlin administrative court granted interim relief to one of the Irish citizens that received a deportation order at the beginning of January. The other three people, another Irish citizen, a Polish citizen and a U.S. citizen, have not yet received the same word back, but they have received a court order which states that they can stay until a decision is made on the filed motion within the coming days or weeks.

The motion that the individuals filed was to be able to stay in Berlin for the duration of the appeal of their cases – which the Ministry for the Interior of Berlin originally wanted them to do from their respective home countries.

Le meas,

  • IrishBlocBerlin

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