Jesus fuck Americans who cares if some undocumented migrants get some healthcare! Who cares if ALL of them do! I'm not even going to say "they pay taxes", because also Americans I don't give a fuck if people get access to healthcare without paying whatever you think is 'enough' in taxes. Grow up

Given events in the US, you have to think any real resurgence of industrial struggle could lead to both increasing state violence against unionising or striking workers, and also increasing anti-worker violence from fascists seeking to play roles previously filled by groups like the American Legion.

"You say you're against ethnic cleansing, but go to Gaza and you'll see they barely recycle at all! Bet you feel differently about the genocide now huh?! Crazy liberals..."

Remember when James Joyce, in probably the funniest truly great novel of the 20th century, had Haines try to de-politicise away any critique of the British Empire's actions in Ireland by saying "it seems history is to blame"?

What roles might National Guards play in the struggles over fascist reconstitution and consolidation of the US state? Will they just be largely kept passive or used as adjuncts to US military personnel increasingly deployed against people in the US?

Bigotries aren't some kind of default setting of human subjectivity; they have to be learned. When I was in primary school, the ONLY kids from whom I ever heard anti-Semitic comments were by a remarkable coincidence also the kids who would go to 'Sunday School' on the weekend.

Every day Haaretz sends out an email to subscribers, 'Israel at War day whatever'. And they just will not stop.

'No Cause For Alarm', a response to the resurgence of racist terrorism against black people in the US following the end of the Second World War, in the October 1946 issue of the Negro History Bulletin.

When I was very young, certainly still a pre-teen, I found a 1971 collection of texts in one of my parents' bookshelves, put together by Angela Davis and Bertina Aptheker and et al, entitled If they come in the morning...: Voices of Resistance.

Zohran Mamdani.

Been reading about the disputes between the English government and the Roman Catholic Church in the three centuries before the Reformation, and the series of statutes passed by successive English parliaments prohibiting the transfer of money to non-resident "alien priors" of the Church.

I sometimes see people pretending to believe people will be "offended" or "distressed" by the "intimidating" act of someone indicating they think Palestinian people are people who should have a right to live free of oppression and ethnic cleansing. It's a whole thing. www.sbs.com.au/news/article...

And before you ask, no, he very much didn't mean it rhetorically. It's not the first time he's said this and he's been very clear about this being the literal, actual truth. 1500 percent. edition.cnn.com/2025/08/11/b...

We've just delivered 80 pages and over 2,700 signatures to the PM's office, calling for sanctions on Israel now to put a stop to the genocide.

Justice Rangiah in his own words in Lattouf v ABC penalty decision. The broadcaster has been ordered to pay $150,000. I was previously awarded $70,000 for hurt and distress. ABC has spent in excess of $2 million on legal fees. The real cost to Aunty is immeasurable.

Fucking Haaretz, war my ass. How about 'Israel at genocide: What you need to know – day 718'. @haaretzcom.bsky.social

"...game managers pushed “beaver drop boxes” attached to war-surplus parachutes out of airplanes" From Steven M. Fountain's 'Ranchers' Friend and Farmers' Foe: Reshaping Nature with Beaver Reintroduction in California', in the April 2014 issue of Environmental History . doi.org/10.1093/envh...

Excerpt from 'The Harveian Oration On Science And Modern Civilisation' delivered by Sir William Roberts before the Royal College of Physicians and then printed in the 23 October 1897 issue of The British Medical Journal. doi.org/10.1136/bmj.... @bmj.com

Despite the predictably dishonest rhetoric of US fascists, it's very obvious that most of the people being targeted in the wake of the murder of Charlie Kirk haven't been publicly "celebrating" his murder so much as quoting things Kirk said or giving their opinions about Kirk's words and actions.

Noting the actual imagined purpose of something I posted for a change, over the last year or so I noticed some people dismissing the suffragettes as just a bunch of racist white women, so I thought I'd illustrate some of the actual content at both ends of the spectrum. bsky.app/profile/benr...

I live in a country where, partly during my lifetime one of the states could not reasonably be referred to as a democracy, because the electoral system was so massively gerrymandered that for over thirty years the same party could win every time with a smaller and smaller vote share.

In 1912, mainstream, supposedly respectable US publications could publish people claiming that "the blond races" - we all know what they mean right? - "cannot permanently live south of the fortieth parallel on account of the effects of the light on their nervous systems".

Arguing for women's suffrage and asking: Who are the REAL defenders of the British Empire? Who is REALLY defending the purity of the race? Excerpt from the 10 September 1909 issue of Votes For Women, the paper put out by the Women's Social and Political Union. www.jstor.org/stable/commu...

Two excerpts from the 520 page pamphlet put out containing President Jackson's 1836 'state of the union' address to Congress and related documentation. Only part of the material dedicated to the project of removing the Great Raft from the Red River.

Excerpt from the 1944 International Communists of Germany pamphlet, 'Capitalist barbarism or socialism: On the development of declining capitalism and on the situation, tasks and perspectives of the labor movement'. www.jstor.org/stable/commu...

American fascists are weird. I'm not especially into superhero media, but I actually liked Peacemaker's drug-fueled bisexual orgy. Because politics of representation. How often is anything like my life shown in mainstream media?

A report on a February 1944 conference of German trade unionists trying to plan for the development of a new trade union movement in a post-Hitler Germany. From the August 1944 issue of the US Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics journal, Monthly Labor Review.

I keep being struck by parallels between how accounts of Palestinian people are effaced and disqualified by nominally serious people, and this one 1937 book about French colonialism in 'Indo-China', how that book talked about occupation and relied almost entirely on French colonial sources...

Thinking of Weimar arty types operating in worlds intersecting with Left Communist and anarchist tendencies, The Activists are one of the first groups to come to mind. Of those in or around The Activists, was Kurt Hiller the one most overtly dedicated to opposing the homophobic laws of Weimar?

In the right circumstances, if you normalise oppression enough, you might get to call the people who point it out bigots. But if you're REALLY successful, you might get to call them criminals or terrorists, and then openly punish anyone who points it out for aiding criminals or terrorists.

Did anyone come up with a word or phrase trying to capture the role of the formal existence and continual invocation of a 'peace process' in helping efface the reality that for decade after decade Zionist settler-colonial expansion never stopped, never even really paused? Peace-process-washing?

'Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, UN Commission finds' (16 September 2025) www.ohchr.org/en/press-rel...

"How dare you say the Reichstag was very ugly architecture!" "Do not put up photos of what the Reichstag really looked like!" "Don't go promoting videos of the building already falling apart!"

Christopher Lockyear, Secretary General of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), 'Doctors can’t stop genocide. World leaders can.' (15 September 2025) www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/docto...

The first proper Nazi concentration camps were set up by 'storm troops' - Sturmabteilung, what people call the SA to distinguish them from the SS - in the aftermath of the 1933 Reichstag fire.

If the world ever escapes this ongoing Nazi-like reconstitution of US state and society, this will be written about as one moment in which those enforcing the new racial state grope toward formal institutionalisation, and toward abolishing any need for formal vindication. youtu.be/6ERPT3tZTSc?...

It's never really been my thing, but for monogamy people who view what they do in online (or any) dating as 'cheating', it's remarkable to watch someone suddenly maintaining hopefully compatible fictions over at least four different channels of communication, in real time. Looks exhausting.

Anyone know of an account of the media response to the Reichstag Fire? What did the spectrum of coverage look like, obviously in the context of the increasing censorship of and fascist influence over much of the media? @evansmithhist.bsky.social @jonpiccini.bsky.social @drjpersian.bsky.social

After World War Two, some people objected to 'the West' supporting the consolidation of fascist rule in Greece. Excerpt from L. S. Stavrianos and E. P. Panagopoulos, 'Present-Day Greece', in the June 1948 issue of The Journal of Modern History. doi.org/10.1086/237194

Very excited that my new article with @andrekosvarnava.bsky.social has been published open access in @historicaljnl.bsky.social 'Transnational Whiteness and the Elite Backlash to Reforming the Australian Immigration Control System in the 1950s and 1960s' www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

There's a reasonably famous incident in Australia in which one of the local nazis got shot to death by another nazi while wearing a shirt that read "say no to gun control laws". Wayne "Bovver" Smith. From the August 1993 edition of Australian Press Council News. Because it's all... something.

Writing a long thread while I'm tired and emotional leads to even more typos than usual, and if I'm twenty-odd posts in before I notice errors earlier in the thread, I'm going to have to learn to feel less bothered by such things.

I replied to Kevin Rudd.

In the '20s and right through until the end of the '30s, probably the most significant minority tendency within the British Conservative Party was the supporters of fascism.

It's comfortably over a year and a half since, somewhere else, I wrote that if wasn't for "this ongoing nightmare", I'd be enjoying writing about how Maxime Rodinson read and wrote about Daniel Guérin in 1953, when the latter wrote at length on the Kinsey Report. January 2024.

So there's a Gaza Solidarity Concert less than two weeks away.. At the Corner Hotel in Richmond on Sunday week. tickets.cornerhotel.com/outlet/event...

The rhetoric currently being deployed especially in the US and even in Australia about 'anti-Semitism' is truly surreal. Not just because a core goal of many trying to shape the discourse is to villainise anyone critical of a state in the middle of ethnic cleansing and committing genocide.

Over five quarters of a century ago, the almost legendary Socialist leader in the German Reichstag, August Bebel, presented a petition to that body arguing for abolition of the repressively homophobic Paragraph 175, laws criminalising homosexuality which would put thousands of gay people in prison.

The International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) Resolution on the Situation in Gaza (31 August 2025) genocidescholars.org/publications...