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Sep 13 9 tweets 4 min read
“Economic liberation will not be granted. It must be seized.” Last night, the @ProgIntl kicked off the UN General Assembly with a presentation of its Program of Action on the Construction of a New International Economic Order — going live on 22 September 2024. Stay tuned.


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“The historical conjuncture in which we find ourselves requires us not only to recognize the threats of the dominant powers of the present international economic order, but also to build a new kind of power—from the bottom up.” – @adam_tooze Image
Sep 11 18 tweets 6 min read
On this day in 1973, Salvador Allende’s democratically-elected socialist government was overthrown in a military coup led by the US-backed fascist Augusto Pinochet. Image Like most of Latin America, resource-rich Chile had been plagued by underdevelopment since Spanish colonisation in the 1500s.
Sep 9 18 tweets 6 min read
Two months after the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, the first meeting of the International Supervisory Committee on Non-Intervention took place in London on 9 September 1936. Image The Non-Intervention Pact was to become a vital instrument in British imperialism’s attempts to conceal its true sympathies, providing diplomatic cover for its lack of support for Spain’s legitimate government. Image
Jul 9 9 tweets 6 min read
The Guatemalan army, under the command of General Efraín Ríos Montt, launched Operation Sofia on 8 July 1982.

Supported by the Reagan administration in Washington, the goal of this brutal counterinsurgency campaign was to “cleanse” indigenous Maya areas of alleged communists. Image Alongside a series of other scorched earth missions, Operation Sofia encapsulated what Ríos Montt referred to as a “war without limits.” More than 600 villages were destroyed, thousands of people were massacred, and thousands more were displaced.
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May 22 11 tweets 5 min read
President Harry S. Truman signed a bill authorising $400 million of "military and economic assistance" for Greece and Turkey on this day in 1947, inaugurating an age of destabilising US interventions around the globe. Image The bill formalised the Truman Doctrine and committed the United States to the Cold War — a war so far-reaching in its implications that some historians described it as a Third World War, which revealed that the US was prepared to use any and every means to defeat communism and the forces of liberation.Image
Mar 24 8 tweets 5 min read
Isabel Perón’s Argentinian government was overthrown by a US-backed coup on this day in 1976, ushering in a bloody dictatorship under which 30,000 people were killed and disappeared. Image For the US Ambassador in Argentina, who had already warned Washington of the plotter's plans for “military rule of extended duration and of unprecedented severity”, the coup was "probably the best executed and most civilized coup in Argentine history."

The West German ambassador in Buenos Aires was even more blunt, describing Argentina as a “cornerstone in the expanded transatlantic security framework, a market and source of raw materials, home of many German settlers and German assets.” These reactions foreshadowed US and European support for Argentina’s murderous junta.Image
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Jan 21 9 tweets 5 min read
Vladimir Ulyanov, known by his pseudonym Lenin, died on this day 100 years ago. Lenin was one of history’s great pathfinders of socialism, a relentless thinker who insisted always on a “concrete analysis of the concrete situation” against the dogmatism and idealism of his peers. Image Writing in 1920, Leon Trotsky called Lenin the “first worker” of the transformation of the old world.

“To be able to direct such a revolution, without precedent in the history of peoples,” he wrote, “it is most evidently necessary to have an indissoluble organic connection with the main strength of popular life, a connection which springs from the deepest roots.”Image
Nov 2, 2023 17 tweets 5 min read
On this day in 1917, Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, issued a public statement declaring Britain’s “sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations” and offering its support for what it called a “national home for the Jewish people in Palestine”. Image The statement, known today as the Balfour Declaration, laid the grounds for what was to come.

In the late 19th century, a political and ideologically colonial movement called Zionism emerged in Europe. It sought to create a Jewish national home in Palestine.
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Oct 27, 2023 42 tweets 17 min read
BREAKING: Amazon announces nearly tripled profits & quarterly revenues of $143 billion.

Amazon can afford to pay a decent wage, clean up its act & pay a fair share of taxes.

Today at the Summit to Make Amazon Pay, we’re coming together to make it so.

makeamazonpay.com/Summit/ “Amazon is a threat to our workers, our communities and our planet.

This is the fight of our time.”

@uniglobalunion's General Secretary @CHoffmanUNI opens the Summit to Make Amazon Pay Image
Apr 19, 2023 13 tweets 5 min read
Today we recall the Conference of Afro-Asian Peoples (18-24 April 1955). Known as the Bandung Conference after the Indonesian city where it was held, the event deepened unity among Africa and Asia, and is said to have inspired the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961. The conference brought together 29 nations representing more than half the world population. Writing about the gathering, R. Wright explained: “the West is excluded. Emphasis is on the coloured nations of the world... This is perhaps the greatest historic event of our century.” Image
Mar 19, 2023 12 tweets 5 min read
Twenty years ago today, the USA, UK and their allies invaded Iraq — one of the greatest atrocities of the 21st century. Built on lies and deception, the war killed as many as one million people; displaced over four million; inaugurated a global network of torture camps; and destabilised an entire region. Two decades later, the war criminals walk free.

Saddam Hussein was not always an adversary. twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Mar 4, 2023 36 tweets 28 min read
LIVE NOW:

Watch the Sydney sitting of the #BelmarshTribunal to #FreeAssange.

Join us as we live tweet from the Great Hall, University of Sydney.

Tag @AlboMP, Prime Minister of Australia, and Joe Biden, @POTUS.

Thread👇

#BelmarshTribunal #FreeAssange

youtube.com/live/fsun8e4E4… Aunty Nadeena Dixon, a Gadigal, Yuin and Wiradjuri woman, welcomes us to unceded Gadigal Country.

#AlwaysWasAlwaysWillBe
Jan 9, 2023 17 tweets 5 min read
On this day ten years ago, Sakine Cansız, Kurdish revolutionary and one of two female founding members of the PKK, was assassinated during the triple murder of Kurdish activists in Paris, France. To some, she was known as the “Kurdish Rosa Luxemburg”, to others just as “Sara”. Cansız was one of the first women to join the Kurdish freedom movement. As one of only two women to participate in the PKK’s 1978 founding congress, she proposed — inspired by examples from other socialist movements — the formation of autonomous women’s units.
Dec 31, 2022 12 tweets 4 min read
On 1 January 1804, the Haitian people threw off the chains of enslavement and established the world’s first Black Republic.

155 years later, on the island of Cuba, Fidel Castro led the Cuban people to defeat the forces of imperialism and embark on the path of socialism. Image Drawing parallels between these two great struggles for national liberation, Trinidadian Marxist historian C.L.R. James wrote that “what took place in French San Domingo in 1792-1804 reappeared in Cuba in 1958.” Image
Oct 25, 2022 13 tweets 5 min read
The US military invaded Grenada on this day in 1983. The invasion toppled the Caribbean Island’s socialist government which had come to power four years earlier. Image Under the pretense of evacuating US medical students, ‘Operation Urgent Fury’ was an imperialist intervention designed to crush the Grenadian liberation movement and any threat it posed to US influence. ImageImageImage
Sep 30, 2022 14 tweets 4 min read
On this day in 1965, the Indonesian military, working closely with the US government, initiated a coup that deposed President Sukarno and installed the 30-year dictatorship of General Suharto. In the dark years that followed, the dictatorship massacred over a million Indonesian communists, with the CIA and US embassy staffers drawing up “kill lists” for the Indonesian military. The operation would become a template for future US regime change operations.
Sep 26, 2022 8 tweets 2 min read
Today, the Cuban people voted to adopt the most progressive Family Code in the world.

Over 66% of voters approved an amendment to the constitution that legally redefines what it means to be a family, putting an emphasis on love, human dignity, equality and non-discrimination. The new Family Code took shape through a participatory process that involved 6,481,200 people, or around 75% of the Cuban electorate. Over 20 new drafts of the law were produced following nearly 80,000 neighbourhood meetings and almost 500,000 public proposals.
Sep 2, 2022 6 tweets 2 min read
This Sunday, the people of Chile will decide: Approve a new constitution or default to the old written under dictator Augusto Pinochet by a group of economists known as the ‘Chicago Boys’. Who were they? Why did they matter? And how can we bury their bloody legacy? The ‘Chicago Boys’, a group of Chilean economists who had studied at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, wrote the El Ladrillo (or The Brick), during the campaign of Jorge Alessandri, the right-wing presidential candidate in the 1970 elections.
Aug 6, 2022 13 tweets 5 min read
Today in 1945, the United States committed a war crime without precedent in human history. It dropped the first atomic bomb, one of only two ever used in war, on the city of Hiroshima, killing a third of its inhabitants. The bombing would define the stakes of the Cold War. Image Japan had already been devastated. The US firebombing of Tokyo had killed over 100,000 people in a single night in March 1945. The bombing of Osaka had destroyed eight square miles of the city in one air raid. Some 100 Japanese cities had been devastated or destroyed entirely. ImageImage
Jun 18, 2022 15 tweets 5 min read
On this day in 1954, the United States backed a coup against the democratically-elected leader of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz. Guatemala held its first free elections in 1945 after the fall of brutal dictator Jorge Ubico, whose regime sanctioned the killings of insubordinate workers and obligatory unpaid manual labor. The government elected in 1945 oversaw improvements in health, education and rights.
Jun 17, 2022 11 tweets 4 min read
On this day in 1971, the Builders Labourers’ Federation of Australia began its first ‘green ban’. These strikes, where builders would refuse to work on construction sites, would cripple attempts by developers to destroy areas of ecological importance and aboriginal heritage. The ‘Battle for Kelly’s Bush’ saw the first of many coordinated efforts by the BLF to prevent development. Kelly’s Bush remains today an area of natural beauty in the suburbs of Sydney, and hosts aboriginal sandstone carvings.