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Nov 8 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
🇵🇸 Today, the @ProgIntl delegation concludes its investigation of Israel’s systematic violations of international law with a clear and urgent call to governments across the globe: Now is the time for a total energy, economic and arms embargo against Israel.
Download the full report from the delegation: bit.ly/3CkHG0n
On 28 October 2024, an emergency international delegation landed in Palestine to amplify evidence of the Israeli regime’s systematic violations of international law since the start of its genocide in Gaza one year ago.
Nov 7 • 17 tweets • 5 min read
On 7 November 1917, the Russian working class sent shockwaves through the world by overthrowing the Tsar, dismantling Russia’s budding capitalism, and establishing history’s first proletarian state.
The October Revolution began months earlier, sparked by the women textile workers of Petrograd. They took to the streets with simple demands: bread, and the “return of our husbands from the trenches” of World War I.
Oct 20 • 19 tweets • 5 min read
On this day in 1952, the British colonial government in Kenya declared a state of emergency in response to the Mau Mau uprising.
During the eight-year crackdown that followed, 90,000 Kenyans were killed or injured and over one million were forcibly resettled into villages under military occupation.
Oct 4 • 21 tweets • 6 min read
The people of East London defeated Sir Oswald Mosley, the Blackshirts and their police protection on this day in 1936.
In what became known as the Battle of Cable Street, some 250,000 residents, trade unionists and communists banded together to halt Mosley’s fascist march into the heart of the capital’s Jewish community.
Sep 30 • 14 tweets • 4 min read
On 30 September 1965, the Indonesian military, working closely with the US government, initiated a coup that would depose President Sukarno and install the brutal, 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 diplomats drawing up “kill lists” for the Indonesian military. The operation would become a template for the US’s regime change operations for decades to come.
Sep 24 • 13 tweets • 5 min read
On this day 65 years ago, Władysław Gomułka, leader of the socialist Polish People's Republic, announced the "1000 Schools for the Millennium" program — an ambitious plan, hatched in the ashes of WW2, to build one school for every year of Poland's existence.
When the program concluded, over 1400 new schools would be built — "for the benefit of the young generation."
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.
“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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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”.
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.
@uniglobalunion's General Secretary @CHoffmanUNI opens the Summit to Make Amazon Pay
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.