The All-Empire Worker’s League and its Member Organizations call on all Communists, all local Marxist cells, and all those who love the people and yearn for liberation, to engage in immediate efforts to unify and solidify their local allegiances. We urge any and all Marxist-Leninist cells within the US empire or its junior partners Canada and Mexico to contact the League directly to begin the process of integration into a country-wide network capable of opposing the imperialist war machine.

Fight, fail, fight again!

On the morning of the 28th of February 2026, the Great Satan and its vassal in occupied Palestine launched a cluster of missiles at the Islamic Republic of Iran. Just in the opening salvo, the settler-terrorist regime has bombed a school and killed over a hundred school-aged children, decisively bringing the devastation of the children’s holocaust in Gaza to the heartlands of another nation. As thus proven, the imperialists will stop at nothing to reassert their hegemony, to rescue the “Pax Americana,” because they cannot stop. The abyss of financial collapse and imperial decline looms wide in the imaginations of the yankee elites, as well it should. To preserve the empire and their place in it, no crime is too criminal, however grotesque, and no atrocity is too atrocious, however vast. No destruction is too devastating, however permanent and disfiguring for the shared future for humanity. Anything and everything is on the table, no matter the consequences.

Today the Third World War is being fought on every continent. The genocides waged by the imperialists in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo continue unabated. The Alliance of Sahel States continues its open rebellion against the neo-colonial system. The battle with Revolutionary Yemen over control of the Red Sea reignites. Missiles launched by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps rain down across the empire’s “middle east.” Sirens blare once again in the heart of the forward base colony in occupied Palestine. Resistance forces in occupied Iraq launch a new offensive against the imperialists. The decade-long struggle by the Russian Federation to wrest Ukraine from the clutches of the neo-nazi NATO coup regime continues to grind at the unity of the US-NATO-EU imperialist cartel. The people’s struggle for control of the state in Bolivia carries on despite setbacks, and besieged Venezuela and Cuba persist and develop national autonomy with the assistance of the multipolar powers. Soldiers of the Korean People’s Army march triumphant in Pyongyang on their return from the Kursk front, bringing home valuable modern combat experience against imperial troops for use in the defense of their homeland. The Taiwan question looms at the forefront of east Asian politics.

The Palestinian people of Gaza, silenced and forgotten by the West, still struggle for their lives against floods, cold, disease, and starvation, as the colony’s encirclement and genocidal siege continues unabated in its third year. With every passing hour the disfigurement and trauma of colonial genocide is laid ever heavier on the lives and minds of hundreds of thousands of innocents.

At every turn for the past five centuries, the settler-colonial invasion and occupation of our beautiful continent by imperialist Europe and its “United States” has revealed itself to operate according to raw violence and self-interest alone — and today more people than ever before in all of world history stand witness to the unremittent and unabashed savagery of the euro-amerikan imperial system and are asking themselves, “what is to be done?”

Inside the borders of the US empire, the ICE secret police continue to kidnap innocents and doom untold thousands to die in concentration camps. Migrant workers, refugees, and Indigenous people are targeted for ethnic cleansing, and resistance is stamped out by increasingly militarized police forces. The empire’s oppressed wage a daily struggle for survival against a still-rampaging but censored SARS-2 pandemic, eugenicist labor policies, and ever more openly-genocidal ableism and transphobic violence. And yet the “progressives” of the imperial heart of darkness itself are talking about their 2028 electoral candidates, as if this war is merely a matter of legislative policy. Many “socialists” insist that revolution is impossible, and the Four Opportunist Parties continue their strategies of co-opting spontaneous organizing and demobilizing radical movements. For those of us in the imperial core, the question of how to respond, how to organize, and how to start winning, weighs more heavily and more urgently than ever.

Take stock of the international situation, of how ever more of the world is drawn into conflict with the empire. Then take stock of your local situation, of how ever more people around you are drawn into antagonism with the system. Settlers splinter into fragmentary interest groups as the solution to the crisis of imperialism becomes a more contentious and pressing issue, or they simply “check out” of political engagement altogether, preferring to numb themselves with the bread and circuses of our age. At the same time, the oppressed are drawn to co-operate and resist together, or die alone. As the international situation shifts, it is reflected in the local conditions we experience. Just as the settlers here are more and more at each others’ throats, the member states of the NATO imperialist cartel descend into infighting as their position worsens and continues to destabilize. The experience of the first two world wars of the capitalist-imperialist era taught us that global war is the standard modus operandi of how the global capitalist system resolves its internal crises. Furthermore, the experience of the first two world wars taught us that only revolutionary war can put an end to these conflicts. The first world war was ended by revolutionary uprisings in Russia and Germany, and the second by the united efforts of the revolutionary peoples of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China. No such revolutionary force directly threatens the heartlands of the imperialist forces today as the Soviet Union and its allies once did, and so this third world war will only end as the first did: when the revolutionary masses within the empire unite and put an end to it. These masses are the millions in occupied New Afrika and the occupied First Nations, and the millions of settlers oppressed by their state on the basis of their ability, gender, sexuality, and age.

In fighting all of these wars the empire is running out of ammunition; its production simply can’t keep up. Where it can’t control us with naked force, it seeks to intimidate us with pervasive surveillance. But always remember that the empire doesn’t have the manpower to surveil all of us. This is why it pours its finances into AI to do the work for it (as well as to create venues for speculation and parasitism). The empire aims to have the repression infrastructure it needs built before the AI bubble bursts, but rampant corruption and insufficient electrical infrastructure call even that goal into question. It has taken the combined efforts of billions of people in struggle over the last century to bring the empire to its knees, and our task is paltry by comparison: organize a few million more to at last tear out the empire’s heart on behalf of all humanity. We have to turn the third world war into the second US civil war, and carry this war to vanquish the settler empire once and for all. Only a policy of revolutionary defeatism, the pursuit of the empire’s defeat and complete capitulation to its enemies from within, can provide us the concrete foundation for building revolutionary unity among our organizations. All revolutionary and anti-imperialist organizations must struggle between one another for unity on this line, and where such organizations do not yet exist, they must be built.

On 12 January, the day commemorating the 1904 revolt of the Herero people against German colonialism, Olaf Scholz’s government announced that it would intervene in the International Court of Justice to oppose South Africa’s charge of genocide against Israel. The move sparked widespread indignation.

The following day, the Namibian presidency published a forceful statement condemning the decision.

“On Namibian soil, Germany committed the first genocide of the 20th century,” the statement said. “In light of Germany’s inability to draw lessons from its horrific history, President Hage G. Geingob expresses deep concern with the shocking decision.”

It is worth dwelling on the word “inability.” Many who condemned Germany’s decision accused it of “failure.”

Germany, they argued, has a sacred responsibility to humanity for its role in World War II. It has failed in that responsibility.

But if Germany’s decision is a failure, then its actions are an aberration, a deviation from some expected historic norm.

“Failure” substitutes open complicity with omission. It replaces the systemic with the particular.

Instead, Germany’s position demonstrates that, despite the horrors that German imperialism has inflicted on humanity in the 20th century, the German ruling class has been able to preserve fascism’s ideological and material basis.

Rather than a “failure,” then, German policy represents a remarkable success. It testifies to the great resilience of the colonial mentality.

And it makes clear that moral condemnation – or, worse still, self-designated “guilt” – is an inadequate framework by which to establish accountability for the crimes of imperial and colonial domination.

Wretched legacy

Germany’s stance is a gift for those of us who consider ourselves anti-imperialists. It dismantles one of the central ideological defenses of the imperial order.

For decades, Europe and North America have worked to cleave Nazism from the colonial tradition that birthed it. The singular evil of the Holocaust became the wellspring of the Germans’ singular “guilt” – a mechanism that both laundered the wretched legacies of the wider colonial world and obscured the threads that bound its sordid history to the present day.

If Nazism stood alone in the annals of human barbarity, then everything else could be cast to the side: the exterminations, the enslavement, the famines, the plunder.

The genocide of the Herero people – and Germany’s flagrant inability to address this legacy – provides an immediate rebuke. It was in modern-day Namibia that Germany’s Imperial Chancery recorded perhaps the first use of the term Konzentrationslager – the concentration camp – to describe an instrument of mass extermination.

Among other abuses, inmates were tortured, starved, worked to death, condemned to disease, and subject to medical experiments. Most were women and children.

As cruel punishment for the 1904 revolt, Germany killed some 65,000 Herero people in four years and over 10,000 Nama people who also dared rise up against its domination. It was in Namibia that Germany honed the tools that it would turn against Communists, Jews, Roma, Sinti, homosexuals and people with mental illnesses just a few decades later.

But the subjugation of Namibia furnished just part of that wretched toolkit.

Hitler’s “Wild West”

Adolf Hitler sought to conquer the “Wild East” and build a slave nation of the Slavs – a people who, by virtue of their past abuse by leaders like Charlemagne, gave the etymological root to the word “slave.” Hitler envisioned a settler-colonial project that would secure “living space” for Volksdeutsche – or “members of the German nation” – and obliterate the “Bolshevik subhumans.”

He found a template in US “manifest destiny” and its project of westward expansion.

In 1928, Hitler remarked approvingly how US settlers had “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage.” Hitler would create a “Wild West” to Germany’s East.

In this way, Nazism carried forward the European colonial tradition against the greatest threat that had yet emerged against it: the Soviet Union.

The Soviet counteroffensive not only crushed the dreams of the Third Reich and liberated Europe from fascist imperialism. It also cast a permanent shadow on the mythos of German “guilt.”

The Soviet Union was, after all, the Germans’ first target. Hitler promised that Germany would stand as the “bulwark” of the West against Bolshevism – a position that, for a time, found broad support among the Western ruling class.

Through its war of extermination and enslavement, the Nazi colonial project claimed an estimated 27 million Soviet lives.

Through deliberate starvation, disease, mass executions, it massacred 3.5 million Soviet prisoners of war, considering them to be Untermensch – or subhuman. Auschwitz was first built for them.

Germany systematically exterminated one in four Belarussians, often by forcing entire village populations into barns and churches, setting them on fire, and shooting anyone who dared to escape. The crimes are too ghastly and numerous to recount here.

If Germany was compelled by “guilt” to pay reparations to Israel for decades after the war, why did its reparations to the Soviet Union cease within years of its defeat? In violation of the Potsdam Agreement, the Western occupation zones stopped their payments to the Soviets before the ashes of war had settled.

The USSR could only plug the gap with technology transfers from its own occupation zone in the East, which proved to be a major burden on the development of the young socialist state.

Not with Israel.

Konrad Adenauer, then chancellor of West Germany, spoke bluntly when he met David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, in 1960.

Adenauer said, “We will help you, out of moral reasons and out of practical politics. Israel is the fortress of the West, Israel has to develop in the interest of the whole world.”

These transfers – in the form of financial assistance, weapons sales, and diplomatic cover – continue to this day.

Here, the payment of reparations reveals itself to have a purely political character, an instrument to bolster the allies of imperialism while stifling the development of its adversaries.

If Germany is compelled by “guilt” to support Israel, then why does it not extend the same support to the Russian and Belarussian people?

Instead, Germany’s former victims have retained their historic designation as Untermensch.

“People simply die”

In 2022, German researcher Florence Gaub channeled the virulent Russophobia that exploded in her country by repeating a trope that will not be unfamiliar to the colonized. “We should not forget that, even if Russians look European, they are not European,” she said. “In a cultural sense, they think differently about violence or death… That is why they treat death differently, that people simply die.”

When a German activist asked whether the German government would consider the siege of Leningrad – which claimed 1.5 million lives in 900 days – as a genocide, Annalena Baerbock’s foreign ministry replied that the UN Genocide Convention did not apply retroactively. Of course, this statute of limitations did not seem to bind the Bundestag, which months earlier recognized a famine that struck the Soviet Union as a genocide in Ukraine, putting it on equal footing with the Holocaust in a grotesque act of historical revisionism.

If Germany is so riven by “guilt,” then why did the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR) stand by the people of Palestine?

At the level of official policy, the GDR differentiated between Jews and the state of Israel – a position that would be considered anti-Semitic in Germany today.

The GDR saw that Israel was deeply imbricated in the system of imperialism led by the US. It cooperated closely with Arab countries and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) – including at a military level.

The first PLO office in Eastern Europe opened in Berlin in 1973.

The GDR considered Zionism as a “reactionary nationalist ideology of the Jewish big bourgeoisie.”

This echoed the analysis of Palestinian thinkers like Ghassan Kanafani, who showed that Jewish migration to Palestine between 1932 and 1936 included a significant percentage of capitalists – along with a sizeable proletariat. Together, they transformed Palestine’s agrarian society into a bourgeois industrialized economy with employment reserved for “Jewish labor only.”

This policy of racial exclusion “was to have grave consequences,” Kanafani wrote, “as it led to the rapid emergence of fascist patterns in the society of Jewish settlers.”

“Never again” must mean resistance

Anti-colonial thinkers understood Nazism for what it was. It was not alien to them.

They saw the coming storm and, when it passed, understood clearly what they had seen. Its ideology had already been threaded through their world.

In 1900, W.E.B. Du Bois had warned that the exploitation of the colonized world would be “fatal” to Europe’s “high ideals of justice, freedom and culture.”

Decades later, after the horrors of German colonialism had swept through Europe, the Martinican poet and thinker Aimé Césaire would repeat that warning — now as a profound indictment of European society:

They say: ‘How strange! But never mind – it’s Nazism, it will pass!’ And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps and trickles from every crack… At the end of the blind alley that is Europe… there is Hitler. At the end of capitalism, which is eager to outlive its day, there is Hitler.

Germany’s gift to progressive forces is precisely that it has exposed the continuity of the colonial project.

Germany does not support the Zionist genocide despite the Holocaust. It supports Zionism for the same reason that it birthed Nazism.

It backs Benjamin Netanyahu for the same reason that it created Adolf Hitler. At a time of systemic crisis, both appeared as bulwarks of Western imperialism against the rebellious Untermensch, the subhumans – the people who “treat death differently,” who “just die.”

The history of colonial and imperial domination has seen many Final Solutions – each limited in its barbarism only by the technological capabilities of the perpetrators and the strength of the resistance mounted against them. That is why the words “never again” ring out from Jakarta to Santiago, Pyongyang to São Paulo, Hanoi to Buenos Aires, Kinshasa to Gaza City.

Gaza is a dress rehearsal for the violence that threatens workers and oppressed peoples everywhere as the crises of our century grow in magnitude. This is the historical tendency of capitalism in decay.

Now, the contours of our century’s struggle – dimmed by decades of imperialist hegemony – come into sharp focus.

On one side, an Axis of Genocide is in formation as Germany, the US, Canada, the UK and other ramparts of the imperial order intervene on the side of extermination. On the other, we find an Axis of Resistance made up of those who know colonialism’s wretched face.

If “never again” is to have any meaning at all, it must mean joining the resistance and dismantling the imperialist system before it absorbs us into its unrelenting death march.