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Almost 500 anti-genocide activists arrested as Starmer government moves to ban protests outright (www.wsws.org)

submitted 1 month ago by technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/world@lemmy.world

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London’s Metropolitan Police arrested another 492 people over the weekend after a protest Saturday in Trafalgar Square, as the Starmer government accelerated its crackdown on opposition to the Gaza genocide.

The entirely peaceful protest was held to oppose the proscription of Palestine Action. It was organised by Defend Our Juries and attended by over 1,000 people. Of the arrests, 488 were for holding up signs declaring, “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action”.

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[-] kami@lemmy.dbzer0.com 163 points 1 month ago

UK is a fascist regime. Well done!

[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 98 points 1 month ago

Folks who get really up in their feelings about the Trump/Harris election seem to forget that Harris was taking campaign advice from this guy. It's so easy to forget how absolutely poisoned so-called "Liberal Democracy" has become with a broad strain of fascist tendency.

On the one hand, you've got a guy who is looking to literally lay siege to cities in the US that didn't vote for him. On the opposite side of the pond, they're doing mass-arrests of anyone with a "Please Stop Killing Brown People" bumper sticker. And in the middle, a sea of smug dipshits posting "You got what you voted for".

[-] BCBoy911@lemmy.ca 56 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Liberals will ALWAYS end up siding with the Fascists to try to suppress the Left. Happened in Germany in the 1930s, and the dumbass liberals eventually ended up lined up against the same walls the communists and socialists were lined up against. If you're a liberal today and defending this fascist suppression against Palestine Action: you're next.

[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 25 points 1 month ago

Happened in Germany in the 1930s

Happened in the 1910s, even. Hence the old quip about Bernie Sanders killing Rosa Luxemburg.

dumbass liberals eventually ended up lined up against the same walls the communists and socialists were lined up against

Or marched out into the snows of Russia to seize more Lebensraum for the imperial core. Or just bombed to death in Dresden or Berlin when the front lines collapsed.

If you’re a liberal today and defending this fascist suppression against Palestine Action: you’re next.

The hard math of living in a fascist state is standing up and getting shot today or ducking and hiding in hopes you won't get shot tomorrow.

Liberals made their bed back in 2009. We're all just living in the aftermath.

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[-] FaceDeer@fedia.io 42 points 1 month ago

And then there's the Americans, for whom literally everything has to be about America in some way or another.

[-] TrojanRoomCoffeePot@lemmy.world 22 points 1 month ago

Have you seen their fiction? Even in sci-fi, they're the center of the fucking universe. Galactic Space Empire HQ, located in NYC/LA/San Francisco of course.

[-] Bronzebeard@lemmy.zip 23 points 1 month ago

I mean... After the USSR fell, the US was the only major player in space for like 25 years, until China finally started to dabble the last few years.

It's not necessarily an ego stroke to extrapolate from that point.

But also, the media is targeted at American viewers. Of course they're going to use familiar cities.

Do you also complain that doctor who, despite being able to travel anywhere in the both the universe AND time, lands in modern day UK so often?

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[-] yucandu@lemmy.world 109 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

That's a funny looking labour government you got there UK.

How did you guys go from Corbyn to this? Is it so hard to have a labour party leader that doesn't back Israel or Russia?

[-] Small_Quasar@lemmy.world 71 points 1 month ago

Starmer is terrified of Reform. So he's taken the really smart stance of pulling Labour to the right to court a demographic that would never vote Labour anyway, and in the meantime utterly piss off his core base.

[-] iAvicenna@lemmy.world 26 points 1 month ago

This almost always fails and only ends up moving the country average to right and make extreme right seem more mild.

Also I don't think right wing voters have that strong an opinion on Israel. This is more likely zionist lobbies pulling some of Starmer's strings.

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[-] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

A campaign by Israeli-backed British Jewish groups of anti-semitism slanders against Corbyn (so extreme that at one point a Jewish Holocaust Survivor was deemed an anti-semite to get at Corbyn by association) toppled him down from Labour Party leadership, to be replaced by these types, who as soon as they got control of the Labour Party started purging it of people who had voiced Leftwing ideas and support for Corbyn.

Essentially Labour was emptied from the inside and its shell was filled with supporters of a foreign ethno-Fascist regime.

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[-] verdi@feddit.org 71 points 1 month ago

90% chance the mossad has a bunch of videos of Starmer and his cabinet diddling kids, or engaging in animality with pigs, whatever is the depravity du jour was in his heyday.

Meanwhile the nazis march against london with Stephen Yaxley-Lennon at the helm. 0 actual enforcement. The funniest part is Yaxley-Lennon was invited by an israeli minister to visit Israel...

Can you imagine travelling back to 1943 and telling people in the camps that their sacrifice would be the fertilizer of a new wave of the same ideological poison that deprived them of dignity and life. This is just heartbreaking... What's even the point of resisting anymore?

[-] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 23 points 1 month ago

Friendly reminder indeed that Epstein was likely a Mossad asset and there are likely more like him.

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[-] ToastedPlanet 14 points 1 month ago

Resisting tyranny is how everything good in the world is possible. The way to have lives worth living is to defeat tyrants and their ideologies. We defeated the Nazis but not fascism. Now we have to defeat the ideological descendants of the Nazis.

If we don't defeat fascism, neoliberalism, and capitalism now the turn around time for the next fascist movement will be measured in years not decades. We have seen as much with the Biden administration. They failed to meaningfully hold Trump and MAGA to account for the insurrection or fundamentally fix the underling systemic issues that they are symptoms of and now we are living under fascist rule.

We don't have dignified lives or liberal democracies to go back to. The way to get something better is with socialist democracies where workers own corporations and the political process. Until then it's liberty or death. We benefited from a free democracy. If anyone is to enjoy that again we must resist now and until we are all free.

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[-] theacharnian@lemmy.ca 58 points 1 month ago

This is so self defeating... Palestine Action should have never been declared a "terrorist organization" in the same category as Al Qaeda and Daesh. People see right through that and it causes a backlash. Nd the UK government doubling down on the backlash creates even more backlash. I mean anyone can see that at this point that the government has lost the political battle on this one and is just chugging through due to the sunk cost fallacy. This is only paving the way for the Right to do a comeback. Fucking centrist liberals man, god damn.

[-] HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 15 points 1 month ago

No of course not, Al Qaeda is our great ally in Syria now, or some completely legit and organic offshoot of said group.

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[-] Hotznplotzn@lemmy.sdf.org 52 points 1 month ago

I don't support the UK crackdown on peaceful protesters, but this wsws.org is a de-facto Chinese propaganda medium. That's not a good source.

[-] dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de 43 points 1 month ago

The Independent

[-] Socialism_Everyday@reddthat.com 17 points 1 month ago

It's a good source if it reports on the fascist behaviors of the UK government. With this trend, how long do you think western media will be able to report freely on this stuff?

[-] NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io 12 points 1 month ago

this wsws.org is a de-facto Chinese propaganda medium.

How so?

[-] yucandu@lemmy.world 20 points 1 month ago

Not OP but I found this on wiki:

The WSWS described the 2014 Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine as a coup backed by the United States and Germany in which the Ukrainian far-right coalition of organizations Right Sector and political party Svoboda would have played a "crucial role".[13] Furthermore, the WSWS criticized the coverage of the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2014 by the majority of German media outlets, describing it was one-sided and "anti-Russian propaganda". Thus, leading outlets such as Der Spiegel and Die Zeit would have been clamouring for military action against Russia and attacking the President of Russia Vladimir Putin, "who is portrayed as a new Hitler and an aggressor".[14]

About the shootdown of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in 2014, the WSWS stated that "Washington has presented not one shred of evidence that Flight MH17 was brought down by a missile either fired by the anti-Kiev forces or supplied by Moscow". Regarding the assassination of Boris Nemtsov in 2015, David North wrote for the WSWS that he was wondering if the United States was planning a coup to replace Putin with a "Western-friendly oligarch".[15] On February 22, 2022 the WSWS issued a statement opposing Putin's invasion of Ukraine, calling for the unity of Russian and Ukrainian workers against both Putin and NATO.[16]

Is it so hard to find a socialist organisation that isn't just simple contrarians?

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[-] twinklefruit@lemmings.world 40 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

[removed by mod]

[-] FlyingCircus@lemmy.world 34 points 1 month ago

Israel is key to western imperialist ambitions in the Middle East. The relationship between zionists and the west is in the same “too big to fail” category that protected the criminal bankers who left so many destitute in 2008. For capitalism’s true believers, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

[-] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 16 points 1 month ago

Historically, British Zionism has been fundamentally tied to English supremacism and antisemitism.

Essentially, Israel is the UK's "not quite final solution" to the "problem" of Jews living in Britain - a place to dump all the Jews so England can be more ethnically pure.

This is public information - see the history of Zionism in Britain on wikipedia. The lesson ethnonationalists took from the holocaust - with Hitler publicly bemoaning he had no place to dump Jews forcing him into his final solution - was that every ethnicity needed their own homeland.

The story is similar for USAmerican white supremacists and ethic supremacists across Europe. If Israel collapsed, millions of Jews would flee to Europe and the US, and that's terrible if you're an antisemite.

But for the past 80 years, publicly admitting you're doing it for antisemitic or even ethnic supremacist reasons has been a faux pas, so there has been a whole literary genre of dogwhistles and motivated reasoning, combined with weaponizing of the "antisemitic" label, resulting in an intentionally opaque mess of justifications.

So then, as icing on the cake, the observation that this is a mess has been brilliantly co-opted by the propagandists through antisemitic conspiracy theory: Don't look behind the curtain, look at the Jewish boogeyman projected onto the curtain.

And of course capitalism also plays into this, but the capitalist elite has always been quite generous towards their fellow elites. "Socialism for the rich" is not just a turn of phrase, a lot of billionaires lost good money in the 2008 financial crisis bailout.

Golden parachutes, positions for each other's nepo babies, charity balls for trophy wives' pet projects, etc. - Despite capitalism supposedly being about profit maximization, the elites don't eat their own. They will let their portfolio burn billions to help each other out. But who is the in-group?

Surprise - it's white supremacists again. It's Epstein, Trump, Musk, the Kochs, the Waltons, the Clintons, the Kennedys, the British royals, etc. Nonwhites can definitely get invited to the cookout - Obama, Oprah, Rothschilds, etc. - but they are always peripheral and more easily cast out.

It's not a cabal, it's a community. Trump was the village idiot but his talent for demagoguery made him the hero of the town. White supremacy isn't a nefarious grand scheme, it's just a common belief that affects their friendships, their worldview, and their choices. Multiculturalism was a fun idea that helped destroy unions but now that people are angry it's easiest to fall back on the people you know (if you know what I mean). Bailouts are helping friends through tough times.

And Israel? Israel is a lightning rod. Anti-elitism can be tainted with antisemitism, ethnic supremacy is legitimized by their existence as a supposed solution to antisemitism while criticism of it isn't directed at white supremacy, anti-imperialism can be externalized, Islamophobia is sustained to justify oil wars, the military-industrial guys have a nice playing ground, the news can always look away from coups and neocolonial violence elsewhere, etc.

So that's the world - a bunch of rich white guys using Jews as a scapegoat for their own fuckery. Same as the past 1800 years, really.

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[-] IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world 14 points 1 month ago

not tongo full tinfoil, but this is beyond just lobbying.

I'm assuming there's lots of blackmail involved

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[-] CircaV@lemmy.ca 35 points 1 month ago

What in the fascist UK fuck.

[-] spirinolas@lemmy.world 29 points 1 month ago

There you go, Trump. There's your 51st state.

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[-] samus12345@sh.itjust.works 26 points 1 month ago

As an American, it's super disheartening to read stories about European governments being fascist assholes as well. It's nice to imagine there's somewhere to go to escape it.

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[-] brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 25 points 1 month ago

Of the arrests, 488 were for holding up signs declaring, “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action”.

what the fuck?

[-] Mrkawfee@lemmy.world 25 points 1 month ago

Keir Starmer is a cunt

[-] aeternum 19 points 1 month ago

nah. he lacks the warmth of a cunt.

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[-] Skullgrid@lemmy.world 24 points 1 month ago

Isn't this fucking idiot a human rights lawyer? People have a right to protest
This is why I fucking left. Oh yeah, the tories are a shitshow. Oh look, their replacements are barely better.

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[-] Echolynx@lemmy.zip 24 points 1 month ago

V for Vendetta is starting to look more like prophecy than fiction...

[-] iAvicenna@lemmy.world 20 points 1 month ago

Reform UK will have a hard time catching up with Labour in the fascism League.

[-] FreeMindFreeAss@lemmy.world 17 points 1 month ago

This will backfire.

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[-] Severus_Snape@lemmy.world 16 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I don't like the way this is being framed.

People aren't arrested for supporting Palestine.

They are arresting for praising Palestine Action, a UK organization that was banned after breaching into a Royal Airforce military base

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn81g4e0nlyo

https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-military-jets-damaged-pro-palestinian-activists-royal-air-force-israel-gaza-us-war/

[-] BCBoy911@lemmy.ca 48 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

So? I support Palestine Action and all actions they've taken to stop the UK's complicity in genocide. It's illegal to say this in the UK.

[-] floofloof@lemmy.ca 48 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Spraying military aircraft with red paint isn't terrorism by any stretch of the imagination. Who does it terrorize? And supporting an organisation whose members sprayed fighter jets with paint isn't terrorism either. There's no justification for the UK government's use of anti-terrorist legislation against these protesters.

By contrast, supporting a regime that has been openly committing genocide for years and uses torture and murder to intimidate its opponents could well qualify as terrorism.

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[-] frongt@lemmy.zip 33 points 1 month ago

And arresting people for saying that is acceptable because...?

[-] TrojanRoomCoffeePot@lemmy.world 13 points 1 month ago

hand on hip and wagging scolding finger "Oi mate, yous can't soiy that, it's prohibited language! You're noit allowed to suppoht a group declared terrohrist feh sproiy paintin' a jumbo jet!"

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[-] dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de 25 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

When Keir Starmer was a solicitor he defended people, successfully, for the same kind of thing. This isn’t terrorism, this is my government taking away our rights to protest.

People are ignoring their proscription to bring attention to the insanity of it and hope to force the government to back down. It’s mainly old people being arrested; including priests. I would do it myself but it’s hard when you’ve got work and being in jail would hinder that.

For what it’s worth I support Palestine Action.

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[-] Zombie@feddit.uk 24 points 1 month ago

Amnesty International, Liberty, and the UN disagree with you.

https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/uk-banning-palestine-action-disturbing-legal-overreach-uk-government-amnesty

https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/issue/governments-use-of-terrorism-powers-against-protest-groups-sets-concerning-precedent/

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/07/un-experts-urge-united-kingdom-not-misuse-terrorism-laws-against-protest

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[-] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 15 points 1 month ago

Wow. Fuck that.

[-] M0oP0o@mander.xyz 14 points 1 month ago

And remember this is from the "left" party in the UK.

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this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2025

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