The place of women in Germany and in the world today—and whether the chains holding them will be tightened, or whether a force will emerge that can shatter them—continues to shake the political scene here. At least 10,000 women and many men attended one or more of five or six separate International Women’s Day demonstrations in Berlin, and thousands more across the country. Many of those attending were moved by deep feelings of solidarity with the powerful uprising in Iran that was ignited with the killing of Mahsa Amini for “wearing her hair wrong.” Many are also deeply concerned about the continuing rise of viciously misogynist fascist forces in Germany and around the world—with the election of a fascist government in neighbouring Italy this autumn fueling foreboding about what might lie ahead in Germany, where 78 MPs from the fascist Alternative for Deutschland sit in the Bundestag.

The turbulent scene in Europe, marked especially by the bloody slaughterfest in Ukraine only a few hundred miles away, sparked vigorous debate over contending political and ideological views. One speaker at a rally of 4,000-5,000 proudly proclaimed that with the establishment of Germany’s coalition government, which includes the Socialist Democratic Party (SPD) and Die Grüne (Green Party), featuring a Green woman foreign minister, at last Germany has a “feminist foreign policy,” which she argued was demonstrated by Germany’s stepped-up criticism of the mullahs ruling Iran. So forget that Germany is one of the main armorers of the U.S.-NATO-led war effort in Ukraine, which is seeing thousands of Ukrainians fed into Russia’s war machine as mere cannon fodder to weaken one of the Western imperialists’ main rivals; forget that Germany is dramatically escalating its arms spending to fuel the slaughter; forget that Germany’s “concern” about Iran’s women is aimed solely at bringing Iran under Western domination, or that Germany’s heartless industrial-scale brothels are filled with immigrants from all over the Middle East and the world—forget all that because there’s a woman in charge, so it’s “feminist”!  Another demonstration billed as “revolutionary internationalist” called for opposing the war in Ukraine and attracted several thousand women—but expressly excluded “cis men.”

A multinational contingent of revolutionaries strode into this turbulent scene with two banners calling to Break the Chains, Unleash the Fury of Women as a Mighty Force for Revolution, in German, English and Farsi, and distributed over 3,000 leaflets sharply indicting the capitalist-imperialist system as the source of women’s oppression and calling for a revolution to bring about a radically new kind of society, grounded in the new communism authored by Bob Avakian. The statement by the Communist Party of Iran—Marxist-Leninist-Maoist in Farsi and German—the statement by the Revolutionary Communist Manifesto Group (RCMG) in German, Farsi and English—and a flyer promoting the three-part interview by Bob Avakian all went out in large numbers. Discussions raged about the war, what now in Iran and what road forward, how to stop the rise of the fascists in Germany—and, swirling above it all, whether it really might be possible to overthrow the existing system and bring forward a radically new and emancipating world!