SIRATYST (Stuff I Read and Thought You Should Too) “Either the triumph of imperialism and the destruction of all culture, and, as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast cemetery; OR, the VICTORY OF SOCIALISM, that is, the conscious struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism.” Rosa Luxemburg
Thursday, June 30, 2022
Wednesday, June 29, 2022
Saturday, June 25, 2022
Democrat Governor of Louisiana Enacts Vicious, Anti-Woman Abortion Law
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https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/06/25/qydk-j25.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
Louisiana will ban virtually all abortions in the state after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling Friday overturned the long-standing Roe v. Wade decision. Louisiana becomes one of 26 US states that will now ban or severely restrict the right to abortion.
Anti-abortion laws have been signed into law in Louisiana by two Democratic governors. On Tuesday, the current governor, John Bel Edwards, a devout Catholic and long-time abortion opponent, signed two abortion bills that ban most abortions, criminalize them and impose draconian penalties for those who perform the procedure.
The state’s criminal code defines “person” as “a human being from the moment of fertilization and implantation.”
Senate Bill 342 strengthens the so-called trigger law from 2006 that went into immediate effect with the Supreme Court decision. SB 342 was signed into law by then-Governor Kathleen Blanco, also a Democrat. Like the original law, it makes no exception for a pregnancy that results from rape or incest and imposes harsh sentences and fines on anyone who performs an abortion.
The law increases penalties for doctors or anyone else found guilty of performing an abortion to one to 10 years of prison time and fines of $10,000 to $100,000. When the gestational age of the fetus is 15 weeks or more, a physician performing an abortion is subject to up to 15 years in prison and a fine of up to $200,000.
Edwards said that he signed the trigger law despite objecting to the lack of exceptions. “I am pro-life and have never hidden from that fact,” he said in a signing statement. “This does not belie my belief that there should be an exception to the prohibition on abortion for victims of rape and incest.”
The law does allow for abortion in the case of an ectopic pregnancy, when a fertilized egg implants outside the uterus and cannot survive. It also provides for an exception for when giving birth would threaten the life of the mother. Suicidal thoughts or mental illness cannot be used to justify an abortion. Both exceptions require that two doctors sign off on the procedure.
The bill does not ban Plan B, or “morning after” pills or “other emergency contraception.” A woman terminating her pregnancy supposedly would not face criminal charges.
However, Senate Bill 388 prohibits the sale of abortion-inducing medication by prescribers outside the state. It effectively bans abortions facilitated by mail, expanding the definition of criminal abortion to include delivering, dispensing, distributing or providing abortion-inducing medications when the person administering the medication is not a doctor licensed in Louisiana.
Violation of SB388 is punishable by five to 10 years of prison time or a fine of $10,000 to $75,000, or both. If the medication is provided to a pregnant minor, the penalty ranges from 15 to 50 years of imprisonment or a $15,000 to $100,000 fine, or both. This law goes into effect on August 1.
Thirty years ago there were 11 abortion clinics in Louisiana. The Supreme Court ruling will force the closure of the three remaining clinics—in New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Shreveport.
Abortion clinics in the state have already closed their doors in response to operating requirements imposed by the state. They have faced more stringent building requirements than similar medical centers, and both a doctor and a nurse had to be present for a surgical abortion to be performed.
Staff have been required to read a state-mandated script directing patients to consider alternatives to abortion. In May, the state-mandated waiting period increased from 24 hours to 72 hours, meaning that women had to wait three days between their initial appointment to the date the abortion was performed.
Hope Medical Center, the clinic in Shreveport, has had a waiting list of 400 people, with abortion appointments booking at least two and a half weeks in advance. Women who called the clinic this week will now not be able to see a doctor. Clinic administrator Kathaleen Pittman told the Louisiana Illuminator that some patients are not aware of the immediate impact of the Supreme Court ruling.
The Shreveport clinic has already seen a huge influx of patients seeking abortions from neighboring Texas, since the state banned abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, in 30 days abortions in Texas will be illegal except to save the life of the mother.
Women seeking a surgical abortion will be forced to travel to states where abortion remains legal, such as North Carolina, Illinois or California. Florida allow abortions up to fetal viability until a 15-week ban takes effect July 1.
In 2021, 64 percent of the Louisiana’s abortion patients were African American, and 89 percent were unmarried, according to state health statistics. Fifty-eight percent were ages 20 to 29; 27 were under the age of 15, 66 were under 18 years old and 11 were over age 45.
Pittman told the Illuminator that most patients receiving abortions at Hope Medical Center already have children and are seeking the termination of their pregnancies for financial reasons. “Women simply know they cannot afford to have another child at this point,” she said.
The ban will have the greatest impact on poor and minority women in those states where abortion is now illegal or potentially illegal. Many will not be able to afford the travel expense or the time needed to obtain the procedure. Women will be forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term or seek out dangerous and potentially deadly illegal abortions.
According to Politico, abortion is now illegal in five states: Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Texas. It is potentially or soon to be illegal in 11 states: Alabama, Idaho, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
Abortion is currently legal in Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia and Washington.
It is legal for the time being in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio and South Carolina.
Thursday, June 23, 2022
Sunday, June 19, 2022
Friday, June 17, 2022
Doctors’ Orders to UK Home Secretary Priti Patel: “Do Not Extradite Assange”--WSWS.org
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https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/06/13/aytb-j13.html
More than 300 doctors from 35 countries have written to UK Home Secretary Priti Patel calling on her to block the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States and demanding his freedom. Patel, a ferocious opponent of WikiLeaks, is expected to rule on his extradition by Friday June 17.
In a letter sent last Friday, Doctors for Assange told Patel that approving his extradition would be “medically and ethically unacceptable”. Assange faces 18 charges under the Espionage Act with a 175-year prison sentence for his role as a journalist and publisher exposing war crimes committed by the US government in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Assange has been imprisoned for exactly 10 years this Sunday, first under UK house arrest, then inside Ecuador’s embassy in London where he was illegally detained by UK authorities who refused to grant him safe passage to Ecuador. Since April 2019, he has been detained in London’s Belmarsh maximum security prison despite having committed no crime under UK law.
The Australian government has refused to intercede on Assange’s behalf, a stance maintained by newly elected Labour Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Assange is an Australian citizen, with a wife and two young children in Britain.
In their letter to Patel, Doctors for Assange point to Assange’s worsening medical condition, “Predictably, Mr Assange’s health has since continued to deteriorate in your custody. In October 2021 Mr. Assange suffered a ‘mini-stroke’. This dangerous deterioration of Mr Assange’s health underscores the medical concern that the chronic stress caused by his harsh prison conditions, as well as his justified fear of the conditions that he would face in the case of extradition, leaves Mr Assange vulnerable to cardiovascular events.”
The doctors continued, “This dramatic deterioration of Mr Assange’s health has not yet been considered in his extradition proceedings. The US assurances accepted by the High Court, therefore, which would form the basis of any extradition approval, are founded upon outdated medical information, rendering them obsolete.”
In January 2021, district court judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled that Assange could not be extradited to the United States on mental health grounds, acknowledging that the WikiLeaks founder was at severe risk of suicide. Her decision was later overturned on appeal by the US government, with Britain’s High Court judges accepting empty “assurances” that Assange would not be subject to oppressive prison conditions.
The doctors warn Patel in their letter, “Under conditions in which the UK legal system has failed to take Mr Assange’s current health status into account, no valid decision to approve his extradition may be made, by you or anyone else. Should he come to harm in the US under these circumstances it is you, Home Secretary, who will be left holding the responsibility for that negligent outcome. The extradition of a person with such compromised health, moreover, is medically and ethically unacceptable.”
Patel’s decision to extradite is virtually a foregone conclusion. She is currently spearheading efforts to push through sweeping revisions to the Official Secrets Act, inspired by the Assange precedent, that will be used to crackdown on national security journalism. The revised Act, whose second reading took place last week, empowers the state to imprison journalists who reveal classified information deemed to be in the UK’s national interest.
Patel is also tearing up international human rights law regarding the treatment of refugees, commencing barbaric transportations this week to camps in Rwanda, a policy condemned by human rights groups worldwide and survivors of the Holocaust.
It is the doctors’ second letter sent to Patel. In November 2019, they sounded the alarm over Assange’s worsening health, calling for his transfer from Belmarsh prison to a university teaching hospital for urgent medical assessment and treatment. The doctors cited the assessment of United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer and visiting doctors that Assange was a victim of “prolonged psychological torture”.
Patel’s office had replied with a media statement declaring, “The allegations Mr. Assange was subjected to torture are unfounded and wholly false. The UK is committed to upholding the rule of law, and ensuring that no one is ever above it.”
Warnings by Doctors for Assange since 2019 were confirmed during extradition hearings in 2020, when expert medical witnesses testified to the disastrous impact of relentless state persecution and incarceration on Assange’s mental and physical health. These impacts have only grown in severity as one after another legal avenue for appeal has been closed off.
Concluding Friday’s letter to Patel, Doctors for Assange note the “assurances” of the US government that Assange would not be treated inhumanely “are worthless given their record of pursuit, persecution and plotted murder of Mr Assange in retaliation for his public interest journalism, quite apart from the fact that the US government reserves the right to subject Mr Assange to the very conditions, namely, ‘Special Administrative Measures’, that would be inhuman.”
Last Thursday, Assange’s lawyer Jennifer Robinson announced a successful outcome to legal action she initiated in 2016 in the European Court of Human Rights. The UK government reached a settlement, admitting there was reasonable cause to believe that Robinson was subject to surveillance as a legal representative for Assange. Robinson explained, “the UK government has now admitted that its surveillance and information sharing arrangements with US violated my rights. That includes in relation to the protection of confidential journalistic material.
“This follows a pattern of unlawful spying on Julian Assange and his legal team, and it raises grave concerns about government interference with journalistic material and privilege.”
Evidence that Assange’s privileged communications with lawyers and doctors were systematically violated has been submitted repeatedly to courts in the UK, along with evidence exposing CIA plans to kidnap and assassinate Assange. Britain’s judiciary had clear grounds to dismiss the entire frame-up case against him, granting Assange compensation for the irreparable trauma and deprivation of liberty he has suffered. But the High Court rubberstamped every illegal act.
A media blackout of the doctors’ letter has been in place today, with not a single major outlet reporting their plea for his freedom. The media’s decade-long campaign of character assassination against Assange, led by the Guardian and New York Times, is reinforced by a wall of silence aimed at facilitating his extradition and preventing any challenge to the outrageous propaganda being used to drag the world’s population into war against Russia and China.
Britain’s media, political establishment and judiciary have overseen an extra-legal conspiracy to make an example of Assange and tear up centuries-old legal and democratic rights. Their actions in crushing a journalist who courageously exposed war crimes, including rendition, torture, and the indiscriminate mass killing of civilians is i
'Another Dark Day': UK Government Approves Assange's Extradition To United States
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Kevin Gosztola's article. He has been following Julian's case brilliantly.
EXCERPT:
https://thedissenter.org/uk-government-approves-assanges-extradition-to-united-states/
United Kingdom Home Secretary Priti Patel approved the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States.
Patel’s decision to hand over a journalist to the US government for prosecution was immediately condemned by human rights and press freedom organizations. The Assange legal team planned to submit an appeal in the High Court of Justice challenging the political nature of the case and how extradition law was interpreted.
Describing it as “shameful,” Reporters Without Borders international campaigns director Rebecca Vincent said the decision represented “another failure by the UK to protect journalism and press freedom, bringing Julian Assange a step closure to extradition.”
The global human rights organization Amnesty International renewed their opposition. “Allowing Julian Assange to be extradited to the US would put him at great risk and sends a chilling message to journalists the world over.”
Don’t Extradite Assange, a campaign which mobilized opposition to the case in the UK, stated, “This is a dark day for press freedom and for British democracy. Anyone in this country who cares about freedom of expression should be deeply ashamed that the Home Secretary has approved the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States, the country that plotted his assassination.”
Assange faces 18 charges brought against him by the US Justice Department, 17 of which fall under the Espionage Act. All the charges relate to documents WikiLeaks released in 2010 and 2011, which were provided by US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning.
Wednesday, June 15, 2022
Tuesday, June 14, 2022
COVID Denial vs. Reality: The Growing Threat of Omicron Subvariants
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https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/06/14/pers-j14.html
Contrary to the relentless propaganda from the political establishment and corporate media of nearly every country, the COVID-19 pandemic is not over and will worsen in the coming weeks and months.
The highly infectious, vaccine-resistant and pathogenic Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants are quickly becoming dominant globally and threaten another surge of infections and deaths from COVID-19. This is taking place under conditions in which almost every world government outside of China has dismantled the infrastructure that had been in place to track and slow the spread of the virus.
In a process analogous to the captain of a sinking ship demanding that all life vests be thrown overboard, since the start of this year mask mandates have been lifted, testing drastically curtailed, contact tracing programs scrapped, and guidelines on isolation, quarantine and travel have been tailored to suit the needs of the major corporations. The ruling elite’s motto has become “Hear no COVID, see no COVID, and do nothing.”
There is now an incredible chasm between this fictional world of corporate myth-making, where COVID-19 is supposedly gone, and the real world, where millions of people are infected and thousands die globally each week and an untold number become debilitated by Long COVID. This conspiracy of world governments and the media has degenerated into a massive cover-up, involving systematic efforts to manipulate data and stop reporting on COVID-19. Tragically, the propaganda has misled millions of people to now walk around without masks, as if the virus can simply be wished away.
The criminal policies implemented by capitalist governments over the past seven months have set the stage for COVID-19 to become a permanent feature of global society, with recurring waves of infections, deaths and mass debilitation from Long COVID to be accepted as the “new normal.” It has become nearly impossible to prevent infection, and many of our readers likely know multiple friends, family members, coworkers or neighbors who are presently suffering or have died from COVID-19.
To put the pandemic in perspective, it is even more terrible than the school shootings that have provoked such immense outrage in the US and internationally. While this goes unreported in the media, it is a fact that far more young people are dying of COVID-19 than die from school shootings.
Outrage was felt over the horrific massacre in Uvalde, Texas, where police stood by and did nothing. But the same basic policy is being conducted on a mass scale by world governments and health officials, as they have consciously implemented school reopening policies that have infected hundreds of millions of children with COVID-19 globally, killing over 1,500 children in the US and tens of thousands internationally.
In order to stop this deepening catastrophe, the international working class must assimilate the political lessons of the pandemic and understand the ongoing dangers posed. Only through the development of a unified mass movement of workers in every industry will it be possible to eliminate SARS-CoV-2 globally, stop the pandemic and lay the foundations for a vast expansion of public health.
The dangers of the Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants
There are now five Omicron subvariants which have become dominant in different countries around the world since last November. Since late December, the BA.1 and BA.2 subvariants have caused an estimated 3.6 million excess deaths worldwide, according to The Economist.
In early March, the Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants quickly became dominant in South Africa, causing another wave of infections and deaths despite the fact that 98 percent of the population had antibodies from infections or vaccinations. Significantly, a higher percentage of children than elderly people were hospitalized during this surge.
The Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants are either dominant or becoming dominant in nearly every country that tracks variant prevalence, including throughout Europe, North America and Australia, as well as many countries in South America, Africa and Asia. This takes place under conditions where global vaccination rates have plateaued and antibodies have waned for the majority of the world’s population.
A recent study from the Sato Lab in Japan, one of the top virology labs in the world, found that BA.4 and BA.5 are more pathogenic than BA.1 and BA.2, and that vaccinations or previous infections with BA.1 or BA.2 provide very little protection against infection from BA.4 or BA.5. The implication is that most of the billions of people who were just infected with BA.1 or BA.2 are now susceptible to reinfection with BA.4 or BA.5 and that these reinfections will likely be more severe.
Last month, BA.5 became dominant in Portugal and has caused a large wave of infections, hospitalizations and deaths nearing the level from BA.1 over the winter, despite the fact that Portugal has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world. Test positivity rates are now above 50 percent, indicating ongoing widespread transmission far above official figures.
One cannot predict precisely how many people will be infected or die from a given variant, but it is very likely that BA.4 and BA.5 will cause a substantial wave of infections and deaths throughout much of the world in the coming months. The general trend continues that more genetically diverse and dangerous variants are evolving, and the potential always exists that a new variant could evolve that retains the transmissibility and immune-escape capabilities of the Omicron subvariants while being far more pathogenic and lethal.
Long COVID and the pandemic as a “mass disabling event”
Beyond the horrific immediate impact of mass infections and deaths, the long-term health ramifications of the “endemic” strategy are nearly incalculable. The phenomenon of Long COVID was identified by patients over two years ago but has been almost entirely ignored by the corporate media and capitalist politicians. As with the science of the pandemic more broadly, there remains very little understanding in the general population of the profound societal risks posed by Long COVID.
Since 2020, Long COVID advocates have aptly characterized the pandemic as a “mass disabling event.” In recent months, research into Long COVID has expanded, firmly linking COVID-19 infection to increased risk of damage to nearly every organ in the body, as well as to risks of developing diabetes, several types of neurological disorders, several categories of cardiovascular disease and more.
The risks for developing Long COVID are compounded with each reinfection and only slightly reduced by vaccination. Extrapolating on this in an interview with the World Socialist Web Site, scientist Arijit Chakravarty of Fractal Therapeutics noted, “If the whole world was vaccinated tomorrow, and we spent just three years ‘learning to live with COVID’ under the current strategy, we could well have over a billion people living with Long COVID.”
The initial societal impacts of this “mass disabling event” can be seen in a study from the Solve Long COVID Initiative, which estimates that through January 31, 2022, roughly 43 million adult Americans, or 13.4 percent of the adult population, were likely suffering from Long COVID. Of these, roughly 14 million were estimated to have debilitating Long COVID. They estimate that the total financial burden, including lost wages, lost savings and medical expenses, was roughly $511 billion. These estimates do not include Long COVID cases that have developed during the Omicron period.
The qualitative impacts of this scenario, including patients’ ability to function at work and enjoy leisure time, are unquantifiable. For more than two years, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other national health agencies have been fully aware of Long COVID and the enormous dangers it poses. Nevertheless, they have consciously chosen to pursue strategies of mass infection.
China’s Zero-COVID policy and the strategy of global elimination
The only country in the world which has maintained public health measures to prevent COVID-19 from running rampant is China, where a Zero-COVID policy has saved millions of lives since January 2020. Most recently, Chinese society defeated the Omicron BA.2 subvariant, which ripped through Shanghai and other parts of the country beginning in early March.
The key components of the Zero-COVID elimination strategy are the following:
- Mass testing wherever outbreaks occur;
- Rigorous contact tracing to identify all chains of transmission;
- Safe isolation and treatment of all infected patients in medical facilities;
- Quarantining of all people exposed to infected patients;
- The temporary closure of all nonessential workplaces and switch to remote learning at all schools until the outbreak is contained;
- The provision and mandating of masks in all public places;
- Mass vaccination programs; and
- Strict travel restrictions and border management to prevent the importing of new cases.
The fact that China suppressed the highly infectious Omicron BA.2 subvariant using these basic public health measures reaffirms in practice that elimination is both possible and necessary. If the above measures were implemented on a world scale, combined with the improvement of filtration and ventillation systems in all indoor spaces, SARS-CoV-2 could be eliminated globally in a matter of months.
Intranasal vaccines, which could potentially provide sterilizing immunity to fully prevent COVID-19 infection, could become another weapon in the arsenal of measures to stop the pandemic. Three of these vaccines are now in Phase 3 human trials. But if they are successful, they will be subordinated to the same profit interests that have prevented the global distribution of existing mRNA and other vaccines.
The elimination strategy must also be adopted to stamp out the unprecedented global outbreak of monkeypox, which has rapidly infected over 1,600 people in more than 40 countries throughout the world, as well as future pandemics. A major study published in April found that climate change will dramatically increase the potential for viruses that already exist among animal populations to spill over into human populations, as happened with SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses.
The fight to eliminate SARS-CoV-2 globally requires a massive social and political struggle of the international working class. Fundamentally, the fight against the pandemic and for public health is not simply a medical question but primarily a political, social and economic issue. Powerful financial interests are determined to block the implementation of paid lockdowns and all other measures necessary to stop viral transmission because this would impinge on their record profit-making.
Masses of workers throughout the world have been deeply impacted by the pandemic and a profound radicalization has taken place. In every country, workers are entering into struggle against the soaring cost of living and rising food prices, which were precipitated by the pandemic and exacerbated by the US-NATO war drive against Russia. In addition to the threat of infection, debilitation and death from COVID-19, hundreds of millions are now threatened with destitution and starvation on every continent, while the ever-present danger of nuclear holocaust looms over mankind.
The growing class struggle against capitalist austerity must be infused with a deep-going antiwar sentiment and an understanding of the measures necessary to stop the pandemic. The experience of the past two years and, in particular, the past seven months of the Omicron variant and the outbreak of the war in Ukraine prove decisively that the fight against the pandemic, war and the anarchy of the capitalist system requires its revolutionary overthrow and replacement with a planned world socialist society.
Monday, June 13, 2022
Sunday, June 12, 2022
Specially from Russia! Documentary "SEARCH FIND TELL"
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I didn't understand the remark made about Somalia, but otherwise this video has information that should be viewed.
Wednesday, June 08, 2022
Monday, June 06, 2022
The Internationale
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Arise ye pris’ners of starvation
Arise ye wretched of the earth
For justice thunders condemnation
A better world’s in birth!
No more tradition’s chains shall bind us
Arise, ye slaves, no more in thrall;
The earth shall rise on new foundations
We have been naught we shall be all.
Refrain:
’Tis the final conflict
Let each stand in his place
The Internationale unites the human race.
We want no condescending saviors
To rule us from their judgement hall
We workers ask not for their favors
Let us consult for all.
To make the theif disgorge his booty
To free the spirit from its cell
We must ourselves decide our duty
We must decide and do it well.
The law oppresses us and tricks us,
The wage slave system drains our blood;
The rich are free from obligation,
The laws the poor delude.
Too long we’ve languished in subjection,
Equality has other laws;
"No rights", says she "without their duties,
No claims on equals without cause."
Behold them seated in their glory
The kings of mine and rail and soil!
What have you read in all their story,
But how they plundered toil?
Fruits of the workers’ toil are buried
In strongholds of the idle few
In working for their restitution
The men will only claim their due.
We toilers from all fields united
Join hand in hand with all who work;
The earth belongs to us, the workers,
No room here for the shirk.
How many on our flesh have fattened!
But if the norsome birds of prey
Shall vanish from the sky some morning
The blessed sunlight then will stay.
Sunday, June 05, 2022
Friday, June 03, 2022
Wednesday, June 01, 2022
The Uvalde Massacre and the Pathological Violence of American Life--WSWS.org
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https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/06/01/pers-j01.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
The shooting in Uvalde, Texas on May 24 has prompted a great deal of discussion. The scale of the horror and the depth of the public reaction suggest that something of a “tipping point” has been reached.
Many people in the US and elsewhere are raising questions about the event. How could such a thing, the massacre of small children, take place? Parents have been placed in the impossible position of having to try to explain to their own children, potential victims, why incidents like this occur.
At the same time, everyone knows it is only a matter of time until news of the next, and possibly worse, mass killing flashes across television and computer screens. Where, when and how many victims are the only unanswered questions. … And the shooting after that. Waiting anxiously for the next shoe to drop has become a way of everyday life in America.
The Texas massacre of the innocents reveals a deep pathology at the core of American society. Vast numbers are sincerely attempting to make sense of how the present state of life in the country unhinges a fraction of the population in this homicidal manner. A politicization and a radicalization are under way.
By and large, however, masses of people do not yet make the connection in particular between the official violence—the endless wars and threats of new and wider wars, the relentless killings carried out by law enforcement, the establishment’s essential indifference to a million dead in a preventable pandemic—and the manner in which the most psychologically susceptible individuals experience, absorb and even reproduce it.
The “susceptibility” is mediated through the political and economic situation, as well as the social and cultural atmosphere. This is not the first violent period in American or world history. What generates a truly damaging “double despair” in certain young people is the combination of their own apparently miserable personal prospects and the barren, repugnant state of the public life they see before them.
The absence of any mass-based, progressive social (or anti-war) movement, even of a reformist kind, has far-reaching consequences. Human beings, except for a handful, do not live for stock market prices or the latest in military hardware. The ruling class imagines that it can get by with endless sleight of hand. The Democratic Party offers an African American candidate guaranteeing historic change, a female candidate supposedly speaking for an underrepresented half of the population, an “honest Joe” promising the most radical administration since the New Deal. Each of these lies has only deepened cynicism and disillusionment.
The media registers the popular revulsion over the actions of the gunman in Uvalde, attempting always to channel it in the narrowest and, if possible, most socially backward directions. When it comes, however, to American military violence in Iraq or Afghanistan or any number of other places, or its proxy war in Ukraine, the press and television news adopt another tone. In these cases, the glorification of killing and death goes on uninterruptedly, and not only in the fascistic Murdoch-owned outlets.
The New York Times recently ran a typically bloodthirsty piece headlined, “Tending Russia's Dead as They Pile Up in Ukraine,” which reveled in the carnage. It described the efforts of a Ukrainian soldier to collect the corpses of Russian war dead.
The Times went on, “This is the best work in the world,” the unnamed soldier said “of the grim satisfaction to be found in collecting the corpses of the invader.” Business Insider, the financial and business news website, for its part, recently reported, “A Ukrainian soldier in a liberated town said that killing Russian forces is ‘like a sport now.’” This only echoes US propaganda about its neocolonial “liberating” efforts, peppered with atrocities, torture and mass killings, in the Middle East and Central Asia.
Why should anyone imagine that the daily glorification of slaughtering other human beings as a legitimate and even preferable solution to difficult problems would not communicate itself viscerally to individuals who find themselves in what they take to be impossible personal binds?
Mass death has also been “normalized” over the course of the past two years through the COVID-19 catastrophe. The population has been told at every turn that it must “learn to live” with the pandemic, that in fact it ought to “get over” any sentimentality about the ill and the dead. The Times, the Wall Street Journal and the rest have made it their business to paint the maintenance of profits and business as a far more pressing issue. Again, what corrosive impact does this continuous devaluing of human life, the complacent acceptance that many old, poor and otherwise vulnerable people will fall victim to the virus, have on the texture and quality of popular life?
At the same time, the Uvalde episode makes the ruling elite nervous. After all, it gives America a major black eye. On the NBC News website, Jacob Ware, research associate for counterterrorism at the Council on Foreign Relations, commented bluntly May 29: “The school shooting epidemic undermines the U.S. in the eyes of both its allies and its adversaries, damaging its ability to provide leadership on human rights and increasing its vulnerability to enemy propaganda. … Tuesday’s shooting is particularly likely to damage America’s standing in speaking out against Russian violence against children in Ukraine.”
Guided by this general concern, the Washington Post attempted in an editorial the same day to deflect attention from America’s diseased condition by incorporating the Uvalde events into a universal, presumably inexplicable process in which “young lives” are “cut short.” Young people, the Post concluded, “continue to be deprived of their lives and their futures—by neglect, greed, orchestrated hatreds or delusional aggressions—in places from Ukraine to Uvalde, Tex.”
Indeed, there is a link between the deaths in Uvalde and those in Ukraine, in a conflict deliberately provoked and now stoked by Washington, but it is not one the Post, the personal property of one of the richest men in the world, chooses to spell out: both tragedies are bound up with the brutal, decayed state of American capitalism and the eruption of its endless violence, at home and abroad.
The pronouncements of establishment pundits on the Uvalde incident continue to be as banal and deluded as ever. The American ruling elite-devil will not voluntarily cut off his own claws—he is incapable of even acknowledging them.
Much of the attention has been directed toward the inaction and incompetence, or worse, of law enforcement in Uvalde. While the media no doubt uses this element to divert attention from other troubling phenomena, this aspect of the disaster has legitimately outraged both families in the town and broader layers of the population.
Generally speaking, as Hurricane Katrina and innumerable “natural” and social disasters have demonstrated over the past two decades, the vast military-police machine, bloated beyond recognition through the “war on terror” and the building up of “Homeland Security,” is useless when it comes to protecting the population. That’s not its purpose. This apparatus is only good as a rule, in the US and on the rest of the planet, for repression, especially for shooting down the poor, the defenseless, the inadequately armed or entirely unarmed.
In keeping with this social reality, one Uvalde parent bitterly complained about being arrested by US Marshals and handcuffed after she urged law enforcement to do something about the ongoing massacre. The woman “said she saw other parents being pushed to the ground, pepper-sprayed, and tasered. ‘They didn’t do that to the shooter, but they did that to us,’ she said. ‘That’s how it felt.’”
A vile, rapacious, ignorant ruling class presides over American society. The political leadership, in both major parties, along with the bankers and corporate CEOs, are hated by every honest portion of the people. The media only exists to inject poison into the atmosphere and obliterate serious thought, shutting up or drowning out critical voices.
But masses of people, undergoing one earth-shattering experience after the other, are concluding that they have had enough.
Inexorably, organically, a movement is beginning to break through the corrupt framework. This finds initial reflection sharply in the voting down of contracts foisted on workers by the unions, the criminal accomplices of the financial oligarchy.
The widespread anger and revulsion are a necessary and welcome development. They already demonstrate that political pessimism is both unwarranted and thoroughly reactionary. But that healthy sentiment needs to be elevated and take on a consciously radical and anti-establishment character through the growth of socialist understanding and influence in the working class. Significant progress will be made when the very foundations of capitalism in America are questioned and challenged on a mass scale.
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