SIRATYST (Stuff I Read and Thought You Should Too) --
“To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”
(Calgacus, as quoted by Tacitus, Agricola 30-31)"
Going forward, the only reliable tools to track COVID-19 infections and
deaths will be rough estimates from wastewater sampling and excess
deaths, respectively. Although imprecise, both of these metrics make
clear that COVID-19 continues to exact an enormous toll globally.
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The world’s most comprehensive study
on the impact of reinfections shows that each reinfection compounds
one’s risk of hospitalization, Long COVID, and damage to nearly every
organ system, as visualized in the graphic [at the original link above].
These
health impacts, combined with the body blow that the pandemic has dealt
to the health care system, have dramatically increased excess deaths
above their pre-pandemic baseline. Throughout the world, hospitals are
in a state of collapse. Emergency room (ER) “boarding,” in which
patients remain untreated for hours, days or even weeks in ER hallways,
is increasingly common, primarily the result of severe understaffing due
to the pandemic.
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Underlying the efforts to cover up the ongoing impacts of the pandemic is a eugenicist strategy to kill older people in perpetuity.
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While the capitalists have drawn their reactionary lessons from the
pandemic, the international working class must consciously assimilate
their own. Above all, the future and progressive development of mankind
is impossible under capitalism. At the same time as they falsely
proclaim the pandemic over, the imperialist powers are rushing headlong
towards World War III, which would inevitably involve the use of nuclear
weapons.
To prevent the looming catastrophes that capitalism has
in store, workers must unite internationally on the basis of a
revolutionary socialist program. Through the reallocation of society’s
resources from war and private profit towards global economic planning
and public health, a future socialist society could stop the threat of
war, rapidly end the COVID-19 pandemic, halt and reverse climate change,
prevent the development of future pandemics and provide a decent
standard of living for all. These principles must animate the coming
revolutionary struggles of the international working class.
All major social issues today, including averting natural disasters, are by nature global problems requiring a socially-coordinated solution. Yet the private profit interests of the bourgeoisie and the division of the world into rival nation-states stand in the way of any progressive response. This is why there has been no worldwide scientific response to the COVID-19 pandemic or to global climate change.
Instead, the imperialist powers, whose criminal “let it rip” policies on the COVID-19 pandemic have led to the deaths of over 21 million people globally, now threaten all humanity with World War III by escalating their war on Russia in Ukraine.
The obstacle to a planned, rational response to urgent social problems can only be removed by a frontal attack by the international working class on the power and wealth of the ruling class, thereby subordinating private profit to social need. The preventable devastation of yesterday’s earthquakes has demonstrated once again the urgent necessity of replacing capitalism with global socialism.
On Saturday, the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (SGP, Socialist Equality Party) held a powerful anti-war rally at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, in which over 300 people participated. It was the SGP’s main rally in its election campaign for the Berlin state House of Representatives, which the party is conducting on the basis of a socialist program against war and social spending cuts.
The strong response to the rally shows that the party is giving a voice to widespread opposition to war and austerity and fighting to arm it with a socialist perspective. The SGP is the only party to oppose the ruling class’s war in Ukraine and the danger of a third world war fought with nuclear weapons.
On January 17, just days before the announcement that the German government would once again send battle tanks to wage war against Russia, the Berlin-Karlshorst Museum commemorated the World War II blockade by German forces of Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg, which resulted in some 1.2 million people starving to death. The blockade lasted from September 1941 until January 1944.
The brochure distributed at the January 17 event, The Leningrad Blockade in the Testimonies of the Mojshes Family, documents the diaries and memoirs of the Russian-Jewish Mojshes family and recalls this immense German war crime.
The Nazi war of extermination against the USSR claimed the lives of 27 million Soviet citizens, 14 million of them civilians, nearly half the death toll in World War II. The number of Leningrad blockade victims alone was roughly 2.5 times the number of US military deaths. Indeed, the US Military Academy in its Atlas of the Second World War estimated that Russian casualties during the siege were greater than combined US and British casualties during the entire conflict.
