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)"
On Tuesday, US President Joe Biden declared that Russia was engaged in genocide in Ukraine. The allegation tossed off by Biden is a lie, but it is more than this. It is a political provocation consciously aimed at whipping up a public hysteria to legitimize a massive escalation of the war, including the full-scale, open participation by the United States.
Genocide is a word stamped with profound historical content. There is no graver charge that can be leveled.
Demolished vehicles line Highway 80 the ‘Highway of Death’ were destroyed as Iraqi forces retreated from Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm. April 8 1991
Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew and lawyer, coined the word “genocide”—a coupling of the Greek genos (race or people) with the Latin cide (killing)—in 1944 in his book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Both the word itself and its subsequent legal codification by the United Nations were inextricably bound up with the Holocaust. What the Allied forces uncovered at the end of World War II was evidence of the worst crime in human history: extermination camps, mass graves, gas chambers, the human ovens and the mounds of spectacles and human hair and extracted gold teeth. Lemkin’s neologism strained to contain this enormity: the carefully planned extermination by the Nazis of European Jewry, 6 million killed with industrial efficiency.
This experience called for a precision of formulation that would give legal force and ethical specificity to the injunction “never again.” The United Nations in 1948, in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, codified an international legal definition of genocide as specific crimes “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”
The crimes of the Holocaust were seared in the consciousness of the world. Genocide was the premeditated and systematic extermination of a population because of its race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion. The monstrous crimes of imperialism and war were weighed in popular consciousness by this measure, and those that began to approximate its barbarisms were deemed genocidal. History was re-examined in this light, and it was found that Hitler’s crimes were anticipated in the crimes of empire.
The westward expansion of American capitalism was fueled by railroad coal and genocidal acts. The indigenous populations of America were impediments to this progress, and cavalry and settlers systematically exterminated them. The Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Trail of Tears, Sand Creek Massacre, the forcible removal of children—the Sioux and Cheyenne, Comanche and Yuki were slaughtered. This is how “the West was won.”
The emergence of American imperialism with the conquest of the Philippines at the turn of the century, seizing a formal colony in Asia, was conducted on a scale and with a rapacity that was genocidal. Over 200,000 Filipinos were killed. They were tortured, their villages incinerated, and populations were forced into concentration camps. General Jacob Smith embodied the brutality of the conquest when he told his soldiers, “I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better it will please me.” Mass murder was a means to colonial conquest.
Each of the major colonial powers held grip on their possessions by genocidal force when they deemed it necessary. The Belgians secured rubber from the Congo with forced labor, mutilations, torture and mass murder. The British retained India by dint of repeated massacres. The French subdued Algeria with genocidal violence.
The dropping of atomic bombs by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were genocidal acts. The bombings killed nearly a quarter million people, the overwhelming majority of them civilians. It is undeniable that race was a critical factor. American citizens of Japanese ancestry were imprisoned in internment camps in the United States. The “Japs” were different, it was frequently argued, and they would not surrender unless you killed every last one of them. Hundreds of thousands—doctors, high school students, grandmothers—were incinerated in the nuclear blasts; tens of thousands more died agonizing deaths from radiation poisoning.
The American ruling class sustained its Cold War hegemony by aiding and overseeing bloodshed around the world, often of genocidal dimensions. The Indonesian dictator Suharto rose to power in 1965 through the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of members of the Indonesian Communist Party. The United States coordinated this mass murder, keeping track of its progress and providing radio communication to the military and paramilitary units carrying it out. Communists and alleged communists were hacked to death with machetes and their mutilated corpses clogged the rivers of Sumatra, Java, and Bali.
When the UN Convention on Genocide was completed in 1948, the United States would not sign and did not do so for another forty years. There was a nervous awareness that charges might be raised against the United States for its wars in Korea and Vietnam, for the carpet bombing of Laos and Cambodia, and the use of Agent Orange and napalm. In 1988, when Washington finally signed the convention against genocide, it was with the stipulation that the United States was granted immunity from prosecution for genocide unless the US national government authorized it.
The last thirty years have witnessed the uninterrupted crimes of US empire in the Middle East and Central Asia. Hospitals and villages were deliberately bombed. Cities were reduced to rubble. Economic sanctions starved hundreds of thousands of children to death, and drone strikes killed them at play. Once proud civilizations are haunted ruins, picked bare by the dogs of war.
The only plausible defense that Bush, Obama and Trump could mount if they were charged with genocide, is that while they did launch and conduct wars of aggression that killed over a million Iraqis and hundreds of thousands of Afghans, they saw the deaths of men, women and children as a useful means to an end, and not as the end in itself. Their actions are undeniably genocidal.
Biden stands at the head of this blood-soaked power and accuses Russia of genocide. The charges deliberately mangle and distort both the contemporary facts and the historically established legal definition.
Biden points to specific events—corpses in the streets of Mariupol, the bombing of a train station—which may be war crimes, but which require investigation. Neither the precise details nor the perpetrator have yet been established. No evidence whatsoever has been presented that Putin is intent upon eradicating the Ukrainian people.
Nothing that has happened in Ukraine can be measured on the genocidal scale established by the Nazis and the United States and other imperialist powers. Biden’s accusation trivializes the Holocaust and does violence to history.
Biden’s accusations of genocide are not the rhetorical overreach of moral indignation. They are the deliberate and reckless escalation of conflict in service to the interests of US imperialism and they target Washington’s enemies.
Washington cries genocide when Russia bombs Kiev, but not when Saudi Arabia drops US weapons on Yemen, killing more than 377,000 people. Biden accuses China of genocide for the treatment of the Uyghurs, but he says not a word about Israel’s systematic devastation of the Palestinians.
The atrocity stories told by Washington and the repeated, baseless accusations of genocide tell us far less of the events themselves and far more of the war fever that is convulsing the imperialist powers. Once genocide is invoked, there is no possible further rhetorical escalation.
The US is preparing for direct military conflict with Russia. Biden speaks of genocide—blurring painfully acquired legal, historical, and moral distinctions—for the purposes of war propaganda. Russians—who bear no responsibility for the actions of their government—are now stigmatized, barred from international competitions, threatened and hounded internationally.
In an unmistakable sense, Biden is cultivating a genocidal frame of mind, marked by irrational scapegoating and hatred on the basis of nationality. Biden’s false use of this term is setting into motion a global war which could prove to be genocidal, one in which the subject of the genocide is the human race itself
Russian President Putin has claimed that he ordered the invasion of Ukraine to “denazify” its government, while Western officials, such as former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul, have called this pure propaganda, insisting, “There are no Nazis in Ukraine.”
In the context of the Russian invasion, the post-2014 Ukrainian government’s problematic relations with extreme right-wing groups and neo-Nazi parties has become an incendiary element on both sides of the propaganda war, with Russia exaggerating it as a pretext for war and the West trying to sweep it under the carpet.
The post-2014 Ukrainian government’s problematic relations with extreme right-wing groups and neo-Nazi parties has become an incendiary element on both sides of the propaganda war.
The reality behind the propaganda is that the West and its Ukrainian allies have opportunistically exploited and empowered the extreme right in Ukraine, first to pull off the 2014 coup, and then by redirecting it to fight separatists in Eastern Ukraine. And far from “denazifying” Ukraine, the Russian invasion is likely to further empower Ukrainian and international neo-Nazis, as it attracts fighters from around the world and provides them with weapons, military training and the combat experience that many of them are hungry for.
Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Svoboda Party and its founders Oleh Tyahnybok and Andriy Parubiy played leading roles in the U.S-backed coup in February 2014. Assistant Secretary Nuland and Ambassador Pyatt mentioned Tyahnybok as one of the leaders they were working with on their infamous leaked phone call before the coup, even as they tried to exclude him from an official position in the post-coup government.
As formerly peaceful protests in Kyiv gave way to pitched battles with police and violent, armed marches to try to break through police barricades and reach the Parliament building, Svoboda members and the newly-formed Right Sector militia, led by Dmytro Yarosh, battled police, spearheaded marches and raided a police armory for weapons. By mid-February 2014, these men with guns were the de facto leaders of the Maidan movement.
We will never know what kind of political transition peaceful protests alone would have led to in Ukraine or how different the new government would have been if a peaceful political process had been allowed to take its course, without interference by the United States or violent right-wing extremists.
But it was Yarosh who took to the stage in the Maidan and rejected the February 21, 2014 agreement negotiated by the French, German and Polish foreign ministers, under which Yanukovich and opposition political leaders agreed to hold new elections later that year. Instead, Yarosh and Right Sector refused to disarm and led the climactic march on Parliament that overthrew the government.
Since 1991, Ukrainian elections had swung back and forth between leaders like President Viktor Yanukovych, who was from Donetsk and had close ties with Russia, and Western-backed leaders like President Yushchenko, who was elected in 2005 after the “Orange Revolution” that followed a disputed election. Ukraine’s endemic corruption tainted every government, and rapid public disillusionment with whichever leader and party won power led to a see-saw between Western- and Russian-aligned factions.
In 2014, Nuland and the State Department got their favorite, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, installed as Prime Minister of the post-coup government. He lasted two years, until he, too, lost his job due to endless corruption scandals. Petro Poroshenko, the post-coup President, lasted a bit longer, until 2019, even after his personal tax evasion schemes were exposed in the 2016 Panama Papers and 2017 Paradise Papers.
When Yatsenyuk became Prime Minister, he rewarded Svoboda’s role in the coup with three cabinet positions, including Oleksander Sych as Deputy Prime Minister, and governorships of three of Ukraine’s 25 provinces. Svoboda’s Andriy Parubiy was appointed Chairman (or speaker) of Parliament, a post he held for the next 5 years. Tyahnybok ran for president in 2014, but only got 1.2% of the votes, and was not re-elected to Parliament.
Ukrainian voters turned their backs on the extreme-right in the 2014 post-coup elections, reducing Svoboda’s 10.4% share of the national vote in 2012 to 4.7%. Svoboda lost support in areas where it held control of local governments but had failed to live up to its promises, and its support was split now that it was no longer the only party running on explicitly anti-Russian slogans and rhetoric.
After the coup, Right Sector helped to consolidate the new order by attacking and breaking up anti-coup protests, in what their leader Yarosh described to Newsweek as a “war” to “cleanse the country” of pro-Russian protesters. This campaign climaxed on May 2nd with the massacre of 42 anti-coup protesters in a fiery inferno, after they took shelter from Right Sector attackers in the Trades Unions House in Odessa.
After anti-coup protests evolved into declarations of independence in Donetsk and Luhansk, the extreme right in Ukraine shifted gear to full-scale armed combat. The Ukrainian military had little enthusiasm for fighting its own people, so the government formed new National Guard units to do so.
Right Sector formed a battalion, and neo-Nazis also dominated the Azov Battalion, which was founded by Andriy Biletsky, an avowed white supremacist who claimed that Ukraine’s national purpose was to rid the country of Jews and other inferior races. It was the Azov battalion that led the post-coup government’s assault on the self-declared republics and retook the city of Mariupol from separatist forces.
The Minsk II agreement in 2015 ended the worst fighting and set up a buffer zone around the breakaway republics, but a low-intensity civil war continued. An estimated 14,000 people have been killed since 2014. Congressman Ro Khanna and progressive members of Congress tried for several years to end U.S. military aid to the Azov Battalion. They finally did so in the FY2018 Defense Appropriation Bill, but Azov reportedly continued to receive U.S. arms and training despite the ban.
In 2019, the Soufan Center, which tracks terrorist and extremist groups around the world, warned, “The Azov Battalion is emerging as a critical node in the transnational right-wing violent extremist network… (Its) aggressive approach to networking serves one of the Azov Battalion’s overarching objectives, to transform areas under its control in Ukraine into the primary hub for transnational white supremacy.”
The Soufan Center described how the Azov Battalion’s “aggressive networking” reaches around the world to recruit fighters and spread its white supremacist ideology. Foreign fighters who train and fight with the Azov Battalion then return to their own countries to apply what they have learned and recruit others.
Violent foreign extremists with links to Azov have included Brenton Tarrant, who massacred 51 worshippers at a mosque in Christchurch in New Zealand in 2019, and several members of the U.S. Rise Above Movement who were prosecuted for attacking counter-protestors at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in August 2017. Other Azov veterans have returned to Australia, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, the U.K. and other countries.
Despite Svoboda’s declining success in national elections, neo-Nazi and extreme nationalist groups, increasingly linked to the Azov Battalion, have maintained power on the street in Ukraine, and in local politics in the Ukrainian nationalist heartland around Lviv in Western Ukraine.
After President Zelensky’s election in 2019, the extreme right threatened him with removal from office, or even death, if he negotiated with separatist leaders from Donbas and followed through on the Minsk Protocol. Zelensky had run for election as a “peace candidate,” but under threat from the right, he refused to even talk to Donbas leaders, whom he dismissed as terrorists.
During Trump’s presidency, the United States reversed Obama’s ban on weapons sales to Ukraine, and Zelensky’s aggressive rhetoric raised new fears in Donbas and Russia that he was building up Ukraine’s forces for a new offensive to retake Donetsk and Luhansk by force.
The civil war has combined with the government’s neoliberal economic policies to create fertile ground for the extreme right. The post-coup government imposed more of the same neoliberal “shock therapy” that was imposed throughout Eastern Europe in the 1990s. Ukraine received a $40 billion IMF bailout and, as part of the deal, privatized 342 state-owned enterprises; reduced public sector employment by 20%, along with salary and pension cuts; privatized healthcare, and disinvested in public education, closing 60% of its universities.
Coupled with Ukraine’s endemic corruption, these policies led to the profitable looting of state assets by the corrupt ruling class, and to falling living standards and austerity measures for everybody else. The post-coup government upheld Poland as its model, but the reality was closer to Yeltsin’s Russia in the 1990s. After a nearly 25% fall in GDP between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine is still the poorest country in Europe.
As elsewhere, the failures of neoliberalism have fueled the rise of right-wing extremism and racism, and now the war with Russia promises to provide thousands of alienated young men from around the world with military training and combat experience, which they can then take home to terrorize their own countries.
The Soufan Center has compared the Azov Battalion’s international networking strategy to that of Al Qaeda and ISIS. U.S. and NATO support for the Azov Battalion poses similar risks as their support for Al Qaeda-linked groups in Syria ten years ago. Those chickens quickly came home to roost when they spawned ISIS and turned decisively against their Western backers.
Right now, Ukrainians are united in their resistance to Russia’s invasion, but we should not be surprised when the U.S. alliance with neo-Nazi proxy forces in Ukraine, including the infusion of billions of dollars in sophisticated weapons, results in similarly violent and destructive blowback.
The fact that all capitalist parties are backing the German
government and NATO confirms the perspective of the International
Committee of the Fourth International that war can only be stopped and a
third world war prevented if the international working class is
mobilised on the basis of a socialist programme. In its statement on the Ukraine war, the ICFI, quoting Leon Trotsky, declared:
“Not
to bind itself to the national state in time of war, to follow not the
war map but the map of the class struggle, is possible only for that
party that has already declared irreconcilable war on the national state
in time of peace.” To follow “the map of the class struggle” means to
root opposition to imperialism in the fight to unify the international
working class in opposition to exploitation, inequality and the
capitalist system.
The ICFI calls for an immediate end to the war. In opposing the invasion
of Ukraine, we denounce the policies of US/NATO imperialism, whose
claims to be defending democracy and human rights are blood-drenched
with hypocrisy.
Workers across the United States are responding with growing anxiety and
apprehension to the outbreak of war in Ukraine, while voicing
skepticism about the hysterical war propaganda being stoked by the Biden
administration and the corporate media.
In its statement released Thursday, “Oppose the Putin government’s invasion of Ukraine and US-NATO warmongering! For the unity of Russian and Ukrainian workers!,” the International Committee of the Fourth International, which publishes the World Socialist Web Site,
wrote, “The public mood is not the same as it was in the 1990s. Masses
of people have gone through the experience of the past three decades of
unending war. The overwhelming sentiment in the working class throughout
the world is opposed to war.”
This was reflected in discussions that the WSWS held on Thursday with workers, a selection of which we publish below.
BNSF railway worker
“I think we’re headed towards a long
drawn-out conflict in Europe. I feel for the people that live there. I
think we should have listened more when Putin talked about demanding
that Ukraine never join NATO. Other than how I feel about Putin
personally, that’s what we should have done diplomatically. I understand
that he has legitimate gripes about that.
“Here in the United
States, I just think with the attack on the working class and the income
divide we have, I don’t want to say it’s past a solution, but with the
current governing principles of this country, and the bipartisan attack
on the working class, in favor of corporations, I just feel like…in our
country, we are some of the least valuable workers in the world because
of the wealth and the income gap. As a person that grew up under the
‘Star-Spangled Banner’ and believing that you get out of your country
what you put into it, it’s hard to believe that anymore. The idea that
hard work makes you rich, that’s BS.”
Clare, an Alabama educator
“I
have absolutely no respect or any kind words for Putin, but I can say
the same about Biden as well, because he egged this on. He turned his
attention against his constituents and his own country to get involved
in this.
“Now we have the whole world looking at us, pointing the
finger at Putin. Biden says ‘we won’t be sending troops in’ but he has
already mobilized troops across Europe, strategically around Russia’s
borders. That’s an automatic indication that you are preparing for war.
Russia might look at that and say, ‘See? They do want war.’
“The US has no businesses doing this. If Biden cannot take care of
his own country, why is he getting involved in this? You can’t just turn
your attention away from the 900,000-plus citizens who have died of
COVID. How can he tell other countries what to do? The US suddenly has
money to mobilize troops, but it doesn’t have money to take care of
people during this pandemic?
“Governor Kay Ivey [in Alabama]
said, ‘We need to pray for people of Ukraine.’ Well, she needs to pray
for people right here, after she turned a blind eye on teachers,
students and parents here who got sick and died from the pandemic.
“Workers
should continue to stand up for themselves, continue the fight to do
whatever it takes to end this pandemic and mobilize against a war. In
Russia, the workers are still facing the pandemic, they do not want war.
In the US, the government will tell the working class it needs to
prepare for war, but we are already treated terribly during non-wartime.
If we continue to protest, we’ll be looked at as ‘unpatriotic.’ But
there is a war right now at home that needs to be fought against the
pandemic. And they are ignoring our voices.”
A trucker in southeast Michigan
“A
lot of people are very skeptical of the lies about Russia, which is
good, because you should always be skeptical of what the ruling class is
telling you. You should also always be trying to see what is really
going on.
“It’s just such a hollow, rickety narrative that
they’re trying to construct here. You cannot possibly look at it in good
faith and think that they are telling you the truth. When they are
pressed just the slightest bit and the reporter asks what evidence do
you have, they say, ‘We have the evidence, and that’s all we’re going to
say, and stop asking questions.’ Any sane person can look at that and
say, ‘Something is not right here.’
“It’s common knowledge now
that the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were a lie. Nobody believes
this narrative they’re trying to tell us. They have to make this thing
up from scratch. There is not a lot left from the Cold War propaganda
for them to grab onto, but it doesn’t stop them from trying. In my
generation, we were born around the time that the Soviet Union
collapsed. So the communist bogeyman has not been around my whole life.
“The
fact that they are willing to commit to this big lie now shows me that
they are totally set on what they are going to do and how little they
take into consideration the attitude and role of the American people.
“The
pandemic made it clear that they don’t care what the people want or
what they are saying or what’s in our best interest. If they want to go
to war, then they are going to war. Nothing is going to stop them short
of working class revolution.
“As crazy as it sounds, I didn’t
think anything could surpass the pandemic. But this is threatening to be
an even more urgent issue with a nuclear holocaust possibly on the
horizon. Nothing could be more important than opposing this war drive.
We have seen their recklessness already, especially the United States.
Who is the only country to ever use nuclear weapons? It’s the United
States. At that time Japan was already in the process of surrendering.
It was pretty much like a show of force.
“We
can’t let nuclear war break out. It would be nice to believe that the
ruling class is not crazy enough to actually take it that far. We cannot
afford that comfort. Frankly, I don’t have any faith in that point of
view. I think it is a false sense of security to think that they would
not provoke a nuclear war. Even if they think they will try to contain
it, and it won’t have to be a nuclear war, that’s just an
impossibility.”
An auto parts worker from Flint, Michigan
“It’s
just like with COVID, all they care about is the money. They say we
need war. We have to provide guns and ammunition, everything, ships to
get them over there, fuel, food for our soldiers. It all costs money.
And somebody is making a bundle. Our schools get cut. We get cut. Our
taxes go up. All because of war. They provoke these wars so that they
can ask Congress to open up the funding.
“When it comes to
providing supplies to fight the pandemic, they say they don’t have the
funding. But when it comes to war, all of a sudden, they have all the
money they need. They don’t have money to fight hunger, or homelessness.
“These army families get tied up in what the government is
saying. That’s how they get us every time. Back in the Gulf War, with
daddy Bush and little Bush, all the way back to Reagan, they lied to us
many times.
“A lot of people are waking up to what’s going on. I
was speaking to a friend of mine, and I explained that everybody has his
breaking point and you haven’t got to yours yet. Mine was losing my
brother to COVID-19. I can accept some things, and some things I just
can’t accept.
“The way they are treating teachers and
autoworkers, doctors and nurses, anybody that has to go to work, they
are not getting a fair shake. Just like my brother, even though he had
diabetes and they knew the plant was full of coronavirus. But people
have to work because they won’t be able to provide for their family if
they don’t. I can understand where a lot of other people are frustrated,
scared, nervous, especially now that there is war time in the middle of
the pandemic. It’s very stressful.
“When I think about the
political parties, I don’t believe any of them anymore. They poisoned my
daughter in the Flint water crisis. We still don’t know the full impact
of that.”
On Saturday, February 26, the World Socialist Web Site is hosting an international online webinar, “Fight COVID and Save Lives! Stop the Drive to World War 3!,”
which will be addressed by leading members of the International
Committee of the Fourth International. We call on all our readers
throughout the world to register and make plans to attend this critical
event.
"Yes, a world war is inevitable, if a revolution does not forestall it. The inevitability of the war flows, first, from the incurable crisis of the capitalist system; secondly, from the fact that the present partition of our planet, that is to say above all, of the colonies, no longer corresponds to the economic specific weight of the imperialist states. Looking for an escape out of the mortal crisis the parvenu states aspire, and cannot fail to aspire, to new partitioning of the world. Only children at the breast and professional 'pacifists' to whom even the experience of the unfortunate League of Nations has taught nothing, can suppose that a more 'equitable' repartition of the territorial surface can be realized around the green tables of democracy. ... Capitalism is condemned. Nothing will save it from collapse. The more resolute and audacious will be the policy of the proletariat the less the socialist revolution will provoke sacrifice, the sooner mankind will enter upon a new road."
Leon Trotsky, interviewed by London Daily Herald in March 1939, via @astrolib
Eighty-two years ago, Leon Trotsky, the great revolutionary Marxist
and leader of the Fourth International, noted (in an essay, “Trade
unions in the epoch of imperialist decay”) that “there is one common
feature in the development, or more correctly the degeneration, of
modern trade union organizations in the entire world: it is their
drawing closely to and growing together with the state power.”
Writing
shortly after the outbreak of World War II, Trotsky explained,
“Democratic unions in the old sense of the terms, bodies where in the
framework of one and the same mass organization different tendencies
struggled more or less freely, can no longer exist.”
Trotsky was
writing shortly after the eruption of the semi-insurrectionary
struggles, including the seizure of factories in sit-down strikes, that
led to the formation of the mass industrial unions in the US. However,
his analysis of the tendency toward the “growing together” of the
unions, the state and the corporations was extraordinarily prescient.
This process continued throughout the post-World War II period,
including through the purging of the socialists and militant workers
from the unions prior to and after the merger of the AFL and CIO in
1955.
Commenting on the transformations that have taken place
since Trotsky’s analysis, WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman
David North noted
that “the process of global economic integration and transnational
production deprived the trade unions of a national framework within
which they could apply pressure for limited social reforms. No room was
left for even the most moderate resort to the methods of class struggle
to achieve minimal gains. The unions, rather than extracting concessions
from the corporations, were transformed into adjuncts of the state and
corporations that serve to extract concessions from the workers.”
Speaking to foreign reporters during a major press conference on Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky criticized the “slightly imbalanced” coverage of the situation surrounding his country exhibited by some Western politicians and media.
“Today
we are not seeing any greater escalation than it was before. Yes, the
number of servicemen has increased, but I spoke about that at the
beginning of 2021 when they talked about the military exercises of the
Russian Federation,” Zelensky stated.
“From media
coverage, it looks like we are at war already, that troops are already
at the roads, that there's mobilization, people going somewhere. It's
not the case. We don’t need this panic.”
Overhyping the
tensions around Ukraine has already had a heavy impact on its economy,
Zelensky revealed. Billions have been withdrawn from the country amid
the panic, he added, without specifying any currency.
The president also touched upon the phone talks with his US
counterpart Joe Biden, which took place earlier in the day. Zelensky
dismissed media reports that they did not go well, insisting that he did
not have any disagreements with the US president.
“We do not
have any misunderstanding with the president of the United States.
Simply, I deeply understand what is happening in my country, and he
understands what is going on in the US well,” Zelensky explained.
At the same time, the Ukrainian leader admitted that he might have some secrets to keep from Biden.
Three senior epidemiologists in Australia—Guy Marks, Brendan Crabb and Raina MacIntyre—have issued an urgent appeal entitled “Backed by Science: Here’s How We Can Eliminate COVID-19.”
The statement, which was published on Sunday by Health Policy Watch, calls for sustained and globally coordinated action to eliminate the deadly virus. It was posted amid an unprecedented surge of COVID infections across Australia which is overwhelming hospitals, aged-care facilities and ambulance services, and leading to shortages of Rapid Antigen Tests and ongoing delays in the provision of “booster” vaccines and the inoculation of school-age children.
The document challenges the escalating barrage of government and mainstream media claims that Omicron is “mild,” that society must “live with the virus,” and that herd immunity can be achieved by “let it rip” policies. These unscientific assertions serve only to justify policies that place corporate profits above health and lives.
As infections rise throughout Seattle and
Washington state, students and teachers have initiated sickouts at two
high schools in defiance of the local, state and federal governments’
policy of mass infection and death.
Students at Franklin High
School in Seattle, Washington, initiated a walkout on Friday, calling
for increased safety measures and for remote learning as Omicron rips
through the schools and the community. Many schools throughout the
Seattle area and the Pacific Northwest have closed this week as the
rampant spread of COVID-19 caused major staffing shortages.
Franklin High School in Seattle [Source: Wikimedia Commons]
Franklin
High School has the highest infection rate in the entire school
district, with Roosevelt High School trailing behind, according to the
Seattle Public Schools (SPS) COVID-19 Dashboard. It recorded 52 cases in
the first week of school alone, an undercount of the real rate of
infection as testing sites are overwhelmed throughout the city.
The
students at Franklin High School are demanding that schools implement
safety measures or they will not return, with many students calling for
remote learning and the closure of schools until it is actually safe to
return. The list of demands on the Change.org petition calls on the district to:
Provide N95 masks for all
Perform weekly required COVID-19 testing at school
Continue contact tracing
Provide COVID-19 vaccines, including booster shots, available at school
Update the district’s COVID-19 dashboard daily
Provide one mental health therapist for every 30 students
There
is broad support for the action of the high school students throughout
the state, with more than 800 people signing the petition as of Friday
afternoon.
One student at Kamiak High School in Mukilteo, north of Seattle, told the World Socialist Web Site,
“At school, we’ve had children test positive in the library. It’s
unfair quite honestly. When we look at the chart for COVID cases in our
county, we’ve had up to 3 times more COVID cases compared to the initial
outbreak when we went into lockdown. The numbers are growing, and our
measly precautions are not preventing sickness. Human life should be
above all.”
The Franklin High School students said they decided to
join the movement initiated by students nationally for the closure of
unsafe schools and other COVID-19 safety protocols, such as those
actions taken by high school students in Chicago, Boston and other
cities across the US.
Alongside the walkout of high school
students, teachers at Chief Sealth International High School in Seattle
also staged a sickout Friday in response to the rise in infections at
the school and the lack of safety protocols. They are calling for the
district to provide KN95 and N95 masks, weekly on-site testing, the
hiring of more staff and increased funding for mental health resources.
If
these conditions are not met, they call for the closure of schools and
for remote learning options. Rebecca Neil, a Chief Sealth International
High School science teacher, said in an online post, “the system is
broken and Seattle Public Schools has failed to provide necessary
protections on so many levels. So much of what we are facing was
preventable with strategic planning and preparation, and [the] Seattle
Public Schools district leadership failed to act.”
In
response to the action by the teachers, the school administration
decided to fully close the high school for the day Friday, with no
remote instruction.
The growing militancy of educators and youth
comes in response to the unprecedented surge of the Omicron variant and
the intransigence of the state’s Democratic politicians, who are
following the Biden administration’s lead in implementing a “herd
immunity” strategy of mass infection and death.
Washington state’s
Democratic Governor Jay Inslee said at a press conference on Thursday
that “hospitalization rates will continue to go up,” acknowledging that
the hospital system in the state is already “in crisis” and that “the
emergency rooms are full.”
Inslee has called out 100 National
Guard troops in order to help the hospitals deal with the unprecedented
crisis, while insisting that SPS schools remain in-person. The school
district is scheduled to return to in-person classes on Tuesday, sending
over 50,000 students and staff into overcrowded, poorly ventilated
buildings where COVID-19 will spread like wildfire.
The walkouts
in Seattle are part of a broader struggle by high school students,
parents and educators against the deadly policy of mass infection and
for the closure of unsafe school. Protests have broken out in New York
City; Chicago, Illinois; Oakland, San Francisco and Los Angeles,
California; Boston, Massachusetts; Portland, Oregon; Baton Rouge,
Louisiana, and a growing number of cities across the US.
The IYSSE
and the WSWS call on students and educators to join the growing
resistance against the unsafe reopening of schools across the country
and internationally.
EXCERPT--Article references Canadian response, but USA is nothing if not worse!:
Four myths we chose to embrace
We find ourselves in this bad place because of the easy currency of bad ideas in a technological society.
These dangerous ideas — and I’m only going
to deal with four — are worth reviewing again because if we don’t
challenge and abandon them, we will be fighting COVID for years.
Myth 1: Vaccines will get us out of this.
From the beginning of the pandemic politicians told citizens to wait for the vaccine because a single technology will save us.
Yet as The Tyee has consistently warned, vaccines are imperfect tools
that have severe limits. Moreover no vaccine has ended any outbreak
without the help of other public health tools including masks,
quarantines and reductions in mobility. The assumption that a vaccine or
drugs can end a novel evolving pathogen in real time without the
strategic use of other interventions to bring transmission to zero has
made society more fragile and not less so.
Omicron’s superspreading events in
vaccinated populations have highlighted the danger of this thinking.
Three doses of the Pfizer vaccine
offers only 70-per-cent protection.
Yes, the vaccines may blessedly keep some
of us out of the hospital and that’s good news. But if vaccines aren’t
smartly paired with other interventions to end transmission, we will be
spinning our wheels for years to come.
A vaccine-only policy will prolong the
pandemic and exhaust our health-care systems. Only nuanced policies that
focus on eliminating transmission with the strategic use of testing,
improved ventilation and restraints on international travel will get the
job done.
Myth 2: Pandemics are unpredictable and have nothing to do with policy or human behaviour.
Not true. Our global technosphere has
provided a perfect environment for COVID to flourish. Two human
behaviours in a technological society have fed and accelerated this
pandemic. The first is unrestricted global travel, which guarantees the
circulation of variants. The second is poor ventilation in our
artificial living and working spaces.
International travel seeded the pandemic
and has launched every variant since. Poor ventilation, in turn, has
guaranteed the rapid transmission of new variants in schools,
workplaces, restaurants and spin classes. Without enclosed spaces built
by our technologies, this virus would perish. The evolutionary
biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein have correctly called COVID
“a disease of buildings, cars, ships, trains and airplanes.”
Yet public policy has failed to address these two critical issues. The complexity expert Joe Norman correctly has imperfect tools
that “Adaptively severing long-range connections — essentially all
long-range connections — should be the first step in addressing any
emerging disease that poses significant pandemic potential.”
And until Canada’s politicians become
strong advocates for changes in clean air standards in public buildings
and workplaces, the pandemic will linger like secondhand smoke.
Myth 3: We can live with this virus, and it will become milder over time.
Really? How’s that working for you?
Economies flooded by fear don’t work very well when people are dying,
the hospitals are full and routine medical care becomes difficult if not
impossible.
In contrast the research shows
that societies that collectively respond with policies that reduced
transmission to zero or near zero experienced fuller civil rights and
healthier economies.
Elimination matters for several key reasons. For starters there is no guarantee any new virus will evolve toward a milder state. It is a complete scientific myth.
Let me repeat Haseltine’s pointed warning that we have not seen the worse COVID can deliver yet.
At the same time the cost of “living with
the virus” is growing exponentially. The variants keep adding to those
political, economic and psychological costs by increasing transmission,
severity and lethality of COVID-19.
More variants equals more mutations which
equals more risk for all of us. And the variants are now clearly
outracing the vaccines. How long do Canadians want to be prisoners to
this charade because politicians believe “we can live with this virus”?
Myth 4: COVID is just a flu-like virus.
Just because a novel coronavirus may
provoke flu-like symptoms doesn’t make it a flu. Or even a close
relative. Unlike the flu, which is spread by children, COVID-19 is
driven by random superspreader events originating in just 20 per cent of
the population. The two viruses represent radically different diseases
requiring totally different public health responses.
As many physicians have argued, it is best to think of this novel virus as an evolving thrombotic fever.
It attacks the vascular system and can destroy brain cells.
Even people with mild symptoms can suffer
from chronic disabilities (fatigue and brain fog) a year after
infection. To date we have no clear idea how an infection might undo a
person’s health a decade from now.
Any politician who still dismisses or compares COVID to a flu should be forced to clean and bathe the dead.
Like many competent public health workers the developmental biologist Malgorzata Gasperowicz has long argued that “waves don’t come on their own. Bad policies make waves.”
And that’s Omicron in a viral nutshell.
It’s the result of only focusing on vaccines and ignoring other vital
interventions such as widespread testing and border controls to stop
transmission.
It’s the consequence of ignoring the science on aerosol spread because Omicron now thrives in unventilated spaces.
It’s also the direct result of not addressing the problems posed by unrestricted global mobility.
Gasperowicz has another important point.
The virus just doesn’t attack individuals but society as a whole. If we
think of society as a meta-organism and each person as a cell in that
organism, then we can think of public health and political leadership as
our immune system.
“Societies with weak or compromised
immune/defence systems end up with raging infection or sepsis. Societies
with strong/functional immune systems clear up the infection. They
don’t get infected or don’t let the infection to progress,” Gasperowicz
told The Tyee.
From the beginning, COVID has asked
Canadian society the rudest of questions: Is your political immune
system working for you? Or for a triumphal global virus?
EXCERPT--Must read for serious socialists. Excellent historical summary & call to action.
That is, the central contradictions of the world capitalist
system—between the global economy and the nation-state system, and
between socialized production and private ownership of the means of
production—have created the conditions for massive, revolutionary
struggles.
68. The development of a revolutionary situation,
however, involves two elements: the objective contradictions of the old
society, and the consciousness and political organization of the
masses—the subjective factor. But the interaction of the objective and
subjective factors is complex. “Society does not change its institutions
as need arises, the way a mechanic changes his instruments,” Trotsky
explained in his monumental History of the Russian Revolution.
Entirely
exceptional conditions, independent of the will of persons and parties,
are necessary in order to tear off from discontent the fetters of
conservatism, and bring the masses to insurrection.
The swift
changes of mass views and moods in an epoch of revolution thus derive,
not from the flexibility and mobility of man’s mind, but just the
opposite, from its deep conservatism. The chronic lag of ideas and
relations behind new objective conditions, right up to the moment when
the latter crash over people in the form of a catastrophe, is what
creates in a period of revolution that leaping movement of ideas and
passions which seems to the police mind a mere result of the activities
of “demagogues.” [5]
69. The pandemic—which has
exposed the obsolescence and irredeemably reactionary character of the
world capitalist system, its political institutions and class
structure—is the catastrophe that is not only provoking strikes and
other forms of social protest but also changing profoundly the
consciousness of the working class and the youth. The ruling class
hypocritically bemoans the closing of schools, which have been
underfunded, understaffed and overcrowded for decades. It is not the
absence of formal education that it fears. Capitalist governments know
that while they have been out of schools, the young people have not
stopped thinking. The pandemic has provided an education of its own,
laying bare the nature of capitalist society.
70. But as
consciousness undergoes a profound change, there remains the question of
revolutionary leadership. Socialist consciousness—that is, scientific
understanding of capitalist society and the political program required
for the transformation of society—does not arise spontaneously or
automatically. The transition of the objective crisis into a conscious
political movement for socialism is the great challenge of our time.
71.
When humanity is confronted with great social issues, nothing is more
futile, not to mention useless, than passive speculation about what can
or cannot be achieved. There has never been a period of crisis when the
path to progress has been strewn with roses. In such historical moments,
as Lincoln once observed, “the occasion is piled high with
difficulties.” Complaining about the impotence and outright treachery of
the trade unions and the old ex-reformist and ex-liberal capitalist
parties is a distraction from the serious tasks at hand. These
organizations, their representatives and accomplices are rotten through
and through.
72. There is no way out of the present disaster, let
alone the looming catastrophes of fascism, war, and irreversible
ecological harm to the planet, except through determined and unyielding
struggle.
73. Marxism, based on historical materialism,
understands very well the law-governed processes that give rise to
genuine mass revolutionary movements. But this understanding of
objective processes and the necessity of action by the masses has never
been an excuse for individual passivity. Individuals make decisions,
including the decision to oppose inequality, injustice and oppression.
There has never been, and can never be, a great mass revolutionary
movement without individuals making the conscious decision to fight.
74.
Therefore, as we enter the new year, we call upon workers and youth to
draw the necessary and inescapable political lessons of the last two
years of crisis—and, in fact, of history. Capitalism has condemned
itself. The future of mankind depends upon the victory of socialism.
Join this fight. Build the International Workers Alliance of
Rank-and-File Committees! Participate in the Global Workers’ Inquest
into the COVID-19 Pandemic! Expand the circulation of the World Socialist Web Site!
Above all, make the decision to join the Socialist Equality Party and
build the International Committee of the Fourth International as the
World Party of Socialist Revolution!
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange | Photo by Cancillería Ecuador
Attorneys
for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange plan to appeal to the Supreme
Court in the United Kingdom after the country’s appeals court overturned
a decision that blocked the extradition of Assange to the United
States.
The High Court of Justice was “satisfied” with diplomatic
assurances offered by the U.S. government related to how Assange would
be treated in jail or prison, and they stated, “There is no reason why
this court should not accept the assurances as meaning what they say.”
“There is no basis for assuming that the U.S.A. has not given the assurances in good faith,” the High Court also insisted.
More
significantly, the High Court remitted the case back to the district
court and instructed a district judge at this level to send the request
to the Secretary of State in the Home Department for extradition. The
Home Department previously allowed the extradition request to be considered by a district court.
The
High Court decision came on Human Rights Day, a day marked by countries
in the United Nations, and the decision was immediately condemned by
press freedom and human rights groups, and various other civil society
organizations throughout the world.
Assange is detained at Her
Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh in London, a high-security prison where he has
been held since he was expelled from the Ecuador Embassy on April 11,
2019. He faces 18 charges—17 of which are charges under the Espionage
Act.
The Espionage Act is a U.S. law passed in 1917 that the
Justice Department has increasingly wielded against media sources who
share “classified” documents or talk about sensitive information with
journalists.
Assange’s attorneys at Birnberg Peirce indicated
their “appeal to the Supreme Court would relate to the question of the
assurances. Appeals on other important questions, including questions of
free speech and on the political motivation of the U.S. extradition
request, have yet to be considered by an appeal court.” (They will
likely be considered after an appeal of this decision.)
"This decision marks a disastrous turning point for journalists and journalism around the world," declared
Rebecca Vincent, the Reporters Without Borders director of
international campaigns. “It falls on the very day when we should
celebrate the presentation of the Nobel Peace Prize to two journalists
and urge states to respect their commitments to press freedom, which
they have just reaffirmed at the Summit for Democracy organized by
United States.”
“We call on the U.S. government to truly lead by
example and to close this case now, before it does any more damage.
Julian Assange should be released immediately and steps should be taken
so that no other journalist, editor, or source can be targeted in this
way.”
“This is a travesty of justice. By allowing this appeal, the
High Court has chosen to accept the deeply flawed diplomatic assurances
given by the U.S. that Assange would not be held in solitary
confinement in a maximum security prison,” said
Amnesty International’s Europe director Nils Muižnieks. “The fact that
the U.S. has reserved the right to change its mind at any time means
that these assurances are not worth the paper they are written on.”
Stella Moris, who is Assange’s fiancé, called
the ruling a “grave miscarriage of justice.” Outside the courthouse,
she reacted, "Today is international Human Rights Day. What a shame. How
cynical to have this decision on this day, to have the foremost
publisher [and] journalist of the past 50 years in a U.K prison accused
of publishing the truth about war crimes, about C.I.A. kill teams."
"In
fact," Moris continued, "every time we have a hearing, we know more
about the abusive nature, the criminal nature of this case."
The U.S. government offered diplomatic assurances after Judge Vanessa Baraitser denied the extradition request on January 4.
According
to the assurances put forward, the U.S. government would not impose
special administrative measures (SAMs) on Assange before trial or after
he was convicted. However, it contained a major loophole. If Assange
committed a “future act” that “met the test” for SAMs, the U.S. would
designate him for such restrictive confinement conditions. They did not
specify what type of acts might justify abandoning this assurance.
The
U.S. government pledged that Assange would not be designated for ADX
Florence, a supermax prison in Colorado. Yet similar to the assurance to
not impose SAMs, they indicated if Assange commits a “future act” that
meets the "test for such designation” he could still be confined in a
maximum security prison.
Prosecutors pledged to allow Assange to
apply for a prisoner transfer to Australia to serve his U.S. sentence
under the Council of Europe Convention on the Transfer of Sentenced
Persons.
If Assange was extradited and held in a U.S. jail or
prison, the U.S. pledged to ensure he received “clinical and
psychological treatment” as recommended by a “qualified treating
clinician employed or retained” by the facility where he is held. But if
a facility lacked resources or the psychologist of staff did not conclude that Assange needed a higher level of care, he might not receive treatment.
“The
first and fourth assurances wholly exclude the possibility of Mr.
Assange being made subject to SAMs, or detained at the ADX, either
pretrial or after conviction, unless, after entry of the assurances, he
commits any future act which renders him liable to such conditions of
detention,” according to the High Court decision. “It is difficult to
see why extradition should be refused on the basis that Mr Assange might
in future act in a way which exposes him to conditions he is anxious to
avoid.”
Such a statement by the High Court accepts there are no
political motives behind the extradition, and none of the U.S. officials
involved in the prosecution intend to inflict harm on Assange.
The
High Court determined the U.S. has “made its decision as to how it will
respond to any request” for a prisoner transfer to Australia if Assange
is convicted. They gave “as explicit an assurance as it can.”
“The
reality is that this court is being invited to reject the U.S.A.’s
assurances either on the basis that they are not offered in good faith
or that they are for some other reason not capable of being accepted at
face value,” according to the High Court. “That is a serious
allegation,” especially since “the United Kingdom and the U.S.A. have a
long history of cooperation in extradition matters, and the U.S.A. has
in the past frequently provided and invariably fulfilled assurances.”
But journalist Richard Medhurst obtained
documents related to the 2009 extradition of David Mendoza Herrarte
from Spain to the U.S. Diplomatic assurances were given by the U.S.
government to Spain, but the U.S. violated those assurances.
Mendoza
was accused of drug trafficking. As the Assange legal team recounted in
a filing submitted to the High Court, “The Spanish Court made Mendoza’s
extradition conditional on prisoner transfer back to Spain to serve any
sentence. In response, the U.S. provided the same assurance offered
here to the Spanish Court.”
“Upon surrender, the prosecution did,
as promised, consent to the application. It was then, however, refused
by the [Justice Department]. When the Spanish court complained of the
‘clear breach’ of the assurance, the U.S.A. retorted that ‘the U.S. did
not make and therefore could not and did not renege on a promise
guaranteeing that Mendoza would comply with the sentence imposed in
Spain.”
“The promise that was made at the time,” U.S. authorities
claimed, was that Mendoza could apply for protection under the Treaty of
the Council of Europe to serve his sentence in Spain.
Similarly,
all the U.S. government is saying at this stage is that they will
consent to an application from Assange for prisoner transfer, which is
relatively meaningless, and they are not saying they would grant the
application.
Amnesty International previously stated
the so-called “assurances” upon which the U.S. government relies “leave
Mr. Assange at risk of ill-treatment,” are “inherently unreliable,” and
“should be rejected,” adding that they are “discredited by their
admission that they reserved the right to reverse those guarantees.”
Though
it did not persuade the court to uphold the district judge’s decision,
the High Court concluded Baraitser did not make an error when she
applied a test and determined extradition would be oppressive for health
reasons.
“We bear in mind that the judge had to take into account
the evidence of a witness called by Mr Assange, who considered the
[Alexandria Detention Center] to be a very well-run jail, accepted that
there had been no successful suicides at the ADC since its last
inspection in 2017, and considered that the ADC had ‘a stellar record’
on preventing suicide.”
The High Court continued, “She had to take
into account the evidence that Mr. Assange would be entitled to a
speedy trial within 70 days, and that the suggested delays caused by
pre-trial motions would not arise if he chose to take advantage of that
speedy trial provision. She also had to take into account the
possibility that Mr. Assange, who asserts that he has a complete defense
to the charges against him, will be acquitted.”
“She had to
consider carefully whether the required link between Mr. Assange’s
mental condition was satisfied when the evidence was that he would
pursue his intention to commit suicide with a ‘single-minded
determination.’”
The High Court was sympathetic but ultimately
rejected the ground for appeal that amounted to an attack on the
professional reputation of Professor Michael Kopelman. He is a clinical
psychiatrist who provided the most comprehensive assessment of Assange’s
condition in 2019 during the immediate months following his arrest and
expulsion from the Ecuador Embassy.
Declassified U.K. reported
days before the announcement that Assange’s “fate” was in the hands of
an appeal judge, Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett, “who is a close friend
of Sir Alan Duncan, the former foreign minister who called Assange a
‘miserable little worm’ in parliament.”
“The two have known each
other since their student days at Oxford in the 1970s, when Duncan
called Burnett ‘the Judge.’ Burnett and his wife attended Duncan’s
birthday dinner at a members-only London club in 2017, when Burnett was a
judge at the court of appeal.”
Duncan was “the key official in
the U.K. government[’s] campaign to force Assange from the embassy,”
according to Declassified U.K. Through a feed in an “operations room” in
the U.K. Foreign Office, he watched the British police drag Assange
from the embassy to a van. He could barely keep a smirk off his face and
later traveled to Ecuador to personally thank President Lenín Moreno
for expelling Assange.
Burnett was not present for the
announcement of the decision. Lord Justice Timothy Holroyde announced
the decision during proceedings that lasted a little more than ten
minutes.
The maintenance of the elimination strategy in China provides the
most critical lessons for the international working class on how to stop
the pandemic. Widespread lockdowns from January-March 2020 effectively
ended all community transmission of COVID-19 within China, with some
regions lifting restrictions in April 2020. This allowed the country to
reopen internally while setting up a strict two-week quarantining
program for all international travelers to prevent the importation of
new cases. Through a massive testing and contact tracing program,
whenever outbreaks occur they are quickly stamped out. This policy,
combined with mass vaccination, has wide support in the Chinese working
class.
China’s
effective response, which was mirrored in many other countries,
demonstrates that COVID-19 can be eliminated. In a country of over 1.4
billion people, only two people have died from the virus since May 16,
2020, compared to 701,170 Americans and roughly 5 million people
globally. The Socialist Equality Party completely rejects the claim that
the scientific measures taken in China, which are necessary to save
lives, represent a violation of democratic rights.
