Belarusian opposition leader Tikhanovskaya appeals to Washington for support

Jason Melanovski

Exiled Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya has spent the last two weeks in the United States to meet with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and later President Joe Biden as part of her ongoing appeal to Western imperialism for support against the regime of President Alexander Lukashenko.

Tikhanovskaya, a former teacher, rose to prominence in August of 2020 after claiming victory in the Belarusian presidential elections against Lukashenko. According to the Belarusian government, President Alexander Lukashenko won by a landslide, garnering 80.10 percent of the vote, while Tikhanovskaya, came in second, with 10.12 percent of the ballot. Tikhanovskaya claimed to have won the presidency with between 60 to 70 percent of the vote.

Amid widespread claims of government ballot rigging, mass protests and strikes erupted. The mass anger was also driven by the government’s criminal mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Lukashenko regime harshly cracked down on strikes and protests. Several protesters were killed, thousands were imprisoned and there were numerous reports of cruel torture in prisons.

While the Western media focused its attention on so-called “pro-democracy” figures, such as Tikhanovskaya (who quickly went into exile), the crackdown was primarily motivated by a fear of working-class protests and strikes spreading throughout the country.

The pro-Western opposition and the Lukashenko regime have, in fact, been united in their opposition to the upsurge in working-class struggles. While the regime responded with harsh violence, the opposition sought to politically derail the strike movement.

As the protests have died down in recent months, divisions have emerged within the opposition, with Tikhanovskaya speaking for a wing that most openly appeals to the imperialist powers.

On the eve of her visit to Washington, she declared in the National Interest that she no longer sought to claim the presidency in Belarus. Instead, she wanted to serve as a “moral authority.” Underscoring her complete orientation to US imperialism, she said, “With Biden’s help we will prevail.”

Throughout her time in Washington, Tikhanovskaya had meetings with the State Department, the White House and the Senate. She also attended the launch of the Friends of Belarus Caucus in the House of Representatives.

While meeting State Department officials, including Secretary Antony Blinken last Monday, she begged the US to implement tough sanctions against the Belarusian economy, including the country’s potash, oil, wood and steel sectors. She reportedly also gave the US government a list of officials who should be sanctioned.

Last Tuesday during a webinar coordinated by the rabidly anti-Russian think tank the Atlantic Council, Tikhanovskaya openly called for a more aggressive imperialist intervention into Belarusian politics, stating, “I think it’s high time for democratic countries to unite and show their teeth.”

Despite weeks-long pleading for a face-to-face meeting with President Joe Biden and several op-eds in the Washington Post, Tikhanovskaya was forced to wait over a week before a snap meeting occurred on Tuesday. Her White House visit conspicuously took place just as US and Russian officials were meeting in Geneva to follow up on Biden’s June summit with Putin. At the summit, the Biden administration sought to ease tensions with Russia in the context of its war drive against China.

Following the meeting, Tikhanovskaya called her visit with Biden “an inspiration for our people” and “a message to the whole world that the greatest country in the world is with us.” Biden tweeted, “The United States stands with the people of Belarus in their quest for democracy and universal human rights.” However, no information about any tangible results of the meeting were revealed.

In a stark display of her utter alienation of social reality in Belarus, Tikhanovskaya at no point during her comments in Washington even mentioned the ongoing pandemic that has had a devastating effect on the Belarusian health care system.

In addition to meeting with top US officials and President Biden, Tikhanovskaya has previously met with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Emmanuel Macron of France while attempting to drum up support for Western-sponsored regime change in Belarus.

Among her list of demands intended to cripple the Lukashenko presidency, she is also pleading with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to cancel a planned $1 billion disbursement to Belarus, so far with little success.

While she has received no official answer to her demand for sanctions, Russia’s TASS news agency reported that the US will announce new sanctions against Belarus in the coming weeks. “There were no promises given to her, no deadlines, because the US is working on sanctions regardless of her visit,” a source told TASS.

Tikhanovskaya currently resides in Lithuania, a NATO member country, where she has received the support and backing of the government. The Lithuanian government granter her official diplomatic status in her attempt to drum up US and EU support against the Lukashenko regime.

Despite the ongoing campaign in the Western press over Tikhanovskaya, within Belarus she is far from the most popular opposition figure with polls showing that she would now fall into third or fourth place in hypothetical elections.

According to a poll of Belarusians by the London-based think tank Chatham House, Victor Babariko is, in fact, the most popular opposition figure with 34 respondents supporting him compared to 25 for Lukashenko and just 10 percent for Tikhanovskaya. Forty-two percent of respondents stated that they did not trust Tikhanovskaya.

Babariko previously worked as a prominent banker with Belgazprombank, a lender that is a subsidiary of Russia’s state-owned Gazprom. He was widely seen as the biggest threat to Lukashenko and was arrested just prior to last year’s presidential elections.

Unlike Tikhanovskaya, who has developed open ties with Western imperialism, Babariko has long-standing connections with Moscow due to his business dealings with Russian companies. He favors Belarus taking a neutral status in the conflict between Russia and the West.

Babariko was recently sentenced to a 14-year prison sentence after Belarusian officials accused him of money laundering, bribery and tax evasion, suggesting that Lukashenko is moving further away from accepting a succession agreement negotiated by Moscow.

While the Kremlin initially backed Lukashenko following the eruption of mass strikes and protests with the open backing of the imperialist powers for the opposition, Moscow is very wary of Lukashenko and has been pressuring him to step down for many months now.

Over the past year, Lukashenko has resorted to arresting over 35,000 people and imprisoning up to 400 political prisoners in a desperate bid to hang onto power which he has held for the past 27 years. Throughout the crisis Lukashenko has refused to undertake measures to stem the COVID-19 pandemic, dismissing it as a “mass psychosis.”

Despite the availability of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine, the government has effectively refused to undertake a vaccination campaign. Only 4 percent of its population of 9 million people are vaccinated, one of the lowest rates in Europe.

In addition to jailing journalists and opposition politicians, closing down NGOs and threatening to interrupt EU trade routes, the Lukashenko regime has turned to increasingly desperate attacks on the country’s working class to maintain power. The Belarusian government has recently curtailed the already extremely limited right to strike. Any worker who participates in protests can now be immediately fired, and the rising of political demands during strikes has been banned altogether.

Last week, Lukashenko, who often blames nefarious “bandits” for undermining his authority, publicly railed against Belarusian workers, who are supposedly stealing diesel, fuel, milk and other products from state companies and are being blamed for threatening Belarus along with the mass media and NGOs.

UK public debt: Pandemic profiteering costs workers’ lives and incomes

Julie Hyland

The costs associated with the Johnson government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic have exposed UK taxpayers to “significant financial risks for decades to come”, according to the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), with the UK deficit set to reach a peacetime record of £372 billion in 2020-21.

The Public Accounts Committee report: Covid-19: Cost Tracker Update

This represents approximately 18 percent of national income. With the contraction in economic output in 2020 estimated to be the worst in more than 300 years, the total level of UK debt is likely to rise to 105 percent of GDP—almost double the level of government borrowing following the 2008/09 global financial crisis, which was followed by more than a decade of austerity.

The PAC report aims at even more savage levels of austerity, with its call on the Treasury to provide a “comprehensive framework for managing the risks to public finances… in its upcoming Spending Review.”

To this end the PAC’s report is predicated on a lie: that government borrowing was aimed at supporting “public services, workers and businesses” following the World Health Organisation’s categorisation of COVID-19 as a pandemic on March 11, 2020.

In truth, Britain’s ruling elite—as the world over—responded with criminal indifference to public services and workers’ lives and livelihoods. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government was the first to publicly admit to a policy of “herd immunity”—allowing the virus to spread through the population with virtually no protections.

This fascistic policy of state-sanctioned social euthanasia was the culmination of the class warfare begun under Margaret Thatcher and pursued for more than four decades by Labour and Conservative governments alike. As the Socialist Equality Party (UK) explained, “The government’s sole concern was to use the pandemic to engineer a further transfer of social wealth to the banks and major corporations .”

On March 17, 2020, Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced billions in “unlimited lending capacity” to big business and the rich. Having taken measures to protect the financial oligarchy, the government, with the support of the Labour Party and the trade unions, immediately moved to end lockdown and re-open schools and workplaces.

The PAC’s own report is forced to briefly acknowledge that out of 32 billion items of personal protective equipment (PPE) eventually ordered last year by the Department of Health in response to public outcry, nearly two-thirds remained unused in May.

The waste of PPE funds, often on useless stock, while “key workers” were left without epitomises the policy of malign neglect. Upwards of 900 health and social care workers have died since the pandemic began, many of whom were forced into workplaces where COVID-19 was rampant without basic protection. They are among the 150,000 people who have died from COVID-19 in the UK alone to date. Nonetheless, the government has removed all remaining social distancing measures, even as new and more deadly variants of the virus spread.

At the other end of the social spectrum, the rich have never had it so good. The total wealth of billionaires worldwide rose by 60 percent, from £3.6 trillion to £9.5 trillion, in the 12 months to March, the largest increase on record.

This is behind the phenomenon of pandemic profiteers, grotesquely highlighted by the competition between Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos to monopolise space as the private playground of the super-rich. These two billionaires are (notionally at least) based in the UK and US respectively, the countries with among the highest death tolls from COVID-19 in the world.

The PAC gives some indication of how this plundering has been facilitated. It estimates that £92 billion was delivered to corporations in government-backed loans under the direction of the British Business Bank. Some £26 billion is expected to be written-off at tax-payers’ expense as the government used the pandemic to waive fraud and transparency checks, with then Health Secretary Matt Hancock secretly establishing a “VIP” high-priority lane for businesses endorsed by politicians or officials.

According to a New York Times estimate, of the approximately 1,200 government contracts made public, worth nearly $22 billion (£15 billion), about $11 billion (£8 billion) “went to companies either run by friends and associates of politicians in the Conservative Party, or with no prior experience or a history of controversy.”

Lord Paul Deighton, former investment banker and Tory Party grandee, acted as the government’s PPE czar, helping “award billions of dollars in contracts––including hundreds of millions to several companies where he has financial interests or personal connections.”

This is the tip of the iceberg. Even the £59 billion provided through the furlough scheme was a subvention to major corporations, including Branson’s Virgin Active group, British Airways and other FTSE 100 firms, who took the money while cutting workers’ wages or making them redundant.

The lobbying scandal around former Tory Prime Minister David Cameron and the now collapsed Greensill Capital partially lifted the lid on the levels of financial parasitism. According to the National Audit Office, Cameron and government ministers applied “unusual” pressure for Greensill to access COVID loan schemes, with a total of £400 million channeled to multiple companies linked to GFG Alliance, owned by the billionaire Sanjeev Gupta, before the finance company collapsed.

Other examples include the grossly misnamed Track and Trace system. At least £37 billion was allocated to NHST&T (NHS Test and Trace), principally run by 22 private companies and overseen by Tory peer Baroness Dido Harding. Described as the “biggest gravy train in history”, its consultants received as much as £6,624 a day to preside over a system demonstrably unfit for purpose.

The one area that the PAC can point to where government spending has benefited public health, the vaccination programme, is also an arena for the appropriation of public funds and pooled scientific expertise by the financial oligarchy.

At least 97 percent of funding for the development of the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine came from public or charitable funds, with millions more provided by the government to fast-track its roll-out. In May, shareholders (of which Lord Deighton is one) agreed a hike in CEO Pascal Soriot’s pay package from £1.3 million to £15.45 million. Small wonder Johnson boasted privately to Tory MPs, “The reason we have the vaccine success is because of capitalism, because of greed my friends… It was giant corporations that wanted to give good returns to shareholders”.

There has been much talk of “cronyism” in response to such revelations. The more appropriate term is kleptocracy—the form of government associated with dictatorships and military juntas whose political leaders steal public funds to enrich themselves and their corporate backers.

The PAC report has been greeted with demands for cuts in public spending, wage freezes and the slashing of welfare benefits and pensions to “get public finances back onto a sustainable path.”

Millions face public sector wage freezes and the gutting of pay and conditions through “fire and rehire.” In October, the furlough scheme, currently supporting approximately two million people, ends. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, many of those earning an average of £20,000 per annum pre-furlough will see their incomes plunge to £3,885 pa.

In the same month, the government intends to withdraw the miserly £20 “COVID” increase in Universal Credit, paid to unemployed and low-earning families, in what the Joseph Rowntree Foundation describes as the “biggest overnight cut to the basic rate of social security since the Second World War.”

State pensions, already the lowest in western Europe at 28 percent of the average wage, are to be slashed as the government moves to end the “triple lock” guarantee, which lifts pensions each year by 2.5 percent, the rate of inflation or average earnings growth, whichever is largest.

The Labour Party’s silence on these attacks is a continuation of the support it has provided to the government throughout the pandemic. Likewise, the trade unions, which have utilised the pandemic to deepen their corporatist relations with government and big business, at the expense of workers’ health, pay and conditions.

Japan records highest COVID-19 daily case number, a foreseeable disaster

Emily Ochiai

As the Tokyo Summer Olympics games proceed into their second week, COVID-19 cases are increasing at a much faster rate than predicted in this huge and densely populated city of over 38 million. On July 29, there were 3,854 new cases in Tokyo, the highest daily infection case count recorded there so far. Daily cases are expected to exceed 5,000 in less than two weeks.

Despite widespread opposition, the Japanese government refused to cancel the Olympics in the face of a global pandemic and the emerging highly-contagious Delta variant. At least $15.4 billion was spent on the Olympics by Japan, $4 billion in broadcast revenue is expected and billions more in advertising. The media and entertainment bosses, and the governments which back them, fully aware of the potential consequences, calculated these revenues to be worth the cost in human life and lifelong complications as hospitals overflow.

Norio Ohmagari, Director of Disease Control and Prevention Center of the National Center for Global Health and Medicine, told the Yomiuri Shimbun, Tokyo is “heading into an explosive spread of infection that we have never encountered before.” Tokyo’s hospitals are unable to keep up with the rapid increase in patient numbers, forcing them to postpone admissions. As a result, an increasing number of patients are forced to quarantine at home, and a growing number are dying at home without any access to healthcare.

Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike’s response to the exploding cases exemplified the ruling class’s irrationality and anti-science tendencies. When questioned about the potential effect of the Olympics on the rising number of cases, she stated “It is the opposite. The Olympics has effectively increased the number of people staying at home.”

Prime Minister Suga also denied the impact of the Olympics on cases, stating, “The Tokyo Olympics did not have any effect on the increasing case numbers.” When asked the reason for this, he claimed, “We are taking measures to prevent infection from foreigners and increased traffic.”

Contrary to these statements, Shigeru Omi, President of the Japan Community Health Care Organization, admitted that the Olympics is one of the major causes, saying, “It is the responsibility of the government and the Olympics Committee to do whatever they can to stop the spread.” Nevertheless, Prime Minister Suga continues to reject any possibility of cancelling the Games.

The government and corporate media are attempting to divert public outrage by blaming young people. The corporate media is developing a false narrative of irresponsible youth spreading the virus by emphasizing the high rate of COVID-19 infection among those in their 20s and 30s. Headlines such as “Young people head to bars at night in Shinjuku, showing little concern over 3,000 COVID-19 cases” are flooding news media, citing cherry-picked and often twisted interview quotes from young people.

However, the reality is that the Japanese government has consistently downplayed the dangers of COVID-19 since the outbreak began, never taking meaningful measures to contain the infection or enforcing a mandated lockdown of non-essential businesses. Additionally, infection was most prevalent among restaurant employees, according to data from the Okinawa prefecture, which experienced one of the worst outbreaks.

Infections are rapidly increasing not only in Tokyo but also in three prefectures surrounding Tokyo, Chiba, Saitama, and Kanagawa. On July 28, all three prefectures saw a record-breaking increase in case numbers. They are considering declaring a state of emergency.

Japan has experienced a number of health care crises throughout the pandemic. The surge in cases is straining hospitals in the Tokyo metropolitan area and the surrounding region, rapidly approaching their capacity. Yokohama Rosai Hospital, a public hospital in the Kanagawa prefecture officially designated to accept Olympics athletes, is located right next to the Olympics arena. The workers at the hospital told Asahi Shimbun about their devastating situation.

Dr. Hayakawa explained how the ER hotline rang continuously throughout the day. In addition to COVID-19 patients, the high temperature in the metropolitan area is causing an increase in cases of heat stroke and dehydration and therefore putting additional pressure on the hospitals. Dr. Nakamura, the head of the emergency department, reported to the same press that he had to decline to take in an elderly patient who had a stroke because there were no more beds available.

Meanwhile, cases among Olympics athletes and staff continue to increase. There are now 193 confirmed infection cases among Olympics-related personnel. Contrary to Olympics organizers and the Tokyo governments’ repeated promise for a “safe and secure” Games, it was revealed that the International Olympic Committee is not following the proposed Covid-19 protocols.

The committee’s guideline states that they will conduct PCR tests on every volunteer worker. However, a number of volunteer workers told TBS news that they have never received the test nor any information regarding COVID testing. A volunteer worker who drives the athletes expressed his concerns to TBS: “I haven’t got tested, not even once. They have not contacted me yet and no explanation was given to me.” A translation volunteer stated, “I still have not received a test. I feel uncomfortable volunteering.”

The opposition to the Games is continuing. Yesterday, demonstrators gathered in front of the Prime Minister’s office. Many held up signs, criticizing the lack of effective COVID-19 measures or any relief fund for those who fell into poverty and homelessness. One sign reads “The Olympics torch relay was started by the Nazis! Money to the people! Use for aiding COVID-19 hardships! The Olympics for the big corporations and the aristocrats is unnecessary!”

The ruling class is responding to the popular opposition by intimidation. On the night of the opening ceremony, a protester was arrested. Law enforcement officers were recorded on video, harassing the protesters on their way home from a demonstration at the Road Cycling course. The ruling class deployed 1,900 Self-Defence Force soldiers at the Road Cycling course and mobilized more than 8,500 for the duration of the Games.

The explosive increase in case numbers will inevitably trigger a destructive health care crisis in Tokyo. In view of this, there are mounting calls for protest in the coming days and many are voicing their anger towards the Olympics, which has brought together anger against the Japanese ruling class, its deadly handling of the pandemic, and social inequality in Japan.

Brazil’s schools set to reopen amid record COVID-19 child deaths

Eduardo Parati

Last week, a news report by UOL revealed that COVID-19 became the number one cause of death among 10-to-19-year-olds in Brazil. Just in the first six months of 2021, 1,581 young people in this age group died from COVID-19. In contrast 1,406 died from cancer in the entire year of 2019.

The death toll of younger children is also alarming, with Health Ministry data showing that 1,187 children younger than 10 died from COVID-19 in 2020. However, data from Vital Strategies, which takes into account the surge in deaths from Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), points to 3,129 lives lost.

Epidemiologist and professor at the Sergipe Federal University Paulo Martins-Filho said that “this increase in the number of hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19, observed particularly since February and March, is a reflex of the high community transmission rate and the circulation of variants of concern in the national territory.” He added that “For children, the pandemic was also associated with profound educational, social and psychological changes, food insecurity … which can result in death in poorer regions.” He concluded that “the disease emerged as a new cause of death among children in poor communities, as observed in the North and Northeast regions in Brazil.”

In an interview with CNN Brasil, Ana Escobar, a pediatrician from the University of São Paulo said that the Gamma variant, which originated and became the dominant variant in Brazil in the first months of the year, was a direct cause for the deadly disease spreading among young people. She explained that it is able to more easily enter cells in the body, while warning of the potential of a new surge in deaths that won’t spare children and teenagers: “the Delta variant, which is already in the country, is even better at it.”

In Brazil, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to cause more than a thousand deaths every single day, while the moving average is again on the rise, registering 45,094 daily cases. Sunday, vaccinations with first shots were suspended in eight state capitals, pending the delivery of new vaccine batches by the federal government.

Meanwhile, state governors, including those of the Workers Party (PT) and Maoist Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB), are signaling their support for the profit interests of the ruling class by touting the vaccination of small percentages of the population while reopening schools and the entire economy.

Maranhão Governor Flávio Dino of the PCdoB announced last week the beginning of in-person classes on August 2, along with the full reopening of theaters, churches, commerce and mass events. He justified his measures stating that “We have the mask mandate and social distancing. This is as critical as the vaccine. From this premise ... we are flexibilizing economic activities.” Meanwhile, Governor Rui Costa of the PT followed the same line, while threatening Bahia’s state teachers that they will have their wages cut if they refuse to enter schools.

The reopenings being carried out by the PT and PCdoB show that these organizations defend capitalist interests just as aggressively as their openly right-wing counterparts, promoting the return of children to unsafe schools and their parents to unsafe factories and workplaces. They are acting in tandem with Brazil’s fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro’s open campaign against lockdowns and for the spreading of COVID-19 among the population.

So far, 12 states have already reopened public schools, while most are expected to be reopened in August. Some capitals, such as Rio de Janeiro, plan on reopening their municipal schools in September, while private schools are already open in 22 states.

In São Paulo, where there are 3.6 million students enrolled in the state school system, Governor João Doria of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) announced plans on June 16 for increasing maximum capacity in schools from 35 percent to 100 percent. On Wednesday, the governor stated that “Things are going back to normal” and announced the end of all restrictions on opening hours and in-door capacity for all economic activities on August 17, two days after the rollout of first shots for 18-year-olds.

With this announcement, Doria aims to promote the inoculation with the first jab of 56 percent of the population of one state as successful “immunization,” using as a pretext the drop in hospitalization rates and deaths. The drive to reopen the economy at all costs ignores the need to complete second jabs for the entire population, with just 19 percent fully immunized nationally, not to mention the need to immunize all young people under the age of 18.

However, after months of refusal of both parents and teachers to allow their children inside crowded schools and amid ongoing mass protests against Bolsonaro’s criminal response to the pandemic, Doria fears that his year-long campaign of bringing students back to schools will provoke an upsurge of opposition not only to the school reopenings but to the entire political establishment and its pandemic policy. The governor announced that each school will be allowed to decide its maximum capacity and declared that in-person activities will remain optional for parents.

If the governors are able to press for the reopening of schools, it’s because they can count on the trade unions, which have isolated and suppressed teachers’ struggles at every turn.

During March, just as the second COVID-19 wave was beginning, the São Paulo’s APEOESP state teachers union and the state capital’s SINPEEM municipal teachers union refused to carry out a joint strike against the school reopenings, much less call for a national strike amid protests by teachers and other sectors of the working class throughout the country.

Both unions are affiliated to the PT-controlled National Confederation of Education Workers (CNTE), which published an article on Thursday reporting a study showing that “badly-worn masks could elevate COVID-19 cases by 1,000 percent.” Rather than fight against the reopening of schools, the unions are already shifting the blame for a future surge in COVID-19 cases onto the students themselves.

On Monday, covering for Governor Doria’s efforts, APEOESP published a supposed defense against in-person activities that actually follows the governor’s line. It states that “For the return to schools to happen, it’s necessary that all education workers have received their second jab of the vaccine.” The union leaves unmentioned the dangers of allowing millions of children inside crowded schools, which could become super-spreader venues.

In an article in Folha de São Paulo, state legislator and APEOESP president, Maria Izabel Azevedo Noronha, held as exemplary the fact that “in Germany, students are tested once a week and classrooms are limited to 15 students, with a 2-meter minimum distance.” She goes on to mention the UK, the US and France as examples of in-person teaching during the pandemic.

APEOESP is covering up the fact that the UK government’s “let it rip” pandemic policy, including in-person classes, resulted in the Delta variant spreading through the country, and that children currently account for eight percent of all hospitalizations.

By allowing in-person classes in August while less than a quarter of Brazil’s population is vaccinated, the teachers union gives credit to the lie that children do not transmit the disease, something that was promoted not only by the mainstream media, the governors and the corporate-funded Escolas Abertas movement in Brazil, but also repeated by president Biden in the US.

The deadly results of such a policy are already being seen in the states that reopened schools. In Rio Grande do Sul, where schools were reopened in May, data gathered until July 12 shows that just in the state school system there were 3,696 cases among students, teachers and staff, out of which half were students. Only 186,000 students are participating in in-person activities, or 20 percent, which shows that a full reopening would be a major factor in producing a catastrophic third wave.

Workers must oppose the “new normal” being promoted by the ruling class, in which they and their children continue to put their lives at risk inside crowded workplaces and schools. Just as the virus developed new variants when governments lifted lockdowns and restrictions, it will continue developing new and even more deadly variants, most of all in regions with low vaccination rates.

The struggle of teachers against the school reopenings was only defeated because the unions were able to suppress a unified struggle throughout Brazil and internationally.

The approved continuation of the strike by state teachers in the state of Sergipe and the current meetings between PT Governor Rui Costa and the trade union in Bahia are both based on the same rotten proposal to accept a full reopening in return for a second jab for teachers. Just as in São Paulo, the SINTESE and the APLB trade unions are maneuvering to give up the teachers’ struggle, keeping their fight isolated.

Also, as much as the media and the government tries to promote the nationally based campaign to immunize the Brazilian population as the ultimate solution to the pandemic, the spread of the Gamma variant in the entire region has showed that only an international response to the pandemic will be able to stop it.

Leaked CDC document exposes Biden administration’s COVID-19 cover-up

Andre Damon

On Thursday, the Washington Post published a leaked internal report from researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warning of mass community spread of COVID-19 among vaccinated people and calling on the Biden administration to stop discouraging mask wearing and social distancing.

US President Joe Biden holds up a mask (Credit: AP)

The secret report contradicts nearly every public statement by the White House over the course of the past two months. Bringing together a broad range of public research—including some that was previously unpublished—the report warns that there are 35,000 symptomatic COVID-19 infections every week among vaccinated people.

The report states that vaccinated people who are infected with COVID-19 are just as infectious as those who are unvaccinated. It acknowledges that the so-called Delta variant of COVID-19 is more infectious than the common cold and, in fact, one of the most transmissible diseases known to man.

The document refutes President Joe Biden’s claim on July 22 that vaccinated people cannot be infected with COVID-19—“You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”

For months, Biden has used the claim that vaccinated people are fully protected from COVID-19 to justify the abandonment of masking and social distancing requirements, despite the fact that the CDC had access to data definitively proving the opposite. “Take your mask off, you’ve earned the right,” Biden said in June.

On May 13, the CDC reversed its guidance on mask-wearing, urging vaccinated people to stop wearing masks and socially distancing in crowded areas.

“Anyone who is fully vaccinated can participate in indoor and outdoor activities, large or small, without wearing a mask or physical distancing,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky declared in May.

The CDC’s statements prompted the near-total abandonment of mask-wearing in the United States. Within days, businesses stopped enforcing mask mandates, while the vaccinated public, misinformed by the CDC, went maskless in public and reduced social distancing.

The deliberate promotion of false advice by US health authorities helped drive a massive resurgence of the pandemic, with cases now surging 50 percent per week.

In the leaked report, CDC scientists call for an urgent reversal of this catastrophic guidance, declaring in bold, “universal masking is essential to reduce transmission of the Delta variant.”

The document further calls for “community mitigation strategies” and non-pharmaceutical interventions, which are “needed to reduce transmission of Delta variant”—such as the closure of non-essential businesses and schools.

In response to the leaked memo, the Biden administration made clear that it has ruled out serious measures to contain the disease. “We are not going to head towards a lockdown,” White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said Friday.

It is unclear how the internal CDC document was leaked to the Washington Post. It remains the case, however, that it was not released by the CDC or Biden administration, and the CDC declined to comment on its publication to the Post—indicating that its leadership opposed its release to the public.

The media’s framing of the report was largely misleading. The report was presented by NBC Nightly News as “new findings from the CDC,” without mentioning that the document was leaked without the CDC or White House’s permission. Its findings were presented as unforeseen and surprising, completely ignoring the fact that most of the report’s conclusions were well-known beforehand.

Epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding, who has for months been raising the alarm about the Delta variant of COVID-19, including in an interview with the World Socialist Web Site in May, responded to the CDC report by detailing, point by point, how the main findings had been known for months.

Noting a study from Public Health England and Public Health Scotland that found the Delta variant was nearly three times as dangerous as the Alpha variant, Feigl-Ding asked, “What’s the date of the report? June 3rd 2021!!! That’s ~2 months ago!”

“We have long known vaccinated transmit,” Feigl-Ding wrote, pointing to a tweet from nearly a month ago in which he showed research from Singapore demonstrating community spread among vaccinated people. He wrote at the time, “This demonstrates why vaccinated people still need to mask up damnit!”

He continued, “Oh cmon, when should CDC have known? The data from Singapore Ministry of Health was all freely accessible online and updated **daily**… and you can see the above graph’s vaccine breakthrough #DeltaVariant cluster was already apparent by mid June!!”

Feigl-Ding continued, “why didn’t we know about breakthrough infections causing transmission earlier? Was the CDC lying or neglectful & derelict in their duty to monitor? Let’s rewind to May 2021— @CDCgov decided to stop collecting & investigating mild breakthroughs!”

Feigl-Ding also noted that on June 26, epidemiologist Larry Brilliant had explained that “the Delta variant is more transmissible than smallpox.”

In the article breaking the story, the Washington Post quoted an unnamed CDC official calling for the full publication of the data in the report, “Waiting even days to publish the data could result in needless suffering and as public health professionals we cannot accept that.”

In May 2020, the ousted US health official Rick Bright filed a whistleblower complaint making clear that “public health officials were fully aware of the emerging threat of COVID-19 by early January 2020,” despite the Trump administration’s efforts to downplay the dangers posed by the pandemic.

Modi government calls exposure of its use of Pegasus to spy on political opponents “fake news”

Wasantha Rupasinghe

India’s political establishment has been engaged in bitter recriminations for the past two weeks over the revelation that the country’s far-right Narendra Modi-led government has used the Pegasus spyware to illegally surveil opponents across the political spectrum. Those targeted include everyone from left-wing activists to senior figures in the opposition, and even government members who have fallen afoul of Modi and the high command of his Hindu-supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for one reason or another.

India Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks in Houston. (AP Photo/Michael Wyke)

Virtually since the Monsoon session of India’s parliament began on July 19, its proceedings have been badly disrupted by opposition protests demanding a full parliamentary debate and independent investigation into the spying. Meanwhile, Modi and his cronies, while conspicuously refusing to categorically deny the Indian state has been using Pegasus to spy on BJP opponents, have denounced the opposition for spreading “false news,” “maligning Indian democracy” and “defaming India.”

The Pegasus spyware program was developed by the Israeli-based NSO Group, which claims to sell it only to “vetted governments” and with the approval of the Israeli government.

The revelations concerning its widespread use, including by India’s government, came to light earlier this month after Amnesty International and the Paris-based media nonprofit Forbidden Stories got access to leaked records of thousands of phone numbers that NSO Group clients had selected for potential surveillance. They then shared the lists with 16 media partners around the world, including the Wire in India.

The list of potential NSO surveillance targets contain at least 1,000 Indian phone numbers. Of these, the Wire has verified about 300 that were listed as potential targets for surveillance during 2017-19.

The identities of those targeted leaves no doubt about the fact that the spying was directed from the inner circle of the Modi government. As the Economist wrote in a summary of those targeted, “The list includes numbers used by some 40 journalists who share nothing but a critical stance towards Mr. Modi’s government. Some belong to Rahul Gandhi, leader of the opposition Congress Party, and his personal friends. Others belong to a political consultant credited with state-level wins against Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, and to a former top election official who had recommended penalising Mr. Modi for flouting rules during the 2019 general election, as well as to members of his family. Figures from inside the government may have been targeted, too, among them at least two BJP ministers, senior civil servants and a number of senior security officers.”

The BJP government has responded to the opposition parties’ attempt to force an independent inquiry into the state spying with brazen lies, stonewalling, and by pointing out that previous Congress-led governments also spied on their opponents. On Friday, as the opposition continued to disrupt parliamentary proceedings, the government threatened to run roughshod over traditional parliamentary procedures to ram through a raft of reactionary pieces of legislation without debate. These include a bill that would pave the way for privatisation of the power industry and another that would strip workers in defence industries of the right to strike.

In light of the Indian bourgeoisie’s notorious record of violating democratic rights, the Pegasus exposure comes as no surprise. The Modi government, which came to power in the 2014 general elections by exploiting mass anger towards the previous Congress-led government, has accelerated the implementation of pro-investor “reforms,” while whipping up Hindu communalism and using trumped-up charges, including sedition and terrorist offenses under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) to victimize opponents. It and the BJP-led state governments have also lashed out with censorship and state violence against critics of their criminal mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

These ruthless attacks directed above all against the working class and rural toilers have been met with little more than handwringing and pro forma denunciations from within the political establishment. By contrast, the opposition has raised a hue and a cry over the Pegasus revelations. This is because they fear and are outraged that Modi is employing authoritarian methods to consolidate political power at their expense and those of the sections of the ruling elite for which they speak

To date, the Wire has confirmed that at least 40 journalists were either targets or potential targets for Pegasus surveillance. The web news portal has conducted forensic analysis on the phones of seven journalists, “of which five showed traces of a successful infection by Pegasus.” Of these, two belonged to M.K. Venu and Siddharth Varadarajan, themselves founding editors of the Wire. Others proven to be under state surveillance included Muzamil Jaleel, an Indian Express journalist who covers Kashmir, Sandeep Unnithan, an India Today journalist who reports on defense and the Indian military, and Vijaita Singh, the Hindu journalist who covers the Home Ministry.

The Wire has found at least nine numbers belonging to eight of the 16 leftists and Dalit activists who were arrested between June 2018 and October 2020 for their alleged roles in the Elgar Parishad (or Bhima Koegaon) case. Among them was the 84-year-old Jharkhand-based tribal activist and Jesuit priest, Father Stan Swamy, who was arrested and jailed in October last year. He died on July 5 of complications from COVID-19 after having been systematically denied proper medical care for months.

Along with the accused in the Elgar Parishad case, the Wire identified some 41 “activists, lawyers and academicians” as possible targets of surveillance by the government and the various Indian security agencies. A number of relatives, friends and lawyers who appeared for the Elgar Parishad accused were also targeted for surveillance. The NSO lists also included: Umar Khalid, a former student of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), who is now in jail awaiting trial as an accused in the trumped-up Delhi riots “conspiracy” case; Shiv Gophal Mishra, a railway union leader; Alok Shukla, an anti-coal mining activist; Bela Bhatia, an academic and a chronicler of life in Maoist-dominated regions; and Saroj Giri, a Delhi University professor.

The Wire found at least two mobile phone accounts used by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi among the hundreds of verified Indian numbers listed as potential targets by an official Indian NSO client. The numbers of five of his friends and acquaintances were also placed on the list of potential targets, despite the fact, reports the Wire, that “none of the five plays any role in politics or public affairs.” Highlighting that Gandhi was targeted for surveillance when he was president of the Congress and leading his party into the 2019 general election, the Wire writes that this “raises troubling questions about the integrity of the election process.”

Significantly, the NSO records show that Ashok Lavasa, the only member of the three-person Election Commission to rule that Modi had violated the Model Code of Conduct while campaigning for the 2019 general election, was listed as a potential candidate for surveillance just weeks after his dissent.

In a separate analysis, the Wire suggested that the Pegasus spyware may have played a role in the BJP’s toppling of the state government in Karnataka in 2019. The article noted, “The numbers of Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy’s secretary, deputy chief minister G. Parameshwara and the secretary of former CM (chief minister) Siddaramaiah were all selected as potential targets for snooping in the run up to the collapse of the JD(S) [Janatha Dal (Secular)]-Congress coalition government.”

Major political figures in West Bengal’s ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) were also selected as potential targets for surveillance in the run-up to this year’s election in the state, which saw the BJP fall short in its objective of coming to power. Those whose numbers appear on the target list include both the personal secretary of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and her nephew, Abhishek Banerjee, who is also a TMC minster.

Much of the media has rallied round the Modi government, both by minimizing the significance of the Pegasus revelations and presenting the BJP’s lame response as credible. Other “liberal” voices are more critical. They fear the Modi government’s open resort to authoritarian methods of rule is exacerbating divisions within the ruling class under conditions of increasing social opposition from below and, above all, that its actions are dangerously discrediting the institutions of the capitalist state in the eyes of India’s workers and toilers.

“When the Israeli vendor insists that the spyware is sold only to ‘vetted governments’,” declared a July 21 Indian Express editorial, “the government does not have the option of brazening it out or resorting to conspiracy mongering.”

The Indian Nation and Its Borders

Ron Jacobs

September 19, 1965. I was riding on a US military bus through the mountains on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. My fellow passengers were women and children who were family members of US military men stationed in Peshawar. There was a doctor on board. Our destination was Kabul, where we would regroup and board refitted cargo planes headed to Turkey. The reason for our journey was not for any US military issue, but an escalating series of battles in the ongoing conflict between India and Pakistan over the disputed territory of Kashmir. That conflict continues to this day. It is but one of several resulting from the creation of the nation state of India. Those borders were often arbitrary and based on lines scribbled down by a British viceroy with little or no investment in the future of a non-British India.

This is the story of modern India, a nation created when Britain finally gave up its colonial hold. Its birth was celebrated as a great victory for freedom and independence. Its creation was also a genocide. Muslims were forced to flee their homes and villages and were massacred along their way to the other newly formed nation of Pakistan. Retribution followed. As far as the Indian politicians were concerned, the definition and defense of their newly made borders would define their national independence. In Suchitra Vijayan’s new book Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India, it becomes clear that those borders would provide an excuse to kill and steal at will in the name of Indian nationhood.

In what can best be described as a uniquely truthful take on the modern nation-state, Midnight’s Borders describes the ongoing skirmishes, police actions and wars that have defined the making of the Indian nation. In doing so, the author illuminates the nature of border policies around the globe and the fragility of the nation-state concept. In a text whose title reference’s Salman Rushdie’s fictional masterpiece Midnight’s Children and took seven years to complete, Vijayan describes the life and the lives of individuals, families and hamlets affected by the borders imposed on them from the outside. These descriptions are written in inviting prose while simultaneously describing the destruction of lives and cultures, families and relationships. It is these stories that make this a true people’s history.

National leaders—revolutionary and otherwise—tell us that borders are what makes a nation free. If one is a citizen of that nation, it is their inclusion as a citizen that makes them free and justifies the defense of those borders. In India, this particular concept was an unfortunate but essential fact of its birth in 1947. The forces who opposed a secular nation defined being Indian in terms of religion and culture. This meant that Muslims had to go somewhere else. In turn, those Muslims who did not wish to live in a secular nation accepted this definition of Indian nationhood and birthed the nation of Pakistan. As anyone with even a minimal knowledge of that historical moment knows, it was a bloody one. Vijayan notes in her history that the exclusion of Muslims from Indian democracy continues. Indeed, it has quickened under the right wing Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi. Muslims and others not considered Indian enough are being denied their Indian citizenship and left without a state. In the world where citizenship provides humans with basic rights, this action means these non-citizens have no legal power. In turn, some are being rounded up into camps and their property taken from them.

In order to write this book the way she felt it needed to be written, Vijayan traveled virtually the entire border of India. In those more than 7,000 miles, she talked with many people, from border guards in the heights of the Himalayas to villagers in the tropical forests of Bengal. She met poor residents of border towns who had seen their children killed for unknowingly stepping across a border and she interviewed military and police officers who saw their job as protecting the nation, no matter what the toll. She discusses the history the Indian citizen id taught about their nation and their enemies and she describes its toll on those who are considered unworthy or unnecessary to its existence. The fact that she finds hope in the despair she describes is both a credit to her journalistic craftsmanship and to the nature of humanity.
Despite the tenacity and hope that keeps the people in these regions alive, there is one reality that overrides and underlines every moment of this text. It is a reality that is true for every nation in the world, not just India. That is this: borders make nations, often through bloodshed and the misery. The maintenance of those borders by governments and their armies insure that that misery continues. Until and unless humanity resolves this basic fact and moves beyond the current understanding of borders and their meaning, it is doomed to maintain and exacerbate that misery, hopefully not to its deadly end.

The Global Right Wing’s Bizarre Obsession With Pedophilia

John Feffer

Hungary’s authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán loves a good enemy. He has lashed out against Eurocrats in Brussels. He has cynically demonized immigrants to boost his political standing at home.

But now he may have gone too far with his attack on an unlikely (and universally unliked) group of people.

Pedophiles.

Last month, the Hungarian parliament passed legislation increasing the sentences for those convicted of sexually abusing minors. Ordinarily, such a move wouldn’t cause much if any backlash. But the Hungarian right wing has used its campaign against pedophilia to target homosexuals and the transgender community. The bill includes a ban on any depictions or promotion of homosexuality to anyone under the age of 18. It’s part of Orbán’s longstanding effort to turn Hungary into a bastion of Christian conservatism in the middle of Europe, which has included, among other things, a decree enshrined in the country’s constitution that marriage is only between a man and a woman.

“Linking the LGBT community to pedophilia is a tactic that may score Mr. Orbán and his party points with conservative rural voters, many of whom, spurred on by a steady stream of government propaganda, see the government as a bulwark against the cosmopolitan liberalism symbolized by opposition political figures in the capital,” writes Benjamin Novak in The New York Times.

The European Union, of which Hungary is a member, is fighting back. The EU is a place “where you are free to be who you are and love whomever you want,” noted the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen. “I will use all the powers of the commission to ensure that the rights of all EU citizens are guaranteed. Whoever they are and wherever they live within the European Union.”

Viktor Orbán is not alone in his obsession. Pedophilia features prominently in the diatribes of far-right politicians in a number of countries, the organizing campaigns of far-right NGOs, and the ravings of QAnon.

The trafficking of children is a serious global problem. Every year, thousands of children are sold for the purposes of sexual exploitation. But the far right is more interested in insane conspiracy theories—and enforcing its antiquated notions of gender and sexuality—than in dealing with this very real problem.

Instead of combatting real-existing pedophilia, the far right has waded into the deep end to battle Satanism and homosexuality, which they tend to equate. Going back a thousand years and more, the real issue has nothing to do with the Devil or sexuality. Rather, like so many other problems, it all boils down to money and power.

The Blood Libel

Nearly 900 years ago, William of Norwich was found dead outside the English town of Norwich. The 12-year-old boy was an apprentice tanner from a family connected to the local cathedral. His death was an unsolved mystery, and the authorities didn’t charge anyone with murder.

But five years after the discovery of the body, a bishop defending a man accused of killing a Jewish moneylender in Norwich made the extraordinary claim that the victim had been responsible for killing young William. The bishop argued that the Jewish community of Norwich had chosen the boy for the purposes of ritual murder, an outrageous defense that successfully deflected attention from the murderer of the moneylender.

And thus was born the “blood libel.” According to this early conspiracy theory, Jews killed children to extract their blood for use in religious rituals or even such mundane tasks as baking matzoh. It has been a particularly durable myth, appearing throughout the Middle Ages, during the Nazi period, and even among modern anti-Semites.

QAnon might at first glance seem to belong to an entirely different category of conspiracy. But the notion that a global cabal traffics in little children for the purposes of Satanic rituals that require their blood is nothing but an updated version of the blood libel, with cosmopolitan liberals substituting for Jews.

Talia Lavin plumbed the connections between QAnon and the anti-Semitic “blood libel” last year in The New Republic. But she failed to note the economic underpinnings of both outlandish conspiracy theories. In Norwich, in the middle of the twelfth century, the blood libel grew out of perceptions of Jews as a rich, powerful, and globally connected community that “sucked the blood” of Christian society through the charging of interest on loans. In those days, the Church considered usury a sin, which opened up the profession to Jews (though plenty of non-Jews also served as bankers in the Middle Ages and afterwards). The “blood libel” thus fed into other anti-Semitic myths that associated all Jews with global power and wealth.

QAnon is similarly focused on a devilish global fraternity that supposedly steals children and somehow transmutes their blood into international power. These feverish nightmares intersect with the diatribes of Trump and his allies against “globalists” who have somehow destroyed the purity of America. Both narratives gain power from the fact that globalization has failed to deliver to so many people around the world. For those willing to believe pretty much anything, QAnon provides a fact-free explanation that what economists call the workings of an impersonal, invisible hand is actually the handiwork of a very real and very evil network of people.

But what does this all have to do with pedophilia?

Manufacturing a Panic

The far right has usually focused its energies on race and nationalism. But the alt-right has also absorbed a large chunk of the social agenda of mainstream conservatives, particularly around gender. This concern has translated into a commitment to preserving the traditional family, circumscribing the role of women, and combatting anything that smacks of same-sex attraction or gender fluidity.

According to a fascinating new report from the Elevate Children Funders Group and the Global Philanthropy Project, the alt-right has enlisted children in its full-spectrum defense of the traditional family. “Gender-restrictive groups prey on our collective desire to protect children,” the report authors argue. “By presenting themselves as ‘concerned adults’ with children’s wellbeing and safety, they appeal to a more moderate, nonreligious audience.”

This “defense of the family” often conflates pedophilia with homosexuality. In 2018, as the Manufacturing Moral Panic report details, the Bulgarian far right mobilized against sex education in schools and managed to persuade the government to reject ratification of the Istanbul Convention, a European treaty to prevent violence against women. To do so, the far right spread various myths about “gender ideology” to suggest that feminists and gay rights activists were intent on destroying the traditional family and binary definitions of male and female, all of which put “children at risk.”

A particularly bizarre element of the campaign was the “Norwegian Model,” according to which the Norwegian government was trying to make it easier for the Bulgarian government to separate children from their families so that they could be adopted by same-sex couples in Norway, which in turn would lead to widespread pedophilia. In this made-up scenario, wealthy Norwegians are merely the stand-ins for all the rich foreigners who have been exploiting Bulgaria for its natural resources and cheap labor.

According to another conspiracy theory that has spread throughout Latin America, the fictitious “Pedophile Activist Movement” is supposedly trying to worm its way into the LGBT community to normalize child molestation. “Two of the main methods of this attack on the reputation of the LGBT community,” writes Andrea Dominguez, “were the dissemination of an alleged pedophile flag, suspiciously similar to the flag that identifies trans people, and the celebration of “pedophile pride day” on June 24th, in dangerous proximity to the LGBT pride day that is celebrated every June 28th.”

Promoting these efforts are the usual QAnon-like social media trolls. But there are also a number of well-financed NGOs that are pushing homophobic, transphobic, and anti-feminist messaging around the world. The Alliance Defending Freedom International, a global battering ram of Christian fundamentalists in the United States, works in dozens of countries to outlaw same-sex marriage and abortion. As Media Matters points out, “In their book The Homosexual Agenda, ADF founder Alan Sears and his former ADF colleague Craig Osten called pedophilia and ‘homosexual behavior … often intrinsically linked.’ The book also falsely claimed that ‘there is a definite link as well between child molestation and later homosexual behavior.’”

Once prominent on the neo-Nazi fringe, for instance in the Russian skinhead effort “Occupy Pedophilia” that was dedicated to gay-bashing, this association of pedophilia and homosexuality has increasingly leaked into more mainstream right-wing discourse. The World Congress of Families, which initially tried to maintain some distance from explicit homophobia, has been overwhelmed by activists pushing this so-called link, with Ted Cruz’s father Raphael Cruz declaring at their 2015 conference that the “next thing [LGBT activists] are going to push [is] to try to legalize pedophiles.” The far-right European petition organization, CitizenGo, has also been obsessed with pedophilia, for instance launching a petition demanding that the film Call Me by Your Name be censored on the grounds that it promotes pedophilia.

All of this, of course, is nonsense.

But again, pedophilia itself is not imaginary. The New Yorker recently ran a story about a renowned sexologist who managed somehow to convince the German government to place young boys in foster homes run by pedophiles. It wasn’t a conspiracy. It wasn’t global. It didn’t involve Satanists. But the state often does not do right by vulnerable children.

Why doesn’t the far right deal with these real cases of pedophilia? Because that would require an examination of some very embarrassing cases within its own ranks. Take the example of far-right Republican congressman Matt Gaetz, currently under investigation by the Justice Department for sex trafficking and having sex with a minor. Ralph Shortey, the chair of Trump’s Oklahoma campaign, is serving 15 years in prison for child sex trafficking. Would-be Senator Roy Moore, would-be congressman Ben Gibson, former Speaker of the House Denis Hastert, Trump Commerce Department official Adam Hageman, Republican digital strategist Ruben Verastigui, and so on: all have stood accused of pedophilia and/or child pornography.

Viktor Orbán faces the same problem of embarrassing scandals within his own party. This month, a former top-ranking official from Orbán’s Fidesz party went to jail after being caught secretly filming children in dressing rooms at the beach. The Hungarian ambassador to Peru was removed from office and fined after his office computer was found to contain thousands of picture of child pornography. Then there have been the various charges of the sexual abuse of children inside the Hungarian Catholic Church.

So, that new Hungarian law on pedophilia? Methinks the Hungarian government doth protest too much. Instead of indulging in the worst forms of homophobia, Viktor Orbán could better direct time and resources at addressing child molestation among his colleagues and inside the conservative mainstream of Hungarian society.