The Utter Stupidity of the New Cold War

Gary Leupp

It seems so strange, twenty-seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to be living through a new Cold War with (as it happens, capitalist) Russia.

The Russian president is attacked by the U.S. political class and media as they never attacked Soviet leaders; he is personally vilified as a corrupt, venal dictator, who arrests or assassinates political opponents and dissident journalists, and is hell-bent on the restoration of the USSR.

(The latter claim rests largely on Vladimir Putin’s comment that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a “catastrophe” and “tragedy”—which in many respects it was. The press chooses to ignore his comment that “Anyone who does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart, while anyone who wants to restore it has no brain.” It conflicts with the simple talking-point that Putin misses the imperial Russia of the tsars if not the commissars and, burning with resentment over the west’s triumph in the Cold War, plans to exact revenge through wars of aggression and territorial expansion.)

The U.S. media following its State Department script depicts Russia as an expansionist power. That it can do so, so successfully, such that even rather progressive people—such as those appalled by Trump’s victory who feel inclined to blame it on an external force—believe it, is testimony to the lingering power and utility of the Cold War mindset.

The military brass keep reminding us: We are up against an existential threat! One wants to say that this—obviously—makes no sense! Russia is twice the size of the U.S. with half its population. Its foreign bases can be counted on two hands. The U.S. has 800 or so bases abroad.

Russia’s military budget is 14% of the U.S. figure. It does not claim to be the exceptional nation appointed by God to preserve “security” on its terms anywhere on the globe. Since the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the U.S. has waged war (sometimes creating new client-states) in Bosnia (1994-5),  Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001- ), Iraq (2003- ), Libya (2011), and Syria (2014- ), while raining down drone strikes from Pakistan to Yemen to North Africa. These wars-based-on-lies have produced hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, millions of refugees, and general ongoing catastrophe throughout the “Greater Middle East.” There is no understating their evil.

The U.S. heads an expanding military alliance formed in 1949 to confront the Soviet Union and global communism in general. Its raison d’être has been dead for many years. Yet it has expanded from 16 to 28 members since 1999, and new members Estonia and Latvia share borders with Russia.

(Imagine the Warsaw Pact expanding to include Mexico. But no, the Warsaw Pact of the USSR and six European allies was dissolved 26 years ago in the idealistic expectation that NATO would follow in a new era of cooperation and peace.)

And this NATO alliance, in theory designed to defend the North Atlantic, was only first deployed after the long (and peaceful) first Cold War, in what had been neutral Yugoslavia (never a member of either the Warsaw Pact nor NATO), Afghanistan (over 3000 miles from the North Atlantic), and the North African country of Libya. Last summer NATO held its most massive military drills since the collapse of the Soviet Union, involving 31,000 troops in Poland, rehearsing war with Russia. (The German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier actually criticized this exercise as “warmongering.”)

Alliance officials expressed outrage when Russia responded to the warmongering by placing a new S-400 surface-to-air missiles and nuclear-capable Iskander systems on its territory of Kaliningrad between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic coast. But Russia has in fact been comparatively passive in a military sense during this period.

In 1999, as NATO was about to occupy the Serbian province of Kosovo (soon to be proclaimed an independent country, in violation of international law), nearby Russian peacekeepers raced to the airport in Pristina, Kosovo, to secure it an ensure a Russian role in the Serbiam province’s  future. It was a bold move that could have provoked a NATO-Russian clash. But the British officer on the ground wisely refused an order from Gen. Wesley Clark to block the Russian move, declaring he would not start World War III for Gen. Clark.

This, recall, was after Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright (remember, the Hillary shill who said there’s a special place in hell reserved for women who don’t vote for women) presented to the Russian and Serbian negotiators at Rambouillet a plan for NATO occupation of not just Kosovo but all Serbia. It was a ridiculous demand, rejected by the Serbs and Russians, but depicted by unofficial State Department spokesperson and warmonger Christiane Amanpour as the “will of the international community.” As though Russia was not a member of the international community!

This Pristina airport operation was largely a symbolic challenge to U.S. hegemony over the former Yugoslavia, a statement of protest that should have been taken seriously at the time.

In any case, the new Russian leader Putin was gracious after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, even offering NATO a military  transport corridor through Russia to Afghanistan (closed in 2015). He was thanked by George W. Bush with the expansion of NATO by seven more members in 2004. (The U.S. press made light of this extraordinary geopolitical development; it saw and continues to see the expansion of NATO as no more problematic than the expansion of the UN or the European Union.) Then in April 2008 NATO announced that Georgia would be among the next members accepted into the alliance.

Soon the crazy Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili, emboldened by the promise of near-term membership, provoked a war with the breakaway republic of South Ossetia, which had never accepted inclusion of the new Georgian state established upon the dissolution of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1991. The Ossetians, fearing resurgent Georgian nationalism, had sought union with the Russian Federation. So had the people of Abkhazia.

The two “frozen conflicts,” between the Georgian state and these peoples, had been frozen due to the deployment of Russian and Georgian peacekeepers. Russia had not recognized these regions as independent states nor agreed to their inclusion in the Russian Federation. But when Russian soldiers died in the Georgian attack ion August, Russia responded with a brief punishing invasion. It then recognized of the two new states (six months after the U.S. recognized Kosovo).

(Saakashvili, in case you’re interested, was voted out of power, disgraced, accused of economic crimes, and deprived of his Georgian citizenship. After a brief stint at the Fletcher School of International Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University—of which I as a Tufts faculty member feel deeply ashamed—he was appointed as governor of Odessa in Ukraine by the pro-NATO regime empowered by the U.S.-backed coup of February 22, 2014.)

Sen. John McCain proclaimed in 2008: “We are all Georgians now,” and advocated U.S. military aid to the Georgian regime. An advocate of war as a rule, McCain then became a big proponent of regime change in Ukraine to allow for that country’s entry into NATO. Neocons in the State Department including most importantly McCain buddy Victoria Nuland, boasted of spending $ 5 billion in support of “the Ukrainian people’s European aspirations” (meaning: the desire of many Ukrainians in the western part of the country to join the European Union—risking, although they perhaps do not realize it, a reduction in their standard of living under a Greek-style austerity program—to be followed by NATO membership, tightening the military noose around Russia).

The Ukrainian president opted out in favor of a generous Russian aid package. That decision—to deny these “European aspirations”—was used to justify the coup.

But look at it from a Russian point of view. Just look at this map, of the expanding NATO alliance, and imagine it spreading to include that vast country (the largest in Europe, actually) between Russia to the east and Poland to the west, bordering the Black Sea to the south. The NATO countries at present are shown in dark blue, Ukraine and Georgia in green. Imagine those countries’ inclusion.

And imagine NATO demanding that Russia vacate its Sevastopol naval facilities, which have been Russian since 1783, turning them over to the (to repeat: anti-Russian) alliance. How can anyone understand the situation in Ukraine without grasping this basic history?

The Russians denounced the coup against President Viktor Yanukovych (democratically elected—if it matters—in 2010), which was abetted by neo-fascists and marked from the outset by an ugly Russophobic character encouraged by the U.S. State Department. The majority population in the east of the country, inhabited by Russian-speaking ethnic Russians and not even part of Ukraine until 1917, also denounced the coup and refused to accept the unconstitutional regime that assumed power after Feb. 22.

When such people rejected the new government, and declared their autonomy, the Ukrainian army was sent in to repress them but failed, embarrassingly, when the troops confronted by angry babushkas turned back. The regime since has relied on the neo-fascist Azov Battalion to harass secessionists in what has become a new “frozen conflict.”

Russia has no doubt assisted the secessionists while refusing to annex Ukrainian territory, urging a federal system for the country to be negotiated by the parties. Russian families straddle the Russian-Ukrainian border. There are many Afghan War veterans in both countries. The Soviet munitions industry integrated Russian and Ukrainian elements. One must assume there are more than enough Russians angry about such atrocities as the May 2014 killing of 42 ethnic Russian government opponents in Odessa to bolster the Donbas volunteers.

But there is little evidence (apart from a handful of reports about convoys of dozens of “unmarked military vehicles” from Russia in late 2014) for a Russian “invasion” of Ukraine. And the annexation of Crimea (meaning, its restoration to its 1954 status as Russian territory) following a credible referendum did not require any “invasion” since there were already 38,000 Russian troops stationed there. All they had to do was to secure government buildings, and give Ukrainian soldiers the option of leaving or joining the Russian military. (A lot of Ukrainian soldiers opted to stay and accept Russian citizenship.)

Still, these two incidents—the brief 2008 war in Georgia, and Moscow’s (measured) response to the Ukrainian coup since 2014—have been presented as evidence of a general project to disrupt the world order by military expansion, requiring a firm U.S. response. The entirety of the cable news anchor class embraces this narrative.

But they are blind fools. Who has in this young century disrupted world order more than the U.S., wrecking whole countries, slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocents, provoking more outrage through grotesquely documented torture, generating new terror groups, and flooding Europe with refugees who include some determined to sow chaos and terror in European cities? How can any rational person with any awareness of history since 1991 conclude that Russia is the aggressive party?

And yet, this is the conventional wisdom. I doubt you can get a TV anchor job if you question it. The teleprompter will refer routinely to Putin’s aggression and Russian expansion and the need for any mature presidential candidate to respect the time-honored tradition of supporting NATO no matter what. And now the anchor is expected to repeat that all 17 U.S. intelligence services have concluded that Vladimir Putin interfered in the U.S. presidential election.

Since there is zero evidence for this, one must conclude that the Democratic losers dipped into the reliable grab bag of scapegoats and posited that Russia and Putin in particular must have hacked the DNC in order to—through the revelation of primary sources of unquestionable validity, revealing the DNC’s determination to make Clinton president, while sabotaging Sanders and promoting (through their media surrogates)  Donald Trump as the Republican candidate—undermine Clinton’s legitimacy.

All kinds of liberals, including Sanders’ best surrogates like Nina Turner, are totally on board the Putin vilification campaign. It is sad and disturbing that so many progressive people are so willing to jump on the new Cold War bandwagon. It is as though they have learned nothing from history but are positively eager, in their fear and rage, to relive the McCarthy era.

But the bottom line is: U.S. Russophobia does not rest on reason, judgment, knowledge of recent history and the ability to make rational comparisons. It rests on religious-like assumptions of “American exceptionalism” and in particular the right of the U.S. to expand militarily at Russia’s expense—-as an obvious good in itself, rather than a distinct, obvious evil threatening World War III.

The hawks in Congress—bipartisan, amoral, ignorant, knee-jerk Israel apologists, opportunist scum—are determined to dissuade the president-elect (bile rises in my throat as I use that term, but it’s true that he’s that, technically) from any significant rapprochement with Russia. (Heavens, they must be horrified at the possibility that Trump follows Kissinger’s reported advice and recognizes the Russian annexation of Crimea!) They want to so embarrass him with the charge of being (as Hillary accused him of being during the campaign) Putin’s “puppet” that he backs of from his vague promise to “get along” with Russia.

They don’t want to get along with Russia. They want more NATO expansion, more confrontation. They are furious with Russian-Syrian victories over U.S-backed, al-Qaeda-led forces in Syria, especially the liberation of Aleppo that the U.S. media (1) does not cover having no reporters on the ground, and little interest since events in Syria so powerfully challenge the State Department’s talking points that shape U.S. reporting, (2) misreports systematically, as the tragic triumph of the evil, Assad’s victory over an imaginary heroic opposition, and (3) sees the strengthening of the position of the Syrian stats as an indication of Russia’s reemergence as a superpower. (This they they cannot accept, as virtually a matter of religious conviction; the U.S. in official doctrine must maintain “full spectrum dominance” over the world and prohibit the emergence of any possible competitor, forever.)

*****

The first Cold War was based on the western capitalists’ fear of socialist expansion. It was based on the understanding that the USSR had defeated the Nazis, had extraordinary prestige in the world, and was the center for a time of the expanding global communist movement. It was based on the fear that more and more countries would achieve independence from western imperialism, denying investors their rights to dominate world markets. It had an ideological content. This one does not. Russia and the U.S. are equally committed to capitalism and neoliberal ideology. Their conflict is of the same nature as the U.S. conflict with Germany in the early 20th century. The Kaiser’s Germany was at least as “democratic” as the U.S.; the system was not the issue. It was just jockeying for power, and as it happened, the U.S. intervening in World War I belatedly, after everybody else was exhausted, cleaned up. In World War II in Europe, the U.S. having hesitated to invade the continent despite repeated Soviet appeals to do so, responded to the fall of Berlin to Soviet forces by rushing token forces to the city to claim joint credit.

And then it wound up, after the war, establishing its hegemony over most of Europe—much, much more of Europe than became the Soviet-dominated zone, which has since with the Warsaw Pact evaporated.  Russia is a truncated, weakened version of its former self. It is not threatening the U.S. in any of the ways the U.S. is threatening itself. It is not expanding a military alliance. It is not holding huge military exercises on the U.S. border. It is not destroying the Middle East through regime-change efforts justified to the American people by sheer misinformation. In September 2015 Putin asked the U.S., at the United Nations: “Do you realize what you’ve done?”

Unfortunately the people of this country are not educated, by their schools, press or even their favorite websites to realize what has been done, how truly horrible it is, and how based it all is on lies. Fake news is the order of the day.

Up is down, black is white, Russia is the aggressor, the U.S. is the victim. The new president must be a team-player, and for God’s sake, understand that Putin is today’s Hitler, and if Trump wants to get along with him, he will have to become a team-player embracing this most basic of political truths in this particular imperialist country: Russia (with its nukes, which are equally matched with the U.S. stockpile) is the enemy, whose every action must be skewed to inflame anti-Russian feeling, as the normative default sentiment towards this NATO-encircled, sanction-ridden, non-threatening nation, under what seems by comparison a cautious, rational leadership?

*****

CNN’s horrible “chief national correspondent” John King (former husband of equally horrid Dana Bash, CNN’s “chief political correspondent”) just posed the question, with an air of aggressive irritation: “Who does Donald Trump respect more, the U.S. intelligence agencies, or the guy who started Wikileaks [Assange]?”

It’s a demand for the Trump camp to buy the Russian blame game, or get smeared as a fellow-traveler with international whistle-blowers keen on exposing the multiple crimes of U.S. imperialism.

So the real question is: Will Trump play ball, and credit the “intelligence community” that generates “intelligence products” on demand, or brush aside the war hawks’ drive for a showdown with Putin’s Russia? Will the second Cold War peter out coolly, or culminate in the conflagration that “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD) was supposed to render impossible?

The latter would be utterly stupid. But stupid people—or wise people, cynically exploiting others’ stupidity— are shaping opinion every day, and have been since the first Cold War, based like this one on innumerable lies.

What Is To Be A Muslim In America Today?

Mustapha Marrouchi

Can one define what a Muslim is in the wake of the decision that President-elect Trump wants to take to ban all Muslims from entering America? The late Edward Said—were he still alive—may attempt an answer to the question I pose here as he did in the late seventies but I gather it will not be sufficient in that we have moved on from the late 20th century stereotype of the Muslim: bloodthirsty, vindictive, and unpredictable. Today, the typecast can be summed up in one word: a monster without a myth. It finds credo in the portrait given to DAECH fighters: bloody, ruthless, and above all, fearless to kill at random.

Still, how can we go on debating Muslims in the wake of the 2016-US election without falling prey to misrepresenting everyone as if Muslims were donuts of sorts? After all, a Muslim from Morocco or Algeria is quite different from a Muslim from Pakistan or Yemen who is in turn different from a Muslim from Chicago or Paris. Needless to note the diversity between a Sunni and a Chi’ia Muslim, an Allaoui and a Druz, a Sufi and a Wahhabi, a fanatic and an agnostic. Many Muslims drink whisky, others prey every day, still others wear burkinis. Never mind all that because the matter is of no concern to President-elect Trump who is bent on expelling all Muslims who live inside America and barring all those who want to enter it in the future. That he is determined to put all Muslims in the same basket is a telling sign of the times we all live in.

Ever since Brexit and the election of Mr. Trump to high office, a good part of the West has become xenophobic, racist, and daring to be politically incorrect. Whether this shift is a backlash following the exit of a black president (the only one ever to hold office since the inception of the country) or a deep-seated hatred for Muslims, one cannot make out. What is certain is that those who call themselves “White” feel beleaguered and are determined to lash out at the world. It will be interesting to see whether Marine Le Pen makes it in the next French presidential election. If she does become the next President of France, which is quite possible given her ratings in public polls, the circle will be complete. I wonder then what will happen to millions of Muslims living in the West. In the meantime, let us not forget that in Austria a Neo-Nazi party led by Norbert Hofer nearly won the last election. Europe and the world took a deep breath when the Green Party championed by Heinz Fischer came to power.

The problem in America is that most of its people are pretty ignorant about where other people come from. They tend to put the rest of us in boxes: European, Indian, Chinese even though you may be Vietnamese, Arab even though you may be a Sikh. No wonder a Sikh was killed in New York two days after 9/11 simply because he was brown and looked like an Arab. Moreover, a Muslim, and more so an Arab living in America today, finds himself badgered unless he conforms to a certain credo; otherwise he really cannot be safe. An example will clarify what I have in mind. Let us say you happen to be reading a magazine written in Arabic in the subway in New York or Chicago, it is likely that you will be stared at more than once because your very presence poses a threat to whomever is sitting next to you. The writing in Arabic itself has become a sign, a leitmotiv for persecution.

I would like to think that there are many Americans who are open-minded and tolerant and kind but I have also a feeling that they are not in the majority. The reason why Trump appealed to so many Americans is because he says it as it is. He is not a hypocrite. On the contrary, bigoted though he may be, he is nevertheless forthright about race, gender, creed, religion, and that is what endears him to the whole country. In fact, he can be said to articulate what many think and feel but do not have the guts to say it out loud. In this sense, he is a surrogate of a kind—he is the subconscious of “White America”—at any rate, of a good portion of it. Otherwise, why would they elect him? I can only surmise that the road ahead for those of us who are Muslim and brown and yellow living in America and paying our taxes and dreaming of a better world will be quite steep during the next four years. We will have to work in harness with the other America (the one that is welcoming and generous and accommodating) so that we may be able at the end of the day to set our energies free. It is a consummation to be wished for.

Another Mass U.S Shooting: Wars And Consequences

Arshad M Khan

Yet another mass shooting in the U.S., this time at Ft. Lauderdale airport, Florida’s second largest.  A certain Esteban Santiago flew from Alaska changing planes en route at Minneapolis.  Arriving, he headed to the baggage collection area, claimed his suitcase, opened it in the privacy of a toilet, removed a gun, methodically loaded it, and began shooting in the baggage area.  When the police reached him, he was sitting on the floor with the gun in front of him.  He offered no resistance.

His family says he has had mental problems since he returned from the Iraq war.  Yet he was allowed to work as a security guard and have a gun.  Of course the pay is low and the firms are not choosy.  Five dead and eight injured is the tally.  Questioned, he volunteered to the FBI that the government was forcing him to watch Islamic State videos.  He heard voices.

So the Iraq war continues to claim victims both at home, and of Special Forces personnel in Iraq/Syria as the battle with IS (or whatever the latest name is) continues.  U.S. Special Forces were deployed in an astonishing 138 countries in 2016.  Our violent society discarding those least able to take care of themselves made the mentally ill shooter also a victim.

The neocon enterprise of destroying every country that could possibly be a threat to Israel, handily executed by Democrat and Republican administration alike has boomeranged badly.  Thus the Islamic fundamentalist actors unleashed are more of a threat, given their asymmetric warfare, than the countries with established static centers of power ever were.  Israel was and is qualitatively a vastly superior military, and President Obama has just given it a $40 billion military gift including state-of-the-art goodies to retain that superiority.

This deliberate policy displacing culturally advanced secular regimes in Iraq and Libya has failed for now in Syria although the country is a wreck.  Russia charges that the U.S., instead of targeting rebels in its air campaign, is systematically destroying Syria’s infrastructure.  Nothing new given the experience of Iraq and Libya.

Meanwhile, the most culturally primitive regime proselytizing an 18th century cleric’s version of a rigid, blinkered Islam, continues to receive the West’s support unquestioned — even enhanced by the purchase of billions of dollars of arms.  So it is that Saudi Arabia has just sentenced a group of protesting foreign construction workers to 300 lashes and four months jail for burning a bus during a protest against unpaid wages.  They have not been paid for over six months.  The lashing sentence was reported on January 4th; no doubt on January 6th, a Friday, the Saudis, as is the custom, were lopping off a head or two in the public square.  The crimes vary from murder to adultery.

Of course the merciless killing of Yemeni civilians continues.  Experts and rights groups have labeled the more horrific incidents war crimes in which the U.S. and U.K. are complicit for refueling and supplying Saudi aircraft.  Both have also sold the Saudis cluster bombs prohibited under the May 2008 Dublin “Convention on Cluster Munitions.”  A significant majority of the world’s states, a total of 119, have joined the Convention according to its website.

A president with great promise who offered greater promises, awarded a Nobel Peace Prize at the beginning of his tenure, instead of ending wars gave us new ones, offering change gave us more of the same, instead of diminishing enemies and developing more friends gave us the opposite, instead of lessening inequality increased it, instead of reducing poverty moved the goal posts.

A trip to downtown Chicago, the President’s adopted hometown, is revealing.  Beggars line the streets in numbers now numbing; they have increased steadily during his eight years in office.  Worth noting, there were none until 1980 and the start of the Reagan revolution.

So what did the people do?  They elected a billionaire!  He offers … promises.  Go figure, as they used to say in the old days.

“Kindy boot camp” enrolments proliferating in Australia

Perla Astudillo

Several media sources have recently highlighted the growing phenomenon of pre-school children entering so-called “kindy boot camps,” designed to enable them to become “school ready.” Tutoring programs, such as the Japanese “Kumon” method, are being tailored to kids as young as three, requiring them to learn the alphabet, basic Maths and “how to hold a pencil.”

Part of a worldwide phenomenon, the tutoring industry is expected to grow at a rate of 6.7 percent until 2020, or around $100 billion worldwide. In Australia, it is booming at around $2.6 billion per year, with coaching colleges pulling in $200 million–$400 million alone—almost a fifth of the non-vocational education sector.

Kumon’s preschool English enrolments in the country have risen by 63 percent since 2011, and in Maths by 38 percent. Other tutoring organisations such as “Begin Bright” also run “school readiness” classes, which cost around $29 per hour, with individual sessions at $80 per hour. Average franchises turn over around $180,000 a year. Kumon, one of the world’s largest, boasts 4.2 million students worldwide, with 42,000 of these enrolled in Australia.

Kumon was developed in Japan in the 1950s to teach students through drills that allegedly prepare them for tests every five weeks. For pre-schoolers, the drilling includes “identifying the alphabet,” testing of “sight words” and “homework tasks” to become “school and assessment ready.”

Kumon knowingly introduces concepts, particularly in Mathematics, that its students cannot understand in any depth. The program consists of a sequential series of 460 steps, where each step comprises a set of 10 worksheets. Students must pass each level before taking an “achievement test.” If they fail a level, they must take it again until they “pass.” This means that the youngsters complete 4,600 timed worksheets, initially set at their standard, then at progressively higher ones, to be completed more and more quickly, until they can perform all of them at speed.

While the children may retain some of the information contained in each worksheet, they are not required to understand or be able to apply it. This form of “learning,” at such an early age, can do great harm to a child’s natural love of learning and early experience with education. Studies have shown that for early childhood learning to be sustained and developed, it needs to be active, engaging, hands on, meaningful and related to the child’s broader experiences.

Kumon instructors are not required to have a tertiary degree or any teaching qualification; they do not even have to prove any background in education, just a “working with children” qualification. In contrast, teachers trained in the curricula and methodologies associated with early childhood learning are required to be thoroughly versed in nuanced development, pedagogy and specialised early childhood curricula in order to provide educational programs that meet each child’s individual needs.

Since 2009, when the Gillard Labor government introduced the standardised testing regime, NAPLAN (the National Assessment Program–Literacy and Numeracy), with the support of the teacher unions, rote learning has become increasingly prevalent. Despite opposition from teachers and education professionals, NAPLAN is now compulsory in every school. Its focus on the results of numeracy and literacy tests has effectively led to a narrowing of the curriculum and the sidelining of critical subjects like music and the arts. Schools are constantly placed under immense pressure to improve their NAPLAN results, including by the global ranking organisation PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment). For their part, the media increasingly highlight school results, exacerbating the problems created by NAPLAN for teachers, parents and students alike.

“Teaching to the test” is part of the ongoing drive by the entire political and corporate establishment to shift education policy towards meeting the interests of industry and cutting costs. This has meant that education for working-class students is increasingly becoming sub-standard due to lack of schools, permanent staff and resources, and focussed on young people acquiring only basic workplace skills rather than an all-rounded education that exposes them to the arts and sciences, history and the development of critical thought.

Parents are under immense pressure to enrol their young children in tutoring programs to ensure they will not “fall behind” or miss the opportunity to enter a university of their choice, particularly under conditions were the competition for decent jobs is becoming ever more fierce. Many see their only hope in preparing their children to win entrance into one of the “selective” high schools, where academic standards are generally significantly higher than in other public secondary schools. Sending a child to a private school is becoming prohibitive for the majority of parents, with costs now up to $180,000 for six years schooling. There are now 21 public selective high schools in the state of New South Wales (NSW) and four in Victoria. Over 13,900 students applied to gain a place in NSW for the 2017 school year, with only 4,188 being successful.

According to Mohan Dhall from the Australian Tutoring Association (ATA), “There’s a clear indicator that NAPLAN is being used by parents to remediate their child’s results. They are making the decision to use a tutor not just in a reactive way, prior to the test, but after the test, to ameliorate concerns.”

Public education funding cuts have played a major role in creating the crisis in public education. The Australian government has shifted funding from the public system to private schools, providing $17,604 in 2014, for example, for each private school student, compared with just $12,779 for each public-school student.

In some parts of the world, tutoring has become a replacement for the absence of professional government-funded teaching staff. In the UK, for instance, where private tutoring is now worth £6.5 billion a year, many state schools are now being forced to pay for private tutors out of their government funding, in order to educate their underprivileged students.

Several educational studies over the past decades have demonstrated the limitations of rote learning. Dr Shona Bass, author of the Australian Council of Education Research’s G uide to Play-Based Learning, explicitly decries the push for pre-school “boot camps.”

“There’s absolutely no advantage to it. It’s wasting parents’ time and money,” she told the Sydney Morning Herald last September. It created a “pushdown effect where opportunities are being presented to children earlier and earlier, all in the name of giving them the best start in life.”

Bass continued, “In most instances it’s the polar opposite, because little children need to be little children. We have a very strong view that school readiness is related to a child’s social and emotional maturity ... Social, emotional maturity is like all those other developmental milestones, it has its own pathway for each child. It’s not something that you can hurry up.”

Lev Vygotsky, a leading Soviet psychologist, explained in his book Play and its role in the mental development of the child, published in 1933, that “play is the work of childhood, and how young people learn and develop schema about the world.” Learning through play allows children to work in groups, share, negotiate, resolve conflicts and learn language and self-advocacy skills, while rote learning and testing cut across this vital process.

The world-wide growth in testing and tutoring has proven to increase child anxiety levels, particularly in China and South Korea, where rising levels of suicide, now the leading cause of adolescent death, are related to the extraordinarily stressful and intensive examination-based curriculum and university entry-requirements. Students often spend more than ten hours a day at school, or in after-school tutoring, leaving little or no time for sport, creative pursuits or recreation.

Former Sri Lankan president threatens to topple government

Pradeep Ramanayake

In comments to the media on December 28, former Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse declared that he would “topple” the government in 2017, accusing it of failing in its “management and development of the country.”

Rajapakse added: “The biggest thing that they did was to stop all the development works that I started and they started taking revenge on me.” He said that although the present government had a parliamentary majority, this might not last long because “they are fighting each other.”

The former president is attempting to exploit the rising popular hostility toward the government, which came to power in January 2015 promising to end Rajapakse’s austerity policies and repressive measures. Over the past two years, the cost of living has continued to rise, social services and subsidies have been cut, youth unemployment has increased and the state repression of protests and strikes has intensified.

Any attempt to “topple” the government confronts constitutional obstacles. The 19th constitutional amendment passed by the present government bars the dissolution of the parliament, even by the Sri Lankan president, until it has completed four and a half years of its full five-year term.

Rajapakse, moreover, cannot constitutionally become president because he has already occupied that position for two terms. When one journalist pointed out these impediments, Rajapakse bluntly declared that he “could govern the country without being the leader.”

In his media interview, Rajapakse blamed the US and India exclusively for his electoral defeat in 2015. American and Indian support for his rival, Maithripala Sirisena, “was too much for us,” he said. “We didn’t know what was going on inside the party.”

The US and India certainly had a hand in helping to engineer a regime-change through the January 2015 presidential election. Having failed to pressure Rajapakse to distance himself from China, Washington backed the intrigues in Colombo to remove him from office.

The selection of Sirisena as the “common opposition candidate” was organised secretly. Sirisena, who was a leading cabinet minister in the Rajapakse government until the election date was announced, was backed by senior figures in the ruling Sri Lankan Freedom Party (SLFP) and the then opposition United National Party (UNP), the country’s two main bourgeois parties. Various pseudo-left organisations, trade unions and civil society groups exploited the widespread opposition to Rajapakse’s despotic methods to falsely promote Sirisena as a “defender of democracy.”

According to the Hindu newspaper, Rajapakse told journalists that the “US had spent nearly $US650 million” on the regime-change operation and denounced the current government for “cosying up” to the US.

Rajapakse, however, is no opponent of imperialism, having previously enjoyed the backing of the Western powers in his regime’s civil war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

In the press conference, Rajapakse also accused Sirisena of double standards in attacking him in 2015 for having close relations with China, while Sirisena himself was seeking Chinese investment.

Posturing as a defender of small landowners, Rajapakse criticised government plans to hand over 15,000 acres of land in Hambantota, adjoining a newly-built port, to Chinese investors. “15,000 acres is too much,” he said. “We wanted to give only 750 acres. These are people’s agricultural lands. We are not against Chinese or Indians or Americans coming here for investment. But we are against the land being given to them and the privatisation that they are doing.”

At the same time, Rajapakse carefully avoided any reference to the record of his own government. On three occasions between 2011 and 2013, it mobilised the military to fatally shoot protestors opposing his policies. Under his regime, tens of thousands of poor families were evicted from their shanty homes in Colombo and other Sri Lankan cities and the land was sold to the local and foreign businesses.

Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe last week played down Rajapakse’s threat to topple the government, declaring that the former president could do whatever he wanted to do. Wickremasinghe confirmed a visit to Switzerland on January 17.

Nevertheless, under conditions of rising national debt, falling export earnings and declining foreign investment, Rajapakse’s threats to overthrow the government and rule by extra-parliamentary means cannot be ignored by Sri Lankan workers and youth.

One indication of the depth of the economic crisis is Sri Lanka’s rising national debt. The currency’s depreciation increased the public debt by 285 billion rupees ($US1.9 billion) in 2015 and by another 141 billion rupees up to July 2016. The total public debt of 7,391 billion rupees in December 2014 climbed to 9,382 billion rupees in July 2016, a record increase in just 19 months.

All factions of the ruling elite—the government and its opponents like Rajapakse—are committed to imposing the debt burden on the masses. They recognise that austerity measures will be met by fierce resistance and are moving to strengthen the state apparatus to crush all opposition by workers and youth.

This is the political background to Rajapakse’s provocative threat against the government. Since losing office, he has mounted a right-wing populist campaign against the government, whipping up Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism against Muslims and Tamils and eulogising “war heroes”—that is, the military responsible for war crimes and gross abuses of democratic rights in crushing the LTTE.

The “national unity” government of Wickremesinghe’s UNP and the Sirisena faction of the SLFP is increasingly fractured. It faces concerted opposition to its Development (Special Provisions) Bill, with protest resolutions from eight out of nine provincial councils.

The day after Rajapakse’s interview was published, the state minster of Provincial Councils and Local Councils, Priyankara Jayaratne of the SLFP, resigned his post, complaining of harassment by UNP ministers. He said 10 others would follow him on the same grounds. Two days later, Sirisena had to personally meet a group of state and deputy ministers and assure them that he would look after their grievances.

The Sunday Times commented last week that Sirisena has “mulled over the idea of a reshuffle of his Cabinet of Ministers this month. The idea is to pick a robust team that could work to a more efficient agenda and thus obviate further public criticism over different issues.”

During his presidency, Rajapakse successfully bribed several UNP members to cross the floor and join his government so as to amass a two-thirds majority to steamroll through legislation to sanctify his arbitrary rule. While he might hope to do the same today, the task of convincing those who already enjoy ministerial privileges to abandon them is not same as enticing opposition members to join a government.

The unstable and unpopular government is increasingly reliant on the pseudo-left organisations and so-called civil society groups to keep promoting the lie that Sirisena and Wickremesinghe represent “democracy” and must be given “more time” to fulfil their “promises.” By blocking an independent movement of the working class to lead the oppressed masses on the basis of a socialist perspective, the pseudo-lefts are preparing the conditions for Rajapakse and an even more right-wing government to come to power.

Devastating HIV epidemic hits Russia

Clara Weiss

A quarter century after the dissolution of the USSR in December 1991, an HIV epidemic, closely bound up with massive heroin consumption, is raging in Russia. It is a devastating indictment of the social catastrophe that was brought about by the restoration of capitalism.

According to Vadim Pokrovski, head of the Federal AIDS Centre in Moscow, around 850,000 Russians were diagnosed with HIV at the beginning of 2016. Another 220,000 have died of AIDS since the late 1980s. He estimates that another half-million Russians are infected, but not diagnosed, with HIV. An estimated 100,000 were newly infected in 2016.

This is by far the highest rate in Europe and constitutes almost 1 percent of the total population of Russia. The HIV epidemic has reached bigger dimensions only in sub-Saharan Africa. The development in Russia is contrary to the international trend: According to data by UNAIDS, the worldwide number of new HIV infections declined by 6 percent since 2010. Even in Africa, while the infection rate is still high, the epidemic is not spreading. By contrast, the number of new infections in the former USSR rose dramatically by 57 percent.

In several regions, HIV is now officially recognised as having reached the stage of an epidemic, with more than 1 percent of the population infected. This includes the oblast Sverdlov, where some 1.7 percent of the population have HIV, as well as the oblasts Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Cheliabinsk, Samara, Irkutsk, Perm and Krasnoiarsk.

Most of these regions were important centres of Soviet industry. In some areas up to 5 percent, often men between age 20 and 40, are HIV-positive, according to the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung. Russian Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova has warned that the epidemic might get out of control by 2020, with the number of infected possibly rising by up to 250 percent.

The spread of the virus is made easier by the fact that there is little to no education about HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases in schools and the public sphere. However, a more significant factor for this horrendous number of sick is the heroin epidemic that has been raging in the country since the 1990s.

The great majority of new HIV infections—54 percent according to official data, others estimate up to two thirds—are a result of the use of infected needles. Most people who are HIV-positive were or still are addicted to heroin. According to UNAIDS, in 2013 1.8 million Russians were injecting drug users, more than in any other country in the world.

The medical journal The Lancet reported that 90 percent of those drug users are also infected with hepatitis C and 24.6 percent of them with HIV. Although Russia’s population of 146 million comprises only 1.9 percent of the world’s total population, the country accounted for a third of the world’s total heroin deaths in 2010 (30,000). The Federal Agency for Drug Control reported that annually about 90,000 young people aged 15 to 34 die of drug overdoses. There are a total of between 8 and 9 million drug addicts in Russia, according to official numbers.

Given that many heroin addicts learn only later about their HIV infection, thousands of children are born every year with HIV, as their mothers cannot take the needed medication in time during their pregnancy to prevent the infection.

Even though the massive drug consumption has been recognised by the Kremlin as a problem—in 2009, the then incumbent president Dmitri Medvedev declared drug abuse a “threat to national security”—neither the sources nor the consequences are being seriously combatted. The reason is that this horrendous drug epidemic is a result of capitalist restoration, the social and historical basis for the ruling oligarchy.

The consumption of heroin exploded in the 1990s under conditions of a catastrophic social crisis. The scale of the socioeconomic disaster that hit millions of workers and youth virtually overnight is still difficult to grasp. The Russian GDP collapsed by around 40 percent, more than during the Great Depression in the US in the 1930s. The last time a similar economic breakdown occurred in Russia was during the Nazi war against the Soviet Union.

The hyperinflation, which amounted to 10,000 percent between 1991 and 1995, threw broad layers of the working and middle classes into extreme poverty. While a small layer of former Stalinist bureaucrats and rising criminals shamelessly enriched themselves, and mafia turf wars raged over the control of the raw material resources of the country, millions of workers could feed their families only by growing their own food or searching for it in the forest. Life expectancy declined dramatically, particularly for men, and the rates of child mortality and suicides rose rapidly. Between 1991 and 2015, an estimated 1 million Russians ended their lives with suicide.

Especially industrial centres like Yekaterinburg in the Urals and the “mono towns”—industrial cities that had been built around one or a few enterprises—were socially devastated. Workers on a regular basis had to work for months without receiving their salary, or only a portion of it. Unemployment, virtually unknown in the USSR, became a serious social problem for millions of families. In the countryside, people witnessed how the destruction of the kolkhoz (collective farm) system resulted in a collapse in agricultural production and the entire social infrastructure.

The social crisis was complemented by a political one: decades of Stalinism and its eventual collapse left the working class politically disoriented and without a perspective. The generation of 15- to 35-years-old, who are now forming the bulk of drug addicts and HIV-infected, grew up under these conditions of social devastation and political disorientation. The drugs have become the desperate response of millions to a situation where they lack any social and political perspective.

Access to heroin has been relatively easy in Russia since the 1990s. Neighbouring Afghanistan, destabilised by the war in the 1970s, became the centre of international drug trafficking and is now producing around 90 percent of all heroin produced worldwide. Given the short transport route, the substance was relatively cheap. Moreover, significant sections of the state apparatus, especially the police, were and still are involved in drug trafficking.

Experts estimate that over 40 percent of Russian GDP is still a result of the shadow economy, which comprises, apart from illegal profits from the energy sector, human and drug trafficking as well as prostitution.

Since the early 2000s, a highly poisonous heroin substitute has been spreading called “Crocodile.” It can be produced based on simple ingredients that anyone could buy in a pharmacy. Estimates put the number of those addicted to Crocodile since 2002 between 1 and 3 million. Their average life expectancy upon addiction does not exceed one year, and the death is usually extremely painful, as the drug corrodes the inner organs of the addict.

The government forbid the ingredients that were used to produce Crocodile in 2012, leading to a slight decline of the official numbers of addicts. However, the drug has now found its way to western Europe, Latin America and the US, where a heroin epidemic has developed as well in recent years due to the extreme social crisis.

At the same time, there are few countries where it is as difficult to rid one’s self of addiction as it is in Russia. This is, first of all, the result of the continuing social crisis, which has even worsened since the beginning of the Western sanctions in 2014. Second, the health care system, chronically underfinanced since the 1990s, offers almost no help to addicts.

According to the Moscow Times, in 2015 there were no more than four state institutions nationwide for the treatment of drug addiction, with a total number of places of just 200. The therapy of heroin addiction on the basis of methadone—internationally recognised as one of the most effective and least painful therapies for heroin addicts—is forbidden in Russia.

Over 100 inmates killed in wave of Brazilian prison massacres

Miguel Andrade

The new year has been marked by a series of prison riots in Brazil’s far north, with at least 102 inmates killed by other prisoners in highly coordinated acts. The first massacre on January 2 involved a 17-hour prison riot in the city of Manaus, capital of the Amazonas state, and ended with the slaughter of 56 inmates in a gang battle.

At least 27 of the victims were decapitated by riot leaders. The police reportedly kept away from ending the riots until prisoners had negotiated a settlement, ostensibly in order to avoid another tragedy like the infamous Carandiru riot in which São Paulo’s Military Police slaughtered 111 inmates in 1992.

Another riot at the nearby Purarequara Prisonal Unit (UPP) left four dead. More than 200 prisoners are thought to have escaped from both complexes in a simultaneous prison break.

On January 4 a third riot resulted in two deaths by firearm during fights between inmates. Later, on early Friday, January 6, a fourth inmate riot resulted in the murder of another 33 inmates in the Monte Cristo Rural Penitentiary, in Boa Vista, the capital of the neighboring Roraima state.

A fifth riot left four dead in the Manaus prison, which had received prisoners who survived the January 2 massacre and were believed to have been involved in the first attack.

The wave of massacres exposes the criminal character of the Brazilian government’s war on drugs, which is aimed at the country’s overwhelmingly impoverished population. The government has sought to cover up the true cause of the massacres: illegal and inhumane conditions for inmates in the country’s overcrowded prison system.

The Raimundo Vidal Pessoa jail, where the third massacre took place, had been deactivated in December 2016 by order of the oversight National Justice Council for human rights violations.

Federal authorities initially believed the Manaus riot was executed in order to cover up the murder of members of the criminal Capital’s First Command (PCC) group, based in southeastern São Paulo. The PCC is South America’s largest drug trafficking gang.

Under this theory, the massacres were part of a latent crime war which escalated dramatically last June when PCC “soldiers” murdered Jorge Rafaat Toumani, the drug lord of Brazil’s border region with Paraguay, in a fight over control of drug routes leading from the Andes to ports connecting to European drug markets.

In the Manaus and Roraima cases, abundant evidence showed the “gang war” theory to be unlikely. The local public attorney’s offices, charities and human rights organizations and family members of the dead have been quick to dismiss the authorities’ claims, pointing out that many dead were not related to the PCC or the FDN but were sexual crime convicts, a particularly endangered population of inmates usually subjected to “crime tribunals” inside the prisons in the name of “crime morality.” The state and federal governments have later admitted that at least half of the dead had no connection to the warring factions.

The government adopted this “gang war” theory to wash their hands of any responsibility for the particularly horrifying circumstances of yet another prison massacre in Brazil. The routine character of prison violence in the country is certainly one of the most brutalizing features of the country’s social life, conditioned in every aspect by its vast social inequality.

The COMPAJ compound holds three times its nominal capacity of 450 inmates, a figure above the already dire national average of 100 percent of overpopulation. Brazil has a total of 620,000 inmates, the world’s fourth largest prison population. According to Folha de S. Paulo, just last October, the National Justice Council (CNJ) found the prison “terrible for any attempt at rehabilitation, with no education, health care, social assistance or legal council for inmates,” an also routine conclusion of prison inspections. The COMPAJ is also a “pioneering experiment” of private management that the Michel Temer government declared as early as August 2016 should be expanded, according to O Globo.

The Roraima prison holds twice its capacity of 750 inmates, and had been visited in May 2016 by the Brazilian Bar Association (OAB). Among the most barbaric conditions found were open sewage systems and a virtual absence of health care. After the riot on Friday, a Folha de S. Paulo reporting team found that the so-called “kitchen wing” had been destroyed by a fire several years before and rebuilt as a shantytown, generating “private rights” over “rebuilt” cells under the gang-imposed “crime code” that dominates many prisons, creating further sources of conflicts among desperate inmates. The shantytown cubicles were reportedly sold to other inmates by those who were freed.

This dire picture extends all over the country. It is estimated that 40 percent of inmates in Brazil have not yet been convicted, being in indefinite “provisional” detention, a number almost the size of the prison overpopulation. According to OAB, in the case of the Roraima prison, a staggering 940 inmates are in “provisional” detention, and 180 of them have never even made a deposition on the circumstances of their arrests.

The most immediate reason for the overcrowding would be, according to a survey by the G1 news station, the approval in 2006 of the Drug Law that formalized Brazil’s “war on drugs.” Ostensibly designed to allow for the differentiation of drug trafficking and possession, it ended up increasing almost fivefold, from 31,000 to 138,000, the number of drug trafficking-related imprisonments.

The main mechanism for this massive repressive operation was the allowing in a large part for the corrupt, murderous and bigoted Military Police corps of each state to determine whether trafficking or possession was involved in any particular arrest. In 2015, G1 quoted the former National Justice Secretary Pedro Abramovay as admitting that the “detention for drug-related crimes are today a mechanism for criminalizing poverty.”

The appeal of these demagogic practices was further evidenced by the treatment given to the families of the dead who were left waiting for many days for news of the inmates and were subjected to a campaign of lies about the behavior, legal situation and conditions of the inmates.

Repressive policies responsible for mass incarceration are nonetheless set to deepen under the Temer presidency, the most right-wing in Brazil since the end of the US-backed military dictatorship. Temer’s justice minister, Alexandre de Moraes, infamously declared in a press conference in August 2016 that the country needed “less research and more weapons” to fight crime, in a reference to the toothless involvement of social sciences experts in security policies during the Workers Party (PT) governments of Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff.

The declaration followed his nomination as justice minister after two years as head of São Paulo’s Military Police, the deadliest in the country, which kills more people per year than all police departments in the United States combined, despite the fact that the US has 7.5 times more people than São Paulo.

Moraes’s immediate response to the massacre was to announce the construction of new prisons to room 30,000 inmates and to suggest a law to make it more difficult for inmates to obtain probation.

Moraes’s actions are only part of an unfolding assault on democratic rights after the right-wing campaign that removed Rousseff. In late September 2016, a regional appeals court in São Paulo annulled the sentences of 74 police officers found guilty of murder in the 1992 Carandiru prison massacre, the deadliest in the country’s history.

Brexit deepens existential crisis of UK and European Union

Chris Marsden

Prime Minister Theresa May used her first interview of the New Year with Sky News to fend off criticisms of her government for having no plan over how to leave the European Union (EU) or for post-Brexit Britain.

She stated that her overarching concern would be to insist on ending free movement of EU labour even if this clashes with securing access to the single market. However, she then claimed that her demands for “control of our borders, control of our laws” would be met while securing the best possible trade deal with the EU. There was no “binary choice.”

Her statements failed to convince speculators, who fear a “hard Brexit,” leading to a drop in the pound to a two month low. By mid-afternoon, the pound fell 1.1 percent against the dollar and 1.23 percent against the euro.

May’s remarks were prompted by the January 3 resignation of the UK’s ambassador to the EU, Sir Ivan Rogers, a close supporter of May’s predecessor David Cameron who is in favour of Britain retaining EU membership.

Rogers left his post after sending a letter to other top civil servants urging them to challenge “ill-founded arguments and muddled thinking” and to “speak truth to power.” He did so on the eve of May’s expected triggering of Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty initiating Brexit, and in anticipation of the Supreme Court ruling on the government’s appeal over parliament needing to vote on doing so.

May has indicated that she will outline her “vision for Britain outside of the EU” in a major speech later this month timed around the Supreme Court verdict. The Daily Telegraph cited a minister declaring, "She needs to make clear that Britain is prepared to leave the single market or they [the EU] will try to screw us down.”

Prior to May’s intervention, the UK media was filled with reports stressing that predictions of economic disaster post-Brexit made during the June 23 referendum campaign were exaggerated and have been refuted by the performance in the economy in key sectors including manufacturing, construction and services.

The Bank of England’s chief economist Andy Haldane went so far as to declare that “the economics profession is to some degree in crisis... In terms of many of the real things like pay and jobs, not much happened in course of last year, it was pretty much business as usual.”

This semi-official debate between the rival wings of the bourgeoisie in reality shows a crisis of political perspective in ruling circles that also, by constant repetition, serves as a means of disarming workers as to what they now face.

In reality, the New Year saw reports pointing out that “business as usual” for workers means wage cuts. Income growth in 2017 is projected to not keep pace with inflation, continuing a six-year pattern. Average earnings fell 9 percent between just 2008 and 2013. The rise in household consumption is fuelled almost wholly by growing personal debt, with each household now owing a record amount of £12,887, even before mortgages are taken into account.

More fundamentally, the broader political and economic situation facing Europe in the aftermath of Brexit and, of yet greater significance, the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, is dire and dangerous.

The row over what relationship the UK will have with the EU takes place under conditions where its very survival is threatened. This is the source of constant discussion within the EU’s own specialist publications and the continent’s ruling elites.

Brexit was not the cause, but an expression of the growth of national antagonisms between the major European powers under the impact of the growing economic crisis and the bitter competition between rival powers this feeds. In similar fashion, Brexit and the turn to “America First” policies by Trump have spurred on the growth of right-wing nationalist movements who exploit popular hostility to the EU and its austerity policies—most importantly in France with the far right National Front.

To these developments must be added the growing possibility that Italy may be forced out of the EU as a result of its banking crisis. Forbes business magazine warned that this could end in the break-up of the EU, which would be “a geopolitical disaster. All the demons that have been bottled up since [World War II] would be let loose.”

This warning was reinforced by Horst Teltschik, national security advisor to former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. “European integration was the peacemaking response of the Europeans to the catastrophe of two world wars,” he said. “We are witnessing an erosion of the EU with the euro crisis, with Brexit and the emergence of populist movements in France, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria or Italy and the authoritarian Eastern neighbours, especially in Poland, Hungary, Romania.”

He concluded by asking, “Should a core Europe go ahead? Suddenly, a defensive union is being discussed again, without a common foreign and security policy within sight...”

The combined idea of a “core Europe” and accelerated militarisation now dominates discussion in Germany. Most recently, writing in Project Syndicate, Joschka Fischer of the German Greens insisted that the EU faces the danger of disintegration “under the neo-nationalist wave sweeping the West.”

Trump, “an exponent of the new nationalism, does not believe in European integration,” he continued. He has an “ally in Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has long tried to destabilize the EU by supporting nationalist forces and movements in its member states” and “continues to call into question America’s security guarantee for Europe.”

With NATO no longer to be trusted to respond to Russia’s efforts to reassert its “hegemony” over Eastern Europe, “Europe can credibly strengthen its security only if France and Germany work together toward the same goal... The old EU developed into an economic power because it was protected beneath the US security umbrella. But without this guarantee, it can address its current geopolitical realities only by developing its own capacity to project political and military power.”

What becomes ever clearer is that all efforts to encourage workers to back one or other capitalist camp within the UK—over for or against the EU—only facilitate the ongoing preparations for trade war and military conflict.

This is the essential political result of the activities of Britain’s pseudo-left groups—both those such as the Socialist Party and Socialist Workers Party which lined workers and youth up behind calls for a “Left Leave” vote in the June referendum and those such as Left Unity and Socialist Resistance which called for a Remain vote while spreading illusions that the EU can be reformed.

At its Third National Congress last October, the Socialist Equality Party passed a resolution, “For a new socialist movement against militarism, austerity and war,” which drew out the significance of our call for an active boycott in the referendum.

We explained that the SEP “was alone in advancing an independent political perspective for the working class” and that our “starting point was to define a policy that upheld the interests not only of workers in Britain, but in Europe and internationally.”

The SEP warned that the referendum was only the “most advanced expression of the failure of the post-Second World War project of European unification through which the ruling elites had sought to resolve the fundamental contradiction that had twice in the 20th century plunged the continent into war—between the integrated character of European and global production and the division of the continent into antagonistic nation states.”

We stressed, “The EU is breaking apart and cannot be revived. It is only through the creation of the United Socialist States of Europe, established as an integral component of a world federation of socialist states, that the vast productive forces of the continent can be utilised for the benefit of all’.”

The adoption of this perspective provides the essential response of the working class to the ever-deeper descent into social savagery and war.