89th Academy Awards: What does Hollywood offer today?

David Walsh

The 89th Academy Awards ceremony, held Sunday at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, was an even more complex and peculiar affair than usual. At such an event, in a quite striking and almost brutal fashion, genuine artistic talent and personal decency cross paths with banality, cynical commercial interest and triviality.

This year, the coming to power of Donald Trump little more than five weeks ago inevitably added an element of heightened tension and anxiety. A number of award presenters and recipients expressed opposition to Trump’s extreme right-wing administration, but the opposition of these circles—despite sincerity in many cases—tends to be distorted by their wealth and distance from the burning problems of the mass of the population.

Moonlight

After an embarrassing mix-up, Moonlight was announced as the winner of the best picture award. The film, about a black youth growing up in Miami in the 1980s and 1990s, also gained honors for best supporting actor (Mahershala Ali) and best adapted screenplay (Barry Jenkins and Tarell Alvin McCraney).

Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, about love and music in contemporary Los Angeles, collected six awards, including best director (Chazelle), best actress (Emma Stone), best original score and best original song (Justin Hurwitz) and best cinematography (Linus Sandgren). The film had been nominated in 14 categories.

Casey Affleck won the best actor award for his performance in Manchester by the Sea, written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan, who won for best original screenplay. The film looks at a working-class man in the Boston area responsible for a terrible personal tragedy.

Viola Davis earned the best actress award for Fences, a film based on the August Wilson play, directed by Denzel Washington, which treats a Pittsburgh sanitation worker and his family in the 1950s.

Fences

The best foreign language film award went to Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman. Farhadi was not present, but issued a strong statement, which we will reproduce below, denouncing Trump’s proposed travel ban. Farhadi’s A Separation won the same prize in 2012.

The best feature documentary award went to Ezra Edelman (the son of children’s rights activist Marian Wright Edelman) and Caroline Waterlow for O.J.: Made in America, a nearly eight-hour miniseries tracing the life and fate of American professional football player O.J. Simpson, accused of murdering his ex-wife and her friend in 1994.

The British film, The White Helmets, directed by Orlando von Einsiedel and produced by Joanna Natasegara, won in the short documentary category. The White Helmets is a dubious organization supposedly carrying out humanitarian efforts in Syria. However, it was created in collaboration with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), notorious for its overseas operations on behalf of American imperialist interests. The White Helmets pushes US intervention in Syria and regime change.

Moonlight, Manchester by the Sea and Fences are intelligently and sensitively made films, whose characters face real economic and moral difficulties. The writers and directors involved accord human beings a considerable degree of respect and sympathy, even if the latter make serious mistakes and act unwisely or thoughtlessly.

At the same time, each of the three films (and the other better ones honored Sunday night) suffers from the limited perspective and outlook that dominates contemporary cultural life. In each case, the viewer is largely restricted to what the given character or characters know and feel. There is no consistent effort to investigate and dramatize the bigger social impulses that lie behind the immediate motives.

Chazelle’s La La Land has a few intriguing moments, and some engaging performances, but it is essentially a poor and insubstantial effort, which largely plays on the more complacent and shallow instincts of viewers.

La La Land

The four performers honored Sunday night are all extremely gifted, although Emma Stone was not seriously challenged by her role in La La Land.

The February 26 ceremony was not simply a cultural event, however. The election of Trump has triggered an immense political and social crisis. It marks and ushers in a new, advanced stage in the disintegration of American democracy. That unquestionably overshadows every significant public occasion at present.

Trump and his supporters have launched numerous vicious attacks on the media and any signs of opposition, including from Hollywood liberals like actress Meryl Streep. Extreme right-wing elements urged a “boycott” of Sunday night’s program on ABC, denouncing the “socialist perverts” who would be gathering at the Dolby Theatre.

It is safe to say that the vast majority of those present at the Academy Awards opposed Trump’s brutal measures on immigration, the proposed wall along the Mexican border and his general policy of extreme chauvinism and nationalism.

The host of the awards ceremony, late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, opened his monologue by noting, “This broadcast is being watched live by millions of Americans and around the world in more than 225 countries that now hate us.” He quipped later, “I want to say, maybe this is not a popular thing to say, but I want to say thank you to President Trump. I mean, remember last year when it seemed like the Oscars were racist? That’s gone, thanks to him.”

Kimmel pointed to the presence of French actress Isabelle Huppert, nominated for Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, and added: “You were amazing in that film, and I’m glad Homeland Security let you in tonight, I really am.” Underscoring in its own way the astonishingly foul and degraded character of the current political atmosphere, the awards host said, “Some of you will get to come up here on this stage tonight and give a speech that the president of the United States will tweet about in all caps during his 5 a.m. bowel movement tomorrow.”

Manchester By the Sea

As noted above, Iranian director Asghar Farhadi made the strongest statement on the present situation. At the time of the introduction of Trump’s ban on travel from seven Muslim-majority countries, as well as his temporary ban on the entry of refugees from any country, Farhadi announced he would not attend the Academy Awards, whether an exception was made for him or not.

On Sunday night, astronaut Anousheh Ansari and former NASA scientist Firouz Naderi accepted the award on Farhadi’s behalf in a speech that evoked strong applause. Ansari read Farhadi’s statement, which first thanked those involved in the production of The Salesman and then continued:

“I’m sorry I’m not with you tonight. My absence is out of respect for people of my country and those of other six nations who have been disrespected by the inhumane law that bans entry of immigrants to the US. Dividing the world into the us and the enemy categories creates fear, a deceitful justification for aggression and war. These wars prevent democracy and human rights in countries in which have themselves have been victims of aggression.

“Filmmakers can turn their cameras to capture shared human qualities and break stereotypes of various nationalities and religions. They create empathy between us and others. An empathy we need today more than ever.”

Backstage, Naderi explained why he and Ansari had been asked to accept the award: “She’s an astronaut. She has gone to the space station. I work for NASA … I think the reason is that if you go away from the Earth and look back at the Earth you don’t see any of the borders, any of the lines. You just see one whole beautiful Earth.”

The Salesman

Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal, on hand to present an award for best animated feature film, spoke out against the Trump administration’s plans to build a wall on the US-Mexico border: “As a Mexican, as a Latin-American, as a migrant worker, as a human being, I’m against any form of wall that separates us.” Bernal played a central role in Desierto (2015), directed by Jonás Cuarón, as an immigrant worker from Mexico being hunted on the border by a ruthless vigilante (Jeffrey Dean Morgan).

In highly emotional remarks, Viola Davis paid tribute to the people now in their graves who never experienced satisfaction in their lives. She explained that she wanted to tell the “stories of the people who dreamed big and never saw those dreams to fruition. People who fell in love and lost. I became an artist--and thank God I did--because we are the only profession that celebrates what it means to live a life. So, here’s to August Wilson [who wrote Fences, the play on which the film is based], who exhumed and exalted the ordinary people.”

There were several other moving and generous moments, including the introduction of 98-year-old Katherine Johnson, the African American physicist and mathematician and former NASA employee whose life-story was one of the inspirations for Hidden Figures.

In the ceremony’s final moments, when it became apparent that Moonlight and not La La Land, as had first been announced by presenter Faye Dunaway, was the winner of the best picture award, the response of the latter’s producers and actors was very gracious. The producers and actors of Moonlight were equally gracious in victory.

There were, naturally, many banal and empty-headed moments Sunday night. A good number of Kimmel’s antics misfired or simply wasted time. Nine-tenths of the introductions of the various categories were trite and dull. The set was ugly, and musical numbers at the Academy Awards rarely fail to convey tawdriness.

In its tone and substance, the special presentation “highlighting the benefits of film and diversity,” delivered by Cheryl Boone Isaacs, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) and a public relations executive, reflected the conservative and establishment character of the film industry hierarchy.

The surprise “gag” in which a busload of unsuspecting sightseers were let in to the Dolby Theatre and led through an “impromptu meet and greet with Hollywood’s A-list” was as distasteful as it was revealing. The “ordinary people” behaved with dignity and so, for the most part, did the actors, but the episode had the character of commoners being permitted a brief audience with royalty. The isolation and insulation of American “celebrities” is not of their doing or necessarily of their choosing, but one had the uncanny and unhappy feeling that this was truly as close to “average” men and women as the star performers ever get.

The consequences of that remoteness are immense and debilitating. In that sense, there was something sad and a little pathetic about the fleeting and surreal encounter, because a sustained encounter with everyday life ought to be the center of the actors’ artistic existence.

One was struck again Sunday night by the fact that, as things presently stand, the American film industry’s greatest strengths lie at two ends of the spectrum—on the one hand, in acting and, on the other, in the technology of image and sound making. The largest and most damaging weakness emerges in the processes of writing and directing, those activities most closely associated with carrying out a rational analysis of the social and historical process and transforming that into something dramatically meaningful.

Free State of Jones

At its weakest, therefore, decency and good will in Hollywood merely trail off into trivia, the wringing of one’s hands ineffectually about the ills of the world or into the political lowest common denominator, which at this moment happens to be the upper middle class obsession with race. The opposition to things as they are remains at a low level, historically and socially uninformed to a large extent.

The African Americans honored February 26 were certainly deserving of their awards, but the contrasting attitude toward class, revealed inadvertently through the “sightseer-commoner” gag, and race, expressed in the endless hymns to diversity and the rather desperate efforts to ensure that there would be black nominees and award-winners, is instructive.

One could also not help but take note of the fact that several of the more creditable films produced by the American film industry this year, Free State of Jones (Gary Ross), Loving (Jeff Nichols) and Snowden (Oliver Stone), were all but snubbed. Ruth Negga, the Ethiopian-Irish actress, was nominated as best actress for Loving, but lost to Stone. All three films included white male characters who resisted oppression or injustice. That thought, and what it might imply about wide layers of the American population, was apparently too much for the academy voters.

Rifts tearing Australian government apart

Mike Head

Extraordinary conflicts have erupted within Australia’s Liberal-National Coalition government, underscoring a profound political crisis that is engulfing not just the government but the entire parliamentary establishment.

An open confrontation is raging between Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his predecessor Tony Abbott, whom Turnbull ousted as Liberal Party leader in September 2015. Last Thursday, Abbott publicly criticised the government and warned it was “drifting to defeat.”

Abbott, who speaks for the conservative wing of the Liberal Party, made it plain that his concerns went far further, pointing to the widespread popular disaffection with both the traditional ruling parties, the Coalition and Labor. Abbott said nearly 40 percent of Australians did not vote for the Coalition or Labor in last July’s election and declared: “It’s easy to see why.”

Abbott issued a five-point manifesto of reactionary, nationalist policies that he declared the government must adopt to halt the reported surge of support for right-wing populists, such as Senator Pauline Hanson’s anti-immigrant One Nation.

The ex-prime minister’s list consisted of cutting the renewable energy target, supposedly to lower electricity bills, reducing immigration, “to make housing more affordable,” scrapping the Human Rights Commission, stopping all new government spending and amending the Constitution to reduce the power of the Senate to block unpopular legislation.

Abbott’s manifesto amounts to yet another attempt by him and his backers to meet the increasingly impatient demands of the financial elite for the gutting of social spending and the slashing corporate taxes, while channelling the rising discontent already produced by the austerity offensive into reactionary and xenophobic directions.

Turnbull accused Abbott of sabotaging the government, blaming him for the latest slump in the government’s opinion poll ratings. Turnbull said Abbott had delivered “an outburst on Thursday and it had its desired impact on the Newspoll.” Monday’s Newspoll, published by the Murdoch media, reported that the Coalition’s vote has collapsed to 34 percent, from 45.6 percent at the July election. Labor’s near-record low of 33.4 percent last July vote rose marginally to 37 percent.

For now, some of Abbott’s closest supporters, such as Finance Minister Mathias Cormann, have opposed his intervention, but they share his concerns. Yesterday, according to quickly leaked accounts of a Coalition party room meeting in Canberra, Turnbull aimed another rebuke at Abbott, warning his colleagues that “disunity is death.”

That message, however, was undercut within hours. Right-wing Liberal National Party (LNP) Queensland backbencher George Christensen quit as the National Party’s whip in the House of Representatives—the party official tasked with enforcing its policies in parliamentary votes. He declared that his resignation would enable him to speak more freely against the government.

In recent weeks, Christensen has repeatedly threatened to defect from the government. This would not immediately bring down the government, which holds only a one-seat majority in the lower house—provided that Christensen supports the Coalition in any vote of no-confidence. But it could encourage other backbenchers to follow suit, further destabilising the government.

Christensen is also advocating a demerger of the LNP in Queensland, in order to re-establish the Nationals as a stand-alone rural-based party, a move that could unravel the Coalition nationally. Today, the Australian Financial Review reported “near unanimous agreement” among LNP parliamentarians from Queensland, including cabinet ministers, that the merger had created a vacuum for a third party with a regional focus.

A poll this week indicated that One Nation is attracting about 30 percent support in Christensen’s northern Queensland electorate, putting it on a par with the LNP. Heavily-promoted by the corporate media, Hanson’s polling numbers have doubled nationally in the past three months to 10 percent. The heaviest concentrations of her support are in the most economically devastated areas, even though she advocates policies, including the slashing of welfare spending, which would hit hardest the voters she claims to represent.

Like Hanson, Christensen has a long record of demagogy directed against Muslims and espouses reactionary nationalist policies, such as cutting immigration, banning the burqa and reintroducing the death penalty. Amid soaring unemployment and social distress in his electorate, Christensen, echoing Hanson, has sought to marry this pitch with demands for protectionist measures, notably for the sugar industry, and an inquiry into the predatory practices of the major banks.

Highlighting the scramble by rival right-wing formations to exploit the political turmoil, Liberal Party defector Senator Cory Bernardi declared that Abbott would find a “warm welcoming embrace” in his recently-launched Australian Conservatives party.

“People are increasingly disillusioned with mainstream parties and are seeking alternatives,” Bernardi told Sky News. He recently returned from the US, where he studied and hailed the election of Donald Trump, and invoked the necessity to develop a similar movement in Australia. Bernardi warned of a leftward turn by young people and workers, as shown by the support for Democratic Party presidential contender Bernie Sanders, who postured as an opponent of the “billionaire class.”

The social crisis in Christensen’s seat of Dawson provides an insight into the disaffection wracking the political system. Extending along the Queensland coast between the regional cities of Mackay and Townsville, the electorate covers sugar cane farms, rural communities and working-class people who have been severely affected by global corporate restructuring and the mining slump.

Across the country, regional and working-class areas are being impoverished by the destruction of jobs, falling wage levels and soaring utility and housing costs. In Mackay and nearby Gladstone the number of jobless workers on poverty-line Newstart unemployment benefits has doubled since 2013 to 3,600. In Perth, the Western Australian capital, the suburbs of Rockingham, Kwinana and Wanneroo have experienced a combined jump of more than 7,000, up to 70 percent.

Even these figures camouflage the elimination of full-time jobs, forcing workers into lower-paid part-time work. According to recent data, the prevalence of part-time work has risen by 70 percent since 2000, more than double the rate of increase in the US, Britain, Canada and New Zealand.

Areas targeted by One Nation are among the worst affected. For example, in the Lockyer Valley, west of Brisbane, mean annual taxable income has fallen by 6.5 percent since the 2008 financial crash, from $41,432 to $38,713.

Statistics released this week indicate an acceleration of the social polarisation. Wages fell by 0.5 percent in the December quarter of 2016, while company profits surged by 20 percent, or $13 billion. Last week’s ruling by the Fair Work Commission (FWC) to cut the Sunday and public holiday penalty wage rates for low-paid retail, hospitality and fast food workers will intensify the wage-cutting, and the resulting discontent.

Like Bernardi, Paul Kelly, the Australian’s editor-at-large, today warned that the real political danger facing the ruling class was the rise of “left populism,” not “right populism.” Kelly said the “weakened” Turnbull government was about to be subjected to a campaign by Labor, the trade unions and the Greens decrying the penalty rates ruling as “proof of Turnbull’s alleged war against working men and women and families.”

In feigning opposition to the penalty rates cut, Labor Party leader Bill Shorten and all those promoting him are displaying breathtaking hypocrisy. Shorten, a key minister in the last Labor government, initiated the FWC review of penalty rates and pledged to abide by its decision.

Labor’s opportunist switch is another indicator of the seething unrest that the political elite is seeking to divert. Far from any of the rival factions having any genuine opposition to the ongoing economic and social restructuring being driven by the capitalist class globally, they have all helped impose that offensive for decades. And they are well aware that this assault will quicken as the full implications of Trump’s aggressive “America First” program of trade war, militarism and elimination of social programs reverberate around the world.

Leading opposition senator arrested in the Philippines

Joseph Santolan

On February 24, Philippine Senator Leila de Lima, the most vocal political opponent of President Rodrigo Duterte’s murderous war on drugs, was arrested on charges of drug trafficking. De Lima’s arrest is an expression of the advanced political crisis in the country which is rooted in the dispute within the country’s ruling class over Manila’s geopolitical orientation.

Since taking office in July 2016, Duterte has reoriented Manila’s foreign policy, in a volatile but nonetheless steady manner, away from Washington and toward improved economic and diplomatic ties with Beijing. Duterte undertook a series of moves calculated to improve relations with China, which had soured drastically under his predecessor, Aquino, who had functioned as the leading regional proxy of the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” against Beijing. Duterte has deliberately ignored the ruling handed down by the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) dismissing China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea, and moved to end the most aggressive joint military exercises with the US military in the disputed waters.

At the same time, under the guise of a “war on drugs,” Duterte has readied the apparatus of military dictatorship. Since he took office, over 7,000 people, the overwhelming majority of them from the poorest layers of society, have been killed in this campaign of police and vigilante murder. He declared a national state of emergency in September, which has not been lifted, granting the police and military to enforce checkpoints and carry out warrantless searches. He has threatened to declare to martial law.

Seeking to use the pretext of “human rights” to pressure Duterte back into the fold, the Obama administration raised mild public criticisms of this policy, while secretly continuing to supply tens of millions of dollars to the Duterte administration’s drug enforcement measures. Duterte responded in an unhinged fashion to these criticisms, and relations worsened further.

There is no genuine opposition to military dictatorship in any section of the Philippine bourgeoisie. When Duterte took office, the various opposition parties all joined with his party—which was a small minority in the legislature—to form a vast “super-majority” bloc. As he launched his murderous crusade, no one voiced opposition.

The opposition to the war on drugs, spearheaded in the legislature by Liberal Party Senator Leila de Lima, is a manifestation, above all, of the interests of Washington, which had sought to use the issue to pressure Duterte, and is now looking at the possibility of securing his ouster.

De Lima served as justice secretary under the Aquino administration, and in this capacity she prosecuted a number of corrupt campaigns against political rivals from the predecessor Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo administration (2001–2010). Arroyo had sought to increase Philippine economic ties with China, a move which entailed shifting Manila somewhat out of the ambit of Washington. No move on her part was as flagrant as those which have been undertaken by Duterte, but Washington was not prepared to tolerate this violation of its interests by its former colony.

Arroyo herself was imprisoned on corruption charges by Leila de Lima and Arroyo’s allies, including the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Renato Corona, were likewise hounded. De Lima oversaw the charges filed against Corona, who was impeached. At least part of the evidence used against Corona was supplied to De Lima by the US Embassy in Manila.

Elected Senator in 2016, De Lima was chair of the Senate Justice Committee, in which capacity she conducted an investigation into claims that Duterte had been the head of long-standing death squads in Davao City, where he had been mayor prior to election as president. Duterte has on numerous occasions admitted, boasted even, that he was the head of these death squads. De Lima brought witnesses before the Senate to testify to the murders which Duterte had ordered.

Duterte first sought to remove De Lima by impugning her character, denouncing her as a “loose woman” for having had an affair with her driver, and threatening to publish video evidence of this. When this failed to stick, Duterte’s Justice Ministry issued a warrant for De Lima’s arrest, citing the testimony of prison inmates convicted of high-level drug charges that De Lima, during her stint as Justice Secretary, had facilitated the smuggling and trafficking of drugs within the Philippine prison system.

Another key opponent of Duterte in the legislature is Senator Antonio Trillanes. On February 20, Trillanes produced a new witness against Duterte, a former Davao police officer named Arthur Lascañas, who claimed to have served as a leader of the Davao Death Squads (DDS) under Duterte. Lascañas’ account corresponds closely to what had already been established by prior accounts, including at least in part to Duterte’s own boastings.

Lascañas revealed that the former members of the New People’s Army (NPA), the armed wing of the Maoist Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), served as the muscle for carrying out hits on Duterte’s orders. He explained that the initial killings carried out by the Davao Death Squad in the late 1980s, had notes left on the corpses which were signed, not by the DDS, but by the NPA. The DDS was paid for every victim killed. Duterte used the DDS to target the poorest layers of Davao society as well as his own political opponents. Lascañas also claimed that a string of bombings of local mosques in the early 1990s in Davao had been carried out on the orders of Duterte.

Trillanes, who has been instrumental in bringing these and earlier charges against Duterte, is a sordid political figure. A Navy lieutenant, he led a coup attempt against the Arroyo administration in 2003, for which he was imprisoned. He was elected for Senate from prison in 2007, and staged another brief military standoff later that year, seizing the Manila Peninsula Hotel, where he denounced Arroyo for “treason” for having signed a deal for joint oil exploration in the South China Sea with China. This coup attempt—which was staged with assistance from both the Maoist CPP and the pseudo-left Akbayan—failed and Trillanes took up life as a Senator. During the Aquino administration, Trillanes served as a key ally, bringing corruption charges against Vice President Jejomar Binay, who was interested in pursuing expanded economic ties with China. Trillanes served as the Aquino administration’s back-channel negotiator with China during the tense military stand-off over the Scarborough shoal in 2012.

Trillanes and De Lima articulate the interests of sections of the Philippine ruling class who are intimately tied to Washington and are looking to reverse the reorientation of Manila’s foreign policy under Duterte. As pressure tactics have proven fruitless, they are making preparations to attempt his ouster, a fact that is openly being discussed.

The Liberal Party, however, which would be the logical standard-bearer of such a move, is in disarray. Duterte’s allies in the Senate, headed by Senator Manny Pacquiao, successfully moved to have the Liberal Party chairs of several Senate committees removed from their positions over the weekend. Former President Aquino convened a meeting of the Liberal Party on Monday, where he called on Liberal Party legislators to break with the super-majority allied with Duterte in the legislature, but was unable to secure support for the move. The majority of the Liberal Party legislators are fearful of the backlash in the legislature from Duterte’s allies.

The remaining bourgeois opponents to Duterte are constellated around Vice President Leni Robredo, a member of the Liberal Party, who, in the event Duterte was removed from office, would take his place. The pattern for such a political transition was established by the removal of President Joseph Estrada by what amounted to a military-backed constitutional coup in 2001 and the installation of Vice President Arroyo.

Duterte has sought to secure the support of the military, as he is readying the apparatus of martial law, doubling soldiers’ salaries and granting the military effectively carte blanche powers. The top brass, however, have been trained in, and are loyal to, Washington. Duterte’s peace talks with the communists, and, above all, his geopolitical reorientation, have provoked coup rumblings among the military leadership.

Congressman Gary Alejano, a former military officer, who followed Trillanes in his coup attempts in 2003 and 2007, told the press on Monday that such coup plotting was being discussed, and while there were as yet “ no ouster moves against the President ... there is always a breaking point.”

South Sudan civil war causing widespread famine

Thomas Gaist 



The 2011 partition of Sudan has proven a fateful moment in the neocolonial Africa policy pursued by American imperialism during the quarter century following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It is now clear that the carve-up of Sudan has set the stage for a historic catastrophe. 

Less than six years after celebrating its “independence,” the criminal regime installed by Washington in Juba presides over one of the worst humanitarian crises worldwide. South Sudan is joining the long list of countries destroyed as functioning societies by the predatory wars and geopolitical operations of the American government. 

South Sudan’s “independence,” proclaimed in July 2011, was orchestrated to assert US interests in relation to the oil wealth of Sudan, whose central government in Khartoum had embraced significant Chinese economic involvement in the oil sector. Via the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) Washington escalated its support for the leaders of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), propelling them into the leadership of the South Sudanese state.

The South Sudanese civil war, which began in December 2013, involves a struggle between opposed factions within the SPLM, which are vying for control over the state apparatus and various economic interests. Both sides in the war, SPLM factions led by President Salva Miir and ex-Vice President Riek Machar, are accused of mass killings of civilians belonging to rival ethnic groups. 

South Sudan may soon “be plunged into a genocide on the scale of Rwanda’s in 1994,” a recent report by Reuters noted. Now in its fourth year, the war in South Sudan has drawn in regional militaries including those of Kenya, Uganda, and Egypt. South Sudan is being described as an “African Syria,” in reference to the involvement of a growing list of outside powers in the conflict.

Three full years of war have wreaked havoc on the country’s productive forces and distribution infrastructure, causing widespread famine. Some 100,000 South Sudanese are presently famine-stricken and another one million are on the verge of starvation. An additional 4.9 million South Sudanese are considered “food insecure,” a figure projected to rise to 5.5 million by July. 

Over 1.5 million South Sudanese have become refugees since the civil war began, making South Sudan’s refugee crisis the largest in Africa and third largest globally, behind Syria and Afghanistan according to ReliefWeb.

“The human rights situation in South Sudan is amongst the worst on the continent and the planet. For the past three years, government and opposition forces have been waging an extremely abusive war and repeatedly targeted civilians, in complete impunity,” Jonathan Pedneault of Euronews told Human Rights Watch. 

“In many areas across the country, civilians have been forcefully displaced by the armed parties and seen their houses and livelihood destroyed in the fighting,” Pedneault noted. “Millions are facing a dire humanitarian situation, rising inflation and ruthless armed actors keen on attacking them and their livelihoods.” 

The civil war has severely disrupted production and distribution of basic goods. Food prices in South Sudan have risen by more than 800 percent since the civil war began, according to Amsterdam News.

“The extreme level of violence has had a severe impact on people’s ability to meet basic needs such as safe drinking water, food supplies, shelter and healthcare,” Doctors Without Borders representative Nicolas Peissel reported in a recent statment.

The South Sudan war is a case study in the criminal role of the leaders of Africa’s “legitimate,” bourgeois governments, who function as little more than mafia dons and bagmen for imperialism. 

A layer of top officials within the South Sudanese government and military have rapidly enriched themselves since becoming top officials in the transition regime framework created by the US-backed 2005 CPA treaty. Kiir family members and SPLA Generals have accumulated major holdings in South Sudan’s oil sector, purchased expensive real-estate abroad, and developed close relations with foreign oil interests. 

President Kiir’s family lives a luxurious lifestyle outside of South Sudan, enjoying a mansion in a wealthy Nairobi suburb and vacations in Europe. The family of Kiir’s top General, Gregory Vasili, owns interests in the oil, construction, finance, aviation, weapons and mining sectors. Between 2012-2016, South Sudanese Generals Reuben and Jok Riak received millions in cash via payments to personal bank accounts held by Kenya Commercial Bank.

Members of “rebel” leader Riek Machar’s family enjoy similar privileges, living between mansions in Addis Ababa and Nairobi and traveling internationally. Machar’s family has continued to amass wealth despite being forced from state power by the Kiir clique. In December 2009, Machar’s nephew, Bading Machar, seized control of private security firm KK Security, by invading the company’s headquarters in Juba, and taking an employee hostage to authorize spending from the firm’s checking account. 

The security company, alternately known as Konkel Security, has since served as the corporate vehicle of the Machar family’s dealings with foreign capital, as it has prosecuted its factional war against the Kiir clique. 

Such are the forces empowered by American imperialism in its effort to assert US control over the oil wealth of the Sudan. 

More fundamentally the civil war in South Sudan is an acute expression of the crisis and breakdown of the global capitalist system. Incapable of meeting the basic social needs of the masses, unable to maintain security within their own territories, and fully aligned with the interests of the American and European ruling classes, Africa’s capitalist elites pursue a policy of abject collaboration with foreign interests, while using repression and terror against their own populations. 

While recognizing the complicity of African nationalism, it must be emphasized that the lion’s share of responsibility for the crimes being committed against the people of South Sudan lies with the American and European ruling elites, which have once again shown their readiness to destroy entire societies in pursuit of geopolitical and economic interests. 

The war is drawing in foreign military forces and pouring fuel on the growing regional power struggle between Iranian and Saudi-led alliances, which have increasingly sought to expand their military and strategic “depth” into the Horn of Africa. There is speculation the Saudi and other Gulf monarchies plan to use their military presence in the Horn to sponsor an insurgency against the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) regime in Addis Ababa. 

The US-backed Egyptian military dictatorship was accused this week of sending weapons and ammunition to South Sudanese forces loyal to President Kiir, and of bombing opposition fighters near Kaka. Ugandan officials have called for military intervention by the major powers in South Sudan, in the name of stemming the massive tide of South Sudanese refugees, as many as 700,000, that have flooded across the border into Uganda since the war began.

Amid resignations of top South Sudanese military commanders, President Kiir made deals with Egypt and Ethiopia last month, and issued pledges of loyalty to the newly-installed Trump administration. 

"Our government has taken and will continue to take all necessary steps to work very closely with the Trump administration to achieve mutual interests. We believe that a strong bilateral cooperation between South Sudan and the U.S will end all the destabilizing hands of external actors in our affairs," Kiir said.

The South Sudanese President held security talks with Ethiopian leaders in Addis Ababa Thursday, and on Friday, Kiir signed cooperation deals including an oil transport highways connecting Gambella, Ethiopia to Palouge in South Sudan and Dima to Boma in Ethiopia. The oil routes will service US and Swiss financed refineries in the Upper Nile. The Kiir regime is planning to double oil production by 2018.

Unions in UK oppose struggle against massive school spending cuts

Tom Pearce

Hundreds of schools and teachers are calling for action in response to an unprecedented funding crisis.

The National Audit Office (NAO) reports that schools faced £3 billion in spending cuts. A forecast from the Institute for Fiscal Studies said this equated to an 8 percent real-term cut to funding. According to a new Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) report, real-term spending on schools in England could drop by 6.5 percent over the course of this parliament. The IFS states, “This will be the first time schools have seen real-terms cuts in spending per pupil since the mid-1990s.”

Frustration with the situation has led to plans for a strike by school governors. Governors of 40 schools in West Sussex have written to MPs warning they may refuse to sign off school budgets for 2017-18 in protest at funding pressures.

School governors, who have taken a more prominent role in schools over the past decade, are being forced to make school staff redundant as budgets are cut. Although governors are not employees, they can refuse to carry out their duties, which include the process of recruitment.

The National Union of Teachers (NUT) has created an online tool called Schoolcuts to show the impact in England and Wales. The web site is supported by the NUT, Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), GMB, National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) and Britain’s two largest unions—Unison and Unite.

One school, Thornhill Community Academy in Dewsbury, West Yorks, will lose an estimated £533,918—an average of £661 per pupil—by 2019. As a result, the school may have to shed 13 teachers.

The Department for Education estimates that 60 percent of secondary schools in England are in deficit. The NUT estimates that just in the southern English county of Hampshire, 1,700 teachers’ jobs could go by 2019-20 as part of a £62 million package of government cuts.

However, the only choices available to teachers and the public who visit the site is to share figures on social media or email their local Member of Parliament as if this is going to miraculously provide extra funding for schools. At the time of writing, no further action is planned beyond this.

The main focus of the NUT is on protecting its income from dues paying members, as it seeks a merger with the ATL in order to “be better positioned to effect change both at school and college and at national level.”

An NUT statement declares, speaking of a Conservative government committed to imposing vast spending cuts, “We will be better able to influence government around issues of concern to the profession such as workload, school funding and student assessment.”

Joint campaigns have been carried out before. In autumn 2012, education staff took action over pay and conditions. This was a joint strike organised by the NUT and the NASUWT (National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers). At the time, the slogan of the unions was “protecting teachers defending education. NUT, NASUWT together.” Nothing could have been further from the truth, with repeated attacks being made on teachers’ pay and conditions over the past five years, with no resistance organised by any of the unions.

Since the 2012 strike, strikes have been few and far between. The NASUWT stopped strike action altogether, in favour of a paltry protest short of a strike. This involves teachers refusing to take part in work that is beyond their remits. The NUT has held just two national one-day strikes since the joint action. In July 2014, NUT members took part in a day of action alongside members of Unison, Unite, GMB, Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) and the Fire Brigades Union (FBU).

At the time, the NUT cited pay, pensions and workload as three key reasons for walking out. According to the union, pension contribution increases and pay restraint had meant that teachers had seen a 15 percent fall in the value of their take home pay. Performance related pay (PRP) was also a key issue, but has now been implemented without further action.

In 2016, the NUT again cited workload as an issue, but focused solely on funding in their letter to the education secretary. Writing in June 2016, Kevin Courtney, then acting general secretary of the NUT, warned that the funding situation in schools could get “progressively worse.”

The NUT argued that these funding cuts could have “negative implications,” including an increase in class sizes, fewer subject choices for children, and cuts in support and teaching staff. As the union pointed out, all of these can affect standards overall. However, this dire situation is the reality in virtually all UK schools and has reached breaking point, but there is barely a whimper of protest from the NUT.

The pseudo-left Socialist Party (SP) and the Socialist Workers Party praise the NUT for supposedly continuing the fight against the government. NUT general secretary Kevin Courtney was part of the Socialist Teachers Alliance (STA), which includes the SWP and Socialist Resistance. Last year the SWP backed Courtney as he ran for the post of general secretary.

When Courtney won the leadership election of the NUT in 2016, he was congratulated by the Labour Party’s nominally “left” leader Jeremy Corbyn. The pseudo-left sow illusions in a Corbyn-led Labour government improving the conditions of teachers, funding and reversing the academy schools programme. But a report on a Labour conference fringe meeting last September by Schools W eek exposed the party’s lack of opposition to the governments’ schools agenda. “We don’t have a policy on what would happen to academies if we were to win the next election,” said Lord Watson, the shadow education minister in the House of Lords, who added, “We are in the early stages of developing education policy.”

He continued, “Obviously, Labour started academies for a different purpose, to help schools that were in difficulties, but it’s gone beyond that now. We should get back to the position where academies are for their original purpose.”

The reality is that academies were introduced to start the privatisation of education in the UK, which has led to massive expansion of the academies programme and now the creation of Free Schools.

The darling of ex-education secretary Michael Gove, Sir Andrew Carter, chief executive of the South Farnham Educational Trust, proposes that schools should be able to ask for fees from families of around £500 a year and seek private investment to help with their finances.

Some heads already realise that complete privatisation is a distinct possibility. John Tomsett of Huntington school in York said, “Until we are officially privatised and charging becomes the norm, I will continue to refrain from asking taxpayers to make additional contributions towards educating their children beyond the tax they have already paid.”

German newspaper publishes fraudulent refugee “sex-mob” report

Marianne Arens

On February 6 in its Frankfurt local edition, the Bild newspaper ran an article with the headline “37 days after New Year, victims break their silence. Sex-mob raged in the Fressgass”—a popular city boulevard in the city. The news spread quickly but proved to be a pack of lies.

The article centred on the testimony of a sympathiser of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), pub owner Jan Mai. Citing Mai, Bild reporter Stefan Schlagenhaufer wrote that a mob of “900 mostly drunken refugees” had rioted on New Year’s Eve, stealing from and sexually harassing those attempting to celebrate.

The article reported that dozens of foreign men had invaded Mai’s bar, First-In, where they assaulted women and stole a number of jackets.

The tabloid quoted Mai as follows: “When I entered, the whole place was full with a group of around 50 Arabs. They did not speak German, drank the drinks of guests, and danced in a provocative manner. The women asked me for help because they were being attacked. The mood changed completely.” Even two hours later there were “problems with the masses of refugees” in front of the bar.

Bild also presented a witness, the businesswoman Irina A., who said she had been sexually harassed in the bar by “around 50 Arabs,” “masses of refugees,” “900 mostly drunken refugees.” The vocabulary used by Bild is precisely that associated with the far-right AfD and Pegida movement. The Bild report was then taken up by many other news outlets, including the television channel Sat.1, the ultra-right Jungen Freiheit newspaper and in Great Britain by the UK edition of Breitbart News.

Sensationalist reports appeared in “serious” newspapers and dailies such as the Frankfurter Rundschau, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Offenbacher Post.

The next day, the Frankfurter Neue Presse and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung printed critical commentaries referring to “A sex mob that nobody has seen” (FAZ). But the false report was rapidly spread on Facebook and Twitter by right-wing groups.

The falsified report played into the hands of leading local politicians. Christoph Schmitt (CDU) protested about the “downside of refugee policy,” i.e., “masses of men ... making the city unsafe.” He called for “more police on the streets, and mobile video surveillance.”

Stephanie Wüst from the FDP (neo-liberal Free Democratic Party) group in the Frankfurt parliament agreed: “The state should punish the perpetrators with the full severity of the law and also not shy from deportations.” These standpoints were in turn taken up by Bild, which ran a new article demanding hysterically: “Zero tolerance! Video monitoring! More police!”

The Frankfurt police, however, were unable to find any evidence of the alleged incidents. It initiated an investigation but found nothing. When police questioned people living in the affected area they could find nothing to support Mai’s claims.

The police then turned to the public prosecutor, who undertook investigations into the witnesses cited by the Bild newspaper. A search of the apartment of Irina A., the chief witness for the report, uncovered air tickets and other evidence that showed she had spent New Year’s Eve in Belgrade. The woman, who had claimed that strange men had “grasped her everywhere” in First-In, was forced to admit she had not been in Frankfurt on New Year’s Eve.

After less than a week the web of lies collapsed, with the police acknowledging that after “intensive and extensive investigations” the Bild report “lacked any foundation.” The entire story of refugees rampaging on New Year’s Eve in Frankfurt was a pack of lies.

On February 16, the Bild-Zeitung had to apologise publicly for the “untruthful reporting and the accusations made against the affected parties.” But the story had already travelled around the world.

On February 23, the New York Times wrote: “The story, about a mob of Arab men rampaging through the well-heeled streets of Frankfurt and sexually assaulting German women as they went, must have been irresistible—so irresistible that Bild, a popular newspaper, published it early this month with little scrutiny.”

The Bild-Zeitung acknowledged this criticism indirectly. Julian Reichelt, the head of the editorial board, told the Berlin Tagesspiegel: “The accusation [levelled at the paper] that we failed to report incidents concerning refugees became, apparently, the impetus for the report.”

Bild had relied on a “witness” who was easily identifiable as an AfD supporter. On his Facebook page (which he has now switched off), Mai posted hate comments against refugees and praised the AfD. After the AfD received more than 14 percent in a recent vote in Berlin, he wrote: “Keep it up, AfD.” He also spread a right-wing video with the title “Merkel must go.”

The owner of the MAI Gastro Group GmbH belongs to a layer of social climbers who seem to be encouraged by the rise of Donald Trump and the “alternative facts” spread by his spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway. Mai owns a number of bars, restaurants and luxury establishments in Frankfurt and the surrounding area, plus numerous other properties. Formerly, he served two years as a full-time soldier in a parachute regiment.

The unmasking of his story and the lies spread by Bild throws further light on the alleged mass sexual harassment of women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015 and 2016. The alleged attacks in 2015 were the pretext for an unprecedented xenophobic campaign and build-up. There is no evidence to indicate such mass attacks took place.

The following year, thousands of policemen were mobilised in Cologne and horrific reports were then circulated about the activities of hundreds of so-called “Nafris” (a racist police term for “North African hardened criminals”). Police selected people based on racial characteristics, held several hundred young men in a police cordon and did not permit them to enter the city centre.

Later, the police had to apologise and correct their statements. Initially the police referred to around 2,000 “North African-looking young men” who had come to Cologne. Later the police admitted that they had identified just 674 suspects, of whom only 30 stemmed from North Africa!

What took place in the city of Hamburg on New Years Eve 2015 was also falsified and exaggerated. On November 1, 2016 a judge from the Hamburg District Court freed the last of three accused persons and raised serious accusations against the investigation carried out by the police and prosecutor’s office.

The media image of “dangerous, criminal alien hordes bothering German women and girls” is part of the arsenal of the far right and serves as propaganda for the building of an authoritarian state.

Thousands flee as US artillery and air strikes intensify in Mosul offensive

Jordan Shilton

As Iraqi government forces press further into the densely populated areas of western Mosul, the key role being played in the advance by US-led air strikes and artillery barrages is becoming clear. The brutal offensive on Iraq’s second-largest city has already displaced upwards of 200,000 civilians, including 8,000 over the past week.

Reporting on the “thunderous booms from howitzers” fired by American troops, the New York Times stated that US artillery was “essential” in “softening the opposition from Islamic State.” A platoon commander responsible for firing rockets into the city told the Times that her unit had been called into action between 10 and 20 times over the past week, while another commander informed the newspaper, “It’s considerably more than we thought we were going to shoot when we left Fort Hood.”

As the fighting intensifies in the most heavily populated areas of Mosul, tens of thousands of residents are being forced to flee their homes. At least 1,000 civilians turned up at Iraqi army checkpoints on Monday morning alone.

The stepped-up use of American firepower has enabled Iraqi forces to capture the city’s international airport and a military base, as well as several districts on the southern edge of Mosul. This leaves the vast majority of western Mosul, where an estimated 750,000 people live, still to be captured.

While precise numbers of civilian casualties are hard to come by, reports indicate that more than half of all casualties in the fighting are civilians. They are being used by ISIS fighters as human shields and those trying to escape ISIS-held areas have come under fire.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimated Tuesday that an additional 250,000 civilians could flee the fighting in the days ahead. The UN described those fleeing as “exhausted and often dehydrated,” and noted that conditions for residents remaining in Mosul were “desperate.” Supply routes, including the highway leading to Syria, have been cut.

Food, water, gas, heating oil and medical supplies are all running out. Prices for basic necessities like sugar and potatoes have risen sharply.

The disregard for the civilian population is an inevitable product of the predatory aims of US imperialism in Iraq and the broader Middle East region. When ISIS first emerged in Syria, Washington was prepared to tolerate it as a fighting force in opposition to the government of Bashar al Assad in Damascus, which the Obama administration had been seeking to remove since 2011. ISIS only became a problem for the United States when it gained substantial territory in Iraq, threatening to undermine Washington’s puppet regime in Baghdad.

In its efforts to oust ISIS from Mosul while at the same time expanding its intervention into neighboring Syria to bring about regime change in Damascus, the United States is seeking to secure its geostrategic dominance over the energy-rich Middle East, while simultaneously weakening the positions of its geopolitical rivals, above all Iran, Russia and China.

The Trump administration will soon vastly expand US military engagement in Iraq and Syria. Recommendations prepared by the Pentagon were sent to the White House Monday, where Defense Secretary James Mattis led a meeting to discuss them with the president.

While the details are yet to be made officially public, it has been widely reported that options under consideration are a significant increase in the number of military personnel to be deployed to the region and a further loosening of the rules of engagement for US troops allowing them to operate on the front line.

A Daily Beast report underscored the continuity between the Obama and Trump administrations on the issue of the Mideast war, noting that many of the proposals contained in the Pentagon plan appeared “familiar.”

Officials speaking on condition of anonymity revealed that among the options being discussed were the establishment of so-called “safe zones” in Syria, which would necessitate a vast increase in American military power, financial sanctions against ISIS and affiliated groups, and a possible abandonment of US support for some of the Islamist fighters in Syria backed under the Obama administration.

In a sign of what is to come, the Iraqi air force struck ISIS positions in Syria for the first time over the weekend, using intelligence provided by the US.

US-backed Iraqi government efforts to retake ISIS-held territory have repeatedly left devastation in their wake. In the process of recapturing Ramadi in the west of the country, advancing forces virtually laid waste to the city, forcing its largely Sunni population to flee.

The sectarian tensions deliberately fostered by the United States following its illegal 2003 invasion are becoming increasingly bitter in Mosul and the surrounding region. Iraqi government forces are Shia-dominated and were supported in the initial stages of their advance on Mosul by Kurdish Peshmerga militia. The predominantly Sunni population in Mosul is often assumed to be ISIS collaborators by government forces, who have been accused of human rights abuses over recent months.

In a report published in October, Amnesty International accused government forces and allied paramilitaries of torture, arbitrary detention, disappearances and extrajudicial killings of thousands of civilians fleeing ISIS-held areas. It described these events as a “terrifying backlash” against civilians and warned of “mass violations” as the military offensive continued.

In November, a separate Amnesty report criticized Iraqi federal police units for torturing and unlawfully killing villagers during the Mosul offensive. Researchers visited the areas of al-Shura and al-Qayyarah and found evidence of six extrajudicial killings in late October. “Men in Federal Police uniform have carried out multiple unlawful killings, apprehending and then deliberately killing in cold blood residents in villages south of Mosul. In some cases the residents were tortured before they were shot dead execution-style,” deputy director of research in Amnesty’s Beirut office Lynn Maalouf said.

Members of the Iranian-aligned Shia Popular Mobilization Units are making their way into units of the Iraqi federal police, which is now being tasked with security in the areas of Mosul under government control. They view the majority Sunni population with undisguised hostility.

A report in Maclean’s magazine underscored the brutality of the operation. After Iraqi efforts to retake the eastern part of the city became bogged down in early December, a two-week pause was announced in the fighting to enable federal police units to be redeployed. But even more significant was the decision to drastically intensify the number of air strikes launched on the city. According to figures from the US-led coalition, the Iraqi air force conducted 95 air strikes in Mosul during January, an increase of 40 percent compared to previous months.

The impact was devastating. Maclean’s reported on one incident where 18 members of one family were killed when three homes were leveled by bombs dropped January 6. It also reported widespread destruction of infrastructure caused by the bombardments.

The hypocrisy in the media and political establishment in the face of the war crimes being committed in Mosul is staggering. Only weeks ago, the press was full of denunciations of Syria and Russia for their assault on Aleppo as they sought to drive US-backed Islamist extremists from the city. Leading US and allied politicians, including former American UN ambassador Samantha Power and British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, called on investigations into war crimes to be launched over the hundreds of civilians killed in the fighting.

Now, with an urban center more than three times the size of eastern Aleppo under siege, and as civilians are either killed or maimed by air strikes and artillery fire, or rounded up by Iraqi forces and treated with suspicion and outright hostility, hardly a word of protest is forthcoming.

Behind the anti-Semitic and racist attacks in the US

Patrick Martin

The coming to power of the Trump administration has encouraged the most reactionary, racist and backward forces in American society. Nearly 100 bomb threats have been phoned in to Jewish Community Centers around the country, all of them so far hoaxes, but causing widespread fear and disruption. Two Jewish cemeteries have been desecrated, most recently Saturday night in Philadelphia, when more than 500 gravestones were displaced or broken—an effort that clearly involved a sizeable and determined effort.

Last weekend, an Indian immigrant software engineer was murdered in Kansas City, shot to death in a bar by a bigoted Navy veteran who apparently thought he was killing an Iranian, and who echoed Trump’s campaign rhetoric, shouting “get out of my country,” before opening fire. This is only the most flagrant in a wave of violence and intimidation against immigrants and Muslims, inspired by Trump’s executive orders targeting refugees and immigrant workers.

Trump gave lip service to concern over racist and anti-Semitic attacks at the beginning of his nationally televised speech to Congress Tuesday night. His crocodile tears were belied almost immediately as he returned to his main campaign theme of demonizing immigrants as criminals, drug dealers and gang members.

The president’s real attitude to the wave of anti-Semitic attacks was expressed in his remarks at the White House Tuesday to a group of state attorneys general. Trump was asked about the bomb threats and desecration of graves, and he replied, “Sometimes it’s the reverse, to make people—or to make others—look bad,” he told the state officials.

This was not the first time that Trump has suggested that his political opponents are staging the anti-Semitic attacks in order to embarrass his administration. Trump said much the same thing, albeit in a typically confused and rambling fashion, when asked about the attacks at his February 16 press conference. “You have some of the signs and some of that anger caused by the other side,” he claimed. “They’ll do signs and drawing that are inappropriate. It won’t be my people. It will be people on the other side to anger people like you.”

Similar claims have been promoted by far-right elements like former KKK leader and neo-Nazi David Duke, with the “people on the other side” replaced with the statement that it is Jews who are responsible for the desecrations.

Officials of Jewish groups have criticized Trump’s latest remarks, as they have a series of comments and actions that have no serious explanation except as expressions of deep-seated anti-Semitism among key officials in the Trump White House.

The most flagrant was the official White House statement commemorating worldwide observances of the Holocaust, which made no reference to the Jewish victims of Hitler’s “final solution,” an omission that White House aides said was intentional.

The ties between Trump and the foul swamp of anti-Semitism and white racism have been noted as far back as his notorious reluctance to distance himself from Duke, who fervently endorsed Trump in the Republican primaries.

Trump’s closest policy adviser, who has taken on a leading role in virtually every area is Stephen Bannon, the fascist-minded former head of Breitbart News, which has become one of the main Internet watering holes for white racist, anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi elements. In his political utterances, Bannon invokes what are diplomatically described as “dog whistles” for anti-Semitism, thinly disguised tropes like his denunciation of the “corporatist, globalist media” at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference.

Trump himself embraced “America First” as the theme of his fascistic inaugural address, despite—or because of—the fact that the group of that name in the 1930s was headed by Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh and the slogan became identified with hostility to Jews.

The White House has repeatedly rebuffed charges of anti-Semitism by pointing to Trump’s family—his daughter Ivanka converted to Judaism when she married Jared Kushner, now a top White House aide—and to prominent Jewish members of Trump’s cabinet like Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin. The issue is not resolved so easily.

Trump’s promotion of anti-immigrant racism and American nationalism has a definite political logic, aligning his administration with the foulest and most retrograde tendencies in American political life. These elements flocked to the Trump campaign and were emboldened both by his election victory and his promotion of figures like Bannon, Sebastian Gorka (associated with the Hungarian neo-Nazi group, the Order of Vitéz) and Michael Anton (who has denounced Islam as a “militant faith”) to high positions in the White House.

The Trump administration has been steeped in racism and chauvinism from its first day in office. Significantly, while he was forced to make a perfunctory condemnation of anti-Semitism last week, Trump has not said a word about anti-Muslim or anti-immigrant violence. He said nothing about the massacre of five Muslims at a mosque in Quebec City, Canada, carried out by an ultra-right racist and Trump admirer.

Throughout this period, the major policy initiative of the new administration has been to launch a pogrom-style onslaught against immigrants, whether Muslim refugees fleeing US bombs and missiles in the Middle East, or Mexicans and Central Americans, feeding their families by working at low-paying and arduous jobs across the United States.

The heavily publicized raids, round-ups and mass jailing of innocent people have served as a green light to every racist vigilante in America. The Trump administration is morally and political responsible for the upsurge of anti-Semitism and racism, and it must be held accountable.

The Trump administration, however, is an expression of a profound disease, and one that did not begin with the entry of Trump and Bannon into the White House. Far-right nationalism in general and anti-Semitism in particular have always been associated with social and political reaction. It is employed by the ruling class to divert popular anger and to create the ideological foundation for war.

The 1930s saw a savage rise of anti-Semitism, not only in Europe, but in the United States as well. This was also a period of racist lynchings in the south, followed during the Second World War by the mass internment of Japanese Americans ordered by the Roosevelt administration.

All of this nationalist filth is again reemerging. Similar forces are on the rise throughout Europe, with parties and organizations that promote Holocaust denial, anti-Semitism, violent attacks on immigrants and the buildup of the police and military—all the trappings of a revival of the fascist forces that were responsible for the greatest crimes of the twentieth century.

In country after country, the ruling class is bringing forward the worst forms of nationalism and religious bigotry. The war policies of American imperialism in the Middle East, with the backing of NATO, have driven tens of millions of refugees to flee their homes. More than a million have made their way to Europe seeking safety and a decent future. But the policy of the Trump administration, and its co-thinkers in Europe, is to brand the victims of imperialism as “terrorists” and bar their entry.

In the final analysis, the mix of fascistic reaction thrown up by the Trump administration is a product of the crisis and breakdown of the capitalist system.

The ‘Two-State Solution’ in Israel-Palestine: An Accelerated Demise?

Derek Verbakel

At a White House press conference on 15 February, US President Donald Trump said he was neither committed to a ‘two-state solution’ nor opposed to a ‘one-state solution’ to the Israel-Palestine conflict. This upended a position held unanimously by the so-called international community, including successive US administrations, which for decades has paid lip-service to the notion of the eventual creation of a Palestinian state co-existing alongside Israel. On 23 February, Trump backpedaled slightly, saying “I like this two-state solution, but I am satisfied with whatever both parties agree with.” While the Trump administration’s ambiguity constitutes a significant rhetorical wobble, in practice it portends an acceleration of long-running US policies enabling Israel to gradually foreclose the possibility of a ‘two-state solution’. 

The UN has endorsed the creation of separate and independent Israeli and Palestinian nation-states since the mid-1970s. Today, Hamas, the militant Islamist party governing the Gaza Strip, eschews negotiations, while secular-nationalist Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) representatives and the Israeli government officially support a ‘two-state solution’. However, Israel’s current right-wing government, like its predecessors, has continued to colonise land on which such an agreement is to be based by establishing state-subsidised, Jewish-only settlements, including on private Palestinian property.

Although in its last days his administration called settlements an obstacle to peace and allowed passage of a UN Security Council resolution condemning them, this process carried on under former US President Obama. Among other actions, the Obama administration vetoed an anti-settlement resolution in 2011; shielded Israel from international justice and accountability measures; and in September 2016, sent Israel the largest US military aid package to any country ever. During Obama’s presidency, Israel’s settler population rose by over 100,000 to bringing the total number to approximately 600,000 in the occupied West Bank (including East Jerusalem). 

Trump, regarded as even more sympathetic, has been welcomed by the Israeli right. He appointed David Friedman, a Zionist hardliner who has long opposed a ‘two-state solution’ and financed settlement construction, as the US' ambassador to Israel. As peace envoy to the Middle East, Trump tapped his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is known to hold similar views. In his most recent statement on the matter, Trump expressed eagerness to relocate the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem – a plan that would effectively recognise Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem, which Palestinians see as their future capital.

Although Trump later called for some restraint in settlement expansion outside existing blocs, since his inauguration, Israel's emboldened Prime Minister Netanyahu has announced plans to construct over 6000 new settlement homes in the West Bank. A Supreme Court challenge may come, but on 6 February, Israeli parliamentarians passed a bill retroactively legalising thousands of settler homes built on Palestinian land in the West Bank.

Netanyahu has said the Palestinians should be left with a “state-minus.” This, it seems, would entail the continued aggrandisement of the territory, resources, and power of an ethnocratic Jewish state at the Palestinians’ expense. Equal rights would remain absent for Palestinian citizens of Israel. Those in the West Bank would continue to have limited autonomy in fragmented enclaves, subjected to systemic violence and overriding Israeli security control over all the area west of the Jordan River. Gaza, already blockaded and periodically subjected to devastating Israeli attacks, would remain in limbo under the pretext of Israeli security concerns. New would be designation of Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel, which would retain at least all the major West Bank settlements, encircled by a completed Separation Wall marking the ‘border’. 

However, Netanyahu’s ability to establish such an arrangement at his own pace is challenged by those within his Likud party and coalition partners who demand open and immediate annexation of all or parts of the West Bank. Netanyahu is a cautious and calculating politician averse to drastic steps. However, with Obama’s departure – and while facing a corruption probe and angling for a fifth term in office – Netanyahu loses the ability to invoke the excuse of an American response. He is less able to resist pressure from even more hawkish politicians echoing well-subscribed public sentiments.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, supported by other Arab states, has reiterated insistence on a ‘two-state solution’ and a halt to settlement expansion. But clinging to this strategy has never resulted in sufficient international pressure on Israel to bargain in good faith or reverse course, and so weakens the ability of the PLO and Palestinian Authority leadership to continue legitimising its own existence. Ordinary Palestinians are increasingly frustrated by their ineffectual leaders and the occupation sustaining them, and this will likely fuel both non-violent civil disobedience and an uptick in uncoordinated armed attacks on Israelis.

Netanyahu may seek Trump’s assent to a ‘state-minus’ scenario, presenting it misleadingly as a security imperative to prevent the West Bank from being taken over by radical Islamists. Such an agreement would help Israel counter expected censure from European countries for dismissing the two-state paradigm. Especially if a ‘state-minus’ model is openly contemplated, the Palestinian leadership and international community will be forced to confront the fact that hollow appeals by all for a ‘two-state solution’ only further the ideal’s demise.

Its preferences may become clearer, but through design or incompetence – and for better or for worse – the Trump administration could usher in a new international agenda to address the Israel-Palestine.