Censorship in the Digital Age

Jason Hirthler

The grand experiment with western democracy, badly listing thanks to broadsides from profiteering oligarchs, may finally run ashore on the rocks of thought crime. In the uneven Steven Spielberg project Minority Report, starring excitable scientologist Tom Cruise, Cruise plays a futuristic policeman who investigates pre-crimes and stops them before they happen. The police owe their ability to see the criminal plots developing to characters called pre-cognitives, or pre-cogs, kind of autistic prophets who see the future and lie sleeping in sterile pools of water inside the police department. Of course, it turns out that precogs can pre-visualize different futures, a hastily hidden flaw that threatens to jeopardize the profits of the pre-crime project. Here is the crux of the story: thought control is driven by a profit motive at bottom. As it turns out, just like real life.

Now, the British government has decided to prosecute pre-crime but has done away with the clunky plot device of the pre-cogs, opting rather to rely on a hazy sense of higher probability to justify surveilling, nabbing, convicting, and imprisoning British citizens. The crime? Looking at radical content on the Internet. What is considered radical will naturally be defined by the state police who will doubtless be personally incentivized by pre-crime quotas, and institutionally shaped to criminalize trains of thought that threaten to destabilize a criminal status quo. You know, the unregulated monopoly capitalist regime that cuts wages, costs, and all other forms of overhead with psychopathic glee. Even a Grenfell Towers disaster is regarded more as a question of how to remove the story from public consciousness than rectify its wrongs.

The Triple Evils

Martin Luther King, Jr. famously, or infamously, depending on whether you are a penthouse mandarin or garden-variety prole, linked the triple evils of poverty, racism, and militarism. These evils are as yet unaddressed in our society, as we are daily shown on the media mouthpieces of imperial capitalism. Wars must be waged. Victims of social injustice must be incarcerated. Society itself must be made poor to ensure higher profits.

Yet there is another set of evils that are primarily used to mask the original trifecta outlined by King. In fact, the connection between propaganda, surveillance, and censorship is clear and inseparable. Take as your initial premise that imperial capitalists want to control the world. Not an unjustified claim. As an imperial capitalist, you are part of a privileged minority whose objective is to further exploit the disenfranchised whose only recourse is the resources you are pillaging. War, be it with bombs or sanctions or special forces or proxies, is immensely profitable to the capitalists. Arms makers make money. Chemical companies make money. Energy companies make money. Media companies make money. Presidents not only make money, they also make history. But the workers, the poor, and the downtrodden pay the price. That’s why they won’t be happy to hear of your plans. Therefore, they must be lied to, lied to so convincingly and comprehensively that they accept, without a second thought, the plans you have laid out before them.

This convincing requires three decisive actions: propaganda, surveillance, and censorship. The first is the official lie you craft to convince them to believe you. The second is the dragnet of digital observation by which you assess whether or not they do believe you. The third is the coercive methods by which you punish those that don’t believe you (justified by the imperial tale you first wove).

The official interpretation of reality is already in place: western civilization is beset on all sides by maniacs that want to take away our freedoms. The surveillance is already in place through programs like the Five Eyes alliance and ECHELON, PRISM, Boundless Informant, FISA, Stellar Wind, and many others. What remains is to tighten the noose of censorship around the neck of our open western societies.

Idiots Abroad

To that end, British Home Secretary Amber Rudd recently announced that citizens that view too much extremist material online could face up to 15 years in jail. Rudd related,

“I want to make sure those who view despicable terrorist content online, including jihadi websites, far-right propaganda and bomb-making instructions, face the full force of the law.”

This flaxen cipher of totalitarian control opened by tabulating some 67,000 tweets by ISIS, along with 44,000 links to ISIS propaganda, had been generated in the last year. Already, Section 58 of the Terrorist Act 2000 criminalized the possession of information that might be useful to a terrorist. But this is not enough for 10 Downing Street. Rudd is taking that law of possession and expanding it into a law of perception. It is now enough to simply watch extremist content. You needn’t download it, distribute it, or otherwise act on it. You need only see it more than once. At that point, by Rudd’s surely flawlessly calculated probabilities, you have become an existential threat to the state, or rather, to national security. You are more likely to commit acts of terror than those who have not seen the extremist content. Pre-crime without the pre-cogs.

But Rudd’s was another step in a long line of encroachments peddled by fascist-minded western governments. Theresa May, the reviled Thatcherite epigone, wants to play a paternal role in preventing citizens from even having the chance to view extremist content. The Tory manifesto tells us, “Some people say that it is not for government to regulate when it comes to technology and the internet. We disagree.” Britain plans, quite proudly it seems, to become the “global leader” in the regulation of the Internet. Just before these announcements were made, Britain had passed the Investigatory Powers Act, which lets the government sweep up user browsing histories. So the surveillance data authorities would use to implement Rudd’s plan is already there. Want to read that eloquent jeremiad against the Tories? Sorry, that was just labeled hate speech. Want to visit your favorite leftist forum? Apologies, mate, but that was deemed a “safe space” for extremist speech and shut down. Want to watch some attractive young people copulate? No problem. Just submit a request to your local minister outlining your precise reasons for wanting access to such nominally proscribed content. Otherwise, forget it.

The Germans aren’t far behind. The so-called Network Enforcement Act is said to create a framework for managing Internet activity, particularly in social media. The act is part of the country’s fake fight against fake news and hate speech, or rather its quite real fight against progressive, leftist, or communist thought and expression. This law demands, on pain of a fifty million euro penalty, that companies with two million or more web visitors must, on receipt of complaint, remove “unlawful content” from their sites. Facebook has opened a new data center in Germany to deal with removal requests, sure to be flooding in from the Bundestag. As the World Socialist Web Site makes clear, if your fake news promotes war (Iraq 2003), mischaracterizes coup d’états (Ukraine 2014), or spreads anti-immigrant hysteria (Cologne 2015), then you’ve got nothing to fear. Of course, it falls to the government itself to decide what is and what isn’t extremist content, no doubt a comforting thought for myriad Der Spiegel loyalists. And, of course, the erstwhile European Commission, destroyer of Greece and perpetrator of other ills, has published guidelines to help member states remove “illegal” content. Even the Russians have joined in, promoting legislation designed to curtail digital freedoms.

Stateside Schlemiels

None of this would be news to Barack Obama, whose own legacy of crumpled writs of habeas corpus, worthless privacy platitudes, and high-altitude wetwork, sits like a canker on the body politic. On his way out the door, through the turnstile of public weal into private gain, he provided the deep state with millions of dollars when he added the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act to the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which consecrates black budgets, cost overruns, price gouging, and all other manner of insecurity practiced by the Pentagon and its parasitic defense contractor community. The CDPA, if that’s how it will eventually be known, will effectively pay people to generate officially sanctioned narratives. The U.S. government is fighting fact by calling it propaganda and then producing its own propaganda and calling it fact.

Thanks in part to pressure from Congressional Senate Intelligence Committee that, and the indefatigable efforts of Democrats Adam Schiff and Mark Warner, major brands have been hopping on the clanging tumbrel of Russiagate, as it wheels unsteadily through the digital space, collecting the corpses of freethinkers. Facebook is now blocking “fake news” from its ads. YouTube has begun to fetter content producers with a more restrictive ad network and murky review policies. Google has tweaked its algorithm to keep “fake news” from surfacing high in Search Engine Results Pages, or SERPS. What precisely constitutes fake news is evidently up to the Zuckerbergs and Schmidts of the world. For Google, it has decidedly meant suppressing progressive and left-wing content, as plummeting traffic numbers have indicated. Of course, it won’t mean suppressing the fake news produced by the CIA or Mi5 or the standard state-fluffing smorgasbord of lies, deceits and hit jobs offered up by the so-called mainstream media.

The always sharp Glen Ford at Black Agenda Report writes that the FBI has created a fresh construct to deal with African-American unrest, called, “Black Identity Extremism,” already truncated into another mind-murdering acronym, BIE. (As though an acronym adds just the note of tenability required to pass off a fatuity on a mal-educated populace.) Foreign Policy, in an otherwise surprisingly liberal-minded story, suggests the construct risks reviving the racism the agency has worked so hard to overcome. Ford drily notes the overlooked matter of J. Edgar Hoover targeting blacks since the 1920s, not to mention COINTELPRO and attacks on the Black Panthers. Regardless, in the eyes of the FBI, blacks angry about police abuses, persistent economic inequalities, and the New Jim Crow, are little more than “identity extremists,” a danger to national security, notably the security of the white plutocracy which it serves.

(Fore) Closing Thoughts

Remember that much of this apparatus of thought control has been applied beneath the banner of the fake Russia hacking story. That story, created by the Clinton camp to distract from the DNC email revelations provided by WikiLeaks, at first blamed Russia for hacking into “our democracy”, then suggested Donald Trump had colluded with Russia to swing the election, and then emphasized that Russia had launched an “influence campaign” designed to swing the election, with the focus subtly shifting from hacking to collusion to influence. At each turn, the evidence proves paltry, the claims absurd, and the virtue signaling nauseating. The bar is being progressively lowered until it meets a threshold of credibility by which the Senate Intel Committee can prosecute Donald Trump or justify some sort of punitive measures against Russia.

The story is so transparently false, from the technical detail to the geopolitical motive, that it is only sustained by the permanent—or deep state—elements of the foreign policy community that need a means by which to control and direct the Trump administration. Russia collusion served as an ideal pretext to force Trump away from campaign-trail odes to conciliation and toward a continuation of the hostile foreign policies glibly enabled and advanced by Barack Obama. The comedy of it all is that Facebook found ‘incriminating’ ads that amounted to less than one percent of the Facebook total ad buys. Congress would like to ban RT, which has ratings that are 0.3 percent of Judge Judy’s. And the infamous hack has been shown to be a leak. What are we left with? A grandiose deceit based on a need to sustain a brutal ideology of oppression, austerity, and war.

But this is how the imperialists do it. They organize globally to oppress locally. That’s why they’ve been rightly rebranded as ‘the globalists’. The workers always trail behind, left to cope with recently discovered alliances of institutional powers collaborating to fence in the prospects for economic equality, social justice, and the fair distribution of a nation’s wealth. We find ourselves beneath the a pregnant cloud of metastasizing repression, conceived and constructed beneath our own gaze. In his recent novel Purity, one of author Jonathan Franzen’s characters, a famous East German exile and whistleblower extraordinaire (a more charismatic Assange), finds himself a global celebrity, the subject of countless interviews wherein,

“…he’d taken to dropping the word totalitarian. Younger interviewers, to whom the word meant total surveillance, total mind control, gray armies in parade with medium-range missiles, had understood him to be saying something unfair about the Internet. In fact, he simply meant a system that was impossible to opt out of.”

Whether it is too late for a world of working class people and the ubiquitous poor to opt out of the globalized imperium dreamed up by our post-war planners, is hard to say. But if you think there’s still time, be extremely careful, since the pre-crime police are nearly omnipresent, and they might overhear you quoting Marx or see you scrawling ideas about redistribution on the walls of some abandoned underpass. Just imagine some future advertisement for the pre-crime program, a glistening LCD ad floating between skyscrapers, a smiling family at play, a nation secure, and an omniscient narrator softly reminding you, “Don’t forget—it’s the thought that counts.”

Erdogan’s Insomnia And Safety of NATO’s H-bombs in Turkey

Nauman Sadiq

Recently, Pravda newspaper of Russia has reported that the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been suffering from serious sleep deprivation and that he was yawning and dozed off during a press conference with the Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko while he was on a state visit to Kiev, and the video of the incident has been going viral over social media.

Though this might appear as a minor diplomatic gaffe but bear in mind that insomnia is a serious psychiatric disorder, the cognitive functions of sleep-deprived individuals are severely hampered, and such people are prone to committing rash and reckless acts.

Moreover, readers who have been keenly watching Erdogan’s behavior since the July 2016 coup plot must have noticed in his recent TV appearances that his facial expressions have been quite bland lately, he has been lacking in any warmth even when he is hugging and kissing children for public relations’ photo ops, and he has that look of a madman in his eyes.

In order to substantiate this subjective psychoanalytical evaluation of Erdogan’s attitude and body language with concrete evidence, I would draw the reader’s attention to quite a few rash and impulsive acts committed by the Erdogan administration during the last couple of years.

First, the Turkish air force shot down a Russian Sukhoi Su-24 fighter jet on the border between Syria and Turkey on 24 November 2015 that brought the Turkish and Russian armed forces on the brink of a full-scale confrontation in Syria.

Second, the Russian ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, was assassinated at an art exhibition in Ankara on the evening of 19 December 2016 by an off-duty Turkish police officer, Mevlut Mert Altintas, who was suspected of being a Muslim fundamentalist.

Third, the Turkish military mounted the seven-month-long Operation Euphrates Shield in northern Syria immediately after the attempted coup plot from August 2016 to March 2017 that brought the Turkish military and its Free Syria Army proxies head-to-head with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and their US bakers.

And fourth, the Turkish military has recently once again invaded Idlib in northwestern Syria on the pretext of enforcing a de-escalation zone between the Syrian militants and the government, despite official protest from the latter that the Turkish armed forces are in violation of Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Regarding the July 2016 coup plot, instead of a serious attempt at overthrowing the government, the coup plot actually was a large-scale mutiny within the ranks of the Turkish armed forces. Although Erdogan has scapegoated the Gulenists to settle scores with his one-time ally, but according to credible reports, the coup was in fact attempted by the Kemalist liberals against the Islamist government of Turkey.

For the last several years of the Syrian proxy war, the Kemalists had been looking with suspicion at the Erdogan administration’s policy of deliberately training and arming Sunni militants against the Shi’a-dominated government of Bashar al-Assad in the training camps located on Turkey’s borders with Syria in collaboration with CIA’s MOM, which is a Turkish acronym for military operations center.

As long as the US was onboard on the policy of nurturing Sunni Arab jihadists in Syria, the hands of Kemalists were tied. But after the US declared a war against one faction of Sunni militants, the Islamic State, in August 2014 and the consequent divergence between Washington’s policy of supporting the Kurds in Syria and the Islamist government of Turkey’s continued support to Sunni militants, it led to discord and adoption of contradictory policies.

And then, the spate of bombings in Turkey claimed by the Islamic State and separatist Kurds during the last couple of years, all of these factors contributed to widespread disaffection among the rank and file of Turkish armed forces, which regard themselves as the custodians of secular traditions and guarantors of peace and stability in Turkey.

The fact that one-third of 220 brigadiers and ten major generals were detained after the coup plot shows the level of frustration shown by the top and mid-ranking officers of the Turkish armed forces against Erdogan’s megalomaniac and self-destructive policies.

More to the point, it bears mentioning that the United States has been conducting air strikes against targets in Syria from the Incirlik airbase and around fifty American B-61 hydrogen bombs have also been deployed there. The safety of those H-bombs became a matter of real concern during the July 2016 coup plot against the Erdogan administration when the commander of the Incirlik airbase, General Bekir Ercan Van, along with nine other officers were arrested for supporting the coup. The movement in and out of the base was denied, power supply was cut off and the security threat level was raised to the highest state of alert, according to a report by Eric Schlosser for the New Yorker.

The anti-nuclear activists around the world have been worried about North Korea’s nuclear crisis. And during Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, the Democrats made a convincing argument to the American electorate that would they trust a US president affiliated with the infamous Alt-Right movement with nuclear codes?

What’s worth noting in the aforementioned report, however, is the fact that some of NATO’s H-bombs deployed in Turkey are to be delivered by the Turkish air force if the contingency arises. And a Muslim Brotherhood’s fanatic who has been suffering from insomnia and is prone to committing reckless and impulsive acts has absolute control over those nukes.

Therefore, in order to preempt the likelihood of a nuclear Armageddon, Washington should either press upon its NATO ally to constitute a medical examination board to evaluate Erdogan’s psychiatric condition whether he is eligible to serve as president or not, or the US should recall those nukes and deploy them in a safer country like Germany, which is home to one of the largest overseas US airbase Ramstein, where 47,000 US troops have currently been deployed and which already hosts dozens of similar NATO’s nukes on its territory.

When The Nuclear Violator Becomes The Accuser

Farhad Shahabi

There is a  necessity to change Western political literature in relation to Iran

In recent years, all references by the West in relation to Iran’s peaceful nuclear programme, have been constantly and invariably accusatory, using terms such as “nuclear threat” or “nuclear danger”.  The signing of the nuclear accord or the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPA) too has not been followed by a reduction in the use of such accusatory terminology by the West, both in formal and informal settings.  Recent examples are the statements from the British Foreign Minister, Boris Johnson, who whilst announcing his country’s support for the JCPA and emphasising the importance by all parties (particularly the US) to uphold their commitment to the nuclear accord, states in relation to Iran that “The nuclear deal was a crucial agreement that neutralised its nuclear threat”; and the statement from the head of EU’s Security and Foreign Policy, Federica Mogherini, who responding to the worrisome likelihood of the US leaving the agreement, comments that “The deal has prevented, continues to prevent, and will continue to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons“.

It is to be noted that Iran, very soon after the victory of the Islamic Revolution, reiterated its commitment to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).  In addition to this and despite many shortcomings of the NPT and the nuclear weapons non-proliferation regime, particularly its extremely discriminatory nature, the leader of the Revolution, issued a Fatwa banning at the highest level of state authority and without any proviso and discrimination, the production, storage, use, and threat of use of nuclear weapons and all other weapons of mass destruction.

Also in practice, looking at the tumultuous history of the 8 year imposed war by Saddam as the acting agent of the West against the Islamic Republic of Iran, it is possible to find numerous evidence that in the most pressing circumstances of the war and even in the face of terrible war crimes by the enemy (who was the aggressor in this war), such as its extensive and repeated use of chemical weapons, bombing of cities and other residential areas in Iran, Iranian armed forces never resorted to WMD and were extremely averse to the use similar methods and to retaliation in kind.

Those who accuse Iran of being a nuclear threat are countries who themselves are not merely “accused” but are definitely and undeniably “guilty” of having both threatened and used methods and weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons.  Some of these Western countries who unbelievably shamelessly accuse Iran of posing a threat to international peace and security, have a shameful and extensive record of egregious crimes against humanity and war crimes, such as the nuclear bombing of Japan, the occupation and chemical bombardment of Vietnam, supporting the illegal occupation of Palestine and the violent repression of Palestinians, the persuasion, arming and total support of Saddam and his war crimes against Iran, the intentional downing of the Iranian passenger plane over the Persian Gulf and the public praise of the perpetrators of this unprecedented war crime, and of course, the keeping and continued expansion of their nuclear weapons production.

And finally, following the nuclear deal, all of the eight reports of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) based on extremely and painstakingly meticulous and extensive inspections of Iran’s nuclear activities, have testified, without exception, Iran’s total commitment to and observance of the nuclear deal.  Considering this undisputed and clear evidence of Iran’s commitment, the accusations of Iran’s nuclear threat is completely unwarranted and unfair, because they attempt at creating the impression in the minds of their audience that Iran is prone to deceitfully violate the NPT, and that it stands guilty of violation and of creating crisis in the international community.

It is therefore necessary that through diplomatic channels and in the first instance through discussion with the P5+1 members, particularly the EU members, to insist that such false labelling and falsely accusatory and humiliating terminology in relation to Iran has to be stopped.  Clearly, terminology such as the removal of “worries” or “concerns” in relation to Iran’s nuclear programme, are considerably less emphatic and offensive falsehoods than words such as the removal of “threat” or “danger” of Iran’s nuclear programme.

Currently in circumstances that, as stated by the German Foreign Minister, the US behaviour towards Iran has pushed Europeans towards Russian or Chinese positions, there might be a suitable opportunity to address this difficulty.

Japan’s Stalinists seek to head off anti-war movement ahead of election

Ben McGrath

Heading into tomorrow’s general election in Japan, the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) has been striving to contain and divert popular opposition to the Abe government’s drive to remilitarize the country. Thoroughly integrated into the political establishment in Tokyo, the JCP is calling for the removal of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in favor of another faction of the capitalist class.

The JCP is a Stalinist party that has long since abandoned any commitment to socialism. While posturing as pacifist to head off widespread anti-war sentiment and political alienation, it effectively has lined up behind Japan’s ruling elite and Washington in their confrontation with North Korea and China.

In an interview with the Japan Times last Monday, JCP chairman Kazuo Shii backed the measures being taken to cripple the North Korean economy, while calling for dialogue between the United States and North Korea. “Economic sanctions against the [North Korean] regime are necessary, but they alone wouldn’t resolve the problem,” he said.

Earlier, Shii condemned North Korea in a September 3 statement following Pyongyang’s sixth nuclear test, saying it posed “a grave threat to global and regional peace and stability” and a rejection of “the international community’s efforts for resolution through dialogue.”

In other words, the danger of war was not caused by Washington’s aggression and imperialist designs in the region, above all directed against China, but by impoverished North Korea. Moreover, the futile appeal for dialogue flies in the face of repeated declarations by President Trump that talks are futile and there is “only one way” to deal with North Korea, that is militarily.

By supporting the sanctions against North Korea and adopting language similar to Washington’s, the JCP is lining up, like the rest of the Japanese establishment, with advanced US preparations for war, in which Japan is centrally involved.

The JCP is also covering up the broad push for remilitarization by Japanese imperialism, by blaming Abe alone. On September 29, the Stalinists wrote: “[The Abe government] is the first ever regime in the postwar era to have totally undermined the Constitution.” The JCP pledged “to join hands with any party, lawmaker, or candidate who is sincerely, bravely loyal to their commitments to the alliance with citizens.”

Despite condemning the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the JCP is leaving the door open for collaboration with it or other right-wing parties. If the primary goal is to remove Abe, as the JCP states, what prevents it from aligning with factions in the LDP that oppose him?

The fact that Japan’s well-armed military, the Self-Defense Forces (SDF), even exists, let alone takes part in numerous operations abroad, is a flagrant breach of the constitution by all the ruling parties since it went into effect in 1947. In recent decades, the SDF has been dispatched overseas to aid US imperialism in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as joining so-called UN peacekeeping operations in other parts of the world.

It is not just the LDP that supports remilitarization. Many members of the Democratic Party (DP), which the JCP has supported for years, back the lifting of constitutional and legal restrictions on the Japanese military. That became evident when the DP split after announcing a merger in late September with the right-wing populist Party of Hope that backs constitutional change.

Those DP members who did not join the Party of Hope formed the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDP), with which the JCP then formed an electoral alliance. The major difference between these two DP factions was on maintaining a pacifist fig leaf, by upholding Article 9 of the constitution that bars the maintenance of armed forces or the use of war as an instrument of foreign policy.

The DP’s opposition to remilitarization has always been a fraud. Last year, for example, the Democrats called for the repeal of military legislation passed in 2015 that removed barriers to Japanese troops taking direct part in conflicts overseas in conjunction with allies, primarily the US. However, the Democrats offered nearly identical bills as replacements, merely adding UN oversight as a requirement for going to war.

The Democrats proved to be no alternative to the LDP and completely discredited themselves while in office from 2009-2012, unwilling to carry out any policies to halt the corporate offensive against the jobs and conditions of the working class. The fact that the JCP continued to sow illusions in the Democrats contributed to the growth of right-wing nationalist and populist parties.

If the JCP maintains the name “communist,” it is only to maintain the pretense that it defends the interests of the working class. The party is Japan’s oldest and was founded in 1922, following the 1917 Russian Revolution. While other parties have undergone name changes and regroupments amid shifts in political winds, the JCP claims falsely to have remained committed to its founding principles.

In reality, the only line it has followed consistently since the late 1920s is that of Stalinism, attempting to bind the Japanese working class to one or other faction of the bourgeoisie. Before World War II, it faced intense state repression, including mass arrests of its members under threat of execution. Many within the post-war JCP leadership had spent more than a decade in prison before being released following World War II.

The major bourgeois parties were all deeply compromised by their support for the militarist, war-time regime. The JCP gained support in the working class only to betray the mass movement that developed. The Stalinists praised the post-war US occupation forces for supposedly carrying through a bourgeois democratic revolution. The JCP shut down opposition to the US occupation, including a planned general strike in February 1947, thus playing a critical role in restabilizing Japanese capitalism.

With the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, the JCP altered its line to denounce the US, claiming that socialism could not be achieved while Japan remained an ally of Washington. This provided the rationale for continuing to subordinate the working class to sections of the Japanese capitalist class.

Over the years, the JCP increasingly sought to integrate itself into the political establishment. It declared at its Twelfth Party Congress in 1973 that it was committed to maintaining the parliamentary form of government—and thus capitalism and the capitalist state. The JCP said it would form a coalition with any party that supported the termination of the US-Japan security treaty.

Today, even that has been discarded. The JCP stated in October 2015 it would support the US alliance if it entered a coalition government with the Democrats, who backed the treaty. The JCP’s demand to end the US-Japan alliance is now little more than a dead letter. The JCP’s latest maneuver, backing the CDP, underscores the Stalinists’ thoroughly pro-capitalist perspective.

German Air Force involved in war crimes in Syria

Philipp Frisch

German Air Force (Luftwaffe) planes have resumed operations in Syria and Iraq as part of the US-led coalition against ISIS. According to official reports of the armed forces (Bundeswehr), German air force Tornadoes have been conducting reconnaissance flights daily from their new base in Jordan. Military sources told the German press, “Full operational readiness was achieved following the transfer of the contingent from Turkey to Jordan.”

In June, the German parliament (Bundestag) decided to withdraw the Luftwaffe from Incirlik Air Base and move closer to the war zone, following a series of foreign policy conflicts with Turkey. The Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in northern Jordan is around 50 kilometres from the Syrian border and is a base for Jordan’s air force. Within the framework of Operation Inherent Resolve, US and Dutch military units are already stationed at the base alongside the German Tornadoes.

“Full operational readiness” means that the Luftwaffe is again providing targets for the air raids carried out by the US-led coalition. The number of aerial attacks has increased considerably since the start of the offensive against Raqqa, the last stronghold of the IS in Syria. The coalition has been supporting the siege of the city, which is being carried out primarily by forces under the leadership of the Kurdish YPG.

The air raids and the shelling of the city by artillery have led to a massive increase in civilian casualties in the Syrian war. According to the United Nations more civilians died in Syria in September than in any other month this year. In light of this bloodbath, the UN called for an armistice at the end of August to allow more than 20,000 trapped civilians to flee Raqqa.

The UN special adviser for Syria, Jan Egeland, said he could “imagine no worse place” in the world than the neighbourhoods under attack by the coalition. According to media reports, civilian facilities, including schools and the al-Mawasah Hospital, have been repeatedly bombed and hundreds of people killed or injured. Those who did not die through the bullets of the coalition have been forced to eat grass and leaves to survive.

The US government has rejected a truce. The longer the “liberation” of Raqqa took, the more civilians would be killed by IS—this was the reasoning of the American side.

A report in the German TV magazine Monitor last week underlined the cynicism of this argument. After three months of siege, Raqqa is in ruins. Only shells remain of the city’s houses; ruins are everywhere and house-to-house fighting and air raids continue incessantly.

Coalition forces have dropped nearly 30,000 rockets, bombs and other projectiles on the densely populated city since June. According to the absurd figures given by the coalition, only five civilians were killed and a few others were injured during this period.

Such figures fly in the face of numerous reports from the inhabitants of Raqqa. One of them, Abu Ahmad, told Monitor how his relatives were killed by coalition forces while fleeing from ISIS. He reported 21 deaths alone in the house of one relative. In total, six houses were razed to the ground.

Based on such reports, the non-governmental organisation, Airwars, assumes that, according to the most conservative estimates, at least 1,100 civilians have died in the siege of Raqqa. According to Airwars, these are cases which were not only reported, but could also be proved. The actual number of victims is undoubtedly much higher. In view of the massive destruction in Raqqa, one must also assume that thousands are still buried under the rubble.

The German military has been directly involved in these crimes. The coalition attacked a school in the village of al-Mansoura near Raqqa, with German Luftwaffe Tornadoes providing air reconnaissance and target coordinates. In the bombing of the school, dozens, possibly hundreds of people were killed. According to Airwars there were up to 100 refugee families in the school building, which was completely destroyed.

Despite their shared responsibility for war crimes, tensions between the major actors in the anti-ISIS coalition, in particular Germany and the US, have risen sharply in recent months. The tensions erupted most recently over the Iranian nuclear agreement. US President Donald Trump’s aggressive attempt to sabotage the deal has been strongly criticised by the German government, which fears for its major business contracts with Iran. It also fears that a further conflagration in the Middle East could endanger the interests of German imperialism in the region.

Against this background of growing transatlantic tensions, the Bundeswehr is preparing to intervene militarily independently from the US. Behind the backs of the population, the German Defence Ministry is working on a rearmament plan, based on the so-called “provisional conceptual guidelines for the future capability profile of the Bundeswehr,” presented by the responsible department head in the defence ministry, Lieutenant General Erhard Bühler.

According to the guidelines, the German air force is to be “put in position to lead a multinational coalition” in the next few years, capable of flying up to 350 reconnaissance and combat missions daily. The German air force must “be able to maintain aerial dominance over Germany and, together with its allies, establish superiority over an operational area.”

Right-wing, four-party government formed in the Netherlands

Derek Bell

Last week, after a record-breaking 209 days of coalition negotiations, Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the pro-business VVD party confirmed a successful agreement had been reached and that he will head the Dutch government for the third time. After the collapse of the Social Democratic party in last March’s elections, Rutte was forced to piece together a new coalition.

When initial talks broke down between the VVD and the Green Party over the latter’s immigration policy not being sufficiently right-wing, Rutte then cobbled together a coalition of four parties that represent some of the most backward and reactionary tendencies in Dutch politics. The right-wing Christian Democrats (CDA-19 seats) along with the even more socially conservative Christian Union (ChristienUnie-5 seats) have been lumped together with the staunchly pro-EU D66 party (19 seats) and Rutte’s neoliberal VVD (33 seats).

Back in March, when Gert Wilders and his extreme right-wing Party for Freedom (PVV) were unable to win the largest number of votes, leaders across Europe lauded the results as a victory over the growing influence of the far right. However, as the WSWS pointed out just after the results came in this celebratory claim has turned out to be utterly farcical.

This coalition has a narrow 76-74 majority in a parliament which is divided among 13 parties. The nine parties in opposition run the gamut from the ultra-right PVV, with 20 seats, the second largest, to the three parties of the official “left” (Green Left, Socialist Party and Social Democrats, with 37 seats between them), with 17 seats divided among advocates of animal rights, senior citizens, Turkish immigrants, Dutch Reformed Church adherents and right-wing anti-EU activists.

Despite the fact that the fragile coalition, desperately put together more than six months after the election, is being headed by a party and individual considered part of the “center” or “establishment,” its program mirrors what, up until recently, would have been the purview of the far right.

Upon announcing the successful agreement for a coalition, the four parties released a 70-page policy proposal document highlighting their united drive to ramp up the assault on the working class and immigrants. Taken together, the outlook of the new government is to push for a stronger EU, boost security, and increase labour market flexibility, all code words for more exploitation and the crushing of dissent.

In keeping with the trend across Europe, such as the brutal crackdown of the G20 protests in Hamburg and the bashing of heads by the Spanish government in the Catalonia independence referendum, at the top of the agenda of this new government is the massive buildup of the police and security forces as well as the expansion of online surveillance powers of the intelligence agencies.

The government proposes pumping in €267 million to fund community police officers and detectives. The budgets for these security forces were once tied to the collection of fees and fines, but now they will be able to rely on regular funding from the state.

Significantly, the coalition will also allocate €95 million specifically designated for fighting “cybercrime.” Moreover, a new law is being planned that will allow the MIVD and AIVD (Military and General Intelligence Services, respectively) to collect vast amounts of data on Internet traffic. What this really amounts to is a ramping up of online surveillance and monitoring.

The buildup of police-state methods of repression is a preparatory action to establish the ability for the state to smash any and all opposition to the parallel austerity and ultra-exploitative economic policies proposed by the new government. As the Financial Times notes, the government is likely to continue its close partnership with Germany, especially regarding policies related to EU reform, such as “stressing the need for budgetary discipline, structural reforms and clear rules in the single currency area”, i.e., rabid austerity.

On the domestic front, in the name of increasing “flexibility,” the coalition partners have set forth a series of labour reforms that will make it easier for firms to fire workers and make use of fixed-term employment by increasing the time allowed for companies to hire employees on temporary contracts.

As part of the promotion of the so-called “gig economy,” there are also plans to promote freelance work with a measly increase in the minimum wage for such workers. Instead of protecting those in this sector, these policies will only promote the precariousness and super-exploitation of workers trying to piece together mini-contracts just to get by.

The new government also aims to dismantle the pension system by making individuals responsible for saving for their own pensions by 2020.

In combination with these reactionary labour market policies, the government seeks to implement a series of tax reforms, which will ultimately place greater burdens on the working class. The proposed reduction of the number of tax brackets from four down to only two will have the worst effects on the lowest income families, who will now pay the same tax rate as more privileged sections of the middle class, while the highest earners will see an overall reduction in their tax rate. This will all be paid for by an increased VAT tax, which will raise the cost of basic necessities such as groceries and energy.

To enhance the “investment climate,” the corporate tax will also be reduced from 25 percent to 21 percent, and the dividend tax will be abolished altogether.

Furthermore, taking the cue from the far right, the government is actively promoting nationalism through policies such as requiring primary schools to recite the national anthem. Beyond this, the coalition seeks to expand the attacks on the social rights of foreigners.

The government plans to cut the time that refugees can keep a residency permit from five years down to three. And, significantly, immigrants who are currently on residence permits will no longer “be able to claim welfare benefits, such as [the] healthcare allowance or rent allowance, for the first two years of their stay” according to the expat website, iamexpat.nl.

The euobserver documents that the coalition says it supports and looks forward to more deals with respect to asylum seekers like the one set up between the EU and Turkey, a deal which saw refugees fleeing war in Syria and Iraq forced to stay in Turkey rather than being permitted to reach Europe. It also backed the European Commission’s suggestion to member states “to be more effective in returning migrants whose asylum procedure has failed.”

Throughout the long months of negotiation, the main press outlets across Europe seemed hardly worried about the crawling negotiations. This occurred for two primary reasons. First, during this time, the financial markets in the Netherlands experienced consistent growth. This market confidence, though, was ultimately a reflection of the second reason: The ruling elites knew that no matter which coalition agreement was struck, their interests would be staunchly defended by the new government.

But all is not so quiet. As the politics of austerity and exploitation continue, they will be met by a resurgence of working class struggle, as seen by the bitter anger towards the arrogance of French President Macron and his labour reforms implemented by decree. In response to this resentment, which is beginning to boil, the capitalist governments of Europe are preparing for the coming clashes.

To do so, on the one hand, the bourgeois political parties are stoking nationalism and xenophobia to divide the working class, as evidenced by, for example, the elevation and praise of Austria’s likely new chancellor Sebastian Kurz and his probable coalition partner, the anti-immigrant far-right Freedom Party. On the other hand, the governments are creating massive police state apparatuses to monitor, censor, and violently crush any opposition to the implementation of the ruling elite’s will.

The urgent task is the creation of an independent mass working class movement uniting workers across Europe in a struggle to defend democratic rights for both citizens and immigrants and to fight the capitalist politics of austerity, exploitation, and state violence. This fight is a fight for socialism, led and guided by Marxist principles. Building that leadership is the task of the ICFI.

Investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia murdered in Malta

Richard Tyler

Investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was murdered by a car bomb as she drove from her home in Bidnija on the Mediterranean island of Malta on Monday.

The explosion was so violent that it blew her vehicle off the road and into a nearby field. On Thursday, Maltese government officials said that initial investigations pointed to her having been killed by a Semtex bomb planted under her automobile that was triggered remotely.

Galizia was well known for her exposures of corruption and criminality at the top of Maltese politics and business. Her brutal slaying is a signal to all those who attempt to lift the lid on the sordid nexus of political power and financial swindling money at the heart of capitalist society: think again if you value your life.

The day after Galizia’s killing, in a Facebook post that has been “liked” 18,000 times and shared more than 7,000, her son, Matthew Caruana Galizia, said his mother “was assassinated because she stood between the rule of law and those who sought to violate it.”

He describes the shocking scene when he arrived at the bombed-out car, “I am never going to forget, running around the inferno in the field, trying to figure out a way to open the door, the horn of the car still blaring,” and realising his mother was dead when he saw her body parts strewn on the ground.

Pointing to those in power, he depicts Maltese society as “a people at war against the state and organised crime, which have become indistinguishable.”

On Thursday, journalists held a rally in the Maltese capital, Valletta, to protest the killing. The protesters held up placards with slogans including “Not Afraid” and “Justice,” while others held up front pages and placards splattered in blood-red paint.

According to Europol, the European Policing Authority, large-scale money laundering is carried out by organised crime through the many online betting outfits based in Malta, and accounts for ten percent of the island’s GDP. The country is also a convenient base for massive tax avoidance, with major corporations evading billions in payments.

Jonathan Benton, head of the UK Metropolitan Police’s Proceeds of (international) Corruption Unit told the BBC, “Malta has a serious problem of money laundering. You cannot have this scale of money laundering without corruption in politics. There cannot be confidence in the judicial process, the independence of judges and the rule of law. It is surprising this is an EU [European Union] member state. Billions in illicit money were laundered in Malta during the Arab spring. The passport scheme of Malta is part and parcel of the big corruption structure of Malta.”

This sort of corruption was something Galizia, described by Politico website as a “one-woman WikiLeaks,” regularly exposed in her weekly column for the Malta Independent and in her blog, Running Commentary, which were followed by up to 400,000 readers, outstripping the circulation of all Malta’s newspapers combined.

The list of those who might have wanted her dead is a long one, as she regularly shed light on the murky financial dealings of Malta’s leading politicians and criminal syndicates both at home and abroad.

In 2016, she played a key role investigating the Maltese connections to the “Panama Papers” tax avoidance scandal. This trove of more than 11 million leaked documents details the financial and attorney-client information of more than 214,000 offshore companies listed by the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. It provides a glimpse into the shady world of tax avoidance carried out by the world’s super-rich elite and corporations.

Documents uncovered by Galizia pointed to a shell company registered in Panama in 2013, but ultimately controlled by Malta’s Labour Party energy minister Konrad Mizzi and Prime Minister Joseph Muscat’s chief-of-staff, Keith Schembri. The company had been set up four months after the Labour Party came to power that year.

In April 2017, a whistle-blower from the Malta-based private bank Pilatus claimed to have seen documents linking Mizzi and Schembri—as well as Muscat’s wife Michelle—to secret accounts held at the bank.

In May, Galizia exposed how “a series of payments, in the form of loans,” had been “routed” from Azerbaijan to Panama-registered shell company Egrant—also set up in 2013 and controlled by Michelle Muscat. A payment of just over $1 million was allegedly made in March of last year, Galizia discovered, that had come from an account at Pilatus bank, where Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev’s daughter, Leyla, also held an account.

The link to Azerbaijan is significant, since the country’s state oil company is a major shareholder in Malta’s new power station. In 2014, Prime Minister Muscat and his wife hosted President Aliyev and his daughter during their visit to Malta.

The material exposed by Galizia proved to be politically explosive for Muscat and the Labour Party government he headed, as Malta took over the rotating presidency of the European Council in January just as the negotiations with Britain over Brexit were due to begin.

British Green Member of the European Parliament, Molly Scott Cato, who also sits on the parliament’s Panama Papers inquiry, said of the growing corruption scandal, “the latest developments and allegations place at stake the credibility of the EU.”

With other MEPs calling for Muscat to go, he sought to deflect the mounting criticism at home and abroad by calling a snap election on May 1, which he went on to win.

But this did not halt Galizia’s stream of articles and blog posts uncovering Malta’s dirty secrets. As far as her enemies were concerned, something had to be done to try and silence the journalist and stop her making further revelations. Speaking to the Guardian, her son Matthew said death threats were “almost a daily occurrence.” His brother Andrew said there had been a “concerted attempt to ruin her financially” through an almost non-stop series of costly libel trials including at the hands of Muscat and opposition Nationalist Party leader Adrian Delia, whom she had accused of money laundering.

Two weeks ago, she filed a complaint with the police that she was receiving renewed threats. The final post on her blog was a comment on a libel trial by former National Party leader Simon Busuttil and Schembri.

“Mr. Schembri is claiming that he is not corrupt, despite moving to set up a secret company in Panama along with favourite minister Konrad Mizzi and Mr. Egrant just days after Labour won the general election in 2013, sheltering it in a top-secret trust in New Zealand, then hunting round the world for a shady bank that would take them as clients.

“(In the end they solved the problem by setting up a shady bank in Malta, hiding in plain sight.)”

Just minutes before she was blown up, she ended her comment with the words, “There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate.”

Matthew and his other brothers, Andrew and Paul, have refused to endorse a €1 million [$US 1.2 million] reward for evidence leading to a conviction of their mother’s murderer. In a Facebook post Wednesday, they said they had been under “unrelenting pressure” to back the reward campaign from the president and prime minister.

The post continued, “We are not interested in justice without change. We are not interested in a criminal conviction only for the people in government who stood to gain from our mother’s murder to turn around and say that justice has been served. Justice, beyond criminal liability, will only be served when everything that our mother fought for—political accountability, integrity in public life and an open and free society—replaces the desperate situation we are in.”

The statement concluded with a call for Muscat to resign for “watching over the birth of a society dominated by fear, mistrust, crime and corruption. Resign for working to cripple our mother financially and dehumanise her so brutally and effectively that she no longer felt safe walking down the street.”

Senate passes resolution setting stage for $1.5 trillion in tax cuts for the rich

Gabriel Black 

Late on Thursday night, the United States Senate passed a budget resolution that paves the way for legislation slashing taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and sets a figure of $1.5 trillion for the amount that will be funneled by the US Treasury into the pockets of the super-rich.

The budget resolution does not have legal effect and is not signed into law by President Trump. Instead, it sets the procedural terms for upcoming tax and budget legislation. The main, if not the only purpose, was to permit tax cuts to be enacted under a procedure known as “reconciliation,” in which filibusters are barred and legislation will require only a bare 51 votes to pass—50 senators and the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Mike Pence.

The vote was split on party lines, 51 to 49, with all 48 Democrats opposing it, joined by only one Republican, Rand Paul of Kentucky, who wanted even bigger budget and tax cuts than proposed by the Republican leadership. The House approved its own version of the budget resolution on October 5, including provisions for greater cuts in social spending and requiring the tax cut to be entirely offset by spending cuts. It is expected that the House will now approve the Senate resolution, since the Senate figure permitting tax cuts that add $1.5 trillion to the deficit is far more lucrative for the big financial interests that are the driving force of the legislative action.

Neither the Trump White House nor the Republican congressional leadership have released the full details of their tax cut plan, but it will include a huge cut in the corporate tax rate, from the present 35 percent (which most companies avoid through accounting gimmicks) to 20 percent or even lower, the abolition of the estate tax, and other cuts in taxation on the wealthy. There will be tiny cuts in taxes for many middle income families, although some will actually have to pay more. There will be no benefit for the 47 percent of the population whose earnings are so low that they pay payroll taxes but no income taxes.

The budget resolution is something of a misnomer, since the spending levels it sets out for the next 10 years have no legal significance and will be altered, in whole or in part, when actual appropriations bills are passed by the Republican-controlled Congress. But the language and the figures set down in the bill demonstrate the intentions of political establishment as a whole: to usher in a new wave of draconian cuts to essential services that tens of millions of Americans rely on.

The resolution overall calls for $5 trillion worth of cuts over the course of ten years, $1.5 trillion more than what Trump called for this May. Were the budget from 2017 to be extended over the course of the next 10 years that would amount to a whopping 13.7 percent reduction in federal spending.

A large part of the budget cuts would come from Medicaid, $1 trillion, and Medicare, $473 billion. Much of the remaining $3.5 trillion in cuts is unspecified. However, Trump’s earlier partial budget gives an insight on a list of possible cuts:

• The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), otherwise known as Food Stamps, could be cut by roughly $200 billion over a decade—that is a quarter of its budget. The program currently serves 44 million people and was already cut back during the Obama Administration.
• Social Security’s Supplemental Security income program, which provides cash benefits to the poor and disabled, could be cut by $72 billion over the decade.
• Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), otherwise known as Welfare, could be cut by $272 billion over the decade.
• Federal employees could have their cost-of-living adjustment eliminated and be forced to pay for more of their retirement, eliminating $63 billion.
• The Air Traffic Control system could be privatized for $70 billion.
• The Environmental Protection Agency would be cut by about 32 percent.
• Funding for the arts, medical research and science would be cut by billions. This could include the National Cancer Institute, the National Science Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

These sorts of devastating cuts could push destitute and already penniless people into their graves. It would not be an exaggeration to say that large sections of the country would descend into third-world conditions.

What will not be cut is the military. The only item in the budget that will receive a significant increase is the military, which will be boosted by tens of billions of dollars each year.

Senator John McCain, who initially opposed the resolution, demanding that military spending be increased higher, gave his support to the final version. He said, “For too long, draconian budget cuts to the military have crippled readiness and put the lives of our service members in danger.”

McCain does not care about the lives of American soldiers. He, and the military-intelligence complex he speaks for, cares about the geopolitical supremacy of the United States as its economic power declines and it prepares to fight its foreign rivals. Only a warmonger could cheer on the rise in defense spending while basic social services of the country are gutted in the most draconian budget in American history.

The Democratic Party, for its part, protested the bill by suggesting several amendments, such as preventing tax cuts for anyone above $250,000 a year in income, banning cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, and banning any tax increases for middle-income families. All of these were voted down.

The Democratic Party’s opposition to the Republican bill is of a tactical, not principled, character. The Obama administration reached a series of agreements on budget cuts and tax cuts with congressional Republicans, though not as deep. The Democrats are not opposed to tax cuts or spending cuts, but seek to preserve their shredded credibility as the party of the “middle class.”

Senate Minority leader Charles Schumer, the favorite senator of Wall Street, postured as an opponent of economic inequality, which he said would be made worse by the Republican tax cut plan. “Our economy suffers from massive inequality—which is growing—a concentration of wealth at the very apex of our country’s elite,” he said. “The rich are doing well in America. God bless them, I’m glad they are. And American corporations are recording record high profits—just look at the stock market, which reflects that. God bless them too, we hope they do well. But middle class incomes have not risen with the rise in corporate profits or record levels of wealth concentrated among the wealthiest families.”

As Schumer’s language indicates, the Democratic Party celebrates wealth no less than the Republicans. But it voices the concerns of sections of the ruling elite that mass social anger, demonstrated in the initial public protests following Trump’s inauguration, will emerge explosively, and materialize as an organized social movement in American politics. They are afraid of the American working class becoming an organized, conscious, force in US politics—a development that would challenge the two-party system and the financial aristocracy’s grip on society.

EU summit endorses Spain’s threat of police-military occupation of Catalonia

Alex Lantier

The two-day European Union (EU) summit of heads of state that ended yesterday in Brussels unambiguously endorsed Madrid’s plans to invoke Article 155 of the Spanish constitution, imposing a new Catalan regional government backed by Spanish police and army units.

The Catalan crisis was not formally on the summit agenda. Nonetheless, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy was allowed to give an address to justify invoking Article 155, the so-called “nuclear option,” after the vicious police crackdown on the October 1 Catalan independence referendum. Rajoy’s brief for the occupation of Catalonia, based on a systematic falsification of the crisis in Spain, received the enthusiastic support of the EU’s major powers.

“Article 155 will be applied tomorrow,” Rajoy declared, effectively ruling out further talks with the Catalan government of premier Carles Puigdemont. Rajoy nonetheless proceeded to place full blame for the crisis on the supposed obstinacy of the Catalan government and of so-called “radicals” in Catalonia: “They are the ones responsible for what is happening today. Frankly, the government of Catalonia defended its positions badly, despite the assistance they were given.”

Rajoy continued, “We have been very cautious, we tried not to create a difficult situation, but it is hard when people liquidate the law and the rule of law … when laws are ignored and referendums are held without guarantees. We have arrived at a borderline situation. If you accept the demands of the radicals, what occurs is what is happening right now.”

Rajoy’s arguments are a pack of bald-faced lies, concocted to justify an aggressive military-police intervention in Catalonia. Madrid and the EU overwhelmingly bear responsibility for provoking this crisis, and the EU powers are backing Rajoy’s drive for a crackdown and a turn to deal with growing political opposition in the population with authoritarian measures.

The crisis provoked by the October 1 referendum is the outcome of the deep crisis of European capitalism, after nearly a decade of savage EU austerity devastated social conditions and left tens of millions of workers unemployed across the continent.

The referendum was called amid a growing conflict between Madrid and Barcelona over how to implement social cuts that the EU had negotiated with Madrid since the 2008 financial crisis. While similar Catalan referendums had been held peacefully before, as recently as November 2014, Madrid reacted violently this year. It seized ballots, tried to arrest hundreds of mayors as well as other officials, and launched a campaign of political intimidation to crush the October 1 vote.

When, on October 1, 16,000 Guardia Civil were stunned by a mass mobilization of the Catalan population to defend polling places, they responded with a brutal assault on peaceful voters. Millions of people worldwide were shocked and appalled by videos of Guardia Civil breaking into schools, kicking people sitting on the ground waiting to vote, and even attacking elderly women in a brutal onslaught that sent over 800 people to the hospital.

Despite the 90 percent vote for independence, Puigdemont suspended a declaration of independence in a speech on October 10 and has, since then, been appealing for dialogue with Madrid, to no avail. Madrid, on the other hand, has escalated the situation—shutting down Catalan web sites, arresting Catalan nationalist politicians, and threatening to impose emergency rule. This has provoked mass protests by hundreds of thousands of people in the Catalan capital, Barcelona.

Speaking in Brussels yesterday, Rajoy tried to downplay the dictatorial character of his policy and counteract entirely justified fears of an even bloodier crackdown to come. “Using Article 155 does not presuppose the use of force,” he claimed, adding that his government would decide on measures to be taken in joint talks with the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) and the right-wing Citizens party, as well as Rajoy’s own Popular Party (PP).

Rajoy made clear that, however, the Madrid ruling establishment is in fact contemplating mass repression against the Catalan population. Asked if he feared violence as on October 1, Rajoy refused to comment but handed a blank check to the police for more violence, saying: “The security forces have the full support of Spain and its prime minister.”

Applying Article 155 entails launching a confrontation with Catalan workers and youth unprecedented since 1978 and the collapse—amid mass struggles of the working class—of the Spanish fascist regime set up by Francisco Franco. It means suspending Catalonia’s elected government and forcibly installing a new one dictated by Madrid, backed by Guardia Civil and army units. Some of the army units to be mobilized in a crackdown—motorized infantry battalions in Barcelona and Sant Climent Sescebes—have already been named in Spanish media.

With mass protests already erupting in Barcelona, Spanish media are discussing a dictatorial agenda for Madrid’s un-elected regime in Catalonia that would provoke even more opposition: austerity, shutting down Catalan public television, and removing Catalan-language items from the schools. In the Spanish security and armed forces, repression even bloodier than the October 1 crackdown is doubtless being actively planned and prepared. Madrid is also discussing invoking Article 116 and setting up a state of emergency across Spain.

A crisis with revolutionary implications is emerging in Catalonia, and in Spain and all of Europe. There is deep, historically-rooted opposition in the European working class to a return to dictatorship, and an attempt by Madrid to maintain an illegitimate stooge regime in Barcelona by mass repression would provoke enormous anger across Europe. The only way to oppose Madrid’s drive to impose dictatorial rule in Catalonia and throughout Spain is the mobilization of the working class across Europe in a politically independent, revolutionary struggle against the EU and the crackdown in Catalonia.

Arguments advanced by forces like Spain’s Podemos party, that the population can wait for the EU to intervene and peacefully resolve the conflict between Madrid and Barcelona, are false and must be rejected. In a statement for Público, the secretary of Podemos for the Madrid region, Ramón Espinar hailed “broad international consensus … on the need for mediation and dialogue” that he saw as key to resolving the crisis.

Such illusions serve no other purpose than to lull masses of people to sleep. The EU—consisting of bankrupt regimes in which the police and army play enormous roles after nearly two decades of the “war on terror” and a decade of deep austerity—is itself rapidly moving to abrogate basic democratic rights, with regimes such as the French state of emergency. It is signaling its support for the attack on the Catalan population, because it is preparing similar attacks on the working class across Europe.

The major European heads of state at the Brussels summit all backed Rajoy’s dictatorial agenda. “We back the position of the Spanish government,” declared German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who later on echoed Rajoy’s calls for an outcome of the crisis “on the grounds of the Spanish constitution.”

Similarly, British Prime Minister Theresa May said yesterday, “I have spoken to Mariano Rajoy this morning as I did earlier this week and made clear that the United Kingdom’s position is very clear. We believe that people should be abiding by the rule of law and uphold the Spanish constitution.”

While Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte called the Catalan crisis “an internal Spanish matter,” French President Emmanuel Macron held a private meeting with Rajoy after declaring on Thursday that EU leaders would “send a message of unity around Spain.”

In an extraordinary gesture of support to Madrid, EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, EU Council President Donald Tusk, and European Parliament President Antonio Tajani all traveled to Oviedo in Spain yesterday after the summit, to attend as Spanish King Felipe VI awarded the EU a Princess of Asturias prize. They listened as the king declared that Catalonia was an “essential part” of Spain—a remark that provoked sustained applause from the audience.

Chinese leader calls for “strong nation” and “strong military”

Peter Symonds

In his lengthy address this week to the 19th Chinese Communist Party congress, President Xi Jinping repeatedly declared that in the next period China would become a “great power” and a “strong power.” This will be, he said, “an era that sees China moving closer to center stage.”

Xi made ritual reference to “the great success of socialism with Chinese characteristics.” In reality he was elaborating the aspirations of the new bourgeoisie who have accumulated vast wealth through four decades of capitalist restoration and whose further advancement requires Beijing to play a more assertive role on the world stage.

Xi’s “China Dream” of a strong, rejuvenated China inevitably comes into collision with the interests of the existing imperialist powers, above all the United States, which is desperately seeking to shore up its dominant position in the world through military force. The “new era,” that Xi speaks of, will not be one of peace and stability, but rather of war and revolution.

Xi made no reference in his speech to the looming danger of a catastrophic US war with North Korea that could quickly drag in China, Russia and other major nuclear-armed powers. US President Trump has flatly rejected Beijing and Moscow’s proposal for new talks and has primed the American military for the “total destruction” of China’s only formal military ally.

The reckless US war drive is not simply the product of the fascistic individual Trump but rather of the historic blind alley in which American imperialism finds itself. China’s economic rise over the past four decades on the basis of a flood of foreign investment to exploit its cheap labour has been accompanied by greater Chinese economic and political influence around the world as it seeks raw materials and markets. Increasingly unable to match China’s economic assistance or “soft power,” the US is resorting to its hard power or military to challenge Beijing.

The Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” was a comprehensive strategy aimed at undermining Beijing diplomatically and economically throughout the Indo-Pacific and encircling China militarily. Obama deliberately exacerbated dangerous flashpoints such as the Korean Peninsula and created new ones including by militarily challenging Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea.

Trump is pursuing the same objectives more aggressively, greatly heightening the danger of war. Having dismantled Obama’s plan for a trade and investment bloc against China—the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Trump threatens Beijing with trade war. The military build-up for conflict with North Korea is also preparation for war with China. The calculation being made in American strategic circles is that, given the continuing decline of the US, the confrontation with China is preferable sooner, rather than later.

On Wednesday, just hours after Xi’s speech, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson implicitly challenged Chinese ambitions. “China, while rising alongside India, has done so less responsibly, at times undermining the international, rules-based order,” he declared, honing in on “China’s provocative actions in the South China Sea.” The “international rules-based order” is, of course, the world order established in the aftermath of World War II, in which Washington dominated and set the rules to suit itself.

Xi’s speech signals that China’s economic and strategic interests cannot be accommodated within the current world order. He warned other countries not to underestimate China’s willingness to stand up for itself. “No one should expect China to swallow anything that undermines its interests,” Xi told congress delegates.

Far from backing down on Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea, Xi declared, near the start of his report, that the consolidation of Chinese-control of islets in the disputed waters was a highlight of his first five years in office. He also boasted of his “One Belt, One Road” initiative—a massive infrastructure plan to integrate the Eurasian landmass via road, rail and sea, thus linking China with Europe and directly undermining US encirclement.

In response to the US military build-up and threats in Asia, Xi foreshadowed a further acceleration of the arms race, setting specific targets to culminate in a “world class” Chinee military by 2050. “A military is prepared for war. All military works must adhere to the standards of being able to fight a war and win a war,” Xi bluntly declared.

Xi’s speech reeked of the stench of nationalism from start to finish. “The Chinese nation is a great nation; it has been through hardships and adversity but remains indomitable. The Chinese people are a great people; they are industrious and brave and they never pause in pursuit of progress,” he said.

Like Trump in the United States, Xi whips up patriotism not only to aggressively promote the interests of the Chinese ruling class, but also to subordinate the multi-millioned working class to those same interests. Xi is acutely aware of the social tensions that have been produced by capitalist restoration and the deep gulf between a tiny layer of the ultra-wealthy and the vast majority of the population. The social divide will only further widen, leading to rising social unrest, as the drive to war accelerates, which is why Xi also calls for a strengthening of the repressive state apparatus.

Without the intervention of the working class, conflict is inevitable, whether over North Korea, the South China Sea or the myriad other flashpoints in Asia and internationally. US imperialism regards China as the chief challenge to its world hegemony, and Chinese capitalism strains against the restrictions of the current world order established and dominated by Washington.

Workers and youth in China and the United States, throughout Asia and the world, have no interest in being used as cannon fodder in a war to defend the interests of the ultra-rich. It is only by uniting in an international movement based on genuine socialism—that is the reconstruction of society to meet the pressing needs of the majority, not the massive profits of the few—that the drive to war can be halted. That is the perspective fought for by the International Committee of the Fourth International and its sections around the world.