21 Oct 2017

Tomorrow Belongs to the Corporatocracy

C. J. Hopkins

Back in October of 2016, I wrote a somewhat divisive essay in which I suggested that political dissent is being systematically pathologized. In fact, this process has been ongoing for decades, but it has been significantly accelerated since the Brexit referendum and the Rise of Trump (or, rather, the Fall of Hillary Clinton, as it was Americans’ lack of enthusiasm for eight more years of corporatocracy with a sugar coating of identity politics, and not their enthusiasm for Trump, that mostly put the clown in office.)
In the twelve months since I wrote that piece, we have been subjected to a concerted campaign of corporate media propaganda for which there is no historical precedent. Virtually every major organ of the Western media apparatus (the most powerful propaganda machine in the annals of powerful propaganda machines) has been relentlessly churning out variations on a new official ideological narrative designed to generate and enforce conformity. The gist of this propaganda campaign is that “Western democracy” is under attack by a confederacy of Russians and white supremacists, as well as “the terrorists” and other “extremists” it’s been under attack by for the last sixteen years.
I’ve been writing about this campaign for a year now, so I’m not going to rehash all the details. Suffice to say we’ve gone from Russian operatives hacking the American elections to “Russia-linked” persons “apparently” setting up “illegitimate” Facebook accounts, “likely operated out of Russia,” and publishing ads that are “indistinguishable from legitimate political speech” on the Internet. This is what the corporate media is presenting as evidence of “an unprecedented foreign invasion of American democracy,” a handful of political ads on Facebook. In addition to the Russian hacker propaganda, since August, we have also been treated to relentless white supremacist hysteria and daily reminders from the corporate media that “white nationalism is destroying the West.” The negligible American neo-Nazi subculture has been blown up into a biblical Behemoth inexorably slouching its way towards the White House to officially launch the Trumpian Reich.
At the same time, government and corporate entities have been aggressively restricting (and in many cases eliminating) fundamental civil liberties such as freedom of expression, freedom of the press, the right of assembly, the right to privacy, and the right to due process under the law. The justification for this curtailment of rights (which started in earnest in 2001, following the September 11 attacks) is protecting the public from the threat of “terrorism,” which apparently shows no signs of abating. As of now, the United States has been in a State of Emergency for over sixteen years. The UK is in a virtual State of Emergency. France is now in the process of enshrining its permanent State of Emergency into law. Draconian counter-terrorism measures have been implemented throughout the EU. Not just the notorious American police but police throughout the West have been militarized. Every other day we learn of some new emergency security measure designed to keep us safe from “the terrorists,” the “lone wolf shooters,” and other “extremists.”
Conveniently, since the Brexit referendum and unexpected election of Trump (which is when the capitalist ruling classes first recognized that they had a widespread nationalist backlash on their hands), the definition of “terrorism” (or, more broadly, “extremism”) has been expanded to include not just Al Qaeda, or ISIS, or whoever we’re calling “the terrorists” these days, but anyone else the ruling classes decide they need to label “extremists.” The FBI has designated Black Lives Matter “Black Identity Extremists.” The FBI and the DHS have designated Antifa “domestic terrorists.” Hosting corporations have shut down several white supremacist and neo-Nazi websites, along with their access to online fundraising. Google is algorithmically burying leftist news and opinion sources such as Alternet, Counterpunch, Global Research, Consortium News, and Truthout, among others. Twitter, Facebook, and Google have teamed up to cleanse the Internet of “extremist content,” “hate speech,” and whatever else they arbitrarily decide is inappropriate. YouTube, with assistance from the ADL (which deems pro-Palestinian activists and other critics of Israel “extremists”) is censoring “extremist” and “controversial” videos, in an effort to “fight terrorist content online.” Facebook is also collaborating with Israel to thwart “extremism,” “incitement of violence,” and whatever else Israel decides is “inflammatory.” In the UK, simply reading “terrorist content” is punishable by fifteen years in prison. Over three thousand people were arrested last year for publishing “offensive” and “menacing” material.
Whatever your opinion of these organizations and “extremist” persons is beside the point. I’m not a big fan of neo-Nazis, personally, but neither am I a fan of Antifa. I don’t have much use for conspiracy theories, or a lot of the nonsense one finds on the Internet, but I consume a fair amount of alternative media, and I publish in CounterPunch, The Unz Review, ColdType, and other non-corporate journals. I consider myself a leftist, basically, but my political essays are often reposted by right-wing and, yes, even pro-Russia blogs. I get mail from former Sanders supporters, Trump supporters, anarchists, socialists, former 1960s radicals, anti-Semites, and other human beings, some of whom I passionately agree with, others of whom I passionately disagree with. As far as I can tell from the emails, none of these readers voted for Clinton, or Macron, or supported the TPP, or the debt-enslavement and looting of Greece, or the ongoing restructuring of the Greater Middle East (and all the lovely knock-on effects that has brought us), or believe that Trump is a Russian operative, or that Obama is Martin Luther Jesus-on-a-stick. What they share, despite their opposing views, is a general awareness that the locus of power in our post-Cold War age is primarily corporate, or global capitalist, and neoliberal in nature. They also recognize that they are being subjected to a massive propaganda campaign designed to lump them all together (again, despite their opposing views) into an intentionally vague and undefinable category comprising anyone and everyone, everywhere, opposing the hegemony of global capitalism, and its non-ideological ideology (the nature of which I’ll get into in a moment).
As I wrote in that essay a year ago, “a line is being drawn in the ideological sand.” This line cuts across both Left and Right, dividing what the capitalist ruling classes designate “normal” from what they label “extremist.” The traditional ideological paradigm, Left versus Right, is disappearing (except as a kind of minstrel show), and is being replaced, or overwritten, by a pathological paradigm based upon the concept of “extremism.”
* * *
Although the term has been around since the Fifth Century BC, the concept of “extremism” as we know it today developed in the late Twentieth Century and has come into vogue in the last three decades. During the Cold War, the preferred exonymics were “subversive,” “radical,” or just plain old “communist,” all of which terms referred to an actual ideological adversary. In the early 1990s, as the U.S.S.R. disintegrated, and globalized Western capitalism became the unrivaled global-hegemonic ideological system that it is today, a new concept was needed to represent the official enemy and its ideology. The concept of “extremism” does that perfectly, as it connotes, not an external enemy with a definable ideological goal, but rather, a deviation from the norm. The nature of the deviation (e.g., right-wing, left-wing, faith-based, and so on) is secondary, almost incidental. The deviation itself is the point. The “terrorist,” the “extremist,” the “white supremacist,” the “religious fanatic,” the “violent anarchist” … these figures are not rational actors whose ideas we need to intellectually engage with in order to debate or debunk. They are pathological deviations, mutant cells within the body of “normality,” which we need to identify and eliminate, not for ideological reasons, but purely in order to maintain “security.”
A truly global-hegemonic system like contemporary global capitalism (the first of this kind in human history), technically, has no ideology. “Normality” is its ideology … an ideology which erases itself and substitutes the concept of what’s “normal,” or, in other words, “just the way it is.” The specific characteristics of “normality,” although not quite arbitrary, are ever-changing. In the West, for example, thirty years ago, smoking was normal. Now, it’s abnormal. Being gay was abnormal. Now, it’s normal. Being transgender is becoming normal, although we’re still in the early stages of the process. Racism has become abnormal. Body hair is currently abnormal. Walking down the street in a semi-fugue state robotically thumbing the screen of a smartphone that you just finished thumbing a minute ago is “normal.” Capitalism has no qualms with these constant revisions to what is considered normal, because none of them are threats to capitalism. On the contrary, as far as values are concerned, the more flexible and commodifiable the better.
See, despite what intersectionalists will tell you, capitalism has no interest in racism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, or any other despotic values (though it has no problem working with these values when they serve its broader strategic purposes). Capitalism is an economic system, which we have elevated to a social system. It only has one fundamental value, exchange value, which isn’t much of a value, at least not in terms of organizing society or maintaining any sort of human culture or reverence for the natural world it exists in. In capitalist society, everything, everyone, every object and sentient being, every concept and human emotion, is worth exactly what the market will bear … no more, no less, than its market price. There is no other measure of value.
Yes, we all want there to be other values, and we pretend there are, but there aren’t, not really. Although we’re free to enjoy parochial subcultures based on alternative values (i.e., religious bodies, the arts, and so on), these subcultures operate within capitalist society, and ultimately conform to its rules. In the arts, for example, works are either commercial products, like any other commodity, or they are subsidized by what could be called “the simulated aristocracy,” the ivy league-educated leisure classes (and lower class artists aspiring thereto) who need to pretend that they still have “culture” in order to feel superior to the masses. In the latter case, this feeling of superiority is the upscale product being sold. In the former, it is entertainment, distraction from the depressing realities of living, not in a society at all, but in a marketplace with no real human values. (In the absence of any real cultural values, there is no qualitative difference between Gerhard Richter and Adam Sandler, for example. They’re both successful capitalist artists. They’re just selling their products in different markets.)
The fact that it has no human values is the evil genius of global capitalist society. Unlike the despotic societies it replaced, it has no allegiance to any cultural identities, or traditions, or anything other than money. It can accommodate any form of government, as long as it plays ball with global capitalism. Thus, the window dressing of “normality” is markedly different from country to country, but the essence of “normality” remains the same. Even in countries with state religions (like Iran) or state ideologies (like China), the governments play by the rules of global capitalism like everyone else. If they don’t, they can expect to receive a visit from global capitalism’s Regime Change Department (i.e., the US military and its assorted partners).
Which is why, despite the “Russiagate” hysteria the media have been barraging us with, the West is not going to war with Russia. Nor are we going to war with China. Russia and China are developed countries, whose economies are entirely dependent on global capitalism, as are Western economies. The economies of every developed nation on the planet are inextricably linked. This is the nature of the global hegemony I’ve been referring to throughout this essay. Not American hegemony, but global capitalist hegemony. Systemic, supranational hegemony (which I like to prefer “the Corporatocracy,” as it sounds more poetic and less post-structural).
* * *
We haven’t really got our minds around it yet, because we’re still in the early stages of it, but we have entered an epoch in which historical events are primarily being driven, and societies reshaped, not by sovereign nation states acting in their national interests but by supranational corporations acting in their corporate interests. Paramount among these corporate interests is the maintenance and expansion of global capitalism, and the elimination of any impediments thereto. Forget about the United States (i.e., the actual nation state) for a moment, and look at what’s been happening since the early 1990s. The US military’s “disastrous misadventures” in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, and the former Yugoslavia, among other exotic places (which have obviously had nothing to do with the welfare or security of any actual Americans), begin to make a lot more sense. Global capitalism, since the end of the Cold War (i.e, immediately after the end of the Cold War), has been conducting a global clean-up operation, eliminating actual and potential insurgencies, mostly in the Middle East, but also in its Western markets. Having won the last ideological war, like any other victorious force, it has been “clear-and-holding” the conquered territory, which in this case happens to be the whole planet. Just for fun, get out a map, and look at the history of invasions, bombings, and other “interventions” conducted by the West and its assorted client states since 1990. Also, once you’re done with that, consider how, over the last fifteen years, most Western societies have been militarized, their citizens placed under constant surveillance, and an overall atmosphere of “emergency” fostered, and paranoia about “the threat of extremism” propagated by the corporate media.
I’m not suggesting there’s a bunch of capitalists sitting around in a room somewhere in their shiny black top hats planning all of this. I’m talking about systemic development, which is a little more complex than that, and much more difficult to intelligently discuss because we’re used to perceiving historico-political events in the context of competing nation states, rather than competing ideological systems … or non-competing ideological systems, for capitalism has no competition. What it has, instead, is a variety of insurgencies, the faith-based Islamic fundamentalist insurgency and the neo-nationalist insurgency chief among them. There will certainly be others throughout the near future as global capitalism consolidates control and restructures societies according to its values. None of these insurgencies will be successful.
Short some sort of cataclysm, like an asteroid strike or the zombie apocalypse, or, you know, violent revolution, global capitalism will continue to restructure the planet to conform to its ruthless interests. The world will become increasingly “normal.” The scourge of “extremism” and “terrorism” will persist, as will the general atmosphere of “emergency.” There will be no more Trumps, Brexit referendums, revolts against the banks, and so on. Identity politics will continue to flourish, providing a forum for leftist activist types (and others with an unhealthy interest in politics), who otherwise might become a nuisance, but any and all forms of actual dissent from global capitalist ideology will be systematically marginalized and pathologized.
This won’t happen right away, of course. Things are liable to get ugly first (as if they weren’t ugly enough already), but probably not in the way we’re expecting, or being trained to expect by the corporate media. Look, I’ll give you a dollar if it turns out I’m wrong, and the Russians, terrorists, white supremacists, and other “extremists” do bring down “democracy” and launch their Islamic, white supremacist, Russo-Nazi Reich, or whatever, but from where I sit it looks pretty clear … tomorrow belongs to the Corporatocracy.

Fatah, Hamas, Israel and the United States

Robert Fantina

It has been said more than once that the only ‘peace’ Israeli Prime Murderer Benjamin Netanyahu wants with the Palestinian people is a greater ‘piece’ of Palestine. We will look at a few facts:
+ After Hamas was democratically-elected by the people of the Gaza Strip, Israel imposed a brutal, crushing, illegal blockade that has now lasted more than ten years.
+ While demanding that Palestine recognize Israel, the Zionist entity continues to steal Palestinian land, decreasing the chances for an independent Palestinian nation.
+ Netanyahu demands that Hamas disarm, despite the fact that Israel has demonstrated nothing but armed brutality against the Palestinians for decades.
+ Israel steals more and more land in the West Bank; the only thing preventing such constant land theft in the Gaza Strip is Hamas.
Now, after a decade of separation, Hamas and Fatah, the puppet government that ostensibly rules the West Bank, although its leader, the traitor Mahmoud Abbas, dances to Netanyahu’s tune, have reached a unity agreement. Both Israel and the United States are in high dudgeon, both making demands on Palestine. A Fatah government spokesman responded to these dictates by saying the following:  “The deal that we signed with Hamas talks about building a Palestinian state on the June 4, 1967 borders.” He also stated that any agreement between Hamas and Fatah is an internal Palestinian affair, and not susceptible to outside demands.
The agreement differs from previous attempts in that Hamas recognizes the pre-1967 borders. Although it stops short of official recognition of Israel, this is a major concession, and one that, if it were dealing with a reasonable international partner, would be seen as such. But Israeli officials take no responsibility for their own constant violations of international law. They decry any ineffective rocket fire from Gaza, ignoring the fact that an occupied people are allowed by international law to resist the occupation in any way possible, as they allow IDF (Israel Defense Forces; the official terrorist arm of the Israeli government), to kill, kidnap and imprison Palestinians for no reason except that they are Palestinian, with complete impunity. The also permit illegal Israeli settlers (the unofficial terrorist arm of Israel), to do the same.
Israel’s leaders appear to be ambidextrous; with one hand, they control the traitor Abbas, and with the other, they pull the strings of the U.S. government. After initially welcoming any move to unite Hamas and Fatah, a U.S government spokesman has now weighed in, echoing Israel’s demands on the Palestinians.
Surely, no one doubts that Israel and Palestine are archenemies. Israel’s very existence was established on the ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Palestinians, innocent people driven from their homes and lands to languish in refugee camps, as Israelis took over, bulldozed their cities and villages, including homes, schools, mosques and everything else, and built new cities. At least 10,000 Palestinians, including men, women and children, were slaughtered at this time. Since then, Israel has continued its unspeakably cruel actions without a break. Palestine, with no army, navy or air force, is in no position to threaten Israel; the Zionist entity, however, backed by the United States, routinely pulverizes the Gaza Strip, as it wreaks terror on the West Bank on a daily basis. Yet both Israel and the U.S. demand that Hamas disarms.
We will look at a hypothetical, but parallel situation. Israel, with no dearth of archenemies, is now encouraging the U.S. to invade Iran. Why does the U.S. not demand that Israel disarm, and recognize Iran? Why does the U.S. not instruct Israel to cease all talk of violence against Iran? Why does the U.S. not seek to dictate how the Israeli government operates (especially since it is quite obvious that the Israeli government dictates a significant area of U.S. foreign policy)?
Obviously, these suggestions are ludicrous; the U.S. would not insist such things of an ally, disreputable as that ally might be. Why, then, does it expect Palestine to do the exact same things it would never realistically expect any other country to do?
Previous presidents have proposed sending a peacekeeping force to ‘protect’ Israel’s constantly-expanding borders from the big, bad Palestinians. But no, Israeli officials have proclaimed that no one is capable of protecting their sacred, stolen land as well as Israelis themselves. The real reason Israel refuses the offer is clear: any international peacekeeping force to ‘protect’ Israel’s borders would need to know what those borders are. Israel can ‘defend’ them as it continues to expand them, by stealing Palestinian land. These are not the actions of a government seeking peace with its neighbors.
Still to be heard from on the U.S. side is the clown-like U.S. Embarraser to the United Nations, Nikki Haley. In April, the illustrious Madam Embarraser suggested that the United Nations Security Council decree that Hamas is a terrorist organization, and declare that there will be ‘consequences’ for any nation that supports it. Sadly, one does not expect anything better from any U.S. political hack.
Also silent, thus far, is the embattled Secretary of State, Exxon oil company executive Rex Tillerson. He may be too busy trying to bail the quickly-entering waters of the ship of state he steers, as his captain seems more and more prepared to make him walk the plank. One must give him some credit; he did refer to U.S. President Donald Trump as a ‘moron’. And, he is pursuing diplomacy with North Korea (efforts constantly undermined by the Great Orange One), and supported certifying that Iran is in compliance with the terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran, which his boss threw out the window. Perhaps he is too engaged elsewhere to deal with the Israel-Palestine situation. And it must be remembered that even Trump himself has said that Netanyahu is more of an obstruction to peace than the Palestinians. It isn’t often that the U.S. president states the obvious.
What comes next for Palestine? There are still many ‘unknowns’:
+ How sincere is Mahmoud Abbas in reunifying the government?
+ Will Abbas insist, as his Israeli masters order, on the disarming of Hamas, which would spell the death of Palestine?
+ If Fatah and Hamas do reconcile, will Israel find some excuse to carpet-bomb the Gaza Strip again?
+ How might the U.S. interfere, to crush the human-rights aspirations of the Palestinians, to please its Israeli masters?
+ Will the international community, which has long betrayed Palestine, continue its neglect, or finally take some positive action?
The success of the reconciliation of the Palestinian government would not stop Israeli violence against the Palestinians overnight; it is too deeply ingrained in the government and large swaths of the racist population to allow that to happen. But a unified Palestinian government on the world stage would send an important message to the international community, which might, in turn, turn up the pressure on apartheid Israel.
The agreement between Fatah and Hamas, coupled with Egypt’s surprising new willingness to assist, however minimally, ever-growing boycotts further ostracizing Israel, and Iran’s growing influence in the Middle East, all bode well for Palestine. One does not wish to be too optimistic, but some positive signs are in view.

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.