Social Programmes Need More Empathy

Moin Qazi

A development professional’s career demands not just technical skills but empathy; not a form of empathy that comes from superiority, but one born from a profound humility. l’ve learned hard lessons that have shaped my ideas about good principles and practices in development. The most abiding lesson is that we should value people over projects, and at the same time value effectiveness over good intentions.

There was an occasion for me in my professional career when my managerial acumen was put to a rigorous test. The farmers in northern Maharashtra had poorly suffered on account of low yields of cotton. Additionally, the government procurement prices for cotton were pegged low. As a result, our loan recoveries plummeted. I conducted a detailed assessment of the farmers and realized that their plight was genuine and a rehabilitation package had to be worked out.

I informed my bosses in my report that on account of the twin effect of low yield and low prices, the farmers didn’t have enough money to service our loans and would need rescheduling. No one from my headquarters came down to meet the farmers and understand the issue. Our boardroom pundits, whose usual way of monitoring the economy is through the reading of business newspapers, came across a news item which stated the state government had worked out a new programme to address the woes of the farmers; instead of raising the prices paid, the government had decided to compensate the farmers by paying subsidies based on landholdings. Our senior officers must have been terribly excited at having got a fix and believed they had scored a victory.

But I was not the one to get trumped by these armchair know-all individuals. I was familiar with this tribe and was convinced that the poor reading of the problems and unrealistic solutions were the root cause of anti-farmer policies being churned out in regal boardrooms. Moreover, most senior executives were out of touch with ground realities, their only source of information being the newspaper where experts’ opinions could be grounded in a particular ideology. Also, these opinions take a macro view and do not account for the wide diversity of regional problems. I shot back a tart letter informing them that the government move was, in fact, a conspiracy against small farmers and smacked of outright feudalism; since eighty percent of the farmers were either tenant farmers or share-croppers, they would not stand to gain anything. Instead, the wealthy landowners would get this subsidy without having cultivated their land or suffered any loss.

I had seen for myself how the anti-poor-farmer lobby operated and how its policies impoverished the farmers rather than offering assistance. Had I not been aware of the pernicious implication of this system at the ground level, I would have kept building pressure on the farmers. Such serious instances of ethical dilemmas keep buffeting the conscientious manager’s mind on account of blatantly political exercises like this. I don’t want to talk about how loan waivers have penalized and demotivated good borrowers and vitiated the credit culture in rural India.

For development staff career ambitions and the lure of closeness to power centres, there are similar pressures and patterns. On the first appointment, the younger and less experienced technical or administrative staff is posted to the poorer, geographically more remote, and politically less significant areas. Those who are less able, less noticed, less smart or less influential, remain in those outposts longer, if not permanently. The more capable and visible, and those who can manage to ingratiate themselves to bosses or who have friends in headquarters, are soon transferred to more accessible or prosperous rural areas, or to peripheral urban areas which continue to be classified as rural areas, thanks to certain inept yardsticks set by the government. With promotion, the contact of these staff with rural areas, especially the more remote districts, recedes and they soon get immersed in the urban power circuit.

Rural postings are mostly perceived as punishment postings and at times genuine workers may suffer and could be used as scapegoats or soft targets. If a serious error is committed, or a powerful politician offended, accountability has to be fixed and a few heads have to roll on. Sometimes an innocent officer may earn a ‘penal posting’, to serve out punishment time in some place with poor facilities: a remote area, inadequately connected to the nearest town, without proper amenities, distant from the capital; in short, a place where frustration will abound. Officers use rural postings as interim schedules or transit assignments. The pull of urban life will remain: children’s education, medical treatment for the family, chances of promotion, congenial company, consumer goods, cinemas, libraries, hospitals, and quite simply, power, all drawing bureaucrats away from rural areas and towards the major urban and administrative centres.

Once established in offices in the capital or regional or provincial headquarters, bureaucrats and bankers quickly become over-committed regarding their time, unless they are idle and incompetent, or exceptionally able and well-supported. There are times of the year, during the budget cycle, performance review, preparing and approving business plans, supervising proper juxtaposition of figures on the spreadsheet, when they cannot contemplate leaving their desks. The very emphasis on agricultural and rural development creates work, which further restricts them in their offices. All this leads to their distancing from the grassroots and they start viewing all issues with a telescopic lens.

If the head of the department or organisation is inactive, he may be relatively free. But the more he tries to drive his goals and introduce new management techniques that he picks up from the occasional seminars that are part of his professional circuit, the busier is the official. Post-seminar and workshop organisation consume further precious time: business cards sorted, emails sent to essential participants with brief but pithy sentences praising their ideas, and acknowledging with appreciation emails from participants who have similarly eulogised him.

By then it will be time for the next seminar. The same formalities have to be completed again. Registration, travel and hotel bookings, a short background paper prepared by the subject expert in the organisation. The circuit continues, and the networking process keeps sprawling, spawning a planet of its own. So the more paperwork is generated, the more coordination and integration are called for, the more reports have to be written and read, and the more inter-departmental coordination and liaison committees set up. The more important these committees become, the more members they have, the longer their meetings take, and the longer their minutes grow. The demands of aid agencies are a final straw, requiring data, justifications, reports, evaluations, visits by missions, and meetings with ministers. Each member is on so many committees that it is hard to ensure that he at least marks his attendance even though he may be mentally occupied with the agenda of another meeting. The staff has to spend overtime processing data, finding logical conclusions and marshalling arguments to support their assumptions. A whole battery of staff is immersed in designing flip charts and preparing PowerPoint presentations, embellishing them with illustrations, charts and tables and drafting executive summaries of committee reports. The grip of the urban offices, capital traps and elite activities has tightened for the government, aid agency and NGO staff alike: more and more emails, meetings, negotiations, reports, often with little staff. Participation has risen in the pandemic of incestuous workshops, many of them about poverty, consuming even more precious time.

Poverty is now a trillion dollar industry. The poor wait with blank stares as entourages of convoys come and go leaving them in wonder what this whole circus is all about.

America’s Deceitful Secret Support of Al Qaeda

Eric Zuesse

In a recent article, I documented that “U.S. Again Supports Al Qaeda in Syria”.

In a prior article, I had documented that since 2012 the U.S. Government has cooperated with the Sauds’ plan to install in Syria a fundamentalist-Sunni government to replace Syria’s existing secular Government, and that the fundamentalist-Sunni organization Al Qaeda has been the U.S. Government’s chief organization on the ground in Syria providing the leadership to that Saudi-U.S. effort. Part One of that report is especially important in order to understand the continuity between the policies of the current U.S. President Donald Trump and the prior U.S. President Barack Obama, in Syria.

The present article will provide the broader historical documentation behind this, starting in 1949, when the U.S. CIA, under President Harry S. Truman, did its second coup d’etat, overthrowing a democratically elected progressive Government (the first having been Thailand 1948, where the CIA had installed an extremely barbaric dictator replacing the democratically elected government that had been headed by a staunch anti-fascist, and simultaneously set up the CIA’s off-the-books supplementary funding mechanism from the international narcotics-trade — a CIA practice which has continued till perhaps the present; and, furthermore, the infamous Nugan-Hand affair, which involved Thailand, definitely involved the CIA’s Michael Hand and William Colby; so, clearly, the CIA is funded off-the-books from the narcotics business, and America’s anti-narcotics laws thus are actually keeping drug-prices and resultant burglaries and CIA profits artificially high, funneling that illicit money into CIA coffers; and any method to defund the CIA down to its core intelligence-gathering function and to eliminate its coup-function, which is the function that took control in Thailand and Syria and then Iran and many more, would need to regulate — instead of to continue outlawing — drugs, which might be the main reason why it hasn’t yet been done: illegal drugs provide wealth to the CIA and other gang-lords, including some U.S. Government officials).

The 1949 coup in Syria overthrew the democratically elected Syrian Government, which had blocked construction of a U.S.-Saudi oil pipeline through Syria into Europe. The CIA imposed upon Syrians a military dictatorship which was so bad, Syria’s military decided that their being stooges of the U.S. wouldn’t really work for them, after all; so, the generals allowed the democratically elected President to run again in 1955, and he won again. In 1957, the CIA tried to overthrow him yet a second time, but failed. The generals wouldn’t cooperate this second time around. In 1958, that democratic Syrian President merged Syria into Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser’s United Arab Republic, which ended in 1960. Thereafter, a series of frequently replaced Syrian leaders ended in 1970, when the popular head of the institutionally secular Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party – Syria Region, Hafez al-Assad, came to power, and he included, in his Government, leaders from the Sunni, Shiite, and Christian, communities, in order to achieve a national Government that would be acceptable to all three of those communities, as well as to Syria’s many seculars. The CIA’s consistent plan has been to break Syria into religiously warring sub-states so that the Sunni one would allow the Sauds’ pipeline; and this plan became placed on-hold until the CIA’s plan for the “Arab Spring” rebellions succeeded in 2011 and seemed to make possible the U.S. regime’s ’democracy’ in Syria, this time meaning a breakup of Syria into Kurdish, versus fundamentalist-Sunni (Saudi-controlled), versus Shiite (pro-Iranian) nations. This also would please another U.S. and Saud ally, Israel, because then the Golan Heights part of Syria which Israel stole in 1967 would be able to become legally Israeli territory.

That 1949 coup in Syria was to enable America’s Bechtel Corporation to construct through Syria the proposed Trans-Arabian Pipeline for the Sauds’ and Rockefellers’ oil from Saudi Arabia to supply European countries and thus to crowd out oil from Russia. The EU is the world’s biggest energy-importer, and by far the largest energy-supplier to the EU is Russia. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently headlined, regarding all of the Saudi-U.S. aristocracies’ grabs for Syria, “Syria: Another Pipeline War”. Syria has important (to the oil and gas industries) real estate. And the destruction of Syria by these foreign thugs has unfortunately resulted from this fact.

Syria is the most secular of all governments in the Middle East, and is the only government that’s committed, both in philosophy and in practice, to separation between church (or clergy) and state (government). I documented in that previous article America’s determination to overthrow the decidedly secular Ba’athist-Party Syrian Government, which is headed by Bashar al-Assad, whom both Riyadh and Washington demand to become “regime-changed” — replaced by a regime that’s acceptable to the rulers of Saudi Arabia (the royal Saud family) and of those rulers’ vassal-nation, the United States. In the present article I shall document that the Sauds have even been allowed by the U.S. regime to select the people who supposedly represent the Syrian public at the U.N.-sponsored Syrian peace talks — those are actually ‘peace’ talks not between the Syrian people and the Syrian Government (to settle a civil war, like the U.S. and its allies claim it is), but instead between the Saud family and the Syrian Government (to stop a foreign invasion, which it really is); this is what the U.S. regime actually supports: the Sauds, against Syria — the invader and its allies, against the victim and its allies. It’s the reality, even if all the ‘news’media are portraying it to be anything but a foreign invasion of the sovereign nation of Syria (which they, of course, are).

Europe — the EU — gets the refugees from America’s invasions and coups (including not only from the Middle East but also from America’s 2014 coup in Ukraine), but still allies itself with the U.S. Government, which nominally represents the American people, though actually representing only the billionaires in three countries: Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the United States. (What’s especially key to understanding U.S. foreign policies is that whereas the U.S. aristocracy is primarily focused against Russia, the Saudi-Israeli alliance is primarily focused against Iran.) Europe subordinates itself to that group of billionaires, but especially to the American ones, since the American ones control the NATO alliance and basically created the EU. (Whether America ever wears-out its welcome amongst European publics will be shown by the extent to which those publics repudiate both NATO and the existing EU, since those two organizations are the immediate agencies of U.S. control there; and the IMF and other U.S.-created entities are global, not merely European entities of these billionaires’ empire.)

Also documented in the prior article was an important part of the back-story to the present one, that:

The U.S., and the royal family of Saudi Arabia, had created Al Qaeda back in 1979, to be their “boots on the ground” against the Soviet Union, and used them not only in Afghanistan but also in Russia’s own Chechnya region, to weaken, first the Soviet Union itself, helping to break it up, and then, after the Cold War ended on the Russian side in 1991 when the Soviet Union and its communism and its Warsaw Pact military alliance all ended, America and the Sauds continued arming and funding Al Qaeda, so as to create terror in Russia, and to overthrow Russia’s allies abroad, such as Assad.

This U.S.-Saudi support of jihadists, in order to topple allies of Russia’s Government, and ultimately even to overthrow Russia’s Government itself, continues till the present day, under U.S. President Donald Trump.

What’s most important to make clear up-front, in order to show that America is waging the Sauds’ war against Syria — that the Sauds aren’t waging America’s war there — is that the U.S.-supported U.N.-managed peace talks in Geneva on the Syrian war are between the Syrian Government and the Saud family; the U.S. ceded to the Sauds the right to select the individuals who represent “the Syrian opposition” at those ongoing ‘peace talks’:

On 9 December 2015, as was reported to Europeans by AFP, the Saud family held an international conference in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, which AFP said was “Saudi-organized talks.” AFP said that these “talks” aimed “to go some way towards establishing an opposition negotiating team” against the Syrian Government. The Saud family had selected this conference’s invitees, in order to consider their applications to become the leaders, or even merely members, of this negotiating team under U.N. auspices, which would be called by the U.N. the “High Negotiations Committee” or “HNC” supposedly representing the people of Syria. However, no one was invited to this two-day Riyadh conference who “argues that Assad’s fate should be decided by the Syrian people.” The U.S. Government and the royal Saud family who own Saudi Arabia, and the royal Thani family who own Qatar, had previously established something they had called the “National Coalition.” Its deputy head was Hisham Marwa, who utterly rejected the idea that “Assad’s fate should be decided by the Syrian people.” AFP’s report said that Marwa was delighted at being surrounded at this conference by “the presence of military and political figures. This is the real opposition.” To him, the Syrian people were not. He was pleased that the Syrian people “will not affect the equation.” And they didn’t — but the royal Saud family did: they actually ran the HNC. Assad’s Government has been ‘negotiating’ against King Saud. That’s the reality, in the U.N.’s ‘peace talks.’

On 20 January 2016, the BBC headlined “Syria conflict: Islamist rebel named opposition chief negotiator” and reported that “A Syrian opposition committee has named an Islamist rebel as its chief negotiator at peace talks that the UN hopes to convene in Geneva on Monday. Mohammed Alloush is the political leader of the powerful, Saudi-backed group Jaysh al-Islam (Army of Islam).”

On 3 February 2016, the Saud-affiliated UAE’s The National newspaper bannered, “Why Jaish Al Islam and Ahrar Al Sham are at the heart of Geneva squabbles: While the groups both oppose ISIL [otherwise called ISIS], they are allies of Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate Jabhat Al Nusra,” and reported that “Jaish Al Islam … already has a central role in the discussions, with its leader Mohammed Alloush acting as chief negotiator for the opposition’s High Negotiations Committee team in Geneva. … Jaish Al Islam’s former leader Zahran Alloush spoke of Alawites and Shiites in derogatory terms and at times advocated that they be cleansed from parts of Syria.” The Alloushes, who had always been jihadists and pro-Saud Syrians, hated Shia just like the Sauds have hated Shia for hundreds of years (since 1744).

So: that’s how the U.S. Government ended up supporting, as constituting the supposed ‘representatives of the Syrian people’ ‘negotiating’ against Syria’s Government, in these U.N.-sponsored ‘peace’ talks, a team consisting of, and even being led by, agents who had been selected by the Saud family, who were determined to impose Sharia Law upon Syria.

It continues a lengthy U.S.-and-Saudi history of trying to replace Syria’s secular Government.

Here are key passages from historian Douglas Little’s excellent “1949-1958, Syria: Early Experiments in Covert Action”:

Declassified records confirm that beginning in November 1948, [CIA operative Stephen] Meade met secretly with Syrian Army Chief of Staff Col. Husni Zaim at least six times to discuss the “possibility [of an] army supported dictatorship.” U.S. officials realized that Zaim was a “‘Banana Republic’ dictator type” with a “strong anti-Soviet attitude.”

Building the Arabian American Oil Company’s Trans-Arabian Pipe Line from Saudi Arabia to Syria.

Meade and Zaim completed plans for the coup in early 1949. On 14 March, Zaim “requested U.S. agents [to] provoke and abet internal disturbances ‘essential for coup d’ etat’ or that U.S. funds be given him [for] this purpose.” Nine days later, Zaim “promised a ‘surprise’ within several days” if Meade could secure U.S. help. As rumors of a military coup grew stronger, Assistant Secretary of State George McGhee arrived in Damascus, ostensibly to discuss resettling Palestinian refugees but possibly to authorize U.S. support for Zaim. Shortly thereafter, … Meade reported on 15 April that “over 400 Commies [in] all parts of Syria have been arrested. … On 16 May, Zaim approved ARAMCO’s TAPLINE. … However, on 14 August, Zaim was overthrown and executed by Col. Sami Hinnawi. … On December 19, 1949, Col. Adib Shishakli ousted Hinnawi in Syria’s third coup in nine months. … Shishakli had a “cordial 2 hour discussion” with the CIA’s Miles Copeland and others at the U.S. embassy on November 23, 195l. When Ma’aruf Dawalibi, long regarded by U.S. observers as pro-Soviet, announced a week later that he would head Syria’s eighth cabinet in less than two years, Shishakli dissolved parliament and set up a military dictatorship. [This was the CIA’s 2nd Syrian coup; and it, too, established a dictatorship there.] … In short order, Syria initiated mutual defense talks with Turkey and renewed the TAPLINE concession. Shishakli was willing to consider a peace treaty with Israel and the resettlement of Palestinian refugees in Syria provided substantial U.S. financial and military aid was forthcoming. In 1952, the Truman administration pressed the World Bank to expedite Syria’s request for a $200 million loan. … CIA director Allen Dulles agreed that “the situation in that country is the worst of all the countries in that area.”  … U.S. Ambassador Moose suggested on 8 January [1955] that “thought be given to other methods,” including an “anti-Communist coup” engineered by the SSNP. In March, Allen Dulles and CIA Middle East chief Kermit Roosevelt flew to London, where they worked out the details for the [third CIA Syrian] coup with Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). …

During an unprecedented New Year’s  [1957] Day meeting with key legislative leaders, Eisenhower requested congressional authorization to use U.S. troops to counter Soviet subversion in the Middle East. He “cited Syrian developments as evidence of Russian intent.” The House approved, 355 to 61 on January 30, 1957, and the Eisenhower Doctrine went into effect.

In August, Washington apparently gave authorization for Operation Wappen, the code name for the new U.S. covert operation against Syria. Howard Stone, a CIA political action specialist with experience in Iran and Sudan, had been planning a coup with dissidents inside the Syrian army for three months. Meanwhile, Shishakli assured Kermit Roosevelt [author of the CIA’s plan] that he was ready to reassume power in Syria. …

Syrian counterintelligence chief Sarraj reacted swiftly on August 12, expelling Stone and other CIA agents, arresting their accomplices and placing the U.S. embassy under surveillance. Left-wing Colonel Bizri used the fiasco as an excuse to wrest control of the army from his moderate rivals.

The U.S. encouraged Turkey and Iraq to mass troops along their borders with Syria. …

Eisenhower gradually edged away from the provocative scheme but the Turks refused to demobilize the 50,000 troops they had massed along the Syrian frontier. …

On July 15, Eisenhower pondered U.S. problems in the Arab world. “The trouble is we have a campaign of hatred against us, not by the governments but by the people.”

The U.S. regime’s enemies here were not any government, but instead “the people.” These people had good reason for hating America’s Government. Syrians didn’t want American thugs to control their lives. Already, the U.S. had become a dictatorship; and not only was it that: it became a dictatorship which is determined to be dictators to the entire world. The U.S. aristocracy demanded this, and still does.

The U.S. gang (the U.S. Government) weren’t dealing with a sufficiently psychopathic military in Syria; so, America’s rule over that country didn’t last long. But, finally, the born CIA asset Barack Obama tried his best to conquer Syria, and he too failed; and, now, the businessman Trump is settling for controlling merely portions of Syria, which the Sauds and the billionaires in Israel and in the U.S. still are demanding.

Thus, Syria hasn’t been sufficiently corrupt to satisfy the U.S.-Israeli-Saudi gang. Syria’s Government still represents the Syrian people. (Even Western polls of Syrians confirm it. And 72% of Syrians are opposed to the U.S. regime’s demand that Assad be removed from power prior to the next Syrian election and not be allowed to run again for the Presidency. And yet the U.S. says it supports democracy — even while trying to block it in Syria.) America’s aristocrats have tried mightily in Syria, many times, but have failed, each time.

What brought down the Soviet Union — Al Qaeda, supported by the aristocracies of the U.S. and Saudi Arabia — has consistently failed to bring down Syria, except to destroy it — and the perpetrators of that destruction (not only America’s dictators, but the Sauds, plus the Thanis who own Qatar, plus Turkey’s Erdogan) even have the gall now to blame their victims, for that $250-billion-plus reconstruction expense. That’s the perfection of conservatism: it’s the epitomization of the blame-the-victim ideology. It is fascism.

Redrawing The Map Of Syria

Abdus Sattar Ghazali

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said the United States “does not want to keep Syria as a state in its current borders”, accusing Washington of seeking to establish a Kurdish-controlled entity along Turkish and Iraqi border zones.

Speaking at an annual press conference in Moscow to review the past year’s diplomatic activities on Monday Jan 13, Lavrov said:

“The [US’] actions that we have been observing indicate that the US does not want to keep Syria as a state in its current borders … The US wants to help the Syrian Democratic Forces to set up some border security zones,” he said, referring to a US-backed rebel alliance dominated by Syrian Kurds, known as the SDF. What it would mean is that vast swaths of territory along the border of Turkey and Iraq would be isolated, it’s to the east of the Euphrates river. There are difficult relations between Kurds and Arabs there. If you say that this zone will be controlled by the forces supported by the US, there will be a force of 30,000 people.”

Erdogan: US trying to form ‘terror army’ in Syria

Commenting on reports of the US plan to establish a 30,000-strong new border security force with the involvement of Kurdish fighters in northern Syria, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that the US was working to form a “terror army” on his country’s southern border by training a new force in Syria that includes Kurdish fighters.

“What we are supposed to do is to drown this terror army before in comes into being,” he said in an address in the capital Ankara on Jan 15, calling the Kurdish fighters “backstabbers” who will point their weapons to the US in the future.

According to media reports quoting US officials, the US-led coalition fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL also known as ISIS) will recruit around half of the new force from the Syrian Defense Forces (SDF), an umbrella group of fighters dominated by the People’s Protection Units (YPG).

Ankara considers Kurdish YPG fighters as a “terrorist” organization with links to to the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has waged a decades-long fight inside the country. PKK is blacklisted as a terrorist organisation by Turkey and its Western allies. The US views the YPG as a highly effective fighting force against ISIL.

Erdogan said that Turkey’s armed forces had completed preparations for an operation against the Kurdish-controlled region of Afrin in northwest Syria and the town of Manbij.

He warned Turkey’s allies against helping “terrorists” in Syria and said: “We won’t be responsible for consequences.”

“The establishment of the so-called Syria Border Protection Force was not consulted with Turkey, which is a member of the coalition,” the Turkish foreign ministry said.

US backtracks on Syrian ‘border guard’

The United States continues to train local security forces linked to the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in Syria, but will not create a ‘border guard force’ and understands the concerns of Turkey, the U.S. Department of Defense said in a statement on Wednesday Jan 17.

“The training is designed to enhance security for displaced persons returning to their devastated communities,” the Pentagon said. “It is also essential so that ISIS cannot reemerge in liberated and ungoverned areas. This is not a new “army” or conventional ‘border guard’ force.”

The statement added that the U.S. was “keenly aware of the security concerns of Turkey, our Coalition partner and NATO ally.”

Noting that Turkey’s security concerns are legitimate, the Pentagon said it would continue to be transparent with Ankara about its efforts to defeat ISIS in Syria, “and stand by our NATO ally in its counter-terrorism efforts.”

“The military campaign against ISIS in Syria is not over and heavy fighting is still underway in the Middle Euphrates River Valley,” the Pentagon said adding:

“These security forces are internally-focused to prevent ISIS fighters from fleeing Syria and augment local security in liberated areas. These forces will protect the local population and help prevent ISIS from launching new attacks against the U.S. and its allies and partners, pending a longer-term political solution to the Syrian civil war in Geneva.”

Will Syria’s conflict redraw the map of the Middle East?

Fabrice Balanche, associate professor and research director at the University of Lyon 2, wrote in June 2017: “The global resonance of the Syrian war has a precedent from some four centuries ago: the conflict in Bohemia (1618–23), which initiated the Thirty Years’ War. Today, world powers such as Russia, China, the United States, and Europe are assessing their regional interests and the measures they will take to achieve them. The conflict itself, meanwhile, can only grow, as the Yemen example shows, given the freeing up of local actors. But amid the great instability, a new Westphalian order is emerging in the Middle East. Rather than erasing the mistakes of the past a new territorial division could end up being superimposed upon the Sykes-Picot line by which the departing colonial powers split the region.”

Not surprisingly, Michael Hayden, a former director of America’s Central Intelligence Agency told CNN in February 2016, that the international agreements made after World War Two are starting to fall apart, and may change the borders of some countries in the Middle East.

“What we see here is a fundamental melting down of the international order,” Michael Hayden said adding:

“We are seeing a melting down of the post-WWII Bretton Woods American liberal order. We are certainly seeing a melting down of the borders drawn at the time of Versailles and Sykes-Picot. I am very fond of saying Iraq no longer exists, Syria no longer exists; they aren’t coming back. Lebanon is teetering and Libya is long gone.”

Hayden described the current situation as a “tectonic” moment. “Within that we then have the war against terrorism; it is an incredibly complex time.”

Argument for greater Kurdistan

Lt. Col. Ralph Peters wrote in June 2006, the most arbitrary and distorted borders in the world are in Africa and the Middle East. Drawn by self-interested Europeans (who have had sufficient trouble defining their own frontiers), Africa’s borders continue to provoke the deaths of millions of local inhabitants. But the unjust borders in the Middle East — to borrow from Churchill — generate more trouble than can be consumed locally.

Yet, for all the injustices the borders re-imagined here leave unaddressed, without such major boundary revisions, we shall never see a more peaceful Middle East, Peters argued and added:

“The most glaring injustice in the notoriously unjust lands between the Balkan Mountains and the Himalayas is the absence of an independent Kurdish state. There are between 27 million and 36 million Kurds living in contiguous regions in the Middle East (the figures are imprecise because no state has ever allowed an honest census). Greater than the population of present-day Iraq, even the lower figure makes the Kurds the world’s largest ethnic group without a state of its own. Worse, Kurds have been oppressed by every government controlling the hills and mountains where they’ve lived since Xenophon’s day.

“The U.S. and its coalition partners missed a glorious chance to begin to correct this injustice after Baghdad’s fall. A Frankenstein’s monster of a state sewn together from ill-fitting parts, Iraq should have been divided into three smaller states immediately. We failed from cowardice and lack of vision, bullying Iraq’s Kurds into supporting the new Iraqi government — which they do wistfully as a quid pro quo for our good will. But were a free plebiscite to be held, make no mistake: Nearly 100 percent of Iraq’s Kurds would vote for independence.

“As would the long-suffering Kurds of Turkey, who have endured decades of violent military oppression and a decades-long demotion to “mountain Turks” in an effort to eradicate their identity. While the Kurdish plight at Ankara’s hands has eased somewhat over the past decade, the repression recently intensified again and the eastern fifth of Turkey should be viewed as occupied territory. As for the Kurds of Syria and Iran, they, too, would rush to join an independent Kurdistan if they could. The refusal by the world’s legitimate democracies to champion Kurdish independence is a human-rights sin of omission far worse than the clumsy, minor sins of commission that routinely excite our media. And by the way: A Free Kurdistan, stretching from Diyarbakir through Tabriz, would be the most pro-Western state between Bulgaria and Japan.”

Lt. Col. Ralph Peters further argued: “A just alignment in the region would leave Iraq’s three Sunni-majority provinces as a truncated state that might eventually choose to unify with a Syria that loses its littoral to a Mediterranean-oriented Greater Lebanon: Phoenecia reborn. The Shia south of old Iraq would form the basis of an Arab Shia State rimming much of the Persian Gulf. Jordan would retain its current territory, with some southward expansion at Saudi expense. For its part, the unnatural state of Saudi Arabia would suffer as great a dismantling as Pakistan.”

His article was published in the Armed Forces Journal under the title: Blood borders: How a better Middle East would look.

Afrin Offensive: Erdogan’s Madness Continues

Nauman Sadiq

During the last 24 hours, 72 Turkish jets have reportedly struck 150 targets inside the Kurdish-controlled Afrin district in north-western Syria in which six civilians and three Kurdish militiamen have lost their lives. And today, Turkish ground troops in armoured vehicles have intruded five kilometres inside Afrin from Syria’s northern border with Turkey.

In addition, Turkey has also mobilised the Syrian militant groups under its tutelage in Azaz and Idlib in Syria, and in Kilis and Hatay provinces of Turkey, the latter of which has a substantial presence of Arabs and Syrian refugees, hence the Kurdish-controlled Afrin enclave has been surrounded from all sides by Turkey and its proxies.

Well-informed readers who have been keenly watching Erdogan’s behaviour since the failed July 2016 coup plot must have noticed that Erdogan has committed quite a few reckless and impulsive acts during the last couple of years.

Firstly, 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.

Secondly, 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.

Thirdly, 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 Syrian militant proxies head-to-head with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and their US bakers.

And lastly, before Turkey’s intrusion in Afrin, the Turkish military invaded Idlib in north-western Syria in October last year on the pretext of enforcing a de-escalation zone between the Syrian militants and the Syrian 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 was actually a large-scale mutiny within the ranks of the Turkish armed forces. Although Erdogan 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 civil war, the Kemalists had been looking with suspicion at 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 centre.

As long as the US was on-board 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 jihadists, it led to discord and adoption of contradictory policies.

Moreover, 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.

Regarding the split between Washington and Ankara, although the proximate cause of this confrontation seems to be the July 2016 coup plot against the Erdogan administration by the supporters of the US-based preacher, Fethullah Gulen, but this surprising development also sheds light on the deeper divisions between the United States and Turkey over their respective Syria policy.

After the United States reversal of ‘regime change’ policy in Syria in August 2014 when the Islamic State overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in early 2014 and threatened the capital of another steadfast American ally Masoud Barzani’s Erbil in the oil-rich Iraqi Kurdistan, Washington has made the Kurds the centrepiece of its policy in Syria and Iraq.

It would be pertinent to mention here that the conflict in Syria and Iraq is actually a three-way conflict between the Sunni Arab militants, the Shi’a-led governments and the Kurds. Although after the declaration of war against a faction of Sunni Arab militants, the Islamic State, Washington has also lent its support to the Shi’a-led government in Iraq, but the Shi’a Arabs of Iraq are not the trustworthy allies of the United States because they are under the influence of Iran.

Therefore, Washington was left with no other choice but to make the Kurds the centrepiece of its policy in Syria and Iraq after a group of Sunni Arab jihadists, the Islamic State, transgressed its mandate in Syria and overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in early 2014 from where the United States had withdrawn its troops only a couple of years ago in December 2011.

The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces are nothing more than the Kurdish militias with a symbolic presence of mercenary Arab tribesmen in order to make them appear more representative and inclusive in outlook. As far as the regional parties to the Syrian civil war are concerned, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the rest of the Gulf states may not have serious reservations against this close cooperation between the United States and the Kurds in Syria and Iraq, because the Gulf states tend to look at the regional conflicts from the lens of the Iranian Shi’a threat.

Turkey, on the other hand, has been more wary of the separatist Kurdish tendencies in its southeast than the Iranian Shi’a threat, as such. And the recent announcement by Washington of training and arming 30,000 Kurdish border guards to patrol Syria’s northern border with Turkey and prolonging the stay of 2000 US troops embedded with the Kurds in Syria indefinitely must have proven a tipping point for the Erdogan administration.

US takes aim at China over trade

Nick Beams

Some of the growing economic tensions underlying the increasingly bellicose moves by the United States against both Russia and China were revealed by last week’s US Trade Representative (USTR) report on the two countries’ compliance with the rules of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

The report coincided with the issuing of a new National Defense Strategy by the Pentagon on Friday, the first in a decade, in which, according to Defense Secretary James Mattis, “great power competition, not terrorism” is the central focus.

Mattis said the US was facing a “growing threat from revisionist powers as different as China and Russia, nations that seek to create a world consistent with their authoritarian models.”

The report on China, which reflected the imprimatur of US trade representative Robert Lighthizer, one of the most vociferous advocates of “America First” within the Trump administration, amounted to a virtual declaration of trade war from the very first paragraph.

It said the hopes that China, when it was admitted to the WTO in 2001, would dismantle state-led policies incompatible with open market-oriented policies had not been realised. China largely remained a state-led economy.

At the same time, China had used WTO membership to become a “dominant player” in international trade. “Given these facts, it seems clear that the United States erred in supporting China’s entry into the WTO on terms that have proven to be ineffective in securing China’s embrace of an open, market-oriented trade regime.”

The conclusions regarding Russia, which only joined the WTO in 2012, were along the same lines.

The report on China ruled out any prospect of addressing US complaints through the WTO’s dispute mechanisms, in which individual countries can take up complaints about the actions of others.

According to the report, “it is now clear that the WTO rules are not sufficient to constrain China’s market-distorting behaviour.” While some matters had been dealt with under WTO procedures, “many of the most troubling ones are not directly disciplined by WTO rules” or additional commitments made by China when it joined.

“The reality is that the WTO rules were not formulated with a state-led economy in mind,” it stated. While China had made certain changes after 2001 in regard to state-led measures, “the Chinese government has since replaced them with more sophisticated—and still very troubling—policies and practices.”

The report set out a litany of complaints, ranging across the board from steel and aluminium production to agriculture, technology, intellectual property rights and services.

Summing up the overall position of the US, it said the Chinese government pursued a “wide array of continually evolving interventionist policies and practices aimed at limiting market access for imported goods and services.” At the same time, Beijing offered “substantial government guidance, resources and regulatory support to Chinese industries, including through initiatives designed to extract advanced technologies from foreign companies in sectors across the economy.”

The beneficiaries were Chinese state-owned companies and other significant domestic firms “attempting to move up the economic value chain,” with the result that markets all over the world are “less efficient than they should be.”

In other words, the US considers it is being increasingly adversely affected, particularly in areas of more sophisticated technology and production that it regards as its own province. The situation is worse than it was five years ago, the report stated. Despite Chinese pronouncements to the contrary, the state’s role in the economy had increased.

The report claimed that since China’s accession to the WTO the US had tried to work with China in a “cooperative constructive manner” to resolve trade disputes and had encouraged China to be a “more responsible member of the WTO.”

“These bilateral efforts have been unsuccessful—not because of failures by US policymakers, but because Chinese policymakers were not interested in moving towards a true market economy.”

The report on Russia, after reviewing a series of complaints, said its actions “strongly indicate” that it had “no intention of complying with many of the promises it made to the United States and other WTO members.” It “was a mistake to allow Russia to join the WTO if it is not fully prepared to live by WTO rules.”

The roots of the intense US hostility toward Russia and China over the issues of trade can be seen, at least partially, in the USTR’s assessment of the significance of the WTO’s creation in 1995 as the successor organisation to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), established in 1947.

The Marrakesh Declaration of April 1994, which set up the WTO at the conclusion of the Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations, said the creation of the new organisation “ushers in a new era of global economic cooperation” based on “a more open and multilateral trading system” centred on “open, market-oriented policies.”

The 1994 declaration was issued in the midst of the euphoria of the American ruling class, following the liquidation of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the collapse of national-based economic policies. The perspective was that the “Washington consensus”—in reality the enforcement of the interests of American finance capital and market power—would open a new era of US domination. Control over the vast Eurasian landmass, with its abundant resources and supply of cheap labour, was viewed as a key component of this strategy.

Things have not turned out exactly as the US planned, however. While capitalism has been well and truly restored in Russia and China, American capitalism does not exercise the degree of direct control, through the operation of the “free market” and finance capital, for which it had hoped.

Capitalist oligarchies have arisen in both Russia and China, which pursue their own interests, often cutting across those of the US. This does not mean that the US has abandoned its drive for domination of these regions—in fact, the ongoing weakening of its global economic position makes that even more imperative. Consequently, there is a push to pursue this goal by other, that is, military measures, as set out in the latest Pentagon strategy, focusing on “great power” competition, above all directed against Russia and China.

Carillion collapse in UK leaves pension scheme deficit of £2.6 billion

Robert Stevens

The political fallout from last week’s collapse of Carillion, the UK’s second largest construction firm, forced Prime Minister Theresa May to write an article Sunday in the pro-Labour Observer, declaring, “Boardroom excesses can no longer be tolerated.”

The discrediting of the private sector by Carillion’s collapse prompted May to insist on “the invention, innovation and creativity of private enterprise,” while promising to “set out new tough new rules for executives who try to line their own pockets by putting their workers’ pensions at risk—an unacceptable abuse that we will end.”

Addressing growing anger at the ruinous impact on the lives of tens of thousands of workers, she pledged, “[I]t will be the shareholders of Carillion, not taxpayers, who pay the price for the company’s collapse.”

May’s worthless promises were made only after it was revealed that Carillion’s debts and pension liabilities were almost double the amount initially cited.

An investigation by Sky News said its total financial liabilities, including most importantly its pension liability, were around £5 billion. Sky News reported that a “private analysis of Carillion’s pension deficit on a Section 75—or full buyout—basis has concluded that it was as high as £2.6 billion. …

“The £2.6 billion figure relates to the cost to Carillion of paying an insurance company to guarantee all of its pension liabilities, and is significant because it is likely to be the sum claimed on behalf of the pension schemes as part of the liquidation process, according to insiders.”

Carillion was a major government contractor, involved in 450 contracts in schools, hospitals, prisons and key infrastructure projects such as the HS2 high-speed rail network. When it went into compulsory liquidation, Carillion employed 20,000 workers in the UK and 23,000 overseas. Its debts were initially estimated at £2.2 billion, of which £900 million was said to be pension liabilities.

The newly estimated pension deficit of £2.6 billion is more than four times as high as the pension deficit figure of £587 million referred to by Carillion’s former chief executive in a High Court witness statement reported in the firm’s last interim financial results.

Behind May’s self-serving statements is the reality that the public purse and all pensioners with still solvent pensions will be fleeced to pay for Carillion’s collapse. Carillion operated 13 final salary pension schemes in the UK, with around 28,500 members. More than 12,000 of these are already claiming a pension.

With their pension schemes collapsed, the liabilities will be paid by the state-run Pension Protection Fund (PPF). Under PPF rules, those already receiving their pensions will be protected and receive the existing value of their pensions, but those below retirement age will face cuts of 10-20 percent as there is a cap on pay-outs to higher earners in defined benefit pension schemes.

The government and media have sought to play down the implications of the collapse of the Carillion pension scheme by citing the PPF as having a £6 billion surplus.

The Conservative government-supporting Daily Mail described the PPF as a “lifeboat” that “can afford to pay the bill without costing taxpayers.” This was even as another columnist in the newspaper felt obliged to point out that the PPF is entirely funded by workers paying into other currently solvent pension funds. Columnist James Coney wrote, “[M]oney for these comes from a pot of cash that the PPF has acquired by charging a levy on final-salary schemes that are still up and running.”

The money does not come from “anonymous pension funds—this comes from the pockets of savers, because it’s their retirement pots that have to pay. Perversely, the higher the fees to run the PPF, the more strain on other pension funds. Every penny to run a final-salary pension comes from cash that would otherwise be used to boost savers’ returns. The more pension schemes that go bust, the more the healthier schemes are forced to subsidise them. This in turn can put the previously solvent schemes under pressure and push more of them to the brink.”

Since the PPF scheme was opened by Labour in 2005, it has served as a boon for the corporations, who have continued to reap massive dividends from pension funds while reducing the amount they pay into them to the bare minimum. Hundreds of pension schemes have been taken on by the PPF, with 230,000 members transferred into it by the end of October 2017. Of these, fully 124,705 receive pension compensation.

Total compensation paid out so far by the PPF is £2.7 billion. This is set to rocket with the Carillion pension scheme—by far the largest yet entering the PPF—along with 20,000 British Steel pension scheme workers who will enter in the spring. They will be joined by a further 2,000 former BHS workers.

The Carillion pension fund collapse is the tip of the iceberg, with many more schemes on the brink of collapse. Their total liabilities dwarf the surplus of the PPF. More than two in three of all final-salary pension schemes—3,663 schemes—have a deficit “black hole,” owing a total of £197 billion.

Among the major corporations recording the largest deficits for the year ending 2016 are Royal Dutch Shell (£6.9 billion, up from £2.8 billion in 2015), BP (£6.7 billion, up from £4.2 billion), BT Group (£.6.3 billion, down from £7.5 billion), BAE Systems (£6 billion, up from £4.5 billion), Tesco (£3.1 billion, down from £4.8 billion), Unilever (£2.2 billion, up from £1.2 billion) and GlaxoSmithKline (£2 billion, up from £1.5 billion).

The pension deficits have risen, not because the corporations have no money but because they refuse to make the necessary contributions to the pension fund for what are essentially deferred wages.

Instead, they have diverted the cash to their shareholders, paying out far more in dividends to shareholders than they contribute to the pension fund, robbing their workforce of their legal entitlement.

Each year, actuarial consultants Lane Clark & Peacock produce a survey of the Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 100 companies’ pension disclosures . Last year it found that FTSE companies with defined benefit schemes, which offer a guaranteed income in retirement, paid £71 billion in dividends in 2015 compared with just £13.3 billion in pension contributions.

This year’s report notes, “[D]espite their persistent deficits, FTSE 100 companies were still able to pay four times as much in dividends in 2016 as they did in pension contributions.”

It states that if the £4.2 billion paid by the RBS bank to its pension scheme as a one-off is excluded, dividends were more than five times the pension contributions paid: “Looking just at companies with 31 December year-ends, 39 declared pensions deficits totalling £37 billion. Those same companies paid out £39 billion in dividends during 2016.”

So the corporations, the regulators and the government know this industrial scale larceny is going on and no one does anything to stop it.

This same looting operation took place at Carillion. Since its pension scheme was established 19 years ago, more than £775 million was paid out in dividends to shareholders. Every year Carillion increased the dividend paid to shareholders, which rose from 4 pence-a-share in 1999 to 18.45 pence-a-share in 2016. Even as the company was on the verge of collapse, with its annual report for the 2016 financial year showing a 5 percent fall in pre-tax profits to £146.7 million and its pension deficit more than doubling in size to £804.8 million, shareholders continued to benefit.

The financial report laid out a “progressive” policy for shareholder pay-outs, whose aim was “to increase the dividend each year broadly in line with the growth in underlying earnings-per-share.”

Analysis carried out by Reuters showed that “underlying earnings-per-share rose 1 percent to 35.3 pence that year, and its dividend was also lifted by 1 percent from 18.25 pence-a-share in 2015.”

Germany: Sharp conflicts inside the Left Party

Peter Schwarz

After the shift to the right in last year’s federal elections and the Social Democrats’ decision to continue the grand coalition with the Christian Democrats, long-simmering conflicts inside the Left Party have intensified.

At the turn of the year, former SPD chairman and founder of the Left Party Oskar Lafontaine called for a new left-wing movement. “We need an all-embracing left-wing movement, a kind of left people’s party, in which the Left Party, parts of the Greens and the SPD can come together,” he told newsweekly Der Spiegel. “This movement should not only include the classic parties, but also trade unionists, social organizations, scientists, cultural workers and others,” he explained his proposal in the Osnabrücker Zeitung.

Sahra Wagenknecht, Left Party faction leader in the Bundestag (parliament) and Lafontaine’s wife, supports his proposal. “Of course, I want a strong left-wing people’s party,” she says in the latest issue of Der Spiegel. “In the end, it can only work if prominent personalities join in, giving people back the hope that something is moving their way politically.” As an example, Wagenknecht pointed to the movement “La France insoumise” of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who “achieved just under 20 percent from a standing start”.

The Left Party leadership around Bernd Riexienger and Katja Kipping, who have been at loggerheads with Wagenknecht for a long time, took the proposal as a declaration of war. Kipping described it as a “project for a schism” and countered with a “Project 15”, which aims to increase the party’s election results from just under ten to 15 percent. Riexinger said that “no new constructions are necessary, but only a stronger Left Party”.

Last weekend, there were two separate Left Party meetings to mark the new year. The party leadership met with representatives from the federal states, many of whom have regional government responsibility. The parliamentary group organized a rally in the Kosmos cinema at Karl-Marx-Allee, the largest cinema in the former East Germany, at which Jean-Luc Mélenchon appeared as a star guest alongside Wagenknecht and Lafontaine.

The only joint appearance of the party and the parliamentary group leaderships was at the annual wreath-laying ceremony at the grave of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht—a “tribute” against which the two revolutionary socialists, murdered 99 years ago, can no longer defend themselves.

The crisis of the Left Party is a consequence of the failure of the perspective on which it was founded over ten years ago. The heirs of the East German Stalinist State party in the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) and the former SPD functionaries, union bureaucrats and pseudo- leftists in the Electoral Alternative Work and Social Justice (WASG) joined forces in 2005 to compensate for the decline of the SPD, which had rapidly lost influence in the working class after implementing the Hartz welfare and labour “reforms”.

Oskar Lafontaine, who had held leading positions in the SPD for forty years, lastly as party chairman and federal finance minister, before giving up office in 1999 amidst conflict with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, had always regarded the SPD’s task as keeping the working class under control. If he denounced social ills, it was not to develop a movement to overthrow capitalism, but to capture and stop such a development.

Unlike many other SPD politicians, including Gerhard Schröder, who went through their “Marxist” phase as members of the Young Socialists before they became pillars of the state, Lafontaine always defended the bourgeois order and held extremely right-wing positions regarding domestic policy. As mayor of Saarbrücken, he ensured a balanced budget in the 1970s, and was one of the first to introduce compulsory work for welfare recipients. As Saarland’s state premier, he was responsible for the trouble-free shutdown of large parts of the state’s coal and steel industry.

After the end of the SPD-Green Party federal government in 2005, Lafontaine supported the founding of the Left Party and, together with Gregor Gysi, took over its leadership, because he hoped in this way he could help to get back a majority for an SPD-led government. “My hope was that the SPD would be compelled by the competition from the left to carry out social democratic politics again,” he told the Osnabrücker Zeitung recently, justifying his attitude at the time.

But this perspective has failed miserably. Not only the SPD—which has ruled for two legislative periods in a grand coalition under Angela Merkel—but also the Left Party, has moved further and further to the right.

In the September 2017 general election, both parties together received just under 30 percent of the vote, 16 percent less than in 1998, when Lafontaine was still chairman of the SPD. The SPD halved its share of the vote, from 40 to 20 percent, while, with 9 percent, the Left Party won only four percent more than the PDS did in 1998. Even including the Greens, this is still not enough for a government majority. Instead, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) entered the Bundestag, with 12 percent.

“I have repeatedly asked myself whether it would have been more meaningful to fight within the SPD for a renewal”, Lafontaine told the Osnabrücker Zeitung. “But that’s water under the bridge. Today, a new all-encompassing left-wing movement would be the right response to the strengthening of the right.”

The task of this movement is to block the left-wing development of the working class and channel growing social outrage in a right-wing direction. Both Lafontaine and Wagenknecht regularly denounce “neoliberalism” and social inequality, but at the heart of their programme is the fomenting of nationalism. Their attitude to refugee policy and the stepping up of state powers at home do not differ from that of the AfD. They attack the government’s refugee policy from the right. In recent days, they have confirmed this in numerous interviews.

Wagenknecht told the Südwest Presse that the Left Party’s losses among workers had “to do with the immigration debate”. She told the Donaukurier, “The impression that the Left Party advocates a lot of immigration discouraged many within this layer at the previous election.” Nobody could “seriously demand unlimited immigration”. We can’t “give everyone who wants to the opportunity to live in Germany”, she added.

On his Facebook page, Lafontaine blames the “burdens of immigration” for “increased competition in the low-paid sector, rising rents in city neighbourhoods, and increasing difficulties in schools.”

It is no coincidence that Lafontaine and Wagenknecht are working together with Mélenchon, who in Berlin confessed “proudly” that he was “a product of the Left Party”.

Mélenchon was a senior Socialist Party official for thirty years, including as Minister of Vocational Training in the government of Lionel Jospin, before launching a French version of the Left Party (Parti de Gauche) in 2008. Now he is trying to steer the growing opposition to the anti-working-class policies of President Emmanuel Macron into a nationalist impasse.

“La France insoumise”, tailored to Mélenchon personally, does not base itself on the working class and socialism, but on “the people” and the French nation, to which it wants to give a new bourgeois constitution in the form of a “Sixth Republic”. Like Lafontaine, Mélenchon is an opponent of the European Union. He does not attack it from the left, however, from the point of view of the unity of the European working class, but from the right, from the point of view of the national interests of France, thereby fuelling anti-German nationalism.

Lafontaine and Wagenknecht’s opponents in the Left Party are no less reactionary. On the one hand, they are oriented to groups of the urban middle class, who have become politically homeless due to the rightward development of the Greens. It was here that the Left Party won votes in the general election, while losing almost half a million voters to the AfD among workers and the unemployed. Party leader Katja Kipping, who is considered to be Wagenknecht’s arch-enemy, represents this course, which focuses on environmental issues, identity politics and the like, and supports the European Union.

On the other hand, they are interested only in power, holding government responsibility in the federal states and municipalities and, in close cooperation with the SPD, the Greens and the Christian Democrats, carrying out social and budget cuts. They regard every political dispute as a disruption. Typical representatives of this trend are the Thuringia state premier Bodo Ramelow and Dietmar Bartsch, who heads the parliamentary group together with Wagenknecht.

In the power struggle with the party leadership, Bartsch had long formed a common front with Wagenknecht. However, he rejects her call for an all-embracing left-wing movement.

Common to all the various currents in the Left Party is their hostility to an independent socialist movement of the working class. The more acute social opposition becomes, the more openly they move to the right.

Twitter warns users: We’re watching you

Andre Damon 

In an overt act of political intimidation, the social media platform Twitter emailed hundreds of thousands of users Saturday informing them that they had shared or followed “Russian propaganda.”

Twitter made these claims without substantiation, refusing to tell its users exactly what content they shared or viewed that fell afoul of the US government and its social media enforcers. Among the recipients of the email was the Senate’s second-highest ranking Republican, John Cornyn.

“As part of our recent work to understand Russian-linked activities on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” read the email sent out by Twitter, “we identified and suspended a number of accounts that were potentially connected to a propaganda effort by a Russian government-linked organization known as the Internet Research Agency.”

Taking the guise of a friendly warning, Twitter continued, “Consistent with our commitment to transparency, we are emailing you because we have reason to believe that you either followed one of these accounts or retweeted or liked content from these accounts during the election period.”

In other words, Twitter is warning its users that it knows exactly what they are viewing and sharing on social media, implying that if they post something that falls afoul of the US government, they may be subject to investigation or prosecution.

Twitter’s action is the latest step in a campaign led by the Democratic Party, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the leading intelligence agencies to argue that the growth of social opposition that expressed itself in broad popular hostility to the Clinton campaign during the 2016 election is the result of “Russian propaganda” aimed at “sowing divisions” in American society.

Lawmakers, including Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, have demanded that the major technology companies draw up lists of accounts and individuals that disseminated what they called “Russian Propaganda.” The technology companies have complied.

Twitter’s action comes amid a massive escalation of the drive by social media companies to censor the Internet. Last week, representatives from Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube testified before the Senate Commerce committee on their efforts to combat “extremist” content.

Monika Bickert, head of Global Policy Management at Facebook, told lawmakers that the social media company has hired 10,000 people for its “security” department to review, block and take down content, and that this number will be doubled over the next year. Google, for its part, plans to bring the number of content moderators it employs to 10,000 this year.

Twitter’s email blast to users followed the January 12 announcement by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg that it plans to dramatically reduce the amount of independent news that appears on users’ news feeds.

On Friday, Zuckerberg clarified that while the total amount of news that users see would fall only slightly, the great majority of news content on users’ feeds would now come from “authoritative” and “trustworthy” news sources, instead of those that promote “polarization.”

In an indication of what this will mean in practice, the stock value of the New York Times shot up by nine percent that day, in the expectation that its postings would displace content from independent media organizations.

The growing drive to censor political speech on the Internet comes amid growing preparations by the Trump administration and the military for the eruption of major state-on-state military conflict.

The National Defense Strategy, published Friday by the Pentagon, stresses the need for the US government to combat “political subversion” in preparation for “Inter-state strategic competition.”

“It is now undeniable that the homeland is no longer a sanctuary. America is a target,” the document states, for “political and information subversion” on the part of “revisionist powers” such as Russia and China.

The document argues for the formation of what can only be termed a totalitarian regime, waging total war. It writes, “A long-term strategic competition requires the seamless integration of multiple elements of national power—diplomacy, information, economics, finance, intelligence, law enforcement, and military.”

The ever-tighter censorship and monitoring of social media and other online communications is a major component of this strategy, which aims to lay the ground for major conflict, potentially involving millions of deaths, by effectively eliminating the freedom of expression.