Another conflict seems to be brewing in the Middle East, this time between Israel and Iran. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently accused Iran of sending drones to attack Israel. Netanyahu’s statement comes after Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif denounced Israel for violating international law.
These statements come in the light of heightened tensions between the two countries. On April 9, Israel allegedly conducted airstrikes on Syria’s T-4 airbase, killing 14 people, including Iranian nationals. While Israel has not officially claimed responsibility for the attacks, Netanyahu along with his ministers, has stepped up the rhetoric against Iran, claiming they will not let Iran establish a military foothold in Syria.
As Syrian President Bashar al-Assad consolidates his rule in Syria with the help of Iranian forces, the conflict between Israel and Iran, which always seemed to be clandestine, is coming out in the open. There are several reasons for the change from shadow war to open conflict.
A sympathetic USA
The foremost reason is the change in the USA’s attitude towards Iran and the nuclear deal. Under the Trump administration, the US has become more hawkish about Iran. In fact, President Trump has regularly voiced his mistrust of Iran and his displeasure with the deal on public channels. The relations between Iran and US, which had improved post the nuclear deal, have worsened again.
Also, Trump’s clear and obvious preference for increasing ties with Israel at the cost of the Palestinian Authority has emboldened Israel’s stand against Iran. While Israel and USA have always been allies, relations had cooled after the Obama administration’s agreement with Iran on its nuclear facilities.
Iran’s increasing influence in Syria
Another factor is Iran’s increasing influence in Syria. As Bashar al-Assad regains more of his territory from the Syrian rebels, Iran, with whose help he has remained in power, also becomes more influential in the region. This has rattled Israel. Another country that feels the same is Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia, which had supported the rebels in Syria, is involved in its own power struggle with Iran for supremacy in the Middle East.
Sensing a new government in the USA that is hostile to Iran and partial to their own interests, Israel and Saudi Arabia have banded together. The cutting off of diplomatic ties with Qatar, Prince Salman’s recent statements on the Jewish people having a right to their own land- all of this is plain evidence of closer ties between the countries to counter Iran.
The present increase in the conflict
Israel has conducted airstrikes previously in Syria, targeting convoys of Syrian troops and the Hezbollah. It sees the growing clout of Iran as a threat to its borders. The Israeli air force confirmed last year that it had conducted almost 100 airstrikes on these targets since the Syrian conflict began.
But the incident on 9 April was unprecedented because airstrikes were launched on a Syrian airbase. This is also the first time that Iran itself, along with Russia, acknowledged the attack on its nationals and blamed Israel for it. Meanwhile, an Israeli officer confirmed to the New York Times that the airstrikes were conducted by Israel.
It also marks an increase in war-mongering rhetoric from both sides. Meanwhile, Russia has announced it is supplying advanced missile systems to Syria. It has warned that Israel could suffer “catastrophically” if it decided to attack the missile systems.
The idea of Russia getting involved in a conflict with Israel, or even an open confrontation between Iran and Israel, is frightening to say the least. The entire world can be dragged into this conflict, particularly given the USA and Russia’s support to opposing sides. While both Iran and Israel deny that the increased tension will spill over into a direct war, it is unclear till when this statement will ring true.
Ahwaz Arabia, whose geography extends from the Shatt al-Arab to the Jagin River in Jask, East of Jamberon (Bandar Abbas), but, since the occupation of Ahwaz on April 20, 1925, the Iranian regime changed the official name of Al-Ahwaz to several provinces such as Khuzestan, Bushehr, Elam, and Hermozgan. The inhabitants of Ahwaz are all Arabs, not the Persians, as the Iranian authorities claim. The natural resources of Ahwaz are oil and gas, and its soil has a high potential for agriculture and Al-Ahwaz has three major rivers, such as Karoon, Jarahi, and Karkheh, which play a vital role in irrigating the arable land.
Al-Ahwaz in a 93-year history of the occupation is suffering from the worst crimes against humanity, which are against the international humanitarian law and the international human rights law – and the most important violations committed by the Iranian authorities in Ahwaz, which include “death penalty, displacement, enforced disappearances and arbitrary arrests, and building excessive dams to change the Ahwazi rivers towards Persian cities, as well as change the demographic of Ahwazi Arabs.
Ahwazi and International Human rights organisations said that despite the passage of 93 years of occupation of Iran to Al-Ahwaz. Iran controls all aspects of life in Ahwaz through oppression, discrimination and systematic violations of the rights of the population.
Iran was distinguished in at least six categories of serious violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law in Ahwaz, such as indiscriminate executions without fair trials; forced displacement; arbitrary detention; severe torture and construction of dams to contaminate the land; settlements; as well as discriminatory policies that harm the Ahwazi Arab people.
Iranian forces and security forces killed more than 500 Ahwazi civilians in the previous and recent protests and uprisings (2005, 2011, 2017, and 2018) through shootings, executions, and killings under torture. Many of these crimes violate the international humanitarian law and international human rights law because they do not take all possible precautions to avoid violence. Some of which constitute war crimes, including the targeting of peaceful demonstrators and the killing of innocent people under torture on the charge of having dangerous for Iran national security.
Since 1989, the Iranian authorities have facilitated the transfer of settlers from Iranian areas to the Ahwazi cities with the aim of changing demographics, including the creating of the Ramin settlement, which has more than 250,000 settlers. Iran has built about 50 settlements for more than 1 million settlers in different parts of Ahwaz since 1979, so that some 200,000 settlers were moved to the city of Jamberon in less than 40 years. Iran applies Iranian civil law to settlers, but does not provide any rights to Ahwazi citizens despite the Ahwazi have an Iranian citizenship. Iran provides the settlers with the infrastructure, services, and support that deprive the Ahwazi of it, creating and strengthening a separate and unfair system of laws, rules, and services.
Iranian authorities have imprisoned 36,000 Ahwazi since 2005, most of them after trials in revolutionary courts, with a conviction rate of nearly 85 percent. In addition, hundreds of people are subject to administrative detention each year on the basis of secret evidence without charge or trial. Some were detained or imprisoned for their involvement in cultural and civic activities. Iran also jails children under the age of 18, creating a violation of international law. Many detainees, including children, face harsh conditions and ill-treatment.
Therefore, the international community, the League of Arab States and the Gulf Cooperation Council have been called upon to act immediately to end the occupation and to end the arbitrary policy against Ahwazi citizens who have suffered persecution since 1925, especially since the coming of the current regime in 1979. For example, the regime killed more than 500 Ahwazi at the beginning of the revolution in 1979 and this is the beginning to suppress peaceful demonstrators in Ahwaz.
The Empire Is Obsessed with Perverse Types Of Punishment
Western culture is clearly obsessed with rules, guilt, submissiveness and punishment.
By now it is clear that the West is the least free society on Earth. In North America and Europe, almost everyone is under constant scrutiny: people are spied on, observed, their personal information is being continually extracted, and the surveillance cameras are used indiscriminately.
Life is synchronized and managed. There are hardly any surprises.
One can sleep with whomever he or she wishes (as long as it is done within the ‘allowed protocol’). Homosexuality and bisexuality are allowed. But that is about all; that is how far ‘freedom’ usually stretches.
Rebellion is not only discouraged, it is fought against, brutally. For the tiniest misdemeanors or errors, people end up behind bars. As a result, the U.S. has more prisoners per capita than any other country on Earth, except the Seychelles.
And as a further result, almost all conversations, but especially public discourses, are now being controlled by so-called ‘political correctness’ and its variants.
But back to the culture of fear and punishment.
Look at the headlines of the Western newspapers. For example, The New York Times from April 12. 2018: “Punishment of Syria may be harsher this time”.
We are so used to such perverse language used by the Empire that it hardly strikes us as twisted, bizarre, pathological.
It stinks of some sadomasochistic cartoon, or of a stereotypical image of an atrocious English teacher holding a ruler over a pupil’s extended hands, shouting, “Shall I?”
Carl Gustav Jung described Western culture, on several occasions, as a “pathology”. He did it particularly after WWII, but he mentioned that the West had been committing terrible crimes in all parts of the world, for centuries. That is most likely why the Western mainstream psychiatrists and psychologists have been glorifying the ego-centric and generally apolitical Sigmund Freud, while ignoring, even defaming, Carl Gustav Jung.
The extreme form of sadism is a medical condition; it is an illness. And the West has been clearly demonstrating disturbing and dangerous behavioral patterns for many centuries.
Let’s look at the definition of sadism, or professionally, Sadistic Personality Disorder (SPD), which both the United States and Europe could easily be diagnosed with.
This is an excerpt of a common definition of the SPD, which appears in Medigoo.com and on many other on-line sites:
“…The sadistic personality disorder is characterized by a pattern of gratuitous cruelty, aggression, and demeaning behaviors which indicate the existence of deep-seated contempt for other people and an utter lack of empathy. Some sadists are “utilitarian”: they leverage their explosive violence to establish a position of unchallenged dominance within a relationship…”
It is familiar, isn’t it? The Empire’s behavior towards Indochina, China, Indonesia, Africa, Latin America, Russia, the Middle East and other parts of the world.
What about the symptoms?
“…Sadistic individuals have poor behavioral controls, manifested by a short temper, irritability, low frustration tolerance, and a controlling nature. From an interpersonal standpoint, they are noted to be harsh, hostile, manipulative, lacking in empathy, cold-hearted, and abrasive to those they deem to be their inferiors. Their cognitive nature is considered rigid and prone to social intolerance, and they are fascinated by weapons, war, and infamous crimes or perpetrators of atrocities. Sadists classically are believed to seek social positions that enable them to exercise their need to control others and dole out harsh punishment or humiliation…”
Just translate “sadistic individuals” to “sadistic states”, or “sadistic culture”.
Is there any cure? Can a sadist be effectively and successfully treated?
“Treating a sadistic personality disorder takes a long time…”
And many sites and publications carry a clear disclaimer:
“The above information is for processing purpose. The information provided herein should not be used during any medical emergency…”
And humanity is right now clearly at the crossroads, facing annihilation, not only a ‘medical emergency’. The world may soon have to literally fight for its survival. It is because of the SPD of the West and its Empire.
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So, what is in store for us now; for instance, for Syria?
What will the sadistic psychopath do to a country that refused to kneel, to prostitute itself, to beg for mercy, to sacrifice its people?
How horrible will the “punishment” be?
We have just witnessed 103 missiles being fired towards Damascus and Homs. But that is only what the Empire did to entertain its masses. It has been doing much more evil and cruel things to the nation which constantly refuses to glorify the Western imperialist and its neocon dogmas. For instance, the Empire’s ‘professionals’ have been manufacturing, training and arming the most atrocious terrorist groups and injecting them into the body of Syria.
The torture will, of course, continue. It clearly appears that this time the script will be based on some latter adaptation of the Marquise de Sade’s work, on his novel Juliette, not Justine. You see, in Justine, women were ‘only’ tied up, slapped and raped. In Juliette, they were cut to pieces, alive; they were burned and mutilated.
While Justine can still be read, no normal human being could go through the 700 pages of pure gore that is Juliette.
But our planet has somehow got used to the horrors that have been administered by the sick Western Empire.
People watch occurrences in places like Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq or Libya as ‘news’, not as the medical record of a severely ill psychiatric patient.
The most terrible ‘novel’ in the history of ourPlanet has been written, for centuries, by theappalling brutality and sadism of first Europe and then by its younger co-author – the United States.
And the human beings in many parts of our Planet have gotten so used to the carnage which surrounds them that they do not throw up anymore; they do not feel horrified, do not revolt against their fate. They just watch, as one country after another falls; is violated publicly, gets ravaged.
The mental illness of the perpetrator is undeniable. And it is contagious.
In turn, the extreme violence that has been engulfing the world has triggered various neuroses and mental conditions (masochism, extreme forms of submission, to name just two of many) among the victims.
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Freedom Equality Brotherhood. For French maybe but not for colonized Vietnamese
Exposure to the constant and extreme violence ‘prescribed’ and administered by the West, has left most of the world in a neurotic lethargy.
Like a woman locked in a marriage with a brutal religious fanatic husband in some oppressive society, the world has eventually stopped resisting against the Western dictates and tyranny, and ‘accepted its fate’.
Many parts of the planethave developed ‘Stockholm Syndrome’: after being kidnapped, imprisoned, tormented, raped and humiliated, the victims have ‘fallen in love’ with theirtyrant, adopting his worldview, while serving him full-heartedly and obediently.
This arrangement, of course, has nothing to do with the healthy or natural state of things!
In Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia, bizarre things are happening! People from those nations that have been robbed and devastated for centuries by the European and North American despots, have been flying happily and proudly to Paris, Berlin, London, Madrid, New York and other Western cities, in order to ‘learn’, to ‘study’ how to govern their own countries. There is usually no shame, and no stigma attached to such obvious intellectual prostitution.
Many victims are still dreaming about becoming like their victimizers, or even more so.
Many former and modern-day colonies of the West are listening, with straight faces, to the Europeans preaching to them (for a fee) about ‘good governance’, an ‘anti-corruption drive’ and’democracy’.
The media outlets of non-Western nations are taking news reports directly from Western press agencies. Even local political events are explained by those ‘wise’ and ‘superior’ Europeans and North Americans, not by the local thinkers. Locals are hardly ever trusted – only white faces with polished English, French or German accents are taken seriously.
Perverse? Is it perverse? Of course, it is! Many servile intellectuals from the ‘client’ states, when confronted, admit how sick the continuous global dictatorship is. Then they leave the table and continue to do what they have been doing for years and decades; the oldest profession in short.
Such a situation is truly insane. Or at least it is extremely paradoxical, bizarre, absurd. Even a mental clinic appears to make more sense than our beloved planet Earth.
However, clinical psychiatrists and psychologists are very rarely involved in analyzing the neuroses and psychological illnesses of the brutalized and colonized planet. They hardly ever ‘analyze’ the perpetrators, let alone expose them for what they really are.
Most of psychologists and psychiatrists are busy digging gold: encouraging human egotism, or even serving big corporations that are trying to ‘understand their employeesbetter’, in order to control and to exploit them more effectively. Other ‘doctors’ go so far as to directly serve the Empire, helping to oppress and to ‘pacify’ the billions living in the colonies and new colonies of the West.
In 2015, I was invited as one of the speakers to the 14th International Symposium on the Contributions of Psychology to Peace, held in Johannesburg and Pretoria, South Africa (hosted by legendary UNISA).
During that fascinating encounter of the leading global psychologists, I spoke about the impact of wars and imperialism on the human psyche, but I also listened, attentively. And I learned many shocking things. For instance, during his chilling presentation, “Human Rights and U. S. Psychologists’Wrongs: The Undermining of Professional Ethics in an Era of ‘Enhanced Interrogation’”, Professor Michael Wessells from Columbia University, New York, spoke about U.S. psychologists and their participation in torturing political prisoners.
Instead of diagnosing the Empire with SPD and other violent and dangerous conditions, many psychologists are actually helping to torture those who are opposing this unacceptable arrangement of the world.
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Names of and photos of murdered Chilean people by pro-US military junta
Those who refuse to ‘learn from the West’, to fall in love with it, or at least to serve it faithfully, are being brutally punished.
Lashes are hitting exposed flesh. Entire nations are being destroyed, genocides distributed to all continents. East Timor, Afghanistan, Iraq: it never stops.
Flogging Punjabi man by British colonialistTorrturing Vietnamese patriots by French colonialistsPoster of human zoo at Military Museum in Paris
I follow the discourses of the US and especially British UN delegations, ‘discussing’ Syria and even Russia. What comes to my mind is Punjab in India. I recall those old, historic photos of Indian men being hanged by the Brits, pants down, and flogged in public.
They have been doing this kind of stuff, for centuries. They like it. It clearly excites them. This is their democracy, their respect for human rights and for other cultures!
If someone refuses to take his or her pants down, they catch the person, rape him or her, then do the flogging anyway.
I also recall what my Ugandan friend used to tell me:
“When the Brits came to Africa, to what is now Uganda, their army would enter our villages and first thing they’d do was to select the tallest and strongest man around. They’d then tie him up, face towards the tree. Then the British commander would rape, sodomize him in front of everybody. This was how they showed the locals who is charge.”
How symbolic!
How healthy is the culture that has been controlling our world for centuries!
One of the most frightening things about mental illnesses is that the patient usually does not realize that he or she is suffering from them.
It is about the time for the rest of the world to treat the West as a mental patient, not as the ‘leader of the free and democratic world’.
We have to think, to gather, to develop a strategy of how to deal with this unfortunate, in fact, terrible situation!
If we refuse to understand and to act, we may all end up in the most dangerous situation: as complacent servants of the perverse whims of a frustrated, extremely aggressive and truly dangerous SPD patient.
The Liberal-National Coalition government has just made it harder for working class families to migrate to Australia, and effectively cut migration numbers at the same time.
The changes feed into the right-wing agitation against immigrants, making them scapegoats for deteriorating economic and social conditions. They also take to a new level the corporate model of migration, imposed by successive Coalition and Labor governments. This utilises a points-based system to prioritise readily-exploitable skilled employees for business, while restricting the number of poorer families.
As of April 1, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s government made significant alterations to the “assurance of support scheme.” This reactionary scheme denies migrants the right to bring family members to Australia unless they demonstrate to the government they can financially provide for them. The scheme is specifically designed to target poorer migrant families and is touted as a means to keep new migrants off welfare.
The amount of income that families must have to act as financial backers for their parents has been doubled. For example, previously a couple had to have a combined annual income of $45,185 to vouch for their parents. That total is now $115,475 a year. Similarly, a single person must now earn $86,606, up from $45,185.40. These income levels exclude millions of working class households.
Additionally, as of April 1, 2019, bank guarantee requirements for certain visas will be increased and expanded. These guarantees force migrant families to provide lump sum assurances to the government, which they must pay if a newly-arrived family member requires a payment from the government. For example, an assurer must guarantee $15,000 if the family member applies for a Contributory Parent or Aged Parent visa, up from $10,000 previously.
Chelsea Liu, a migration agent, told the media her clients, predominately from Chinese backgrounds, were confused and worried. “Some of our clients, they are already thinking of withdrawing their application, or [getting] family members’ or friends’ help to support their parents as well,” she said.
This attack on poor migrant families has paralleled moves by Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton to reduce the annual immigration intake. In February, Dutton publicly called for immigration levels to be cut. At the time, Treasurer Scott Morrison said that would cost the Australian economy up to $5 billion over four years by slowing growth and reducing the pool of skilled workers for employers.
It was reported this month that in a private meeting Dutton proposed reducing the annual immigration intake, currently capped at 190,000, by 20,000. Both Turnbull and Morrison denied the media report, but it is now clear that such a cut is being implemented.
The Australian reported last week that with tighter “vetting” methods undertaken by the Department of Home Affairs, the intake for 2017-18 was expected to hit a 10-year low of between 160,000 and 170,000.
Senator Pauline Hanson’s right-wing populist One Nation party has continued to demonise immigrants and refugees, especially Muslims and “Asians,” and demand harsher cuts to immigration. Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott has echoed this demand, reflecting worsening rifts inside the Coalition government.
Despite Turnbull’s formal rejection of large-scale immigration reductions, the entire migration policy is geared toward denying entry to poor and working-class families, while prioritising wealthy business people and workers with specialised skills required by big business.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) recently reported that changes made in July 2017 to the skilled independent subclass 189 visa may already have cut the migration intake. The new visa subclass is allocating places to New Zealand residents who have been in the country for five years or more.
The ABC revealed that 1,512 of these new visas had been issued since February, with 7,500 applications still being processed. With a 44,000-annual cap on skilled visas and between 60,000 to 80,000 eligible New Zealand residents in Australia, the changes may crowd out applicants from other countries.
New Zealanders living in Australia should have full civil, employment and political rights, as should all workers internationally, but the government is playing them off against other immigration applicants.
As part of this divisive policy, the government is also seeking to introduce university-level English language tests for citizenship, and give “special” treatment to white South African farmers supposedly facing persecution.
Greens immigration spokesman Senator Nick McKim said he was “deeply concerned” by the changes. “[Dutton] is seeking to cut immigration by stealth and to have more English-speaking, white and wealthy people migrate to Australia,” he told the Guardian.
The reality is Australia’s immigration policy has always been biased against poor working-class people, dating back to the racist White Australia policy, championed by the Labor Party and the trade unions, which existed for most of the 20th century.
Since the 1980s, one government after another has introduced anti-working class immigration cuts. During 1989–90, the Hawke Labor government specifically cut the parent intake from 10,900 to just 2,500 annually. In 1992, the Keating Labor government slashed migrant intakes and introduced vocational English language proficiency tests into the visa points system.
These policies were intensified by the Howard Coalition government from 1996 to 2007. It increased the required pass mark on English tests, imposed further limits on family immigration and introduced the Regional Sponsored Migration Scheme for companies in regional or remote areas to recruit workers from overseas.
After 2007, the Rudd-Gillard Labor governments and the Abbott-Turnbull Coalition governments stepped-up these discriminatory policies, focusing on making residency and citizenship for poor families increasingly difficult. While the Greens voice “concern,” they had firsthand experience in overseeing anti-immigrant and anti-refugee policies when they formed a de facto coalition with the minority Labor government from 2010 to 2013.
The latest attacks on poor migrant families will leave thousands of people scrambling to get large sums of money together, while their elderly parents and relatives languish, often in isolation, denied the basic right to family reunion.
Long-standing Indian plans to build a naval base on Assumption Island in Seychelles have stalled amid mounting resistance throughout the sparsely-populated 115-island, Indian Ocean nation.
Seychelles is strategically situated in the western Indian Ocean, about 1,500 kilometres east of Kenya. Its 94,000 people live on a group of 42 islands that sit astride east African and south Asian sea lanes, amongst the busiest in the world.
Wavel Ramkalawan, leader of the Linyon Demockratik Seselwa (LDS), a four-party opposition alliance, declared on March 22 that it will not ratify the India-Seychelles base agreement. Other political activists also have denounced the deal. The LDS holds a majority in the country’s parliament, after winning 15 positions in the 25-seat legislature in 2016.
The construction of an Indian base was first agreed between then Seychelles President James Michel and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in March 2015. The first visit to Seychelles by an Indian prime minister in more than 30 years was part of New Delhi’s drive to dominate the Indian Ocean and boost its strategic influence in Africa and the Middle East.
India has promised to invest $US550 million in the project. This includes renovating Assumption Island’s airstrip, upgrading its jetty and constructing new buildings for the Seychelles Coast Guard. Indian soldiers would also train archipelago forces as part of the 20-year agreement.
The Seychelles government hoped that the military base would increase the country’s capacity to patrol its 1.3-million square kilometre exclusive economic zone against illegal fishing, drug trafficking and piracy.
Full details of the agreement, however, were kept secret and not presented to the parliament as legally required, even when the Michel administration had a majority.
Information about the deal was then leaked and published on YouTube. This forced some revisions, including the insertion of clauses preventing India from using the base in times of war and disallowing nuclear-armed vessels at the facilities. LDS leader Ramkalawan declared, however, that the alliance would still not back the agreement in its current form.
If established, the base would dramatically increase India’s military presence in Seychelles, which has had a military cooperation deal with New Delhi since 2003. India built the Coastal Radar Surveillance (CRS) system in Seychelles in 2016 and has given the Seychelles Defense Forces three fast-track patrol vessels and one Dornier aircraft.
While the CRS is supposedly assisting Seychelles to combat piracy it also helps India track the movement of Chinese navy and merchant vessels across the Indian Ocean. A March 29 article by Abhishek Mishra in the Diplomat noted that apart from assisting “ensure safe passage of shipping vessels,” the “base could counter Chinese unilateralism and increasing securitisation of the Indian Ocean Region.”
Ralph Volcere, a Seychelles opposition activist, who has led protests against the base agreement, told Al Jazeera that India’s principal aim was to “monitor the energy transport of China.”
Volcere said Seychelles “cannot afford to be taking sides” in the “rivalry between China and India” over geo-strategic influence in the Indian Ocean. “[The] Chinese also wanted to build a base here, but we turned that down… we don’t want foreign military personnel here,” he said.
Although the anti-base opposition of Volcere and others is premised entirely on nationalist considerations, it reflects growing popular concern about the dangerous consequences of escalating rivalry between major powers in the Indian Ocean.
Washington’s strategic aim is to diplomatically and militarily isolate Beijing. It has enlisted India as a frontline state in this geo-strategic manoeuvring.
India, however, is facing “a lot of blowback in the region,” Delhi-based foreign policy commentator Manoj Joshi warned recently. “China is a subtext in India’s troubles in both Maldives and Seychelles,” he told Al Jazeera, adding: “China offers a leverage [for small countries] against a big neighbour like India.”
New Delhi’s attempts to strengthen military relations with Seychelles include offering assistance in health, science and technology, and renewable energy. It has promised also to invest $8.36 million in various civilian projects.
The Seychelles government is maintaining its political and economic relations with Beijing, however. Congratulating Xi Jinping on being reappointed Chinese president last month, Seychelles President Danny Faure said: “The One Belt, One Road initiative, in particular, reflects China’s determined willingness to play a more important role to improve the infrastructure for facilitation of world trade and integration.”
India is continuing its efforts to revive its stalled agreement with Seychelles. On April 10, the Wire, an Indian-based web site, reported apparent “closed door” activity between the two countries. The report quoted Seychelles Vice President Vincent Meriton who said: “A declaration will be made very soon to find a feasible way to build this facility because the country really needs it.”
After almost two weeks of mass protests, Armenia’s prime minister, Serzh Sargsyan, announced on Monday, April 23, that he would step down. Commentators in Russia and internationally expressed fears that the political crisis could lead to a renewed escalation of the frozen military conflict over Nagorno-Karabkh with neighboring Azerbaijan with potentially far-reaching consequences for the entire region.
The protests started 11 days earlier, after Sargsyan announced he would be the country’s prime minister after serving 10 years as president. In 2015, Sargsyan had pushed for changes to the constitution that would give him the same powers as prime minister that he had wielded as president.
Initially limited to a few hundred people, drawn largely from supporters of the liberal, pro-EU opposition, the protests rapidly embraced broader sections of the population and spread to cities other than the capital, Yerevan. By April 21, about 100,000 people had joined the protests across the country. Thousands of students at the country’s most important universities went on strike. There were also reports of strikes by workers at a number of factories. In a country of just under 3 million people, the protests involved a significant portion of the population and are among the largest in Armenian history.
Nikol Pashinian, who has been celebrated in the Western media as the opposition leader, announced on April 17 that the protest movement constituted a “non-violet velvet revolution.”
The scope of the protests, which took virtually everyone by surprise, and the involvement of sections of the working class indicate that more was involved than just the machinations of the pro-EU opposition, which has received barely 8 percent of the votes in the country’s last parliamentary elections.
After over a decade in power, Sargsyan was widely associated with a state of corruption and ill-begotten wealth at the top side-by-side with desperate poverty for the majority of the population.
The official unemployment rate stands at almost 18 percent, and almost every third Armenian lives beneath the very low poverty line. The average salary in the capital Yerevan was just $390 a month in 2016.
Unlike Russia, Azerbaijan or Kazakhstan, Armenia does not have any significant raw material resources, making it one of the poorest and economically most underdeveloped states that emerged out of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since then, about a third of the population has left the country because of the lack of jobs in Armenia.
Hundreds of protesters were arrested by the government, including several opposition leaders.
The situation tipped after the release of the opposition leader Nikol Pashinian on Sunday, April 22, failed to quell the protests. In a televised debate between Sargsyan and Pashinian on April 22, the opposition leader said, “You do not understand the situation in Armenia, the power is now in the hands of the people,” to which Sargsyan replied: “a party that has registered only 8 percent at the [legislative] elections cannot speak in the name of the people.”
On Monday, up to 200,000 people—almost a tenth of the country’s population—again took to the streets calling for Sargsyan to step down. Hundreds of members of the armed forces as well as clergy joined the protests, indicating that important sections of the state apparatus had by then also turned against Sargsyan.
However, the biggest fear of the Armenian bourgeoisie as a whole was that the protests would turn into a full-blown movement by the working class. In a desperate attempt to regain control over the situation, Sargsyan announced his resignation, describing the demonstration as a “turning point for the country.” Tens of thousands of people celebrated his resignation.
Pashinian immediately stepped forward, demanding snap elections and for allies of Sargsyan in the government to step down. Protests in support of Pashinian and the opposition on Tuesday drew significantly fewer people than those of the previous days, with about 10,000 supporters marching in Yerevan.
The Russian government has issued statements, insisting that the demonstrations were a matter of Armenia’s internal affairs, and indicating Moscow’s hope for a “smooth and peaceful political transition.” There is little question that the Kremlin, like the Armenian political establishment, fears a movement of the working class in the Caucasus that could quickly spread beyond the borders of the small country.
The US government and the European Union (EU) are closely following the situation, hoping that a change in government will further their own interests in the region by bringing the liberal opposition into power. US media like the Atlantic have celebrated the demonstrations as “Armenia’s Democratic Triumph.”
While broader sections of the working class and youth were involved in the protests, under conditions of the absence of any political organization that expresses their interests, the liberal opposition has been able to step forward in an attempt to reassert control over the situation in the interests of the bourgeoisie and to advance its own foreign policy agenda.
The political crisis in Armenia has implications far beyond the borders of the country. Due to its geographic location in the Caucasus, which functions as a bridgehead between eastern Europe and the Middle East and possesses some of the world’s largest oil reserves, developments in the region have far-reaching implications for the geopolitical situation internationally.
Ever since 1991, the Armenian government has maintained very close ties to Russia, by far its most important economic and military partner. Russia also has an important military base in southern Armenia. In recent years, however, the Armenian government has undertaken tentative steps toward a rapprochement with the EU. Yet in 2013, the government backed away from signing an Association Agreement with the EU, and instead joined the Russia-led Eurasian Union. The liberal opposition has sharply criticized this move and has continued to advocate for an Association Agreement with the EU.
In February 2017, the Armenian government announced that it wanted to work within both the EU and the Eurasian Union, and signed an agreement for closer economic and political ties with the EU. The liberal opposition advocates a pro-market platform and deeper cooperation with the EU, including EU membership. Several members and trustees of the opposition party Civil Contract, which Nikol Pashinian represents, are entrepreneurs, current or former members of the Armenian political establishment, or are working in the US.
The tactical differences over foreign policy within the Armenian bourgeoisie have been significantly exacerbated by the escalating war drive of US imperialism against Russia in both eastern Europe and the Middle East, while the development of growing working class struggles in both Europe and the Middle East has sent shock waves through the ruling class in the region.
Armenia is surrounded by Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Iran. Turkey is a NATO member and has historically had hostile relations with Armenia, while Georgia and Azerbaijan are closely aligned with US imperialism.
Iran, Armenia’s only foreign policy ally among its neighbors, was shaken by mass working class protests last winter. At the same time, the increasingly aggressive posture of US imperialism, which threatens all-out war with Iran, has exacerbated nervousness and tensions in the entire Caucasus. Russian media have been running reports that US-backed Israel and Iran are standing on the brink of war.
Armenia itself has been in a state of war with its neighbor, Azerbaijan, over Nagorno-Karabakh, a small mountain enclave in southern Azerbaijan, since the late 1980s. The war over the territory from 1988 to 1994 took the lives of 20,000 to 30,000, wounded 50,000 and permanently displaced hundreds of thousands of people. The conflict was never resolved, and border clashes have occurred repeatedly in recent years.
Both in the Russian media and in Armenia there were warnings that the current political crisis might fuel a renewed outbreak of the conflict. Thus, the Russian online newspaper Gazeta.Ru warned that the South Caucasus could become “something like a Middle East in miniature, the hearth for a new war,” if Azerbaijan were to exploit the current political crisis in Armenia and intervene militarily to reestablish control over Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan, one of the most important oil-producing countries in the world, has maintained close ties to both the EU and especially US imperialism, which has built up extensive ties with Azeri oil and gas companies since 1991. Azerbaijan has also been an important ally in the US war preparations against Iran and would likely receive US backing in any open military clash with Armenia.
US stocks tumbled Tuesday after a warning from executives of the industrial giant Caterpillar scared investors and the 10-year Treasury yield climbed to 3 percent for the first time since 2014. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 600 points at one point, extending the index’s losing streak to five sessions.
The S&P 500 dropped 35.73 points, or 1.3 percent, to 2634.56. The Nasdaq Composite fell 121.25 points, or 1.7 percent, to 7007.35.
Markets opened higher, but fell significantly after Caterpillar released its profit margins for the first quarter. It reported earnings and revenue that beat expectations, sending the stock higher initially. Investors cheered the latest corporate earnings, sending the Dow up by 131 points at its session high. Major corporations such as United Technologies, Verizon and Coca-Cola reported better-than-expected earnings as well.
But the industrial giant’s shares sunk later in the day, sparking a mass sell-off throughout the stock market, after Caterpillar Chief Financial Officer Brad Halverson said the company’s first-quarter profit “will be the high-water mark for the year” because of expected increases in investment later in 2018.
Caterpillar is seen as a barometer for the state of the economy and stock market. According to Kensho, an analytics company, Caterpillar’s stock has had a 0.81 correlation with the Dow over the last six months.
Caterpillar shares fell by 6.2 percent after Halverson’s comment, with other corporations following suit. 3M, the maker of scotch tape and Post-it notes, saw its shares fall by 6.8 percent. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, saw its shares decline by 4.8 percent. Facebook, Amazon and Netflix shares all fell over 3 percent.
Meanwhile, Wall Street was also spooked by the changes in the 10-year Treasury yield. The 10-year Treasury is seen as a proxy for interest rates and a predictor of the long-term outlook for the US economy. The yield on the 10-year is one of the most closely followed financial measures in the world, as mortgages and corporate loans are closely tied to the government bonds.
The stock market’s fall reflects investors’ fear of rising interest rates and a national struggle for higher wages. Workers winning wage increases would be considered a disaster for Wall Street. The parasitic growth of the stock market has been fueled by the suppression of the class struggle. A rise in working-class militancy would send the inflated share values into a precipitous decline.
The American ruling class is well aware of the threat and is ruthlessly attempting to prevent a nationwide movement. Earlier this month, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon suggested a sharp rise in interest rates to halt economic growth and increase unemployment. The aim of such a policy would be to demoralize workers, allowing more pressing austerity measure and wage cuts.
The national wave of teacher strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona and other states is particularly alarming to the American ruling class. Wage increases have been a central demand in each movement. The ruling class is frightened that the teachers’ demands may trigger a nationwide struggle for higher wages.
Facebook, the world’s largest social media company, spelled out for the first time the criteria it uses to censor speech on its platform, purely at its own discretion, and with no legal oversight or recourse.
Its “community guidelines” are so sweeping and broad that effectively any statement expressing any critical political view can be constrained as violent, defamatory, “extremist,” “bullying” or—in the most sweeping catchall—“fake news,” and flagged for removal or undetectable censorship.
These “community guidelines” are used by the 20,000 in Facebook’s “security” and “moderation” departments—constituting the absolute majority of the company’s employees—to shape political discourse and block content the massive and unaccountable technology monopoly deems objectionable.
The centerpiece of this censorship apparatus is Facebook’s policy regarding “fake news.” In its newly released community guidelines, the social media monopoly made clear that it would not let users know their content is being blocked from distribution as “fake news” because such censorship is a “sensitive issue”:
Reducing the spread of false news on Facebook is a responsibility that we take seriously. We also recognize that this is a challenging and sensitive issue. We want to help people stay informed without stifling productive public discourse. There is also a fine line between false news and satire or opinion. For these reasons, we don’t remove false news from Facebook but instead, significantly reduce its distribution by showing it lower in the News Feed.
The campaign against “Fake News” was initiated in November 2016, immediately following the 2016 election, by the US intelligence agencies, the Democratic Party, and the major technology giants. This cabal, shocked by the electoral defeat of Hillary Clinton, the favored candidate of the military/intelligence apparatus, and the widespread support for socialist ideas reflected in broad support for the campaign of Bernie Sanders, initiated a media offensive aimed at pinning the growth of social opposition on an amorphous, and rarely defined, concept called “fake news.”
Although the hundreds of accounts in major newspapers devoted to the topic never defined what “fake news” is, Hillary Clinton, in her memoir of the 2016 election, put the genesis of “fake news” with WikiLeaks and its release of documents revealing the Clinton campaign to have rigged the 2016 primary and engaged in corrupt relations with Wall Street.
Given that no one has ever pointed out any inaccuracies in WikiLeaks’ reporting, the clear implication is that the definition of “fake news” is any information, whether true or false, that is damaging or discrediting to the state.
In other words, the blocking of “fake news” by the major technology giants, working on behalf of the US intelligence agencies, is nothing but political censorship.
Given this fact, Facebook’s wording is highly significant. Because the suppression of “fake news,” i.e., censorship, is a “sensitive issue,” the company will do it secretly, by “significantly reduc[ing] its distribution by showing it lower in the News Feed.”
La Rochefoucauld’s maxim that “hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue” applies here. Since journalists, publishers and users would raise a hue and cry over their content being censored, Facebook simply carries out its censorship in secret. By blocking distribution on the Facebook news feed, the company’s actions have the same effect as simply deleting content, but without any legal proof that the company violated its users’ First Amendment rights.
While Facebook is the only technology company that has spelled out these actions with such directness, Google and Twitter have both admitted, via legal representatives in congressional testimony that they follow a similar policy to suppress “fake news”—i.e., oppositional viewpoints.
Facebook’s admission is yet another vindication of the campaign launched by the World Socialist Web Site to expose political censorship by Google and other technology giants, an allegation in an open letter published August 25 that the company was engaged in “enforcing authoritarian-style direct and deliberate blacklisting.”
The World Socialist Web Site published its letter in response to the revelation that leading left-wing, anti-war, and socialist web sites had their search traffic from Google fall by up to 75 percent after the company announced measures to “improve” its search system.
It is now clear that the WSWS’s allegations were entirely correct. The technology giants, unbeknownst to their users, are blocking “alternative” news sources and promoting “trusted” news outlets, including, as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg put it earlier this year, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal .
The measures taken in secret to limit the distribution of critical political viewpoints are accompanied by more explicit censorship measures. In a quarterly report published Monday, Google bragged that it removed over 8 million videos from YouTube, of which the great majority—some 6.7 million—were “first flagged for review by machines rather than humans.” More than three quarters of the videos flagged by Google’s AI systems “were removed before they received a single view.”
The company declared, “Deploying machine learning actually means more people reviewing content, not fewer. Our systems rely on human review to assess whether content violates our policies.” Like Facebook, Google has hired an army of censors, aiming to employ 10,000 people in this department by the end of the year.
Facebook and Google are under no legal obligation to police its content. As communications companies, they are not responsible under US law for what its users say or do on its platform. They have, rather, voluntarily become an arm of the US police and law enforcement agencies, but with one caveat: as a private corporation, they claim exemption, speciously, from the protections under the First Amendment barring the state from impinging on the freedom of expression.
The real target of the crackdown by the technology giants on the freedom of speech is not “fake news,” “extremist content,” or any other of the myriad catchphrases used to justify censorship. It is, rather, the growth of oppositional sources of news and political analysis, and the use of social media to organize political resistance. As the strike movement by workers in the United States and internationally continues to grow, the technology giants will only expand their assault on the freedom of expression.
Over the past six years, with virtually no publicity, some of Australia’s most prominent trade unions have pioneered a “new cooperative approach” to workplace bargaining to inflict mass retrenchments, wage reductions and the overturning of hard-won conditions on their members.
Supervised by the Fair Work Commission (FWC), established by the last Labor government of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, the “interest-based bargaining” (IBB) system takes to a new level many decades of union collaboration with employers and governments.
The IBB regime has already been used to implement wholesale restructuring, casualisation and the demolition of basic conditions at major workplaces, including Sydney Water, News Corp, Orora Fibre Packaging, Alcoa and Patrick stevedoring.
In the forefront are prominent unions, such as the Australian Services Union (ASU), the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU), the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) and the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU).
Ever since the Keating Labor government and the unions imposed enterprise-by-enterprise bargaining during the early 1990s, unions have used enterprise bargaining agreements (EBAs) to split the working class into individual workplaces, suppress most industrial action and subordinate workers to the profit demands of “their” employers.
This corporatist partnership was forged between the unions, governments and the corporate elite through the “Accords” struck by the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) with the Hawke Labor government in the 1980s, in order to make Australian capitalism “internationally competitive.”
IBB goes further by junking the previous “position-based bargaining” approach, in which some unions still went through the motions of presenting employers with logs of claims, supposedly based on a mandate from their members, before entering closed-door talks with corporate executives behind workers’ backs.
IBB casts aside even the notion of employers and unions starting from different “positions.” Instead, it is based, from the outset of a bargaining period, on delivering “collaborative transformations” by “exploring the common interests” with management and devising means of satisfying those interests at workers’ expense.
What this means in practice can be seen from three IBB case studies on the Fair Work Commission’s website. The first was at Sydney Water, a semi-privatised New South Wales state government utility. The ASU worked with senior executives to push through a 2012 EBA that delivered a near-20 percent cut in costs to satisfy the demands of the state government.
The EBA, which allowed Sydney Water to outsource maintenance, also “amended redundancy and re-deployment provisions” and “rosters and shift changes.” A joint ASU-management “road show” travelled to depots to persuade union members to accept the agreed changes, but encountered “difficult discussions” and “hot meetings, with hot conversations.”
That hostility reflected the fact that “many employees in Civil Delivery saw significant declines in take-home pay because of new shift arrangements.”
Beating down this opposition was just the beginning of a “new cooperative relationship between the enterprise and the union,” formalised by a memorandum of understanding signed by the managing director and the ASU state secretary.
New consultative mechanisms were established at different levels throughout Sydney Water. “At the top,” the managing director “agreed to attend two meetings each year of the ASU’s Committee of Management, while the ASU secretary attended two meetings each year of Sydney Water’s Executive.” More “informally,” the two leaders “established a relationship that allowed them to contact each other whenever issues arose.”
In other words, from the top down, the union works with management to report on and silence opposition by workers. One union official noted: “Of course, they still have a blue every day, but we’ve really changed the culture of the workplace.”
Union and company officials alike heaped praise on the “facilitator” of this partnership, Fair Work Commission (FWC) deputy president Anna Booth, a former national secretary of the Textile, Clothing and Footwear Union of Australia and ACTU vice president.
At Orora packaging, which was “demerged” from Amcor in 2013, there was similar acclaim for Booth and another FWC commissioner, ex-AMWU national president Julius Roe. With their facilitation, the printing division of the AMWU partnered with Orora to shut down a plant at Somerton, near Melbourne, carry out three rounds of redundancies and impose other “negative effects on the workforce, notably a reduction in take-home pay for many workers.”
This process was enforced from the top. It began with a February 2013 “off the record” discussion at the FWC. Participants included the AMWU national secretary and the CEO of Amcor Australasia. On the shopfloor, union delegates acted as “troubleshooters as required” for an AMWU-management Steering Group.
Even greater job losses—up to 70 percent of the workforce—were inflicted by the AMWU and Electrical Trades Union (ETU) at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp Melbourne Print Centre (MPC), during 2015 and 2016.
After a “training session” at the FWC, attended by union officials and delegates, and a host of senior News Corp managers, the “collaborative change” also featured “changes to shift and roster arrangements,” “multi-skilling,” greater “use of casual staff” and reduced payment of wage penalty rates.
A union official acknowledged that the process was difficult because it required many redundancies, both forced and “voluntary,” so “there was conflict there … very emotional.”
The “MPC Collaboration Team”—a three-level hierarchy of joint management-union committees—was headed by a Senior Steering Committee consisting of the AMWU Printing Division national secretary and News Corp’s national director of production.
Murdoch’s managers were so impressed with the outcomes that the partnership is being extended. According to the FWC case study: “Beyond the MPC, the next step is to continue the collaboration to other print sites around Australia.”
Among the FWC’s other “success stories” are three involving the MUA, which has been falsely depicted by the media and various pseudo-left groups as a “militant” union. They relate to two rig crewing companies, Go Offshore and MMA Offshore, and Patrick, a national stevedoring business.
Patrick led a major attack on dockworkers in 1998, then worked with the MUA to halve its workforce. It joined the FWC’s “New Approaches” program with the MUA in 2015. Since then, “the parties have been able to focus on shared interests in the success of the ports and have saved millions of dollars.”
At Sydney’s Macquarie University, the NTEU, which postures as a “progressive” union, is collaborating intensively with management through IBB to try to push through an EBA that will mean a real wage cut and academics being coerced into having 80 percent of their workloads allocated to teaching.
According to the FWC’s latest annual report, its “New Approaches: Cooperative and productive workplaces” program was in operation at 24 workplaces as at June 30, 2017, up from 17 a year earlier.
The IBB process is a new stage in the decades-long transformation of the unions into corporatist entities. They have been totally integrated into management, functioning as nothing but instruments for imposing the agenda of the corporate elite on their members.
This also exposes the reality behind the ACTU’s current “Change the Rules”advertising blitz. Conscious of the hostility that has built up in the working class against the corporate assault that the unions have policed for decades, the ACTU is trying to divert the discontent into a campaign for the return of yet another pro-business Labor government. At the same time, the unions are using IBB and the other Fair Work “rules” to accelerate the dismantling of workers’ jobs and conditions.
