Mandela Institute for Development Studies (MINDS)/Old Mutual Masters Scholarships 2019/2020 for African Students

Application Deadline: Ongoing

Eligible Countries: African Students


To be taken at (Institutions): 

• Strathmore University, Kenya
• University of Cape Town, South Africa
• University of Witwatersrand, South Africa
• Kwame Nkrumah University of Science & Technology, Ghana
• University of Ibadan, Nigeria
• University of Development Studies, Ghana

About the Award: MINDS Scholarships are applicable to full-time studies of a one or two-year Honours or Master’s degree at one of the MINDS preferred institutions in Africa. As one of the partners of the programme, Old Mutual sponsors studies related to Actuarial Sciences, Finance, Business Sciences and Accounting for students studying in South African, Kenyan and Nigerian institutions.

Type: Masters

Eligibility: To be considered for a MINDS Scholarship, you must:

• Be a national of an African country, residing in any African country;
• Have been formally accepted by one or more MINDS preferred institution/s outside of your country of citizenship and/ or residency;
• Have been formally accepted by one or more MINDS preferred institution/s to pursue postgraduate studies within the following year;
• Have obtained at least 70% in each subject/ course in the last two completed years of study;
• Produce evidence of demonstrated leadership abilities or potential guided by the questions/ requirements set out in the application form;
• Submit a complete application form with the required supporting documentation as set out on the application form.

Selection Criteria: Individuals with a Pan-African outlook, demonstrated leadership ability and an excellent academic record who wish to study elsewhere on the African continent, but outside their home country, are invited to apply for the scholarships.

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award: Each scholarship covers the expenses below, depending on whether a partial or full scholarship is awarded:

• Tuition
• Accommodation and meals
• One return ticket per duration of studies
• A fixed stipend

Duration of Programme: 1 or 2 years.

How to Apply:  Apply now

• It is important to go through all application requirements on the Programme Webpage see link below) before applying

Visit Programme Webpage for Details

With Monsanto and Glyphosate on the Run AAAS Revokes Award to Scientists Whose Studies Led to Ban on Weedkiller in Sri Lanka and Other Countries

Russell Mokhiber

Congresswoman and Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) last week called for a ban.

“We need to ban all products containing glyphosate, including Roundup,” Gabbard tweeted on February 16. “It’s poisoning our people, butterflies and other insects, the land and the water.”

And then again today, Gabbard tweeted: “Monsanto proves they’ll do anything to pad their pockets, including manufacturing ‘scientific studies’ to influence the EPA while destroying small farmers. They unleashed the scourge of Roundup on us and should be held accountable for the consequences.”

Also last week the Guardian reported on a broad new scientific analysis showing that people with high exposures to the popular pesticides have a 41% increased risk of developing a type of cancer called non-Hodgkin lymphoma.”

Last August, a jury in San Francisco awarded $289 million to a former school groundskeeper who said Monsanto’s Roundup left him dying of cancer.

But now comes the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

On February 4, 2019, the AAAS put out a press release announcing it was awarding the 2019 Scientific Freedom and Integrity award to two scientists, Sarath Gunatilake and Channa Jayasumana, whose research into the hazards of glyphosate led to the banning of the weedkiller in Sri Lanka and other countries.

“Drs. Sarath Gunatilake and Channa Jayasumana faced death threats and claims of research misconduct while working to determine the cause of a kidney disease epidemic that has claimed tens of thousands of lives in their home country of Sri Lanka and around the world,” the AAAS said in its press release. “Ultimately, their advocacy led to the culprit, an herbicide called glyphosate, being banned in several affected countries.”

“To right a wrong when significant financial interests are at stake and the power imbalance between industry and individual is at play takes the unique combination of scientific rigor, professional persistence and acceptance of personal risk demonstrated by the two scientists recognized by this year’s award,” said Jessica Wyndham, director of the Scientific Responsibility, Human Rights and Law Program at AAAS in the press release.

Then, the next day, the researchers received an email from Wyndham telling them that the award has been revoked and the press release taken down.

“As discussed over the phone earlier today, following the announcement of the Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award yesterday, AAAS has received concerns from scientists and members of the organization that we consider need assessment,” Wyndham wrote. “That means that we will not be able to present to you and Dr. Jayasumana the Award next week as originally planned.”

“We are defining the assessment process, but in general I expect it will involve convening subject matter experts, including those from within AAAS’ governing bodies, so that their concerns can be elaborated. There will of course be an opportunity for you and Dr. Jayasumana to be engaged in the process. Following that review we will determine next steps.”

“As I mentioned, I do not suggest cancelling the tickets altogether at this stage, but rather suspending them until after the assessment has reached its conclusion. Travel costs that you and Dr. Jayasumana may have incurred because of this change will be reimbursed once we know how we are proceeding.”

Wyndham did not return calls seeking comment for this article.

“I feel this is an insult, discrimination, humiliation to a scientist live in poor third world country,” Jayasumana told Corporate Crime Reporter last week.  “All my friends and colleagues ask why award is pulled after the announcement. I have no answer. I feel industry is behind this shameless process.”

“The AAAS has a lot of explaining to do about why they revoking an award to these two scientists,” said Gary Ruskin of US Right to Know. “The appearance here is that the AAAS is caving to the agrichemical industry.”

“The AAAS has many significant ties to the agrichemical industry.  An influential former AAAS president, Nina Federoff, works for the Big Ag lobbying firm Olsson Frank. Other former AAAS presidents, such as Peter Raven, have close ties to Monsanto.”

And former Monsanto employee Alison L. Van Eenennaam is the incoming chair of the AAAS Agriculture, Food and Renewable Resources Steering Group.

“Is corporate corruption eating at the heart of American science?” Ruskin asked.

Mapping the American War on Terror – Now in 80 Countries, It Couldn’t Be More Global

Stephanie Savell

In September 2001, the Bush administration launched the “Global War on Terror.” Though “global” has long since been dropped from the name, as it turns out, they weren’t kidding.

When I first set out to map all the places in the world where the United States is still fighting terrorism so many years later, I didn’t think it would be that hard to do. This was before the 2017 incident in Niger in which four American soldiers were killed on a counterterror mission and Americans were given an inkling of how far-reaching the war on terrorism might really be. I imagined a map that would highlight Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Syria — the places many Americans automatically think of in association with the war on terror — as well as perhaps a dozen less-noticed countries like the Philippines and Somalia. I had no idea that I was embarking on a research odyssey that would, in its second annual update, map U.S. counterterror missions in 80 countries in 2017 and 2018, or 40% of the nations on this planet (a map first featured in Smithsonian magazine).

As co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, I’m all too aware of the costs that accompany such a sprawling overseas presence. Our project’s research shows that, since 2001, the U.S. war on terror has resulted in the loss — conservatively estimated — of almost half a million lives in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan alone. By the end of 2019, we also estimate that Washington’s global war will cost American taxpayers no less than $5.9 trillion already spent and in commitments to caring for veterans of the war throughout their lifetimes.

In general, the American public has largely ignored these post-9/11 wars and their costs. But the vastness of Washington’s counterterror activities suggests, now more than ever, that it’s time to pay attention. Recently, the Trump administration has been talking of withdrawing from Syria and negotiating peace with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Yet, unbeknownst to many Americans, the war on terror reaches far beyond such lands and under Trump is actually ramping up in a number of places. That our counterterror missions are so extensive and their costs so staggeringly high should prompt Americans to demand answers to a few obvious and urgent questions: Is this global war truly making Americans safer? Is it reducing violence against civilians in the U.S. and other places? If, as I believe, the answer to both those questions is no, then isn’t there a more effective way to accomplish such goals?

Combat or “Training” and “Assisting”?

The major obstacle to creating our database, my research team would discover, was that the U.S. government is often so secretive about its war on terror. The Constitution gives Congress the right and responsibility to declare war, offering the citizens of this country, at least in theory, some means of input. And yet, in the name of operational security, the military classifies most information about its counterterror activities abroad.

The U.S. is fighting its global war on terror in 40% of the world’s nations

(Stephanie Savell, Costs of War Project, originally published in the February issue of Smithsonian magazine)

This is particularly true of missions in which there are American boots on the ground engaging in direct action against militants, a reality, my team and I found, in 14 different countries in the last two years. The list includes Afghanistan and Syria, of course, but also some lesser known and unexpected places like Libya, Tunisia, Somalia, Mali, and Kenya. Officially, many of these are labeled “train, advise, and assist” missions, in which the U.S. military ostensibly works to support local militaries fighting groups that Washington labels terrorist organizations. Unofficially, the line between “assistance” and combat turns out to be, at best, blurry.

Some outstanding investigative journalists have documented the way this shadow war has been playing out, predominantly in Africa. In Niger in October 2017, as journalists subsequently revealed, what was officially a training mission proved to be a “kill or capture” operation directed at a suspected terrorist.

Such missions occur regularly. In Kenya, for instance, American service members are actively hunting the militants of al-Shabaab, a US-designated terrorist group. In Tunisia, there was at least one outright battle between joint U.S.-Tunisian forces and al-Qaeda militants. Indeed, two U.S. service members were later awarded medals of valor for their actions there, a clue that led journalists to discover that there had been a battle in the first place.

In yet other African countries, U.S. Special Operations forces have planned and controlled missions, operating in “cooperation with” — but actually in charge of — their African counterparts. In creating our database, we erred on the side of caution, only documenting combat in countries where we had at least two credible sources of proof, and checking in with experts and journalists who could provide us with additional information. In other words, American troops have undoubtedly been engaged in combat in even more places than we’ve been able to document.

Another striking finding in our research was just how many countries there were — 65 in all — in which the U.S. “trains” and/or “assists” local security forces in counterterrorism. While the military does much of this training, the State Department is also surprisingly heavily involved, funding and training police, military, and border patrol agents in many countries. It also donates equipment, including vehicle X-ray detection machines and contraband inspection kits. In addition, it develops programs it labels “Countering Violent Extremism,” which represent a soft-power approach, focusing on public education and other tools to “counter terrorist safe havens and recruitment.”

Such training and assistance occurs across the Middle East and Africa, as well as in some places in Asia and Latin America. American “law enforcement entities” trained security forces in Brazil to monitor terrorist threats in advance of the 2016 Summer Olympics, for example (and continued the partnership in 2017). Similarly, U.S. border patrol agents worked with their counterparts in Argentina to crack down on suspected money laundering by terrorist groups in the illicit marketplaces of the tri-border region that lies between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay.

To many Americans, all of this may sound relatively innocuous — like little more than generous, neighborly help with policing or a sensibly self-interested fighting-them-over-there-before-they-get-here set of policies. But shouldn’t we know better after all these years of hearing such claims in places like Iraq and Afghanistan where the results were anything but harmless or effective?

Such training has often fed into, or been used for, the grimmest of purposes in the many countries involved. In Nigeria, for instance, the U.S. military continues to work closely with local security forces which have used torture and committed extrajudicial killings, as well as engaging in sexual exploitation and abuse. In the Philippines, it has conducted large-scale joint military exercises in cooperation with President Rodrigo Duterte’s military, even as the police at his command continue to inflict horrific violence on that country’s citizenry.

The government of Djibouti, which for years has hosted the largest U.S. military base in Africa, Camp Lemonnier, also uses its anti-terrorism laws to prosecute internal dissidents. The State Department has not attempted to hide the way its own training programs have fed into a larger kind of repression in that country (and others). According to its 2017 Country Reports on Terrorism, a document that annually provides Congress with an overview of terrorism and anti-terror cooperation with the United States in a designated set of countries, in Djibouti, “the government continued to use counterterrorism legislation to suppress criticism by detaining and prosecuting opposition figures and other activists.”

In that country and many other allied nations, Washington’s terror-training programs feed into or reinforce human-rights abuses by local forces as authoritarian governments adopt “anti-terrorism” as the latest excuse for repressive practices of all sorts.

A Vast Military Footprint

As we were trying to document those 65 training-and-assistance locations of the U.S. military, the State Department reports proved an important source of information, even if they were often ambiguous about what was really going on. They regularly relied on loose terms like “security forces,” while failing to directly address the role played by our military in each of those countries.

Sometimes, as I read them and tried to figure out what was happening in distant lands, I had a nagging feeling that what the American military was doing, rather than coming into focus, was eternally receding from view. In the end, we felt certain in identifying those 14 countries in which American military personnel have seen combat in the war on terror in 2017-2018. We also found it relatively easy to document the seven countries in which, in the last two years, the U.S. has launched drone or other air strikes against what the government labels terrorist targets (but which regularly kill civilians as well): Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. These were the highest-intensity elements of that U.S. global war. However, this still represented a relatively small portion of the 80 countries we ended up including on our map.

In part, that was because I realized that the U.S. military tends to advertise — or at least not hide — many of the military exercises it directs or takes part in abroad. After all, these are intended to display the country’s global military might, deter enemies (in this case, terrorists), and bolster alliances with strategically chosen allies. Such exercises, which we documented as being explicitly focused on counterterrorism in 26 countries, along with lands which host American bases or smaller military outposts also involved in anti-terrorist activities, provide a sense of the armed forces’ behemoth footprint in the war on terror.

Although there are more than 800 American military bases around the world, we included in our map only those 40 countries in which such bases are directly involved in the counterterror war, including Germany and other European nations that are important staging areas for American operations in the Middle East and Africa.

To sum up: our completed map indicates that, in 2017 and 2018, seven countries were targeted by U.S. air strikes; double that number were sites where American military personnel engaged directly in ground combat; 26 countries were locations for joint military exercises; 40 hosted bases involved in the war on terror; and in 65, local military and security forces received counterterrorism-oriented “training and assistance.”

A Better Grand Plan

How often in the last 17 years has Congress or the American public debated the expansion of the war on terror to such a staggering range of places? The answer is: seldom indeed.

After so many years of silence and inactivity here at home, recent media and congressional attention to American wars in Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen represents a new trend. Members of Congress have finally begun calling for discussion of parts of the war on terror. Last Wednesday, for instance, the House of Representatives voted to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, and the Senate has passed legislation requiring Congress to vote on the same issue sometime in the coming months.

On February 6th, the House Armed Services Committee finally held a hearing on the Pentagon’s “counterterrorism approach” — a subject Congress as a whole has not debated since, several days after the 9/11 attacks, it passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force that Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and now Donald Trump have all used to wage the ongoing global war. Congress has not debated or voted on the sprawling expansion of that effort in all the years since. And judging from the befuddled reactions of several members of Congress to the deaths of those four soldiers in Niger in 2017, most of them were (and many probably still are) largely ignorant of how far the global war they’ve seldom bothered to discuss now reaches.

With potential shifts afoot in Trump administration policy on Syria and Afghanistan, isn’t it finally time to assess in the broadest possible way the necessity and efficacy of extending the war on terror to so many different places? Research has shown that using war to address terror tactics is a fruitless approach. Quite the opposite of achieving this country’s goals, from Libya to Syria, Niger to Afghanistan, the U.S. military presence abroad has often only fueled intense resentment of America. It has helped to both spread terror movements and provide yet more recruits to extremist Islamist groups, which have multiplied substantially since 9/11.

In the name of the war on terror in countries like Somalia, diplomatic activities, aid, and support for human rights have dwindled in favor of an ever more militarized American stance. Yet research shows that, in the long term, it is far more effective and sustainable to address the underlying grievances that fuel terrorist violence than to answer them on the battlefield.

All told, it should be clear that another kind of grand plan is needed to deal with the threat of terrorism both globally and to Americans — one that relies on a far smaller U.S. military footprint and costs far less blood and treasure. It’s also high time to put this threat in context and acknowledge that other developments, like climate change, may pose a far greater danger to our country.

The International Rogue Nation: America

Eric Zuesse

In 2003, America (and its lap-dog UK) invaded and destroyed Iraq on the basis of lies to the effect that the U.S. (and UK) regime were certain that Saddam Hussein had and was developing weapons of mass destruction. These U.S. allegations were based on provable falsehoods when they were stated and published, but the regime’s ‘news’-media refused to publish and demonstrate (or “expose”) any of these lies. That’s how bad the regime was (and its media’s ‘news’ were) — this was virtually a total lock-down against truth, and for international conquest (in that case, of Iraq): it was mass-murder and destruction on the basis of sheer lies, by the regime and its stenographers.

That’s today’s U.S. Government — that’s its reality, not  its ‘pro-democracy’ and ‘human rights’ myth. (After all: its main ally is the Saud regime, which the U.S. regime is now helping to starve and kill by cholera perhaps millions of Houthis to death.)

In 2011, the U.S. regime, then under a different nominal leader than in the Iraq invasion, invaded and destroyed Libya — also on the basis of lies that its press (which is controlled by the same billionaires who control the nation’s two political Parties) stenographically published from the Government and refused ever to expose as being lies.

In 2011-2019 (but actually starting undercover in 2009), the U.S. regime (and its then allies King Saud and Tayyip Erdogan, and the Thanis who own Qatar) hired tens of thousands of jihadis from around the world to serve as foot-soldiers (the U.S. regime calls them ‘rebels’), in order to bring down Syria’s secular, non-sectarian, Government, and thereby, via these jihadist proxy-forces, they invaded and destroyed Syria — likewise on the basis of lies that the ‘news’-media hid, secreting from the public such facts as that “The US Government’s Interpretation of the Technical Intelligence It Gathered Prior to and After the August 21 Attack CANNOT POSSIBLY BE CORRECT.” But the lies are never publicly acknowledged by any of the participating regimes and their press.This is an international empire of death and destruction based upon lies.

In 2011-2014, the U.S. regime perpetrated a bloody coup that ousted Ukraine’s democratically elected Government and replaced it by a fascist rabidly anti-Russian regime that destroyed Ukraine and perpetrated ethnic cleansing. How much of this reality was being reported in the U.S. regime’s press, at the time, or even afterward? It was hidden news at the time, and so those realities have since become buried, to become now only hidden history; and the U.S. regime and its ‘news’-media continue to hide all of this ugly reality. It remains hidden, and isn’t mentioned by either the regime or its press.

Right now, the U.S. regime (along with its other lap-dog Canada) is perpetrating, or at least attempting to perpetrate, a coup to take over Venezuela.

On February 8th, the Latin American Geopolitical Strategic Center (CELAG) issued their study, “The Economic Consequences of the Boycott of Venezuela”, and reported that throughout the five-year period of 2013-2017, Venezuela’s “economy and society suffered a suffocation [of] $ 22.5 billion in annual revenues, as a result of a deliberate international strategy of financial isolation [of Venezuela]. Evidently, this financial pressure intensified since 2015 with the fall in the price of crude oil.” So: that’s a total loss of over $112 billion from Venezuela during the entire 5-year period, and the result has become (especially after 2014) the impoverishment of the country. The U.S. regime and its allies and their propaganda-media blame, for that, not themselves, but the very same Government they’re trying to take down. The U.S. regime and its allies have contempt for the public everywhere. The more that Venezuelans blame their own Government for this impoverishment, instead of blame America’s Government for it, the more that their exploiters will have contempt for them, but also the more that their exploiters will benefit from them, because the exploiters’ taking control of the Government will then be much easier to do.

The U.S-and-allied exploiters are attempting to install in Venezuela a man who has absolutely no justification under the Venezuelan Constitution to be claiming to be the country’s ‘interim President’. For some mysterious reason, Venezuela’s President isn’t calling for that traitor to be brought up on charges of treachery — attempting a coup — and facing Venezuela’s Supreme Judicial Tribunal on such a charge, which Tribunal is the Constitutionally authorized body to adjudicate that matter. So, Venezuela’s Government is incompetent — but so too have been all of its predecessors since at least 1980, and incompetence alone is not Constitutional grounds for replacing Venezuela’s President by a foreign-imposed coup. At least Venezuela’s actual President is no traitor, such as his would-be successor, Juan Guaido, definitely is.

Did Venezuela invade America so as for America’s economic war against it to be justified? Did Iraq invade America so as for America’s destruction of it to be justified? Did Libya invade America so as for America’s destruction of it to be justified? Did Syria invade America so as for America’s destruction of it to be justified? Did Ukraine invade America so as for America’s destruction of it to be justified? None of them did, at all. In each and every case, it was pure aggression, by America, the international rogue nation.

Back in 1986, regarding America’s international relations including its coups and invasions, the U.S. quit the International Court of Justice (ICJ), when that Court ruled against the U.S. in the Iran-Contra case, Nicaragua v. United States, which concerned America’s attempted coup in that country. But though the U.S. propaganda-media reported the Government’s rejection of that verdict in favor of Nicaragua, they hid the more momentous fact: the U.S. Government stated that it would not henceforth recognize any authority in the ICJ concerning America’s international actions. The public didn’t get to know about that. Ever since 1986, the U.S. Government has been a rogue regime, simply ignoring the ICJ except when the ICJ could be cited against a country that the U.S. regime is trying to destroy (‘democratize’). And then, when the ICJ ruled on 9 March 2005 against the U.S. regime in a U.S. domestic matter where the regime refused to adhere to the U.S. Constitution’s due-process clause regarding the prosecutions and death-sentences against 51 death-row inmates, and the Court demanded retrials of those convicts, the U.S. regime, in 2005, simply withdrew completely from the jurisdiction of the ICJ. Ever since 9 March 2005, the U.S. regime places itself above, and immune to, international law, regarding everything. George W. Bush completed what Ronald Reagan had started.

This rogue regime has no real legitimacy even as a representative of the American people. It doesn’t really represent the American public at all. It is destroying the world and lying through its teeth all the while. Its puppet-rulers on behalf of America’s currently 585 billionaires are not in prison from convictions by the International Court of Justice in the Hague. They’re not even being investigated by the International Court of Justice in the Hague. That’s a U.N. agency. Does the U.N. have any real legitimacy, under such circumstances as this? Can an international scofflaw simply refuse to recognize the authority of the international court? This mocks the U.N. itself. The U.S. places itself above the U.N.’s laws and jurisdiction and yet still occupies one of the five permanent seats on the U.N’s Security Council and still is allowed to vote in the U.N.’s General Assembly. Why doesn’t the U.N. simply expel America? It can’t be done? Then why isn’t a new international legal body being established to replace  the U.N. — and being granted legal authority everywhere regardless  of whether a given national regime acknowledges its legal authority over matters of international law? Why is Venezuela being internationally isolated and sanctioned, instead of the U.S. being internationally isolated and sanctioned?

On top of all that, this is the same U.S. regime that has blocked the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, and that has broken one international agreement after another — not only NAFTA, and not only the nuclear agreement on Iran, and not only many nuclear agreements with first the Soviet Union and then Russia, but lots more — and all with total impunity.

And it’s not only the countries that the U.S. invades or otherwise destroys, which are being vastly harmed by this international monster-regime. How many millions of the flood of asylum-seekers who are pouring into Europe have done that in order to reach safety from America’s bombs and proxy-troops — jihadists and fascist terrorists — which have ravaged their own homelands? What is that flood of refugees doing to Europe, and to European politics — forcing it ever-farther to the right and so tearing the EU apart? Why are not Europeans therefore flooding their own streets with anti-American marches and movements for their own Governments to impose economic sanctions against all major American brands, and demanding prosecution of all recent American Presidents, starting at least with G.W. Bush — or else to vote out of office any national politicians who refuse to stand up against the American bully-regime?

It isn’t only weak nations such as Nigeria that are corrupt and rotten to the core. The entire U.S. empire, and especially its U.S. masters, are.

How much more will the peoples of the world remain suckers to the vast corporate propaganda-operation by that out-of-control beast of a rapacious regime, which displays the Orwellian nerve to label as being a ‘regime’ each and every Government that it seeks to overthrow and to call itself  a ‘democracy’? The U.S. regime is, itself, actually allied the most closely with the world’s most barbaric rulers, the Saud family, that own Saudi Arabia. The U.S. regime is also allied with the apartheid and internationally aggressive regime in Israel. Is such an international gang, as this is, going to get off scot-free, as if there were no international law — or at least none that applies to itself?

And, if the U.S. regime is so concerned to ‘protect democracy’ and ‘protect human rights’ all over the world (as that perennially lying bunch always claim to be the ‘justification’ for their invasions and coups), then why isn’t it starting first by prosecuting itself? (Or, maybe, by prosecuting Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman al-Saud, for his many crimes — and prosecuting his predecessors for financing the 9/11 attacks against Americans?) Well, of course, Hitler didn’t do anything of the sort. (Nor did he prosecute his allies.) He set the standard. Maybe, ideologically, Hitler and Mussolini and Hirohito actually won the war, though this has happened after they first physically lost what everyone had thought was the end of WW II. After all, nobody is prosecuting the U.S. regime today. Isn’t that somewhat like a global victory for fascism — the Axis powers — after the fact? Maybe “we” won the war, only to lose it later. Doesn’t that appear to be the case? Mussolini sometimes called fascism “corporationism”, and this is how it always functions, and functions today by agreement amongst the controlling owners of international corporations that are headquartered in the U.S. and in its vassal-nations abroad.

Is this to go on interminably? When will this international reign of fascism end?

What would happen if all the rest of the world instituted an international legal and enforcement system (under a replacement U.N.) in which all commitments and contractual proceeds to benefit American-based international corporations and the U.S. Government were declared to be immediately null and void — worthless except as regards the claims against  the U.S. entities? (The owners of those entities have been the beneficiaries of America’s international crimes.) Contracts can be unilaterally nullified. The U.S. Government does it all the time, with no justification except lies. Here, it would be done as authentically justifiable penalties, against actually massive global crimes.

The U.S. militarily occupies the world; this is a global empire; it has over a thousand military bases worldwide. Why aren’t the people in all of those occupied countries demanding their own governments simply to throw them out — to end the military occupation of their land?

You can’t have a world at peace, and anything like international justice, without enforcing international law. This is what doing that would look like.

What we know right now is actually a lawless world. That’s what every international gangster wants.

Flooding of mines in Zimbabwe leaves 24 dead, dozens more missing

Eddie Haywood 

On Sunday, the bodies of 24 miners were recovered from Silver Moon Mine and Cricket Mine in Kadoma, after heavy rains last week caused the collapse of a dam wall, resulting in the massive flooding of the two mines. At around midnight on Wednesday, February 13, the wall of water exploded from the dam and surged into the mines, completely flooding the tunnels where several dozen miners were reported to have descended.

The two mines, adjacent to one another in an area known as Battlefields, share three linked shafts which run 30 meters (about 100 feet deep) with 20-meter-wide tunnels (65 feet). The massive flood completely filled the mine’s tunnels to the surface.

The town of Kadoma, over 100 miles from the capital city, Harare, is the center of mining industry in the Mashonaland West province that holds significant deposits of gold, copper and nickel.

An estimated 70 miners are believed to have been inside the mine when the flood occurred. Of this number, only eight have been rescued alive. With around 40 missing and still unaccounted for, rescue workers stated to the media Sunday that they have little hope of finding survivors.

Describing the terror of the moment flood waters rushed into the mines, Charles Mwenye, a 41-year-old survivor, told the UK Guardian that four friends were with him in the shaft. “I could have been the one trapped underground too. When I was on my way out of the shaft, I saw a flood coming straight in … Thank God I am alive. The police came yesterday and today but nothing has been done. All my hope is lost now.”

Many of the disaster’s victims were jobless youth under the age of 30. Depicting the gravity of the tragedy, Lovejoy Mbedzi spoke to the Guardian of her brother, Evan Chibuwe, 29, who is still missing since he went into the mine. “I am very sad. This mine shaft is full of boys between the ages of 18 and 30. They are so young and don’t deserve to die in this manner.”

Also speaking to the social catastrophe experienced by surviving family members, for whom in many cases mining was their only source of income, Ida Gwangwari spoke about losing her son, Donald. “I don’t have a funeral policy, burying my child will be very difficult.”

Rescue workers are critically hampered by a lack of equipment, with only hand shovels, picks, and buckets to remove the massive amounts of mud and water burying the miners underground. Much-needed mechanical pumps were not available in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, and were brought to the site the following day by the Civil Protection Unit (CPU), the country’s national emergency response agency.

The following day, Wednesday, Cecilia Chitiyo, the Mashonaland West provincial administrator of CPU, told the media, “We urgently need to mobilise more pumps. As many as we can because the water levels are continuously rising from beneath and we are not sure if the miners had reached an aquifer below.”

Fortunate Muzulu, the Mhondoro-Ngezi district administrator, told the media the miners were operating illegally and entered the mine under the cover of night without the knowledge of the mine’s owners.

Cricket Mine is owned by mining giant Rio Zimbabwe (RioZim), which claimed that the mine had been decommissioned. RioZim spokesperson Wilson Gwatiringa told the BBC that miners had illegally gained access to sealed portions of the mine that were not in operation.

The mining tragedy comes amid an immense social and economic crisis wracking Zimbabwe. The downturn in the economy in recent years has led to skyrocketing inflation, which has made the cost of food, housing, medical care and education prohibitively high for the majority of the Zimbabwean masses.

The collapse of Zimbabwe’s economy has led to high unemployment, felt most acutely in rural areas like Kadoma. Many workers, having no economic prospects, have taken to mining in shafts that have become disused and decommissioned.

The mining disaster at Kadoma is only the latest in three such catastrophes occurring in Africa in the last two weeks.

On February 7, at South Africa’s Gloria coal mine, 12 miners were killed and several others trapped after a methane gas explosion collapsed the mine’s tunnels. Following this, on February 13 in Liberia, on the same day as the flooding disaster at Kadoma, at least seven miners were killed and 40 trapped after a gold mine collapse. Adding insult to injury, Liberian police arrested survivors for illegal mining.

The key component to the high fatality rate of workers in mines and other industries in Zimbabwe and across the continent is the complete lack of any safety regulations and equipment in place to protect workers.

Social calamities like the mine disaster at Kadoma must be understood in the broader context. Zimbabwe, despite possessing vast economic resources, is a country blighted by extreme poverty experienced by the majority of the masses. While the working class confronts this pervasive social misery, a tiny layer of the ruling elite at the top of society has accumulated vast wealth at their expense.

Coinciding with the growing class struggle internationally, there are growing signs that the working class in Zimbabwe is coming into open class conflict with the wealthy elite that rules the country with an iron grip.

As the World Socialist Web Site reported on Monday, the deadly disaster at Kadoma took place amid a crackdown on popular opposition to the government of President Emmerson Mnangagwa, including the repression of workers who are fed up with their social immiseration.

Anti-Semitic and far-right violence on the rise in Germany

Johannes Stern

Statistics shedding light on dangerous political developments in Germany were released over the past week. Antisemitic crimes and acts of violence have risen sharply over the past year. According to the latest figures from the federal government, police forces across the country registered 1,646 antisemitic criminal acts during 2018. This is 10 percent more than in 2017. For that year, the federal government registered 1,504 antisemitic attacks.

The number of antisemitic acts of violence grew even more quickly last year, by 40 percent. While the police confirmed 62 violent crimes in 2018, it was 37 a year earlier.

The figures were provided in answers by the grand coalition to parliamentary questions tabled by the Left Party on antisemitic criminality. The answer also revealed that the largest number of antisemitic violent crimes were perpetrated by individuals associated with the far-right spectrum. Out of 755 criminal acts categorised as antisemitic, 670 were labelled politically motivated crimes (PMKs). Twenty-five are listed as “PMK-foreign ideology,” 17 as “PMK-religious ideology,” and eight as “PMK-left-wing.”

These extremely concerning figures were barely noted by the political establishment and mainstream media. Most newspapers published brief news items, and neither the German chancellor nor leading politicians from the government or opposition parties made statements. At the government press conference on February 13, Interior Ministry spokesperson Sören Schmidt dismissed the question of how these attacks were to be explained and what was being done to prevent them by saying that the government’s antisemitism ombudsman was looking into the matter. He had “no further comment to make at this time.”

The published figures are obviously a major irritant for the establishment parties. The figures expose the lying official claim, supported by the far-right AfD, that antisemitism in Germany has been “imported,” and is linked above all to Muslim immigrants. As the statistics reveal, the vast majority of antisemitic incidents are not linked to religious or “foreign ideology,” let alone left-wing groups, but are the responsibility of the far right.

The rise of antisemitic crimes is part of a growing wave of far-right violence. According to the latest figures on right-wing criminality published by the Interior Ministry, there were 19,105 crimes committed between January and November 2018 that were classified as “PMK-right-wing,” including 1,072 acts of violence. In addition, “one successful and six attempted murders motivated by right-wing politics took place.” The real number is likely much higher.

Most of the right-wing criminality and acts of violence last year occurred in September. During this month, neo-Nazis repeatedly marched through Chemnitz to witch-hunt foreigners and left-wing opponents. During the right-wing extremist marches, antisemitic attacks also occurred. In one of these incidents, a neo-Nazi mob attacked the Jewish restaurant Schalom. At the time, there was no outcry in the media or political establishment. On the contrary, leading government officials, including Interior Minister Horst Seehofer and former head of the domestic intelligence agency Hans-Georg Maassen, declared their solidarity with the right-wing extremist protests, and denied that any violent attacks took place.

The figures that have now been published are an indictment of the German government and the entire ruling class, which have created the conditions in which violent right-wing extremist thugs and antisemites are able to act ever more aggressively. The established parties are promoting and defending the right-wing extremist AfD, cooperating with it in parliamentary committees, and embracing its programme so as to enforce militarist policies, the strengthening of the domestic repressive apparatus and social spending cuts.

The grand coalition’s refugee policy is just as heavily influenced by the AfD as its strengthening of the police, intelligence agencies, and military. The grand coalition’s Verfassungsschutz Report, issued by the domestic intelligence agency, also bears the AfD’s imprint. While the AfD and its right-wing extremist supporters are merely mentioned as the “victims” of alleged “left-wing extremism,” all opposition to capitalism, nationalism, militarism, and imperialism is denounced as “left-wing extremist” and “unconstitutional.” The Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (SGP) is taking legal action against surveillance by German secret service.

In his book, Why Are They Back? Historical Falsification, Political Conspiracy, and the Return of Fascism in Germany, SGP Deputy National Secretary Christoph Vandreier examines in detail how the AfD’s rise was systematically prepared ideologically and politically by the intelligence agencies, political parties, the media and university professors. This created the intellectual environment within which fascism could thrive once again almost 75 years after the collapse of the Third Reich.

In the first chapter, “The return of German militarism,” Vandreier deals with what is in a certain sense a programmatic article, “The transformation of the past,” which appeared in Der Spiegel in early 2014. Authored by Dirk Kurbjuweit, who was subsequently promoted to the position of deputy editor-in-chief of Germany’s largest news magazine, the article appealed for a “revision” of the crimes of German imperialism in the twentieth century. As key witnesses in support of this “transformation,” Kurbjuweit cited the right-wing Humboldt University historian Jörg Baberowski, and the best-known Nazi apologist of the post-war period, Ernst Nolte.

He cited Nolte as saying, among other things, “I am more and more convinced that we should attach more weight to the role played by the Poles and the British [in the question of responsibility for triggering World War II] than is usually the case.” Nolte also accused the Jews of “ ‘Their own part in the gulag’, because some Bolsheviks were Jews.” Although Kurbjuweit remarked that this has long been an argument of “jew haters,” he went on to comment, “But this man [Nolte] wasn’t wrong about everything.” He then cited Baberowski, a firm supporter of Nolte, who stated, “Hitler was not a psychopath, he was not vicious. He did not want to talk about the extermination of the Jews at his table.”

“Baberowski’s breathtaking falsification of history and downplaying of Nazi crimes met with no opposition whatsoever from academia and the media,” wrote Vandreier in Why are They Back? He then dealt with the reasons for this. The sharp shift to the right in intellectual life in Germany “cannot be explained by referring to the spinelessness of a few professors.” Behind this quiescence lies “a fundamental development: the return of German militarism. The falsification of history prepares the ground for new wars.”

It is now commonplace for right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis to ridicule the Nazis’ victims without any protests coming from the political establishment or media. At the end of January, AfD parliamentary deputy Marc Jongen delivered a fascist speech following the annual parliamentary commemoration of the Holocaust in which he relativised the Nazis’ crimes. Prior to this, AfD deputies in the Bavarian state parliament boycotted a Holocaust commemoration event. And on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Polish right-wing extremists demonstrated on the grounds of the former concentration camp and shouted anti-Semitic slogans.

In contrast to the 1930s, fascism is not yet a mass movement. But it is equally as dangerous due to the support it enjoys from high places. The most important lesson of German history is that the struggle against fascism, antisemitism and militarism is inseparable from the fight against their source, the capitalist system, and against all defenders of this bankrupt system. This is the perspective of the SGP. The SGP is running candidates in the European elections to arm the opposition of workers and young people to the far-right danger with a socialist programme.

French ruling elite attacks “yellow vests” while claiming to fight anti-Semitism

Alex Lantier

On Tuesday night, the big-business Socialist Party (PS) called rallies in several cities after an altercation Saturday between right-wing ex-Maoist commentator Alain Finkielkraut and a protester wearing a yellow vest. The man, known to French intelligence for his Islamist ties, called Finkielkraut a “dirty Zionist.” Since then, the media have mounted a furious campaign to denounce the “anti-Semitic left” and demand that the “yellow vests” support the PS demonstration.

Anti-Semitism is a reactionary and repugnant ideology, indissolubly tied to fascism and the worst genocide of world history: the massacre of the Jews in fascist Europe. The mass murder of six million Jews, including nearly all the over 76,000 Jews deported from France to Nazi death camps, with the active assistance of the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime, is a horrific crime that cannot and will not ever be forgotten. The struggle against any trace of anti-Semitic influence is part of the essential work of any socialist organization of the working class.

But the PS is in no position to lecture anyone about anti-Semitism. Examining the reactionary record of the PS and of President Emmanuel Macron’s Republic on the March (LRM) party exposes their pretenses to oppose anti-Semitism as a political fraud. While they mount a campaign to tar the entire “yellow vest” movement against social inequality as genocidal and racist, and to discredit rising opposition in the working class across Europe, they are themselves appealing to racism and strengthening neo-fascistic tendencies.

The PS invited virtually the entire French political establishment to join its protest. Prime Minister Edouard Philippe and 23 other LRM ministers participated, together with former Presidents François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy. The Stalinist French Communist Party (PCF), the Greens, the Democratic Movement of François Bayrou, the leader of the right-wing Republicans (LR) party Laurent Wauquiez and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan of the Arise France (DLF) party, allied to neo-fascist leader Marine Le Pen, all attended.

The PS leader, Olivier Faure, invited Marine Le Pen, saying she would be “welcome.” He refused to invite her National Rally (RN) party, stating that “its entire history is precisely bound up with the question of anti-Semitism and racism.” Faure wanted to get the support of Vichy’s political descendants against the “yellow vests,” but without unmasking his own fraudulent maneuver by letting figures like Marine’s father Jean-Marie, who has been convicted of making anti-Semitic statements, attend a rally supposedly called against anti-Semitism.

Le Pen ultimately did not attend the rally. The RN published a communiqué refusing to march “alongside organizations and politicians who either have done nothing against the spread of Islamist networks in popular neighborhoods, or encouraged them, or even discuss them in a criminal and irresponsible doublespeak.”

While the “yellow vest” protesters have mobilized with the support of most of the French population against Macron, the PS is mobilizing the government with the support of the political establishment against the “yellow vests,” while making its deals with anti-Semitic forces. It received broad support in official circles. Alongside the Freemasonry, the unions sent top officials to the PS protest, after having called off strikes in order to isolate the “yellow vest” protests.

At the rally, General Confederation of Labor (CGT) chief Philippe Martinez again denounced the “yellow vests,” whom he had slandered as neo-fascists before their first protest on November 17 in order to justify the unions’ decision to shut down strikes in solidarity with their actions. He called for CGT members to join the PS protest, however. There, he asserted that the “yellow vests” racism “has shocked me from the beginning of the protests, and a small part of the yellow vest movement is poisoning the rest.”

The only sections of the political establishment that were not welcome were those who did not fall in line with the media campaign slandering the “yellow vests.” Unsubmissive France’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon complained he had not been invited. He was the target of a media campaign for having criticized “the political exploitation of the struggle against racism and anti-Semitism” by the PS. But Mélenchon, a former PS minister, finally decided to join in this act of political exploitation and participate in the PS rally in Marseille.

PS-LRM propaganda against anti-Semitism is hypocritical and corrupt to the bone. The recent rise of anti-Semitic crimes across Europe is an extremely serious phenomenon; they have increased 60 percent over the last year in Germany and 69 percent in France. But it is impossible to fight against the rise of anti-Semitism without fighting the entire ruling class and the capitalist system.

In Germany, official statistics highlight the role of the far right, which is responsible for a large majority of such crimes. But the far right is prospering with the tacit support of Germany’s Grand Coalition government, whose Interior Minister Horst Seehofer infamously hailed neo-Nazi riots in Chemnitz during which a Jewish restaurant was attacked.

In France, the PS and Macron’s LRM government that emerged from it in 2017 have played the central role in legitimizing the heritage of French political anti-Semitism.

Hollande twice invited Marine Le Pen to the Elysée presidential palace. These were the first times a neo-fascist politician had been invited to the Elysée. At the same time, he sought to inscribe in the constitution deprivation of nationality, the legal mechanism that Vichy used to deport the Jews to the death camps and justify repressing the Resistance. Finally, last November Macron hailed Philippe Pétain, the head of the Vichy regime that approved these deportations.

The target of all these policies that reinforce anti-Semitism is growing opposition in the working class. Alongside the “yellow vest” protests in France, strikes in Portugal, Belgium and Germany are unfolding. The ruling class is terrified, and it is seeking to foment by all means necessary the political conditions to more broadly carry out repression.

Thus PS Prime Minister Manuel Valls attended a rally in Madrid of the Spanish right-wing parties including the new fascist party, Vox. This demonstration aimed to install a right-wing coalition government that would include Vox—a party that defends the record of fascist dictator Francisco Franco’s army during the civil war, that is, the use of mass murder against left-wing workers.

The “yellow vest” movement expresses the rejection by workers and significant layers of the middle classes of policies that have been imposed in Europe over decades. It is critical now to draw political lessons. After three decades of growing imperialist war since the Stalinist dissolution of the USSR in 1991, and a decade of deep austerity since the 2008 crash, capitalism is in a mortal crisis. The growth of anti-Semitism is again indissolubly bound up with this crisis of capitalism.

The struggle against it requires a conscious break with all these political tendencies that legitimize anti-Semitism while claiming to fight it, and a struggle to build a Trotskyist vanguard in the working class. Faure sought to present the PS as the historic opponent of anti-Semitism by mentioning the participation of PS founder François Mitterrand in a protest against the defacing of a cemetery in Carpentras in 1990. In fact, this example refutes his arguments.

Mitterrand, an ex-Vichy official, cynically participated as a scandal erupted about his continuing ties to René Bousquet, the Vichy chief of police who organized the Vél d’Hiv mass round-up of Jews for deportation in 1942. This scandal illustrated that the alliance formed between the PCF, petty bourgeois Pabloite forces like today’s New Anticapitalist Party, and the PS after the May 1968 general strike was a reactionary trap for the workers’ movement. It handed over the working class bound hand-and-foot to the PS, a bourgeois party pursuing austerity and militarist policies.

Thirty years later, the descendants of these parties are tacitly promoting anti-Semitism to poison the political atmosphere, all the while cynically claiming to combat it.

The Parti de l’égalité socialiste (PES) bases its policy on the growing international upsurge of the class struggle, of which the “yellow vest” movement is one expression in France. It fights anti-Semitism by seeking to arm the working class with a Marxist and internationalist, that is to say Trotskyist program to fight for political power, against Stalinist and Pabloite tendencies that have capitulated to capitalism, which is rotting on its feet.