The Far Right’s War on Culture

John Feffer

The far right is on a roll. Just a few years ago, liberals and conservatives would have considered its recent political victories a nightmare scenario. Right-wing extremists have won elections in the United States, Brazil, Hungary, India, and Poland. They pushed through the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom. In the most recent European Parliament elections, far-right parties captured the most votes in France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Hungary.

Sure, Trump is being impeached, Brexit is a mess, and the far right in Austria and Italy have suffered recent setbacks. Still, looking at the bigger picture, it’s hard not to conclude that such extremists have acquired the sort of mainstream legitimacy across the planet that they haven’t enjoyed in nearly a century.

What’s worse, those electoral victories obscure an even deeper, potentially far more influential success — in the world of storytelling. The radical right has developed a global narrative that, by uniting virulent racists and commonplace conservatives, mass shooters and populist politicians, is already injecting fringe ideas into mainstream culture.

Admittedly, it’s not a story that has either universal appeal or will win any literary awards. Still, by telling it over and over again in different languages to a growing number of listeners, the far right is having a profound impact on global culture. In many places, it may already be winning the crucial battle for hearts and minds.

The radical right’s story is rooted in the most basic plot of all: us versus them. Its main nemesis is determined, so the tale goes, to storm the battlements of the “civilized world” and, in what’s called a “great replacement,” oust its innocent inhabitants. Since this isn’t the Middle Ages, the evil adversary isn’t deploying siege engines or an army of pillagers. Its tactics are more insidious: taking over institutions from the inside, infiltrating culture, and worst of all birthing lots of babies.

But who exactly are the pronouns in this story? The idea of “the great replacement” is based on the fantasy that “they” (especially migrants and Muslims) are intent on replacing “us” (whites, Christians). Some versions of the narrative have an anti-Semitic slant as well, with Jews lurking in the shadows of this fiendish plot. For racists, the Others, of course, have darker complexions. For Islamophobes, the outsiders practice the wrong religion.

If you’re not a member of the far right, if you don’t subscribe to its YouTube channels or follow its burgeoning Twitter accounts, you might have only scant acquaintance with this story. But once you start looking for it, the great replacement turns out to be omnipresent.

Between 2012 and 2019, for instance, 1.5 million tweets in English, French, and German referenced it. You could hear an echo of the phrase at the Unite the Right gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, when neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other demonstrators chanted, “You will not replace us!” But the phrase really broke into the headlines in March 2019 when a mass shooter who opened fire at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 51 people, titled the online manifesto he prepared for the occasion, “The Great Replacement.”

By now, it’s become alarmingly clear that an increasing number of people are taking this bizarre, historically deficient, and thoroughly warped story to heart.

Once Upon a Time

At first glance, the man who came up with the idea of the “great replacement” might not seem like your usual suspect. Renaud Camus was a radical student demonstrator in Paris in 1968 and in 1981 voted for socialist Francois Mitterrand for president of France. A noted poet and novelist, he published books on his gay identity that attracted accolades from the likes of intellectual Roland Barthes and poet Allen Ginsberg. By the early 2000s, however, Camus had begun to outline a new philosophy that distinguished between “faux” or false French (immigrants or their children) and real French (those who had lived in the country for many generations). In 2010, he published a book entitled Le Grand Remplacement bemoaning the prospects of a France and a Europe transformed by immigration.

Camus’s work became the foundational text for a growing movement called Generation Identity, a modernized version of white nationalism that has influenced the alt-right in the United States, gained momentum on the Internet, and become a global phenomenon. The “identitarians” embraced Renaud Camus and spread his ideas in a virtual echo chamber all their own. “The playing field is not level,” points out Julia Ebner of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. The far right now has a striking “advantage in terms of algorithms of social media favorable for spreading conspiracy theories and potentially harmful and inciting content.”

And keep in mind that it’s not just explicit racists and Islamophobes who are pushing this meme. A softer version, embraced by mainstream conservatives, transposes the racial anxiety at the heart of the Great Replacement into a cultural key. “Our civilization,” it claims, is now at risk. French culture must be preserved. European civilization is being undermined. The American way of life is endangered. “Africa wants to kick down our door and Brussels is not defending us,” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in 2018. “Europe is under invasion already and they are watching with their hands in the air.”

This isn’t a new story. It was so prevalent in the 1920s that F. Scott Fitzgerald lampooned the idea in his famed novel The Great Gatsby when he put such arguments in the mouth of one of his characters. “If we don’t look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged,” Tom Buchanan says over dinner in the first chapter. “It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”

Buchanan was then echoing arguments in well-known books like The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant (1916) and Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920). Such arguments would take firm root in Europe as well. Adolf Hitler, for instance, called Grant’s book “my bible.” The Nazis, of course, didn’t just impose immigration controls to ensure the supremacy of the white race. They took Gatsby, Grant, and Stoddard to their logical, genocidal conclusion.

In the wake of the defeat of Nazism, Italian fascism, and Japanese racism in World War II, a global consensus emerged, shared by capitalists and communists alike, that the extreme version of the replacement story had been consigned to the trash bin of history. In the West, the political center would eventually sign on to some variant of multiculturalism in which immigration became an integral part of civilization, not antithetical to it.

The end of the Cold War, however, brought an end to this consensus. Communism was effectively over and union membership declining. Liberal parties attracted to the Third Way politics of President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were abandoning their working-class base. In the industrialized world, economic globalization was creating greater insecurity among the middle class and the working poor. In this context, multiculturalism and immigrants became easy targets for a rising white nationalism. In the 1990s, the growing popularity of previously fringe politicians like Jörg Haider in Austria, Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, and Vladimir Zhirinovsky in Russia paved the way for future parties and movements that would far more vigorously break the anti-fascist taboos of the past.

In the 1920s, the far right had found an effective way to attract adherents by blaming all the ills of the nation on “degenerate races.” This story of racial eugenics united both conservatives like President Calvin Coolidge and conspiracy theorists like Grant and Stoddard. “The demographic replacement is a similar master frame that can unite both clear extremists and conservatives who might be worried about demographic change,” warns Matthew Feldman of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right. “Once you add those two together you have potential majorities in many countries. They’ve found a winning formula. There’s nothing that I’ve seen that comes remotely close to countering that formula.”

Same Old Story

When war broke out in Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, it was the first time that bloodletting on that scale had taken place in Europe since the end of World War II. The subsequent fragmentation of the country would also prove a giant step backward for the project of European integration. Here was a multicultural state, the first in line among the former Communist nations of Eastern Europe for membership in the European Community (later, the European Union or EU), that a set of Balkan politicians would tear apart thanks to political expediency, nationalist ideology, and economic arrogance.

At the time, the widespread ethnic cleansing that took place during the Yugoslav wars was generally seen as either a throwback to an earlier era of genocide (ancient hatreds) or a final bout of violence accompanying the end of the Cold War (temporary antagonisms). It was, in either of these scenarios, entirely backward looking.

By now, the Yugoslav successor states have indeed put those wars behind them, with Slovenia and Croatia even joining the EU. But the desire for ethnic purity has not disappeared, not in the Balkans or in Europe as a whole. Only recently, for instance, new walls have appeared in the Balkans — between North Macedonia and Greece, Slovenia and Croatia, Hungary and Serbia — this time to maintain greater homogeneity by keeping out migrants and refugees from the Greater Middle East and North Africa. Meanwhile, the EU is paying Turkey billions of dollars to stop more desperate Syrian refugees from heading for Europe, while investing resources in Libya aimed at preventing migrants and refugees from making their way across the Mediterranean. Fleeing war and poverty, those migrants and refugees have only grown in number as European sentiment against them has reached new heights.

The European far right has risen in the slipstream of such xenophobia. Buoyed by its electoral success, the far right now wants to take a further giant step that might indeed return Europe to the days of ethnic cleansing — not just keeping out immigrants but expelling ones already there. This policy of “remigration” is the active corollary of the great replacement.

For decades, the European right rejected multiculturalism, insisting on the full assimilation of all immigrants. Now, it has given up on assimilation entirely. The platform of the German far-right party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), for instance, reads: “Germany and Europe must put in place remigration programs on the largest possible scale.” Already the biggest opposition party in the German Bundestag, or parliament, the AfD similarly increased its representation in the European Parliament in 2019 and also surged dramatically in the states of the former East Germany in recent local elections. The AfD’s position on immigrants is particularly disturbing given that the Nazis, before they embarked on the Final Solution, promoted their own version of remigration by proposing to send Jews en masse to Madagascar.

Ideas like the great replacement and remigration, having percolated in the identitarian movement for close to two decades, have now circulated back to the states of the former Yugoslavia. The far right has found fertile ground in Serbia and in the Serbian regions of Bosnia. And mass murderers like Anders Breivik in Norway and the Christchurch shooter in New Zealand have drawn a straight line between their brutal acts and the ethnic cleansing supported by war criminals like Serbian politician Radovan Karadžić during the breakup of Yugoslavia. In this way, the proponents of the great replacement are keeping alive the spirit of the worst war Europe has experienced on its soil since World War II.

Tell Me Something Else

The obvious response to the far right’s great-replacement story, here and in Europe, is to promote more humane immigration and refugee policies and a more inclusive vision of society. But that story — along with celebrations of multiculturalism, nods to the Statue of Liberty (“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”), and the endless repetition of the EU’s official motto of “unity in diversity” — has not proven sufficiently compelling to those around the world anxious about their own slipping status in society.

A better story is needed: a story that somehow captures the same “us” versus “them” dynamic.

How about this: believe it or not, the great replacement is indeed actually happening, just not the way the far right imagines. We are about to be replaced by a desperate set of adversaries. This foe is crafty and able to get through nearly all our careful democratic defenses.

The difference with the far right’s narrative boils down to pronouns. The “us” in the counter-story I imagine is not a marginalized group of people. The us is all of us on a fast-heating planet.

As for the “them,” it’s tempting to follow the example of that other Camus — Nobel Prize-winning writer Albert Camus — when he equated fascists with rats in his novel The Plague. The far right and its mainstream collaborators, along with the energy extraction industry, the finance sector, and corrupt oligarchs, are certainly a form of pestilence, a “them” that needs to be countered. Since 1965, just 20 of the major fossil-fuel companies have produced a third of the greenhouse gas emissions sent into the atmosphere. And now they’re aided by Donald Trump and his top environmental and energy officials, intent as they are on heating the planet to the boiling point for their own profits, as well as similar figures around the world.

But here’s the thing, we don’t have to work hard to dehumanize the adversaries they’re letting loose on all of us because they aren’t human at all.

The list of “them” would, for instance, begin with a buzzing mosquito. After all, as a result of rising global temperatures, disease-bearing mosquitos are now spreading far beyond their normal range. That would include the mosquitos responsible for transmitting the Zika, dengue, and chikungunya viruses. Dengue fever, present in only 10 countries in the 1970s, can now be found in 120 of them. And there is no question that, as the planet heats, malaria-bearing mosquitos will return to the United States after having been eradicated nearly 70 years ago. Climate change may also produce new types of mosquitos that could be even more effective in transmitting disease.

Lest you think that the mosquito is hardly worth losing sleep over unless it’s buzzing around your tent at night, remember that this tiny creature may well be the deadliest adversary humankind has ever faced. In his new book The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator, Timothy Winegard argues that, as a result of the illnesses they’ve transmitted, mosquitos have killed 52 billion people, about half of everyone who has ever lived on the planet. This tiny creature, in other words, has proven a truly genocidal force.

It’s not just mosquitos, of course. The “them” that we’re going to find ourselves up against will include disease-bearing ticks, rats, and a range of crop-devouring insects. Such creatures are all, in essence, standing on the sidelines and cheering climate change on. Their gain, our loss: it’s no more complicated than that.

We don’t need an evil space invader to unite the planet in a common fight. The adversary is just above our heads and right beneath our feet. In combatting a pestilence that affects everyone, we can tell an inclusive story that can appeal even to former supporters of Donald Trump, Hungarian ruler Viktor Orbán, and others. The far right is all about drawing borders and excluding “undesirables.” They will always win at that game.

It’s time to flip the script. We are indeed in the fight of our lives. When it comes to the climate crisis, a great replacement does loom on the horizon. Humans and the civilization that goes with us may, it turns out, be all too replaceable. It’s time for everyone — and I mean everyone — to pull together, forget our superficial differences, and win this epic battle of us versus them.

The Complexity of Citizenship Amendment Bill: The Cloth of Fear

Kabir Deb

“If we desire a society of peace, then we cannot achieve such a society through violence. If we desire a society without discrimination, then we must not discriminate against anyone in the process of building this society. If we desire a society that is democratic, then democracy must become a means as well as an end”~ Bayard Rustin

For people outside Barak Valley, it is much easier to give their opinion on the controversial Citizenship Amendment Bill, whereas those who are living in the Barak Valley region or in the Bengali regions of Brahmaputra Valley, it’s tougher to the same extent to decide anything about the impact of Citizenship Amendment Bill because one decision can be false too.

The bill has taken over the seven sisters and it is leading to wide anger from various communities. Many are supporting it to the last extent whereas even more number of people are protesting against it by even giving a decision that if the bill is passed then they would either go for self immolation or they would fight for an independent state. Recently, after Assam, CAB just took over whole Mizoram as many Mizos started protesting against the Bill since it would grant citizenship to many Chakma citizens who they claim as “illegal immigrants”.

In Assam, the scenario is far more complex since it has established various angles because of different ideologies running in a nonsense manner without even thinking that what the bill suggests and what can be its impact. However, those who protest against it from a racist perspective are far worse than the human rights activist, because the former discriminates one community as an illegal community while the latter fights for every community. The complexity, however, cannot be seen because either some are blindly believing it because of communal love whereas another community (Assamese Community) protests for the growing impatience and intolerance against another community which is the minority community.

THE HISTORY OF THE OPPRESSION

Has the nation ever asked the Bengalis of Barak Valley, Assam, about what we feel about the word ‘freedom’? No. If you ask us about this very word, we would simply call it a pigeon’s flight. To us, freedom has never been a part and parcel of our soul rather we were deliberately imprisoned by the masters of this national politics to suppress our culture and voice. Today, even after the implementation of unconstitutional Citizenship Amendment Bill no one bothers to focus on our history. If the nation would have read about our history, then they would have felt our oppressed soul. With deaths multiplying it is high time to remember the day when we were forced to join Assam and with it came a properly planned imprisonment.

To understand the barbaric history, you need to go back to the time of partition of Assam. Shocked? Don’t be. It is true that the nation always talks of two partitions as the major partitions of India, but no, right at that very moment, Assam was also divided on the basis of religion and language. The only difference here lies is that this partition was of the interest of British, East Bengal as well as Assam (or the Assamese). In this partition, the Bengalis of Southern Assam faced the catastrophe in the highest level. 1930, the year in which the sword was first struck over the process of partition where an Assamese politician, passed a resolution in which he demanded to rename the undivided state of Assam since the state is having a majority of Bengali people as compared to the Assamese population. It initiated because the region of Sylhet was transferred by the British from Bengal to Assam in 1874 making the state full of Bengali people who spoke in Sylheti.

All of the acts of the British made the discriminatory Assamese people more active to evacuate the Bengalis of Assam by dividing Sylhet back to East Bengal, so that the state stays for the Assamese although Bengalis lived in Assam for more than a thousand years. The Assam Pradesh Congress were so discriminatory that they never wanted any Bengali to stay in Assam since we may destroy their homogeneity. In 1945, the party released a manifesto to brainwash the brains of all the Assamese so that they can protest against the Bengalis of Assam.

Then came the year of 1946, in which Gopinath Bordoloi, the then Prime Minister of Assam started the politics to throw the Sylhet district away from Assam caging the few Bengalis of Southern Assam. For the manifesto, the Sylhet district was finally handed over to East Bengal in which the division took place on the basis of religion. In the voting system, Sylhet got divided because the Muslim majority wanted to join the East Pakistan. The politics of this partition when the Assamese, British and the Muslim league voted for the same partition of Sylhet district, since the Assamese wanted their homogeneity, British had the notion of dividing the nation before leaving India while the Muslim League wanted to have all the Muslim majority of Sylhet to build power.

But among all of the acts, the people who suffered were the original Bengalis of Southern Assam since Sylhet got divided making Assam more linguistically dominant and from history, we can understand that the Assamese have dominated over the Bengalis. Partition was done in such a manner that the region of Southern Assam with Karimganj, Silchar etc., became completely isolated since right after that East Bengal was divided to give rise to another nation named Bangladesh. So, if we notice the demography then we can very clearly understand that it was a deliberate step by three communities to suppress the Bengalis. It has always been said that in the partition the Assamese parties stayed silent and that is a clear indication of their discriminatory demand.

After Sylhet got divided, it became clear that the Bengalis had nothing for them because the state is of the Assamese and the government would favour their demands and needs, and it can be seen and felt even today. The time saw huge communal riots on the basis of religion and language killing more than lakhs of people. Rebels fought to save Bengali language while others fought against the Muslim. All of these started for that one manifesto of the Gopinath Bordoloi. After that Hindu Bengalis started migrating from Bangladesh since it became tough for them to live in a Muslim majority country at the time of communal warfare. Today the Citizenship Amendment Bill, works unconstitutionally against these Bengalis who were forced to leave Bangladesh for the communal riots.

Today if you visit Southern Assam, you would find the lack of communication, little exposure and no industry to sustain the economy of this region and all of it happened for the linguistically dominant but discriminatory Assamese politicians. Southern Assam today has Bangladesh in its South with other states blocking its path making the transport facility dormant. Once the region had the highest import – export facility since the then East Bengal helped us to export goods to other countries as well as to other regions of India. Today it hardly gets any medium to connect this region to other parts of India. It is joined to Sikkim by a small road which today has been blocked by numerous check posts. So, after all of this freedom for us is just a bread which hangs above our head while our hands are tied backwards.

If you ask us, how well do we see our culture getting caged, then we would say, it is on the doomsday since, the culture is the sole thing where oppressed could speak of their sufferings! With the dominance of the Assamese, suppression of the Bengali language started in Assam. People won’t tell you because they have to live here but it is the truth because it is quite obvious from the history. If you read “Prothom Alo” (First Light) by Sunil Gangopadhyay, then you could clearly see that the culture of one region had to connect with the culture of another region to survive. Before partition of Assam and Bengal, the Bengalis of Assam had the most effective spread of culture since the Sylheti people had an easy connection with the Bengalis of Assam and West Bengal. This blend gave us some of the most brilliant novels, poems and plays but after the partition we lost everything.

Today if you watch a reality show, you could clearly see that one who goes from Assam has to represent the culture of Assamese and the rest of the India knows even the Bengalis of Assam using the culture of the Assamese, for example, Bihu isn’t the festival of the Bengalis of Assam but the rest of the India knows that it is our festival. People of upper Assam hardly like to talk in Bengali even after they come to Southern Assam but they force the Bengalis of Assam to talk in their language after we go to upper Assam. Quite discriminatory! Interestingly, few people know that Bengalis live in Assam. So, it is quite clear that from 1874, the Assamese majority along with others have always tried to suppress the Bengalis by partitioning the state on the basis of language and then seizing the Bengali community from having any communication to the rest of the India. Unconstitutional Citizenship Amendment Bill, is yet another tool of the Assamese and right wing government to suppress the Bengali community. Detention camps are a clear proof of how they want to suppress the people. It is time for the rest of India to grow up and please have a look over us. We belong to the same nation are not different in any manner but we are suppressed.

THE COMPLEXITIES OF THE BILL

As the people of Assam, more population of Southern Assam, are instructed to move to Foreigners Tribunal, a legal body to help the victims of this mass exodus from being declared as immigrants, they are selling their land, home, jewelries to at least have the right to call them as Indians. Families are forcefully pushed into detention camps and a culture of fear is what one can find in Assam, especially Southern Assam. Yet the people of the rest still aren’t able to understand the cold blooded complexity this bill carries.

● From the perspective of people who live in the region of Barak Valley, if the Citizenship Amendment Bill, is seen then it is clearly dividing the Bengali community into two on the basis of religion: Hindus and Muslims. Even after that, most of the Bengali community supports it because of the growing intolerance inside the Assamese community, which demands for the elimination of the Bengali citizens completely.

Leaders of various political parties protest against the Bill in a very communal manner by saying that, “The Bengali community shouldn’t be allowed to live in the state and so the bill shouldn’t be allowed to pass. And if allowed, then they would demand for an Independent Assam since Assam belongs to Assamese citizens only”. The loud discriminatory and derogatory comments in an open field with thousands supporting the comments is quite enough for people of Barak Valley and Bengali regions of Brahmaputra Valley to support the bill making it a “good move”. It is like the Satan of a pessimistic story. Satan gets the support because the whole plot itself is negative and the only hope to live in the society is by letting Satan live which is supporting them.

● The Assamese community with their own political parties find Assam to be under threat since the state is being populated by the Bengali community and if spoken in a religious manner, then populated by Muslims, which the Assamese citizens find as a threat to the state and it would sustain if the bill is passed and hence, they protest against the Bill. It is quite devastating to see that the whole community, which had the history to be discriminatory over the Bengalis, today finds an even more derogatory path to eliminate the Bengali community over a political platform. The political leaders along with the extremists protest against it by breaking alliance (which is just a way to collect votes) and shooting bullets over the Bengalis of Brahmaputra Valley. For the people, who sit in an air conditioned cabin, it is quite easy to give their own opinion but the field scenario is far more devastating because the whole process of division is racist and communal.

● From the perspective of the Citizenship Amendment Bill itself, we can clearly see that the bill is a silent weapon of the ruling government to divide the Bengali community along with creating an agitation between the Assamese and Bengali. The bill clearly has little protection for the largest minority community of Assam, Bengali Muslims or Muslims as a whole. It plays the trick of divide and rule by dividing the Bengali community into Hindus and Muslims, thus reducing the strength and hence, making the fight even more brutal. It also agitates the Assamese community and hence, pushing the community to be more racist and communal.

It is quite easy to say that the bill is just communal. But the reality is, “the bill is both communal and racist” and as we all know, a victim of racism would be with the helping hand he/she gets from the government without even seeing the pros and cons and that is far more deadly for peace and humanity. It is just like a virus with government as the engineer and the communities of the state as the victim. The government injects the virus to experiment on its interests and no one identifies the side effects because the mutation and pain is a pleasant thing to play politics on.

● If the bill is seen from the perspective of Human rights activists, then it would be sane for the citizens of this country. But it would be insane to ignore the perspective of the Bengali community, and just giving an opinion on the basis of the bill only. The activists protest against the Bill because it is communal in nature since it divides the Hindus and Muslims but at the same time, it is the duty of the activists to visit the Bengali regions of Assam and to identify the reasons that why the community supports the bill! The bill is a danger because it is communal and it is a big reason to stand against the Bill plus what is even more disastrous is the elimination of people in the form of refugees to live in camps. The people who were citizens of this country yesterday, today live in Refugee camps and that is what ruins the Constitution. The bills isn’t just communal to the Muslims but it is racist to the same extent towards the Bengali unity but it is also inhuman towards the thriving humanity of this country.

So, basically, the support for the bill comes out:

of blind faith over a helping hand when the major community of the state passes communal and racist remarks before thousands without any strict judicial action against the minority community of Assam.

because of religious support for the Hindus and a repulsive attitude towards the Muslims.

because of the ongoing extremism by the Assamese extremists.

The complexity which the bill introduced inside the population cannot be seen from one angle without being a part of the state or without speaking to the communities living in the state because the bill has multiple faults and both the support and protest is for the flaws of the bill which for the mass is unseen because the covering of racism and communalism is thicker to penetrate.

Digital Inclusion is still a Distant Dream in India

Rahul Kumar

Technology has revolutionized the world. Without innovating & adopting new technologies, no country in the world can make a sustained and fast economic and social advancements in a globalized world. India`s story of digitalization began when the former Prime Minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi, introduced computer science in the country. Taking this step forward, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, launched Digital India project in 2015 under which several programmes such as Broadband Highway, Universal mobile connectivity, Public Internet Access, E-governance, E-Kranti through electronic delivery of services, Information for all, Electronic manufacturing, IT for Jobs, Early harvest. There are several digital India programmes being run by the government in the country in an effort to digitize the whole country. Some progress, of course, has been made but there are still many challenges in the path. It is, therefore, necessary to examine the current status of the progress made in the direction of digitalization. It has been observed that a few people running tech companies in the country are reaping the benefit of digitalization and the majority of the people particularly living in the remote villages of India are excluded from the benefits of digitalization.

According to census 2011, 70 percent of the Indian population lives in the villages of India. “Bharat Broadband Network Limited (BBNL)” was launched to connect 250,000 villages with high speed. Broadband & internet connectivity in the remote villages of India is still irregular. The Internet & Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) survey (2015) also found that 76 percent of Indian respondents cited lack of awareness about the internet as the reason they weren’t online. In addition to this, access to electricity is another hurdle in rural areas, with only 55 percent of rural households having access to electricity (Census of India, 2011).

The World Development Report noted that almost 1.063 billion Indians were offline. (World Bank, 2016). According to McKinsey Global Institute 2019 report, India is lagging behind the four most digitized economies of South Korea, Sweden, Singapore, and the United Kingdom.

Digital exclusion is astonishing particularly in the villages of India due to poverty. According to India Exclusion Report 2016, internet access in India remains beyond the reach of close to 1.063 billion people as the lower-income group does not have discretionary money4 to spend on cyber cafes or to get Internet connectivity on their own to access digital information.

One study (Ericsson Consumer Lab, 2015) estimates that even with the low and competitive prices of devices and data plans compared with the rest of the world, internet access in India remains beyond the reach of close to 1.063 billion people as the lower-income group do not have discretionary money.

The Ericsson Consumer Lab Report (2015) stated that in India, for the consumers who do not use mobile broadband, affordability was the prime obstacle to the adoption of ICT services as 88 percent of Indian consumers on 2G felt that mobile broadband is too expensive. Two-thirds of Internet users in India are in the age group of 12-29 years as per IAMAI. According to a report by (IAMAI), the gender gap is higher in rural areas as compared to urban.

Digital literacy is the main cause of digital exclusion. The larger majority of India, particularly in the villages of India, still do not feel the necessity of internet in their life. In addition to that, the majority of the people living in remote villages of India have not seen even a computer or mouse but to talk about operating such technological devices. According to (World Bank 2104), language is the barrier. At least 80 percent of all content on the internet is in one of 10 languages: English, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, German, Arabic, French, Russian, or Korean.

When we talk about digital India we find that the current situation is abysmally dismal in three important sectors viz. Agriculture, Healthcare and education. Agriculture is still the mainstay of the Indian economy. McKinsey report 2019 illustrates that Indian farmers have a dearth of machinery and relatively little data on soil health, weather, and other variables. Marginal farmers are still struggling because of poor logistics and warehousing. Mckinsey reports that $ 15 billion worth of agriculture produce goes to waste before reaching consumers. The condition of the healthcare system in rural villages of India is still pathetic. Government hospitals and dispensaries largely suffer due to short of qualified doctors & nurses. The shortage of free medicine for poor patients in the villages of India is a permanent feature.

According to Mckinsey report 2019, Indian women are three times as likely to die in childbirth as women in Brazil, Russia, China, and South Africa – and ten times as likely as women in the United States. According to India Exclusion report 2016, “Women with no internet are not able to access the vast plethora of health-related services, especially related to the sensitive issues that women are not comfortable discussing with others”.

In the education sector, only rich students are in a good financial position to avail of the benefits of advanced technologies. The online education is gaining impetus due to two important reasons. One, the Modi government is short of necessary funds to support the up-gradation of technical infrastructure in the government-run academic institutions; other, the so-called advisers of Modi government including the RSS want to exclude the people belonging to the marginal sections of a society from the mainstream society by allowing & strengthening online learning platforms in India. For example, the entry of Coursera, an American online learning platform into India is likely to further exclude millions of poor students who can neither afford computer nor internet.

Ravi Shankar Prasad, the Minister for Electronics and Information technology (Meity) unveiled a Start-up portal in Delhi. Five outstanding women tech entrepreneurs who have made a success story in the field of digital India were awarded a certificate and cash money (Rs 2 Lakhs each). All awardee women belong to the higher castes, mostly from Brahmins. These upper-caste awardee women are laced with technical degrees hence they are able to make a successful story. These are few such women across the country. The story of poor women living in slum areas are quite disturbing.

Women living in the slum areas in urban cities like Delhi, Gurguram, etc. do not have knowledge of computers. Some of them did not even see a laptop in the vicinity of their residence. I conducted a survey with 50 poor women in a highly populated slum area called Kusumpur Pahari(Delhi) mostly with migrant families from Bihar, UP, Haryana so & so on. The majority of the women in this slum area work as a maidservant. A 35 years married woman from Uttar Pradesh told about her daily life routine, “I belong to UP and came to Delhi & got married. My husband is a driver. I do not know how to operate a computer. I do not know what is the internet and how it functions. My life is so busy from morning till late evening to meet both ends for the family. Another respondent aged 28 married woman from Bihar commented, “Computer & Internet is electronic toys with which rich and educated people can play & they are playing well. I do not know how a computer functions. Life is difficult in Delhi. I work as a maidservant in DDA flats and do not have time to look for such expensive electronic toys”. A 25 years newly married woman explained I hear people talking about the internet. It costs to have internet facility so my family cannot afford. A 42 years old married woman responded, “I do not know about Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, Whatsapp etc. My children studying in a government school do not have a computer at home. They do not have a mobile phone”.

The age group 25-42 shows that there is a vast gap between speech and action. From this survey, we can draw a conclusion that the majority of poor people have no access to computers, the internet what to talk about cutting-edge technologies. The poverty existing among them will never allow them to rise in life as compared to the awardee tech women. The rich high tech entrepreneurs’ men or women will always exploit these poor people for their own economic advancements. E-commerce is monopolized by IT firms which are mostly run by rich Brahmins in India. The profit being raised through E-commerce is eaten away by these rich Brahmins in India. The small scale manufacturers in village industries remain in financial debt. IT firms in India have no agenda for addressing social ills prevailing in the society. For example, in India every 8 minutes, as per a BBC report, a child is missing. Hardly, any IT firm in India work on such social issues & develop a data-driven application. IT firms in India have been following unethical practices under the nose of the government to generate revenue.

In his speech, Ravi Shankar Prasad spoke about women empowerment through digital technology. While talking about some women in the villages he emphasized that today women feel empowered to touch a computer & mouse. But the Minister did not tell how village women are empowered by touching a computer or mouse. It is sorry to say that women belonging to the SC/ST/OBCs, Muslims, Christians castes living in the remote villages of India have no access to computers, computer mouse, and the internet. A tiny percent of urban women are participating in the digital transformation. The gap is as deep as the government of India has no funds to skill the illiterate women living in the villages of India to learn computer and take the benefit of digital transformation. This imbalance will create further social & economic distance between rich & poor. A few success stories in the last five years do not guarantee that India will be at par in technological advancements with China, the USA, Korea, UK, Japan or any developed nations.

As a matter of fact, the digital transformation is only for the elite class of the society, male or female. India is still a super-poor country. The voters as per World Bank poverty line $2(Rs140) a day) in India. By empowering digitally a few in the country will never serve the purpose. Delhi & Bengaluru are not India. The Modi government must first uplift as many people as possible from the poverty then think of making a “digital India”. The unbalanced digital mass movement will cause social & economic turbulence in the coming years.

Illegal forest fires send another lethal haze over parts of Indonesia

Owen Howell

After three weeks of improved air quality, the thick haze of smoke from deliberately lit forest fires, which began to spread across Indonesia in July, has returned to the province of South Sumatra. On October 14, the haze descended on the provincial capital of Palembang, causing the city’s Air Pollutant Index (API) to soar to an all-time high of 921. The return of the smog forced the closure of Palembang’s airport and most of its schools.

The Sumatran provinces of Jambi and Riau continue to be severely affected by the deadly haze. The air quality in Jambi, where the blanket of toxic smoke has taken on an ominous orange glow in the sky, has been described by the Air Quality Monitoring System as “unhealthy” and “hazardous.”

Indonesia’s Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB) issued a warning on October 15 to Sumatran residents about more smoke on the way from revived forest fires. Spokesman Agus Wibowo said the agency has used weather satellites to detect 1,547 hotspots in a total of six provinces. The fires, intensified by the El Niño weather pattern, have so far destroyed more than 320,000 hectares of forest.

The haze began in July this year when vast stretches of land on Sumatra and Borneo islands were burned. The national government sent 9,000 military, police, and disaster agency personnel to fight the ravaging fires, using dozens of aircraft for water bombing and cloud-seeding to trigger rain.

By August the haze had spread to Singapore and Malaysia, where the API reading registered in places at 223, or “very unhealthy.” The Malaysian government closed over 400 schools across the country and a heated diplomatic dispute with Indonesia ensued. Over the past two months, the widespread haze has engulfed Brunei, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

This year’s fires are the worst on Indonesia’s record since the catastrophic haze of 2015. The Southeast Asian haze is a yearly occurrence which has steadily grown in intensity throughout the last two decades. The air pollution crisis is caused every dry season (from July to October) in the region by the industrial-scale slash-and-burn practices of palm oil companies in Indonesia. Every year the fires are lit in the provinces of South Sumatra, Riau, and West Kalimantan, the country’s central locations for palm oil and pulpwood plantations.

Companies resort to these land clearing methods as a cheaper and faster alternative to the typical use of heavy construction equipment. Clearing land through the use of machinery and chemicals can cost up to $US200 per hectare, but fire costs only $US5 per hectare. Then, as the clearing takes place on the swampy peat forests of Sumatra and Borneo, the peat soil, which is acidic, deficient in nutrients, and often ridden with plant diseases, has to be made suitable for agriculture. With chemicals and fertilisers, the cost per hectare is $US2,800, but with fire, only $US140. Burned land can also be sold illegally at a higher price.

The excessive drainage of peat land for agricultural use has resulted in the top layer of peat drying out making it very flammable. In the dry season, the carbon-rich peat, now drained, can potentially be a highly toxic contributor to the haze.

The fires themselves cause damage both to small village communities and the region’s invaluable biodiversity, as well as releasing huge amounts of carbon to the atmosphere.

The haze is responsible for a sudden rise in debilitating health problems, especially among poorer sections of the population, who are exposed to the haze for sustained periods while at work, yet are afforded limited medical access. Excessive inhalation of the smoke from forest fires has been linked to various cardiovascular conditions, including acute ischemic stroke and even cardiac arrest.

Children, the elderly, and those with respiratory issues such as asthma are the most likely to be afflicted by the pollution. As of September, there were 885,026 cases of severe respiratory infections in South Sumatra, Riau, and West Kalimantan.

As a protective measure against the smog, authorities have repeatedly advised residents to wear masks when going outdoors. The face masks, handed out at medical clinics, are notorious for offering almost no protection at all from the thick, choking haze.

Amid government panic over the situation, President Joko Widodo threatened to sack firefighters if the fires were not soon extinguished, as Tempo reported in August. Following this line of attack, provincial police have been engaged in various efforts to blame the fires on impoverished farmers and thereby direct attention away from the pulp and palm oil companies.

The truth, on the other hand, is no secret to Indonesian workers. Amiruddin Noer, a taxi driver from Jambi, told Channel News Asia, “it’s not just individuals who set the land on fire. There are a lot of companies too, but they are untouchable by the police.”

Those lighting fires face a fine of $US706,600 and a prison sentence of up to 10 years if convicted. However, a recent finding by Greenpeace Indonesia showed that several plantations owned by palm oil companies, whose lands were known to be burned every dry season for the past four years, were never punished with serious sanctions.

The Environmental Affairs and Forestry Ministry announced it had sued more than 60 companies, 20 of which are foreign-owned firms, believed to be responsible for the blazes. Successive Indonesian governments have promised to tackle the forest fire issue and hold companies accountable, suing them for “negligence”.

In September 2015, at the height of the crisis, Widodo stated that the recurrent haze problem was “not a problem that you can solve quickly.” Addressing an angry public, he declared: “You will see results soon, and in three years we will have solved this.”

The same companies which were discovered burning wide expanses of land during the crisis of 2015 have been found carrying on identical practices four years later, with devastating consequences for Indonesia’s natural environment and the conditions of life of its working class.

Solomon Islands deal with Chinese developer highlights Pacific tensions

John Braddock

A province of the Solomon Islands, a small island state in the southwestern Pacific, has agreed to lease a large island to a Chinese company to develop into a special economic zone, sparking concerns in the US and among its regional allies, New Zealand and Australia.

The Central Province agreement, signed on 22 September, gives the Beijing-based Sam Group an exclusive five-year development lease, renewable for 75 years, for Tulagi and its surrounding islands. The Xiamen International Trade Group, a second Chinese company, is also listed as a party to the agreement.

Radio NZ reported that the Central Province premier, Stanley Manetiva, confirmed he had signed the “strategic cooperation agreement” in Honiara with representatives of Sam Group. But he said it was not legally binding and the company would have to comply with local laws and respect landowner rights.

“We want the investors to come to our province,” Manetiva said, “but we must be mindful… that the people are our priority.” A statement by the Sam Group said the two parties hope to carry out “comprehensive cooperation in energy, chemical industry, investment, trade and other fields in addition to existing cooperation.”

Manetiva noted that the recent diplomatic switch by the national government to Beijing had opened up investment opportunities. Weeks earlier, defying pressure from the US Trump administration, the Solomon Islands and Kiribati governments sealed diplomatic ties with China after severing relations with Taiwan. Solomons Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare visited Beijing, signing agreements covering education, economic and technical cooperation and foreign affairs. China is the Solomons’ largest market, taking 65.2 percent, or $US326 million, of its total exports in 2017.

The New York Times, a mouthpiece for the US foreign policy and intelligence establishment, reacted with a provocative and dishonest article on October 16. Authored by Sydney-based correspondent Damien Cave, it bluntly alleged the Tulagi agreement was further proof of Beijing’s “military ambitions” in the important strategic area, “where Allied forces fought a bloody battle with Japan in World War II.”

Cave asserted that the “secretive” deal with Sam Group—which he accused, without any evidence, of having “close ties to the Chinese Communist Party”—alarmed US officials who regard the Pacific islands as “crucial to keeping China in check and protecting important sea routes.” Beijing, the writer declared, was “moving in with plans to effectively take control.”

The article, subsequently republished by the New Zealand Herald, quoted New Zealand-based Anne-Marie Brady, a prominent critic of Beijing, who claimed: “The geography tells you that this is a good location. China is expanding its military assets into the South Pacific and is looking for friendly ports and friendly airfields just like other rising powers before them.”

The contention that China seeks a military foothold in the Pacific reprises an alarmist campaign waged by the Australian media in April last year, stoking fears that Beijing was about to establish a naval base in nearby Vanuatu. The construction of a wharf on the island of Espirito Santo, funded with Chinese aid, the Sydney Morning Herald intoned, was “a globally significant move that could see the rising superpower sail warships on Australia's doorstep.”

The Vanuatu government vehemently denied the claims. Foreign Minister Ralph Regenvanu criticised the Australian media’s “paranoia” about China, and declared that, being non-aligned, Vanuatu was “not interested in any sort of military base in our country.”

The propaganda offensive vilifying China on the basis of threadbare claims turns reality on its head. Its purpose is to justify the aggressive diplomatic, economic and military build-up for war in the Pacific by the US and its allies launched by the Obama administration in 2011, and intensified under Trump. The imperialist powers are the ones stepping up their military operations across the region aimed at Beijing.

In August Mike Pompeo became the first US Secretary of State to visit Micronesia and negotiate an extension to a regional security agreement. It was necessary, he said, to face off “Chinese efforts to redraw the Pacific.” Under a so-called Compact of Free Association, the US military has exclusive access to the vast airspace and territorial waters of the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau. US imperialism carried out more than 100 nuclear bomb tests in this region in the years following World War II, with devastating consequences for the environment and indigenous peoples’ health.

Australia and New Zealand are following suit. Australia, the US and Papua New Guinea (PNG) have agreed to establish a naval base on Manus Island, blocking a Chinese proposal to build a port nearby. Australia previously outbid China to fund a major regional military base in Fiji. In a visit to the Solomons in June, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison reiterated Canberra’s “security partnership” with Honiara, an agreement that includes more joint military exercises.

Following the intervention of top-level US officials in 2018, the Australian government moved to stop Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei from providing a new internet cable to PNG and the Solomon Islands, on “security” grounds. The Solomons’ government had signed a contract with Huawei in 2017 to build the cable, but then agreed to renege on the contract.

There is opposition within the Solomons to the Tulagi deal. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation claimed on October 18 that many islanders did not “want to do business with Chinese operators” and are vowing to block it. Deputy opposition leader Peter Kenilorea Junior, who opposed severing ties with Taiwan, said there were no safeguards for “the interests of Central islands province peoples and the resources.” The Sam Group would be able to survey for oil and gas developments, despite a sizeable anti-mining movement on the island, he said.

Successive US administrations have regarded the southwest Pacific as Australia and New Zealand’s “patch” to police, as part of US dominance over the Pacific, established by its defeat of Japan in World War II. In return, Canberra and Wellington have long exploited the Pacific’s resources and cheap labour.

Pacific states, however, are seeking to reduce their dependence by increasing diplomatic and economic relations with China. Rifts over climate change, which poses an existential threat to low-lying islands, have intensified geo-political tensions. The Pacific Islands Forum held in Tuvalu in August was marked by a dispute over the Australian government’s refusal to limit coal production to cut carbon emissions.

The response by Washington, Canberra and Wellington to developments in the Pacific is part of a broader xenophobic campaign against supposed Chinese “interference” in politics and business designed to whip up anti-Chinese sentiment in preparation for military conflict abroad, and to attack fundamental democratic rights at home.

Major distributors and manufacturers of opioids avert trial by reaching $260 million wrist-slap settlement in Ohio

Brian Dixon & Benjamin Mateus

On Monday, three major drug distributors and Teva Pharmaceuticals, the Israel-based manufacturer, avoided a landmark federal opioid trial by reaching a wrist-slap settlement with two Ohio counties for $260 million. The agreement was reached shortly after midnight and announced in the morning.

Under the agreement, the nation’s three largest distributors, AmerisourceBergen, McKesson, and Ohio-based Cardinal Health—the three distribute 90 percent of all medicines to pharmacies, hospitals, and clinics in the United States—will pay $215 million.

Teva will make a cash payment of $20 million to Cuyahoga and Summit counties to be paid by 2021. They will also donate $25 million in the drug Suboxone used in the treatment of opioid addiction. Henry Schein, a smaller New York-based distributor, reached a $1.25 million settlement, while Walgreens, another defendant in the lawsuit, will have its trial delayed.

The settlement is seen as a “bellwether” case for opioid lawsuits moving forward. As part of these settlements, the drug companies make no admission of guilt in the opioid overdose crisis which has ravaged the US. Avoiding trial also keeps closed internal documents that would expose the inner workings of these manufacturers and distributors.

There have been more than 2,300 federal lawsuits filed against said companies over the upwards of 400,000 deaths attributable to the use of opioid drugs. Most of these cases had been filed by cities and county governments nearly two years ago, with many states filing cases only more recently.

The two Ohio counties had been seeking more than $8 billion for damages sustained to recoup medical expenses and establish long-term addiction treatment facilities for individuals affected by the opioid epidemic. There were no discussions within the mainstream news outlets as to why the sum of the settlement fell so astronomically short of the original amount being demanded.

Still under wraps is an ongoing negotiation between the three distributors and two manufacturers, Teva Pharmaceuticals and Johnson & Johnson, with federal and state attorneys on a global settlement worth $48 billion. What remains to be determined is how the money will be distributed to various states and county governments. It is also unclear how much of these funds will proceed to pay legal fees, sit in general funds for state legislatures or ultimately provide a modicum of relief for the numerous catastrophes created by this epidemic.

Democratic Attorney Generals Josh Stein of North Carolina and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania have been leading the negotiations for a national settlement. The proposed deal would have the three distributors and Johnson & Johnson give $22 billion in cash paid out over 18 years. Teva pharmaceuticals would give $250 million including additional drugs for the treatment of addiction valued at $23 billion. The distributors would also provide $3 billion in distributions services for over ten years.

Another proposal is to create a national trust fund where cities, counties, and states would apply for money. And still another model being considered is to apportion the money into state, city and county coffers with the largest for general public funds to be used for treatment.

In a recent sobering report published last week by the Society of Actuaries, the cost of the opioid epidemic on the US economy was placed at from 2015 to 2018 at $631 billion. For the present year 2019, the midpoint cost estimate is $188 billion, which means that the cost of the opioid crisis over the last five years could be covered by reallocating the US military budget for 2019.

The breakdown in the cost of the crisis includes $205 billion in excess healthcare for the management of individuals with opioid use disorder, infants born with neonatal abstinence syndrome, or neonatal withdrawal syndrome. Premature death from drug overdose accounts for $253 billion in lost lifetime earnings. Criminal justice costs that include police engagement and legal proceedings, lost property due to crime, and cost of jails and prisons totals $39 billion.

Additionally, child and Family Assistance and Education Programs, which are government-funded, contributed another $39 billion. Lost productivity, costs associated with absenteeism, reduced labor participation, time incarcerated and employer costs for disability and workers’ compensation benefits total $96 billion.

The projected cost of the opioid crisis since 2001 is estimated at $1.5 trillion, according to nonprofit health research and consulting institute Altarum. From 2016 to 2020 the cost curve has doubled. The cost is born predominately by workers and their families in the form of lost wages. It is estimated that there is $800,000 per person in lost wages at an average age of 41 among overdose deaths. In 2017, more than 72,000 deaths were reported, and in 2018, 68,000.

Meanwhile, in 2018, Teva pharmaceuticals had revenues totaling $18.9 billion. Johnson & Johnson totaled $81.6 billion. According to Health & Pharmaceuticals, the United States alone holds over 45 percent of the global pharmaceutical market. In 2016, this share was valued at around $446 billion. Six of the top ten companies were from the United States.

The 2017 National Survey on Drug Use and Health provided a snapshot of the state of the drug abuse epidemic in the United States. The report found that 1 in 12 American adults (19.7 million) had a substance abuse disorder and 1 in 5 (46.6 million) had a mental health illness. More than 8.5 million of these have both disorders.

The treatment of substance abuse disorder can take years or last a lifetime. As the staggering numbers demonstrate, confronting the social burden of this long-standing criminal assault on the health of the nation would require the reallocation of the vast resources which will remain locked away in the bank vaults of these companies and their shareholders or squandered on war.

However, the purpose of the present settlements, in line with the goals and purpose of these various political representatives of the financial oligarchs, including the judicial system, is to rapidly shut down legal maneuverings and claim the limited settlements as a victory over the pharmaceutical giants.

Germany, US threaten war amid Russia-Turkey summit on Syria

Alex Lantier

As Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan flew to the Russian resort of Sochi for a summit yesterday with President Vladimir Putin on the war in Syria, Berlin and Washington issued bloodcurdling threats of all-out war in the Middle East.

In Washington, where a bitter debate is unfolding over Trump’s Middle East policy, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo threatened war with Turkey, a NATO ally and major regional military power. Asked for his reaction to the Turkish military offensive against the Kurds, Pompeo replied: “We prefer peace to war. But in the event that kinetic action or military action is needed, you should know that President Trump is fully prepared to undertake that action.”

The most aggressive proposal, however, came from Berlin, where Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer called for a massive European Union (EU) force to occupy northern Syria, supposedly working in coordination with Russia and Turkey. “My proposal is that we would set up an internationally controlled safe zone, involving Turkey and Russia,” she said. “I believe that would be a strong political and diplomatic response of the European powers in NATO.”

Tens of thousands of troops from Germany, Britain, France and other EU states would be mobilized under this proposal, in the largest EU overseas occupation force in decades. Roderich Kiesewetter, a former German army staff officer serving as a foreign policy specialist for Kramp-Karrenbauer’s Christian-Democratic Union (CDU), estimated that 30,000 to 40,000 troops would be involved.

Kramp-Karrenbauer is to argue for her proposal at tomorrow’s NATO defense ministers meeting in Brussels.

This proposal testifies to the vast shift to the right in official European politics over the last decade. For the first time since the fall of the Nazis in 1945, Berlin is proposing an international military operation; previously, it supported wars launched by Washington, Paris or other powers. Since Berlin began to remilitarize its foreign policy, however, shortly after Washington backed off from bombing Syria in 2013, politicians and right-wing extremist academics have ceaselessly promoted militarism to try to overcome deeply rooted popular opposition.

Amid a military buildup across Europe, France and Sweden have announced timelines for restoring the draft. Collectively, the EU powers have pledged to pour hundreds of billions of euros into their militaries over the coming years. Kramp-Karrenbauer’s remarks show that this buildup aims not to make Europe safe for democracy against foreign invasion, but to prepare the EU powers to wage their own neocolonial wars in oil-rich regions key to their strategic interests.

Imperialist circles in both America and Europe are outraged at the military and financial advantages that could accrue to Russia, Iran and China from their defeat in Syria. One recent essay from the US Brookings Institution think tank complained: “The prospect of lucrative reconstruction deals has triggered a deluge of interest from governments and firms looking to profit from Syria’s devastation. The regime’s closest allies, Russia and Iran, have been the most prominent beneficiaries of the Syria reconstruction gold rush, with China not far behind.”

As a trade war escalates between Washington and the EU, with threats of billions of dollars in trade war tariffs on both sides, US-EU geostrategic divisions are also widening. However, the EU powers also view the defeat of NATO’s Islamist and Kurdish proxies in Syria, and the victory of the Russian-backed Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad, as a threat to their strategic interests and world position. As Berlin seeks to advance its own independent interests, it does so—for now—under the increasingly thin and unsteady cover of the NATO alliance.

In an article titled “What the Syrian debacle means for the Middle East and Europe,” German news magazine Der Spiegel warned: “Now that the U.S. has withdrawn from northern Syria, a trio of autocrats is dividing the country up between them. … Rarely has a single act in global politics triggered such a rapid chain of events as the U.S. pullout from Syria last week.”

Calling Trump’s Kurdish policy “the end of a world power,” Der Spiegel continued: “A changing of the guard is taking place in Syria. The West has surrendered. The Europeans and the Americans have repeatedly condemned the atrocities in Syria, but they have done little to prevent them. Meanwhile, the despots—Assad, Erdogan and Putin—are emerging as the victors. And the consequences will be felt far beyond the Middle East.”

EU denunciations of Middle East despots reek of hypocrisy. The plain fact is that the imperialist powers currently face a humiliating defeat in the Middle East, where they bear responsibility for decades of wars launched on the basis of lies and provocations, like the claim that the Iraqi regime had weapons of mass destruction used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

A general retreat of NATO forces is now underway across Syria and Iraq, where Washington and its European allies have been involved in bloody wars of plunder ever since NATO led the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq. Taken collectively, these wars killed or wounded millions, and turned tens of millions of people into refugees. The hasty retreat of the remaining US troops from northern Syria is now leading to an outpouring of protests.

The population of Syrian villages through which convoys of US armored vehicles passed pelted them with tomatoes or eggs, or allegedly shouted slogans denouncing them for betraying Washington’s Kurdish allies. After they crossed the border into Iraq, these convoys were met with further protests and calls in English of “Fuck off.”

A further blow to the US military position in the Middle East came from the neocolonial puppet regime set up by the 2003 US war in Iraq. Now more closely aligned with Iran, it is reeling under a scandal over its bloody repression of mass protests at the beginning of the month, in which Iraqi troops killed 121 people—shooting them in the head and torso. This comes also amid a wave of ongoing mass protests in Lebanon.

Suddenly, yesterday, the Iraqi regime countermanded US Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s claim that US troops leaving Syria would remain in Iraq to fight terrorist groups. The Iraqi army issued a statement that US forces only have the permission to transit through Iraq and leave, not to remain there.

Berlin’s proposal for EU military occupation of northern Syria is, no less than Pompeo’s open threat of all-out war with Turkey, a call for a vast escalation of imperialist violence in the Middle East. It involves the danger of a direct military confrontation with Russia, a major nuclear-armed power whose forces are allied to the Syrian government. It would inevitably collide not only with military opposition in the region, but with growing protests and anti-imperialist sentiment among Middle East workers and youth.

While Kramp-Karrenbauer proposed to coordinate her deployment with the Russian and Turkish officials, there was every indication yesterday that Moscow opposed it. Asked about Berlin’s proposal, Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov evaded the issue, implying that Moscow had not even considered the possibility at all. “It is a new initiative, there is no clear position on it. One would have to look at it,” he said.

However, German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle interviewed Ruslan Mamedov of the Russian Council for Foreign Policy think-tank, who bluntly declared: “The official Russian position is that all foreign troops must leave Syria. I do not believe any sort of safe zone under the joint control of EU countries and Russia will develop.”

As for Erdogan, he participated in a seven-hour meeting with Putin in Sochi aimed at eliminating the remaining NATO-backed militias in Syria and avoiding the outbreak of war between Turkish and Syrian army units operating in close proximity along their common border. The resulting agreement, subsequently approved by Assad after a telephone conversation with Putin, divides the Syrian-Turkish border into zones patrolled by Turkish troops, along which military action against Kurdish fighters may continue if they do not leave, and an area jointly held by Syrian border guards and Russian military police. Alleged Islamic State (IS) fighters are to stay in prison camps where they were kept, in horrific conditions, by NATO-backed Kurdish troops. Finally, it reaffirms the 1988 Adana accord committing Syria not to host forces of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), against which Turkey has waged a decades-long war.

Marking Moscow’s distance from Washington and its European allies who had troops in Syria, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared: “We do not particularly look at the United States and its stance. That stance is quite variable and contradictory, and of course, the coalition led by the United States is in Syria illegally. That is well known.”