Over 40 workers killed in Indian factory fire

Wasantha Rupasinghe

At least 43 workers were killed in a massive fire at a four-storey factory building in New Delhi, early Sunday morning. More than 50 workers were injured in the blaze, with some of them in a critical condition. It was second most deadly fire in the capital’s history.

About 200 people were reportedly sleeping at the time when fire broke at about 5 a.m. Those rescued were rushed in auto rickshaws or three-wheeler taxis to the RML, LNJP and Hindu Rao hospitals, according to fire officials. All the victims were poor migrant workers from the states of Bihar and Uttar Prades in northern India. The youngest was 13 years old and the oldest 51.

Doctors confirmed that smoke inhalation was the primary cause of the death. Some of bodies were charred beyond recognition.

About 150 fire fighters struggled for five hours in a narrow lane to douse the blaze and prevent it from engulfing other buildings in the congested area. Two firefighters were injured. Media reports describe “chaotic scenes” as grief-stricken and shocked relatives of the victims rushed to the site to search for their loved ones.

A fire engine stands by the site of a fire in an alleyway, tangled in electrical wire and too narrow for vehicles to access, in New Delhi, India, Sunday, Dec. 8, 2019. Dozens of people died on Sunday in a devastating fire at a building in a crowded grains market area in central New Delhi, police said. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup)

Manoj, 23, whose brother was working in a handbag manufacturing unit operating from the premises, told the Indian Express: “I got call from his friend saying he has been injured in the incident. I have no idea which hospital he has been taken to.”

The Times of India reported that Mohamed Mahbub, 13, was pronounced dead on arrival at the LHMC Hospital. No trace had been found of his 14-year-old brother who also worked at the factory.

A desperate Wajid Ali from Samastipur told the Times: “My cousin Mohammed Atamul, who is about 18 years old, I saw his body. And my two brothers—Sajid (23) and Wazir (17) are untraceable.”

Each floor of the building, which was located in Anaj Madi on Rani Jhansi Road, had four to five rooms and contained a range of illegal manufacturing units. The ground floor made plastic toys; the first floor was involved cardboard manufacturing; the second floor had a garment workshop; and the third floor produced jackets and also had printing facilities.

According to fire officials, preliminary investigations suggest that the early morning blaze may have been triggered by an electrical short circuit.

Delhi Fire Service director Atul Garg told the Indian Express that the building was old and did not have fire safety certification or fire safety equipment. Firemen had to cut window grills to access the building.

Garg said that about 60 people, most of them contract labourers and factory workers, were asleep in the building when the fire began. He said that four fire-fighting units were rushed to the site, then another 30, but only one unit was able to get into the congested laneway.

More details about the disaster emerged on Sunday evening after the National Disaster Response Team (NDRF) entered the building and discovered high levels of hazardous carbon monoxide fumes.

NDRF deputy commander Aditya Pratap Singh told the Press Trust of India that the entire third and fourth floor of the building had been “engulfed with smoke” and that most of workers in the illegal manufacturing units had died of suffocation. “There was a room, where most of the workers were sleeping, which had only a single space for ventilation,” Singh said.

Police arrested the building owner Rehan and his manager Furkan on Sunday. They were charged under sections 304 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder) and 285 (negligent conduct with respect to fire or combustible matter) of the Indian Penal Code.

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal rushed to the devastated building and declared that the “guilty will not be spared.” He ordered a ministerial inquiry into the disaster, and in a desperate attempt to dissipate mass anger, announced compensation of one million India rupees ($US14,000) to the families of the deceased and 100,000 rupees to each family of the injured.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi offered 100,000 rupees compensation to the next of kin of those killed and 50,000 rupees for the seriously injured. Modi issued a perfunctory Twitter message describing the fire as “extremely horrific” and declaring that his “thoughts are with those who lost loved ones.”

These hypocritical statements and the meagre compensation are a desperate attempt by Modi and Delhi territory leaders to deflect attention from their political responsibility for the tragedy. Territory and local government officials have also sought to offload blame on each other.

Sanja Singh, an MP from of Delhi’s ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), questioned the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, which is ruled by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. Singh asked why the council had not shut the factory when it knew it was operating illegally and did not have fire clearance.

Delhi Congress Committee President Shubash Chopra denounced the AAP and the BJP, declaring that “they are equally responsible.” Chopra’s statement is a shameless attempt to deflect the blame from Congress, which has held power for decades.

The entire political establishment and the Indian capitalist class, which have created the sweatshop conditions that produced this fire, are directly responsible for this and numerous similar disasters throughout India. The latest tragedy has occurred as the Modi government is stepping up its efforts to boost “investor sentiment” by abolishing India’s limited but hard-won labour laws.

Notwithstanding the finger-pointing and statements of “concern,” the aftermath of Sunday’s fire will see no change in the dangerous conditions and the brutal exploitation of the Indian working class. The entirely preventable fires and other disasters will continue.

The list of deadly fires in Delhi over the past two decades include:

* In 1997, 59 people were killed in a fire at Uphaar Cinema in New Delhi.

* In August 2009: Scores of patients were evacuated after a fire broke out near the emergency ward at Delhi’s AIIMS. While there were no casualties reported, the fire severely damaged the structure. The Microbiology department’s virology unit on the second floor of the teaching block was completely gutted.

* In November 2018: Four people were killed and one person injured after a fire broke out at a factory in central Delhi’s Karol Bagh.

* In February 2019: At least 17 were killed and 35 injured in fire at the Hotel Arpit Palace in Delhi’s Karol Bagh area.

America’s torturers and their co-conspirators must be prosecuted

Tom Carter

“I was in such an indescribable state of pain… I could hear sounds coming from the brothers, not only one but more than one brother; one was moaning, another one vomiting and another one screaming: my back, my back!”

“He started banging my head against the wall with both his hands. The banging was so strong that I felt at some point my skull was in pieces… Then he dragged me to another very tiny squared box. With the help of the guards he shoved me inside the box…”

—Denbeaux, Mark et al., How America Tortures (2019), Appendix I: Abu Zubaydah’s Notes

**

Last month, the Seton Hall University School of Law’s Center for Policy and Research published a paper titled “How America Tortures,” which contains eight significant drawings by torture victim Abu Zubaydah.

The drawings by themselves are a powerful indictment of the entire political establishment in the United States, which has failed to hold anyone accountable for the crimes that are depicted.

The paper represents the work of a team led by Professor Mark Denbeaux, who is serving as an attorney for a number of Guantanamo Bay detainees, including Abu Zubaydah. The paper brings together material from numerous sources, including Central Intelligence Agency cables and other government documents, and Abu Zubaydah’s own account of what occurred, to provide a chronology “not only from the CIA’s perspective, but also from the perspective of the tortured.” The result is damning.

The CIA’s torture techniques are cataloged in comprehensive detail in the report. They include “cramped confinement” in small boxes, in some cases “adding insects to the dark box as another way to scare the detainee locked inside.” The paper documents the use of female soldiers to sexually abuse and humiliate detainees, with “female military personnel going shirtless during interrogations, giving forced lap dances, and rubbing red liquids on the detainees which they identified as menstrual blood.”

One FBI agent described finding detainees “chained hand and foot in a fetal position on the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they had urinated or defacated [sic] on themselves, and had been left there for [eighteen, twenty-four] hours or more.”

Loud rap music was played around the clock. The now-infamous practice of “involuntary rectal feeding” involved pumping pureed food into the victim’s rectum for no medical reason.

How have the perpetrators of these bestial crimes managed to avoid prosecution? It is not for lack of evidence.

Today is the fifth anniversary of the release of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s “executive summary” of its findings regarding the CIA torture program. This executive summary, which runs in the hundreds of pages, is itself merely an outline of the full 6,700-page report, including 38,000 footnotes, which has been suppressed.

The World Socialist Web Site wrote at the time of the release of the summary: “From a legal standpoint, the war crimes and crimes against humanity that are documented in the report warrant the immediate arrest, indictment, and prosecution of every individual involved in the program, from the torturers themselves and their ‘outside contractors’ all the way up to senior officials in the Bush and Obama administrations who presided over the program and subsequently attempted to cover it up.”

George W. Bush and Barack Obama (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

The crimes perpetrated by the American military and intelligence agencies in the course of the so-called “war on terror” were heinous, premeditated, and involved extreme depravity. These crimes were further aggravated by protracted efforts to cover them up, destroy evidence and obstruct investigations.

The crimes cannot be written off as the overzealous conduct of low-level “rogue” agents. On the contrary, they were organized in cold blood and at the highest levels. The Seton Hall Law School paper states as a matter of fact that “top officials in the West Wing of the White House and the Office of Legal Counsel of the Department of Justice orchestrated and poorly oversaw a horrific torture program that was responsible for the detention and interrogation of countless detainees.”

A New York Times editorial dated December 5, titled “Don’t Look Away,” is an attempt at damage control following the release of the Abu Zubaydah illustrations. While denouncing torture as “barbaric and illegal,” the article seeks to blame the torture program on the Republicans, denouncing President Trump and “those who think like him.”

The Times concludes: “The United States has by far the greatest security establishment on earth, with the greatest reach. When the United States commits or abets war crimes, it erodes the honor, effectiveness, and value of that force.”

The Times does not attempt to explain how it came to pass that nobody was ever prosecuted for conduct that it admits was “barbaric and illegal” and constituted “war crimes.”

In reality, the CIA torture program was entirely bipartisan. Jay Rockefeller, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, as well as then-House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi were briefed on the program in 2002.

The Obama administration played a key role in legitimizing torture and shielding war criminals from prosecution. Under the slogan of “looking forward not backward,” the Democrats refused to prosecute anyone involved in the program or cover-up. The only CIA employee who was ever prosecuted by the Obama administration in connection with torture was analyst John Kiriakou, who was jailed for publicly acknowledging that the CIA was engaged in waterboarding.

Obama refused for years to release the Senate torture report and assisted the CIA’s efforts to suppress it. In 2015, the Obama administration successfully sued to prevent the American Civil Liberties Union from obtaining it under the Freedom of Information Act.

What did the New York Times have to say about these “barbaric and illegal” practices at the time? On April 6, 2002, a Times headline gloated, “A Master Terrorist is Nabbed.” Describing the abduction of Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan, without charges or legal proceedings of any kind, the Times wrote, “His seizure demonstrates that the painstaking international detective work of the current phase of the war on terror is paying off.”

On June 12, 2002, in an article titled “Traces of Terror,” the Times continued its role as a CIA stenographer: “After nearly 100 sessions with CIA and FBI interrogators at a heavily guarded, undisclosed location, the captured terrorist Abu Zubaydah has provided information that American officials say is central to the Bush administration’s efforts to pre-empt a new wave of attacks against the United States.”

This version of events was, as is now universally acknowledged, a pack of lies. Abu Zubaydah was not a high-level operative in Al Qaeda, and he may not have even been a member. He has never been charged with a crime, let alone tried and convicted. Yet to this day, he continues to rot in a cell in the Guantanamo Bay torture camp, with no prospect of being released.

Five years after the publication of the Senate report, where are the torturers and their co-conspirators now? Gina Haspel, who presided over a CIA torture compound in Thailand and was implicated in the destruction of tapes of Abu Zubaydah’s torture in 2005, was promoted by Trump to become the new director of the agency.

The previous director, John Brennan, who was a high-level CIA official during the Bush administration and under Obama ordered agents to break into Senate staffers’ computers in an effort to search for incriminating information relating to torture, is now serving as a well-paid “senior national security and intelligence analyst” for NBC News and MSNBC. He makes regular appearances on news programs to agitate in favor of the Democrats’ impeachment drive.

James Mitchell, whose company, Mitchell Jessen and Associates, received a $81 million contract from the CIA to develop and implement the “enhanced interrogation” techniques that were used on Abu Zubaydah and others, remains at large. According to a Bloomberg News article in 2014, he is now retired and spends his free time kayaking, rafting and climbing.

And what has been the fate of those who have exposed official criminality? Julian Assange is imprisoned in Belmarsh Prison in London, where his life is endangered by conditions amounting to torture. Chelsea Manning was imprisoned and tortured, released, and then imprisoned again for refusing to testify against Assange before a grand jury. Edward Snowden was forced to flee the country and seek refuge in Russia.

The torturers and their co-conspirators have not been prosecuted, not because of lack of evidence or insufficient legal grounds, but because the entire political establishment is implicated at the highest levels, including the Democrats, the Republicans, the military and intelligence agencies, the establishment media, and all of those who perpetrated the reactionary fraud of the “war on terror.”

The failure to prosecute the torturers has served to embolden the most fascistic layers in the state apparatus, opening the way for Trump to boast of his support for torture in broad daylight. Trump and his fascistic advisers, frightened by the growth of social opposition, believe that the Gestapo-style methods that have been implemented in the course of the “war on terror” are necessary to terrify and suppress opposition both abroad and internally. While Trump brags that he is in favor of implementing torture practices at Guantanamo Bay that are a “hell of a lot worse,” he tells police officers within the US: “Don’t be too nice.”

The Democrats and their allies are concerned that public discussion of the crimes of the state would serve to fuel popular hostility towards the institutions the New York Times describes as the “greatest security establishment on earth.” It would cut across the Democrats’ ongoing efforts to ingratiate and align themselves with the CIA as part of the impeachment drive against Trump. Moreover, the revelations of CIA torture underscore the hypocrisy of their efforts to justify American imperialist aggression and subversion all over the world in the name of “human rights.”

For these reasons, the demand to bring the torturers to justice must be taken up by the international working class. Every individual who participated in the CIA torture program or the cover-up in any capacity, including those who failed to intervene when they had an opportunity to do so, should face arrest, indictment and prosecution.

The fight to end torture once and for all must be connected to the mounting struggles of the international working class to defend and expand its democratic and social rights and halt the drive of the ruling class toward dictatorship. The entire existing social order is implicated in torture and must be overthrown.

How American Exceptionalism is Killing the Planet

William J. Astore

Ever since 2007,  I’ve been arguing against America’s forever wars, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, or elsewhere. Unfortunately, it’s no surprise that, despite my more than 60 articles, American blood is still being spilled in war after war across the Greater Middle East and Africa, even as foreign peoples pay a far higher price in lives lost and cities ruined. And I keep asking myself: Why, in this century, is the distinctive feature of America’s wars that they never end? Why do our leaders persist in such repetitive folly and the seemingly eternal disasters that go with it?

Sadly, there isn’t just one obvious reason for this generational debacle. If there were, we could focus on it, tackle it, and perhaps even fix it. But no such luck.

So why do America’s disastrous wars persist? I can think of many reasons, some obvious and easy to understand, like the endless pursuit of profit through weapons sales for those very wars, and some more subtle but no less significant, like a deep-seated conviction in Washington that a willingness to wage war is a sign of national toughness and seriousness. Before I go on, though, here’s another distinctive aspect of our forever-war moment: Have you noticed that peace is no longer even a topic in America today? The very word, once at least part of the rhetoric of Washington politicians, has essentially dropped out of use entirely. Consider the current crop of Democratic candidates for president. One, Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, wants to end regime-change wars, but is otherwise a self-professed hawk on the subject of the war on terror. Another, Senator Bernie Sanders, vows to end “endless wars” but is careful to express strong support for Israel and the ultra-expensive F-35 fighter jet. The other dozen or so tend to make vague sounds about cutting defense spending or gradually withdrawing U.S. troops from various wars, but none of them even consider openly speaking of peace. And the Republicans? While President Trump may talk of ending wars, since his inauguration he’s sent more troops to Afghanistan and into the Middle East, while greatly expanding drone and other air strikes, something about which he openly boasts.

War, in other words, is our new normal, America’s default position on global affairs, and peace, some ancient, long-faded dream. And when your default position is war, whether against the Taliban, ISIS, “terror” more generally, or possibly even Iran or Russia or China, is it any surprise that war is what you get? When you garrison the world with an unprecedented 800 or so military bases, when you configure your armed forces for what’s called power projection, when you divide the globe — the total planet — into areas of dominance (with acronyms like CENTCOM, AFRICOM, and SOUTHCOM) commanded by four-star generals and admirals, when you spend more on your military than the next seven countries combined, when you insist on modernizing a nuclear arsenal (to the tune of perhaps $1.7 trillion) already quite capable of ending all life on this and several other planets, what can you expect but a reality of endless war?

Think of this as the new American exceptionalism. In Washington, war is now the predictable (and even desirable) way of life, while peace is the unpredictable (and unwise) path to follow. In this context, the U.S. must continue to be the most powerful nation in the world by a country mile in all death-dealing realms and its wars must be fought, generation after generation, even when victory is never in sight. And if that isn’t an “exceptional” belief system, what is?

If we’re ever to put an end to our country’s endless twenty-first-century wars, that mindset will have to be changed. But to do that, we would first have to recognize and confront war’s many uses in American life and culture.

War, Its Uses (and Abuses)

A partial list of war’s many uses might go something like this: war is profitable, most notably for America’s vast military-industrial complex; war is sold as being necessary for America’s safety, especially to prevent terrorist attacks; and for many Americans, war is seen as a measure of national fitness and worthiness, a reminder that “freedom isn’t free.” In our politics today, it’s far better to be seen as strong and wrong than meek and right.

As the title of a book by former war reporter Chris Hedges so aptly put it, war is a force that gives us meaning. And let’s face it, a significant part of America’s meaning in this century has involved pride in having the toughest military on the planet, even as trillions of tax dollars went into a misguided attempt to maintain bragging rights to being the world’s sole superpower.

And keep in mind as well that, among other things, never-ending war weakens democracy while strengthening authoritarian tendencies in politics and society. In an age of gaping inequality, using up the country’s resources in such profligate and destructive ways offers a striking exercise in consumption that profits the few at the expense of the many.

In other words, for a select few, war pays dividends in ways that peace doesn’t. In a nutshell, or perhaps an artillery shell, war is anti-democratic, anti-progressive, anti-intellectual, and anti-human. Yet, as we know, history makes heroes out of its participants and celebrates mass murderers like Napoleon as “great captains.”

What the United States needs today is a new strategy of containment — not against communist expansion, as in the Cold War, but against war itself. What’s stopping us from containing war? You might say that, in some sense, we’ve grown addicted to it, which is true enough, but here are five additional reasons for war’s enduring presence in American life:

The delusional idea that Americans are, by nature, winners and that our wars are therefore winnable: No American leader wants to be labeled a “loser.” Meanwhile, such dubious conflicts — see: the Afghan War, now in its 18th year, with several more years, or even generations, to go — continue to be treated by the military as if they were indeed winnable, even though they visibly aren’t. No president, Republican or Democrat, not even Donald J. Trump, despite his promises that American soldiers will be coming home from such fiascos, has successfully resisted the Pentagon’s siren call for patience (and for yet more trillions of dollars) in the cause of ultimate victory, however poorly defined, farfetched, or far-off.

American society’s almost complete isolation from war’s deadly effects:We’re not being droned (yet). Our cities are not yet lying in ruins (though they’re certainly suffering from a lack of funding, as is our most essential infrastructure, thanks in part to the cost of those overseas wars). It’s nonetheless remarkable how little attention, either in the media or elsewhere, this country’s never-ending war-making gets here.

Unnecessary and sweeping secrecy: How can you resist what you essentially don’t know about? Learning its lesson from the Vietnam War, the Pentagon now classifies (in plain speak: covers up) the worst aspects of its disastrous wars. This isn’t because the enemy could exploit such details — the enemy already knows! — but because the American people might be roused to something like anger and action by it. Principled whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning have been imprisoned or otherwise dismissed or, in the case of Edward Snowden, pursued and indicted for sharing honest details about the calamitous Iraq War and America’s invasive and intrusive surveillance state. In the process, a clear message of intimidation has been sent to other would-be truth-tellers.

An unrepresentative government: Long ago, of course, Congress ceded to the presidency most of its constitutional powers when it comes to making war. Still, despite recent attempts to end America’s arms-dealing role in the genocidal Saudi war in Yemen (overridden by Donald Trump’s veto power), America’s duly elected representatives generally don’t represent the people when it comes to this country’s disastrous wars. They are, to put it bluntly, largely captives of (and sometimes on leaving politics quite literally go to work for) the military-industrial complex. As long as money is speech (thank you, Supreme Court!), the weapons makers are always likely to be able to shout louder in Congress than you and I ever will.

America’s persistent empathy gap. Despite our size, we are a remarkably insular nation and suffer from a serious empathy gap when it comes to understanding foreign cultures and peoples or what we’re actually doing to them. Even our globetrotting troops, when not fighting and killing foreigners in battle, often stay on vast bases, referred to in the military as “Little Americas,” complete with familiar stores, fast food, you name it. Wherever we go, there we are, eating our big burgers, driving our big trucks, wielding our big guns, and dropping our very big bombs. But what those bombs do, whom they hurt or kill, whom they displace from their homes and lives, these are things that Americans turn out to care remarkably little about.

All this puts me sadly in mind of a song popular in my youth, a time when Cat Stevens sang of a “peace train” that was “sounding’ louder” in America. Today, that peace train’s been derailed and replaced by an armed and armored one eternally prepared for perpetual war — and that train is indeed sounding’ louder to the great peril of us all.

War on Spaceship Earth

Here’s the rub, though: even the Pentagon knows that our most serious enemy is climate change, not China or Russia or terror, though in the age of Donald Trump and his administration of arsonists its officials can’t express themselves on the subject as openly as they otherwise might. Assuming we don’t annihilate ourselves with nuclear weapons first, that means our real enemy is the endless war we’re waging against Planet Earth.

The U.S. military is also a major consumer of fossil fuels and therefore a significant driver of climate change. Meanwhile, the Pentagon, like any enormously powerful system, only wants to grow more so, but what’s welfare for the military brass isn’t wellness for the planet.

There is, unfortunately, only one Planet Earth, or Spaceship Earth, if you prefer, since we’re all traveling through our galaxy on it. Thought about a certain way, we’re its crew-members, yet instead of cooperating effectively as its stewards, we seem determined to fight one another. If a house divided against itself cannot stand, as Abraham Lincoln pointed out so long ago, surely a spaceship with a disputatious and self-destructive crew is not likely to survive, no less thrive.

In other words, in waging endless war, Americans are also, in effect, mutinying against the planet. In the process, we are spoiling the last, best hope of earth: a concerted and pacific effort to meet the shared challenges of a rapidly warming and changing planet.

Spaceship Earth should not be allowed to remain Warship Earth as well, not when the existence of significant parts of humanity is already becoming ever more precarious. Think of us as suffering from a coolant leak, causing cabin temperatures to rise even as food and other resources dwindle. Under the circumstances, what’s the best strategy for survival: killing each other while ignoring the leak or banding together to fix an increasingly compromised ship?

Unfortunately, for America’s leaders, the real “fixes” remain global military and resource domination, even as those resources continue to shrink on an ever-more fragile globe. And as we’ve seen recently, the resource part of that fix breeds its own madness, as in President Trump’s recently stated desire to keep U.S. troops in Syria to steal that country’s oil resources, though its wells are largely wrecked (thanks in significant part to American bombing) and even when repaired would produce only a miniscule percentage of the world’s petroleum.

If America’s wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen prove anything, it’s that every war scars our planet — and hardens our hearts. Every war makes us less human as well as less humane. Every war wastes resources when these are increasingly at a premium. Every war is a distraction from higher needs and a better life.

Despite all of war’s uses and abuses, its allures and temptations, it’s time that we Americans showed some self-mastery (as well as decency) by putting a stop to the mayhem. Few enough of us experience “our” wars firsthand and that’s precisely why some idealize their purpose and idolize their practitioners. But war is a bloody, murderous mess and those practitioners, when not killed or wounded, are marred for life because war functionally makes everyone involved into a murderer.

We need to stop idealizing war and idolizing its so-called warriors. At stake is nothing less than the future of humanity and the viability of life, as we know it, on Spaceship Earth.

Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and the Insecurity of China’s Leadership

Mel Gurtov

Hong Kong is in chaos, with no sign that the protesters will yield on their demands. Mass incarceration and indoctrination of Uyghurs and other Chinese Muslims has become so widely publicized, and evidenced, that Chinese leaders no longer try to deny that a roundup has taken place, though they dispute the numbers. As China extends its economic reach, its leaders have to confront another reality: Reputation matters, and economic clout will not easily convert to political or cultural influence. International repugnance is widespread over the Xi Jinping government’s flouting of human rights norms and seeming indifference to human suffering.

The larger context here is Xi’s determination to wipe out all sources of resistance to his lifetime rule, foreign or domestic. His government typically cites “three evils” to justify repression: separatism, terrorism, and extremism. Actually, it has several other “evils” in its sights, including organized religion, protest demonstrations, cultural autonomy, activist lawyers, and independent journalists and environmental organizations. In its view, all these forces threaten the one-party state, disrupt economic plans, and unravel the myth of the unified multi-national state. They challenge the Chinese party-state’s security and legitimacy, which have always been far more important to Beijing than spreading a political model abroad.

Naming and shaming can sometimes help mitigate widespread and systematic human rights violations. Bringing the Uyghur repression (which some call cultural genocide) before the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has already produced a joint statement of twenty-two countries, in July, condemning “large-scale arbitrary detention” and other violations. The statement calls on China to allow UN and independent access to the so-called “retraining” camps. Britain has separately urged China to “allow UN observers immediate and unfettered access to the region.” The European Union has also criticized China’s conduct. Possibly more effective than the so-called spotlight effect is boycotting companies that, directly or indirectly, facilitate repression, and sanctioning individuals responsible for it, and blocking international financial institutions such as the World Bank from investing in Xinjiang.

What brings Hong Kong and Xinjiang together is the failure of China’s leaders to accommodate local politics and culture, and instead to impose “stability” through draconian measures—a clear indication of leadership insecurity and blindness to the conditions that prompt unrest. Outside pressure, however, has to be carefully calibrated lest it lead to even more oppressive Chinese steps. More direct US political intervention in Hong Kong, for example, would only exacerbate the situation—and give demonstrators false hopes. As Chen Jian, a distinguished scholar of China-US relations, has written: “It is beyond America’s capacity and mandate to try to impose answers upon the Chinese in American ways. Any attempt to do so will only trigger China’s lingering ‘victim mentality’ and mobilize radical Chinese nationalism centered on an anti-American-hegemony discourse. The biggest beneficiary of such a scenario will, ironically, be no one else but the Chinese ‘communist’ state.”

At times like these we need more, not less, interaction with China. Care needs to be exercised not to feed an anti-China hysteria by, for example, cutting back people-to-people and other exchanges, closing down Confucius Institutes, imposing immigration and visa restrictions, putting Chinese nationals and Americans of Chinese heritage who work in US laboratories and universities under suspicion, or using trade as a weapon. Legislation such as the US Senate’s Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act appropriately sanctions Chinese and Hong Kong officials but also reeks of political posturing about American values and bipartisanship. Donald Trump quietly signed the act, but indicated he would not honor all its provisions. For him, protecting human rights pales in importance beside the prospect, however remote, of a favorable trade deal with China.

One other thing: We should not be self-righteous about repression in China. Few countries are free of religious, political, or social oppression. Few have eschewed violent official responses to mass protest. Fewer still are the governments that have recognized, much less apologized and compensated for, the harm they have done in the name of social stability. The scale of China’s human rights abuses may have no current counterpart—by some estimates, as many as 1.8 million Chinese Muslims have been incarcerated—but it is also part of a global pattern that embraces even the most “developed” and “democratic” countries. The struggle against abuses here is also a struggle against abuses there.

Chernobyl, Lies and Messianism in Russia

Monika Zgustova

“How much are these lies going to cost?” asks the nuclear physicist Legasov, as played by Jared Harris in the American series Chernobyl. This HBO series, broadcast a few months ago and based partly on Svetlana Alexievich’s book Voices from Chernobyl, reveals how the Soviet state tried to cover up the lethal explosion of the nuclear power station, by telling lie after lie. How much do lies cost? Today this question is just as valid as in the days of Gorbachev, Stalin and Lenin,

Oddly enough, the state apparatus under Putin was irritated by the series. What it found most infuriating was that in the West, the directors of the series, and millions of viewers, had analysed and severely criticised events which had taken place in Russia. The Russian TV channel NTV, owned by Gazprom, announced that it would be producing its own series about the Chernobyl catastrophe: ‘the true story’, according to them. It ends by explaining – and this is not a joke – that the fatal disaster at the nuclear power plant was caused by a CIA agent.

The lies of the Russian state are similar to those invented by the Soviet one. In the year 2000, not long after Putin took power in the Kremlin, the nuclear submarine Kursk was shipwrecked in the Barents Sea and, just as they had done with Chernobyl, the Russian authorities silenced the accident, to the extent that they didn’t even inform the families of the crew who had died in the disaster. Two years later, during the terrorist assault on Moscow’s Dubrovka theatre, the FSB security service filled the theatre with an unidentified gas, with the aim of paralysing all the people present, including the terrorists; once the operation had been completed, the FSB refused to reveal the formula and the characteristics of the gas, with the result that the 130 people who were rescued from the theatre ended up dying in hospitals, leaving their doctors frustrated and confounded. Something similar happened in 2014 when Islamist militants – most of them Chechens and Ingush – occupied a school in Beslan, in the autonomous region of North Ossetia, which forms part of the Russian federation. Instead of saving the children by liberating them and removing them from the building, the Russian security forces sent in tanks and heavy armament and attacked the school; as a result 334 people died (excluding the terrorists), including 186 pupils. The Russian authorities have said nothing about all these fatal miscalculations, heavily censoring all the media and providing Russian citizens with false information. The political reforms which came in the wake of the disaster were the direct cause of Putin’s consolidation of power in the Kremlin; instead of losing his power, the Russian president used the lies to augment it. Also in Syria, in 2018, Russian military officials, by denying to the Americans time and again that the so-called Wagner Group – a private paramilitary organisation of Russian mercenaries – was involved, they exposed these men to an American bombardment; it seems that some two hundred men died because of this deliberate disinformation which resulted in the Syrian media accusing the Americans of a ‘brutal massacre’, while the Russian media accused the Americans of attacking them for economic reasons, because oil had been discovered in the region involved.

The Russian government continues to sacrifice the lives of its own citizens without any scruples whatsoever, when it’s a matter of protecting its own interests. This was shown clearly in the Chernobyl series: the people who supported the Soviet state and on whose support this state was based, were precisely the people who were crucified mercilessly by Soviet power.

In recent years, Vladimir Putin has been making ostentatious displays of his military strength. Some commentators have interpreted this as a threat to NATO and the United States. Which is the case; however, Putin is playing primarily to a Russian audience. Seeing that his popularity was waning (in January of 2019, only 33% of Russians said they had faith in their president, the lowest figure on record so far) the Russian president launched into rhetoric about an imminent nuclear apocalypse.

Recently, Putin claimed that Russia had just manufactured a new ‘invincible’, hypersonic nuclear missile, the Avengerd, which he described as ‘the best gift he could give to his country’. The Russian president also talked about a ‘nuclear apocalypse’, explaining that Russia would use its nuclear weapons to punish or avenge. Recently, the president has made frequent use of apocalyptic rhetoric, including in some of his speeches to the Federal Assembly, in which he has claimed that certain countries wish to annihilate Russia and that he would not hesitate to respond.

Putin isn’t the only person who is providing the Russian people with visions of the apocalypse; he has the support of many of his followers, including the Patriarch Krill who insists on repeating that Judgement Day is nigh. Aleksandr Duguin, the Kremlin’s chief ideologue, known for his Fascist ideas, has called Putin katechon, meaning an Orthodox leader who, so he says, ‘will prevent the reign of the Anti-Christ’. In this particular case, the Anti-Christ is represented by a combination of Western globalisation and post-industrial society.

There are even writers who support the messiano-apocalyptic message of the Russian president in their work. The extremely well-known novelist and TV presenter Vladimir Solovyov, in his novel Vladimir’s Apocalypse, calls Putin ‘a Tsar and a prophet’. The poet Elena Fanailova, too, recently wrote that ‘the contemporary world, just as was the case in the Middle Ages, longs for an apocalypse because a world without apocalypses would be unbelievably dull’. According to the American scholar Dina Khapaeva, this idea is linked to the beliefs of certain sects within the Russian Orthodox church, one of which claims that Putin is the reincarnation of the apostle Paul: ‘God has appointed Putin as president of Russia so as to prepare it for the coming of Jesus Christ’, in the opinion of Mother Fotina, the founder of the sect.

The much-read nationalist writer Aleksandr Prokhanov has also proclaimed that Putin is the Messiah. On top of which, he maintains that in our era, with a nuclear war upon us, something which ‘worries the minds of world leaders’, it is essential to reread the Apocalypse, the exclusively prophetic section of the New Testament which talks about the apocalypse and the Messiah. According to Khapaeva, the aforementioned Patriarch Krill, who has an enormous influence in Russia and supports Putin, has said, referring to this subject, that ‘You would have to be blind not to see that the terrible historical events described by Saint John in his Apocalypse, are not taking place now.’

If the Russian regime is afraid of a TV mini-series, this only goes to show how weak it is. And to hide this weakness, it presents itself to its people as a tough guy with powerful nuclear weapons, as a government that does everything well – because state propaganda turns everything into something positive and beneficial – and as a regime which, like a guardian angel, keeps watch over the good of the people, threatened by serious dangers from beyond its borders. This strategy has borne fruit: recently, Putin’s popularity has been on the rise, although it is unlikely to reach the 81% of 2007 or the 86% it had after the annexation of Crimea.

Global Poison Spring

Evaggelos Vallianatos

The power of the chemical industry in the United States all but wiped out the US EPA. The politicized department administers laws and regulations that prescribe what it can do. However, in practice, it’s the political appointees that decide what EPA does. Related to this political reality, and knowing the deep roots of industry influence in Congress and the White House, EPA does its work reluctantly most of the time.

In the case of hazardous chemicals, EPA is scared to even do the minimum of protecting the health of Americans, much less protect the integrity and health of the natural world.

Sky empty of birds

The result of such calculated political indifference is bad for all life. In the last fifty years, birds in North America declined by 29 percent. Our skies are becoming empty of tiny and modest-sized flying animals. There are some 3 billion birds missing.

Perpetual use of deadly neurotoxic pesticides in a gigantic one-crop agriculture cripples, starves and poisons birds all over the United States and Canada.

Skyscrapers and other lighted large buildings and millions of lighted homes are another deadly trap for birds. In the evenings countless millions of lights on these man-made hills and mountains change night into day, all but erasing the stars. This artificial and thoroughly unnecessary situation creates a threatening reality for birds that guide themselves from the position of stars in the sky. The lights disorient flying birds. They die crashing on the glass windows and walls of tall buildings and homes.

“Modern” humans do more than build skyscrapers. They keep destroying wetlands, marshes, watersheds, and forests, home to millions of birds.

Collapse of fish

The other effect of spraying neurotoxins over the natural world is the killing of much more than honeybees. Neurotoxic neonicotinoids target insects, vital food for fish. Parallel to the sharp decline of birds, neonicotinoids are responsible for the collapse of fish.

Chemical hegemony of Europe

The Europeans are by no means more sensitive to the precarious anthropogenic threat and domination of the natural world. Germany gave us chemical warfare during WWI. It has continued its production of neurotoxins, including neonicotinoids. Germany is owner of the world’s most popular carcinogenic weed killer, glyphosate /roundup, a product of Monsanto that used to be a controversial agrochemical, bioengineering, and pharmaceutical company of the United States. In 2018, the German giant chemical company Bayer paid $ 63 billion for Monsanto.  Switzerland is home to very large chemical companies like Novartis, Syngenta and Roche.

European and North American agrichemical conglomerates dominate the Western political ruling class as well as agribusiness and  the chemical industry. Their products circulate all over the planet, making it almost impossible for a living being to avoid contamination and potential poisoning.

The 1984 Bhopal tragedy

In December 2, 1984, Union Carbide’s pesticide factory in Bhopal, India, blew up. Its deleterious methyl isocyanate filled the sky over Bhopal, asphyxiating 25,000 people and injuring hundreds of thousands more.

Did the world, including India, learn anything from that man-made calamity? No! Pesticides are even more popular in 2019 than in 1984.

For example, one in seven species in the United Kingdom is on the verge of extinction. The most responsible factor for this evolving ecological catastrophe is industrialized farming and the nasty habit of spraying country roads for “weeds.”

Global pesticide danger

The UK, the European Union, and North America are not alone in this blind path to oblivion. The entire world has been converted to the gospel of agrotoxins: the worldwide addiction to pesticides is appalling.

In November 2019, a group of researchers from the tropics published a comprehensive report in which they documented the extensive use of pesticides and their deadly effects on people and the ecosystems of the natural world. Their message is, watch out.

There’s legal and illegal spraying and over spraying of brand new chemicals as well as decades-old toxic and persistent insect poisons like DDT: with “drastic effect on most raptor species like Gypaetus barbatus (bearded vulture)… and Aquila adalberli (imperial eagle)… Other important components of ecosystems which are negatively affected by pesticide overuse are biological pest control…, soil fertility… and proper crop pollination.”

In the Punta San Juan Marine Protected Area, in Peru, a researcher found lots of DDT and DDT-like poisons in the blood of the endangered Humboldt penguins (Spheniscus Humboldt).

In Uruguay, researchers found high levels of neurotoxic pesticides in 14,800 beehives. The result was “bee disorientation.” This effectively means honeybees cannot find their way back to their hives. They die from cold or starvation.

This global study reported that even the “regular” spraying of pesticides is bad for human beings. For example, eating food contaminated by pesticides is worse than drinking pesticide-contaminated water or breathing pesticides. In out bodies, pesticides act like hormones, causing chaos in the body’s endocrine mechanisms of healthy development.

Finally, the study warns:

“Long-term low-dose [human] exposure [to pesticides] affects human health with reducing immunity, disturbs hormonal balance, reduces intelligence and causes reproduction-related problems and cancer.”

Lessons and remedies

Reading this timely and insightful report from the tropics, brought me back to my early days at EPA, only seven years after the EPA banned DDT in 1972.

This king of spray had its defenders. In fact, once a chemical passes the easy EPA “registration” (official approval) and ends up in the magic market, it’s extremely difficult to dislodge it. In addition to the corporate owner, a battery of industry scientists and scientists funded by the industry are ready to take oaths the chemical is innocent of all ecological and human health insults.

We have not learned this lesson either. Or, rather, like in the case of Bhopal, the chemical billionaires are bribing politicians and televisions and academics to keep painting a rosy picture of industrialized farming hooked on pesticides.

I am not a prophet. But putting to use my long-term experience with the EPA and learning from history enable me to reasonably predict the outcome of this pathology.

Alas for the younger people brought up in this irresponsible and amoral age. They will pay the highest price in health, ecological devastation, and personal dignity and survival.

My advice to people younger than forty is to overthrow their parents’ ecocidal economics for a just ecological civilization. The key in this desired metamorphosis is love for the natural world.

Learn from science: abolish pesticides and fossil fuels; learn from the wisdom of ancient societies – and never allow any person to become a billionaire.