The human cost of school reopenings: Six teachers dead in the US in the past month

Renae Cassimeda

As a result of the widespread reopening of K-12 schools across the US, at least six teachers have died from COVID-19 over the past month, bring the death toll among educators to at least 210 since the start of the pandemic. All of these deaths were absolutely unnecessary and are the direct result of criminal policies carried out by Democratic and Republican politicians at every level in the interest of protecting the profits of the financial oligarchy.

The recently leaked recordings of telephone interviews between US President Donald Trump and senior Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward have made clear that the Trump administration was fully aware of the massive and deadly danger posed by COVID-19 as early as January. The White House, both big business parties, and the corporate media have conspired to downplay the threat of COVID-19 and try to inure the population to mass death.

A large proportion of the deaths of educators are from New York City, an earlier major epicenter of the virus, where at least 31 teachers and 44 staff members have died from COVID-19, mainly in March and April. Underscoring the fact that the conspiracy against the working class continues today, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is colluding with the United Federation of Teachers to once again reopen schools in the largest school district in the country, with the aim of forcing 1.1 million students back into classrooms in order to set a precedent for Democrat-led districts across the country that have begun with online instruction.

The six reported deaths linked to school reopenings mark the beginning of what will become a flood of such reports, barring the independent intervention of educators, parents and students to force the closure of schools. The Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee is fighting to organize the immense opposition to the deadly school reopenings, helping already to form committees in Florida, Texas, Michigan and New York.

Demetria “Demi” Bannister (Credit: Leevy's Funeral Home)

In Columbia, South Carolina, Demetria “Demi” Bannister, only 28 years old, died Monday, September 7, just three days after being diagnosed with COVID-19. Bannister was a third grade teacher at Windsor Elementary School and had worked there for five years. In addition to teaching, Bannister was passionate about music and worked with the school choir, as well as a student club for aspiring singers.

The district began the school year virtually on August 31, and Bannister began the year teaching from home. However, she had been forced to work from her school site the week prior for teacher training. South Carolina has had more than 126,000 infections and over 2,900 deaths since the onset of the pandemic.

In Potosi, Missouri, 34-year-old AshLee DeMarinis, a special education teacher at John Evans Middle School, died Sunday, September 6, after a three-week battle with complications from COVID-19. Coronavirus cases have been rising in Missouri since early August.

St. Louis County health officials said last week that 39 students and 34 staff members at public and private schools tested positive in August, with most of the students attending middle or high schools. The state reported 773 new cases on Tuesday, surpassing 95,000 in total. According to Johns Hopkins University, Missouri is now tied with Oklahoma for the fifth-highest rate of new confirmed cases per 1,000 residents. St. Louis County is in the top 50 counties for total COVID-19 case numbers.

In Vancleave, Mississippi, Tom Slade, 53, tested positive for COVID-19 on August 24 and died Sunday. Since 1991, Slade taught US history and World Civilizations at Vancleave High School. According to the Jackson County School District’s reopening guidelines, teachers had returned to the classroom on August 3, with in-person instruction beginning August 6, but reports indicated that Slade contracted the virus from a church gathering.

In Oxford, Mississippi, 42-year-old Nacoma James, a teacher at Lafayette Middle School, died in early August during the first week that students returned to campus. James, also the Lafayette High School Football coach for over 16 years, spent the summer coaching at football practices until he was forced to self-quarantine after contracting COVID-19. Mississippi alone has reported 604 COVID-19 cases among school teachers and staff since the start of the pandemic, with the majority happening over the past six weeks.

In Tahlequah, Oklahoma, Teresa Horn, 62, died August 28 from a heart attack after testing positive for COVID-19 just four days prior. She was a special education teacher at Tahlequah High School for 26 years. Horn had been teaching on site until August 21, when she called in sick.

The sixth death is a still unnamed special education teacher in the Des Moines Public Schools in Iowa, who died on Tuesday, September 1. District spokesman Phil Roeder said the teacher, who worked at the Ruby Van Meter School for intellectually disabled students, fell ill after an out-of-state trip and died this week. Nearly 1,500 district employees have underlying health conditions that could put them at higher risk, not including those who are over age 60.

One in four teachers in the US, or nearly 1.5 million people, are at increased risk for serious illness if they become infected with the coronavirus, according to a report from the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF). This figure includes educators who are over the age of 65 or who have an underlying health condition that makes them more vulnerable to complications from COVID-19.

Infections have exploded in Florida, one of the five states with state-mandated in-person instruction available part-time or full-time for K-12 students. According to a report published in the Washington Post earlier this week, cases of COVID-19 among school-aged children in Florida have increased by 34 percent since schools started to reopen in August. This means that more than 10,500 children under the age of 18 have tested positive since August 10, when about half of the state’s 4,500 public schools began herding students back into their buildings.

Amid such stark conditions, K-12 schools and colleges have continued to reopen their campuses with in-person instruction in recent weeks, producing a rapid spike in COVID-19 cases in these communities. In places where major opposition is mounting, local and state governments have leaned on contracts and the courts to retaliate against opposition to in-person reopening plans.

In Polk County, Iowa, the Des Moines Public School District filed for an injunction after the Iowa Department of Education denied its waiver to begin the school year fully online. The district’s counsel claimed, “social distancing would be impossible because most of Des Moines’ schools are already at capacity, putting students and staff at risk for COVID-19.” A district court judge denied the motion on Tuesday, siding with the state, and argued that in-person school attendance was a matter of state law, not local control. The ruling came one week after confirmation of the above-mentioned Des Moines teacher’s death was released.

Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds issued a criminal state mandate in July that every student must spend at least half of their schooling inside classrooms. Temporary or continuous remote learning for an entire school or district can only be requested if the COVID-19 positivity rate averages 15 to 20 percent countywide over the course of 14 days.

Polk County’s current positivity rate is just under 10 percent, itself a highly-elevated figure that indicates widespread community transmission and inadequate testing. It has the highest number of cases and deaths in the state with 14,313 cases and 248 deaths, while cases have surged throughout the state with major outbreaks at the universities.

On August 31, teachers in Andover, Massachusetts protested unsafe working conditions by refusing to work inside their school buildings for a professional development day. Teachers had cited concerns about poor ventilation and safety and decided to work outside the school buildings instead. School district officials denounced the action as an “illegal strike” and took legal action against teachers, who were then ordered back to work by the union.

The Commonwealth Employment Relations Board (CERB) ruled Wednesday that Andover teachers participated in an illegal strike when they refused to enter school buildings for a professional development day last week.

Andover Public Schools are set to begin the school year with a hybrid learning plan on September 16, with each student attending in-person two full days per week. The court ruling indicates that teachers have no right to choose where they work, regardless of safety concerns, and the teachers unions have long agreed to these mandates.

Alongside hundreds of thousands of workers throughout the world, educators are being sacrificed in the interests of private profit. Workers and youth are waking up to this reality across the globe and entering struggles to close their campuses and protect their teachers and students. This fight is currently spearheaded by the strike of graduate students at the University of Michigan, which portends a major upsurge of the class struggle in the US and internationally.

The fight to ensure not a single further death is inflicted on the population lies in the struggle of teachers, school workers, and students to protect their lives by forming independent, rank-and-file safety committees which they control. Such committees have begun forming throughout the US, with committees in Detroit, Texas, and New York City established within the past week.

The coronavirus conspiracy: What did they know, and when did they know it?

Andre Damon

The release by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward of tapes showing that Trump deliberately misled the public over the COVID-19 pandemic has cast light on a massive conspiracy at the highest levels of the American state to cover up the threat posed by the disease.

In the tapes published by Woodward, the president admits to lying to the public as part of a criminal policy that has already taken the lives of nearly 200,000 people. But it is clear that he did not act alone.

Richard Nixon’s abortive effort to break into the Watergate hotel to ransack Democratic Party files pales in comparison with the present crime, which involves preventable death on a massive scale. But the bigger the crime, the bigger must be the group of conspirators. Unlike the Watergate conspiracy, which involved just a handful of people, the coverup surrounding the pandemic involves not just the president, but his cabinet, the federal bureaucracy, the intelligence agencies, Congress, and the media.

The watchword of the Watergate investigation that led to the resignation of Nixon in 1964 was, “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” Today, the same question must be asked of every institution of the American political establishment: “What did they know, and when did they know it?”

January

Throughout the month of January, the number of new COVID-19 cases in the Chinese province of Hubei grew steadily, reaching a peak at the end of the month. The city of Wuhan, with its hospital system totally overrun, was put under lockdown, with residents only allowed out to buy groceries.

As demonstrated by Trump’s description of his phone call with Chinese president Xi Jinping, Chinese authorities were as transparent with US officials as they were with the public health community, precisely explaining the disease’s method of transmission, its fatality rate, and the measures necessary to contain it.

According to subsequent studies, community transmission was likely already occurring in the United States by early January. But despite the availability of a COVID-19 test from the World Health Organization, no tests were conducted in the US during the entire month of January, according to figures from the COVID Tracking Project.

On January 24, the Senate Health Committee and Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a closed-door briefing, open to all senators, on the COVID-19 outbreak. Committee staffers told the WSWS that no records were kept of the content of or attendance at the meeting. However, media reports indicate that Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr and Senator Kelly Loeffler attended.

A photo of the January 24 hearing published by the Senate Health committee on Twitter. Beyond this photo, there is no public record of attendance of the meeting or the statements made there.

Emerging from the hearing, Dr. Anthony Fauci told reporters, “I don't think this is something that the United States public should be worried or frightened about.” He added, “I think the risk is very low right now for the United States.”

Whatever was said in private at the hearing, Loeffler did not get the same message as Fauci communicated publicly. Beginning immediately after the hearing, Loeffler began selling stock in the first of 29 stock transactions lasting several weeks. While she dumped stocks that lost value, she purchased shares in the online meeting firm Citrix, whose business boomed during the pandemic.

On January 28, according to Woodward's account, Trump was told by his national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien, “This will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency... This is going to be the roughest thing you face.”

Woodward’s reporting is consistent with an account published in the Washington Post on March 20, which reported that lawmakers were repeatedly and extensively briefed about the danger posed by the pandemic.

U.S. intelligence agencies were issuing ominous, classified warnings in January and February about the global danger posed by the coronavirus while President Trump and lawmakers played down the threat and failed to take action that might have slowed the spread of the pathogen, according to U.S. officials familiar with spy agency reporting.

The report continued:

Taken together, the reports and warnings painted an early picture of a virus that showed the characteristics of a globe-encircling pandemic that could require governments to take swift actions to contain it. But despite that constant flow of reporting, Trump continued publicly and privately to play down the threat the virus posed to Americans. Lawmakers, too, did not grapple with the virus in earnest until this month [that is, March]…

Intelligence agencies “have been warning on this since January,” said a U.S. official who had access to intelligence reporting that was disseminated to members of Congress and their staffs as well as to officials in the Trump administration, and who, along with others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive information.

February

No systematic testing for COVID-19 took place until the very end of February, despite the fact that the first US fatality had already occurred. During the month, Reuters reported that the Senate Intelligence Committee was receiving “daily” updates “monitoring the spread of the illness around the world.”

Between January 31 and February 18, Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, sold between $1.5 million to $6 million worth of stock. On February 13, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr sold between $628,000 and $1.72 million in stock, unloading shares in hotel chains that would see their shares plunge as a result of the pandemic.

On February 27, Burr secretly told a group of affluent Washington insiders at a private club known as the Tar Heel Circle, who paid as much as $10,000 per year for membership, that the pandemic would be much more severe than the public was being told. “There’s one thing that I can tell you about this: It is much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history,” he said, according to a secret recording of the remarks obtained by NPR. “It is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic.”

These statements flatly contradicted the tone of a public op-ed he wrote just three days earlier, in which he declared the US is “better prepared than ever before” to respond to a pandemic. Burr would subsequently resign as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in response to the revelation.

As the senators were dumping their stock, there was still no testing occurring, even with widespread community transmission in the US. The first batch of COVID-19 tests occurred on February 29.

Throughout the months of January and February, leading figures within the Democratic Party observed an airtight silence on the pandemic. This was in line with the posture of the New York Times, which did not write a single editorial on the subject between January 29 and February 29.

The embargo appears to have been lifted approximately on February 25-27. The Twitter accounts of Nancy Pelosi, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which had not posted a single statement about the outbreak for the first seven weeks of the year, all tweeted about the virus during that timespan. Joe Biden also tweeted, declaring, “If I were president today, I would not be taking China's word when it comes to the coronavirus.”

March

In March, the floodgates opened, as testing began to come online, and the number of documented US cases surged from less than a hundred to more than 200,000. But it was not until approximately March 14 that widespread lockdowns began in the United States. If lockdowns had had begun just two weeks earlier, on March 1, Columbia University estimated that 83 percent of the country’s COVID-19 deaths could have been avoided.

On March 19, Trump told journalist Bob Woodward that he was deliberately misleading the American public about the danger. “I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

On March 14, the Socialist Equality Party published a statement entitled, “Shut down the auto industry to halt the spread of coronavirus!” which circulated widely inside the auto plants of the American Midwest.

Autoworkers stage a walkout at Dundee Engine south of Ann Arbor

Over the following week, a series of wildcat strikes forced the shutdown of the entire US auto industry, with Fiat Chrysler announcing the end of production on March 18. Trump’s interview with Woodward occurred the next day, as the markets were near their lows for the year after the Dow Jones Industrial Average had dropped close to 10,000 points.

The first procedural vote on what would become the CARES Act took place on March 22. After that vote failed, the Dow futures hit their down limit. Another procedural vote failed on March 23, after which the markets reached their low for the year.

On March 25, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced an agreement on the CARES Act. The Senate unanimously passed the bill that evening, and the House followed with an unrecorded voice vote. The bill was signed by Trump within just four days of the first procedural vote.

On the same day as the first procedural vote for the CARES Act, and within just a week of the beginning of widespread lockdowns, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman published “A Plan to Get America Back to Work,” arguing for letting the virus run rampant through the population and a policy of “herd immunity.”

Trump immediately began agitating for an end to lockdowns, just one week after they began in earnest, using Friedman’s phrase, “The cure can’t be worse than the disease.” Immediately, states began the campaign to end lockdowns, aided by media accounts that declared that Americans were sick of restrictions and demanding a return to work, despite polls to the contrary.

By mid-May, manufacturing activity had resumed in every state, and over the subsequent months, effectively all restrictions were dropped, culminating with the reopening of indoor dining in New York and gyms in Michigan this week, alongside the nationwide reopening of schools and universities.

Public health officials blamed the major resurgence of the pandemic on the premature ending of lockdowns, which, according to Fauci and others, were far shallower and shorter than they were in Europe.

                                                 * * *

By the beginning of next week, more than 200,000 people will have died in the United Sates from COVID-19. These deaths were the result of a conspiracy to place profits over human lives.

It is clear that everyone was in on this conspiracy except the broad mass of the population. The intelligence agencies warned the politicians, both in the White House and in Congress. The politicians warned their well-heeled backers.

Among those deceived were Trump’s deluded followers among sections of the middle class and working class, who Trump secretly despises and whose lives mean nothing to him. The people now lying in mass graves on Ellis Island, the human beings whose bodies were defiled by being piled in refrigerated trucks in the Bronx, or in the spare rooms of Sinai Grace hospital in Detroit—they were left out.

In an editorial published Thursday, the New York Times, responding to the Woodward tapes, commented, “Imagine what this picture could look like today had the president been honest with the American public on Feb. 7.”

Obviously, Trump was not “honest” with the American people. But neither was the Times editorial board. Everything of which they accuse Trump, they themselves are guilty.

The World Socialist Web Site was not a party to this conspiracy.

Unlike Congress, we were not receiving daily briefings on the pandemic from the intelligence agencies. But we were able to make the necessary warnings because our aim was to reveal, not to conceal. On January 28, we warned, “The outbreak has exposed the enormous vulnerability of contemporary society to new strains of infectious disease, dangers for which no capitalist government has adequately prepared.”

We added, “While the governments of the world, particularly the United States, have made meticulous plans for large-scale war during the past quarter-century, no such resources or forethought have been devoted to combating the rash of epidemics that have plagued the planet over the same period.”

The next month, the WSWS rang the alarm louder. “The danger cannot be overstated,” the International Committee of the Fourth International warned on February 28. “[T]he US government is completely unprepared for a major outbreak,” the statement declared, calling for “a massive allocation of resources for health care and treatment.”

Those that lied about the pandemic in January, February and March are still lying to this day. Every claim made by the government, including of an imminent vaccine, must be treated with extreme suspicion.

The conspiracy continues. Students are being herded into classrooms at universities and schools throughout the country, fueling what is universally expected to be a major resurgence of the pandemic. According to one projection from the University of Washington, another 200,000 people are expected to die by the end of the year, doubling the current death toll.

The Current Impasse in Belarus and the Peace Alternative

Roger Harris

Back in the 1970s, the left and even many liberals were clear that Nixon’s dropping napalm on Vietnamese villages was an abomination. By the 1990s, some thought Bill Clinton’s bombing of Yugoslavia was, perhaps, humanitarian. Fast forward to the present, there is sentiment that the US has a global “responsibility to protect” the less enlightened lands in the name of “democracy.” Some on the liberal-left fail to recognize the fallacy of what Jean Bricmont exposes as “humanitarian imperialism – using human rights to sell war.”

In response to a peace organization advocating no foreign intervention in the internal affairs of Belarus, a US commentator protested: “[T]here has been no US intervention in the country. There’s nothing wrong, intrinsically, with external support of democracy. Your support for someone who seems like a bloody dictator is dismaying.” So, several inevitable questions arise. What is a dictator? Has there been foreign intervention in Belarus? Who has the right to intervene? And does advocating non-intervention implicitly support a presumptive dictator?

The Belarusian presidential election as a catalyst for regime change

Opposition elements in Belarus had long planned to use the September 9 presidential election as a catalyst for regime change. Their main base is with upwardly mobile white-collar professionals. However, they would have not been able to rally the tens of thousands of demonstrators had there not been broad and genuine discontent with President Alexander Lukashenko.

Elements of the opposition leadership in Belarus are partly financed by the European Union and the US and reflect those political interests. They have adopted the red and white flag, flown during the Nazi occupation. Their Resuscitation Reform Package, modeled after a nearly identical program for Ukraine, calls for the complete neoliberal privatization of the economy and an alignment with the NATO west.

Exit polls, conducted by the opposition, were cited to claim gross electoral fraud with Lukashenko garnering only 3% of the vote. Other observers accepted that Lukashenko won a majority but not by the official count of 80%. Golos, a pro-opposition election monitoring organization using data collected by US-backed youth organizations, reported Lukashenko winning with 61.7%.

BBC News laments that the election in Belarus had “no independent observers invited.” Yet there was an election observation delegation from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), which reported the August 9 election “was open and competitive and ensured that Belarus citizens could freely express their will.” But the CIS report did not have the kind conclusion or “independence” sought by the BBC, itself a quasi-governmental corporation of the British state and funded by a mandatory state levy.

The voices of political tendencies and parties in Belarus and elsewhere in Europe that consider themselves socialist or communist, but are critical of their home governments, are excluded by western media. Even leftish outlets such as Democracy Now! follow the flag repeating the US/NATO regime change narrative, without providing alternative views. DN! laments the “massive crackdown on any kind of independent reporting” in Belarus, while serving as an information gatekeeper in the homeland of the empire.

Objectively, no one authoritatively knows the real outcome of the vote.

Convenient definitions of a dictator

Being unelected or fraudulently elected is not the only definition of a dictator. The functional definition for the US government is a leader disloyal to the empire.

Washington considers the democratically elected President of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro a dictator. While Juan Guaidó, who proclaimed himself president of Venezuela on a Caracas street corner and was immediately recognized by the US government, is considered a legitimate head of state.

The monarch of Saudi Arabia is considered legitimate by Washington, even though the ruling House of Saud does not even bother to conduct sham elections. This is a country where women do not have basic rights, where slavery is practiced, and where those who run afoul with the law are routinely beheaded. But Saudi Arabia is the largest purchaser of US military equipment in the world, eclipsing the next contender by a factor of 2.6. So, the Saudi monarch is not on the official US list of dictators.

Then there are the leaders chosen and installed by the US after coups, such as Ukraine in 2014. There, the US literally handpicked the post-coup leader for Ukraine from a rogue’s gallery of neo-Nazis.

Intervention in Belarus by the West

The US does not have boots on the ground in Belarus and, so far, has refrained from drone attacks on funerals or wedding parties. Despite this praiseworthy restraint by the world’s sole superpower, it would be wrong to assume that the US is not intervening in Belarus. A US hybrid warfare program has been in effect since at least 2004 when the US passed the Belarus Democracy Act creating anti-government NGOs in Belarus and prohibiting loans.

Belarus is under unilateral US sanctions, illegal under international law, but justified by a presidential declaration, which bogusly claims a “national emergency” because Belarus “constitute[s] an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

The USAID, the above-ground face of the CIA, states in Orwellian language the US regime change plans for Belarus:

“[P]romote the emergence of a…market-oriented Belarus…USAID works…to stimulate the country’s transition to a market-based economy through programs that support…private business.”

Such is the imperial mindset that the US brazenly takes upon itself to “transition” a supposedly sovereign state into a neoliberal dependency.

The website of the quasi-governmental National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA cutout, lists some three dozen current projects in Belarus for what are euphemistically called strengthening “independent” online media, civil society, culture, and public discourse. NED’s years of hard work were on display in the media sophistication of the opposition in Belarus.

The runner-up in the Belarus presidential election with 10% of the official vote, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, fled to Lithuania, where she met with US Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun. Although self-described as apolitical with no prior political experience, she proclaimed herself ready to lead Belarus. Indeed the 37-year-old has all the qualifications for a puppet president, being photogenic and speaking English. On September 4, she addressed the UN Security Council calling for punishing sanctions on her own people.

The European Union is playing an even more overt role in promoting regime change in Belarus and is planning to extend sanctions. The openly anti-Semitic government of Poland, with which Belarus shares a border, has an irredentist interest in “recovering” portions of the country which were once part of a Polish empire.

The Russian legacy

Belarus was a Soviet republic, which did not become a sovereign country until 1990 after the breakup of the USSR. Belarus has strong historical and cultural affinities with its Russian neighbor to the east. Some 70% of Belarusians speak Russian at home. In 2000, Belarus and Russia established the Union State, a supranational confederation for economic integration and common defense.

The US and the European Union yearn to use the color revolution in Belarus to complete the military occupation of Russia’s western border. Belarus is the last piece in that puzzle now that Latvia and Estonia are in the NATO camp and Ukraine is on its way.

Russia’s involvement has largely been in reaction to this hostile military encirclement. Escalation of tensions only motivates Russia to be more defensive. The best antidote to Russian intrusion is détente rather than a new cold war. Besides, the government that the US peace movement can best influence is its own.

The current impasse in Belarus

The color revolution in Belarus is now stalled and the opposing forces appear to be stalemated. Without getting into a debate over Lukashenko, the salient question is how the working people of Belarus can best determine their destiny.

The opposition claims Lukashenko’s 26-year rule of Belarus has degenerated with questionable elections, mismanagement, and corruption. But the cure could be worse than the disease, as in the case of Libya, especially if it is left up to the tender mercies of the US empire to dictate the new “democratic” leader and the form of government to follow.

Belarus has enjoyed a low level of unemployment, public housing, almost no homelessness, and accessible and affordable healthcare and education. These social welfare factors compare favorably to the harsh neoliberal austerity and civil disintegration of its neighbors, now drawn into the NATO bloc. The critical issue is how can the Belarusians defend their gains in a contentious international milieu.

Tony Kevin, the former Australian ambassador to Poland, sums up the current impasse:

“Belarus is at risk, because in the Lukashenko political twilight there is confusion and fear: the people have lost their ideological moorings, and there is no coherent national vision as was recovered in Russia under Vladimir Putin starting in 2000.  Belarusians hopefully are coming to see the danger they will be in if they depose Lukashenko without knowing what comes after.”

Regardless of what the security forces might do, Lukashenko could easily be deposed if the workers in the major industrial enterprises went on a wildcat strike. Some discontented workers have walked off their jobs, but a majority look to the cautionary examples of the turncoat Solidarity in Poland, the sellout Yeltsin in Russia, and the neo-Nazis in Ukraine.

In those and other examples, state enterprises were sold off at bargain basement prices to new oligarchs and western financiers. Factory equipment was ransacked, work forces drastically downsized, and labor rights abrogated. Absent the specter of another US-backed coup like in Ukraine with its severe neoliberal austerity, Lukashenko would likely have been history.

The peace alternative – no foreign intervention in Belarus

The principle of non-intervention is enshrined in the UN Charter. There is no unilateral right to intervene into the internal affairs of another sovereign state. The greatest violator of this fundamental international law is the world’s sole superpower. The consequence, according to the late Uruguayan political analyst Eduardo Galeano has been: “Every time the US ‘saves’ a country, it converts it into either an insane asylum or a cemetery.”

A non-interventionist stance should not be confused with an endorsement of Lukashenko. Opposing US/NATO interventionism is no more an endorsement of Lukashenko than opposing the invasion of Iraq was an endorsement of Saddam Hussein. Belarus needs more than the binary choice of Lukashenko and the failed Ukrainian option. To have that space requires no foreign intervention in Belarus.

For those of us in the US, that means keeping our own government from fishing in troubled waters and letting the people of Belarus decide. They have the power and don’t need to be told what democracy looks like by those of us who will choose between Trump or Biden in November.

Argentina’s Dark Hours

Cesar Chelala

It is interesting to try to survive in a country run by incompetent and corrupt leaders. Argentines are already near 200 days on home seclusion. We call this the “infectadura,” playing with the Spanish words for infection and dictatorship. After 200 days, the only thing we have achieved with the Alberto Fernández government is the right to be among the ten most coronavirus-infected countries in the world.

In the meantime, the country’s Vice President, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, continues to be the power behind the throne. Mediocrity, not meritocracy, is the rule. We live in a country of no future, no measures for protecting small industries, desultory decision-making. It is a unique experience under populist Peronism, corrupted Kirchnerism, and this strange experience the President is performing. We may call it “Puppetism.” We understand under this term something between a farce or being a puppet animated by someone else.

This is our cruel reality: we are under an oxymoronic president, incapable of taking one decision without contradicting a past statement, and a vice president – corrupt as no one before in Argentina’s history- who is pulling strings to move the puppet. Argentina is making all the right moves to be like Venezuela. Jorge Luis Borges, the noted Argentinian writer, once famously said, “Peronists are neither good nor bad. They are incorrigible.”

The latest effort of the government is a reform of the judicial system. The idea is to extend the number of federal tribunals and to put in charge judges closely allied to the government’s ideology. It is nonsensical for the government to be intent on reforming the judiciary during the most terrible pandemic of our history, instead of being focused on caring for the health of its people.

The main idea behind judicial reform is to guarantee impunity to all those accused of corruption charges during Cristina Kirchner’s presidency. Kirchner herself facing a dozen charges of bribery, embezzlement, and money laundering from her time in office as President. Besides, she is accused of giving Iran significant control of the investigation into the still unresolved bombing of AMIA, a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. Eighty-five people were killed in that terrorist attack and hundreds were injured. The Iranian government is believed to have been behind the attack. Her main accuser then was the man who is now the country’s President; none other than Alberto Fernández. Kafkaesque…

This is happening as the coronavirus pandemic has devastated Argentina’s economy. Respected economist Orlando J. Ferreres, predicts that approximately 30,000 companies will close this year due to the pandemic. According to the U.N., almost 900,000 people may lose their jobs this year, and GDP will fall in December between 8.2% and 10%.

Poverty and hunger levels are also increasing rapidly. “The country that produced food for 400 million people today needs to provide food assistance to 11 million Argentines,” says Roberto Valente, UN resident coordinator in Argentina. This number represents a quarter of the country’s total population.

We Argentinians have learned from Kafka better than any other country in the world. And Argentina seems like a country out of Kafka’s fertile imagination. We are a paradigm of surrealism. We don’t know if President Fernández has read Kafka. But even if he hasn’t read him, he is still entangled in the strings typical of Kafka’s stories. We are impotent spectators of this incredible development. But something must be said: despite hurricanes and earthquakes, despite any and all possible miseries, Argentines will never surrender. We have lived in a normal country. And we want to live in one again. Growing opposition to the regime will prove that Argentina will survive these darkest hours.

As Washington Retreats, Eastern Mediterranean Conflict Further Marginalizes NATO

Ramzy Baroud

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is an alliance in name alone. Recent events notwithstanding, the brewing conflict over territorial waters in the Eastern Mediterranean indicates that the military union between mostly Western countries is faltering.

The current Turkish-Greek tension is only one facet of a much larger conflict involving, aside from the two Mediterranean countries, Israel, Egypt, Cyprus, France, Libya and other Mediterranean and European countries. Notably absent from the list are the United States and Russia; the latter, in particular, stands to gain or lose much economic leverage, depending on the outcome of the conflict.

Conflicts of this nature tend to have historic roots – Turkey and Greece fought a brief but consequential war in 1974. Of relevance to the current conflagration is an agreement signed by Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu and his Greek and Cypriot counterparts, Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Nicos Anastasiades, respectively, on January 2. The agreement envisages the establishment of the EastMed pipeline which, once finalized, is projected to flood Europe with Israeli natural gas, pumped mostly from the Leviathan Basin.

Several European countries are keen on being part of, and profiting from, the project. But Europe’s gain is not just economic but also geostrategic. Cheap Israeli gas will lessen Europe’s reliance on Russia’s natural gas which arrives in Europe through two pipelines, Nord Stream and Gazprom, the latter extending through Turkey.

Gazprom alone supplies Europe with an estimated 40% of its natural gas needs, thus giving Russia significant economic and political leverage. Some European countries, especially France, have labored to liberate themselves from what they see as a Russian economic chokehold on their economies.

Indeed, the French and Italian rivalry currently under way in Libya is tantamount to colonial expeditions aimed at balancing out the over-reliance on Russian and Turkish supplies of gas and other sources of energy.

Fully aware of France’s and Italy’s intentions in Libya, the Russians and Turks are wholly involved in Libya’s military showdown between the Government of National Accord (GNA) and forces in the East, loyal to General Khalifa Haftar.

While the conflict in Libya has been under way for years, the Israel-et al EastMed pipeline has added fuel to the fire: infuriating Turkey, which is excluded from the agreement; worrying Russia, whose gas arrives in Europe partially via Turkey, and empowering Israel, which may now cement its economic integration with the European continent.

Anticipating the Israel-led alliance, on November 28, 2019, Turkey and Libya signed a Maritime Boundary Treaty, an agreement that gave Ankara access to Libya’s territorial waters. The bold maneuver allows Turkey to claim territorial rights for gas exploration in a massive region that extends from the Turkish southern coast to Libya’s north-east coast.

The ‘Exclusive Economic Zone’ (EEZ) is unacceptable in Europe because, if it remains in effect, it will cancel out the ambitious EastMed project and fundamentally alter the geopolitics – largely dictated by Europe and guaranteed by NATO – of this region.

However, NATO is no longer the once formidable and unified power. Since its inception in 1949, NATO has been on the rise. NATO members have fought major wars in the name of defending one another and also to protect ‘the West’ from the ‘Soviet menace’.

NATO remained strong and relatively unified even after the dismantlement of the Soviet Union and the abrupt collapse, in 1991, of its Warsaw Pact. NATO managed to sustain a degree of unity, despite its raison d’être – defeating the Soviets – being no longer a factor, because Washington wished to maintain its military hegemony, especially in the Middle East.

While the Iraq war of 1991 was the first powerful expression of NATO’s new mission, the Iraq war of 2003 was NATO’s undoing. After failing to achieve any of its goals in Iraq, the US adopted an ‘exit strategy’ that foresaw a gradual American retreat from Iraq while, simultaneously, ‘pivoting to Asia’ in the desperate hope of slowing down China’s military encroachment in the Pacific.

The best expression of the American decision to divest militarily from the Middle East was NATO’s war on Libya in March 2011. Military strategists had to devise a bewildering term, ‘leading from behind’, to describe the role of the US in the Libya conflict. For the first time since the establishment of NATO, the US was part of a conflict that was largely controlled by comparatively smaller and weaker NATO members – Italy, France, Britain and others.

While former US President, Barack Obama, insisted on the centrality of NATO in US military strategies, it was evident that the once-powerful alliance had outweighed its usefulness for Washington.

France, in particular, continues to fight for NATO with the same ferocity it fought to keep the European Union intact. It is this French faith in European and Western ideals that has compelled Paris to fill the gap left by the gradual American withdrawal. France is currently playing the role of the military hegemon and political leader in many of the Middle East’s ongoing crises, including the flaring East Mediterranean conflict.

On December 3, 2019, France’s Emmanuel Macron stood up to US President Donald Trump, at the NATO summit in London. Here, Trump chastised NATO for its reliance on American defense and threatened to pull out of the alliance altogether if NATO members did not compensate Washington for its protection.

It’s a strange and unprecedented spectacle when countries like Israel, Greece, Egypt, Libya, Turkey and others lay claims over the Mediterranean, while NATO scrambles to stave off an outright war, among its own members. Even stranger, to see France and Germany taking over the leadership of NATO while the US remains, thus far, almost completely absent.

It is hard to imagine the reinvention of NATO, at least a NATO that caters to Washington’s interests and diktats. Judging by France’s recent behavior, the future may hold irreversible paradigm shifts. In November 2018, Macron made what then seemed as a baffling suggestion, a ‘true, European army’. Considering the rapid regional developments and the incremental collapse of NATO, Macron may one day get his army, after all.

UAE Recognition of Israel Dents Emirati Religious Soft Power

James M. Dorsey

The United Arab Emirates’ establishment of diplomatic relations with Israel is damaging its efforts to garner religious soft power by projecting itself as a model of Islamic moderation and tolerance and a force for peace. The UAE move has sparked splits within a key group, created and nurtured by the Gulf state, to project its image as a moderate religious power.

The United Arab Emirates’ bold recognition of Israel, earning it valuable brownie points in the West, has come at a cost: a blow to its efforts to earn religious soft power in the Muslim world.

The setback raises questions about the UAE’s strategy of co-opting prominent Muslim scholars with financial incentives to project the Gulf state as a model of tolerance that seeks to promote a moderate interpretation of Islam in a global competition for religious soft power with Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia.

The UAE attempt to reap religious support for its opening to Israel encountered blowback when a statement by the Abu Dhabi-based Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies — one of several UAE-backed groups created to counter similar Qatari institutions and give the UAE effort religious cachet — sparked protests and resignations.

Members of the Forum’s board complained that the statement had been issued without a discussion in the Forum’s board of trustees. The board includes former Jordanian Islamic chief justice and minister of endowments Ahmad Hilayel and Abdullah Al-Maatouq, a Kuwaiti royal court advisor and former religious affairs minister and United Nations envoy.

Hamza Yusuf, the Forum’s vice president and a popular American Islamic scholar who heads Zaytuna College — the United States’ first accredited Muslim undergraduate college — distanced himself from the statement, asserting that he did “not engage in or endorse geopolitical strategies or treaties” and that his “allegiance is and has always been with the oppressed peoples of Palestine, whether Muslim, Christian, or otherwise.”

Similarly, while announcing her resignation from the Forum’s board, prominent American Muslim activist Aisha al-Adawiya, founder of the human rights group Women in Islam, said that there had been “no agreement on any kind of support for the UAE’s deal with Israel.”

So did Muhammad Hussein, the grand mufti of Jerusalem. Mr. Hussein banned Muslims from the UAE from visiting and praying at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third holiest site.

However, the statement issued by Abdullah Bin Bayyah, a Mauritanian politician, religious scholar, and the head of the Forum and president of the Emirati Fatwa Council, took a different tone.

Praising “the wisdom of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces,” the statement asserted that normalization of relations with the Jewish state had “stopped Israel from extending its sovereignty over Palestinian lands” and was a means to “promote peace and stability across the world.”

Mr. Bin Bayyah’s defense of the statement reflected the UAE’s definition of moderate Islam as one that is state-controlled and preaches absolute obedience to the ruler. He insisted that “international relations and treaties are among the initiatives that fall within the policy-making purview of the ruler.”

Despite longstanding relations with Abu Dhabi’s ruling Al-Nahyan family, Mr. Bin Bayyah was long aligned with their nemesis as vice president of the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS) and the European Council for Fatwa and Research, that was established to provide guidance to European Muslims through the dissemination of religious opinions.

The two groups were headed and founded by Qatar-based Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of the world’s most prominent living Islamic scholars who is widely viewed as a spiritual guide of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Qatari support of the Brotherhood is a main driver of the more than three-year-old UAE-Saudi-led diplomatic and economic boycott of the Gulf state. The Emirates and the kingdom earlier designated the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization.

Members of the Abu Dhabi ruling family, including Crown Prince Mohammed and his foreign minister, Abdullah bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, began courting Mr. Bin Bayyah in early 2013.

They invited the cleric to the Emirates the same month that Egyptian President and Muslim Brother Mohammed Morsi – the post-2011 revolt democratically elected head of state — was toppled by a UAE-backed military coup.

In a letter Mr. Bin Bayyah sent three months later to the IUMS, he announced that he was resigning from the group. He wrote: “the humble role I am attempting to undertake towards reform and reconciliation (among Muslims) requires a discourse that does not sit well with my position at the International Union of Muslim Scholars.”

Mr. Bin Bayyah wrote his letter after the IUMS had bitterly denounced the Egyptian coup and condemned the subsequent brutal repression of the Brotherhood and he published it to demonstrate to Emirati leaders that he had ended his association with Qatari-supported Islamic groups.

The courting of Mr. Bin Bayyah emanated from Prince Mohammed’s realization that he needed religious soft power to justify the UAE’s wielding of hard power that started with the Egyptian coup and expanded with military interventions in Yemen and Libya.

The emergence in recent years of Mr. Bin Bayyah – a celebrated Islamic jurist whom Islam scholar Usamaa Al-Azami dubbed “counter‐revolutionary Islam’s most important scholar” – as the religious face of the UAE coincided with the 93-year-old Mr. Qaradawi’s withdrawal from public life.

The backlash sparked by Mr. Bin Bayyah’s statement highlights the Achilles heel, at least in the Muslim world, of the UAE’s religious soft power ploy.

“The counter‐revolutionary Islamic political thought that is being developed and promoted by Bin Bayyah and the UAE suffers from certain fundamental structural problems that means its very existence is precariously predicated on the persistence of autocratic patronage,” Mr. Al-Azami asserted. “Its lack of independence means that it is not the organic product of a relatively unencumbered engagement with political modernity that might be possible in freer societies than counter‐revolutionary Gulf autocracies,” he added.

Mr. Al Azami’s criticism goes to the heart of a debate, particularly in Turkey and Indonesia, on Islam’s ability to recontextualize itself and break away from the shackles of outdated concepts and traditions without being freed from control by states that seek to impose a self-serving vision of the faith.

Expressed more bluntly, Yahya Birt, a scholar of British Islam and a convert to the faith, who has researched UAE-backed clerics, argued that there is discrepancy between how they project their sponsors abroad and the reality on the ground.

“The extracted price of government patronage is high for ulema (religious scholars) in the Middle East. Generally speaking, they have to openly support or maintain silence about autocracy at home, while speaking of democracy, pluralism, and minority rights to Western audiences,” Mr. Birt said.

The backlash to the support of the UAE recognition of Israel by the Forum and Mr. Bin Bayyah suggests a serious flaw in the Gulf state’s approach to religious soft power: It targets first and foremost Western corridors of power rather than the Muslim community at large.