Ideology Behind Character Assassination

Bhabani Shankar Nayak

What is character? Character indicates totality of feature of an individual’s personality, courage, commitment and outlooks from righteousness to humility. The material or physical representations or moral frameworks are not character. Class, gender, race, sexual orientations, religious practice and moral values do not represent character. Character is a commitment to one’s own self, to one’s own family, friends, society, state and beyond. And character assassination is as old as human civilisation.

The character assassination manifests itself in different ways by spreading factually incorrect information, rumours, lies, misquoting, misrepresentation, silencing, acts of vandalism, name-calling, mental illness, creating false perceptions, and sexual deviance. These are discussed in detail in Martijn Icks and Eric Shiraev’s edited volume on “Character Assassination throughout the Ages”. The criminal tribes, underdeveloped rural poor, dirty working classes, unhygienic lower castes, characterless women and brainless blacks are some of the examples of stereotypes-based character assassination campaigns against different groups of populations in the world. The Nazi regime has flourished by discrediting Jewish population. The anti-terrorism campaign has shaped post 9/11 world by demonizing Muslims. It is often used against women, working classes, minorities, and revolutionaries to tame their creativities and emancipatory potentials.

Why do people follow the strategy of character assassination? Is it for the sake of defeating or winning in an argument? What are the aims and objectives of character assassinations? Is it spontaneous or pre planned?  Is it a mechanism of self-defence? Is it a product of anger, revenge, frustration and jealousy? Who fears character assassination and why? Who are the victims of character assassination? These are some of the questions central to understand the ideology behind character assassination. The time, place, people and their social, political, cultural and religious conditions shape the ideology of character assassination. From politics to personal lives, from villages to cities, from corporate world to literature, character assassination continues to be an intoxicating strategy adopted by both opponents and friends alike in different stages of life.

Character assassination as a form of smear campaign is an old and powerful strategy of social, political and cultural control of individuals and their freedom. Character assassination is a deliberate attempt to demoralises a person or a community by destroying their image with the help of spreading rumours, lies or facts to reduce their abilities to actively engage with themselves and with their fellow beings. It hurts the victims by diminishing their reputation and achievements in public eye, which disables the victims to achieve their goals successfully. In 1950, Jerome Davis published a book called “Character Assassination” which outlines “fear, ignorance, envy, suspicion, malice, jealousy, frustration, greed, aggression, economic rivalry, emotional insecurity and an inferiority complex” as reasons behind character assassinations. Jerome Davis was a sociologist and a labour organiser. His book is an autobiographical reflection on self-defence against personal attacks.

There are different types of character assassinations but the objectives are very similar. The idea is to discredit the abilities, integrity, charisma, intellect and power of an individual, a group or an institution. It often leads to deaths and destitutions. Character assassination is a dangerous strategy of demonization, which silences people and their voice of reason. Therefore, it is important to understand it and fight back to ensure truth to prevail. Silence is not an option in the age of post truth world dominated by the mass production of fake news. The reactionary ruling classes run character assassination campaign against the alternative forces to control and monopolise state power and control the society without facing any radical challenges of transformation.

The fascist forces indulge in character assassination of the past leaders to legitimise their politics of otherness and hegemonize their power over public.  Harriet Flower has coined a concept called “memory sanctions,” in her book “The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture”.  The idea of ‘memory sanctions’ is “deliberately designed strategies that aim to change the picture of the past, whether through erasure or redefinition, or by means of both”. The forward march of neoliberal authoritarianism led by the right-wing forces use this strategy by rewriting history and abusing progressive past and defame radical leaders to establish their reactionary rule. The collective memory is a threat to neoliberal authoritarianism. Therefore, the world is witnessing erasure of history, humanities and social sciences, weakening of scientific research, and onslaught on reason as non-merit goods. Character assassination of people and their past is the best way to domesticate them as per the needs and desires of the powerful. Character assassination as a tool, it has served the ruling and non-ruling elites and powerful for centuries to limit alternatives to flourish.

In the age of digital platforms, social media enables speed assassination of character without any time lapses. It is dangerous for peace and prosperity. Truth is the greatest causality of character assassination. It is a big business today. The public relations agencies, advertisement industries, mass media and other propaganda machines are net beneficiaries and enablers of character assassination to generate revenue. Therefore, it is apt to call character assassination is a self-help product and tool of patriarchal capitalism to control, domesticate and emasculate individual freedom and creativity. It tames the voice of science and reason within the cacophony of mass media; the voice of ruling and non-ruling classes.

Therefore, the radical politics and progressive ideology need to conceptualise ‘character’ as commitment for fellow human beings, nature and animals. Such a conceptualisation and its praxis can fight and defeat the character assassination as a reactionary and ruling class strategy to uphold individual dignity and collective spirit of human essence.

Fur Trades and Pandemics: Coronavirus and Denmark’s Great Mink Massacre

Binoy Kampmark

“The worst case scenario is a new pandemic, starting all over again out of Denmark,” came the words of a grave Kåre Mølbak, director of the Danish health authorities, the State Serum Institute.  According to the Institute, COVID-19 infections were registered on 216 mink farms on November 6.  Not only had such infections been registered; new variants, five different clusters in all, were also found.  Mink variants were also detected in 214 people among 5,102 samples, of whom 200 live in the North Jutland Region.

A noticeable tremor of fear passed through the public health community.  It was already known that mink are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2.  On April 23 and 25, outbreaks linked with mink farms were reported at farms in the Netherlands holding 12,000 and 7,500 animals respectively.  The mink had been infected by a farm worker with COVID-19 and, like humans, proved to be either asymptomatic, or evidently ill with symptoms such as intestinal pneumonia.  In time 12 of the 130 Dutch mink farms were struck.  What interested researchers was the level of virulence in the transmission of the virus through the population.  “Although SARS-CoV-2 is undergoing plenty of mutations as it spreads through mink,” writes Martin Enserik for Science, “its virulence shows no signs of increasing.”

The Danish discoveries, however, fuelled another concern: the possibility that the virus from cluster 5, as identified by the Institute, was more resistant to antibodies from humans infected with SARS-CoV-2 when compared to other non-mutated SARS-CoV-2 viruses.  Potential vaccines, in other words, could be threatened with obsolescence.  “This hits all the scary buttons,” claimed evolutionary biologist Carl Bergstrom.

In her November 6 briefing, Tyra Grove Krause, head of the department of infectious disease epidemiology and prevention at the SSI, did not wish to strike the doomsday register.  But she was none the less abundantly cautious.  “We definitely need to do more studies on this specific variant and its possible effect on future vaccines, but it takes a long time to do these kinds of studies.”  But she was in no mood to wait to “get all the evidence” given the possible risks.  “You need to act in time to stop transmission.”

The World Health Organization is attempting to provide some reassurance, and while this is welcome, that body’s public image has been often unjustly frayed by its initial approach to the novel coronavirus.  In a statement to National Geographic, the WHO admitted concern “when a virus has gone from humans to animals, and back to humans.  Each time this happens, it can change more.”  But Soumya Swaminathan, the WHO’s chief scientist, refrained from drawing any conclusions from the current crop of revelations from Denmark.  “We need to wait and see what the implications are but I don’t think we should come to any conclusions about whether this particular mutation is going to impact vaccine efficiency.”

Francois Balloux, director of University College London’s Genetics Institute, is also making his own infectious disease wager, thrilled by this “fantastically interesting” scenario.  “I don’t believe that a strain which gets adapted to mink poses a higher risk to humans.”  This comes with qualification, of course.  “We can never rule out anything, but in principle it shouldn’t. It should definitely not increase transmission.  I don’t see any good reason why it should make the virus more severe.”

In Denmark, no scientific chances are being taken on either the issue of virulence or the matter of vaccine effectiveness. The entire mink herd of 17 million is being culled.  The Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, attempted to see the problems of her country and its mink industry in humanitarian terms.  “We have a great responsibility toward our population,” she explained on Wednesday, “but with the mutation that has now been found we have an even greater responsibility for the rest of the world as well.”  Residents in seven areas in North Jutland have also been told “to stay in their area to prevent the spread of infection …. We are asking you in North Jutland to do something completely extraordinary.  The eyes of the world are upon us.”

Despite the immediate and effective destruction of an industry, Mogens Jensen, Minister for Food and Fisheries, stated that this would be “the right thing to do in a situation where the vaccine, which is currently the light at the end of a very dark tunnel, is in danger.”  Magnus Heunicke, the Minister for Health, also reiterated the point that “mink farming during the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic entails a possible risk to the public health – and for possibilities to combat COVID-19 with vaccines.”

The inevitably callous and brutal measure means that both the animals concerned and an industry, are being confined to history.  Animal welfare advocates see mixed promise in the measure: cruelty in the culling, but hope in the eradication of a trade.  “The right decision,” according to Animal Protection Denmark, “would be to end mink farming entirely and help farmers into [another] occupation that does not jeopardize public health and animal welfare.”

Joanna Swabe, the senior director of public affairs for Humane Society International/Europe, did express some pleasure at what was otherwise a grim end to Denmark’s mink population.  As one of the largest fur producers in the global market, the “total shutdown of all Danish mink fur farms amid spiraling COVID-19 infections is a significant development.”  She even went so far as to congratulate the Danish prime minister for the “decision to take such an essential and science-led step to protect Danish citizens from the deadly coronavirus.”

Fur lobbyists and traders, while accepting of the health risks, have had reservations at the absolute nature of the Danish response.  Magnus Ljung, CEO of Saga Furs, noted how control of COVID-19 infections in mink populations was achieved in the Netherlands and Spain without a need to resort to mass culling.  Mick Madsen of the Brussels-based industry group Fur Europe accepted that “public safety must come first” but urged Danish authorities to “release their research for scrutiny amongst international scientists.”

In the United States, mass culling is yet to take off.  The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention remains cool to any drastic measures, despite cases of contracted coronavirus at mink farms in Utah, Wisconsin and Michigan.  Transmission to humans had yet to be documented, though spokesperson Jasmine Reed noted “ongoing” investigations.

Some scrutiny from international sources regarding Denmark’s decision has been forthcoming, though it is more in the order of modest scepticism.  Marion Koopmans of the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, recalling the research into mink outbreaks in Dutch mink populations, considered the claim on a resistant mutation a bold one.  “That is a very big statement.  A single mutation, I would not expect to have that dramatic an effect.”  Emma Hodcroft, a molecular epidemiologist based at the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine in Bern, Switzerland, was also doubtful.  “It’s almost never the case that it’s such a simple story of one mutation and all your vaccines stop working.”

After the great Danish mink massacre, it may well transpire that Prime Minister Frederiksen’s decision might have been less “science-led” as was presupposed.  This does not dishearten Hodcroft, who warmly embraces the Danish approach to “take a step too far rather than a step too little”.  Pity about the mink, then.

In face of rising coronavirus infections, teachers, students, and parents express support for European-wide school strike

Gregor Link

Hospital bed shortages, overloaded test laboratories and health authorities that can no longer reliably track contacts are threatened everywhere. As throughout Europe, the ruling class’s herd immunity policy has set the course for an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe in Germany. On Friday, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) reported over 21,500 new coronavirus infections in the previous 24 hours—another record figure.

French students studying German (posted by a teacher on Facebook)]

The importance of schools and day-care centres as breeding grounds for the virus has long been comprehensively documented scientifically. Just two weeks ago, researchers from the University of Edinburgh demonstrated that opening up schools had been accompanied by a 24 percent increase in the transmission of infections within a month. The study analyses data sets from 131 countries and was published in The Lancet Infectious Disease journal.

Although the health authorities are completely overloaded, and three-quarters of infection cases cannot be traced due to the German government’s “testing strategy,” schools and day-care centres were themselves among the relevant “infection environments,” according to official reports. Current data from the health authorities show at least 11 percent of traceable chains of infection begin in educational institutions.

Inquiries by tagesschau.de have brought to light menacing figures from several German states. For example, when asked, Rhineland-Palatinate reported that the number of infected schoolchildren in the state had increased more than fivefold in the past week. The number of affected teachers had also multiplied: from 16 to 71. Four hundred eighty-five infected pupils were registered in Lower Saxony in the weeks from October 12, followed by 686—and in the week from October 26, there were as many as 1,255 cases. In the current week, there were 366 cases from Monday to Tuesday morning alone.

In Bavaria, according to a report by tagesschau.de, more than 2,000 pupils were infected on October 30, the last day of school before the autumn vacations. In Hamburg, almost one in four current cases relates to a school context.

Workers and young people are reacting with consternation and anger to the murderous decision of the federal and state governments to keep schools, businesses, and day-care centres open. Given the “almost 20,000 new infections,” Christine D. from Karlsruhe, for example, commented on Facebook, “It won’t be long before hospitals are overwhelmed. Schools should be closed immediately because infections will only go down after weeks. I’m afraid that we’ll wait too long and then feel the same as everyone else in Europe. There were 500 coronavirus deaths in the UK alone yesterday.”

Deutsche Presseagentur reports that more and more laboratories are reaching their limits in evaluating tests. According to the RKI, 69 laboratories reported a backlog of 98,931 samples still to be processed in the past calendar week (up to November 1). Two weeks earlier, there were 52 laboratories with 20,799 outstanding unprocessed samples. According to the RKI, 55 laboratories recently reported delivery problems for reagents needed for evaluating the tests, plastic consumables, and pipette tips, among other things.

Because of backlogs in the laboratories, residents of old people’s homes were having to wait up to five days for test results, the German Foundation for Patient Protection warned the press on Tuesday. At the same time, according to board member Eugen Brysch, there was a demand “that overstretched laboratories must deliver results several times a week to keep the Bundesliga [football league] going.” This policy was “unacceptable.”

As is widely known, this completely predictable overload means the infection process can no longer be reliably monitored and is increasingly out of control. Christine continues on Facebook, “Due to congestion in the laboratories, 100,000 tests have not yet been evaluated—so who knows how high the numbers really are? We could already be at 30,000 or more new infections without knowing it. The only certainty is that it’s increasing.”

The COVID-19 research team at Johns Hopkins University in the US reported a new infection rate of 31,480 and 232 deaths Thursday, warning of another exponential increase.

Meanwhile, the rate of positive coronavirus tests in Germany has increased more than tenfold from 0.7 to 7.3 in the past two months. In some regions of Austria, one in six tests is now positive. According to WHO Regional Director Hans Kluge, the mortality rate of infected persons is also increasing in Europe. Kluge spoke to the press in Copenhagen on Thursday about an “explosion” in case numbers across the continent, which had once again become the global epicentre of the pandemic with 293,000 deaths.

Throughout Europe, massive resistance is developing against the herd immunity policy and the associated enforced keeping of schools open. After mass movements for safe education by students in Greece and Poland a few weeks ago, thousands of young people took to the streets in France on Wednesday. At more than a dozen schools, they protested for school closures and blocked school entrances. The Macron government reacted with massive violence and sent riot police to deal with the student protests, using truncheons and tear gas.

On Twitter, Tatjana, from Bavaria, who has four children herself, commented on the pictures on the Internet, “I am extremely disgusted by what is going on here in Europe and how children, parents, teachers, educators who are afraid are being treated. Not even violence seems to scare them away. I am speechless with outrage.”

In the last week, students in several German states have set up action committees to coordinate the coming struggles in this country as well. Like Britain, where over a thousand parents took part in a coordinated school strike action, more and more parents in Germany support the fight for safe education for all.

“Children and teenagers are to be sent to schools come hell or high water,” said Anita, a mother from southern Germany. “Collateral damage must simply be accepted,” she adds bitterly. “Protect patients at risk? Certainly not inside families.”

“My daughter is in eleventh grade, sits in packed trains and buses every day and can’t maintain [a safe] distance,” says Ulrike from Mönchengladbach on Facebook. “At school, she is then in a class with 30 students. She would be happy if there were online lessons and she didn’t have to expose herself to this risk every day. There are already dozens of students who have fallen ill and yet students must still go to school—I wonder what else has to happen to protect students. In many cases, father, mother, or siblings are high-risk individuals. Does it make no difference if our children become sick or carriers?”

In addition to parents, hundreds of teachers in France joined the students’ struggle in nationwide strikes. On Monday and Tuesday, shortly before 9 am, teachers held local meetings in dozens of schools and voted not to enter classrooms until measures were in place to contain the spread of the virus.

“In France, parents and teachers are on strike—rightly so, because their lives are at stake,” says Teja H. from Soest, who works as a photographer and has a girlfriend in France. “What the teachers are doing is the only right thing. While restaurants and cultural institutions are closed without any significant support, millions of people continue to meet at work and school.”

French students on the first day of school after the vacations (posted on Facebook by a student)

This policy is “madness, especially for at-risk people in families.” Given the increase in eugenicist positions in the media and official politics, he adds, “This is how the pension system is being restructured. It is only a matter of guaranteeing production and profits, which is why the schools remain open in our country.”

Pictures from French schools, which show dozens of young people in rundown classrooms without infection protection, are also meeting with a big response among teachers in Germany.

“It’s the same at our schools,” writes Gabriele, a teacher from Frankfurt, on Facebook. “Every day, we are in small classrooms with thirty children without safe distancing—and I am a high-risk person!” In Germany and other countries, too, a strike by teachers must be organized, she says, but media coverage gives the impression that teachers have “no support in society” for such a programme of action.

The significance of this propaganda campaign —which goes hand in hand with a targeted trivialization of the virus—is confirmed by Gabriele’s colleague Anja. She writes in a comment for the World Socialist Web Site :

“It is really unbelievable that the risk—which is currently serious in my school—is being ridiculed and trivialized in such a way. Teaching with thirty students is simply not sustainable because infection pathways can’t be traced. Wherever infections can be prevented—for example, by attending classroom and home-schooling alternately on a daily basis—this should and must be done. There were solutions even before the vacations—and they worked. But this level [of infection prevention measures] is simply not being activated, even though it is long overdue given the current number of cases.

“Employers must provide protective clothing, must take protective measures using [air] filters,” says teacher Anja. “But nothing happens. In our case, the college has now been hit because we couldn’t protect ourselves. Students from different classes were hit with positive cases. The remaining students in classes were neither sent into quarantine nor were tests ordered. After more than a week, several classes are now in quarantine—much too late. Several teachers now have symptoms. The infection occurred after teaching in the affected classes. The affected colleagues were not even informed about the infection of the students at that time.”

MAS denounces dynamite attack against Bolivia’s President-elect Luis Arce

Tomas Castanheira

The Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) has charged that newly elected president Luis Arce was the target of a bomb attack on Thursday night while attending a meeting at the party’s headquarters in La Paz, the capital of Bolivia. The explosion left no one injured.

Luis Arce (Credit: Casa de America)

The episode was reported this morning by MAS spokesman Sebastián Michel to the national television networks Televisión Universitaria and Red Uno. He stated: “We were victims of a group that planted dynamite in the campaign headquarters where our elected president, Luis Arce, was attending a meeting.”

Only days before Arce’s inauguration ceremony this coming Sunday, the coup regime of self-proclaimed president Jeanine Áñez issued no statement on this grave episode, which appears to have been an assassination attempt against the elected president.

According to Michel: “We have not seen any statement from Government Minister Arturo Murillo; thus, we feel that we are at the mercy of ourselves, totally unprotected and nobody gives us the necessary guarantee for the security of our authority.”

The Bolivian media has also barely reported the event. In an effort to summarily dismiss the accusation made by MAS, the newspaper of Santa Cruz, El Deber, published an article with the title: “Police rule out use of dynamite in ‘attack’ on MAS campaign headquarters.”

In the article, El Deber reported the case closed on the basis of a completely vague statement by the departmental director of the Special Force to Fight Crime (Felcc), Alfredo Vargas. Vargas declared that “there is a report from firemen mentioning that if it is not an explosive device, it would be fireworks.”

The attack on Arce occurred on the same day that fascist and extreme-right groups initiated new rounds of protest and “civil stoppages” demanding the overturning of the presidential elections and the repeal of a recently approved measure that lifts the requirement of a two-thirds majority for certain votes in the Legislative Assembly.

The protests were called in the cities of Santa Cruz, Cochabamba and Potosí by the Civic Committees of each of these cities. In La Paz, where a demonstration of about 300 people took place, Página Siete reported that “a group protesting against the election result passed in front of the place [where the explosives would have been planted].”

The demonstrations this Thursday and Friday continue the protests that have been taking place since last week, headed by the Civic Committees and, especially, by their armed branches, such as the Cruceñista Youth Union (UJC) and the Cochala Youth Resistance (RJC).

In Santa Cruz de la Sierra, the largest city in Bolivia and center of the right-wing opposition, the coup protests gained direct support from the departmental government. The government’s general secretary, Roly Aguilera, declared: “The government will not only comply, but will be an active part of the Committee’s mobilization. We reject any attempt to undermine democracy. We have to redirect ourselves in Santa Cruz as a single voice.”

The right-wing coup mobilization, which is based on completely unfounded accusations of electoral fraud, received another strong boost coming from the Supreme Electoral Court (TSE) itself. The TSE spokeswoman, Rosario Baptista, sent a letter on Thursday to the Organization of American States (OAS), demanding an audit of an alleged “alternative data block … beyond the reach of those who have verified the integrity of this record so far and which, in this and other elections, may have induced or conditioned the final result.”

Rosario retracted her absurd remarks the following day, sending a new letter to the OAS today saying that she “does not specifically question the outcome of the October 18, 2020 election process.” Her action, however, served to fuel the fascistic conspiracies and violence.

The response of the MAS to the escalation of political violence in the post-election period—which included the assassination of miners’ union leader Orlando Gutiérrez, according to every indication, by the far right—is to reinforce its calls for “national unity” and the “pacification of the country.”

On Wednesday, while the fascists were organizing demonstrations to overthrow his presidency, Arce tweeted: “This is a time for unity, to reconstruct and live in peace. Let us not respond to provocations.” This appeal was seconded by Evo Morales, responding to the attempt on Arce’s life. Morales wrote on Twitter: “Small groups are trying to generate a climate of confusion and violence, but they will not succeed. Let’s not fall into any provocation.”

The MAS also showed great nervousness in the face of reports that a sector of the party, in El Alto, had proposed the creation of “armed militias” within legal frameworks to defend itself against “people in Santa Cruz who are convulsing” the country. In his interview denouncing the dynamite attack, Sebastián Michel stressed that Arce will not allow any irregular armed group and will not allow the use of weapons.

The objective of the MAS is to prove to the Bolivian bourgeoisie, its true social base, that it is ready to suppress any attempt at resistance by the working class, whether against fascistic violence or the austerity measures that the Arce administration itself will enforce on behalf of the entire ruling class and international capital.

World coronavirus cases to soar past 50 million

Bryan Dyne

On Saturday, the number of confirmed global cases of the coronavirus pandemic will rocket past the grim milestone of 50 million. One in every 156 people on the planet have so far caught the disease, with no end in sight. Of those who contracted it, more than 1.2 million have lost their lives to the deadly contagion, including more 9,000 Friday alone.

It was barely two months ago that the world witnessed its 25 millionth case, on August 28. Daily new cases regularly exceed 500,000 and are well on their way to three-quarters of a million. New deaths have exceeded their April highs despite the advances made in treating COVID-19 these past 10 months, a further indication of how entrenched the pandemic has become.

Healthcare workers move a COVID-19 patient to the Motol hospital in Prague, Czech Republic, November 6, 2020 [Credit: AP Photo/Petr David Josek]

Such figures are only a prelude of what is to come. If these trends are allowed to continue, there may be 100 million cases by the end of the year, surging at a rate of 1 million cases each day. As Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recently told the Washington Post, “It’s not a good situation. All the stars are aligned in the wrong place as you go into the fall and winter season, with people congregating at home indoors. You could not possibly be positioned more poorly.”

One of the sharpest dangers is that hospitals become too overwhelmed to treat all of their patients, such as in El Paso, Texas and in various locations across Europe. As was witnessed in Wuhan, China, Lombardy, Italy and, to a lesser extent, New York City in the early days of the pandemic, the death rate skyrockets when there are not enough supplies and medical personnel to properly treat every patient. While the rate of new deaths to new cases is currently at just above 1 percent, it is possible and likely for that number to spike if the coronavirus continues its essentially uncontrolled spread.

The United States alone has recorded more than 10 million instances of infection, along with 242,000 deaths. The state of Texas surpassed the 1 million mark on Friday, placing it after the nation of Colombia as the tenth most infected region in the world. It is closely followed by California, which has more than 960,000 cases. Combined they have more than 37,000 deaths, more than all but eight other countries (excluding the US as a whole).

Amid such calamitous numbers in the US and internationally, President Donald Trump’s fascistic former adviser Steve Bannon called for Dr. Fauci’s beheading. During his podcast Thursday, which has since been taken down by Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, Bannon declared that Trump should start his second term, “firing Wray, firing Fauci” (Wray, referring to FBI Director Christopher Wray).

President Donald Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon leaves federal court, Thursday, Aug. 20, 2020, after pleading not guilty to charges that he ripped off donors to an online fundraising scheme to build a southern border wall. (AP Photo/Craig Ruttle)

He continued, in openly medieval fashion, “I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England. I’d put their heads on pikes, right, I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats, you either get with the program or you’re gone.”

Fauci is widely recognized as one of the foremost authorities on infectious diseases, who rose to national prominence in the 1980s for his work combating the HIV/AIDS outbreaks in the United States. He has come under increasingly right-wing attacks over the past several weeks over his criticisms of Trump’s policy, or rather lack thereof, in handling the pandemic in the lead up to the recent and as of yet still undecided presidential election.

In particular, Fauci recently advocated for a nationwide mask mandate in the face of surging cases. At the time, there were 8.8 million cases in the US, more than 1 million less than now. This sparked another round of calls by right-wing figures such as Alex Jones to “fire Fauci” on Twitter and at Trump’s in-person rallies. Trump himself has called Fauci a “disaster” and other leading medical officials “idiots” for suggesting even basic measures to combat and contain the deadly pandemic.

The necessity of both basic and far-reaching actions to end the ongoing surge in coronavirus infections was highlighted in a recent study published in the Lancet, showing that the rate at which the disease spreads increases by an average of 24 percent when schools reopen. The research, led by You Li at the University of Edinburgh, also noted that the only other increase more significant occurred after bans on in-person gatherings, including in workplaces, were lifted.

The study used reopening data from 131 countries, including the United States and several countries in Western Europe. They found that “following the relaxation of school closure, bans on public events, bans on public gatherings of more than ten people, requirements to stay at home, and internal movement limits,” new cases increased consistent with models of how the coronavirus spreads when there are no such restrictions, peaking four weeks after restrictions are lifted. While they did not comment on the rate of deaths in the wake of rising cases, that is known to rise two to four weeks after infections increase.

Conversely, the researchers found that broad restrictions on mobility, including banning public events, closing down workplaces, shutting down schools and general stay-at-home orders reduced COVID-19 transmission by an average of 52 percent within four weeks. The reduction in transmission is even more pronounced when combined with other public health measures, including robust coronavirus testing, contact tracing and any necessary isolation of infected individuals.

A further threat from the pandemic was highlighted in Denmark this past week. Danish health authorities reported 12 people infected by a mutated strain of coronavirus that came from the country’s 17 million-strong mink population. In response, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen ordered all mink killed in an effort to stop the spread of a new strain of the pandemic virus.

“Due to the discovery of a mutated infection in mink, which weakens the ability to form antibodies, resolute action is needed,” Frederiksen said on Wednesday. She continued, “The mutated virus carries the risk that a future vaccine will not work as it should.” These comments were echoed by Kaare Molbak, Denmark’s top epidemiologist, who warned that in the “worst-case scenario, the pandemic will restart, this time in Denmark.”

That such a possibility is even posed speaks to the inability of the current social order to deal with the pandemic. It is an unanswerable indictment of capitalism that the worst outbreaks of the pandemic have occurred in the most “advanced” capitalist countries, supposedly with the most resources to fight the disease. Instead, their ruling elites have closed ranks to protect the profits of banks and corporations, not human lives. Such actions make clear that the solution to the coronavirus pandemic will not merely be medical and scientific but political as the working class fights to overthrow this outmoded and disastrous system and replace it with socialism.

More than just James Bond: Sean Connery (1930-2020)

Paul Bond

The Scottish actor Sean Connery died in the Bahamas October 31 at the age of 90. He had been unwell for some time.

There was more to him than James Bond, but Connery will forever be identified with the spy. Connery cannot be held responsible for the Bond phenomenon, but the film franchise’s initial success and subsequent durability owes much to the actor. Strikingly attractive and hard-edged, Connery’s suave and imposing presence gave the character much of its authority. He chafed against overidentification with Bond, but the role continued to define him throughout his lengthy career.

Connery was notably blunt and hard-nosed, qualities which owed much to his working-class background. Born in Edinburgh, the son of Effie, a cleaner, and Joseph, a lorry driver and factory worker, he left school at 14, and took a job at a local milk co-operative. After three years he joined the navy.

Invalided out of the navy in 1949, aged 19, he returned to the co-op, then worked a round of manual jobs, driving lorries and labouring on building sites. He later said there was “nothing special about being an actor. It’s a job like being a bricklayer.”

Connery was also training with a former army gym instructor and competing in bodybuilding contests. A tall man, 6’2”, he acquired a reputation as a tough individual who refused to be cowed by local thugs.

The serious attitude to his impressive physique led to him modelling at the Edinburgh College of Art, where artist Richard Demarco described him as “a virtual Adonis.”

He went to London in 1953 for a bodybuilding competition. Learning that there were parts available, he joined the chorus line in a production of South Pacific. A year later he was playing the role of Lieutenant Buzz Adams.

Encouraged by American actor Robert Henderson, Connery educated himself in the theatrical classics, reading Shakespeare, Ibsen and Shaw. He also took elocution lessons to refine his accent into what would become one of cinema’s most distinctive voices.

Connery quickly started to get work. It is hardly surprising that this tall, muscular man with a regional accent found work playing gangsters, in films like Hell Drivers (Cy Endfield, 1957) and Frightened City (John Lemont, 1961), but there were also signs of the positive impact of his self-education.

British television’s production of serious drama throughout the 1960s, both in new writing and classical productions, encouraged Connery’s scope as an actor. He appeared in substantial work by John Millington Synge, Jean Anouilh, Arthur Miller (John Proctor in The Crucible), and Leo Tolstoy (Vronsky in Anna Karenina). There were also forays into Shakespeare, playing Macbeth for a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation production, and, most successfully, playing Hotspur in the BBC’s cycle of Shakespeare’s history plays.

What changed everything, for better or worse, was getting the part of Bond in the first picture based on Ian Fleming’s novels, Dr No (Terence Young, 1962), which also featured Ursula Andress.

Connery’s working-class muscularity and bluntness were not the sophisticated ruling-class hero envisaged by Fleming, who was playing out his Cold War chauvinist and triumphalist fantasies and thinking ideally of David Niven: “I’m looking for Commander Bond and not an overgrown stuntman.”

Producer Albert R. Broccoli saw Connery’s physicality as key. “I wanted a ballsy guy… Put a bit of veneer over that tough Scottish hide and you’ve got Fleming’s Bond.” Young took responsibility for that veneer, with actress Lois Maxwell saying the director “took [Connery] to dinner, showed him how to walk, how to talk, even how to eat.”

Sean Connery in Dr. No (1962)

Dr No was a popular success, although critical reactions were not so enthusiastic. Director François Truffaut, for example, thought the film “marked the beginning of the period of decadence in cinema… For the first time throughout the world, mass audiences were exposed to a type of cinema that relates neither to life nor to any romantic tradition but only to other films and always by sending them up.”

That became more pronounced as the series progressed, building on what Connery had brought to the role. Connery made the first five Bond films— From Russia With Love (1963), Goldfinger (1964), Thunderball (1965), You Only Live Twice (1967) being the others—but they were becoming increasingly formulaic and repetitive.

Connery found the attentions of overnight superstardom unwelcome, and was reluctant to accept the stereotyping, as his non-Bond work during this period indicates. Among the more interesting pieces were Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964), one of the director’s better late films (Truffaut described it as “the last picture to reveal Hitchcock’s deepest emotions”), and The Hill (1965), the first of five films with Sidney Lumet. In The Hill, Connery played a mutinous inmate of a brutal British military prison camp in wartime north Africa.

Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery in Marnie (1964)

The other four Lumet-Connery collaborations were The Anderson Tapes (1971), The Offence (1973), Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and Family Business (1989). A commentator at Film Stories recently asserted that “Lumet fulfilled Connery’s desire to be challenged and treated seriously as an actor. In return, Connery afforded Lumet creative freedom from financiers by putting his star power behind his projects, even if their commercial prospects were mixed.”

Woman of Straw (Basil Dearden, 1964) and A Fine Madness (Irvin Kershner, 1966) were also worthwhile efforts featuring Connery in the 1960s.

There was also evidence of a rebellious—or at least critical—streak in the actor. In 1967 he made his only directorial venture, a documentary on attempts to introduce new managerial practices on the Clydeside shipyards. In Martin Ritt’s The Molly Maguires (1970) he played an Irish immigrant miner in Pennsylvania taking retaliatory action against the exploitative coal company.

Richard Harris and Sean Connery in The Molly Maguires (1970)

That film’s box office failure was one factor in Connery’s agreement to return as Bond when Peter R. Hunt’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) was unable to prevent the franchise’s developing trend towards gimmicky flash. Diamonds Are Forever (Guy Hamilton, 1971) marks a further decline towards the lightweight nonsense of the later films, but Connery had already stamped his mark. Critic Roger Ebert said “Basically, you have Connery, and then you have all the rest.”

Connery, however, demonstrated his independence, if not any critical acumen. He was given upfront a US $1 million fee, which he donated to an educational charity he had established to help deprived Scottish children, paid a weekly salary of US $10,000 and given a promise of financing for two films of his choice.

One was Lumet’s The Offence (1973), although its box office failure meant no second film was made. Here he played a brutal policeman undergoing a nervous breakdown after a suspect dies from a police beating.

Connery had some depth, and sometimes seemed fascinated by the psychological and emotional impact of violence. This is not always healthy. In 1964 Connery’s then wife Diane Cilento encouraged him to visit controversial psychologist R.D. Laing in an effort to deal with the demands of his stardom. Laing’s session involved giving Connery a tab of LSD and trying to probe childhood traumas.

Cilento later said she thought that “with his enormous reserves and physical armouring, Sean resisted the drug,” but he was deeply affected by the session. Cilento claimed that Connery beat her on several occasions. He denied this strongly, although he also told interviewers he thought it was acceptable to slap a woman to “keep her in line.”

This provocative and backward remark has occasioned numerous media denunciations following his death: “Don't canonise Sean Connery–he was a coward and a bully,” “Have we all forgotten the dark side of Sean Connery?” Connery is not around to defend himself, but even if it happened that he was not always a pleasant person and could even be a “bully,” this does not justify the Independent’s stupid, self-serving column, “Johnny Depp, Sean Connery, Oscar Pistorius—why our attachment to ‘brilliant’ men is so dangerous for women.” The article, in the #MeToo vein, irresponsibly amalgamates Pistorius, who shot his girlfriend four times, with Depp, embroiled in bitter court battles with his former wife, Amber Heard, and Connery.

Whatever Connery’s failings, as an artist he deserves to be judged by artistic standards.

In any event, leaving Bond behind did allow Connery to take more mature roles. Connery made some genuinely valuable films in this period, including John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King (1975) alongside Michael Caine, and Robin and Marian (Richard Lester, 1976) as an aging Robin Hood renewing his love for Maid Marian (Audrey Hepburn). Visually arresting and deeply eccentric, John Boorman’s Zardoz (1974) is not a particularly good film, but compelling in some ways.

Sean Connery and Michael Caine in The Man Who Would Be King (1975)

After this, his film choices sometimes looked to be driven solely by mercenary calculations, as with his final return as Bond. The very title Never Say Never Again (Irvin Kershner, 1983) seemed an astutely cynical comment on his decision.

These films only sometimes paid off for the viewer, although Connery was usually worth watching. He was well cast as Major General Roy Urquhart in Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far (1977), his cameo in Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits (1981) is charming and he lends pleasing authority (and uncertain Irish accent) to Brian de Palma’s The Untouchables (1987). There were interesting performances as the defecting Soviet submarine commander in The Hunt for Red October (John McTiernan, 1990) and William de Baskerville in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s adaptation of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1986), amongst others.

Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn in Robin and Marian (1976)

He finally decided to retire after the dreadful The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Stephen Norrington, 2003), which he called “a nightmare.” He later said he was “sick of the idiots now making films in Hollywood.”

All too often his resolute independence looked more like a purely business consideration. He had a reputation for hard bargaining, and a history of litigation against studios and former accountants. There was something bitter and misanthropic at work here, as in his view “to get anywhere in life you have to be antisocial. Otherwise you’ll end up being devoured.”

In politics he gave this commercial hardness a romantic veneer, supporting Scottish independence and the pro-business Scottish National Party (SNP). Notwithstanding the SNP’s ostensible republicanism, Connery accepted a knighthood in 2000.

Australia’s first “foreign interference” arrest targets Liberal Party figure accused of links to China

Mike Head

This week, a prominent Vietnamese-Chinese member of Australia’s ruling Liberal Party became the first person to be charged under the “foreign interference” laws, introduced in 2018 as part of the intensifying US-led confrontation against China.

In a Melbourne magistrate’s court on Thursday, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) charged 65-year-old Duong Di Sanh, also known as Sunny Duong, on the vague charge of “preparing to commit foreign interference.” Duong, a former Liberal Party election candidate, could face 10 years in prison as a result, although he was released on bail until his next court appearance in March.

Duong Di Sanh [Credit: ABC News]

The AFP issued a brief statement declaring that the charge followed a year-long joint investigation with the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). No details whatever were provided, nor was China named as the alleged source of the supposed foreign interference.

Nevertheless, all the circumstances point to a high-level decision, by the US-linked security agencies, to step up the official and media accusations against China, amid rising trade tensions fueled by the US conflict with China. By targeting a prominent figure within the Liberal-National Coalition of Prime Minister Scott Morrison, the arrest also sends a threatening message to anyone, even within the political elite, who does not line up sufficiently with Washington.

Duong’s prosecution is regarded by the corporate media, in both Australia and the United States, as a test case for the “anti-influence” legislation, which Washington sees as a model for its drive to economically and militarily prevent China from challenging the post-World War II hegemony of the US, across the Asia-Pacific and globally.

The Melbourne Age reported: “The arrest will have international reverberations, after other countries have eagerly awaited to see how Australian authorities would prosecute the nation’s foreign interference laws passed in 2018.”

Despite the arrest occurring amid the political crisis in the United States, triggered by the presidential election, key US media outlets closely followed the news. The New York Times, in particular, gave favourable coverage to Duong’s arrest, saying it “follows a breakdown in the relationship between China and Australia.”

The New York Times claimed to be well informed about the arrest, saying it related to alleged attempted influence of a federal government minister. Citing an anonymous source, it reported: “A person familiar with the details of those raids said the police were investigating whether Mr. Duong had sought to influence the acting federal immigration minister, Alan Tudge, and whether the conduct was on behalf of or in collaboration with the Chinese Communist Party.”

Duong, a business owner, is a high-profile member of the Southeast Asian Chinese community in the state of Victoria. He is the deputy chairperson of the Museum of Chinese Australian History in Melbourne, and president of the Oceania Federation of Chinese Organisations from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos Inc.

Duong has long been publicly identified with the Liberal Party, and stood as the party’s candidate for the inner-Melbourne electorate of Richmond in a state election in 1996. He wrote in an autobiography last year, that he had been a member of the party since 1992 and had helped establish a local branch, of which he had been chairman.

Duong’s most recent public appearance was in June. He stood next to Acting Immigration and Multicultural Affairs Minister Tudge at a media conference, where Duong handed over a cheque for more than $37,000 to the Royal Melbourne Hospital to help with coronavirus research and preparation.

In front of reporters and cameras, Tudge said at the event: “I would give you a big hug, but I’m not allowed to in these pandemic days, Sunny.” Tudge continued: “I want to say a very big thank you to you directly, Sunny Duong and your organisation.”

Whether or not Duong’s supposed connection to Tudge is the alleged offence, it is clear that any and all such relations are now under close surveillance by the AFP and ASIO—Australia’s political spy agency—and their US counterparts.

AFP commissioner Reece Kershaw recently revealed, for the first time, that a 65-strong specialist AFP unit, established last December to counter “foreign interference,” has been trained by officials from the American Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI).

Little is being said by the AFP, the Morrison government or the media about Duong’s arrest, although it is part of an anti-China witchhunt.

Last month, ASIO’s annual report declared that Australia was under threat from “espionage and foreign interference.” Without providing any evidence, or naming China, it claimed it had foiled a far-reaching operation by a foreign intelligence service.

In its statement on Duong’s arrest, the AFP used similar language. “Foreign interference is contrary to Australia’s national interest, it goes to the heart of our democracy,” it said. “It is corrupting and deceptive, and goes beyond routine diplomatic influence practiced by governments.”

These assertions serve also to blacken Duong’s name, and prejudice his chances of a fair trial, despite the lack of any information about the allegations against him. Moreover, according to the police, his alleged conduct was only “preparatory.” AFP Deputy Commissioner Ian McCartney said: “The CFI [Counter Foreign Interference] Taskforce has taken preventative action to disrupt this individual at an early stage.”

McCartney’s comment underscores how far the foreign interference laws can extend into so-called “early stage” conduct. Offences such as “preparing,” “attempting” and “conspiring” can be used to incriminate people for supposedly intending to do something, not for any actual activities or links to “foreign” entities.

As the WSWS has documented and explained, the “foreign interference” laws do not only target China and its alleged local sympathisers. They can be used to outlaw political opposition, anti-war dissent and social protests by alleging that these are connected to “foreign” or international campaigns.

For the first time, criminal offences, which carry up to 20 years’ imprisonment, now apply to simply undertaking political activity in partnership with an overseas organisation. The outlawed activities could extend to anyone opposing Australian involvement in a US-led military conflict with China.

The aggressive police methods used against Duong—despite his long-time establishment credentials—are also a warning of the type of police-state measures that can and will be used against targeted opponents of the US-led war drive.

The AFP said it had raided several Melbourne properties in relation to the alleged offences on October 16. Huong’s neighbours told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that police were at his house for seven hours on that day. They said multiple AFP cars and officers descended on the house, at around 7am.

“At least 12 officers minimum went in,” they said. “They came in with equipment for asking questions, they were checking computers, coming and going for hours.” On the day of Duong’s arrest last Thursday, two police cars and a number of officers spent around one hour at the house.

Similar AFP-ASIO raids were conducted against the home and parliamentary office of New South Wales state Labor Party parliamentarian Shaoquett Moselmane in June, accompanied by lurid media headlines accusing him of being a Chinese Communist Party agent.

Labor’s state and federal leadership immediately supported the raids and forced Moselmane to take indefinite leave from parliament. Yet no charges have been laid. The only publicly-released evidence against Moselmane was that he had visited China, and had made statements praising the Chinese response to the coronavirus, and criticising US provocations targeting Beijing.

It later emerged that this ongoing AFP investigation is aimed at John Zhang, who worked as a part-time staffer in Moselmane’s office. This is also on the basis of threadbare accusations of associations with Chinese community organisations, and membership of a private WeChat group with Moselmane. Zhang has launched a Supreme Court challenge, maintaining that the accusations against him are an attack on the implied right to freedom of political communication in the Australian Constitution.

In September, it was belatedly revealed that, on the same day that Moselmane was raided, so were four journalists employed by Chinese state-media in Australia. Their laptops and devices were taken, reportedly in order to seize Chinese consular correspondence, in violation of international diplomatic law. The journalists felt compelled to leave Australia, a fact that was not reported by the corporate media until the Australian embassy in Beijing advised two Australian journalists to leave China.

Under pressure from the Trump administration, the Morrison government has ramped up its provocations against China, including by joining the US and Japan in sending warships close to Chinese-occupied islets in the South China Sea. But the Duong arrest is another signal that Washington is demanding much more, and wants to silence anyone, including within the Coalition and Labor parties, who is not unconditionally committed to taking a frontline role in the US preparations for a war against China. Regardless of whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden is in the White House, this US “interference” will only intensify.