Joe Biden, Recognition and the Armenian Genocide

Binoy Kampmark

Attributing names to the brutal acts humans are capable of inflicting upon each other is never without problems.  There are gradations of terror, hierarchies of atrocity and cruelty.  In these, the pedants reign.  Disputes splutter and rage over whether a “massacre” can best be described as a crime against humanity or a counter-measure waged with heavy sorrow against a threatening enemy. Scratch the surface of such arguments, and the truth is bleakly common: apologists for murder will be found.

With the Armenian Genocide, terms acutely matter. The treatment of the Armenians by the Turks as the Ottoman Empire was running out of oxygen led to deportations from eastern Anatolia in May 1915 that eventually caused some 1.5 million deaths.  (The Turkish estimate is closer to 300,000.)  Suspicions abounded that the Christian Armenians were plotting with Imperial Russia and seeking the establishment of an Armenian state under Russian protection. But importantly, the ailing Ottoman state, pushed along by the Committee of Unity and Progress (CUP), was moving into a phase of murderous homogenisation.

Henry Morgenthau, the US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire between 1913 and 1916, took strong exception to the conduct of Ottoman forces in what he described as a “campaign of race extermination”.  Towards the deportations of Armenians, he insisted that Turkish authorities knew in implementing them that they constituted “giving the death warrant to a whole race”.  His protest had the blessing of then US Secretary of State Robert Lansing.

Calling a historical event one of genocide demands special attention to the word’s meaning, one connoting both the mental state and the institutional planning in destroying a race, nationality, ethnic, or religious group.  This has been previously resisted by US presidents.  Turkey’s membership of the NATO alliance has also seen White House administrations avoid ruffling feathers in Ankara.

Less reluctant to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide were members of the US Congress, who passed a resolution in 2019 resolving to “commemorate the Armenian Genocide through official recognition and remembrance” while rejecting “efforts to enlist, engage, or otherwise associate the United States Government with denial of the Armenian Genocide or any other genocide”.

The Biden administration has joined the fold, signaling a departure from previous tiptoeing reservation.  On April 24, President Joe Biden spoke of remembering “the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian Genocide”.  It was necessary to “remain ever-vigilant against the corrosive influence of hate in all its forms.”

With all this brimming virtue, it would be easy to forget the ease with which genocide has been politicised over the decades.  The United States could hardly count itself immune to this.  Despite the 1948 UN Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide coming into force in January 1951, the US would only ratify the instrument in 1988.  The American Bar Association, and a suspicious Senate, saw genocide specifically and human rights more broadly as a matter of domestic, not international concern.  Ratifying the Convention would, they also charged, disturb the balance of federal-state relations.

Resistance against the Convention proved formidable.  It led US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to promise members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on April 6, 1953 that the Eisenhower administration would never “become a party to any [human rights] covenant for consideration by the Senate”.  That field would become the domain of “methods of persuasion, education and example.”  It took a relentless campaign by the umbrella group of organisations known as the “Ad Hoc Committee on Human Rights and Genocide Treaties” to force recognition of the issue in the country, not to mention a growing number of embarrassments on the international stage.

The denial of the Armenian Genocide has been a scaffolded platform of Turkish policy, re-enforced by laws that criminalise the use of the term for reasons of “national security”, and publicists who have, wittingly or otherwise, taken up Ankara’s cause.  Certain scholars have tried to throw stones at the argument of central planning and pre-meditation.  The debate, at points, becomes chillingly reductive, one waged over historical memory and corpses.  Guenter Lewy’s effort insists on partial blame of Armenians who “had fought the Turks openly or played the role of a fifth column” while posing the question “whether the Young Turk regime during the First World War intentionally organized the massacres that took place.”  He dismisses the huge number of deaths as not probative of either knowledge or intention.

Unfortunately for Lewy, select readings are something of a forte, as they often are when the object needs to fit the box of presumption.  His quotations of one particularly notorious figure, Dr. Mustafa Reşid, governor of Diyarbekir province, are selective trimmings that focus on chaos and the impossibility of having “an orderly deportation”.  Unfortunately, the same governor was very enthused at points in dealing with those “microbes infesting” the fatherland; thinking of his work as a physician, it was incumbent upon him to “eradicate sick people.”

Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu felt Biden’s recognition of the genocide had done nothing to add or subtract to the history books.  “Words cannot change or rewrite history.  We don’t have lessons to take from anyone on our history.”

Unfortunately, and tellingly, the treatment of the Armenians by Ottoman Turkey furnished dark lessons for the international stage.  On the eve of Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, Adolf Hitler gave a briefing to his generals at Obersalzberg contemplating imminent mass slaughter. Genghis Khan had been responsible for the slaying of millions of women and children, he lectured, and did so with a merry heart.  “History sees him only as a great state-builder.”  It was accordingly appropriate that the Death’s Head units had been deployed to the East “with the order to kill without mercy men, women and children of the Polish race or language.  Only in such a way will we win the lebensraum that we need.  Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

UK government’s pandemic contracts: A looting operation behind the smokescreen of “the national interest”

Tony Robson

An investigation by independent watchdog Transparency International UK (TI-UK) into the Johnson government’s awarding of contracts during the coronavirus pandemic has exposed the corruption and outright criminality that has pervaded the entire process.

The TI-UK report, Track and Trace, was published on April 22. It examined £18 billion worth of contracts awarded between February and November 2020, concluding that one in five raised “red flags” for possible corruption. The 73 flagged contracts—worth £3.7 billion—accounted for 20 percent of the value of all reported pandemic-related contracts. Red flags were triggered by uncompetitive tendering, politically connected contractors, or contractors with no proven experience in providing the goods and services under contract.

“The way the UK Government handled bids for supplying personal protective equipment (PPE) and other COVID-19 response contracts appears partisan and systemically biased in favour of those with political access,” the report found.

Safeguards designed to prevent corruption were removed without adequate justification. The report singles out for particular concern the “VIP channel”, later renamed the “high priority lane”. This was supposedly aimed at “triaging” the government’s emergency pandemic response by circumventing normal tendering procedures. The report states it was used to fast track and select PPE bids based on referrals from “MPs, peers and senior officials.”

The clandestine nature of the government’s tender award process has already led to censure by the parliamentary watchdog, the National Audit Office (NAO). Its own investigation into a tranche of £17.3 billion worth of contracts awarded to the private sector, showed that £10.5 billion (58 percent) was awarded without any tendering process. NAO found the government had violated transparency rules and failed to publish documents in a timely manner.

In February, the High Court ruled the government acted unlawfully in relation to its failure to meet strict time limits mandating that any state contract award notices must be published within a 30-day period. The verdict reflected concerns by the judiciary that the government’s secretive process was producing widespread public distrust, with Mr Justice Martin Chamberlain stating, “One unfortunate consequence of non-compliance with the transparency obligations (both the public and for the government) is that people can start to harbour suspicions of improper conduct, which may turn out to be unfounded.”

Health Secretary Matt Hancock was completely dismissive of the High Court verdict, telling Sky News, “If I had my time again, absolutely I would do exactly the same thing.”

Health Secretary Matt Hancock speaking at a government Covid-19 press conference inside No10 Downing Street (credit: picture by Andrew Parsons/No 10 Downing Street--Flickr)

Hancock gained notoriety over £30 million worth of contracts for vials and plastic funnels awarded to his former pub landlord Alex Bourne, who ran The Cock Inn in Thurlow, Essex. Bourne had no expertise in the manufacture and supply of medical equipment and his company is currently under investigation by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency over allegations he did not have “adequate facilities from a health and hygiene perspective.”

The Johnson government’s new tendering regime amounted to a bonanza for pandemic profiteers.

Some of the report’s key findings include:

· £1.6 billion worth of PPE contracts (comprising 14 tenders) was awarded to entities with known connections to the Conservative Party. Three contracts worth £536 million went to politically connected companies for testing related services.

· 98.9 percent of COVID-19 related contracts (£17.8 billion) were awarded without any form of competition. Contracts were awarded to suppliers without any proven proficiency. Fourteen companies incorporated in 2020 received contracts worth more than £620 million, of which 13 contracts totaling £255 million went to 10 firms that were less than 60 days old and which could have had no track record of actual business.

· Contracts awarded to politically connected companies were more likely to be published late. Details of 93 percent (28) of the 30 contracts awarded to politically connected companies were published late, compared to 70 percent (688) of the 970 without. Seven of these late contracts awarded to politically connected suppliers went unpublished for more than 100 days.

TI-UK’s report lists 10 recommendations, consisting of calls for further investigation, transparency and improved regulation, but its own Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) over the award of COVID-19 contracts have been denied. A November 18 request for details about 493 companies referred for consideration under the high priority lane between January and June 2020—including the source, decision and status of the contracts—was rejected on grounds of cost. A second request on December 16, narrowed to the names of the companies involved, was equally unsuccessful. Initially stalled on the pretext of reviewing whether the FOI request was in the public interest, the DHSC later cited “commercial sensitivity”. The DHSC has breached the statutory response time, reneging on the full response it had promised by April 14.

The blatant efforts by the state to conceal industrial-scale corruption and criminal profiteering exposes the decomposition of democratic rule. The Johnson government stands above the law and openly proclaims it is accountable solely to speculators and profiteers on whom it has showered £18 billion worth of contracts, equivalent to one eighth of the entire annual NHS budget.

The corruption and criminality of the government is matched only by the hypocrisy of the Labour Party, which attempts to present such profiteering as the outcome solely of Tory cronyism. Labour’s Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves declared of the TI-UK’s report, “The scale of corruption risk to vast amounts of taxpayer money revealed in this report is shocking, as is the evidence of endemic cronyism flowing through the government's contracting.”

In fact, the Labour Party provided the Tories a free pass for this orgy of jobbery and political graft through the emergency exemptions it granted to awarding COVID-19 contracts as part of the Coronavirus Act 2020 it voted to support and repeatedly renewed.

The exploitation of the pandemic for the self-enrichment of a grasping layer of economic and social parasites—whether directly connected to the Tory party or otherwise—has underpinned the entire ruling class response to the pandemic in the UK and internationally. The wealth of the world’s billionaires has increased collectively by 60 percent over the last year with Forbes magazine commenting, “COVID-19 brought terrible suffering, economic pain, geopolitical tension—and the greatest acceleration of wealth in human history.”

The Labour Party has invoked the “national interest” to justify its role as de facto coalition partner with the Johnson government. Behind this smokescreen, the ruling elite has glutted itself through a £350 billion bailout of the corporations, £895 billion of quantitative easing, and the evisceration, privatisation and looting of the NHS and other forms of pandemic profiteering. The price paid by workers has been over 150,000 preventable deaths, the imposition of fire and rehire contracts based on massive pay cuts, the slashing of jobs, and the ongoing destruction of essential services.

Nothing remains of the myth of concern within the ruling class for the NHS and the “heroes” that work in it. The failure to provide adequate PPE through the private sector has been a major factor in the deaths of around 1,000 health and social care workers during the pandemic. The clap for carers and other cynical displays of gratitude to National Health Service (NHS) staff has been replaced by the imposition of a pay cut and state repression.

The same Coronavirus Act used to enrich big business was recently renewed unopposed and used to break up protests by NHS workers against the government’s miserly 1 percent pay award. The Johnson government also confirmed that it will not even match the £500 one-off bonus for nurses granted in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland for their services during the pandemic.

Up to 130 asylum seekers drown in the EU’s Mediterranean graveyard

Stefan Steinberg

Up to 130 asylum seekers are feared to have drowned after their flimsy rubber dinghy capsized in the Mediterranean off the coast of Libya on Thursday. NGO rescue ships arriving on the scene reported seeing many bodies floating in the water around the upturned craft, which had been carrying about 130 persons.

The tragedy at sea is the latest in an unceasing catalogue of drownings, which have been deliberately allowed to take place by European governments in order to deter migration to Europe.

In this Friday, Feb. 12, 2021 file photo, migrants and refugees from different African nationalities wait for assistance on an overcrowded wooden boat, as aid workers of the Spanish NGO Open Arms approach them in the Mediterranean Sea, international waters, at 122 miles off the Libyan coast. (AP Photo/Bruno Thevenin, file)

The first contact with the dinghy in distress was reported on April 21 by the volunteer organisation Alarm Phone, which alerted the European humanitarian group SOS Méditerranée to the presence of three boats floundering in rough seas off the coast of Libya.

Alarm Phone has issued a timeline that establishes the criminal role of European authorities, including the EU border protection force Frontex, in the latest drownings. After establishing contact with the dinghy, Alarm Phone repeatedly passed on its GPS position to European and Libyan authorities. The only response was the dispatch of a Frontex surveillance airplane, seven hours after the first alarm raised by Alarm Phone.

The Frontex aircraft found the boat and contacted the appropriate European authorities, which rejected any responsibility to undertake a rescue operation, and instead passed the buck to Libya, declaring that the war-torn country was the ‘competent’ authority. For its part, the Libyan coastguard refused to coordinate any rescue operation, leaving the refugees to die after drifting in heavy seas. A second boat was intercepted by the Libyan coastguard, and over 103 people were returned to Libya “and detained.” A mother and child were found dead on board this vessel.

The United Nations Human Rights Commission recently called for an end to the practice of returning refugees to Libya, following many reports of torture and murder as well as the selling of refugees into slavery. A third boat, estimated to be carrying about 40 people remained undetected.

Referring to the victims of the capsized dinghy, Alarm Phone concluded: “The people could have been rescued but all authorities knowingly left them to die at sea.”

According to the International Migration Organisation (IOM), more than 16,700 people have tried to cross the Mediterranean since the start of this year. Around 750 have died, including the victims of Thursday’s incident, with more than 500 drowned on the so-called Central Mediterranean sea route. This figure is almost three times greater than the total for the same period last year.

At the same time, these figures are likely to be a gross underestimate of the total number who have died at sea attempting to enter Europe. EU governments have not only withdrawn their own rescue vessels from the region, they are actively sabotaging rescue operations by volunteer organisations with boats in the Mediterranean.

In particular, the authorities in Italy and Malta have sought to prevent rescue ships carrying rescued migrants from entering their ports. When some rescue vessels docked anyway, the ships were confined to the ports pending legal action against the captain and crews. Dozens of investigations have been launched by Italian prosecutors against NGOs in past years. As a consequence, for entire months last year not a single NGO rescue vessel was reported to be at sea. This means that it is highly probable that many other victims of the EU’s criminal anti-migrant policy remain uncounted.

The Missing Migrants Project estimates that the remains of 14,000 humans are unaccounted for in the Mediterranean Sea, while what is left of the corpses of at least 1,000 people remains missing in the Atlantic Ocean along the highly dangerous sea route chosen by desperate migrants attempting to cross from Africa to the Canary Islands.

COVID-19 and migration flows

The COVID-19 pandemic has further intensified the crisis for migrants fleeing hunger, political repression, war and the consequences of climate change in their home countries. Last year, Italy and Malta both declared their ports to be unsafe for ships bearing migrants. Initially in 2020, as governments closed their borders in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, migration levels to Europe fell, but there are many indications that as the health and attendant economic crisis worsens in Asia and Africa more and more asylum seekers will risk their lives trying to enter Europe.

A report released at the end of March by the United Nations migration agency stated that migrant arrivals in the Canary Islands increased by 750 percent last year. Numbers were increasing before the pandemic, but COVID-19, the report states, seems to have “acted as a multiplier of existing factors motivating migration on this route.”

The report noted that many migrants had worked in sectors such as fishing and agriculture that have suffered greatly from the economic consequences of the pandemic.

An additional consequence of the pandemic is a major decline in the amount of money migrant workers send home. Migrant workers in European countries are most likely to have been the first to have lost their jobs and/or their lives due to the pandemic. The Migration and Development Brief published by the World Bank estimates that migrant money flows from wealthier countries to the migrants’ home of origin will decline by 14 percent in 2021 compared to pre-COVID-19 levels in 2019.

The increasing immiseration of families in poorer countries reliant on such money flows will only increase the pressure on younger dependents to attempt the perilous sea crossing to Europe. The staggering toll of migrant deaths in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Seas during the past two decades must be added to the rap sheet of the ruling elites in Europe, which have so recklessly sacrificed human lives in the course of the pandemic.

British Columbia hospitalizations set new record as COVID-19 variants spread

Alexandra Greene

British Columbia’s health care system is becoming increasingly strained as active COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations reach their highest-ever levels in Canada’s West Coast province.

As of Saturday evening, 486 people stricken by COVID-19 were hospitalized and 160 in intensive care. The rapid rise in infections is the direct product of the provincial New Democratic Party (NDP) government’s reckless open economy/open schools policy, which has created an ideal environment for the new, more infectious variants to flourish among younger, working-age adults.

Currently, there are 8,842 active COVID-19 cases in BC and a further 12,608 people are in self-isolation after public health agency warnings that they have potentially been exposed to infected persons.

Royal Columbian Hospital (Wikiwand)

Hospitals in four of the province’s five health regions are nearing capacity. Already on April 19, 94.9 percent of total beds were occupied and 80.9 percent of critical care beds. Hospitals in the Vancouver Coastal Health region were at 100 percent of critical care capacity before emergency “surge beds” were added. Surge capacity, it should be noted, commonly consists of patients being placed in hospital hallways, waiting rooms, shower rooms, sunrooms, or having to be kept in the emergency room for abnormally long periods due to a lack of availability of in-patient units.

Dr. Kelly Kasteel, a doctor from Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster, wrote a public Facebook post last weekend detailing the conditions she is working under and the growing crisis hospital staff are bearing witness to. “Last week, all of our emergency beds including suture beds and casting beds had admitted patients in them and I only had 2 chairs to assess patients in,” she wrote. “Let that sink in. ... 2 chairs in my entire department that I had at my disposal to assess every emergency patient that came in.”

Dr. Kasteel went on to describe assessing a patient on the floor of the emergency room. “She was in the Covid area,” explained Dr. Kasteel, “and after waiting four hours was feeling so faint she decided it was better to lay on a disgusting emergency floor than to collapse. Covid patients who are transferred in by ambulance because their oxygen is critically low are waiting 3 hours for a bed. ICUs are refusing our transfers out because they literally have no space to care for patients. This is dangerous care. Nothing about this situation is acceptable.”

On April 20, there were only 23 unoccupied hospital beds in all of the BC Lower Mainland, where most of the province’s residents live.

Across the Lower Mainland, 1,750 surgeries have now been postponed at nine hospitals, in a desperate attempt to ease the strain on the health care system, by freeing up critical care staff and hospital beds for the influx of COVID-19 patients.

Over 1,550 people in British Columbia have lost their lives to the virus to date, including an infant under two years of age who is now the youngest person to have died from the virus in Canada.

According to data provided by the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control (BC CDC), as of April 13, 52 of those hospitalized with the virus were children under the age of 10. Yet, John Horgan’s trade union-backed New Democratic Party government continues to insist that schools remain open across the province, as part of its systematic prioritizing of corporate profits over working people’s health and lives.

The government has even refused to switch to a more appropriate stage of its own much-touted “Five-Stage school reopening plan.” The K-12 reopening framework was created by the NDP government at the beginning of the pandemic, with total remote learning due to high case numbers being the advisable measure to enact at Level 5, and full in-person schooling with no protective health measures—the standard before the pandemic — reached at Level 1.

Schools entered Level 2 (full-time in-person learning but within learning groups of limited size) in September 2020. Despite pandemic conditions having dramatically worsened since then, there has been no indication whatsoever that Levels 3 or 4, let alone 5, will be returned to or even considered.

In a public address delivered on April 15, BC Chief Medical Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry claimed, “Most of the cases in the school setting were acquired outside the school and there was little transmission within the school itself.” This is merely a restatement of the falsehood continually promoted by the ruling class in Canada, the US and around the world that schools are safe and children are not vectors of the virus.

The authorities in BC have perfected an especially perfidious tool to peddle this big lie. They describe a school outbreak, regardless of its size, as a single “exposure” event, meaning that nobody ever knows how many infections actually occur in a specific school. Nor, as a result, can they properly trace “an exposure’s” community impact.

COVID-19 infections in BC have been rising sharply since mid-March, driven by new, more infectious and lethal variants. Last Wednesday, BC health officials announced that a doubly mutated strain of the virus first identified in India, known as B.1.617, is now in the province.

Officials said that several cases of this variant had been identified in early April, but that at that time B.1.617 was not classified as a variant of concern (VOC) or variant under investigation, and so the development was not immediately made known to the public.

On Wednesday and Thursday, health officials in Quebec and Alberta announced respectively that B.1.617 cases had also been identified in those provinces. Ontario health officials followed suit, announcing on Friday that they were aware of 36 cases of the variant in the country’s most populous province.

Updated reports state that there are now 42 known cases of the variant in British Columbia. The province is already struggling with the spread of the VOCs first identified in Brazil (P.1.), the United Kingdom (B.1.1.7) and South Africa (B.1.351). As of April 22, more than 78,000 cases of these VOCs had been recorded across all 10 Canadian provinces.

B.1.617 is currently being labelled a “variant of interest” by the BC CDC, as scientists have yet to determine whether or not it is more contagious, deadly or vaccine-resistant than the original strain. But a March report from the Indian Ministry of Health and Family Welfare states that the pair of double mutations found in the B.1.617 variant “confer immune escape and increased infectivity.”

From April 4 to April 16, 120 flights arrived in Canada with at least one COVID-19 positive passenger; 32 of these were flights from India, which is currently struggling with a staggering 2.5 million active cases of the virus. In response to mounting public pressure, the federal government announced at a press conference last Thursday that all commercial and passenger flights from India and Pakistan would be suspended for 30 days.

Domestic travel restrictions were announced for British Columbia by Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth on April 23. Farnworth told reporters that the provincial government will be splitting the province into three regional zones and that residents will soon be confined to their home region.

The restriction of travel between the three regions of the province will be enforced through the establishment of fixed police checkpoints on major roads and at ferry terminals. Farnworth stated that the police will not engage in random checks and made remarks that insinuated disapproval of the recent measures taken by Ontario’s Ford government that saw police granted sweeping new powers, an action that was quickly retracted due to public outcry.

Farnworth repeatedly compared the new police checkpoint process to the roadside stops carried out by police to target intoxicated drivers. Many questions remain surrounding the grey area of what travel is considered essential versus non-essential, and on what legal grounds law enforcement can issue fines of up to $575 for those deemed to be in violation of the rules.

While the new, more infectious and deadly variants are undoubtedly facilitating the more rapid spread of COVID-19, the lion’s share of responsibility for the mounting health care crisis in BC is borne by the Horgan government, and its close political ally, the Justin Trudeau-led federal Liberal government.

Like Ottawa and its provincial counterparts across Canada, the ostensibly “left-wing” NDP government has kept schools and large workplaces—especially resource industries, manufacturing and construction sites—open, while blaming working people when outbreaks occur.

Schools reopen in France and Italy amid continuing spread of coronavirus

Will Morrow

Schools reopened yesterday across France and Italy, even as tens of thousands of cases continued to be reported each day, and the hospital system remains strained by near-record numbers of patients in intensive care.

In France, primary schools returned, while middle and high schools are due to return in one week, on May 3. In Italy, schools reopened for in-person teaching at all grade levels. The decision to proceed with the reopening is a criminal action taken in the profit interests of French and Italian corporations in order to prevent a prolonged restriction on business operations caused by the closure of schools.

A medical worker checks a tube after a child underwent a saliva COVID-19 test at the Niederau school in Strasbourg, eastern France, Thursday, March 11, 2021. (AP Photo/Jean-Francois Badias)

French President Emmanuel Macron had announced the school closures in a televised address on March 31. He did not explain why the government was taking this action, given that its official policy has been that schools do not contribute significantly to the spread of the coronavirus. Primary schools were closed for just a single week before the two-week holiday break, with an additional week of online learning for middle and high school students.

On April 6, Macron declared that the government was committed to maintaining this schedule, regardless of how many people fell ill or died. “It is essential that we resume in-person classes” as scheduled, he said. “I have not conditioned the reopening of the kindergartens, primary, middle or high schools on any health indicators.” In other words, the school reopenings are not conditioned by “health indicators,” as would be a precondition for any scientific policy, but by the defense of the profits of the French capitalist class.

On March 31, at the time of Macron’s speech, the seven-day average of daily cases stood at 37,997. Yet today, as schools reopened, it remained at almost 30,000, a level that, before March 18, had not been surpassed since November last year. In contrast, when schools were reopened last year following stricter lockdowns, the number of daily cases numbered in the hundreds.

Moreover, the number of people hospitalized stands at 30,287 and has remained virtually unchanged since the end of last month. The number of people in intensive care units is actually higher than at the end of March at just over 6,000, a level that had not been surpassed since the peak of the first wave last year. The positive test rate nationally, averaged over seven days, has increased since the end of March from 7.67 percent to 9.62 percent.

To the extent that there has been a reduction in cases over the previous three weeks, it is mainly due to the impact of the school closures and the holiday break. Now even this measure is being abandoned.

The Élysée is also preparing to announce a further lifting of lockdown restrictions in the middle of May, including potentially the reopening of outdoor dining. The government is due to make an announcement on this in the coming days.

In Italy, outdoor dining has already been reopened today, along with swimming pools, museums and other cultural centers. Prime Minister Draghi stated that it was necessary to carry out a reopening and take a “calculated risk” that it would lead to a renewed upsurge of the virus.

On Sunday, Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer spoke on the “Grand Jury” program of Radio France Internationale. “It is essential to get the students back to school,” he said. “I have said it for more than a year. … We have to take into account all the different parameters. Of course, there is the coronavirus. But there are other things as well.”

Blanquer said he would prefer to have one percent of classes closed due to coronavirus infections among students and teachers than to have all schools closed. In the last week of March, the government modified its school protocol so that classrooms would close after a single confirmed case, rather than three as previously, in an acknowledgment that the virus was spreading largely unimpeded throughout the education system. More than 11,200 classes were closed from March 29 to April 2, three times as many as the week before.

Asked whether the government’s position was that the reopening of schools would not lead to a significant increase in the spread of the virus, he answered that “school is not the place where we should concentrate all our attention. … That means that school is not responsible for the pandemic. It represents only a small portion.” The government’s own statistical health agency reports a major fall in the number of cases among youth since the closure of schools: by 19 percent among those aged 6-10, by 23 percent among those aged 11-14, and by 19 percent among those aged 15-17.

The surge among students is also being accelerated by the presence of more contagious variants of the virus. The British variant is responsible for almost all cases in France. On Saturday, Prime Minister Jean Castex attempted to dismiss the danger of the spread of the Brazilian variant, claiming that “the variants are not numerous and have a tendency to decline.” The data published by Public Health France shows instead that the Brazilian variant now makes up 4.8 percent of all cases.

The Macron government’s school reopening policy is so brazenly dictated by naked class interests and so antiscientific that it would be impossible to pursue it were it not for the active support from the trade unions. The national education unions have collaborated with Macron in enforcing the reopening of schools throughout the year. France has kept schools open longer than any other country in Europe. According to UNESCO, from March 2020 to March 2021, France had only 10 weeks of school closures, compared to 28 in Germany.

In response to yesterday’s reopening, the unions have maintained their policy of offering helpful criticisms of the most egregious absences of protective measures in schools, while opposing any action to close schools and proposing no action even to enforce safer conditions.

The FSU-SNES education union published a statement yesterday, denouncing the government mainly for “holding few discussions with the unions which, once again, discover the principal measures of the reopening via the media. This causes great confusion while the information arrives very late. From the day after the school closures, the FSU had urged that the return to in-person classes be anticipated.”

This underscores that if action is to be taken to oppose the Macron government’s policy of allowing the virus to spread throughout the schools, it must be taken by educators and students themselves. Schools must be closed, with vast resources made available for online learning, including the provision of high-speed internet and computer access for every child; and parents must be provided with pay in order to be able to remain at home. Nonessential work must be stopped, with workers and small businesses fully compensated.

French retired army generals threaten a coup d’état

Alex Lantier

On April 21, the 60th anniversary of the 1961 attempted French military putsch in Algiers, 23 retired generals published an open letter to the government in the neofascist website Valeurs Actuelles . The letter is an extraordinary intervention by the army into political life. One hundred and fifty years after the 1871 Paris Commune and the massacre of the Communards by the army in the Semaine sanglante, the letter alludes to a military intervention and bloody civil war in the country, supposedly provoked by the “complacency” of the French.

France's President Emmanuel Macron and French Armies Chief Staff General Francois Lecointre stand in the command car, center, as they review troops before the start of the Bastille Day military parade, Tuesday, July 14, 2020 in Paris. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

The connection of these fascist threats and the growth of working class struggle is obvious. In 2019, faced with the “yellow vests” and the rail strike against pension cuts, retired General Pierre de Villiers demanded more “firmness” in police repression of protesters. As workers’ anger mounts against the European Union’s policy of “herd immunity,” which has led to over a million deaths on the continent, a clique of officers is trying to intimidate workers by raising the specter of mass murder.

Addressing Macron and the parliament, the former generals demand greater patriotism and claim, “France is in peril, several mortal dangers threaten it. … Know that we are ready to support policies aimed at safeguarding the nation.”

The letter exudes hatred of the working class suburbs and denounces Islamism and postcolonial theories as divisive and requiring bloody repression.

Echoing Macron’s proposed fascistic law targeting so-called Islamic “separatism,” they denounce “the disintegration which, with Islamism and the suburban hordes, is leading to the separation of numerous portions of the country, transforming them into territories subject to dogmas contrary to our constitution,” They add: “Today, some speak of racialism, indigenous nationalism and decolonial theories, but through these terms it is the race war that these hateful and fanatical supporters want.”

However, the intensity and scale of the massacre that the officers describe refute the idea that their target is a team of postmodernist academic researchers, or even a small network of Islamists threatening terrorist attacks. Their target is a broader uprising. Indeed, they write in conclusion:

If nothing is done, laxity will continue to spread inexorably through society, ultimately causing an explosion and the intervention of our active comrades in a perilous mission to protect our civilisational values and safeguard our compatriots on the national territory. We see that it is no longer time to procrastinate, or else tomorrow civil war will put an end to this growing chaos, and the deaths, for which you will be responsible, will be counted in the thousands.

The rising anger among workers at the politically criminal mismanagement of the pandemic by the ruling elites terrifies the military brass. As school teacher strikes mounted last November against the reopening of schools in the midst of the pandemic, de Villiers warned in Valeurs Actuelles about the “profound changes” and political crisis he feared on an international scale in the aftermath of the pandemic.

“Today, in addition to the security crisis, there is the pandemic, all of this against a backdrop of economic, social and political crisis with a lack of confidence in leaders,” he said. “When you add up these threats, there is every reason to be worried in the short term. I fear that this pent-up anger will explode at once,” he continued, before adding: “We have to think the unthinkable. ... The rule of law is obviously respectable, but at some point, we also have to develop a strategic reflection.”

Although de Villiers did not sign the letter of April 21, it nevertheless makes clear that cliques of the military brass are working actively on precisely such a “reflection” of the alternative to a parliamentary regime—i.e, a dictatorship. This is evident from the identity of the signatories. Foreign Legion General Christian Piquemal, the first signatory of the letter and a supporter of the disbanded far-right group Génération identitaire, was arrested and disbarred from the army after wearing his uniform during an antimigrant demonstration in Calais in 2016.

Another, General Dominique Delawarde is campaigning against social distancing measures against the coronavirus, arguing that it “is not as lethal as people want to make it out to be.” Two other signatories, generals Emmanuel de Richoufftz and Philippe Desrousseaux de Médrano, are members of “subsisting families of the French nobility,” i.e., aristocratic families whose feudal property was expropriated in France during the 1789 revolution.

The significance of this letter cannot be understood outside the international context of the breakdown of capitalist democracy. Undermined by three decades of rising social inequality, austerity measures and imperialist wars in Europe following the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, it is buckling under the shock of the pandemic. Terrified of the anger of the masses and defending the vast fortunes it accumulated during the pandemic, the ruling class is veering towards fascist politics.

This trend is accelerating internationally. In the US, Trump attempted a coup in Washington D.C. on January 6 to occupy the Capitol and overturn the outcome of the presidential elections. Retired Spanish top brass declared their fascist sympathies in the face of strikes to halt nonessential production during the pandemic and called for the killing of “26 million” Spaniards.

In France, it is increasingly clear that the capitalist class will use the 2022 election, whatever its outcome, to install an even more authoritarian regime. On April 23, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Rally, replied in an op-ed in Valeurs Actuelles, hailing the fascistic generals and calling on them to support her candidacy in 2022.

Le Pen noted the “degree of concern you have in the face of the worrying deterioration of the situation in our country.” She added that their concern “requires, in a democracy, the search for a political solution, concretised by a project of change that must be confirmed by the vote of the French. This is the object of my campaign and my candidacy for the Presidency of the Republic, with the goal of a government of National Union.”

Her decision to salute generals planning the massacre of thousands in France, with a clumsy attempt to teach them a lesson in “democracy,” confirms that a “National Union” regime led by Le Pen would be violently reactionary and bloodthirsty. The current government, which is passing fascistic laws and whose coronavirus policy has caused more than 100,000 deaths during the pandemic, does not, however, represent a democratic alternative to Le Pen.

The Minister of the Armed Forces in the Macron government, Florence Parly, reacted last night on Twitter by first trying to minimise the entire affair. “The irresponsible tribune published in Valeurs Actuelles is only signed by retired military personnel, who no longer have any function in our armies and only represent themselves,” she wrote.

Parly also posed as a more responsible militarist than Le Pen: “Madame Le Pen’s words reflect a serious misunderstanding of the military institution, which is worrying for someone who wants to become head of the armed forces. … The politicisation of the armed forces suggested by Madame Le Pen would weaken our military tool and therefore France.”

Austrian government approves comprehensive reopening of businesses

Markus Salzmann

Despite high rates of infection, Austria is suspending virtually all protective measures against the spread of the coronavirus from May 19. As new virus strains spread rapidly in the country, the government of the right-wing conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) and the Greens is thus paving the way for a massive flare-up of infections with catastrophic consequences.

Chancellor Sebastian Kurz (Image: www.kremlin.ru / CC-BY-SA 4.0)

According to the government’s plans, hotels, restaurants, sports and cultural facilities are to open without restrictions. Restaurants will then allow four people per table indoors and as many as 10 people per table outdoors. Fitness studios will also be able to reopen. Cultural and sporting events can be attended by up to 1,500 people in enclosed areas, and twice as many in open areas.

Chancellor Sebastian Kurz announced even more extensive openings, such as the operation of restaurants at night, large celebrations of clubs and weddings, for the beginning of July.

From May 17, schools, which have been a hotspot of infection activity, will switch to in-person attendance nationwide. There are also to be no more significant restrictions on travel and thus tourism in the Alpine republic. Government representatives explained that a quarantine obligation only applied to high-risk areas. For example, for those entering from Germany, a negative coronavirus test or proof of vaccination would suffice.

The supposedly “strict safety concept” that accompanies the “careful opening up” is nothing more than window dressing and is meant to lull the population into a false sense of security. The millions of tests conducted in the country, which serve as the main justification for reopening the economy, have been going on for several months. However, they have not led to any significant decrease in the number of infections, as the protective measures are far from sufficient or have been ended too early.

Microbiologist Michael Wagner told the Wiener Standard, “Contrary to what is claimed, the model is not a success in my opinion. The infection figures have quadrupled within a short time. Even the many tests have not prevented this.”

In February, the government had ended the already mild lockdown, which had previously been imposed due to public pressure and the dramatic situation in hospitals. As a result, the number of infections, and the number of severe cases, rose sharply again.

In Vienna and Lower Austria, restrictions had to be reimposed due to the critical situation in hospitals. At the end of March and the beginning of April, 3,000 new infections were reported daily. Currently, the seven-day average is still above 2,300 new infections daily. One day before the reopening was announced, the 10,000th death from COVID-19 was recorded in a country with just 8 million inhabitants.

Currently, the seven-day incidence is 182 per 100,000. Several provinces are still significantly higher. In Tyrol, it is 205, in Vienna 211 and Vorarlberg even 218. For months, hospitals have been at their limits, the number of patients in intensive care units is hardly decreasing, while the course of the illness tends to be more severe and the patients younger.

Like Germany and other European countries, doctors and scientists are speaking out against a further reopening. Tyrol has the highest proportion of cases of the B.1.1.7 E484K strain worldwide. This is a so-called “escape mutation” of the British variant, which also has characteristics of the South African (B1.351) and Brazilian (P.1) variants. Initial investigations have shown that the mutation is not only significantly more contagious than previous pathogens but has also developed resistance to common vaccinations.

In laboratory tests, the new variant reduced the protection offered by the Biontech/Pfizer vaccine by a factor of 10. According to the study published in the scientific journal Nature, the variant poses a serious threat to the effectiveness of the vaccine. According to reports, there are already at least 1,800 reported cases of this strain in Tyrol.

Chancellor Kurz and his government are well aware of the enormous dangers posed by the reopening of businesses. Kurz explicitly stated that a renewed increase in the number of coronavirus infections was to be expected given the reopening plans. He added that “if there is a dramatic development in certain regions,” one must “of course react there” and “take steps to tighten things up.”

Green Party leader and Vice-Chancellor Werner Kogler ignored all warnings from experts and, given the announced reopenings, even declared, “There is already a certain anticipation in the air.”

A key architect of the unscrupulous reopening policy is the new Green Health Minister Wolfgang Mückstein. He took over the post only a week ago from Rudolf Anschober, who resigned for health reasons.

Mückstein, a general practitioner, is an eager careerist for the Greens who had already been active in the background for some time. He was instrumental in drafting the current government programme on health issues and is highly regarded by the ÖVP coalition partner as well as by business circles.

Mückstein has campaigned for school reopenings with the argument that children showed increased depression and sleep disorders due to the lockdown. The same argument has been used for months by the right-wing extremist Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) in its fight for a mass infection of the population.

Furthermore, Mückstein cynically complained that “chronically ill people were being treated badly and too late, also acutely ill people.” He conceals the fact that it is the government’s criminal coronavirus policy that has led to the catastrophic conditions in the health sector. Despite mass infections and illnesses of pupils, teachers and parents in the pandemic, Mückstein described the complete reopening of schools as an important psychosocial measure.

The Austrian government, like everywhere else in Europe, is oriented exclusively toward the interests of the economy and the super-rich. Business associations had massively pushed for the reopening of restaurants and the hotel industry. “What we need is a broad upswing for everyone,” the president of the Chamber of Commerce Harald Mahrer demanded, for example.

It is hardly surprising that the government’s decision was welcomed across party lines. All the state premiers, whether from the ÖVP or the Austrian Social Democratic Party (SPÖ), support the plans. The right-wing New Austria and Liberal Forum’s only criticism was that the reopening would come too late. The far-right FPÖ also demanded an end to the compulsory wearing of masks and any restrictions.

The so-called “social partners” are also behind the ruthless herd immunity policy. Renate Anderl, president of the Chamber of Labour, and Wolfgang Katzian, president of the ÖGB trade union federation, explicitly agreed with the plans in an interview with PULS 24. They praised the reopenings as a “perspective” for employees. Addressing the jump in infection figures in Vorarlberg after reopening steps were taken, Anderl said these were “important” for the Chamber of Labour because they meant an “upswing for the economy.”

Lacking oxygen, scores in India suffocate to death as COVID-19 infections reach record high

Wasantha Rupasinghe

Setting yet another grim record, India’s new COVID-19 infections surpassed 300,000 for the fifth day in a row yesterday. A further 352,991 cases were reported Monday, the highest single-day total ever recorded in India or, indeed, anywhere.

Izhaar Hussain Shaikh, left, an ambulance driver who works for HelpNow, and others pick up a COVID-19 patient from his home in Mumbai, India May 28, 2020. (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool)

Officially, India’s active case count stands at more than 2.6 million, underscoring the potential for continued exponential growth in COVID-19 infections. This in a country where hundreds of millions live in squalid urban slums or in rural areas where public health facilities do not exist; and where in great metropolitan centres, like Mumbai and Delhi, the health care system has already been overwhelmed by the deluge of COVID-19 cases.

Yesterday, India recorded its highest number of new COVID-19 deaths to date, 2,812. The official death tally since the beginning of the pandemic now stands at 195,123. According to Indian Health Ministry data, 16,257 people died from the virus, during the week ending Sunday, April 25, nearly double the previous week’s 8,588 deaths.

India’s emergence as the world’s COVID-19 epicentre—accounting for more than 40 percent of all new cases worldwide last week—is the direct product of the “profits before lives” policy enforced by Narendra Modi and his far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government.

As terrible as the official death toll is, it indubitably grossly understates the true scale of the calamity now unfolding in the world’s second most populous country. Prior to the pandemic, Indian authorities medically certified less than 30 percent of all fatalities. With the country’s ramshackle health care system now collapsing, proper attribution of deaths is in even greater disarray.

India’s Economic Times reported last Friday that official figures for deaths from coronavirus in Lucknow, the capital city of India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, stood at 145 in the six days between April 11 and April 16. But testimony from health and crematorium workers and other witnesses showed that “just two of the city’s main crematoriums reported more than 430 or three times as many cremations under COVID-19 protocol” during the same period.

Hospitals in major cities, including the national capital Delhi and in Maharashtra, the second most populous state, have been forced to turn away hundreds, possibly thousands, of extremely ill patients because of shortages of beds, trained personnel, drugs, and oxygen.

Scores of patients have died in recent days gasping for breath after the hospitals in which they were being treated exhausted their medical oxygen supplies, and could not, despite harrowing pleas to government for emergency help, be resupplied in time.

• Twenty patients died at Delhi’s Jaipur Golden Hospital died early Saturday morning for want of medical oxygen. Less than 24 hours later, the same hospital sent out a tweet saying that the lives of nearly 200 patients were at stake as the facility had again run out of oxygen.
  
  
• On the same day, six patients at Neelkant private hospital in Amritsar, Punjab, died due to an oxygen shortage.
  
  
• On April 22, the medical director of Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, one of the premier hospitals in Delhi, said, “25 sickest patients have died in the past 24 hours at the hospital. Oxygen will last another 2 hours.” He added, “Ventilators and Bipap not working effectively. Need oxygen to be airlifted urgently. Lives of another 60 sickest patients in peril.”
  
  
• The previous day, 24 COVID-19 patients at the Dr. Zakir Hussain Hospital in Nashik, a city in Maharashtra, due to an oxygen tank leak.

The Modi government, reports the Indian Express, had weeks’ notice of a looming oxygen supply crisis, but failed to take action. On April 1, the Empowered Group-VI, which is tasked with organising “an effective COVID response,” warned at a meeting with officials from various wings of the government, including the Prime Minister’s Office, “In the coming days India could face a shortage of oxygen sullies.” Yet, it was only last week that the central government imposed a ban on the supply of oxygen to industrial sites, and the ban only came into effect on April 22.

In an interview with NewsClick on April 23, Giridhar R. Babu, head of the epidemiology section at Public Health Foundation, warned that as horrific as conditions already are, the worst is yet to come. With the pandemic’s spread increasingly fueled by new, more-contagious and lethal variants, he projected that within two to three weeks, “We will be reaching between four to five lakh [400,000 to 500,000] cases per day in” just five states—Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal.

Responsibility for this catastrophe lies squarely with the BJP government, but also with the Congress Party and the other ostensible opposition parties. Acting at the behest of India’s financial and corporate elite, they have all supported the “reopening of the economy,” spurned calls for lockdown measures as new cases surged from mid-February on, and refused to make massive investments in India’s dilapidated, chronically underfunded health care system.

Brushing aside repeated warnings from epidemiologists and other medical experts that disastrous levels of infections and deaths would develop if restrictions were lifted, the Modi government abandoned any effort to contain the virus following last year’s ill-prepared lockdown. Having refused to provide workers and the poor with adequate financial resources to prevent widespread destitution during the shutdown, Modi threw open all sectors of the economy with the aim of protecting the profits and vast wealth of big business and the super-rich.

Boasting about this policy as recently as February, when indications of the rising wave of infections were already present, the Modi government claimed it had “set an example in front of the world for what work can be done during COVID-19.”

Even now, when thousands of preventable deaths are being recorded daily, Modi is insisting that the urgent task, to use his words, is to “save” India from another lockdown, not from the virus. What this means in practice is that hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives should be sacrificed to guarantee the uninterrupted flow of profits to the corporate and financial elites.

Addressing an online forum last Friday on “India’s Quest for Economic Power,” Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman reiterated the Modi government’s opposition to even regional or state-wide lockdowns to impede the virus’s advance, in the most affected areas, declaring, “Micro containment zones would be the way forward.”

Having ruled out any coordinated action to save lives and curb the spread of the virus, Sitharaman turned her focus to reassuring the event’s audience of domestic and international business executives and investors that the wave of infections and death will not disrupt or even slow the Modi government’s drive to intensify the exploitation of India’s workers and rural toilers. “[E]ven if there were one or two centres where lockdowns were to happen,” said Sitharaman, “they may not affect our disinvestment (privatisation) programme, or the plan to set up DFI (Development Finance Institutions) or any other institutional reforms that we have announced.”

As the Indian Express, which co-sponsored the event with the Financial Times, bluntly noted, the thrust of the finance minister’s speech was that the “second wave” of the pandemic in India “will not affect (the) big reform push” demanded by local and international capital.

While rushing to reassure investors that the BJP will do their bidding, the Modi government is balking at providing free vaccinations to India’s poverty-stricken masses. To date, India has provided less than 10 percent of the country’s population with one dose. But as COVID-19 cases soared last week and reports emerged from multiple states that the government’s immunisation effort was stalling due to vaccine shortages, Modi suddenly announced that everyone 18 and over will be eligible to be vaccinated as of May 1.

However, it quickly emerged that neither the Union government nor the state governments are ready to provide vaccines for free. Rather, impoverished Indians will be asked to pay sums equal to several days’ earnings per dose. Cynically, the BJP has promised to provide free vaccinations in the state of West Bengal if it becomes that state’s government after the multi-phase state election now underway there. According to an article in Bloomberg, some states “may provide vaccines at subsidised rates, while others “may pass on the full cost to citizens.”

Various experts calculate that it would cost between 0.32 and 0.36 of India’s GDP or around $3.5 billion to vaccinate all Indian adults. This is only a tiny fraction of last year’s $48 billion increase in the fortune of just one of India’s more than 130 billionaires, Mukesh Ambani, or the $73 billion dollars India spent in 2020 on its rapidly expanding military.

Mass anger is growing against the Modi government and the ruling class over their failure to contain the virus, provide health care to those infected, and ever-deepening social inequality. CNN reported on April 23, “Tens of thousands of people took to twitter with trending hashtags like #ResignModi, #SuperSpreaderModi, and #WhoFailedIndia.” Fearing the eruption of popular opposition on a much broader scale, the Modi government asked social media platform Twitter to take down “dozens of tweets, including some by local lawmakers, that were critical of India’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak,” Reuters reported.