French anti-vaccine protests expose right-wing politics of Jean-Luc Mélenchon

Will Morrow

Last weekend, tens of thousands in France took part in protests against the Macron government’s “health pass,” which effectively legally mandates vaccination against the coronavirus. The protests were politically dominated and led by the extreme right. They mobilised both fascistic layers openly opposed to coronavirus restrictions as well as disoriented, libertarian and anti-scientific sections of the middle class opposed to vaccination.

The protests were called by openly neo-fascist parties, including Marion Maréchal Le Pen and Florian Philippot, the leader of the Patriots party. Le Pen and Philippot openly call for ending even limited measures to combat the virus. Underscoring the political forces mobilised in this movement, the weekend of the protests saw two coronavirus vaccination centres in the Isère and Pyrénéees regions attacked.

Jean-Luc Melenchon in Marseille, May 11, 2019. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)

But the central role in providing this movement with a “popular” image has been played by pseudo-left tendencies, including Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France (La France Insoumise—LFI).

Macron’s law requires that anyone who enters public spaces, including cafes and restaurants, public transport and shopping centres, carry with them a “health pass,” consisting either of evidence of total vaccination, recent recovery from the coronavirus, or a negative test in the previous 48 hours. Health care workers are legally required to be vaccinated. In a particularly reactionary measure, coronavirus tests will no longer be free.

The Socialist Equality Party does not support Macron’s law, which is not aimed at stopping the spread of the coronavirus. It is aimed at justifying his policy of fully reopening the economy, ending social-distancing measures, and allowing the coronavirus to spread, in order to support business operations and corporate profits. While vaccination in France stands at only approximately 40 percent, daily cases are already over 10,000, dominated by the more contagious Delta variant. Macron’s policy of herd immunity is preparing a new wave of deaths.

The campaign by LFI against the law, however, has not been aimed at mobilising working class opposition to this policy of herd immunity. Rather, it has supported the same policy by promoting resistance to vaccinations and undermining public consciousness of the necessity for a continued struggle against the pandemic.

Following Macron’s announcement of the new law on Monday, Mélenchon and fellow LFI deputy François Ruffin released statements which dovetailed with the right-wing campaign against mass vaccination. They endorsed the protests to be held on July 17 without acknowledging that far-right forces were leading calls for the protests.

In a video address published last Thursday, Mélenchon attacked the policy of universal vaccination: “A mandatory vaccine seems to be a disproportionate measure, given that, according to the World Health Organisation, not everyone needs one, and that it is pointless to want to vaccinate everyone, when it suffices to vaccinate above all those who are most directly placed in danger by the circulation of the virus.”

This is an outright fabrication of the position of the World Health Organisation, which actively campaigns for the broadest vaccination of the entire population, except those who should not be vaccinated for medical reasons. It has insisted that to prevent the spread of the virus a sufficient percentage of the population—which numerically has not been determined—must be vaccinated. Mélenchon advocates an opposed, anti-scientific policy, involving vaccinating only those most at risk of dying.

The WHO has warned that such a policy provides an ideal breeding ground for the development of new and even more deadly variants. Mélenchon dishonestly uses the phrase “above all” to confuse the question of the prioritisation of vaccines with the overall goal of vaccinating the population.

Mélenchon also opposes the requirement that health workers be vaccinated. “Let’s look at this list—it is abhorrent—of those who must get vaccinated,” he said. “We see health workers. I understand why they would be indignant. For months they were celebrated like heroes and now … we point the finger at them like bastards.”

Health workers work directly with the most vulnerable sections of the population, using the latest developments in science to save lives. It is entirely appropriate that they be vaccinated, for their own safety and that of their patients. Moreover, this has the support of more than 70 percent of the population in France, according to polls. Why health workers would be “indignant” at a requirement that would assist in their efforts to stop the pandemic, Mélenchon does not explain.

François Ruffin has also campaigned to undermine public support for vaccination. In his various interventions, he downplays the danger of the virus, asserting that it presents virtually no danger to himself or anyone his age. While he himself is personally vaccinated, he insists that this is a purely personal choice that he took to reduce the possibility of social distancing restrictions. Downplaying any dangers of the pandemic, Ruffin claimed on BFMTV that “those getting vaccinated now are doing it less out of fear of coronavirus than because they say, I want to go to the bar, to the restaurant in peace, to see my family in hospital.”

In the same interview, Ruffin said vaccination should instead be decided by the individual “when we know that there is a benefit that is superior to the risks.” But this is a fraud. In reality, the benefits of vaccines that cause harmful side effects in only a handful of people per million vaccinated is inevitably far superior to the risks of a virus that kills tens of thousands of people per million infected. Ruffin is effectively arguing against vaccination as a tool to eradicate the virus.

Defending resistance to vaccination, Ruffin argued that compulsory vaccination had “undermined a fundamental medical ethical principle: that we don’t have the right to use one person for another.”

“What is the alternative?” he stated. “Instead of vaccinating everyone, we should massively target the at-risk population.” Making clear that in any case the deadly virus would keep spreading through the population, Ruffin added that, “in any case, that would clearly help stopping the hospitals from overflowing.”

Mélenchon and Ruffin justify their policy of herd immunity using the same argument as the far right—that mandatory vaccination is an attack on their democratic rights and personal liberty.

This is not a defence of democratic rights. Their argument could be used to justify a broad variety of anti-social behaviour, including drunk driving, on the grounds that it is everyone’s “right” to do as they please.

As a point of fact, there are currently 11 viruses for which vaccines are legally mandated in France. The extension of universal vaccination throughout the 20th century, both in the Soviet Union and in western capitalist countries, was a by-product of advances in science and the rise of health care and living standards in the population, won through major social struggles by the working class.

It is worth noting that while LFI participated in Saturday’s right-wing protests against vaccinations, they issued no similar calls for protests and strikes against Macron’s policy of “back-to-work” or the reopening of schools throughout the pandemic.

That is because their campaign against vaccines is part of their efforts to normalise the spread of the virus and justify a policy of herd immunity demanded by the corporate and financial elite.

The Macron government has sought to capitalise on the openly right-wing anti-vaccine protests in an effort to justify its own policy. Thus, spokesman Gabriel Attal denounced Saturday’s rallies of a “capricious and defeatist fringe” that would “be happy to remain in chaos and inactivity.” He counterposed this to “a labouring and voluntary” population that “wants to put the virus behind them and work.” In fact, hesitancy toward vaccination has been exacerbated by Macron’s policies, which have from the outset been aimed at protecting profits and not lives and been marked by a series of lies and 180-degree turns.

Covid-19 infections soar 500 percent: a social crime of the Dutch ruling class

Parwini Zora

Coronavirus infections in the Netherlands skyrocketed by more than 500 percent in early July, an unprecedented contagion rate for a European country. The reproduction rate (R0) remains at an all time high in the Netherlands at 2.91—indicating that each person infected goes on to infect nearly three people on average.

The surge in infections is the direct result of the scrapping of almost all remaining social distancing restrictions, driven by the bourgeoisie’s campaign to fully reopen the economy after June 26. Now, an average of more than 11,000 recorded daily cases are announced by the Dutch Public Health Institute (RIVM), compared to approximately 500 daily infections in mid-June.

Health care workers wait for the arrival of an ambulance at Bernhoven hospital in Uden, southern Netherlands, Monday, March 23, 2020. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)

In line with an undeclared official policy of spreading the virus, the Dutch ruling class utilized the falling case numbers in June and the vaccination program in recent months as an excuse to dispense with social distancing measures. This included eliminating even the minimal mandated use of face masks in public spaces.

Only 43 percent of the Dutch population is vaccinated, though roughly two-thirds has had at least one of the two shots. However, around three-quarters of new cases in the Netherlands are occurring among young people, particularly among those who have not completed the two vaccination shots. More than half of infections involve the highly contagious Delta variant, which is now present in at least 104 countries.

As many as 1,000 COVID-19 infections were linked to the Verknipt outdoor festival in Utrecht alone, a two-day festival that was attended by 20,000 and which required a “test for entry.” This only underscores yet again that official plans to prevent super-spreader events at mass gatherings are ineffective.

Eighteen months into the pandemic, the ugly reality of Dutch society, with its colossal levels of social inequality, pervasive poverty and ruling class criminality, has been exposed. The Netherlands was classified as having the worst risk level for COVID-19 infections by the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. Faced with mounting social indignation, the Dutch caretaker government can no longer entirely conceal their complacency and indifference.

Prime Minister Mark Rutte felt compelled to officially “apologize” for the premature relaxation of social distancing, calling it “an error of judgment.”

Acting Health Minister Hugo de Jonge said at the same press conference that the late June loosening of restrictions combined with a lack of social distancing and the Delta variant “had had, of course, an accelerating effect. You can unfortunately see that with hindsight.”

Rutte followed up with a second “apology” for a “bad press conference” during which he and de Jonge had dismissed criticism that the government had eased restrictions too early. The ministers maintained the decision had been responsible, given the information they had at the time. In fact, it shows primarily that the government is in hock to the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, the banks, and their most vocal henchmen, the neo-fascistic far-right and affiliated anti-vaccination outfits.

While Rutte offers his cynical and empty “apologies,” the financial aristocracy is rejoicing that profits are surging due to the reopening of the economy. The economic bureau of ABN AMRO, the third-largest Dutch bank, stated in a communiqué last October that “the explanation for the decline in economic activity must largely be sought in the effect of the fear of the virus.” As of July 1, as infections surge, the agency has tweeted: “Now that the fear of the virus has gone, the economic damage is also less.”

Despite months of warnings from epidemiologists of outbreaks across the continent, capitalist governments in Europe have lifted or are ending the last of their limited measures to tackle the virus. They are thus fueling a rapid rise of the more infectious Delta variant.

An open letter denouncing the British government’s murderous policy in The Lancet, now signed by over 1,200 scientists, warns of “a generation left with chronic health problems and disability.” Immunologists in the Netherlands are warning that inadequate vaccine coverage among youth, coupled with the lack of social distancing, is leading to the surge in cases. “It is not just because of the Delta variant. It’s also because most of these young people were not fully vaccinated,” Dr. Dimitri Diavatopoulos, an immunologist at the Radboud Centre for Infectious Diseases told Sky News.

The National Institute for Public Health and the Environment stated that from infections that could be traced to their source, 37 percent occurred in hospitality venues such as bars and clubs.

Dutch authorities are now scrambling to reintroduce minimal social distancing, bargaining with business owners on subjects like closing times of cafes and restaurants and fixed seating for diners or concert-goers. All dance venues and nightclubs will be closed. Also, festivals spread over several days would be canceled and large public gatherings restricted to smaller groups. The current ‘curbs’ went into effect on 17 July and, for now at least, are to remain in place until 14 August.

The concerted downplaying of risks, and the dead-silence about effects of Long-COVID among an officially infected record number of 1.7 million, approximately 10 percent of the entire Dutch population, accounting for nearly 18,000 official deaths in between, fits into the capitalist logic and calculation of herd immunity. In other words, anything that hinders business or potentially makes people reluctant to let money roll must be removed.

In the meantime, the Dutch ruling establishment, with the tacit support of the union bureaucracies and their political allies, are presenting the pandemic as largely a thing of the past and have ignored calls from scientists and medical personnel to take coordinated scientific public health measures. This is a politically-criminal action, complicit with social murder as governments play Russian roulette with the health of millions.

Suicide attempts among Canadian children have doubled during the COVID-19 pandemic

Dylan Lubao

A Canadian children’s charity has declared a state of emergency with respect to children’s mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. Children First Canada launched the #codePINK campaign, which aims to raise awareness about pediatric emergencies.

The figures reported by the campaign are devastating:

● A 200 percent increase in hospital admissions for substance abuse among children over the past year

● A 100 percent increase in suicide attempts by children during the same period

● 70 percent of children between ages 6 and 18 say that the pandemic has harmed their mental health in some form

● 62 percent of parents admit that the pandemic has worsened the mental health of at least one of their children

● 61 percent of parents expect the residual effects of the pandemic to impact their child’s mental health even after the pandemic ends

While the pandemic has unquestionably dramatically worsened the mental health crisis facing children, the real cause of the dramatic rise in suicides and substance abuse, which had begun well before COVID-19 emerged, is the capitalist profit system.

The statistics cited by #codePINK are ultimately a by-product of the disastrous, decades-long gutting of social services by all the major political parties, from the social democratic New Democratic Party to the Liberals and Conservatives. Mental health services across Canada are in an atrocious state, with patients often waiting months to see specialists and receive support. Public education is also in a deplorable state following decades of austerity, which has pushed up class sizes, cut back on support staff, and placed increased demands on already overworked teachers.

Meanwhile, the same politicians and political parties who repeat ad nauseam the claim that there is “no money” for critical health care and mental health services have lavished hundreds of billions of dollars on the banks and major corporations, and increased military spending by tens of billions of dollars.

Even as Canada’s billionaires increased their wealth by $78 billion over the past year, no significant additional resources were made available to support children and their families. The millions of workers thrown out of their jobs were provided with a piddling $500 per week under the Canada Emergency Response Benefit, plunging tens of thousands of families into poverty.

Provincial governments across the country, under the direction of the federal Liberals, have pursued a savage policy of mass infection, including by keeping schools open to in-person learning. The underlying goal of this policy was to keep children in classrooms as much as possible, so that their parents could go to work and generate profits for the corporations. This policy was continued even when COVID-19 ran rampant during last winter’s second wave, which claimed the lives of more than 10,000 people across Canada.

When the authorities felt they had no other option but to resort to remote learning, they pursued a policy of deliberate sabotage. Children and their families, not to mention teachers, were left largely to fend for themselves. Virtually no equipment or support was provided to facilitate the transition to online learning, including much needed social support for students facing an unprecedented situation that placed incredible pressure on their mental health.

In partnership with some of the country’s top children’s hospitals and pediatric organizations, Children’s First Canada is using the #codePINK platform to lobby governments for greater investment in and support for improved mental health outcomes. They stress that for years, every government in Canada has grievously underfunded mental health supports. This has disproportionately impacted working class communities, where individuals are twice as likely to be hospitalized due to self-harm than their counterparts in affluent neighbourhoods.

According to Sara Austin, CEO of Children First Canada, “We simply haven’t seen that robust investments that are really needed in our health-care system, particularly when it comes to the mental health of our children, but even simple things like accessing rehabilitation services or life-saving surgeries for children, kids are being put on a waitlist sometimes for months, upwards of years now, and it’s getting worse by the day.”

A prominent, yet unsettling feature of their campaign is the demand for a return to in-classroom learning while the global pandemic rages out of control.

The campaign organizers have called for a summit between Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the provincial premiers to address their concerns. Such a meeting, however, would only be used to provide unwarranted scientific legitimacy to the ruling class’ drive to end all restrictions on the spread of the virus.

A return to in-classroom learning would lead to thousands of infections among children, especially given their low vaccination rates—those under age 12 are still ineligible for vaccination. These children would then go on to infect their family members and the broader community, fuelling a resurgence of the pandemic. To date, there have been over 271,000 COVID-19 cases among youth 19 and under, representing 19.2 percent of all infections, the largest proportion of any age group.

Capitalist governments across the world have utilized a mixture of pseudo-science, cherry-picked medical research and outright lies to advance the claim that schools are not significant vectors of COVID-19 infection, and that children are not at risk of serious illness when contracting the virus.

This was most egregiously demonstrated in February, when US President Joe Biden flatly lied to a second grader, telling her that she and her family bore no risk of getting infected. A barrage of editorials in the major US papers followed, falsely claiming that schools were safe to reopen, even as classroom transmission helped drive the disastrous winter and spring waves of the pandemic in the US and Canada. This prepared the way for school reopenings across the continent.

The majority of school districts in Canada remained open for at least partial in-classroom education through the end of the current school year. However, millions of workers opted to keep their children learning remotely. A survey conducted in June revealed that a majority of respondents (59 percent) opposed the return of students to classrooms in the fall without being vaccinated.

In conjunction with the inadequate and haphazard execution of remote learning, the renewed push to scapegoat the latter for children’s declining mental health is squarely aimed at breaking all remaining opposition in the working class to full school reopenings.

The ruling class reopening campaign has produced its intended effect on a section of the middle class, represented by pediatricians and children’s health professionals. On June 4, an open letter was sent to Ontario’s Progressive Conservative Premier Doug Ford, demanding the immediate reopening of schools, and the provision of in-classroom instruction for summer and fall classes. Similar letters have been sent to provincial governments across Canada.

Signed by over 400 medical professionals, the letter’s arguments for reopening schools mirror the rhetoric articulated by the most unabashed proponents of the “herd immunity” policy, which has been thoroughly debunked by science. The nightmare unfolding in the UK shows what is in store for Canada if such a course is pursued. There, the number of daily new cases driven by the Delta variant has surpassed 50,000 and the death rate is quickly rising.

In a recent column on the current surge in the UK, the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) clearly laid out how school transmission helped drive the rapidly emerging fourth wave of the pandemic. Examining outbreaks of the more transmissible Delta variant up to the end of May, Public Health England identified 140 outbreaks in schools, the largest number of any setting. As the BMJ put it, “Spread of the delta variant is likely to have played an important role in the exponential rises we are seeing of cases in England, and hospitalisations in North West England.”

While the pediatric concern for children’s mental health is well-founded, capitalist governments across the country have absolutely no interest in devoting additional resources to the safe resumption of public education. On the contrary, the concerns as outlined in the doctors’ letters are being shamelessly touted by these governments as proof that all school doors must be reopened with virtually no public health restrictions in place.

A situation in which the ruling class feels unrestrained to promote its murderous herd immunity policy is primarily the responsibility of the trade unions and their pseudo-left adjuncts. From the start of the pandemic, they have supported this policy and ruled out any job action to oppose it. In April of this year, Harvey Bischof, president of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation, urged the provincial government to “safely” resume in-classroom education, knowing full well that the hard-right Conservatives had no intention of keeping children and their families safe.

French President Macron among those targeted by international Pegasus smartphone spyware operation

Kevin Reed

The Pegasus Project media consortium published new revelations on Tuesday about the targeting of the smartphones of as many as 50,000 journalists, business and political figures and dissidents with spyware by governments around the world. According to the Washington Post, the list of identified targeted individuals contained fourteen prominent heads of state and governments.

Although none of those who were identified offered their phones up for forensic analysis so the infiltration of their devices with the spyware could not be confirmed, the Post report said the list of targeted leaders included “three presidents, 10 prime ministers and a king.”

Emmanuel Macron [Sebastien Nogier, Pool via AP]

The identities of the fourteen individuals were derived from the list of 50,000 phone numbers that was leaked to the French media non-profit Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International and then reviewed by the 17 news organizations that comprise the Pegasus Project.

The Post reported that the three sitting presidents are France’s Emmanuel Macron, Iraq’s Barham Salih and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa. Three former prime ministers are Pakistan’s Imran Khan, Egypt’s Mostafa Madbouly and Morocco’s Saad-Eddine El Othmani. Seven former prime ministers are Yemen’s Ahmed Obeid bin Daghr, Lebanon’s Saad Hariri, Uganda’s Ruhakana Rugunda, France’s Édouard Philippe, Kazakhstan’s Bakitzhan Sagintayev, Algeria’s Noureddine Bedoui and Belgium’s Charles Michel. The one king is Morocco’s Mohammed VI.

The Post said the media groups within the Pegasus Project confirmed the ownership of the phone numbers “through public records, journalists’ contact books and queries to government officials or other close associates of the potential targets.”

The revelations about the scope of Pegasus spyware use internationally is resulting in a series of lawsuits and political crises around the world. On Tuesday, for example, the French government demanded an investigation into the report that President Macron was one of the individuals who had been targeted by the hacking operation.

French Prime Minister Jean Castex told the National Assembly that the government had ordered investigations. An official Élysée Palace statement said, “If the facts are confirmed, they are clearly very serious. All light will be shed on these press revelations. Certain French victims have already announced that they would take legal action, and therefore judicial inquiries will be launched.”

The Pegasus spyware—developed by the cybersecurity firm NSO Group—has been contracted by governments since 2016 to transform smartphones running the latest versions of either iOS or Android operating systems into 24-hour surveillance devices. The initial versions of the software used a technique called “spear-phishing” in which text or email messages are used to get the device owner to click on a malicious link that would then download the spyware onto the phone.

Since these methods have become less effective, NSO developed more advanced methods of getting Pegasus onto the smartphones such as “zero-click” attacks that do not require the device owner to do anything for the spyware to be actuated. The zero-click methods exploit flaws in the operating system security to gain entry into a targeted smartphone. The Guardian reported on Sunday, for example, that NSO had been exploiting vulnerabilities in WhatsApp by placing the malicious code directly into the program and infecting a user’s phone as soon as they download it. More recently NSO has been exploiting a weakness in Apple’s iMessage to gain “backdoor access to hundreds of millions of iPhones.”

The Guardian also said that, “Pegasus can also be installed over a wireless transceiver located near a target, or, according to an NSO brochure, simply manually installed if an agent can steal the target’s phone.”

Once a phone has been hacked by Pegasus, the operators of the spyware can harvest any data on the device included phone call records, text messages, address books, calendars, email messages, internet browsing histories, geolocation and map data and also activate the microphone and camera.

NSO Group—named after the first names of its founders Niv Carmi, Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie who are all ex-members of Unit 8200, the Israeli Intelligence Corps—was founded in 2010 in Tel Aviv. The use of NSO’s software for spying on journalists and political oppositionists was initially exposed in 2012 following the signing of a $20 million contract with the government of Mexico.

In 2014, NSO Group was purchased by the American private equity firm Francisco Partners for $130 million, and these investors then flipped the cybersecurity company for $1 billion three years later.

By 2018, Amnesty International accused NSO Group of helping the regime of Saudi Arabia to spy on a member of the organization’s staff. It was later alleged that NSO’s Pegasus software played a role in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudi regime by tracking his whereabouts in the months leading up to his death. In 2019, WhatsApp accused NSO Group of injecting spyware into its system by exploiting the call feature of the software.

NSO Group has denied all along that it is responsible for the ongoing malicious software attacks. When WhatsApp presented evidence of smartphone hacking with NSO’s tools, the company blamed the hacks on its customers. The company has recently stated publicly that it has sold licenses for Pegasus to 40 unnamed countries and continues to maintain that it does not maintain any of the data of its clients or operate the software once it is sold to a country.

NSO Group has also maintained that it is technologically impossible for its spyware to be installed on smartphones within the US. According to Slate, the company claims that the Pegasus software will “self-destruct if it finds itself within American borders.”

Responding to the absurd statements by NSO Group, Edward Snowden, the whistleblower and former intelligence analyst who exposed a global US government electronic surveillance program, tweeted on Tuesday afternoon, “NSO’s claim that it is ‘technologically impossible’ to spy on American phone numbers is a bald-faced lie: an exploit that works against Macron's iPhone will work the same on Biden’s iPhone. Any code written to prohibit targeting a country can also be unwritten. It’s a fig leaf.”

Earlier in the day, Snowden commented on the revelation that French President Macron was on the target list, “No one is safe from the out-of-control designer spyware industry. Export controls have failed as a means of regulating this easily abused technology. Without an immediate global moratorium on the trade, this will only get worse.”

Snowden also denounced the Washington Post for its editorial response to the Pegasus revelations. “WaPo’s editorial solution to the NSO scandal is so embarrassingly weak that it is itself a scandal. These companies (and their hosts) claim ‘transparency, accountability, and licensing requirements’ are already in place! You ask for less than nothing.”

A crime against humanity: COVID-19 has killed an estimated four million people in India

Bryan Dyne

The real toll of the COVID-19 pandemic in India is between three and five million, ten times the official figure, according to a new study by the US-based Center for Global Development. “True deaths are likely to be in the several millions not hundreds of thousands,” notes the report, “making this arguably India’s worst human tragedy since partition and independence.”

This massive death toll is a crime against humanity, in which the entire imperialist world order is implicated no less than the ruling class of India. Moreover, the massive undercount of cases and deaths in India is no doubt replicated in other countries. This means that the real global death toll from the pandemic, which stands at 4.13 million by official figures, is well over 10 million and likely far higher.

Funeral pyres of those who died of COVID-19 in New Delhi, India, April 24, 2021. (AP Photo/Altaf Qadri)

The study, released on Tuesday, estimates that there were between 1.5 and 3.4 million “excess deaths” in India during the “first wave” of the pandemic between April 2020 and March 2021. The number of deaths per day was even higher during the “second wave” between April and June of this year, as India’s hospitals collapsed in the face of a tsunami of infections. An estimated 1.4 to 2.4 million people died during in these three months, a rate of death three times higher than the previous period.

Basic and necessary equipment to fight the symptoms of the coronavirus, such as oxygen and Remdesivir were all but non-existent. Families were forced to purchase such supplies themselves from the black market, and often also forced to administer care themselves as well. Images and videos of crowds outside hospitals clamoring for assistance even as their loved ones were dying burned themselves into the minds of millions across the world.

Such mass death was spurred on by the abysmal social conditions facing hundreds of millions of India’s working poor, who are malnourished, lack access to clean water and live in cramped quarters unable to socially distance. Given these conditions, when the pandemic first emerged, it was all the more important that the government mobilize the necessary resources to contain it.

The Modi government bears responsibility for this catastrophe. Its response was guided at every step by the single-minded aim of preserving the wealth and privilege of the financial elite. It did virtually nothing to contain the pandemic until abruptly calling for a nationwide lockdown on March 24, ordered with only four hours’ notice, which was later removed before the virus was contained.

No economic assistance was provided for the hundreds of millions of informal workers rendered unable to feed themselves and their families, which induced a mass migration of workers back to rural areas, spreading the virus to every corner of the country.

Even as coronavirus cases and deaths mounted, Modi pressed forward with reopening, proclaiming that the country had to be “saved” from measures to prevent the spread of a lethal and virulent contagion. Speaking for the Indian ruling elite, he infamously declared on April 20 during a national broadcast that, “In today’s situation, we have to save the country from lockdown!”

This horrifying death toll reveals the true meaning of this declaration. In the midst of the largest surge of COVID-19 anywhere in the world, the country had been “saved” from the basic measures necessary to contain the disease, but at the cost of millions of lives. According to Forbes, in 2020 the wealth of India’s billionaires nearly doubled to $596 billion. During that same period, an estimated 230 million Indians were robbed of their livelihood and pushed below the national poverty line of 375 rupees (US $5) a day.

However, direct responsibility for this crime against humanity extends to every capitalist government—and, in particular, the United States and the major imperialist powers. The mass infection in India is the product of the decision to reject emergency measures to stop the pandemic when it first emerged, because these measures impinged on the profit interests of the corporate and financial elite.

On February 28, 2020, when there were as yet only three reported cases of COVID-19 in India, the International Committee of the Fourth International issued an urgent call for a globally coordinated emergency response to the pandemic. “The response to the coronavirus cannot be coordinated on a nation by nation level,” the ICFI wrote. “The virus does not respect borders or visa immigration restrictions. The global network of transportation and economic integration have turned the virus into a global problem.”

Instead of taking emergency action, however, the major capitalist powers, led by the United States, used the crisis to organize a massive bailout of the financial markets and the rich. This was followed by the campaign to return workers to work and remove all necessary restrictions to stop the further spread of the virus.

The consequences have been devastating for the population of the advanced capitalist countries. In the United States, more than 625,000 people are dead, according to official figures, while the real toll is likely over one million. The failure to eradicate the disease in its early stages ensured that it would spread rapidly throughout the world, including to India.

The massive loss of life, moreover, has been fueled by the policy of “vaccine nationalism,” with the major capitalist governments hoarding vaccines. India, one of the world’s leading producers of pharmaceuticals, has a vaccination rate that is one tenth of Europe and the United States. According to the Reuters COVID-19 vaccination tracker, only 6.3 percent of the country is fully vaccinated, meaning that about 1.3 billion people are still vulnerable to new and even more deadly variants.

In any rational society, the scale of social misery produced by the “second wave” in India would have evoked an enormous, globally coordinated response. India’s colossal manufacturing capacity would have turned to making equipment and medicine to fight the disease and emergency hospitals would have been erected to care for the sick. An army of testers and contact tracers would have been mobilized and financial resources provided to those who were forced to isolate to protect themselves and others from the virulent and deadly disease. Non-essential production would be halted, with full monetary compensation to the workers and small business impacted.

The collective resources of global society would have been mobilized to stop the carnage. Instead, the imperialist governments offered a pittance of assistance. Trillions are expended every year on military armaments and nuclear weapons, but almost nothing was provided to save the lives of millions of people. The multinational corporations, moreover, insisted that production continue to churn out profits.

For the capitalist oligarchs, the death of millions of people was considered—and is considered—an acceptable sacrifice.

There will be an accounting for this policy of social murder. The pandemic has exposed, through the deaths of uncounted millions, that all aspects of socioeconomic life are ultimately subordinated to profit, producing the social miseries of poverty, hunger and disease alongside the existential threats of ecological catastrophe, global pandemics and nuclear war.

Moral Intelligence or Nuclear War

Robert Koehler

One of these days, something will give — the rich, the powerful will suddenly look around cluelessly. What’s happening? Awareness will sweep across the planet: We are one, and life is sacred. This consciousness will even invade political life and what I call moral intelligence will find political traction.

This won’t mean that life suddenly becomes simple — anything but! The politics of today, nationally and internationally, is simple: somebody wins, somebody loses; war is inevitable, there are always several on the horizon, and the primary consequence of every war that is waged is that it spurs more wars, a fact that remains officially unnoticed; only some lives matter, those that don’t are collateral damage, illegal aliens or simply the enemy; nuclear weapons  (ours, only ours) are justified, necessary and must be continually upgraded; national borders, however arbitrary, are sacred (the only thing that’s sacred); if these norms are challenged, the best response is mockery and cynicism.

Transcending this mindset requires facing life in all its complexity, which is a necessary part of our personal lives. But could it be that facing the endless complexity of life is also politically possible? This seems to be the question I’ve been given to ponder — and cherish — as I step into my elder years. Come on! Politics requires simplistic public herding, does it not? You can’t steer a country without an enemy.

As a peace journalist, I usually begin by focusing on the media. Consider this recent Washington Post piece regarding the use of nuclear weapons. Even though the article is critical of the Trump administration, which in 2018 “expanded the role of nuclear weapons by declaring for the first time that the United States would consider nuclear retaliation in the case of ‘significant non-nuclear strategic attacks’,” the article remains trapped, I fear, in linear, conventional thinking.

Its focus is on the fact that, because of the Trump decision, it’s possible that the recent cyberattacks on U.S. companies, apparently the work of criminal organizations based in Russia, could be used as a justification for a nuclear response. While this is unlikely and utterly insane, “imagine,” the article tells us,

a much worse cyberattack, one that not only disabled pipelines but turned off the power at hundreds of U.S. hospitals, wreaked havoc on air-traffic-control systems and shut down the electrical grid in major cities in the dead of winter. The grisly cost might be counted not just in lost dollars but in the deaths of many thousands of people.

Wow! This is certainly cruel and evil, almost in the zone of U.S. bombing runs in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. (we’ve dropped 326,000 bombs on various countries since 2001), but the article continues to express profound concern that — in a trigger-happy administration — it could result in a nuclear retaliation, which would not only be wrong but, uh, illegal under international law. The key moral point the article makes seems to be primarily technical.

While the American public would indeed be likely to want vengeance after a destructive enemy assault, the law of armed conflict requires that some military options be taken off the table. Nuclear retaliation for ‘significant non-nuclear strategic attacks’ is one of them.

Two things about this paragraph stop me cold. First of all, the assumption that “the public” (whatever that is) would be focused on vengeance after a horrific cyberattack is simplistic, to say the least. The public — you, me, and perhaps everyone on the planet — would be in shock, wounded and grieving, and would be primarily focused on healing, help and the heroism of the many who gave their lives in rescue efforts. When I recall the days right after 9/11, what I think about are people lined up to donate blood, not shaking their fists in cartoonlike demands for vengeance against whomever.

But to slide such an assumption — the public is impulsive and stupid — into an article about nuclear weapons removes the possibility of bringing a larger awareness to the discussion, a public awareness that nuclear weapons should never be used and, indeed, should not exist, in our hands or anyone else’s. The Post appears not to want to go that far, instead presuming with its words that our national leaders are the ones keeping things calm and under control, even if they need to be kept in check by international law.

I fear there are far deeper realities loose in the world: a military-industrial complex that will do whatever it can to prevent the world from transcending war; the possibility of a president in political trouble, seeing war (even the nuclear button) as a solution; and the hidden forces of the deep state, exerting pressures on political leaders the public will never know about.

To declare that nuclear weapons can only “legally” be used in retaliation for a nuclear strike hardly leaves me feeling safe. Are we left with a world continually at war with itself, with our best hope being that all future wars will be waged legally and politely?

Regarding nukes, the Post notes, the Obama administration’s guidance document declares that “the United States will not intentionally target civilian populations or civilian objects.” And a former head of the U.S. Strategic Command under Obama told the Post the command had developed nuclear delivery “tactics and techniques to minimize collateral effects.”

“Minimize collateral damage” is a phrase you’d use only in regard to people whose lives didn’t matter. And if the weapons involved are nuclear, it sounds like a grotesque lie. All of which intensifies my outrage: We are one, and life is sacred. The game of war has been going on sufficiently long — a dozen millennia or whatever — and is at its stopping point. We can no longer create a wasteland and call it peace. The wasteland it is in our power to create is Planet Earth.

I know the human species has what it takes to reach beyond its artificial borders and refuse to let this happen. The time for the best of us to emerge is now.

The Taliban’s Dramatic Military Victory

Ted Rall

Joe Biden deserves nothing but praise and support for his decision to honor America’s commitment, negotiated between the Trump administration and the Taliban, to finally withdraw from Afghanistan. After more than 20 years of wasted lives, endless property damage and squandering of billions of U.S. tax dollars that would have been better spent on just about anything else you could think of, it’s incredible that corporate media is still giving airtime to the idiots and warmongers who want to keep troops over there. “I have heard general after general, as you have, say, just give us a little more time,” ABC’s Martha Raddatz said July 4^th.

It’s been two decades. There was no legal or moral justification for the war to begin with. They’ve had too much time as it is.

For those of us who have been closely connected to America’s longest war last week’s abandonment of Bagram airbase, the biggest U.S. facility in occupied Afghanistan, makes the long-promised withdrawal feel real.

And the hand-wringing over what comes next has built to a fever pitch. Will the Taliban come back? Will it be like 1997 all over again, with women subjugated and horribly oppressed? Will the Taliban kill the translators, fixers and other Afghans who worked for U.S. occupation forces? Will Afghanistan once again become a staging ground for terrorist attacks like 9/11?

Some of these questions are reasonable. Others couldn’t be less so, based as they are on assumptions fed by lies.

What’s important to remember is the motivation for sewing these doubts. The military industry and its pet media outlets want to change our minds about withdrawal or, if they fail to do so for now, to set the stage for ground troops to invade again in the near future.

Afghanistan will not “again” become a staging ground for terrorist attacks against the United States or any other Western power because it was hardly one in the first place. In 2001 there were four Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan; there were 6,000 in Pakistan. On 9/11 Osama bin Laden was almost certainly in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. The attacks were planned by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Pakistan. Most of the funding came from the royal family of Saudi Arabia, as did 15 of the 19 hijackers; none came from Afghanistan. It is true that the hijackers all trained in Afghanistan but that’s a distinction without a difference; they could just as easily have picked up the same education in Pakistan, where 99% of Al Qaeda’s infrastructure and personnel had been situated.

There is good reason to worry about the immediate future after we leave. It is likely that the Taliban will quickly topple the militarily inferior and wildly unpopular U.S. puppet regime installed by the George W. Bush Administration. Neighboring countries are bracing for flows of Afghan refugees; hundreds of Afghan government soldiers have already fled to Tajikistan. Violence is inevitable: military casualties in the civil conflict, reprisals against political opponents and repressive acts against women and other targets of Muslim fundamentalists. But nothing can change the truth: Afghanistan is not a U.S. colony. It is a sovereign nation. As such, it has the right and duty of self-determination. The Afghan people must sort out amongst each other what kind of future they want to have.

In the event of a Rwanda-scale genocide, intervention could be justified in conjunction with an international force under the auspices of the U.N. At this writing, however, that seems unlikely. The Taliban are far more sophisticated, younger and modern than the regime that took over Kabul in 1996. So is the population that they seek to govern. Afghans are interconnected with the wider world and its culture via the Internet and cellular phones. They are Muslim extremists, but they are far more pragmatic than ISIS. Afghanistan under the Taliban will feel more like Pakistan than ISIS-held Syria. As is currently the case, rural areas will be more conservative—burqas, girls banned from schools, the occasional stoning—than the cities.

Certainly the United States has the moral obligation not to repeat its habit of discarding its local employees after withdrawal. We should offer green cards and economic support to our Afghan collaborators on an expedited basis rather than the shameful foot-dragging that has been reported. Otherwise the Taliban may execute them as traitors.

Be prepared, as Biden’s September 11, 2021 deadline for withdrawal of the last U.S. troops draws closer, for a rising chorus of voices calling for him to change his mind. Don’t abandon Afghanistan again, the war pigs will cry.

Don’t listen to their siren song of imperialism. The invasion was a mistake, the occupation was a mistake, and so was our propping up of our corrupt puppet regime. We never should have been there in the first place and it has taken 20 years too long to get out.

Robotic Killing Machines and Our Future: Chris Pratt, Aliens and Drones

Chris Pratt of Parks and Recreation and Guardians of the Galaxy fame has a new film out. In The Tomorrow War, Pratt uses time travel to save Earth from hordes of ravenous aliens. The film ultimately is an allegory for climate change, so kudos to Pratt and all in Hollywood for a movie demonstrating that climate change will bring surprising and inevitable deadly consequences to all of us.

By no means is The Tomorrow War a masterpiece; I would give it 5 stars out of 10. It is what you would expect from a summer action-adventure blockbuster. However, one thing that stuck with me regarding this film about humans fighting aliens 30 years in the future is that there is little to be seen of drone warfare. In only a couple of scenes do we see drones fighting the aliens. The absence of drones is because Hollywood makes money off of its stars and not robots. The reality, though, is that based upon where we are in the present with robotic killing machines and the predictive course of technological progress and adaption, in 30 years from now, humans will not be present on the battlefront. The likely scenario is that the fictional aliens in The Tomorrow War would not stand a chance against the automatized warfare of the present, let alone the future. What needs to be asked is: what chance do we as non-fictional humans have?

The idea that machines may kill on their own is older than I am. Science fiction writers and futurists crafted laws in their novels and predictions that humans would program robots with constitutional instructions not to harm humans. When I was a boy in the 1980s, Arnold Schwarzenegger shot to stardom as he played the role of the assassin robot in The Terminator. At about the same time, Matthew Broderick starred in Wargames, a movie about the consequences of putting the decision to kill in the hands of computers. Frighteningly, what was once considered gist and speculation for science fiction novels and movies is now existent.

It has been more than a year since the first known autonomous drone conducted a kill mission on its own. In early 2020, a Turkish-built drone carried out a successful autonomous kill mission in Libya. As reported by the United Nations, this drone conducted its entire mission: takeoff, targeting, attack, and return, without the assistance of a human. This machine found and killed who it wanted to without a human hand or mind involved. Yes, humans instructed the machine who to look for, but once that information was provided, the machine could operate and kill independently of any additional input. Go out and look for someone who says certain words on a cellphone, wears a particular style of “uniform,” or meets a broad demographic category is what the drone is programmed to do, and once it has that input, it can kill on its own.

We now readily know machines can learn, and killer drones can incorporate that learning so that their initial target inputs are updated and adapted to allow the drones to search for expanded targets without human assistance. Drones can also be resupplied and refueled by other drones so that a drone that is hunting people needs never stop its hunt until it is successful. This near-dystopian fear of machines operating on their own, finding and killing humans, is a decades-old worry that is now true.

Drones are operating effectively and efficiently throughout war zones. In last year’s quick but bloody war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, Azerbaijan, again with Turkish drones, impressively defeated Armenia. Armenia lost hundreds of tanks, armored vehicles, and artillery pieces. The success of drones in combat has been noticed and is causing changes. After more than 100 years of tanks on the battlefield, the US Marine Corps recognizes their vulnerability, as tanks are easy things for cheap and autonomous drones to find and destroy. The US Marine Corps no longer has tanks. The Marines decided to discard their tanks before Azerbaijan’s use of drones against Armenia, but that decisive victory by Azerbaijan’s drones cleared doubts about keeping tanks that Marine leaders may have held.

One of the things necessary to understand about warfare is it is the most competitive of all human activities. When I was a Marine officer in Iraq, I was responsible for the counter-improvised explosive device (IED) operations for my regiment. My Marines and sailors went on the roads looking for those roadside bombs. After returning home, I worked for the Joint IED Defeat Organization, trying to get technology to US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan to protect them from IEDs. What I learned, and what we experienced, was that within 30 to 60 days of whatever technology or tactic we put into the field to try and protect our soldiers from IEDs, the insurgents had come up with a counter to our countermeasure. We would issue a piece of equipment that would attempt to protect our troops, but the insurgents had found a way to defeat it within a month or two. We would then produce an upgrade, a change in tactics, or another piece of equipment, and the insurgents would then find a way to counter that countermeasure. On and on it went, and, since these wars continue, on it goes. This degree of extreme competition is why the human race has often seen its swiftest and most extraordinary technological progress during warfare.

Militaries recognize the danger of drones and are trying to find ways to protect their troops from them. One such advancement that may reap horrifying effects on civilians, particularly in a country like the US, where mass shootings are daily, is a rifle that automatically tracks and fires on the target at which the shooter aims. Ostensibly created to combat drones, this rifle can be used against anything or anyone. The shooter aims at the person they want to shoot, and the computerized rifle sight follows the person selected. The shooter pulls the trigger; however, the rifle does not fire until the computer tells the rifle to fire to ensure a hit. You can buy one of these rifles for $6,000. How long until one of these is used at a church, a school, a concert…If Chris Pratt and his friends in The Tomorrow War had the weapons available today, let alone 30 years from now, that movie would not have lasted fifteen minutes.

Movies, and all art, speak to and reflect our society’s dreams, fears, obsessions, values, etc. They record our progress and attempt to tell us where we are going. Gerard Butler and Morgan Freeman in 2019’s Angel Has Fallen show quite dramatically how adversaries will use drones to overwhelm defenses and assassinate VIPs. In real life, we have seen Venezuela’s president survive a drone assassination attempt. Houthi insurgents have skillfully utilized drones to punish Saudi Arabia for its war crimes against Yemenis, and militias in Iraq and Syria, both Sunni and Shia, appear to be using more drones to attack occupying US forces. Thus the age-old question: does art imitate life, or does life imitate art?

On my TV, I watched Chris Pratt heroically battle aliens 30 years in the future. However, such a war would be fought almost entirely by robots. The idea of robots fighting aliens is no longer a purely speculative one, as the robots do exist. Autonomous robots that utilize artificial intelligence, machine learning, computerized fire control systems, and amazingly sensitive sensors are machines that do not seem to miss and never hesitate to pull the trigger. It is clear the aliens Chris Pratt fights in the future would not stand a chance against today’s robots. That is Hollywood, though. The question for us, outside of the movie theater and away from our TVs, is what chance we as human beings stand?