Research Outside of the Above: relevant work in areas that may not align with the research priorities highlighted above.
About the Facebook Fellowship:
The Facebook Fellowship is a global program designed to encourage and support promising doctoral students who are engaged in innovative and relevant research in areas related to computer science and engineering at an accredited university.
The program is open to students in any year of their PhD study. We also encourage people of diverse backgrounds and experiences to apply, especially those from traditionally under-represented minority groups. Applications are evaluated based on the strength of the student’s research statement, publication record, and recommendation letters.
Winners of the Fellowship are entitled to receive two years of paid tuition and fees, a $42,000 annual stipend to cover living and conference travel costs, a paid visit to Facebook headquarters for the annual Fellowship Summit, and various opportunities to engage with Facebook researchers.
Giving people the power to share and connect requires constant innovation. At Facebook, research permeates everything we do. We believe the most interesting research questions are derived from real-world problems. Our engineers work on cutting edge research with a practical focus and push product boundaries every day. We believe that close relationships with the academic community will enable us to address many of these problems at a fundamental level and solve them.
Type:
PhD, Fellowship
Selection Criteria and Eligibility
Applicants must be full-time PhD students who are enrolled in an accredited university (in any country) by the start of the Fellowship (i.e., Fall 2021)
Students must be involved in ongoing research related to one or more relevant disciplines (see available fellowships below)
Students must remain enrolled full-time for the duration of the Fellowship to receive program benefits
Students should not apply for Facebook Fellowships if they are actively being funded by Facebook through some other sponsorship or collaboration and/or if they are actively being supervised (or co-supervised) by a Facebook researcher. If in doubt, please email academicrelations@fb.com.
Number of Awards:
Not specified
Value of the Facebook Fellowship:
Each Facebook Fellowship includes several benefits:
Tuition and fees will be paid for the academic year (up to two years).
A $42,000 annual stipend to cover living and conference travel costs
Paid visit to Facebook HQ to present research.
As part of the program, current Fellows are invited to Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park for the annual Fellowship Summit. At the Summit, Fellows can engage with other winners, share their current research, speak with Facebook researchers and teams, and learn more about research at Facebook.
Duration of Award:
Facebook Fellowship Award to cover two years!
How to Apply for the Facebook Fellowship:
500-word research summary that clearly identifies the area of focus, importance to the field, and applicability to Facebook of the anticipated research during the award (reference the available fellowships below)
Two letters of recommendation, including one from an academic advisor. You will be asked to provide your references’ contact information, and they will receive a corresponding form to submit their letters.
Available Fellowships
AI System HW SW Co-Design Applied Statistics AR/VR Computer Graphics AR/VR Future Technologies AR/VR Human Computer Interaction AR/VR Human Understanding AR/VR Perception, Cognition & Action AR/VR Photonics and Optics Audio Presence Augmented Reality Audio Blockchain and Cryptoeconomics Computational Social Science Database Systems Distributed Systems Economics and Computation Networking Privacy and Data Use Programming Languages Security and Privacy
The Application is now live. Go to the Site and enter your information.
The corporate media was forced to admit the obvious by early July. Even before U.S. troops left Afghanistan, the reactionary Islamist Taliban that their invasion overthrew had retaken huge swaths of the country. After 20 years and over $2 trillion spent, Washington faced a massive failure with nothing to show for it but death and destruction.
What apologists for U.S. barbarism avoided at all costs was a tally of the devastation or the lies used to justify it. Corrupt collaboration government officials and their allies have looted the country. Not only the Taliban, but also al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (ISIS or Daesh), are stronger than ever.
It will be up to the Left in Afghanistan, the U.S., and around the world to draw the lessons of this history and back the fight of the Afghan people for a better future.
Lies, corruption and imperial hubris.
The invasion of Afghanistan after al-Qaeda brought down the World Trade Center in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001, was always built on fabrications. The “war on terror,” like the “war on communism” before it, was a handy excuse for attacks on whatever targets served U.S. geopolitical interests.
The invasion was not to free the women of Afghanistan or install democracy, as advertised. It was about political hegemony over this key country at the crossroads of the Middle East, Central Asia and South Asia — and about war profiteering. Now Washington’s relations with countries surrounding the “Graveyard of Empires” are worse than ever. The only success was enriching the enormous military industry.
In late 2019, the Washington Post printed the Afghanistan papers, some 600 interviews with insiders to the occupation. They revealed how Republican and Democratic administrations alike systematically lied about the huge sums wasted on corruption and empty “development” schemes. The total failure to bring peace or prosperity was well known but covered up.
Throughout, war crimes were committed with impunity by U.S. and NATO forces and their installed government (See “War crimes and civilian casualties in Afghanistan,” by Left Radical of Afghanistan, or LRA, at socialism.com). Barack Obama explicitly declined to investigate George W. Bush’s policy of widespread prisoner torture. In November 2019, Donald Trump had the gall to pardon two soldiers for war crimes, one convicted in U.S. courts and another before even standing trial.
Devastation wrought.
According to the Costs of War Project at Brown University, some 241,000 people have died in Afghanistan and Pakistan due directly to the violence of the war. Several times that number have died from lack of food and water or other indirect causes. Among the dead are more than 71,000 civilians, 78,000 Afghan soldiers, and 84,000 opposition fighters. The deaths of U.S. and NATO troops and military contractors number 7,522. Tens of thousands on all sides have been wounded.
There are 2.7 million UN-registered Afghan refugees. Most are stuck in camps with no hope of permanent settlement. Over 2 million people are internally displaced within the country.
Eteraz monthly is a collaboration by Afghan radicals, including LRA. Recent journal articles, reprinted at socialism.com, describe dire conditions for women and youth. Violence against women is at an all-time high, not only in rural areas dominated by Islamist forces, but also in large cities under government control.
Women and girls are not allowed to go to school in Taliban-controlled areas. Media reports say that three female journalists, a woman physician and two female judges have been assassinated since the beginning of 2021. In May, a school bombing in Kabul killed 85 girls, most of them Hazara Shiites, an ethnic and religious minority.
As for youth, Eteraz reports that about 70% of the population is under the age of 22, and schools have been closed throughout the country during the war. Many Afghans are illiterate, and the numbers are much higher for women and young people. All the factions in conflict, including the government, target unemployed and impoverished youth for recruitment. With an unemployment rate estimated at 72%, options are few beyond taking up arms, getting into the opium trade, or attempting to flee the country.
A Taliban takeover or civil war seems imminent. Either way, women and religious and ethnic minorities are in serious peril.
Looking forward.
Even by the probably rosy estimates of the Pentagon, the Taliban took over a third of the country between the beginning of May and early July. The U.S. played a key role in creating the disaster it is backing away from. To engineer the overthrow of a Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan during the 1980s, Washington funded the mujahideen (precursors to the Taliban), spawning the spread of right-wing Islamic fundamentalism throughout the region. Now it and its NATO allies are cutting their losses and leaving Afghans to pick up the pieces.
In early July, defiant women took up that challenge. Demonstrations of hundreds of women armed with assault rifles broke out in the north and central areas where the Taliban have been conquering territory and reinstituting heavy misogynist restrictions. The Guardian quoted a marcher who is head of the women’s directorate of Ghor province saying that while some women’s protest may have been symbolic, others “were ready to go to the battlefields.”
Afghan women, youth and poor people, and the Left that defends them, urgently require international solidarity, especially from socialists in the imperialist heartland. People in the U.S. can begin by demanding that their government pay war reparations and provide real reconstruction aid, no strings attached, to Afghanistan!
Governments around the world are letting COVID-19 rip through their populations. Besides the terrible toll in deaths, which officially stands at over 4.2 million, this policy is condemning millions more to severe long-term health problems.
A scientist researching Covid-19 (credit: Creative Commons)
A growing body of research has pointed to the serious neurological impact of a COVID-19 infection. Last month, a major study led by Imperial College London, “Cognitive Deficits In People Who Have Recovered From COVID-19”, provided an alarming confirmation of these effects.
Published in The Lancet, the study reveals that people who recover from COVID-19 are more likely to score substantially lower on IQ tests than they were before they were infected, with the impact increasing with the severity of the illness.
Using records from the ongoing Great British Intelligence Test, the researchers analysed the cognitive test scores of 81,337 people, of which 12,689 indicated they had experienced or suspected they had experienced a COVID-19 infection. Forty-four were hospitalised on a ventilator, 148 were hospitalised without a ventilator, 173 received medical assistance at home, 3,386 had symptoms which they self-managed at home, 8,938 had no noticeable symptoms and 68,648 were not ill.
The study found that people hospitalised with COVID showed “substantial” cognitive performance deficits, with those placed on a ventilator losing roughly seven IQ points, and those not ventilated losing roughly four.
Putting this in perspective, the “score reduction for the hospitalised with ventilator sub-group was greater than the average 10-year decline in global performance between the ages of 20 to 70 within this dataset. It was larger than the mean deficit of 480 people who indicated they had previously suffered a stroke.”
Half a million people have so far been hospitalised with COVID-19 in the UK.
Even those who were not hospitalised showed “small” but “statistically significant” performance deficits in the Lancet study. People who experienced respiratory difficulty lost between one and two IQ points. This is roughly equivalent with the effects of lead poisoning.
A study of 24,000 COVID patients published last June found that breathing problems affected 23 percent of infected people, broadly confirmed across multiple sources. The UK has recorded close to six million COVID-19 cases. On this rough calculation, close to 1.4 million people have had their cognitive function significantly impaired.
Deficits were most pronounced for tests which “tapped cognitive functions such as reasoning, problem solving, spatial planning and target detection whilst sparing tests of simpler functions such as working-memory span as well as emotional processing.”
The researchers suggest, “recovery from COVID-19 infection may be associated with particularly pronounced problems in aspects of higher cognitive or ‘executive’ function, an observation that accords with preliminary reports of executive dysfunction in some patients at hospital discharge”.
These findings “accord with reports of long-COVID, where ‘brain fog’, trouble concentrating and difficulty finding the correct words are common.”
According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), 945,000 people in the UK are currently living with Long COVID, defined as persistent symptoms lasting more than four weeks after infection. This includes 11,000 children aged 2-11 and 23,000 children aged 12-16. There are 380,000 people who have suffered the effects of Long COVID for more than a year.
A link between severe respiratory disease requiring hospitalisation and negative cognitive effects is not new. The study’s authors explain: “previous studies in hospitalised patients with respiratory disease not only demonstrate objective and subjective cognitive deficits but suggest these remain for some at 5-year follow-up.” They describe the impact on ventilated patients as “not altogether surprising”.
However, they add, “the scale of deficits in cases who were not put on a ventilator, particularly those who remained at home, was unexpected”.
Addressing the rigour of their results, the scientists explain, “Our analyses provide converging evidence to support the hypothesis that COVID-19 infection is associated with cognitive deficits that persist into the recovery phase.” The observed deficits “could not be explained by differences in age, education or other demographic and socioeconomic variables, remained in those who had no other residual symptoms and was of greater scale than common pre-existing conditions that are associated with virus susceptibility and cognitive problems.”
Placing the findings in the context of the UK government’s policy of herd immunity by mass infection, lead researcher Dr. Adam Hampshire told psychology and neuroscience website PsyPost, “We need to be careful as it looks like the virus could be affecting our cognition. We do not fully understand how, why, or for how long, but we urgently need to find out…
“I think it is fair to say that those of us who have been analysing data such as this are somewhat nervous at the decision to let the pandemic run its course within the UK.”
The study’s authors collectively stress that these results “should act as a clarion call for further research… to plot recovery trajectories and identify the biological basis of cognitive deficits in SARS-COV-2 survivors.”
A recent review of such research by the journal Nature charts the growing biological evidence base for COVID’s neurological symptoms, which it notes “appeared in 80% of the people hospitalized with COVID-19 who were surveyed in one study”. Experiments and studies have demonstrated the virus’ ability to infect astrocyte cells which perform important functions in the brain and pericyte cells which are important to brain blood flow. COVID-19 can also prompt the production of “autoantibodies” which attack the body’s own tissues.
The Nature article refers to a preprint study led by the Welcome Trust, “Brain imaging before and after COVID-19 in UK Biobank”, which found a loss of grey matter in several areas of the brain among those who had recovered from COVID-19. The loss particularly affected the areas concerned with sense of smell and taste.
That the resources have not been made available for scientists to submit these questions to vastly more extensive research at this stage of the pandemic, as the basis for preparing effective treatments, is an abject failure of capitalist society. That reference to these grave health risks is largely suppressed in the media and political discussion, in service to the mantra of “learning to live with the virus”, is an immense social crime. To sustain profits, millions more people are being exposed to a virus whose known effects are frequently devastating and whose full consequences for a person’s health are still being explored.
Over three years after the Conservative government’s announcement that an Infected Blood Inquiry would be held, the families and loved ones of the thousands of people who died are no nearer seeing justice.
Bottles of Factor VIII (credit: Wikimedia Commons)
The inquiry was announced by then Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May in July 2017, with opening hearings held in Westminster in late September 2018. The inquiry began to take evidence from those infected and affected at the end of April 2019. A series of current and former government ministers have been called to give evidence over the last weeks.
The contaminated blood scandal saw the deaths of thousands of people in Britain and internationally after they were given blood infected with diseases in the 1970s and 1980s. Major drug companies made enormous profits through the sale of blood products, including infected blood.
According to a 2015 parliamentary report, around 7,500 people were affected in the UK. Most other sources agree that far more, up to 30,000 people, including many with bleeding disorders were given contaminated blood products. Among others who have suffered are people who received blood transfusions or received blood after childbirth.
The suffering was on a vast scale, with the needless deaths of so many described as a “horrific human tragedy.” Some of those who died did so as the result of multiple organ failure.
Even today, decades later, people continue to die due to infected blood at a rate of one every four days according to estimates.
Haemophiliacs represented the majority of those affected by infected blood products in the 1970s and 80s. Among the deadly diseases they contracted were Hepatitis C and/or HIV. According to the Haemophilia Society nearly 5,000 people were infected with around 3,000 dying.
Among those who died were many from Treloar’s College, a disabled children’s boarding school in Hampshire, England. Dozens of the children died after the school’s on-site health centre gave them infected blood products such as plasma to treat their haemophilia. The inquiry heard in June that of all 89 former haemophiliac students who attended the school in the 1970s, only 16 of them are still alive. All were infected with hepatitis B and C, and 64 contracted HIV.
Haemophiliacs were given Factor 8 products to control their bleeding. The UK began to import Factor 8 products from the US because it was unable to produce enough and because it was cheaper. Unlike in the UK, the US authorities would pay people to give blood. Many drug addicts and those with compromised health would donate for the money. The process of producing Factor 8 involves pooling many donations which vastly increased the risk of it being infected with hepatitis C and then HIV as that infection took off in the US.
Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government opened the door to mass infection and deaths in order to save money. Everyone who lived through the 1980s remembers the governments public information film campaign which included the warning: “AIDS: Don't Die of Ignorance”. In 1987, every household in Britain received a leaflet warning about AIDS, “Anyone can get it, gay or straight, male or female. Already 30,000 people are infected.”
Yet while this was taking place, people were being injected with infected blood containing HIV.
Decades have since passed with no single individual or corporate entity anywhere brought to account for these crimes.
Two previous inquiries were whitewashes. The first inquiry into the contaminated blood scandal was led by Lord Archer of Sandwell, under the Labour government of Gordon Brown. Set up in 2007, it reported in 2009. Archer’s was a non-statutory inquiry with no powers to force government ministers or civil servants who declined invitations to give evidence. Archer concluded that commercial interests had been given a higher priority than patient safety. While criticising the government’s slow response, the inquiry apportioned no blame.
The Scottish National Party-led government announced an inquiry in 2008 that only finally reported in 2015. The Penrose Inquiry, called under the 2005 Inquires Act, did not even take evidence from anyone at Westminster and concluded that the Scottish authorities at the time did their best. Costing over £12 million, it made just one recommendation, that blood tests should be offered to anyone in Scotland who had a blood transfusion before 1991 and who has not already been tested for hepatitis C! It too apportioned no blame.
Those seeking to establish the truth through researching documents from the 1970s and 1980s hit a brick wall. David Watters, general secretary of the Haemophiliac Society from 1981 to 1993, said all files relating to the HIV crisis, including correspondence with the Department of Health, had been destroyed. Even former Labour Health Secretary David Owen (1974-76) was unable to get hold of ministerial papers relating to the contaminated blood event. They had been “cleaned up” to prevent the matter going to court, he was told.
The Infected Blood Inquiry is being led by former High Court judge Sir Brian Langstaff. Its remit is to “examine the circumstances in which men, women and children treated by National Health Services in the United Kingdom were given infected blood and infected blood products, in particular since 1970.”
Previous calls by campaigners for an inquiry with the powers to summon witnesses and access documents were rebuffed by Conservative and Labour governments. However, following the launching of a civil litigation case in 2017 by Jason Evan s, —whose father died as a result of infected blood products and who runs the Factor 8 campaign—May was forced to call for an inquiry with such powers.
After his inquiry testimony last week, Tory Lord Kenneth Clarke was denounced for displaying “contempt” for his reluctance to answer questions during his three session appearance. Clarke was a leading figure in Thatcher’s government (1979-1991) and in that of her successor John Major (1991-1997), in which he served as home secretary and chancellor. He was a health minister from 1982 to 1985 and was health secretary from 1988 to 1990.
While a health minister, Clarke issued a press release issued in September 1983 asserting, “there is no conclusive proof that Aids is transmitted by blood products”. At the inquiry he stood by the statement as being correct at the time. Yet in May 1983, the director of the Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre in England and Wales had notified the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS) of the death from AIDS of a haemophiliac who had been given Factor 8 imported from the US.
A vital document unearthed by Evans was a letter to a constituent, dated May 4, 1983, from Hugh Rossi, a Department of Health and Social Security minister. It read, “It is an extremely worrying situation, particularly as I read in the weekend press that the disease [AIDS] is now being transmitted by blood plasma which has been imported from the United States.”
In his July 27 testimony, Clarke let rip his irritation at the line of questioning by inquiry lead counsel Jenni Richards QC, complaining, “Why do we have to go through such meticulous detail through who said what when, when did he change his mind?”, dismissing the inquisition as “pretty pointless”.
Inquiry chair Langstaff chastised Clarke for his response but it didn’t stop him from minimising his role in the scandal. Clarke declared, “I was not directly responsible for any of this. I only play such a prominent part in evidence because I am… slightly better known than any of the others and the nearest to a B list celebrity you’ve got.”
Victims and their family members had in some cases travelled long distances to hear Clarke give his account and then had to go on a waiting list to get into the inquiry. Sam Stein QC, representing some victims, made an application for permission to address Clarke on his behaviour over the three days of questioning. Langstaff turned down the request.
Commenting after Clarke had finished his evidence, Evans said, 'We've all waited a long time to hear Clarke give evidence but what we will all remember from this week is not answers or the truth, it will be the total disrespect shown to all those infected, affected and the inquiry's own legal team.”
On July 29, Clarke was asked by the inquiry whether the victims should be compensated. He responded, “You can't just pay out compensation in all those cases where there's no fault on the part of the doctors there's no fault on the part of the health authority… that’s still the approach today… I think any other approach would be quite, quite impossible you would destroy the health service.”
Clarke was able to display such contempt safe in the knowledge he would not pay any political price, let alone face prosecution.
The Infected Blood Inquiry was set up under the 2005 Inquiries Act legislated by Tony Blair’s Labour government. The Act serves to protect the guilty as it stipulates, “An inquiry panel is not to rule on, and has no power to determine, any person’s civil or criminal liability.”
In his announcement David Lidington, Cabinet Minister in May’s government, wrung his hands declaring, “It is very important that the inquiry can identify why and how this tragedy occurred and provide answers for all the victims who have suffered so terribly and can identify lessons to be learned so that a tragedy of this scale can never happen again.”
The inquiry is not set to complete until next year or even 2023.
The Infected Blood Inquiry stands alongside other 2005 Act inquiries—including the already widely discredited four-year and ongoing inquiry into the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire. After 32 years, and multiple inquiries, inquests and panels, the 97 people who died and the hundreds injured in the Hillsborough disaster received no justice with all those responsible getting away with it.
All that is required of such inquiries is that they conclude by making a few recommendations and roll out stock phrases about how everyone has learned lessons. All those affected by the infected blood scandal must demand the immediate arrest and prosecution of all those in government and corporate circles who perpetrated and then covered up for terrible crimes.
Against a backdrop of rising social tensions, widening inequality and emerging resistance by the working class to austerity, New Zealand’s Labour Party-Greens government is preparing new “hate speech” laws that will severely limit free speech and muzzle political dissent.
The Justice Ministry last month released a discussion document, “Proposals against incitement and discrimination,” for a six-week public “consultation” period before legislation is finalised and taken to parliament. The document, which invites responses to six vaguely worded proposals, reveals no precise text of the foreshadowed law, although planning is doubtless well advanced.
The Socialist Equality Group (NZ) unequivocally condemns the government’s attack on freedom of speech and warns that, whatever its declared intentions, the law will inevitably be used against the working class, and target left-wing and socialist organisations and individuals as the emerging rebellion against the assault on living standards and basic rights intensifies.
PM Ardern visiting Muslim community at Phillipstown Community Centre, 16 March 2019 (Source: Wikipedia - Kirk Hargreaves)
Labour intends to alter two sections of the Human Rights Act 1993, which currently outlaws communications that are intended “to excite hostility or ill-will against, or bring into contempt or ridicule” any group on grounds of their colour, race, or ethnic or national origins. The proposed changes expand the list of “protected” groups to include those based on gender, religion, sexuality, marital status, age, employment status and political opinion.
The changes will apply to Section 61 of the Act, which contains civil provisions against inciting hostility on the basis of race or ethnicity, and Section 131 which make such activities a criminal offence. Under the reworked Section 61 any person who “encourages others” to treat members of a protected group worse or differently than others would be breaking the law and could trigger a complaint to the Human Rights Commission.
Section 131 will become a new offence within the Crimes Act, where it will have substantially increased penalties. The maximum fine is lifted from $7,000 to $50,000, and the maximum term of imprisonment raised from three months to three years.
The new section will specify that anyone who “intentionally incites, stirs up, maintains or normalises hatred” against a protected group breaks the law if they do so by being “threatening, abusive or insulting, including by inciting violence,” regardless of whether this is done verbally, in writing or online.
The terms used are vague and open to interpretation. What counts as “normalising hatred” or “abusive language” will be determined by the state.
Under the Bill of Rights Act 1990, everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to “seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form.” However, several long-standing legal provisions already restrict what people can say or publish. The Summary Offenses Act 1981 makes it illegal to use racist slurs. The Harmful Digital Communications Act 2015 regulates “extreme” tweets or Facebook messages while film classification rules target “harmful” material and content that “breaches society’s standards.”
The legislation is being promoted by the media and the government on the basis of middle class identity politics: the notion that the fundamental divisions in society are those of race, gender, religion and sexuality, and that a stronger state is required to protect “diverse” groups. A typical op-ed by Donna Miles-Mojab on the Stuff website, for example, declared that the new law would “make our great country a more inclusive, safe and tolerant place for all.” She dismissed concerns about the impact on free speech, saying “I trust [the courts] to get the balance right.”
In fact, the government’s discussion document pays scant attention to the basic democratic right of freedom of speech, and has nothing to say about how it should be protected. In two brief paragraphs, the Justice Ministry baldly asserts that legal limits on free speech are “justified in a free and democratic society.” The law preventing “incitement” will, it declares, prohibit the expression of “attitudes” that are “incompatible with human rights and Aotearoa New Zealand’s democratic values.”
The changes will purportedly clamp down on “intolerance, prejudice, and hatred” and defend “our values of inclusiveness and diversity.” In fact, New Zealand society is sharply riven on class lines, with deepening inequality, child poverty, an uncontrolled housing crisis and crumbling health system. The contention that the new law will “foster greater social cohesion” and “encourage unity and continue to strengthen our society” is as absurd as it is dangerous.
Justice Minister Kris Faafoi has, unsurprisingly, been evasive about how the law might operate. Asked by Newshub reporter Tova O’Brien whether younger people “hating” older “Boomers” for the high cost of housing was “hate speech,” Faafoi replied that “potentially” such statements could trigger prosecutions. Prominent rugby player Israel Folau could also, he admitted, face prosecution if he was in NZ for his repeated anti-gay statements. Faafoi said that ultimately police would decide what prosecutions to take.
The law has been justified as a response to the March 2019 terror attack in Christchurch, in which 51 people were massacred in two mosques by the fascist Brenton Tarrant. Last year’s Royal Commission of Inquiry into the attack recommended stronger penalties for “hate speech” and to include religion as a protected category, in order to foster “social cohesion” and “prevent… the development of harmful radicalising ideologies and downstream violent extremism.”
Wellington vigil in solidarity with Muslim community following fascist terror attack on Christchurch mosques in March 2019 (WSWS Media)
Nobody should believe that the law will be used solely, or even primarily, against the extreme right. After initially denying it, Prime Minister Ardern admitted that “political opinion” could be declared a protected category. Section 21 of the Act currently lists “political opinion” among the prohibited grounds for “discrimination.” On this basis, the new law would make it unlawful to “insult” or “incite” hatred towards a group or party because of their political program or views.
This is being put forward in the context of rising, and completely justified, anger among workers towards the government’s austerity measures, including a three-year public sector pay freeze. During the June 9 strike by 30,000 nurses and healthcare workers, Health Minister Andrew Little was shouted down and booed off the stage while trying to justify the government’s actions to workers outside parliament. It is entirely conceivable that, in the future, such protesters could be accused of “hate speech.”
There are already clear indications that the government is preparing to target left-wing opponents. A report commissioned by the Department of Internal Affairs, published last month by the UK-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue, claimed that in addition to 170 far-right social media accounts, there were 25 “left-wing extremist” “accounts or websites” in New Zealand. It declared that the latter unidentified groups or individuals were “more politicised than any other group” and “most likely to be active on standalone forums and to use action-oriented or aggressive language [emphasis added].”
The report said these groups were “often influenced by communist and anarchist ideologies, reject the principles of social democracy” and “rely on extra-parliamentary struggle against capitalism and refuse to compromise with political actors who advocate maintaining the status quo.” The report must be taken as a serious warning that the government is laying the basis for the criminalisation of “aggressive” anti-capitalist and anti-establishment speech.
The hate speech proposal is only the latest in a series of measures that have exploited the Christchurch attack to boost the powers of the state and intelligence agencies, while advancing demands by governments internationally for censorship of the internet.
Since the attack, the political establishment and media have largely suppressed discussion about the political roots of the atrocity. New Zealand’s chief censor promptly banned possession of Tarrant’s manifesto, which expressed admiration for US President Donald Trump and contained racist, anti-immigrant and anti-socialist exhortations.
The Royal Commission identified “weaknesses” in the current Act and called for the criminal provision to outlaw “extreme speech” and to specifically include electronic communications.
The commission’s report meanwhile whitewashed the police and intelligence agencies in Australia and New Zealand, which overlooked the danger of fascist violence and ignored specific warnings about Tarrant. The inquiry, moreover, covered up the record of Labour and its then-governing coalition partner, the right-wing populist NZ First, which was responsible for stoking Islamophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment.
Ardern has collaborated internationally with right-wing French President Emmanuel Macron, other world leaders and technology company executives to promote the so-called “ Christchurch Call to Action ,” intended to develop mechanisms to censor online content deemed to be inciting terrorism or “violent extremism.” The government has also doubled funding to the Office of the Censor and introduced legislation to expand its power to immediately take down online content, including social media posts.
The “hate speech” law is another step in this ever-expanding process. There is, however, widespread public opposition. A straw poll released by Newshub gained 5,345 responses in 24 hours, with an overwhelming 84 percent against the law and just 12 percent in support. Reasons cited include a lack of transparency, excessive overreach and the inherent right to freedom of speech.
The right-wing parties are seeking to exploit the opposition by falsely posturing as defenders of free speech and democratic rights. ACT Party leader David Seymour, for example, said: “Hate speech is subjective and politicised. Faafoi knows Police will end up facing pressure to prosecute people with unpopular views.” The previous National-ACT government, while overseeing a major increase in social inequality, vastly expanded the powers of the state surveillance agencies to spy on the population and joined the global witch-hunt against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
The Labour-Green government’s widening assault on basic democratic rights is enabled, above all, by the trade unions and pseudo-left groups. None of the unions has uttered a word about the policy. The pseudo-left groups—Socialist Aotearoa, International Socialist Organisation (ISO), and Organise Aotearoa—are equally complicit, all of them assiduous promoters of the very identity politics nostrums being advanced to justify the new law.
New coronavirus infection totals hit a new six-month high in the United States on Friday, with more than 130,000 cases reported, according to the Worldometer site, which compiles a running total worldwide.
The rise in the United States was greater than for the next three countries combined—India, Indonesia and Brazil—although their combined population is six times that of the US, and far more of the American population have been vaccinated.
Such a comparison underscores the criminal role of the American ruling class and both its political parties, the Democrats as much as the Republicans, in sabotaging the only effective public health response to a pandemic of such lethality as COVID-19: a full-scale lockdown, with mass testing and contact tracing, combined with mass vaccination, until the virus is exterminated.
While the Biden administration claims to be fighting the pandemic, it is spreading the illusion that the pandemic is virtually over, and that vaccines by themselves will be sufficient, while all public health measures can be relaxed.
Most dangerously, the administration is demanding that all public schools be reopened, beginning this month, with full in-person instruction. Given that there is no vaccine for children under 12 and that the Delta variant, which now dominates, is highly transmissible, this is a recipe for mass infection and death.
Already, children’s hospitals across the Southern US, the current epicenter of the pandemic, are reportedly filled to capacity. Infections have been reported among children who cannot yet walk and deaths of children barely old enough to go to school.
Only half the US population is fully vaccinated, leaving tens of millions of adults extremely vulnerable to the pandemic, as well as nearly all children. The great danger is that this huge pool of vulnerable people provides ample raw material for the virus to develop new variants, one of which may prove to be more resistant to the vaccines.
All 50 states were classified as having either high or substantial community transmission, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But instead of emergency measures to break the chain of transmission, state and municipal governments, Democrat and Republican alike, are approving mass summertime assemblies of people, largely unmasked and frequently unvaccinated, which will inevitably fuel the contagion.
Fans gather and cheer on day one of the Lollapalooza music festival at Grant Park in Chicago, July 29, 2021 [Credit: AP Photo/Shafkat Anowar File]
At the Lollapalooza festival last week in Chicago, more than 385,000 people were packed for a four-day event of music headliners. While Mayor Lori Lightfoot responded about the financial boon to her city with, “I feel very good about what we’ve done,” Dr. Tina Tan, a professor of medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago, warned that the festival was “a recipe for disaster” expected to ignite another wave of infections throughout the city.
Summerfest, an annual music festival staged in downtown Milwaukee since 1968, will hold packed events in September and will not require masks, proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test for admission. But already, at least 500 people who joined in the mass celebration of the Milwaukee Bucks championship in the National Basketball Association last month have contracted COVID-19, according to health officials.
Milwaukee Health Commissioner Kirsten Johnson said during a press briefing, “We encourage anyone who has attended a large gathering, such as the watch party in the Deer District, get tested for COVID-19 due to the increased risk of transmission.” This would mean well over 100,000 people. COVID cases in Milwaukee have risen 155 percent in one week.
On Friday, Sioux Falls, South Dakota began hosting the 81st iteration of the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, which had spawned a massive superspreader event in the Dakotas and the Northwest last year when more than 450,000 people attended, leading to a chain of events that infected a quarter million people across the country. This year, more than 700,000 are expected to descend on South Dakota, more than the entire adult population of the state.
South Dakota Republican Governor Kristi Noem has been one of the foremost opponents of any public health response to the pandemic and is preparing a campaign for the Republican presidential nomination as an advocate of “freedom,” presumably the freedom to spread disease and death. Her real interest is the freedom to make money, as the Sturgis event is expected to generate more than $800 million in sales for state businesses.
Equally criminal is the conduct of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has ordered local school districts not to require students to wear masks, threatening to cut off their state funding if they do so. This decree was issued even as the Delta variant is running wild throughout the state, and major hospitals have begun suspending elective surgeries extending their COVID units into conference rooms, auditoriums and cafeterias.
Dr. Marc Napp, chief medical officer for Memorial Healthcare System in Hollywood, Florida, told the Associated Press, “We are seeing a surge like we’ve not seen before in terms of the patients coming in. It’s the sheer number coming in at the same time. There are only so many beds, so many doctors, only so many nurses.” The number of hospitalized patients in the US has increased four-fold to nearly 45,000 in the span of a month.
Many of the state’s larger school districts have filed suit against DeSantis seeking a court order to overturn the ban on mask mandates.
In a heart-rending case, parents of disabled children have filed suit against the governor, charging that his ban violates the Americans with Disabilities Act, because it forces the children to return to school unmasked, when this is a huge risk to their health. “Parents are put into an impossible situation of having to choose between the health and life of their child and returning the school,” the lawsuit states.
Many of these children, because of their disability, require hands-on instruction and cannot learn in a virtual setting. Also because of their disability, they are more vulnerable to getting infected and to the worst consequences of COVID-19.
The frigate Bayern (Bavaria), one of Germany’s largest warships, has been on its way to the Indo-Pacific since Monday.
German frigate Bayern
With a total journey of more than 30,000 nautical miles, the operation is one of the most comprehensive by the German navy since the end of the Second World War. The Bayern travelled through the North Sea and English Channel before traversing the northeast Atlantic, passing through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean Sea. From there, it will continue through the Suez Canal and Red Sea, through the Indian Ocean and into the western Pacific, which is scheduled to be reached in the autumn.
The most politically and militarily explosive part of the trip is the return leg. This is when the frigate will pass through the South China Sea and the Straits of Malacca. The latter, owing to its economic and geostrategic significance, is referred to as the “aorta of the Indo-Pacific region.”
The South China Sea is at the heart of the US military buildup against China. Under President Biden, Washington has intensified its provocative operations to secure “freedom of navigation” for shipping in the waters claimed by China in the South China Sea and is preparing to install offensive missiles along the coasts of several densely populated islands in the region, including Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines.
Germany’s intervention into the Indo-Pacific not only heightens the danger of war in the region, it also initiates a new stage in the return of German militarism.
In her speech on the occasion of the Bayern’s departure from the town of Wilhelmshaven, Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer declared explicitly that the purpose of the mission was to enforce the geostrategic and economic interests of German imperialism in the region. “As a major trader and exporter in the region, we have a strong interest in the securing of free trade routes,” she proclaimed.
Although Kramp-Karrenbauer asserted that Germany’s engagement in the Indo-Pacific is “not against something or anyone,” her speech was a direct attack on China. “The message is clear, we are raising the flag for our interests and values,” she said. This is “important,” because “it is a reality for our partners in the Indo-Pacific that the seas are restricted and sea lanes are no longer secure.” Experience shows that “territorial claims are being made based on the law of the strongest.”
The Defence Minister threatened Beijing directly, commenting, “We will cooperate with China where we can and push back where we must. Because we will firmly resist anyone who tries to ignore international law and impose their own new rules of the game on us and our partners.” Although the headwinds are “stiffening, we know how to set our sails against it. We will not allow ourselves to be diverted from our course.”
Kramp-Karrenbauer openly stated what this “course” consists of. With the mission, “the soldiers are implementing practically and visibly what the German government laid out in its Indo-Pacific doctrine,” she said.
The strategy paper published by the Foreign Ministry in September 2020 declared the Indo-Pacific to be the “key to shaping the international order in the 21st century.” It also clearly formulated Germany’s claim to play a leadership role in the region. “The Himalayas and the Straits of Malacca may appear a long way off. But our prosperity and geopolitical influence in the decades to come will depend in particular upon how we cooperate with the states of the Indo-Pacific.” As a “globally active trading nation” Germany cannot “content itself with the role of a spectator.”
Kramp-Karrenbauer’s great power speech culminated with the declaration, “From Wilhelmshaven through the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, to the South China Sea and the Pacific, the IPD [Indo-Pacific Deployment] is an example of how Germany is taking responsibility.” The “more fundamental significance of the mission” goes “beyond the coming seven months.” It stands for “Germany’s active engagement for the rules-based order and the increased strategic significance of the sea.”
Berlin’s mad grand plan to confront the nuclear-armed China in the South China Sea and reassert itself as a naval and world power stands in the militaristic traditions of German imperialism.
On July 27, 1900, Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II held his notorious “Hun Speech” in Bremerhaven. On the occasion of the departure of the German East Asia Corp., which was mobilised to brutally suppress the Boxer Rebellion in China, he declared that the German military had emerged in the course of “thirty years of faithful peaceful labour.”
Germany’s head of state accused China of “overturning the law of nations” and of having “mocked the sacredness of the envoy, the duties of hospitality in a way unheard of in world history…” Wilhelm II then made his notorious threat, “Just as a thousand years ago the Huns under their King Attila made a name for themselves, one that even today makes them seem mighty in history and legend, may the name German be affirmed by you in such a way in China that no Chinese will ever again dare to look cross-eyed at a German.”
The aggression was the prelude to the First World War. The intervention against the Boxer Rebellion, initially launched as a joint operation, intensified the conflicts between the imperialist powers, culminating in August 1914 in what was at the time the greatest mass slaughter in world history. The German Empire had launched a massive rearming programme in the preceding years, including the so-called “flotilla laws” focusing specifically on the navy.
The ruling class is working towards this end once again. The federal government’s current munitions report includes the purchasing of several warships. These include the building of four multi-purpose ships of the 180 class, an option to purchase a further two, the bringing into service of a frigate of the Baden-Württemberg 125 class, five class 130 corvettes, and two class 212 Common Design submarines.
The cost of this rearmament is gigantic. For the purchase of the four multi-purpose ships alone, €5.27 billion has been set aside. This makes it the navy’s largest project since the massive naval armament drive during the Second World War. And this is only the beginning. In March 2019, Kramp-Karrenbauer and German chancellor Angela Merkel spoke out in favour of a plan to build Germany’s own aircraft carrier.
As early as 2014, the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) analysed the objective forces underlying the return of German militarism and warned of its implications in a resolution. Just a few months after former Foreign Minister and current German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier told the Munich Security Conference that Germany is “too large and economically strong to comment on world politics from the sidelines,” we wrote:
“History is returning with a vengeance. Almost 70 years after the crimes of the Nazis and its defeat in World War II, the German ruling class is once again adopting the imperialist great power politics of the Kaiser’s Empire and Hitler… The propaganda of the post-war era—that Germany had learnt from the terrible crimes of the Nazis, had “arrived at the West,” had embraced a peaceful foreign policy, and had developed into a stable democracy—is exposed as lies. German imperialism is once again showing its real colours as it emerged historically, with all of its aggressiveness at home and abroad.”
Seven years later, it is clear how correct this assessment was. Despite its unspeakable crimes in two world wars, the German ruling elite sees no limits in the 21st century on the pursuit of its imperialist interests. After having sacrificed tens of thousands of people on the altar of profit during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is now preparing together with its imperialist allies for major military conflicts.
