Photograph Source: Combined Joint Task Force – Public Domain
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is producing secondary crises. Some are well publicised, such as the threat to world food supplies because the war has prevented Ukraine exporting millions of tons of grain from its Black Sea ports. The exodus of Ukrainian refugees crammed onto trains as they sought refuge in other countries was shown on every television screen in the world.
But some of the worst consequences of the war outside Ukraine remain beneath the media radar, notably Turkey’s announcement in the last few weeks that it is planning an offensive to seize Kurdish-controlled enclaves in northern Syria. Going by previous Turkish incursions over the last five years this attack will mean the ethnic cleansing of Kurds left with no choice but to flee to other parts of Syria.
Displacement, destruction, death
“We are facing displacement, destruction, death and the end of our existence in Syria,” said Shivan Ahmad, a 39-year-old Syrian Kurdish teacher of the Kurdish language, as he and his family wait for the Turkish assault. His fears are not exaggerated since Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan claims to be acting against “terrorists”, though in practice this means the step-by-step expulsion of the two million Syrian Kurds from their cities, towns and villages and into the few pockets of territory they still hold.
The Ukraine war has enabled Turkey to speed up this process of eliminating Kurdish majority areas south of the Turkish border because both the United States and Russia are vying for Turkish support. The US wants to prevent Turkey getting closer to Russia, with whom it has been in loose alliance since 2016, and to withdraw its objections to Sweden and Finland joining Nato.
Though the Syrian Kurds provided the ground troops for the successful American-led campaign against Islamic State (IS) in Syria, losing 11,000 fighters in hard-fought battles, Washington is unlikely to save its former allies from the Turkish attack. Russia, which has in the past acted both for and against the Kurds at different times, needs to conciliate Turkey and has reduced its forces on the ground who previously monitored ceasefire arrangements.
A very bloody event
The Turkish-led offensive is likely to be a very bloody event, just as savage as the Russian occupation of parts of Ukraine which has rightly attracted international outrage. “Erdogan wants to create a security belt 30 km south of the Turkish border,” says Prof Fabrice Balanche, an expert on northern Syria at the Washington Institute and Lyon 2 University in an interview with Le Figaro. “In the northeast [of Syria], this means the elimination of the Kurdish population, and not just the YPG [Kurdish] militia, replacing them with Arab populations…Actually, Erdogan wants to build an Arab and Islamist belt in northern Syria, from the Mediterranean to the Tigris.”
Turkey draws on Arab mercenaries from parts of Syria under its control to occupy and ethnically cleanse Kurdish majority districts. “Erdogan’s regime has thus reinstated the body of bashi-bazouks of the Ottoman era, known for their indiscipline and their taste for looting,” says Balanche. These pro-Turkish fighters and their families have in the past been the primary recipients of land and buildings stolen from Kurds.
Turkey has made clear that its first onslaught will fall on Tel Rifaat and Manbij in north west Syria. The latter is a bustling little city of more than 300,000 people west of the Euphrates and east of Aleppo. When I visited it four years ago, it was clearly vulnerable to Turkish-led assault launched from what were at that time somnolent trenches a short distance to the north. But it was under vague but visible American protection and I saw a convoy of American armoured vehicles displaying a large stars-and-stripes flag racing down the road on the outskirts of the city.
But the Americans no longer need the Syrian Kurds since IS was defeated and they do need Turkey because of its deft balancing act between Washington and Moscow. Turkey’s geographical position on the Black Sea gives it great military and political leverage that other powers cannot ignore.
Few places where a Syrian Kurd is truly safe
Ordinary people in places like Manbij can see the calamity heading towards them and are seeking safety wherever they can find it, though there are few places where a Syrian Kurd is truly safe. One resident in Manbij says that “in the last two weeks many families have left for Aleppo, and some whose men are wanted by [President Bashar al-Assad’s] regime” have fled eastwards to the Kurdish cities of Qamishli and Hassakeh, although these are already full of refugees.
The fate of the Syrian Kurds and the destruction by Turkey of their statelet, which grew out of the uprising against Assad in 2011, is one of the great tragedies of our era. None of it happened in secret and there are plenty of pictures available, backed up by testimony given to human rights organisations, giving proof of atrocities just as gross as anything committed by Russians against Ukrainian villagers.
Some may make the ridiculous argument that saying other armies can behave as badly as the Russian army lets the Russians off the hook. On the contrary, pretending that the Russian military has a monopoly of criminal brutality devalues accusations against them and demotes denunciations to partisan propaganda.
This bias is justified by the absurd claim that even mentioning atrocities in Yemen, Kashmir, Palestine or Turkey in the same breath as murders and destruction in Ukraine is to indulge in “what about-ism”. In reality, the use of the latter phrase always exposes the hypocrite and the propagandist who divide the world into hostile black hats and friendly white hats.
But that is what governments and their cheerleaders invariably do in times of conflict. In the original Cold War against the Soviet Union, Apartheid South Africa and General Franco’s fascist Spain were co-opted as supporters of the “free world” and the most grisly pariahs were rehabilitated as suitable allies.
Now the same thing is happening again with the outbreak of the Ukraine war and it is not only Erdogan who is being cultivated as a valued ally. President Biden, who had once described Saudi Arabia as “a pariah” and refused to phone Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is now having his own callsrejected by Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader.
Not so long ago, Biden had released a report written by the US Office of National Intelligence that said, “We assess that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey, to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.” But now the dismemberment of Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018 is forgotten, as Biden plans a visit to the kingdom and tries to persuade bin Salman to pump more oil.
The pariahs of yesterday are the allies of today but the misery of Kurdish refugees driven from their homes forever in the near future will not differ much from that of desperate Ukrainians in flight from Russian shells in the Donbas.
Starting on May 31, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrovembarked on a tour to Gulf Cooperation Council countries, where he visited Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, among others. Lavrov’s main objective of these visits is to strengthen ties between Russia and GCC nations amid a global race for geopolitical dominance.
The Middle East, especially the Gulf region, is vital for the current global economic order and is equally critical for any future reshaping of that order. If Moscow is to succeed in redefining the role of Arab economies vis-à-vis the global economy, it would most likely succeed in ensuring that a multipolar economic world takes form.
The geopolitical reordering of the world cannot simply be achieved through war or challenging the West’s political influence in its various global domains. The economic component is possibly the most significant of the ongoing tug of war between Russia and its western detractors.
Prior to the Russia-Ukraine war, any conversation on the need to challenge or redefine globalization was confined largely to academic circles. The war made that theoretical conversation a tangible, urgent one. The US, European, western support for Kyiv has little to do with Ukraine’s sovereignty and independence and everything to do with the real anxiety that a Russian success will demolish or, at least, seriously damage, the current version of economic globalization as envisaged by the US and its allies.
Following thecollapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the world was no longer a contested space between two military superpowers – NATO vs Warsaw Pact – and two massive economic camps – US vs USSR. We often speak about the Americaninvasion of Panama (1989) andwar in Iraq (1990), to demarcate the uncontested American ascendency in global affairs. What we often omit is that the military and geopolitical component of this war was accompanied by an economic one.
As Panama and Iraq were meant to demonstrate US military dominance, theestablishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1994-5, was meant to illustrate Washington’s economic outlook in this new world order.
Though unprecedented in their scale and ferocity, the anti-WTOprotests in Seattle in 1999 seemed like a desperate attempt at reversing the alarming trend in the world’s economic affairs. Though successful in demonstrating the power of civil society at work, the protests have failed to produce any real, lasting outcomes. In the US/Western-centered definition of globalization, smaller countries had little bargaining power.
While rich countries successfully negotiated many privileges for their own industries, much of the Global South was left with no other option but to play by the West’s rules. The Americans spoke of free trade and open markets while maintaining a protectionist agenda over what they perceived to be key industries. Globalization was branded as a success story for freedom and democracy while, in essence, it was a cheap reproduction of the 18th-century ‘laissez-faire’ France’s economic doctrine.
It is easy to criticize poor countries for failing to challenge US/Western dominance. In fact, they tried, and the result was economic sanctions, regime change and war. The only silver lining is that this predatory form of capitalism encouraged small countries in the Global South toformulate their own economic blocks, so they may negotiate with greater leverage. However, even that was not enough to influence, let alone dismantle, the skewed global paradigm.
Large economies, like China, were allowed to benefit from globalization as long as their massive growth served the interests of the global economy, namely the West. Things began changing, however, when China’s political and geopolitical outreach started to match its economic influence. Former US Republican President Donald Trump dedicated much rhetoric and eventuallydeclared economic war on the so-called ‘China threat’. The current Democratic administration of Joe Biden is hardly different. Though busy countering Russia’s military operations in Ukraine, Washington remainsdedicated to its anti-Chinese rhetoric.
TheMarrakesh Agreement in 1994, the treaty upon which the WTO was established, was reached to replace the geopolitically defunctGeneral Agreement on Tariffs and Trades of 1948. Note how each one of these global economic treaties resulted from their unique global geopolitical orders, the latter following World War II and the former following the collapse of the socialist camp. Though Russia and its allies are now mostly focused on claiming some kind of victory in Ukraine, their ultimate goal is to sow the seed for a different economic balance, with the hope that it will ultimately force a renegotiation of today’s globalization, therefore the West’s economic hegemony.
Russia is clearly invested in a new global economic system, but without isolating itself in the process. On the other hand, the West is torn. It wants to drop on Russia the Iron Curtain of the past, but without hurting its own economies in the process. This equation is simply unsolvable, at least for the next few years.
In a speech at the Eurasian Economic Forum, Russian President Vladimir Putinsaid that trying to isolate Russia is “impossible, utterly unrealistic in the modern world”. His words accentuate Russia’s full awareness of the West’s objectives, and Lavrov’s busy itinerary, especially in the Global South, is Moscow’s own way of animating an alternative global economic system in which Russia is not isolated. The outcome of all of these efforts will not only redefine the world from a geopolitical perspective, but will redefine the very concept of globalization for generations to come.
Finland and Sweden’s application for membership of the NATO military alliance was carried out in close collaboration with the major imperialist powers, who view the integration of the Scandinavian countries as crucial to the opening of a second front in their war to subjugate Russia.
Contrary to the claim that Helsinki and Stockholm went from “neutral to NATO” overnight in response to Russia’s reactionary invasion of Ukraine, their membership in the Western military alliance, like the war itself, was prepared in a behind-the-scenes conspiracy over many years. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine served merely as a pretext to trigger plans for NATO expansion drafted long before February 24, 2022.
US Marines work alongside members of the Swedish mechanized infantry during BALTOPS 22. (Credit: US Marines/Twitter)
The formalities surrounding Helsinki and Stockholm’s NATO membership remain to be finalized, with Turkey refusing to provide the unanimous consent required to start the membership procedure due to concerns over the two countries’ support for Kurdish nationalist groups. However, since Helsinki and Stockholm filed their formal applications in mid-May, US imperialism has moved to create “facts on the ground” to make the Scandinavian countries de facto alliance members. General Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited Stockholm this month with a US battleship to coincide with Sweden’s hosting of the BaltOps 22 military exercise, a NATO provocation against Russia in the Baltic Sea involving 45 maritime units, 75 aircraft, and 7,000 military personnel that began June 5 and runs to June 17. Last week, Finland announced the initiation of plans to construct barriers along its 1,300-kilometre border with Russia, citing the threat of “hybrid warfare” from Russia sending migrants into the country.
The most significant political role in turning Finland and Sweden into frontline states in NATO’s war with Russia has been played by the Social Democrats and pseudo-left parties, who owed much of their substantial support throughout the 20th century to their professed opposition to militarism and war. They have emerged as the leading warmongers and are playing a critical role in suppressing the significant popular scepticism that remains among the population to NATO.
Prime Minister of Finland Sanna Marin talks at the Finnish Parliament in Helsinki, Finland, Monday, May 16, 2022. (AP Photo/Martin Meissner) [AP Photo]
Both the Finnish and Swedish governments are currently led by Social Democratic parties. Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin and Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson are the leaders of their countries’ Social Democrat parties. Marin heads a five-party coalition that includes the Green League and ex-Stalinist Left Alliance, while Andersson governs in a minority administration tolerated in parliament by Sweden’s Greens and ex-Stalinist Left Party.
From opponents of militarism to NATO war hawks
Sweden’s Social Democrats went further than other social democratic parties in Western Europe in granting concessions to the working class during the 1950s and 1960s. These gains, including relatively generous wage increases and extensive social services, were part of a policy supported by Sweden’s ruling elite that sought to regulate the class struggle through a system of national collective bargaining and union/corporate co-management. It was made possible by Sweden’s neutrality during World War II, which left much of its key industrial and manufacturing sectors intact while its European competitors lay in ruins.
More fundamentally, Sweden’s economic development depended upon the temporary stabilisation of world capitalism in the post-war era made possible by the betrayal of the revolutionary working-class struggles that erupted after the war by the Stalinist bureaucracy and the ability of the United States, the preeminent imperialist power, to underwrite the revival of the capitalist system.
The Social Democrats were associated in popular consciousness with free health care and education, generous social welfare support, and free childcare, which created a society—the Folkhemmet (People’s Home)—that stood in stark contrast to the grinding poverty experienced by masses of Swedish workers just two generations earlier at the beginning of the 20th century. The Social Democrats also owed their popularity to a strong stand, at least in public, against military violence and repression, whether employed by American imperialism or the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union.
Minister Olof Palme (second from left) participates in the torchlight procession together with North Vietnam's Moscow Ambassador Nguyen Tho Chan (third left) (Credit: Creative Commons/Scanpix)
In 1968, Education Minister Olof Palme, who would become Swedish Prime Minister one year later, joined a demonstration against the Vietnam war in Stockholm with North Vietnam’s ambassador to Moscow. In a famous speech, Palme declared, “Democracy is an exacting system of government. It demands respect for others. One cannot foist a system of government upon a nation from the outside. The people must have the right to decide over their own destiny. It therefore presupposes the national right of self-determination. Democracy demands justice. One cannot win a people by filling the pockets of those who are already rich while the poor are driven into ever deeper distress. One cannot meet the demand for social justice by violence and military power.”
Washington responded by recalling its ambassador from Stockholm for consultations. Later in 1968, Palme condemned the deployment of Soviet troops to Czechoslovakia by the Stalinist bureaucracy to crush the Prague Spring.
In another speech broadcast on national radio in December 1972, shortly after the Social Democrat government officially recognised North Vietnam, Palme compared the US bombing of Hanoi to the crimes of Hitler’s Nazis. “(T)he bombings are an atrocity,” he declared. “And of this we have many examples in modern history. They are generally connected with a single name: Guernica, Oradour, Babi Yar, Katyn, Lidice, Sharpeville, Treblinka… Now another name is added to the row: Hanoi, Christmas 1972.”
Palme and the Social Democrats’ opposition to US imperialist aggression was not of a principled character. The Social Democrats pursued a policy of military “non-alignment,” which Swedish ruling circles broadly supported. Maintaining Stockholm’s distance from both Cold War blocs enabled Sweden to serve as a key conduit for intelligence gathering operations against the Soviet Union by the imperialist powers, with whom Sweden struck an intelligence sharing agreement as early as 1954. It enabled Swedish businesses and diplomats to establish contacts with developing countries and national liberation movements deemed a “communist” threat by US imperialism and its allies. Sweden thus assumed a disproportionate role on the global stage given the relatively small size of the country, which became known as a “humanitarian superpower.”
The Social Democrats’ public criticisms of American imperialist violence secured them substantial popular support. Palme remained prime minister until 1976, concluding more than four decades of continuous Social Democrat rule. His assassination in murky circumstances in February 1986, by which time he had been prime minister again for over four years, expressed growing social and political tensions tearing Swedish society apart as the post-war era of capitalist stability gave way to mounting crises.
Finnish Social Democracy and Stalinism in the post-war era
Although the domination of social democracy in Finland was less pronounced, the Social Democrats were the largest party throughout most of the post-war era. They generally polled around 25 percent of the vote and played an important role in developing Helsinki’s neutral foreign policy during the Cold War.
Signing of the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance between the Soviet Union and Finland in Moscow on April 6, 1948. Signed by Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov (seated), followed by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin (standing, behind Molotov). To the left of Stalin are the Prime Minister of Finland Mauno Pekkala, to the right of Stalin are Foreign Ministers Carl Enckell and Reinhold Svento, Minister of the Interior Yrjö Leino and MPs Urho Kekkonen, Onni Peltonen and J. O. Söderhjelm. (Credit: Creative Commons/Unknown source/Unknown author)
The Stalinist Communist Party of Finland (SKP) also played a prominent role in official politics. One of the largest Stalinist parties west of the Iron Curtain, the SKP entered the government after the end of World War II to stabilise Finnish capitalism. It was intimately involved in the negotiations of the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance with the Soviet Union in 1948 guaranteeing the continuation of a market economy in Finland and stipulated Helsinki’s neutral status in world affairs. The treaty obligated Helsinki to pay reparations to the Soviet Union for its participation on the side of the Nazis in the war of extermination against the USSR and required Finland to resist any attack by “Germany and its allies,” a formulation widely interpreted to mean the Western powers, on the Soviet Union carried out via Finnish territory. SKP member Mauno Pekkala attended the treaty signing ceremony in Moscow in April 1948 as Finland’s prime minister.
The Finnish People’s Democratic League (SKDL), an electoral alliance dominated by the Stalinists, remained outside the government from 1948 to 1966 polling around 20 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, it participated in several Social Democrat-led governments. In 1990, with Gorbachev’s programme of capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union in full swing, the SKDL transformed itself into the Left Alliance, which now holds two ministerial posts in Marin’s pro-NATO government.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union
The Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union and restoration of capitalism in Russia and throughout Eastern Europe fundamentally changed the political and geostrategic framework on which Finnish and Swedish “neutrality” rested. Almost immediately after the end of the USSR, both Scandinavian countries took steps to subordinate their foreign policies more directly to American and European imperialism. Finland renegotiated its 1948 treaty with Russia in 1992 to allow it more freedom to participate in Western alliances. Three years later, Finland and Sweden joined the European Union.
Social Democrats were prominent in deepening Sweden and Finland’s relationships with the major imperialist powers, beginning with their joining of NATO’s Partnership for Peace (PFP) in 1994. The PFP served as a mechanism to integrate 13 countries from the former Soviet sphere of influence into NATO and strengthen cooperation with Ukraine.
US Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen (left), Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari (2nd from left), and Russian Minister of Defense Marshal Igor Sergeyev (2nd from right), are joined by an interpreter (right) as they meet for further talks at the Presidential Place in Helsinki, Finland, on June 17, 1999. The participants are discussing the details of Russia's participation in the peacekeeping efforts in Kosovo. (Credit: Creative Commons/Helene C. Stikkel)
Maartti Ahtisaari, Finland’s president from 1994 to 2000, emerged as one of the most outspoken Social Democrats in favour of NATO membership. Ahtisaari, the lead European Union negotiator seeking Serbia’s surrender in June 1999 during NATO’s ongoing savage bombardment of Belgrade, commented in 2014, “Finland should have been in all of those international organisations to which Western democracies belong long ago. That includes NATO.”
Swedish forces in Afghanistan (Credit: Creative Commons/ Brindefalk from Karlskrona, Sweden)
Under the Social Democrat-led government of Göran Persson, Sweden formally abandoned its foreign policy neutrality in early 2002. This coincided with the dispatch of Swedish troops to support NATO occupation forces in Kosovo and Afghanistan. Swedish warplanes would subsequently join NATO’s savage bombardment of Libya, which claimed the lives of tens of thousands and plunged the country into a civil war that continues to this day.
The Western-backed Maidan coup of 2014, spearheaded by fascist forces that led to the overthrow of pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in Kiev, was seized on in Scandinavia to legitimise a major military build-up. Citing Russia’s annexation of Crimea, a response to the establishment of a pro-Western regime in Kiev that persecuted Russian-speaking Ukrainians, Sweden initiated a massive increase in defence spending. Finland and Sweden both became “enhanced opportunity partners” through NATO’s Partnership Interoperability Initiative, launched at the 2014 NATO summit in Wales allowing partners to join exercises and adopt NATO standards. Ukraine was another “enhanced opportunity partner.”
UK Challenger 2 tank in action during Exercise Arrow, a Joint Expeditionary Force exercise held in Finland in May 2022 (Credit: Defence Equipment & Support/Twitter)
The Social Democrat-led government of Stefan Löfven, whose parliamentary majority depended on support from the Greens and Left Party, signed a Nordic defence agreement with Finland, and NATO members Denmark, Norway, and Iceland in 2015. In 2017, Helsinki and Stockholm joined the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF), a British-led alliance of Baltic and Nordic NATO members aimed explicitly at confronting Russia.
The US-NATO war with Russia and the rush to join NATO
This history makes clear the absurdity of media reports claiming that Finland and Sweden performed a U-turn in their foreign policy following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Stockholm and Helsinki’s plans to join NATO were long in the works and merely awaited a pretext to be implemented.
Finland and Sweden were intimately involved in the series of NATO provocations that led up to Putin’s invasions. Their militaries participated in NATO-led exercises with Ukraine in the Black Sea and in the Baltic region. In December 2021, the same month that the Biden administration rejected Russia’s appeal for negotiations over security guarantees, Finland finalised a deal with Washington to purchase 64 F-35 fighter jets from Lockheed Martin. The deal, which equates to a country the size of Germany purchasing over 900 fighter jets, was the largest military purchase in Finnish history.
Immediately following Russia’s invasion, Sweden and Finland rapidly swung into all-out war mode. The Social Democrats gained near unanimous support in the Swedish parliament on February 28 to send weaponry and military equipment to Ukraine, the first time Sweden had officially sent weapons to a country at war since the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union in 1939.
A Finnish Maxim M-32 machine gun nest during the Winter War (Credit: Creative Commons/unknown author)
The decision saw the ex-Stalinist Left Party fully embracing the war fever. At a meeting of the party leadership on February 27, the party initially took a decision to oppose supplying weapons to Ukraine. But after five deputies broke ranks in parliament the following day and backed the weapons transfer, a second leadership meeting on March 1 reversed the Left Party’s position from two days earlier opposing the supply of weapons to Ukraine.
Left Party leader Nooshi Dadgostar speaking in Parliament on July 7, 2021 (Creative Commons/ Frankie Fouganthin-Eget arbete)
Left Party leader Nooshi Dadgostar all but declared her support for NATO membership in a nationalist outburst later in March. “My position is that we are more safe in Sweden if we are outside of any military alliance,” she stated. “But it is important that we have broad agreement. That we do this together as one people and one nation. I don’t often agree with Carl Bildt [a former conservative prime minister and long-standing advocate of NATO membership], but on this question I do. There’s the left-wing and there’s the right-wing, but the Swedish military is all Swedes together.”
The Finnish pseudo-left behaved in an equally venal manner. Having claimed in June 2019 during talks on joining the Social Democrat-led government that it would do so on condition that Finland would not join NATO during the government’s term in office, the Left Alliance embraced Finland’s NATO application. Notwithstanding the Left Alliance’s formal opposition to NATO, party leader Li Andersson declared in early May that if the government in which she occupies the position of education minister filed an application to join NATO, she would not see this as a reason to resign her post. “The Left Alliance used to be quite unanimous on this issue, but there are now two distinct camps within the party and many are unsure of their position,” Andersson declared following a meeting of the party leadership on May 7.
Andersson received the backing of a joint meeting of the party council and parliamentary group, which voted by 52 votes to 10 to remain in the government if a NATO membership application was filed. The Left Alliance’s “opposition” to NATO was on paper only. Andersson made this explicit on May 12, declaring her support for a NATO application.
Three days later, an overwhelming vote in favour of NATO membership took place at the Social Democrats’ national council, with 53 out of the 60 members present voting to join the alliance. Speaking to parliament May 17, Prime Minister Marin declared, “Our security environment has fundamentally changed.”
The transformation of Finland and Sweden into frontline garrison states in the US-NATO war with Russia by the very political forces who claimed for decades that it was possible to remain outside of great power rivalries and reform capitalism into a more peaceful and “fair” society is a political lesson for working people internationally. The deepening crisis of world capitalism, expressed in the danger of world war, the growth of social inequality, and a deadly pandemic that has killed millions, leaves no part of the world untouched. Political fantasies based on national parochialism and piecemeal reforms, which “progressives” around the world justified with reference to the “Swedish model,” have been proven bankrupt.
The “Bundeswehr Special Fund” of more than 100 billion euros has now been agreed to by both chambers of parliament, providing a massive boost to Germany’s rearmament drive.
With this decision, the ruling class has set into motion the biggest rearmaments spiral since the fall of the Nazi regime. The political, historical and social implications are enormous. In the words of Chancellor Olaf Scholz (Social Democratic Party, SPD), Germany—already ranked fifth among countries with the highest military budgets—will in future have “by far the largest conventional army in Europe.”
After hospitals, schools and nurseries were brought to the brink of collapse and billions were cut from education and social services amid the still-raging COVID-19 pandemic, an additional 100 billion euros will be made available overnight for the armed forces. The war budget is thus expected to rise annually to more than 2 percent of Gross Domestic Product.
The scale of the rearmament is gigantic. Reaching the so-called 2 percent target means that defence spending will rise from just under 50 billion euros to more than 70 billion this year alone. This represents an increase of more than 40 percent. To put the “special fund” in perspective, 100 billion euros is five times this year’s total federal budget for education and research.
The sum would be enough to support every family in Germany with €5,000 per child and at the same time pay out €360,000 in compensation for pain and suffering to the relatives of all those who officially died from coronavirus. Alternatively, the amount could be used over five years to double the number of nurses and pay their most senior colleagues a bonus of €1,400. A single billion would be enough to install air filters against the coronavirus in all classrooms.
But instead, the money is going to the military. The Defence Ministry’s plans—in addition to cyber capabilities and space systems—call for €41 billion for the air force, €19 billion for the navy and €16 billion for the army, to be spent on nuclear bombers, warships and tanks. The war materiel is intended to enable the military to once again conduct “very large” and “highly intensive” military operations, according to the “Bundeswehr Concept“ issued back in 2018.
In domestic terms, too, the rearmament offensive is a declaration of war on the population. By enshrining the special fund in the constitution and maintaining the so-called “debt brake,” the ruling class is creating conditions to squeeze every cent of the war budget out of the working class. At the same time, any criticism of rearmament is to be made illegal.
In a resolution in 2014, when then President Joachim Gauck and government representatives announced Germany’s return to an aggressive foreign and great power policy at the Munich Security Conference, the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei warned of the far-reaching consequences of this development:
The propaganda of the postwar 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 has emerged historically, with all of its aggressiveness at home and abroad.
The rearmament of the Bundeswehr that has now been decided is without precedent in the history of postwar Germany. It has unmistakable parallels to Hitler’s “rearmament” of the 1930s, when the ruling class installed a fascist dictatorship and rearmed the country within a very short time, preparing it for World War II. The strategy documents of the military and the war speeches of leading politicians leave no doubt that the government is once again pursuing the old “great power” goals.
Then, as now, German imperialism aspired to bring Europe under its domination and to emerge as a leading military world power. “Germany’s destiny: to lead Europe in order to lead the world” was the title of a post on an official Foreign Ministry website back in 2014. Now these plans are being put into action, with all their consequences.
Media warmongers and foreign policy strategists are already calling for German and European nuclear weapons to “contain” Russia and to be able to fight out future “conflicts of interest with the leading Western power,” the United States. A commentary in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung warns that “the hundred billion euros should only be a start” in meeting Germany’s “security responsibility in Europe.”
German troops in Lithuania (AP Photo/Mindaugas Kulbis)
This rearmament is aimed directly against Russia. Eighty-one years after the German war of extermination against the Soviet Union, which claimed the lives of almost 30 million people, German combat troops are again marching into Eastern Europe. At the same time, Germany is arming the Ukrainian army to the teeth, which is riddled with far-right forces, and pursuing its declared goal of defeating Russia.
Contrary to official propaganda, the so-called “turn of the times” is not a reaction to the Russian attack on Ukraine. The ruling class is using Russia’s reactionary invasion, which was systematically provoked by NATO, to put its own rearmament and war plans into action. As in the First and Second World Wars, this is not about “human rights” and “democracy” but about the conquest of spheres of influence and resources. At the same time, war policy serves to deflect explosive class tensions outward.
Unlike the bourgeois politicians who revel in and profit from militarism, war and dictatorship are deeply hated among workers in Germany and Europe. Official policy under these conditions takes the form of outright conspiracy.
The return of German militarism, which enormously fuels the danger of a third world war, is also being pushed forward above all by the nominally left-wing parties in the Bundestag. The SPD, with Scholz, leads the federal government and thus also the offensive against Russia. The Greens, who in 1998-99 together with the SPD already organized the war of aggression against Yugoslavia, in violation of international law, are among the most aggressive agitators and warmongers.
The Left Party and the trade unions also have both feet in the camp of German imperialism. In the Bundestag, the Left Party voted against the special fund because its votes did not matter since all the other parties supported the fund. Politically, however, it agrees with the war course. Leading party representatives support sanctions against Russia and arms deliveries to Ukraine and even demand the reintroduction of compulsory military service.
In a recent statement, the Verdi trade union—which has imposed pay freezes and real-wage cuts on nurses, educators and teachers—called for “sustainable improvement of the Bundeswehr” and an “improvement in the cybersecurity” of the armed forces. The German Federation of Trade Unions (DGB) also recently demanded a “substantial contribution” from Germany to the military strength of NATO and the EU.
A death sentence against Algerian whistle blower and activist Mohamed Benhalima was announced by an Algerian military court, only two months after Spain’s PSOE (Socialist Party)-Podemos government denied his asylum application and deported him. Benhalima was made aware that the death penalty had been handed down against him on May 8, although his lawyers report that the sentence was imposed in absentia, while Benhalima was still in Spain.
Benhalima, a former officer, fled Algeria for Spain in 2019, after learning that his name was on a list compiled by the Algerian authorities of servicemen wanted for their involvement with the Hirak movement. He had taken part in mass anti-government protests triggered in February 2019 by former President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s announcement of his fifth presidential candidacy. While the demonstrations forced Bouteflika out of office in April of that year, the military regime he headed remains in power.
Algerian whistleblower Mohamed Benhalima smiling Algerian whistleblower Mohamed Benhalima at the foreign internment camp in Valencia, Spain (Adrián Vives)
In Spain, Benhalima built a reputation on social media as an opponent of the Algerian military regime. He amassed more than 345,000 followers on his Twitter, Facebook and YouTube pages, where he posted videos exposing and denouncing corruption in the Algerian armed forces.
Benhalima’s deportation is a damning indictment of Spain’s nominally “progressive” PSOE-Podemos government. It is a blatant violation of international law, which forbids deporting individuals to a country where they risk suffering torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. The PSOE and Podemos are sending an unmistakable signal that they will act brutally to avert any challenge from below to the existing social order.
According to Amnesty International, Benhalima entered Spain on September 1, 2019 on a Schengen Zone visa, applying for political asylum in February 2020. He was given a temporary residence permit, which he later renewed, making it valid until November 2021. However, in August 2021, he received summons to a police station in Bilbao, Spain. Fearing deportation back to Algeria, Benhalima fled to France, but was later arrested and sent back to Spain.
On March 14, 2022, Benhalima was detained by Spanish authorities. They filed an expulsion order against him for allegedly infringing Article 54.1.a of Spain’s immigration law, claiming that he participated in “activities contrary to public security or which may be harmful for Spanish relationships with foreign states.”
This was based on flimsy allegations that Benhalima is tied to the Algerian Islamist opposition group Rachad, which Algiers listed as a terrorist organisation last year. UN Special Procedures human rights experts stated in December 2021 that the definition of “terrorism” in the Algerian Penal Code was too imprecise and undermined human rights.
An Algerian court had already sentenced Benhalima in absentia in January and March 2021 to 20 years in prison, for charges of alleged “participation in a terrorist group” and “publishing fake news undermining national unity,” among other accusations.
Four days after Benhalima’s arrest in Spain, he applied for asylum a second time, while detained in an internment camp in Valencia. At 17:35 on March 24, he was then told his second application had been unsuccessful; just three minutes later he was notified of his expulsion. Two hours after that, Spanish authorities forced Benhalima aboard a plane back to Algeria, where he was detained on arrival.
Benhalima appeared in a clip on Ennahar TV on March 27, in which he appears to “confess” to having conspired against the state and says he had not been ill-treated in custody. Just two days before his deportation from Spain, Benhalima had warned that he would likely be forced to make a false confession if detained by the Algerian regime, most likely be because he had been “subjected to severe torture at the hands of intelligence services.”
On March 21, 2022, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had written to the Spanish government calling for Benhalima’s case not to be expedited, arguing that the risk of torture was credible, and that the Algerian regime’s criminalisation of political opposition is well known.
In March, while detained in Valencia, Benhalima had told Spanish media outlet Levante EMV: “If I return to Algeria, they’re going to violate my human rights. Prison and torture are waiting for me. First, I will have a trial for having revealed corruption in my country … Then I fear that they will torture me in a military prison, that I’ll suffer sexual violence, or even that they’ll kill me and then say that I caught coronavirus.”
Benhalima is the second Algerian whistle blower to be deported from Spain and then imprisoned in Algeria in under a year. Last August, former border patrol officer Mohamed Abdellah—who sought asylum in Spain after exposing alleged corruption, bribery, fraud, and cross-border arms and petrol smuggling by high-ranking officers of the Algerian Gendarmerie—was forcibly returned to Algeria by the PSOE-Podemos government.
On his arrival in Algeria, Abdellah was handed to the intelligence service and taken to the Antar barracks in Algiers, notorious as an interrogation and torture site. As of January this year, Abdellah was being held in isolation at the Blida military prison, awaiting trial for undermining state security and the reputation of the army. Since then, there has been little information on his whereabouts.
The PSOE-Podemos government’s decision to deport Benhalima has been widely acknowledged in the bourgeois media as a goodwill gesture to the Algerian dictatorship. Algerian–Spanish relations have been tense since PSOE Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez recognised Morocco’s claim to the Western Sahara in mid-March.
The Western Sahara is a sparsely inhabited former Spanish colonial possession on Morocco’s south-western border, with considerable mineral and phosphate deposits, which Rabat has long sought to bring under its administration as an “autonomous region.”
After Spain ended its long-standing stance of neutrality in this dispute, Algeria, which has backed the pro–Sahrawi independence Polisario Front, withdrew its ambassador from Madrid. Just five days later, the PSOE and Podemos expelled Benhalima from Spain, in an apparent attempt to curry favour with Algeria, which provided more than 40 percent of Spain’s natural gas imports in 2021. This comes as the European Union and NATO campaign for an energy embargo against Russia, the EU’s major oil and gas supplier, amid the war in Ukraine.
The treatment of Benhalima and Abdellah gives the lie to claims by the PSOE-Podemos government, as part of the NATO alliance, to be defending “democracy” and “human rights” in Ukraine against Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The Spanish government has no problem violating the rights of asylum seekers and tacitly condoning the arbitrary detention, torture and murder of political prisoners.
The PSOE and Podemos already have the blood of thousands of refugees on their hands. By blocking off “legal” routes to enter Spain, they forced desperate migrants to make perilous boat journeys across the Mediterranean to mainland Spain or the Atlantic to the Canary Islands, leading to thousands of deaths at sea. Taking its cue from the far-right Vox party, it built prison camps on the Canary Islands, separated children from their parents, and summarily deported thousands of asylum seekers without even examining their cases.
By deporting Benhalima, the PSOE and Podemos aim to terrorize workers and youth in Algeria opposed to the regime. They aim not only to block renewed eruptions of class struggle threatening the existing regime in Algeria, which is complicit in their anti-refugee policies. After Podemos and the PSOE have deployed tens of thousands of heavily armed police against strikes by metal workers and truckers over the last year in Spain itself, it is apparent that the target of this escalation of police-state terror is the entire working class.
On May 28, the Stade de France in the northern suburbs of Paris hosted the UEFA Champions League final between Liverpool and Real Madrid. Fans endured what a Liverpool supporters’ magazine called “five hours of hell,” as they were assaulted by police before the match.
Before the game. Liverpool fans, including children, pensioners, and disabled individuals were tear gassed and beaten by police outside the stadium. One video viewed over 9 million times shows a French cop pepper-spraying fans standing peacefully behind a fence.
Another video showing fans desperately climbing fences and jumping over barriers to avoid suffocation has received over 4.5 million views.
The kick-off of the final, watched on television by an estimated 400 million people internationally, was delayed by 35 minutes. Even with the delay, thousands of Liverpool fans with tickets did not enter the stadium until half-time. Fans were also assaulted after the game, as they left the Stade de France.
The police rampage against football fans has exposed before a world audience the brutality and thuggery of the French police and of President Emmanuel Macron’s government. The government has responded by smearing Liverpool fans and defending the police violence.
The extent of the cover-up became clear on June 9, when Erwan Le Prévost, director of the French Football Federation, told BFM-TV that the CCTV footage of security cameras around the Stade de France had been deleted and was likely irretrievable. He said tapes were destroyed automatically after seven days as they had not been requested for review by police or any other authorities. However, Théo Leclerc, a civil liberties lawyer, told L’Express, “The police did not need the public prosecutor to requisition the images.”
Police manifestly did not request the security camera footage because it would have shown what other camera footage showed: a blatant police assault on peaceful fans. It also exposes all the lies Macron government officials have used to excuse and justify the police rampage.
On Monday, May 30, French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin denounced a “massive, industrial and organized fraud of counterfeit tickets,” claiming that “30,000 to 40,000 fans ended up at the Stade de France either without a ticket or with falsified tickets,” before going on to imply this was only an issue with English fans.
Darmanin went on to thank “all the police forces who, through their calm, avoided a tragedy.” On June 1, Darmanin told the French Senate that responsibility for the violence rested with the city of Liverpool: “It is clear—all the security services notes say so—that the people of Liverpool pose public order problems.”
Darmanin’s comments recalled those by British officials in the aftermath of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, blaming “tanked-up mobs” for the death of 97 Liverpool fans. In fact, they were crushed to death due to egregious police error in handling the movement of the crowd at Sheffield’s Hillsborough Stadium.
In the days after the May 28 final, there were reports of errors with the stadium’s digitized ticketing system, and the estimated number of fake tickets was dropped to 2,589. However, on June 10, the French Sports Minister admitted that 2,700 real tickets were never activated. Beyond Darmanin’s claim, there is no evidence suggesting there was any effort by Liverpool fans to gain access to the final with fraudulent tickets.
Liverpool left-back Andrew Robertson expressed disbelief at the claim of ticket fraud by Liverpool supporters, telling Sky Sports: “Obviously my tickets were [supplied] through the club, and somehow somebody told one of our mates he’s got a fake ticket, which I can assure you it definitely wasn’t.” Robertson added that a number of Liverpool players’ relatives were caught up in the violence: “Pretty much all of our families were affected.”
There is no clear evidence that Liverpool fans were even acting in a disorderly, let alone criminal, manner as they approached the stadium. Ex-Ireland manager, Brian Kerr, who attended the final, told extra.ie: “The Liverpool fans were bang-on in their behavior,” whereas French police “looked like they were up for a fight.”
French police appear to have overwhelmingly targeted Liverpool fans, including players’ families and friends. Moreover, though Liverpool and Madrid fans had ticket problems in roughly equal numbers, Liverpool supporters disproportionately suffered from them. According to Darmanin, only 50 percent of Liverpool fans were seated at the Stade de France by 9 p.m., the scheduled kick-off time, compared to 97 percent of Madrid fans. It raises the question of whether French authorities tried to deliberately interfere with the atmosphere and outcome of the match.
Whatever exactly occurred, the crackdown at the Stade de France is another reminder of the class violence meted out by Macron’s police.
Ex-Liverpool player and pundit Jamie Carragher summed up the feelings of many Liverpool fans, tweeting: “Liars @GDarmanin @AOC1978 [the account of French Sports Minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéra] @UEFA video evidence proves how corrupt you all are. Margaret Thatcher & Norman Bettison all over again.’’
A Liverpool fan named Peter, who attended the final, told sofoot.com: “As a Liverpool fan, Hillsborough is always on my mind. We were afraid it would happen again. I lived through this tragedy when I was in my twenties. … This Saturday at the Stade de France, I saw the same police incompetence as at Hillsborough. Miraculously, it didn't have the same consequences.”
Peter added, “You know, I have been to France many times. But now I don't want to go back. I don’t feel safe there anymore, and especially not in Paris.”
In previous decades, heads could have rolled inside the police forces as part of the French capitalist government’s reaction to such an internationally embarrassing event. This did not reflect democratic sentiments, but the cold self-interest of the capitalist class. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, 9.7 percent of France’s GDP came from tourism. In the next two years, moreover, France is to host both the 2023 Rugby World Cup and the 2024 Olympic games.
Today, however, Macron depends almost entirely on inciting fascistic forces in the police to suppress working class opposition. In his second term, Macron, the “president of the rich,” is preparing new, deep cuts to pensions and unemployment insurance, university tuition hikes, and the impoverishment of the working class by global inflation. For this reason, French officials have chosen to double down in support of police repression at the Stade de France.
On June 10, Paris police chief Didier Lallement told a commission investigating the event that the management of the final was “a failure because the image of the country was undermined.” He claimed to be “sorry” for the use of tear gas. Nonetheless, Lallement, who is infamous in France for telling a protesting “yellow vest” worker she was “on the other side,” then brazenly defended the assault at the Stade de France, claiming there was “no other means” of moving people back than firing barrages of tear gas at them.
