The imperialist powers prepare for World War III: US, Japan, Germany plan record military spending

Andre Damon

Over the past week, the United States, Germany, and Japan, three of the principal combatants in the last world war, moved to approve their largest military budgets since World War II, each marking a major escalation in their preparations for military conflict with Russia and China.

On Thursday, the US Senate voted overwhelmingly to approve an $858 billion National Defense Authorization Bill that is $45 billion larger than that requested by the White House, which was in turn larger than the request by the Pentagon.

Two US Air Force B-1B bombers, top center, South Korean Air Force F-35 fighter jets and US Air Force F-16 fighter jets, bottom left, fly over South Korea Peninsula during a joint air drill in South Korea, Saturday, Nov. 19, 2022. [AP Photo/South Korean Defense Ministry via AP]

The budget marks an eight percent increase over last year and a 30 percent increase in military spending over the 2016 Pentagon budget. The massive surge in military spending comes as the typical US household had its real income fall by three percent in the past 12 months.

The overwhelming majority of the American population was not informed that the measure was being debated or voted on. Neither the passage of the record-setting budget through the House of Representatives or Senate this week was reported on the evening cable news.

The bill increases funding for every single military department and weapons program. The US Navy will get $32 billion for new warships, including three Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and two Virginia-class submarines. And the Pentagon is authorized to purchase a further 36 F-35 aircraft, each costing approximately $89 million.

Members of Congress did not even bother hiding the fact that the central purpose of the bill was to prepare for what they called “a future conflict with China” and the ongoing US-led proxy war against Russia.

“This year’s NDAA [National Defense Authorization Act] takes concrete steps towards preparing for a future conflict with China by investing in American hard power, strengthening American posture in the Indo-Pacific, and supporting our allies,” Wisconsin Republican Representative Mike Gallagher said.

The US NDAA would upend the US’s decades-old One China policy in relation to China by providing $10 billion in direct military funding to Taiwan for the first time. The bill would also institute no-bid contracting, typically only used in wartime, allowing defense contractors to charge the US government whatever they want.

The bill transforms Taiwan into a frontline proxy for conflict with China, in a manner similar to how Ukraine is serving as a US proxy for war with Russia. In a press statement, Gallagher praised the fact that the bill “Provides similar drawdown authority to arm Taiwan as we have Ukraine.”

On Friday, just one day later, the Japanese government unveiled a new national defense strategy that would double the country’s military budget and transform its military into an offensive fighting force. For the first time, Japan would procure long-range missiles capable of striking China in an offensive strike.

The strategy openly defies Japan’s constitution, which declares that “land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be sustained.”

The Japanese population is overwhelmingly opposed to military rearmament, stemming from  popular horror both at the crimes committed by Japanese imperialism throughout Asia, and at the devastating toll the war with the United States took on the Japanese population.

The Japanese imperial government oversaw the murder of millions of people through massacres, starvation and forced labor. In China alone, which was invaded by Japan, it is estimated that between 10 and 25 million civilians died in the war. During its war in the Pacific, the United States and its allies killed over one million Japanese civilians, including in the fire-bombing of Tokyo and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

On Wednesday, the budget committee of the German parliament voted to approve the purchase of nuclear-capable F35 aircraft from the United States. While Germany does not have nuclear weapons of its own, as a member of NATO it participates in nuclear weapon sharing with the United States, and US nuclear weapons are stationed in Germany.

The purchase of the F-35 fighters is part of a $100 billion spending package passed through the German parliament earlier this year, which more than doubles previous German military spending.

As in Japan, there is broad popular opposition in Germany to military rearmament as a result of the horrendous crimes of German imperialism in the Second World War. The Nazis murdered six million European Jews in the Holocaust and millions of other European civilians, laying waste to large portions of the continent. German imperialism is also responsible for the murder of as many as 19 million civilians in the Soviet Union against which it conducted a brutal “war of annihilation.”

Both the First and Second World Wars were preceded by years of military spending increases in a massive global arms race. During the Nuremberg tribunal, a key pillar of the case against the leaders of Nazi Germany was that they facilitated a years-long military build-up in preparation for waging aggressive war.

Now, too, both Germany and Japan are making preparations for wars that risk consequences for their populations as devastating as those of the Second World War.

In June, NATO published a strategy document declaring that the alliance, which includes Germany, must prepare “for high-intensity, multi-domain warfighting against nuclear-armed peer-competitors” including Russia and China.

The United States, Germany, Japan and other imperialist powers are preparing for a new imperialist world war. Their targets are Russia and China: two countries that, for many decades, were excluded from direct exploitation by imperialism as a result of the Russian and Chinese revolutions. They remained outside the direct control of imperialism even after the Stalinist restoration of capitalism. But while the primary targets of the imperialist war drive are now Russia and China, the logic of inter-imperialist rivalries will inevitably lead to the reemergence of open and bitter conflicts among the temporary allies of today.

The war in Ukraine, instigated, provoked and prolonged by the United States, has become the catalyst for this new global redivision of the world. That war is only intensifying, with US officials now openly discussing Ukraine’s stated goal of retaking Crimea – a move that threatens nuclear retaliation by Russia.

In an interview this week with the Economist, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky doubled down on his declaration that Ukraine’s aim is to retake Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014. Asked what “price would be too high” for Ukraine to advance “to the 1991 borders,” Zelensky made clear that his aim was to fully retake the peninsula, no matter the cost.

Nationwide crackdown on “Last Generation” climate activists in Germany

Ulrich Rippert

On Tuesday morning, heavily armed police units searched the homes of 11 members of the climate activist group “Last Generation” in a nationwide raid. The public prosecutor’s office in Neuruppin, Brandenburg, had ordered the house searches.

Chief public prosecutor Cyrill Klement announced that the investigations were being conducted by the political department of his office, on “suspicion of forming or supporting a criminal organisation, disrupting public services, trespassing and coercion.”

Carla Hinrichs of the “Uprising of the Last Generation” is carried away during a blockade of the A100 in Berlin in February 2022. [Photo by Stefan Müller / wikimedia / CC BY 2.0]

The background to the investigation is apparently several protest actions by the climate activists against the Brandenburg oil refinery PCK Schwedt in the spring of this year. At that time, members of the group had, among other things, turned off emergency valves of a crude oil pipeline leading from Rostock to Schwedt. The action only temporarily interrupted operations but did not harm anyone. It was a form of civil disobedience, but not a criminal offence.

The police action took place only a few days after the large-scale raid against a comprehensive right-wing terrorist network of the so-called Reichsbürger, which reaches deep into the German armed forces, the state security apparatus, and social elites.

The house raids on climate activists are intended to criminalise peaceful protest and distract from the extent of the fascist threat in Germany. They show that the tightening of internal security laws is not directed against the right, but against oppositional youth and workers. Peaceful protest, civil disobedience and other forms of resistance are to be criminalised and intimidated.

Carla Hinrichs, one of the spokespersons for the climate protest group, confirmed that her flat, among others, was searched. At a spontaneous demonstration in Berlin-Kreuzberg on Tuesday evening, she said it was already “very scary when the police ransack your wardrobe.” It frightened her, but she would not be intimidated by it, she said. “What I cannot accept is that our government is trying to silence us,” Hinrichs told the dpa press agency. “The criminalisation of peaceful protest is an attack on all of us,” she stressed.

In contrast, the parliamentary domestic policy spokesperson of the Greens and former police officer Irene Mihalic said about the raid against the climate activists: “We take the accusations made very seriously, and they must be fully investigated. The responsible public prosecutor’s office and the police must now investigate accordingly. We will certainly also deal with the issue in the [parliamentary] Domestic Affairs Committee at an appropriate time.”

The action against the “Last Generation” group is reminiscent of conditions in the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, when the judiciary ruthlessly prosecuted opponents of war such as Carl von Ossietzky and communists. At the same time, right-wing perpetrators of violence and Nazis—such as the murderers of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and Hitler after the failed putsch of 1923—were spared or received petty sentences.

Paragraph 129 of the German Criminal Code, on which the prosecution of the climate activists is being based, stands in this tradition. From 1871 to 1945, it was directed against any “association hostile to the state.” Under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, it was used to persecute social democrats in the 19th century and, after the First World War, the German Communist Party (KPD). In the 1950s, KPD members who only a few years earlier had been released from the Nazi concentration camps were again confronted with this paragraph. It was used in the 1950s and 1960s to prosecute opponents of rearmament and actual or alleged supporters of the KPD, which was banned in 1956.

Legally, the investigations against the climate activists are baseless. Legal Tribune Online quotes Tübingen constitutional law professor Jochen von Bernstorff saying that even “disruptive forms of protest are generally protected by the fundamental right to freedom of assembly.” Von Bernstorff points out that the debate is not new. He recalls the sit-ins against nuclear reprocessing and final storage sites in the 1980s and protests in front of US barracks against nuclear rearmament in the so-called hot autumn of 1983.

At that time, leading intellectuals such as the writers Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Walter Jens, the theologian Helmut Gollwitzer and Otto Schily (who later became SPD interior minister) took part in sit-ins against the NATO Double-Track Decision, which contained a threat to deploy more medium-range nuclear weapons in Western Europe.

But since then, criminal law has been systematically tightened. As early as 1976, Paragraph 129 was supplemented by Paragraph 129a, which makes the formation, membership, and support of a “terrorist organisation” as well as promoting it a punishable offence. Terrorist attacks by the Red Army Faction (RAF) and the 2nd June Movement served as justification.

Implementing regulations of the Criminal Procedure Code associated with section 129a represent an unprecedented encroachment on the democratic rights of defendants and defence lawyers. They allow pre-trial detention on mere suspicion, restrict visiting and postal traffic of detainees, allow control of postal traffic between defence counsel and clients, and prohibit defence counsel from representing several defendants at the same time.

Solitary confinement can be imposed after a conviction under section 129a, which violates the United Nations Convention on Human Rights and has earned Germany multiple complaints from Amnesty International, the UN Human Rights Committee and the European Parliament. In addition, section 129a offers the possibility of extensive police surveillance and the elimination of data protection regulations.

The more fiercely popular resistance to war, inflation and social devastation develops, the more the powers of a police state are being heightened. In Bavaria at the beginning of November, the police put 12 climate activists in preventive detention because they had glued themselves to the Stachus square in the city centre and obstructed traffic for an hour and a half. This Tuesday, coinciding with the raids, Bavarian judges confirmed the weeks of preventive detention.

The actions against “Last Generation” clearly show the ruthlessness with which those in power will act against any resistance that really threatens their interests. “Last Generation” advocates extremely limited political demands that do not challenge the capitalist profit system, the cause of environmental destruction—calling for a general speed limit of 100 kilometres per hour on motorways, a law against food waste, a €9 ticket covering local and regional travel.

The group does not address itself to working people, who are most affected by the devastating consequences of climate change, but to governments. It seeks to put them under pressure with spectacular protest actions that are meant to attract as much media attention as possible. Its demands explicitly include a discussion with the federal government.

The group was formed a year ago when activists staged a hunger strike in Berlin’s government quarter during the federal election. It demanded talks with the three candidates for chancellor from the Christian Democrats (CDU), Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens and “immediate measures against the climate crisis.”

Since then, “Last Generation” has networked with similar groups in other countries, which, in addition to street blockades, also carry out spectacular attacks on works of art and other precious objects. As the WSWS pointed out in an earlier article, such actions are “misguided and reactionary in several respects.”

Criticism of the methods of “Last Generation,” which spring from a combination of despair at the devastating scale of the climate crisis and misguided politics, does not, however, justify persecution by the state. On the contrary, the group’s democratic right to freedom of expression and protest must be vigorously defended.

Tens of thousands of UK National Health Service nurses strike for first time

Robert Stevens

Tens of thousands of nurses began two days of strikes on Monday. It is the first mass strike by nurses in Britain for over 100 years and the first ever in the National Health Service.

Nurses walked out at 76 hospitals and health centres for 12 hours from 8am to 8pm across the NHS in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The second strike takes place December 20. Nurses and supporters flooded pickets lines in many parts of the country. At the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle, the picket was more than 100 strong.

National Health Service nurses took strike action across the UK on Thursday. They will hold another strike on December 20. The nurses walked out to demand a pay increase of 19 percent. WSWS reporters spoke to some of the nurses on picket lines about the issues in the dispute.

The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) members are demanding a pay increase of almost 20 percent—inflation, based on the current RPI measure (14.2 percent), plus 5 percent. The government awarded one million NHS staff employed under its Agenda for Change contracts a uniform £1,400 backdated from last April—just 4 percent on average to health workers. UK nurses are paid less than in most European Union countries, the US and Australia.

The nurses’ strike is the most politically significant of a wave of strikes across the public and private sectors that began in the summer.

The strike was provoked by the Conservative government, which wants the defeat of nurses to further its plans to destroy much of the NHS and hive the most profitable sectors off to the private sector—depriving millions of workers of life-saving services built up over 70 years. Their plans to crush the NHS workers, numerically the largest section of the working class with massive popular support, includes mobilising hundreds of soldiers to run ambulance services.

Years of systematic underfunding, with £400 billion required just to plug cuts over the last decade, have left the NHS chronically under-resourced and understaffed. The government’s “let it rip” COVID policy, responsible for the deaths of over 212,000 people, resulted in the deaths of over 1,500 health and social care workers.

• Hundreds are still dying of COVID weekly with infections in the week to November 21 rising to over a million once again. This threatens, along with increases in flu and RSV cases, a “tripledemic” this winter amid a marked increase in the number of deaths of children from Strep A bacteria.
• NHS waiting lists have risen from around 5 million at the start of the pandemic to over 7.2 million today.
• According to a study by the Guardian, NHS vacancies in England alone “have risen to a new record high with more than 133,000 full-time equivalent (FTE) posts unfilled.”

The strike went ahead after Conservative government Health Secretary Steve Barclay refused to even discuss the pay claim during talks on Monday with RCN leader Pat Cullen. Cullen pleaded that the strikes did not need to go ahead, after signaling the RCN would accept a below inflation pay deal. Today, the government even rejected calls for the NHS’s pay review body to update its recommendation for nurses given the surging inflation rate since February.

Workers throughout the public and private sectors are already engaged in determined struggle against the government and employers in ongoing national strikes in the rail, postal and university sectors. Hundreds of thousands more are being balloted to strike. Mass popular support for the nurses means that their action has the potential to galvanise and unite the many disparate struggles of workers that are being isolated by a trade union bureaucracy doing everything to end the strike wave.

Striking postal workers from Wolverhampton Mail Centre, West Midlands, protest at this week's national rally in London [Photo: WSWS]

In this fight, workers are up against not just the Tories but every institution of the capitalist state. They confront enemies just as bitter as the Tory government on the opposition Labour benches. This week Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, who has repeatedly denounced strikes and banned his front bench from attending picket lines, attacked the pay claim of the nurses as “unaffordable”, with Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting ranting in the pro-Tory Sunday Telegraph that in office Labour would fight what he described as a “something-for-nothing culture in the NHS”.

The following day Streeting addressed parliament, acknowledging the offer by the RCN and Unison to “call off strikes this week” if the government was “willing to negotiate with them seriously on pay” and asked, “what on earth are they [the government] playing at?”

The union bureaucracy is desperate to ensure that workers are driven into the dead-end of support for Starmer’s “proud to be pro-business” party. This week the Labour-supporting Mirror newspaper hosted a meeting of seven union leaders involved in disputes, including Cullen. It reported, “The summit… called on Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer to be ‘more vocal’ when it came to the strikes.”

This is a transparent fraud. Labour, described by Starmer as “the party of NATO”, agrees with the Tories that Britain’s major role in the war against Russia in Ukraine, and plans to confront China, mean that the ruling elite can no longer tolerate the spending of hundreds of billions of pounds on public health care, education, housing and welfare benefits. Only a few months ago, the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think-tank said of a Tory pledge to spend £150 billion more on the military in the next eight years that it would mark “the end of the peace dividend.”

It complained that “Since the mid-1950s, the UK has been able to fund the growing share of its national income devoted to the NHS and state pensions through cuts in the GDP share spent on defence.” That was no longer possible.

The same agenda of looting public spending is being carried out in every major capitalist country, fueling an escalation of the class struggle.

German states strike mask requirements in public transportation

Tamino Dreisam

In Germany more than 100 people are dying daily from COVID-19, clinics are at capacity and a winter storm of coronavirus is brewing. In spite of this, German state governments are striking down the last protective measures against the unchecked spread of the virus.

Last Monday, federal and state health ministers met to conclude a common approach to mask requirements on public transportation. When those meeting failed to reach a consensus, several state governments unilaterally lifted the mask requirement on mass transit. Others announced their intention to soon follow suit.

A packed BVG bus in Berlin, Germany. [Photo: WSWS]

On Thursday, Saxony-Anhalt lifted the mask requirement, as did Bavaria on Saturday. Bavarian Health Minister Klaus Holetschek (Christian Social Union, CSU) justified this by saying that the mask requirement was “no longer proportionate.”

The state government of Schleswig-Holstein announced that it would let the mask mandate expire at year’s end. The majority of federal states declared that they would extend the mask requirement until the end of the year, but not what would happen after that. There are many indications that other states will soon follow the example of Bavaria, Saxony-Anhalt and Schleswig-Holstein. The state coalition government in Bremen (Social Democrats-SPD, Left Party and Greens) had previously announced that it would end mandatory masking in March.

The state governments of Thuringia and Hesse did declare a desire to retain mask requirements for the time being. Yet they simultaneously stressed it would difficult if it were abolished in the other federal states. Past experience has amply demonstrated that when one state repeals a measure, the others move to follow.

At the federal level, Finance Minister Christian Lindner, chairman of the liberal Free Democrats (FDP), reacted to the Bavarian government's decision by calling for the abolition of masking requirements throughout Germany: “Right decision ... to do away with the mask requirement in public transport. Hope that this decision sets a precedent throughout the country.”

Federal Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach (SPD) made an appeal to retain obligatory masking in local transit, but this was a lie. He himself played a leading role in drafting the current “Infection Protection Act,” which eliminated most mitigating measures and gave the states the power to abolish those remaining.

It is particularly telling that the unions support the abolition of masking requirements. In recent days, both major rail unions—the EVG and the GDL—spoke out in favor of a nationwide abolition of required masking on local and long-distance trains.

EVG chairman Martin Burkert told the major weekly Der Spiegel that wearing masks on trains should be voluntary. The current patchwork of rules is “simply no longer comprehensible,” he said.

GDL leader Claus Weselsky spoke similarly: “It certainly proved its worth during the hot phases of the pandemic and made sense at the time. Now it is starting to take on grotesque form because my colleagues are the only ones who are still obliged by their work to strictly adhere to it ... It’s enough at some point. We, as a railroad, are the only mode of transportation for which masks are still required on long-distance and commuter services.”

The unions’ support for the workplace infection of their members shows their anti-worker character. Throughout the pandemic, their goal has been to force workers back on the job, despite unsafe conditions, to keep profits rolling in. Now they are calling for the elimination of the last workplace protections.

Local and long-distance transport is the only sector where a mask requirement—and thus one of the last remaining protective measures—still applies. At the end of November, Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Hesse and Schleswig-Holstein lifted the isolation requirement for those infected. Rhineland-Palatinate followed suit at the beginning of December.

The lifting of obligatory masking ahead of the winter wave amounts to codifying viral death into law. Contrary to the general claim of politicians and the media, the virus has by no means become harmless, rather it remains extremely deadly.

About 110 people die from the virus every day in Germany. Ten thousand people are hospitalized every week. The number of coronavirus outbreaks is increasing in medical facilities as well as in nursing homes and homes for the elderly.

There were 191 outbreaks in medical facilities last week (compared to 119 the previous week) and 280 in nursing homes and homes for the elderly (compared to 269 the previous week). These coronavirus outbreaks resulted in 26 reported deaths in the medical facilities and 69 in the nursing homes. These numbers are bound to rise as the anticipated winter wave of coronavirus rolls over Germany.

A number of other respiratory diseases are also spreading due to the abolition of measures against coronavirus. As Lothar Wieler, president of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the federal institution responsible disease control and prevention, explained, “One notices at present that ever more people are catching the flu. That’s why I think there won’t be a pure Corona wave in the winter, rather multiple respiratory infections will spread in parallel.”

According to the RKI, the number of respiratory illnesses is “currently above the peak level of severe flu waves from previous years.” The current RKI report estimates the number of acute respiratory illnesses in the population totals around 9.5 million. According to internal evaluations of the health insurance provider DAK, more people had reported sick this November than in the previous three. Compared to November 2021, the number has doubled.

This is reflected in hospitals. According to the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine (Divi), the number of vacant intensive care beds has fallen below 2,000 for the first time since the pandemic began. As of Thursday last week, there were only 1,886 beds free. A year ago at the same time there were 2,250 and two years ago almost 4,000.

And the figures refer only to intensive care beds for adults. At the children’s hospitals, the situation is even more catastrophic. The spokesman for the Professional Association of Pediatric Doctors (BVKJ), Jakob Maske, told the broadcaster Deutschlandfunk: “It is the case at the moment that the health of children and adolescents and also their lives are fairly endangered.”

Seen as a whole, German clinics are on the verge of collapse. “We now have a very normal increase in infectious diseases, as we see every winter, and the systems are breaking down,” said Maske. Critically ill children, for example, are being transferred hundreds of kilometers from Berlin because there are no beds available in the capital.

Mass protests in Bangladesh against brutal cost of living increases

Wimal Perera

Tens of thousands of people protested in Dhaka on December 10 to demand the resignation of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League-led government and to call for new elections over rising inflation, fuel increases and violent police attacks. The next general election is not officially due until the end of 2023. The demonstrations—part of a national series of “restore democracy” protests—were organised by the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).

Thousands of Bangladesh Nationalist Party supporters rally in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Dec. 10, 2022, to demand the Hasina government resign and hold early elections. [AP Photo/Mahmud Hossain Opu]

The BNP’s campaign has nothing to do with restoring democracy, nor is it driven by concerns about the deepening social crisis facing the Bangladeshi masses. The right-wing BNP is attempting to take advantage of the mass discontent against the Hasina administration, which has been in power for three consecutive terms since 2009.

But the BNP is determined to keep popular anger within the country’s parliamentary framework. When it was in power the BNP brutally repressed the opposition parties and the struggles of workers and the poor.

The BNP-led 20-party alliance, which includes the Islamic fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami and several other Islamist groups, has held 10 rallies, starting on October 12 in Chittagong, over the past two months.

Along with calls for the resignation of the Hasina government and for early elections, last Saturday’s rally in Dhaka issued eight other demands. These included the release of BNP chairperson Begum Khaleda Zia who was jailed in 2018 for 17 years on corruption charges. The BNP alliance also announced that it would hold nationwide protests on December 24.

According to media reports, some 32,000 police mobilised in Dhaka to crack down on last weekend’s rally. The Awami League had previously warned the BNP not to hold mass protests in Dhaka on December 24 because it was holding its national council in the city on the same day.

Earlier BNP-led protests were violently attacked by police, aided by ruling party thugs. Seven BNP protesters have been killed by police and thousands injured so far.

Thousands more have been detained, including BNP secretary Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, who has been charged with “provoking party members to launch an attack on police” during a December 7 protest in Nayapaltan, Dhaka. Police raided the BNP’s central office on the same day.

The Hasina regime, which faces an escalating economic crisis, is acutely nervous about the rising mass opposition. Reflecting these concerns, a December 8 editorial in the Daily Star warned, “What could it [the ruling establishment] possibly gain from a heavy-handed confrontation and raid on the central office of the BNP?”

Running parallel with the BNP’s campaign, various Stalinist and “left” organisations have staged anti-government protests. The Left Democratic Alliance—which includes six pro-capitalist parties, including the Stalinist Bangladesh Communist Party (CPB), Socialist Party and Revolutionary Communist League—held a national protest on December 13 over government repression.

Echoing the BNP’s demands, CPB general secretary Ruhin Hossain Prince has declared that the only alternative to the current political crisis is to hold the next general elections under a neutral interim government.

The CPB and its allied trade unions, such as the Garment Workers’ Trade Union Centre, have repeatedly betrayed workers struggles. In 2020, when Bangladeshi apparel factories’ shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Chowdhury agreed with employer demands that workers’ wages be cut by 35 percent.

In late November, Workers Party president Rashed Khan Menon appealed to various political parties to take joint action against the government. The Workers Party, which is another Stalinist formation and a member of Hasina’s ruling alliance, is desperately attempting to hoodwink its supporters by distancing itself from the government’s repressive actions.

All these Stalinist parties have a long record of aligning themselves with both of the country’s main bourgeois parties. In 1983, the CPB joined the Awami League-led 15-party alliance against the military rule of Hussain Muhammad Ershad. In 2006 it supported the BNP and since 2008 it has been part of Hasina’s grand electoral alliance.

The sordid political manoeuvres of the BNP, the Stalinists and other bourgeois parties, reflect their concerns about the deep-seated mass anger of working people over rising inflation, job cuts and government moves to privatise state-owned enterprises.

In the last six months, the prices of more than 50 essential medicines have increased. In early August, the government announced a more than 40 percent increase in fuel prices—the highest rises in Bangladeshi history—which immediately triggered nationwide protests of workers and the poor.

In November, the price of loose flour increased by 4 percent to 60–63 taka per kilogram. This month the average bulk electricity price will be increased by 20 percent, even as consumers suffer from daily power cuts. Bangladesh imports almost 77 percent of its total oil and refined fuels.

Anger is brewing, particularly among the country’s four million Bangladesh garment workers, who have suffered hundreds of thousands job losses, wage cuts and unpaid salary arrears during the pandemic.

On October 10, Janoron Sweater workers in Ashulia demonstrated to demand outstanding wages. On November 2, Olio Apparels workers protested due to four-month’s unpaid wages. On December 13, workers at the New Line Clothing Company in Gazipur took action for between three and five months of unpaid wages.

Farmers have also held demonstrations in Jamalpur, Rangpur and several other districts, to demand an uninterrupted supply of fertilisers.

Since coming to power in 2009, Hasina’s Awami League-led regime has ruthlessly mobilised the police and the notorious Rapid Action Battalion to repress all opposition from workers and the poor.

In January 2019, police shot dead a garment employee and injured scores when thousands of garment workers struck to demand a wage rise. Under bogus claims of fighting drugs in 2018, Bangladeshi police have conducted a systemic campaign against the population killing over 100 people and arresting about 12,000.

Like every other country, the deepening economic crisis in Bangladesh is a direct result of the US-NATO proxy war in Ukraine and the impact of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

After having recorded several years of increased foreign currency reserves, Bangladesh’s current reserves have dropped to $US34.47 billion. At the end of June this year its foreign debt soared to $94.5 billion. In August, inflation surged to a 10-year high of 9.52 percent and continues to rise.

According to the International Monetary Fund’s October global outlook report, Bangladesh’s GDP growth forecast for fiscal year 2022–23 will decline to 6 percent, down from the government’s target of 7.5 percent. The Hasina government is currently attempting to secure a $4.5 billion IMF bailout package, the third country in South Asia behind Pakistan and Sri Lanka to seek help this year.

The World Bank reported in October that “revenues from self-employment [in Bangladesh], as well as median earnings for salaried and wage workers, still have not bounced back to levels commonly reported before the pandemic.”

Even though the BNP is attempting to seize upon the growing mass discontent, this right-wing bourgeois party, which has deep connections to the military, was deeply hated for its repressive rule. In the December 2008 general elections, it was routed with its number of parliamentary seats reduced from 300 to 29.

The BNP and the Awami League are pro-imperialist big business parties. They depend on the political support of the Bangladesh Stalinists, pseudo-left organisations and unions to maintain capitalist rule and impose the burden of the capitalist crisis on the working class and the poor.

Elon Musk’s Twitter mass bans tech and left-wing reporters

Kevin Reed

In an act of blatant retaliation Thursday evening, Twitter suspended the accounts of leading tech journalists who have been reporting on the social media company and its billionaire owner Elon Musk.

Among the purged accounts are those of Ryan Mac of the New York Times, Donie O'Sullivan of CNN, Drew Harwell of the Washington Post, Matt Binder of Mashable, Micah Lee of The Intercept and independent journalists Aaron Rupar, Keith Olbermann and Tony Webster. The account of the open source social media platform Mastodon was also suspended.

No explanation was given by Twitter for the suspensions. NBC News reported that a spokesperson for the New York Times said the suspensions were “questionable and unfortunate” and that neither the journalist nor the Times organization had received any information about the banning of Mac’s account.

“We hope that all of the journalists’ accounts are reinstated, and that Twitter provides a satisfying explanation for this action,” said Charlie Stadtlander, communications director for the Times.

Some tech news sources reported that the shutdowns were connected to the Twitter decision on Wednesday to suspend @ElonJet, the account of 20-year-old Florida college student Jack Sweeney which tracked the whereabouts of Elon Musk’s private jet, based on publicly available flight information.

Explaining the decision to terminate Sweeney’s account, Musk tweeted on Wednesday, “Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info.” Twitter then suspended more than 25 accounts that tracked planes of government agencies, billionaires and others. 

However, after his jet tracking account was closed, Sweeney moved it to Mastodon, a social media competitor of Twitter, and continued to post the jet location information. The journalists who were suspended had shared the Mastodon account information as part of their reporting on Twitter.

In the case of The Intercept’s Lee, for example, the journalist said in a text message that before the suspension of his account he had attempted to tweet out a link to the Mastodon account that tracked Musk’s jet but was unable to and instead tweeted a screenshot.

Washington Post reporter Harwell described a similar experience when he tweeted about Mastodon being kicked off Twitter. His account was terminated immediately after he posted information about how Twitter had shut down the account of its competitor and was violating free speech rights.

As of this writing, Musk had not responded to requests for comment and Twitter did not respond to email inquiries by news media.

The measures taken by Twitter expose as a fraud Musk’s claims that he is a “free speech absolutist” and that his $44 billion private acquisition of the social media company would result in an increase in the free exchange of ideas on the platform. On April 25, for example, Musk tweeted that he hoped “even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means.”

Meanwhile, in October, Musk said any decision to reinstate the account of Donald Trump—or others permanently banned from the platform since the January 6, 2021, assault on the US Capitol—would be made by a content moderation council. Instead, Musk moved to restore Trump’s account several days after the fascistic former president announced his intention to run for the White House in 2024. No content council has ever been convened.

Brazil’s Lula endorses Castillo’s impeachment in Peru on behalf of imperialism

Tomas Castanheira

The fall of Peru’s pseudo-left-backed President Pedro Castillo, impeached and arrested a week ago, is a political event with profound implications for Latin America.

In the one and a half year he has remained in office, the former Peruvian teacher and trade unionist has faced a sustained effort by the far-right opposition to illegally remove him from power.

Brazil’s president-elect, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, participates in the closing event of the work of the Transition Cabinet, on December 13. (Photo: Valter Campanato/Agência Brasil) [Photo: Valter Campanato/Agência Brasil]

Castillo quickly lost any popular support by implementing the same pro-capitalist policies he had promised to fight and unleashing brutal repression against the growing struggles of the working class.

Like all the reactionary measures Castillo took to win the support of the Peruvian ruling class, the military and the imperialist powers, his final act of despair—to call for the dissolution of Congress and the establishment of a state of exception—played into the hands of the extreme right conspiring against his government.

The impeachment and arrest of Castillo, along with the appointment of his vice president, Dina Boluarte, as president of Peru, were enacted at lightning speed by a Congress that has an even lower popular approval rating than the deposed president. However, its decisions were promptly endorsed by the European Union and Washington.

The eagerness of the imperialist powers to back Boluarte is primarily motivated by the fear that the process of transferring power entirely behind the backs of the Peruvian population will spark a social explosion in the country with the potential of spreading throughout the region.

These counterrevolutionary efforts of imperialism had the immediate backing of the newly elected president of Brazil, Luís Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers Party (PT).

On Wednesday evening, December 7, Lula published a letter supporting Castillo’s removal from office and assuring that “everything was carried out within the constitutional framework.” Presenting the episode as a lesson for South America, the Brazilian leader greeted Boluarte and wished her “success in her task of reconciling the country and leading it along the path of development and social peace.”

The position taken by Lula, who is desperate for the support of the imperialist powers and the reactionary ruling class of his own country, differed from those of other Latin American leaders, who either remained silent or openly defended Castillo.

Lula’s attitude towards the Peruvian crisis signals an ostensible break with the diplomatic policies pursued in his previous terms as president of Brazil, between 2003 and 2010. Then, the Brazilian former trade unionist belonged to a group of bourgeois national governments in Latin America, the so-called “Pink Tide,” that sought to present themselves as a viable alternative to the capitalist misery and imperialist oppression that historically dominated the region.

In 2008, alongside figures such as Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Nestor Kirchner of Argentina, and Evo Morales of Bolivia, Lula founded the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). The purported goal of this initiative was to forge an economic, political, and military bloc that would allow for unprecedented development of the oppressed continent.

In a supposed show of independence from US imperialism, the South American countries jointly responded to the police insurrection against Rafael Correa in Ecuador in 2010. In an emergency meeting convened on the same day of the events, UNASUR condemned the coup attempt in Ecuador and approved a resolution to prevent future coup attempts in the continent.

Within a decade, the UNASUR project completely foundered, alongside the crisis of the Pink Tide governments and their pretensions of an alternative Latin American path to socialism.

Although Lula promises in his new government program that he will resume efforts for “South American, Latin American and Caribbean integration” and to strengthen initiatives like UNASUR, his response to the crisis in Peru shows a determination to achieve a unilateral accommodation with the imperialist powers.

Lula’s verdict on the undemocratic process of Castillo’s ouster—“everything was carried out within the constitutional framework”—is even more hypocritical if one considers his response to the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff of the PT in 2016. The toppling of Rousseff and the elevation of her right-wing vice president Michel Temer to the presidency, executed on the basis of trumped-up charges by a Congress determined to undemocratically remove her from power, was characterized by the PT as an unequivocal “coup d’état.”

Castillo faced an even more unscrupulous and blatant conspiracy by the far-right. Determined first to subvert the popular vote, it then worked feverishly in the Congress to sabotage the basic functioning of the government and to remove the president based upon absolutely reactionary charges such as “betrayal of the fatherland.” In this case, however, Lula claims that’s what a constitutional process looks like. The success he wished Boluarte “in reconciling the country” might as well have been directed to Michel Temer!

Lula’s readiness to throw Castillo to the lions is an expression of his own tremendous political weakness in the face of conditions analogous to those that undermined Peru’s pseudo-left government.

The new PT government struggles to assume office as it is confronted by an authoritarian conspiracy by Brazil’s current President Jair Bolsonaro, supported by sections of the military. Like Keiko Fujimori, defeated by Castillo in Peru, the fascistic Bolsonaro and his Liberal Party refuse to acknowledge the election’s results and demand that political power be kept in their hands.

Last Friday, Bolsonaro spoke out for only the third time in public since his defeat was confirmed 40 days ago. He urged his supporters to remain mobilized, stressing that he remains “the supreme chief of the Armed Forces,” which he defined as “the last obstacle to socialism.” His speech was followed, three days later, by violent protests in Brasilia by his fascist supporters against the official certification of Lula’s victory.

German military’s special forces unit has ties to far-right Reichsbürger terrorist network

Peter Schwarz

On December 7, in one of the largest police raids in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany, some 3,000 officers stormed about 150 locations in 11 federal states and arrested 25 people, who continue to be held in pretrial detention. Another 29 people are under investigation. The state prosecutor has accused them of being members or supporters of a terrorist organisation, and the searches are ongoing.

On the day of the raid, the federal prosecutor released a statement saying those arrested belonged to an organisation “that aimed to overturn the existing state order in Germany and replace it with its own form of government.”

Prince Reuss Heinrich XIII was charged by the federal prosecutor as the ringleader. Prince Reuss is a Frankfurt real estate agent and descendant of a Thuringian noble family who ruled the Vogtland region for 700 years, while another leading suspect is the former paratrooper commander Rüdiger von Pescatore, who led the terrorist organisation’s “military arm.”

Among the detainees are also the Berlin judge and former member of parliament of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, as well as former elite soldiers, including the former special forces (KSK) Colonel Maximilian E. The locations searched included the barracks of the KSK in Calw, Baden-Württemberg, which was previously identified as a centre of the right-wing terrorist Hannibal network.

The network, which draws on the milieu of Reichsbürger, QAnon supporters, so-called “lateral thinkers” (Querdenken) and coronavirus deniers, is estimated to number in the tens of thousands. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution (as Germany’s domestic secret service is called) numbers the supporters of the monarchist and anti-democratic Reichsbürger at 23,000 alone, 2,000 more than a year ago. It considers 10 percent to be prepared to use violence.

KSK soldiers at the Bundeswehr Day 2017 at the army airfield Faßberg [Photo by Tim Rademacher / wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4.0]

Last week’s raid was apparently carried out because the Interior Ministry and the chief federal prosecutor’s office feared imminent attacks against state institutions, which would have endangered the lives of high-ranking government officials and politicians.

The investigation thus far into the terrorist network within the Reichsbürger milieu has uncovered a strikingly large number of members of the KSK.

In addition to the above-mentioned Rüdiger von Pescatore, those figures already known by name include Maximilian Eder, who led an armored grenadier battalion in Kosovo in 1999 and later served in the KSK; Peter Wörner, a trained KSK elite soldier who now works as a survival coach; and Andreas Meyer, who is still active in the KSK as a staff sergeant.

Not all of the 54 people under investigation by the public prosecutor’s office are known, so there could well be further KSK members among them.

The strong presence of elite soldiers among the terror suspects makes clear that the plans for a putsch were not simply the fantasies of a few crazy individuals, as is often claimed. It is now also known that during the first raids, the police secured some 90 weapons and a six-figure sum of cash, and discovered a reference to gold bars worth €6 million allegedly stored in a Swiss safe.

In addition, the investigators found lists of possible enemy targets. According to the news magazine Der Spiegel, they discovered at the arrested Marco v. H.’s residence a handwritten list of 10 politicians from Baden-Württemberg, several doctors and a judicial official. In addition to the names, the addresses of the politicians’ electoral district offices and the doctors’ practices were noted.

The high number of suspected military personnel is significant for another reason. It shows how closely the growth of fascist terrorist networks and the right-wing extremist milieu on which they are based is connected with the revival of German militarism and the associated rehabilitation of Nazi ideology and the crimes of the Wehrmacht.

The emergence of the KSK was directly associated with the transformation of the German army (Bundeswehr) from a territorial defence army into an international intervention force. It was founded in the mid-1990s, after the Federal Constitutional Court gave the green light for out-of-area military operations beyond NATO’s borders. It also followed the declaration by Federal President Roman Herzog that the “end of free-riding” had been reached, and Germany had to assume political and military responsibility in the world in correspondence with its increased weight due to reunification.

The KSK is trained for special operations behind enemy lines, including targeted killing. It operates in the strictest secrecy. No data on casualties and losses suffered by the unit is published, even after operations have been completed. It was used during the Yugoslav war in Bosnia and Kosovo, in commando operations in several African countries and especially in the war in Afghanistan.

There, the KSK worked with US Special Forces in the hunt for Taliban members. It is said to have killed more people than the rest of the Bundeswehr combined. The Bundeswehr only responded to inquiries by stating that as a matter of principle it does not count dead enemies. When Colonel Georg Klein ordered an air raid in Kunduz that claimed 142 predominantly civilian lives, the KSK was involved. Klein was later promoted and the role of the KSK was concealed.

The elite unit, which comprises only a little more than 1,000 men, is surrounded by the stench of fascism. Its almost 30-year history is accompanied by right-wing extremist incidents, which have repeatedly been covered up and trivialised.

In 2005, Reinhard Günzel, who had commanded the KSK until 2003, together with Ulrich Wegener, the founder of the federal police special operations unit GSG 9, published a book at a far-right publishing house placing the KSK in the tradition of the Wehrmachtsdivision Brandenburg. The Brandenburg Division operated behind enemy lines in the war of extermination against the Soviet Union.

Günzel was dismissed in 2003 because he expressed his solidarity with anti-Semitic statements by former Christian Democratic Union member of the federal parliament Martin Hohmann. Today, Hohmann is a member of the far-right Alternative for Germany.

In 2008, Daniel K., a KSK captain, threatened Lieutenant Colonel Jürgen Rose, a member of the critical soldiers’ association Darmstädter Signal. He described Rose as an “enemy within” whom one must “smash.”

K. received a referral and was promoted. Rose had to retire prematurely and pay €3,000 in penance because he had warned of right-wing tendencies in the KSK. K. was only removed from service in 2019 after he outed himself on Facebook as a Reichsbürger (citizen of the Reich).

In 2017, KSK soldiers celebrated the retirement of KSK Lieutenant Colonel Pascal D. with far-right rock music and Nazi salutes. They competed in long throws with pig heads, and the winner’s prize was a prostitute.

In 2020, the 45-year-old KSK instructor Philipp Sch. was arrested after the police found explosives, an arsenal of weapons and ammunition and Nazi literature in a raid on his private property.

The Hannibal network shows most clearly the extent of the far-right threat posed by the KSK. After the arrest in April 2017 of the military officer Franco A., who had posed as a refugee, it gradually became known that a non-commissioned officer of the elite unit named André S. had built up an extensive right-wing extremist network under the pseudonym Hannibal, with groups throughout Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

The Hannibal network included commando soldiers, elite police officers, agents for the intelligence agencies, judges and other state officials. They made extremely violent plans. They had access to military and security resources and planned to use them to eliminate political opponents.

Members of the Hannibal group “Nordkreuz” stole tens of thousands of ammunition rounds from authorities and planned to kidnap political opponents with Bundeswehr transporters and murder them at specified locations. They kept enemy lists, and order lists for caustic lime and hundreds of body bags.

Although journalistic investigations revealed numerous details about the far-right conspiracy and the Federal Prosecutor’s Office conducted investigations, André S. was never prosecuted. After eight years of service in the KSK, most recently as an instructor and security officer in the Calw barracks, he was transferred but not released from the Bundeswehr. There has not even been a disciplinary case mounted against him. The Frankfurt Higher Regional Court rejected putting him on trial due to a lack of “sufficient suspicion of terrorism.”

One reason is that André S. worked as an informant for the military intelligence service MAD. This reveals the same pattern as in the National Socialist Underground (NSU) case. Numerous informants and employees of the secret services who promoted far-right forces with state funds were active in the immediate proximity of the far-right NSU trio that murdered 10 people. The files in the case are still under lock and key. Parliamentary committees of inquiry were denied access to them.

The obvious conclusion is that there is a connection between the Hannibal group and the Reichsbürger Network, which the Federal Public Prosecutor is now investigating. However, the investigation will either be stonewalled or limited to alleged “individual perpetrators” as in previous cases—the NSU trial, the attack on Cologne’s Mayor Henriette Reker, the murder of Kassel’s regional President Walter Lübcke and the terrorist attacks in Halle and Hanau.

The far-right structures extend deep into the state apparatus and are closely linked to the return of militarism. In the Baltic States and Ukraine, the Bundeswehr cooperates with armies that worship Nazi collaborators during the Second World War as heroes. Historians such as Jörg Baberowski and Timothy Snyder, who trivialize the crimes of the Nazis, are promoted.

The ruling elite needs the far right to suppress the growing opposition to militarism and its devastating social consequences. Having been forced to move against the Reichsbürger Network, the ruling class will use the exposure of the fascist coup plot as justification to strengthen the state and take action against left-wing opponents.

Only one week after the raid against the Reichsbürger, the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Neuruppin ordered nationwide house searches of “last generation” activists. The Prosecutor’s Office is investigating the environmental group for “the initial suspicion of formation or support of a criminal association, disruption of public enterprises, trespassing and coercion.” The pretext for the legal attack is a protest against the refinery PCK Schwedt, in which members of the group are said to have turned off the emergency valves of the pipeline that carries oil from Rostock to Schwedt.