Germany’s Reichsbürger terrorist network and the fight against fascism

Peter Schwarz

The resurgence of a fascist movement in Germany is a matter of grave concern. There is no other country in which fascism has shown its barbaric face with such sadistic brutality. During the 12 years of the Nazi dictatorship, from 1933 to 1945, Hitler smashed the workers' movement, established a regime of terror, and unleashed a war of conquest and extermination that claimed 27 million victims in the Soviet Union alone and murdered six million Jews. By the time of Hitler’s demise, Germany and half of Europe lay in ruins.

Neo-Nazi march with Reichsbürger symbol in Munich (2005) [Photo by Rufus46 / wikimedia / CC BY-SA 3.0]

The more than 50 people from the Reichsbürger (Citizens of the Reich) movement against whom 3,000 police officers carried out the largest raid in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany are not harmless “crackpots,” as some now claim. Following the police sweep on December 7, the Federal Public Prosecutor accused them of establishing a terrorist group to seize power by military force and kill political opponents.

They are said to have planned to invade the federal parliament (Bundestag), following the example of the attempted coup in Washington D.C. led by former American President Donald Trump on January 6, 2021. Their aim was allegedly to imprison members of parliament and the government, provoke unrest throughout Germany and overthrow the government.

The terrorist network extends deeply into the state apparatus and elite social circles. The detainees include a member of the high nobility, a lawyer, a doctor, a pilot and a judge and former Bundestag delegate for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). There are also several police officers and a significant number of former and active members of the military, including several officers of the Special Forces Command (KSK), an elite army unit that is trained to kill and take hostages.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. According to members of the Bundestag’s Legal Affairs Committee who were informed of the investigations, hundreds of people signed the group’s “confidentiality declaration.” Preparations were made for the establishment of 280 “homeland security companies” tasked with “arresting and executing” people in the event of a coup.

The network is intertwined with the AfD, which sits in the Bundestag and the state parliaments. It is based on COVID deniers, QAnon supporters, “lateral thinkers”—a title adopted by opponents of COVID public health measures—and Reichsbürger. The latter group alone is estimated to consist of 23,000 people, one in 10 of whom is prepared to commit violence. Reichsbürger deny the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany and strive for the restoration of the German Empire within Germany’s 1937 borders, i.e., including large parts of Poland and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.

The right-wing terrorist networks have not fallen from the sky. The Socialist Equality Party (Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei—SGP) has been warning about their development for many years. In 2018, Mehring Verlag published the book Why are they back? by Christoph Vandreier, the current chairman of the SGP. The book demonstrates in detail “how in the last five years the return of German militarism and the construction of a police state have been promoted and the ideological foundation for a fascist movement has been laid.”

It is impossible to understand the growth of the extreme right “without examining the role of the government, the state apparatus, the parties, the media and the ideologues in the universities that pave the way for it,” the preface states.

Right-wing extremist groups and parties have been systematically promoted, even as the danger they pose has been downplayed. The AfD, the first fascist party in the German Bundestag since the end of the Nazi regime, owes its rise largely to the Verfassungsschutz, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, which protected and advised it, and to the established parties, which paved the way for it to assume positions in parliament and adopted its anti-refugee and militaristic program.

The revival of German militarism was accompanied by the trivialization of the crimes of the Nazis. Historical lies justifying Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union were vehemently rejected in the Historians’ Dispute of the 1980s, but today they dominate academic and public discourse. In Ukraine and the Baltic States, the federal government and the German army cooperate with regimes that erect monuments to Nazi collaborators.

Neo-Nazis, such as the three-member National Socialist Underground terrorist group and Stefan Ernst, the murderer of conservative politician Walter Lübcke, were able to kill without interference, even though they were under the surveillance of the intelligence agencies. Right-wing terrorist organisations such as the wide-ranging Hannibal network remained largely untouched, even though they drew up death lists and hoarded large quantities of weapons and ammunition. While there were occasional arrests and trials, the number of accused was always kept low and the “single perpetrator” myth was maintained.

The same applies to fascist networks within the police. In both Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia, dozens of police officers participated in neo-Nazi chat groups. Hardly anyone was prosecuted. Only this week it emerged that 70 police officers are being investigated in Baden-Württemberg for exchanging swastikas and Hitler pictures in chat groups.

It is against this background that the Reichsbürger terrorist network developed. There can be little doubt that what is thus far publicly known about its members barely scratches the surface, and the Federal Public Prosecutor will do everything possible to keep it that way.

The growth of fascist forces with the support of the ruling elites is not limited to Germany. In the United States, the Republicans, one of the two major bourgeois parties, are increasingly dominated by fascist figures. A coup attempt by Donald Trump only narrowly failed in January 2021. Italy is governed by a prime minister who stands in the political tradition of the fascist dictator Mussolini. In Sweden, the former model country of social democracy, the government relies on a neo-Nazi party to remain in power.

The shift to the right by the ruling elites is an expression of the decay of bourgeois democracy. This has deep objective causes. When the class struggle in Europe intensified in 1929 and authoritarian parties seized power, Leon Trotsky wrote:

The excessively high tension of the international struggle and the class struggle results in the short circuit of the dictatorship, blowing out the fuses of democracy one after the other… What is called the crisis of parliamentarism is the political expression of the crisis in the entire system of bourgeois society.

This is once again true today. Decades of social spending cuts, in which an ever greater portion of national economic output was appropriated for the enrichment of a small minority and for brutal wars, have eroded parliamentarism and exacerbated the class struggle. The needs of the broad masses for decent incomes, secure jobs, good health care, affordable rents and peace no longer find even a distorted expression within the parliamentary framework.

Germany’s Social Democrats and the Left Party have become experts at attacking social services and imposing low wages, and the Greens have become the leading war party. For a long time they relied on the trade unions to suppress the class struggle. But the greater the social opposition from below, the more openly the pro-capitalist parties move to the right and rely on state violence and right-wing terror to suppress it.

The fact that from time to time they are forced to arrest overzealous fascists does not change this. Nobody should give in to the illusion that the German judiciary, which beginning in 1933 was virtually united in the service of the Nazis, will stop the right-wing conspiracy. On the contrary, the measures and laws which it adopts in the name of restricting the far right are inevitably directed against the opponents of capitalism and war.

Australia’s housing crisis pushing thousands into poverty and homelessness

Max Boddy

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) lifted interest rates by 25 basis points on December 6, the eighth consecutive monthly hike. RBA governor Philip Lowe has signaled that this program, aimed at slowing the economy and beating back a wages push by workers, will continue into the new year. 

Public housing in Sydney inner-city suburb. [Photo: WSWS]

The cumulative impact of the rate rises has been to plunge broad sections of the working class into mortgage stress as their monthly repayments continue to rise. This is having a flow on impact, with unprecedented rental costs, growing homelessness and associated distress, including increasing suicide rates.

The impact of the rate rises is exacerbated by runaway inflation, which the hikes will do nothing to address. While official inflation is at 7.3 percent, for household goods and essential basic items the rate is much higher. According to the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) figures, for instance, fruit and vegetables had a 16.2 percent annual price increase in the 12 months to the September quarter.

Research agency Roy Morgan has stated that, taken together, the rate increases thus far will push one in four home loan borrowers into “mortgage stress.” There are different measures for this phenomenon, but the market research firm defines it as households allocating more than 25 percent of their take-home pay to repayments.

This, however, is only the tip of the iceberg. Next year, between July and December, at least $275 billion worth of home loans from the major four banks are set to come off fixed rates.

Andrew Barker, economist at the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA), said “almost half of loans taken out in the middle of 2021 were taken out on a fixed-rate basis.” This was “unusually high for Australia.”

The growth in fixed-rate loans was bound up with the RBA’s decision to reduce interest rates to record lows in 2021 to encourage families to purchase houses at massively high prices, with false promises that there would be no rate rises until 2024. The purpose was to funnel billions into the financial markets.

Those who purchased houses at that time are at the highest vulnerability. 

The dangers are compounded by falling house prices. According to CoreLogic, home values in the five largest capital cities, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth, have dropped by 6.4 percent based on the year-on-year average. 

The drop is different in each of the cities, with some values rising, however Sydney, Australia’s most populous city, has seen a 11.5 percent year-on-year decline.

Some are at risk of becoming “mortgage prisoners.” This occurs when a mortgage holder is unable to refinance their loan and the value of their underlying asset, their property, is less than their outstanding debt on it.

The increasing hardships facing mortgage-holders are having a flow-on effect, with record rental increases. Mortgage-holders who rent out a property are seeking to offset their costs by hiking rents. This is compounded by long standing issues of supply.

Figures put out by SQM research, also in November, indicated that rents in Sydney had skyrocketed by an unprecedented 28 percent over the previous 12 months to an average of $709 per week. The indices were similar in a number of other capital cities, with a 24 percent rise to $574 per week in Brisbane, for instance. Rents are also rising more rapidly in regional areas than ever before.

The annual Rental Affordability Index, released last month, found that more than 40 percent of low-income tenants are now in rental stress, defined as spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs.

Increasingly, there are simply no affordable dwellings for the poor. A March 2022 study, for example, found just 1.4 percent of properties advertised nationally were affordable to a couple on the aged care pension.

Growing numbers are being pushed into homelessness, underscored by research published by Launch Housing in conjunction with the University of NSW at the beginning of the month.

Their Australian Homelessness Monitor 2022 report notes there are no up-to-date statistics measuring homelessness. Instead, they used a proxy measure, the increased caseload of specialist homelessness services. “Across Australia,” the report states, “the average monthly number of specialist homelessness service (SHS) users grew from 84,800 people in 2017–18 to 91,300 people in 2021–22.” 

This may be a conservative estimate as SHS caseloads vary from region to region and monitor only those who seek, and are provided with, assistance. Even so, it amounts to an increase of 8 percent over the four-year period, twice the rate at which the total number of households has grown.

Over the four years there has been a disproportionate increase in older adults reporting homelessness. The report notes “SHS service users aged 50–64 and 65+ increased in number at more than twice the rate of younger age groups.” 

Social misery is inevitably increasing. Suicide Prevention Australia is warning that housing access and affordability is the fastest growing cause of distress in the country.

Its December Community Tracker noted a 71 percent increase in Australians experiencing elevated stress levels in November compared to the same time in 2021. While cost of living and personal debt remained the number one driver, housing access and affordability have escalated rapidly over the past three months, overtaking unemployment and job security.

Some 38 percent of Australians knew someone in their life or personal networks who has died from or attempted suicide in the past twelve months, a 7 percent increase from the previous month.

The housing crisis is the direct result of the policies of successive governments, Labor and Liberal-National alike. They promoted the speculative housing bubble which drove up costs through tax incentives, the low interest regime and other measures.

At the same time, governments have gutted public housing, depriving the poor and vulnerable of any affordable options. 

Social housing, involving government subsidies to non-government organisations, is also in a crisis. The Australian Homelessness Monitor stated that “over the period 1991–2021, social housing lettings plunged by 42 percent—or proportionate to population, 61 percent.”

None of these issues will be addressed by the federal Labor government. After assuming office in May, it dropped its campaign slogan of a “better future,” instead declaring that working people would need to accept “sacrifice” and “pain,” in the form of continuing real wage cuts, a soaring cost of living and austerity cuts to social spending.

As part of this offensive, the government budget allocated virtually nothing to housing. It included just $350 million to build a measly 10,000 new dwellings, with the state and territories contributing in kind to building another 10,000. In total, with previous commitments, Labor claims the plan will construct 40,000 new homes. Some will be social housing, while others will be vaguely defined “affordable housing.”

However, construction will not begin until 2024 and they will be built over a five-year period. Even if they are built, of which there is no guarantee, it is barely a drop in the ocean for the social housing need. According to several research reports, Australia’s shortfall in social housing dwellings is 524,000 and is set to reach 671,000 over the next decade.

The housing crisis is a stark example of the fact that the most basic needs of working people are incompatible with a society dominated by the profit interests of the banks, the billionaires and governments that do their bidding.

Growing malnutrition is a Big challenge

Vikas Parasram Meshram

India is the second largest food producing country in the world and we are number one in the production of milk, pulses, rice, fish, vegetables and wheat. Despite this, a large population of the country is a victim of malnutrition. According to the United Nations’ report ‘The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022’, people’s struggle with hunger has increased rapidly after the Corona period of 2019. In the year 2021, 76.8 crore people in the world were found to be undernourished, out of which 22.4 crore i.e. 29 percent were Indians. This is a quarter of the total number of undernourished people in the world.

Malnutrition is one of the most serious problems in India, yet it has received the least attention. Today India has the highest number of stunted and 2.55 crore stunted children in the world. As a result, the burden of disease on the country is very high, National Family Health Survey-4 data shows that the prevalence of malnutrition in the country has decreased, but today more than half of the children in 51 percent of low-income families are stunted and 49 percent are underweight.

According to the Global Hunger Index report released on October 14 – “Hunger levels in India are critical.” India ranks 107 out of 121 countries in the world. India’s score is 29.1, while ‘zero’ means no one is hungry. India also lags behind its neighbors – Nepal (81st), Bangladesh (84th), Sri Lanka and Pakistan (99th).

It is estimated that on average about 20 percent of children under the age of 5 suffer from visible and life-threatening malnutrition. About 35 percent of children are not as tall as they should be. Of course, there is a fundamental difference between hunger, unhealthy food, and malnutrition.

The authors and compilers of this Global Hunger Index report have compiled data on hunger and malnutrition in India. Compared to a population of over 140 crores, the hunger situation in India presents a very alarming situation. India’s Food Security Act, Public Distribution System, Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Food Yojana, Poshan Mission, Anemia Free Mission etc. issued from 2020 onwards, malnutrition and hunger are not reducing.

Malnutrition is still a serious problem in India with more than 33 lakh children being malnourished. Although the Government of India has launched a ‘National Poshan Abhiyan’ campaign to ensure a ‘malnutrition-free India’ by 2022, the goal seems far off.

In 2021, the number of undernourished people in the world was estimated to be 768 million. Of these, 224 million (about 29 percent) were Indians. Today the situation has improved a lot, as food security is a constitutional right of the average Indian. In this context it is also worth noting that India is the second largest food grain producing country in the world. India ranks first in the world in the production of milk, pulses, rice, fish, vegetables and wheat. How can such a country be ‘hungry’? Yet there is widespread malnutrition in the country, which is an alarming situation. India has a considerable population below the poverty line. The Government of India needs to consider these figures from these aspects as well as through projects like Nutrition Mission 2.0 and Mid Day Meal, as India has changed completely since independence. India is becoming self-reliant. The average growth rate of agriculture sector has been consistently positive
According to a report titled ‘The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022: Repurposing Food and Agriculture Policies to Make Healthy Diets More Affordable’ by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, it concludes that hunger and malnutrition in India are at critical levels?

German parliament agrees purchase of F-35 fighter jets for nuclear war against Russia

Johannes Stern

Three weeks after the German government launched its 2023 war budget, a massive arms build-up is underway. On Thursday, the Bundestag (parliamentary) budget committee released €10 billion for the procurement of 35 US F-35 Lightning II stealth bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons.

In this Aug. 5, 2019 photo released by the U.S. Air Force, an F-35 fighter jet pilot and crew prepare for a mission at Al-Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates. [AP Photo/Staff Sgt. Chris Thornbury/U.S. Air Force]

That same day, the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) Federal Office of Equipment, Information Technology and In-Service Support (BAAINBw) signed the purchase agreement with the US Air Force. According to a statement from the American Embassy in Berlin, the fighters are to be delivered “between 2026 and 2029.” The US Foreign Military Sales Program will “handle the sale, which includes mission planning systems, munitions, logistics and training.”

The acquisition of the nuclear bombers is a declaration of war on the working class and youth in several ways. For one thing, it makes it clear that the ruling class is prepared to wage nuclear war to advance its imperialist interests—even if it means the deaths of tens of billions of people and the potential destruction of the entire planet.

In his government statement on Thursday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz (Social Democratic Party, SPD) blatantly threatened nuclear power Russia with all-out war: “If necessary, we will defend every single square meter of alliance territory,” he declared. To this end, he said, “the special fund of 100 billion euros has been agreed—the largest investment in our Bundeswehr since its existence.” With the procurement of modern F-35 fighter jets, he said, “We are continuing to make our German contribution to nuclear sharing in the alliance.”

Scholz preferred not to elaborate on what that means. In the event of a nuclear war against Russia, Bundeswehr fighter jets—currently of the Tornado type—would be armed with US nuclear bombs stored in Germany and would also deploy them. The possible armament of the F-35 includes “free-falling nuclear weapons,” according to an article on the official Defence Ministry website.

With the ongoing escalation of the NATO proxy war in Ukraine against Russia, the leading NATO powers not only accept the threat of a nuclear third world war, but they are also actively preparing for it. Air Force Inspector General Ingo Gerhartz openly threatened Russia with the use of nuclear weapons back in June. “For credible deterrence, we need both the means and the political will to implement nuclear deterrence, if necessary,” he declared.

The World Socialist Web Site commented at the time, “The fact that a German general is openly threatening to use nuclear weapons against Russia must be taken as a serious warning. Seventy-seven years after the fall of the Third Reich, a fascist mentality is once again spreading in the ruling class. It is ready to commit the worst crimes once again in order to assert its imperialist interests.”

With the purchase of the F-35s, German war plans are now massively accelerated. When Gerhartz announced the deal on Thursday, along with Bundeswehr Inspector General Eberhard Zorn and Defence Minister Christine Lambrecht (SPD), he boasted that the procurement of the fighter jets was not only “historic” but “that we are buying the appropriate spare parts [and also ammunition] that will ensure us a high level of operational readiness right at the start.”

Lambrecht herself made it clear that the purchase was part of a comprehensive upgrade of the Bundeswehr. It was “a good day for the Bundeswehr, a good day for national and alliance defence,” she cheered. “Today, we succeeded in getting a procurement worth almost 13 billion euros underway in the Budget Committee.” She added that work was being done at “full speed” to “breathe life into the turn of the times,” proclaimed by Chancellor Scholz at the beginning of the Ukraine war. The “procurements” that had been set in motion concerned “the entire range of the Bundeswehr.”

In addition to the F-35s, the Budget Committee released funds for the procurement of the following weapons systems at its last meeting this year: modern radios for the Army worth almost €3 billion, 140 over-snow vehicles worth €552 million and 118,718 new HK416 assault rifles for around €273 million. In addition, the Puma infantry fighting vehicle is to be upgraded at a cost of €1 billion.

The purchases will be financed from the €100 billion special fund for the Bundeswehr already approved in June. This is just the start of Germany’s biggest rearmament and war offensive since Hitler. “For me, this was now the starting point for implementing our projects from the special fund,” Zorn explained. “That means we will still be submitting a large number of so-called 25 million [euro] bills to parliament in the next few years.”

Specifically, the inspector general named the following “necessary orders”: Germany’s assumption of command of the NATO spearhead Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (VJTF) next year; the deployment of a combat-ready Bundeswehr division for NATO by 2025; the deployment of a combat brigade for the European Union, also by 2025; and the readiness “of 20 boats and ships annually” of the German Navy. For all of this, he said, “a reliable rising financial line” was needed.

The “historic” rearmament requires historic attacks on the working class. While billions are gushing into the Bundeswehr, massive cuts are being made in the areas of health, education and social welfare. Adjusted for inflation, the 2023 budget includes the biggest cuts since the end of World War II. The health budget alone will be cut by almost €40 billion (!) from €64.36 billion to €24.48 billion—and this amid a pandemic that has already cost several million lives worldwide.

Hardly any acquisition could sum up the priorities of the ruling class better than the F-35 nuclear bombers: death and destruction are higher priorities for them than life and social progress. The €100 billion special fund is more than four times the health budget and almost five times the education budget (€21.46 billion). The €10 billion now being squandered on fighter jets alone could be used to hire more than 34,000 additional teachers for five years; or nearly 52,000 nurses for the same period in the health care system, which is also completely underfunded.

All parties in the Bundestag are working closely together to push through this militaristic madness, which is destructive in every respect. Lambrecht expressly thanked “the budget holders for making this possible today—with a broad majority even beyond the traffic light coalition” of the SPD, Liberal Democrats (FDP) and Greens. He said it was a “very important sign that the breadth of parliament is behind the Bundeswehr, behind this turn of the times.”

The massive rearmament of the Bundeswehr is also vehemently supported by the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). Within the federal government, the Greens are taking a particularly aggressive stance. “We are pleased to be able to put the most modern jet in the world in the capable hands of the pilots of our air force,” said Philip Krämer, who sits on the defence committee for the former pacifists. His colleague Sebastian Schäfer stressed that the task now must be to “ensure a functioning and rapid operational readiness.”

Although the Left Party criticizes the purchase of the F-35s and the Bundeswehr special fund in words, it is itself closely involved in the war and rearmament offensive. Its leading representatives, such as Thuringia State Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow and Berlin mayoral candidate Klaus Lederer, explicitly support arms deliveries to Ukraine and even call for the reintroduction of conscription.

Others, such as former party chairwoman Gesine Lötzsch, sit on both the budget committee and the secretly convened “Special Fund of the Bundeswehr” committee. Speaking to the left-wing party paper Junge Welt, Lötzsch recently gave an insight into her activities as a de facto lobbyist for German imperialism. “In the summer, I was in the US with a delegation from the budget committee. There, we talked to politicians and arms manufacturers,” she reported. Then she added cynically, “They already had a precise plan of how they will divide the 100 billion euros among themselves.”

Protests mount in Peru with at least 21 killed by US-trained security forces

Andrea Lobo

Peru’s military and police, both trained by the Pentagon, have escalated their repression after the declaration of a national state of emergency on Wednesday and the imposition of a regional curfew on Friday.

Clash between protesters and police in Lima, Peru following the removal of President Pedro Castillo (Photo: VOA) [Photo: VOA]

The onslaught ordered by the newly installed regime of President Dina Bolaurte, backed by Washington and the European Union, has killed at least 21 demonstrators. Videos show military battalions charging forward and shooting live ammunition, and police firing deadly tear gas canisters directly at crowds, including from helicopters, carrying out arbitrary detentions, and brutally beating unarmed protesters.

While the initial demonstrations were triggered by the impeachment and arrest on December 7 of Peru’s elected president, Pedro Castillo, who tried to preemptively dissolve Congress, the growing unrest has been triggered by a mountain of social grievances against the entire ruling elite, including inflation, mass unemployment, hunger, the highest COVID death rate in the world, generalized corruption, environmental destruction, among others.

The protests have taken the form of large marches, dozens of roadblocks and several airport occupations primarily by youth from the impoverished, marginal areas of the towns and cities, which are dominated by informality and precarious social services and housing. Major contingents from rural areas in the south, where the support for Castillo is concentrated, have also joined the demonstrations.

The largest march so far took place in Lima on Thursday, with tens of thousands demanding the resignation of Boluarte, who was Castillo’s vice president, the dissolution of the Congress and immediate elections. A police rampage ensued in the evening, with cops brutally beating protesters, journalists, emergency workers, and passersby.

Boluarte has failed to appease the anger by promising to hold elections in 2024 and then 2023 and declaring to congress people “We are all leaving!” She even absurdly sent her condolences to the “mothers in Ayacucho,” where her government has killed several teenagers for demonstrating.

Meanwhile, the state forces have tried to claim that the protests are being led by “terrorist and criminal” agitators. The police antiterrorism chief Óscar Arriola tried to criminalize the protests claiming that they have identified a handful of people linked to the defunct Maoist guerrilla movement Sendero Luminoso, Movadef, a group formed to seek amnesty for Sendero prisoners, and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA). Given the widespread nature of the social explosion, however, he was forced to effectively undermine his own argument by stating that “there are no leaders; this is a sui generis situation” and that “there is a class hatred in every behavior.”

The far-right legislators who drove Castillo out of power are now demanding tougher repression. In the words of legislator Héctor Valer in a congressional session, “A grouping of people cannot push the state against the wall… These people deserve more authority and a tougher hand.”

Applying victor’s “justice” after the successful parliamentary coup against Castillo, the prosecutors and courts controlled by the far-right have ordered Castillo to remain in custody for 18 months. The ousted president and his former prime minister Aníbal Torres were arrested together on their way to the Mexican embassy, when their escorts were ordered to turn them in. Castillo was denied a lawyer at the summary online hearing Thursday that ended with his prison sentence. Torres, aged 79 and the preeminent legal scholar in the country, has gone into hiding. Both are being vindictively investigated on the trumped-up charge of “rebellion,” which legally refers strictly to an “armed uprising.”

Castillo, who had until now focused his pleas of defense to US imperialism, published another handwritten note on social media in which he declared, “The visit of the [US] ambassador to the [presidential] palace… was to give the order for deploying the troops on the streets to massacre my defenseless people and open the roads for the exploitation by mining companies…”

While the government and US imperialism ramp up the repression, the spontaneous character of the protests is being exploited by the trade union bureaucracy and pseudo-left groups to channel them away from any appeal to the working class in Peru and internationally and toward illusions that a new Constitution and elections within the same nationalist framework of capitalist politics will somehow resolve the urgent social demands of the youth, workers and rural poor.

The General Confederation of Peruvian Workers (CGTP), which includes the main miners unions, as well as those in construction, among metalworkers, and other sectors, has resisted organizing a strike and instead convoked a vague “national day of protests” on Thursday.

While denouncing the Congress as “illegitimate,” the CGTP leadership has actually worked to legitimize the regime that Congress and US imperialism have installed. On Tuesday, after meeting with Dina Boluarte, the chairman of the CGTP Luis Villanueva declared: “We believe that a bad decision was made but it has been corrected through a constitutional succession. However, we are facing a much stronger crisis. We believe that the decision is in the hands of President Dina Boluarte and the Congress.”

The meeting to legitimize Boluarte fully exposes the bureaucracy’s radical-sounding demands as merely an attempt to mimic the mood in the streets verbally only to divert the movement back into the dead-end of capitalist politics.

Similarly, the Agrarian and Rural Front of Peru, which includes a wide array of organizations, has called for a “popular insurgency against the neo-fascist coup” and the liberation and restitution of Castillo. However, their demands for a new “Patriotic, gender-equal, eco-friendly and plurinational Constitution” and new elections also seek to divert the protests behind the same capitalist framework.

This is the script their counterparts in Bolivia and Chile used to suppress the mass upheavals that erupted in both those countries in 2019. In Bolivia, the demand for new elections overseen by the US-backed coup regime only served to legitimize it and its killings of demonstrators, while maintaining the role of the military as the ultimate political arbiter. In Chile, a despised new draft Constitution—rejected at the polls—and the election of pseudo-left president Gabriel Boric have not resolved any of the issues around privatized pensions, education, inequality, and state repression that fueled the protests.

The discrediting of the entire political establishment—reflected in the demand “Throw them all out!”—poses the key question of what is to replace it and which social class will determine this? The election of another capitalist politician and drafting of another capitalist constitution will not resolve the crisis of bourgeois rule in Peru. It will only serve to politically demoralize, confuse and demobilize the masses as the local oligarchies and imperialism prepare to reimpose dictatorships under the supervision of the US-trained armed forces.

In Peru, the second-top producer of copper, the mines are owned by a handful of global corporations led by BHP Billiton, Glencore, Freeport, Teck and Grupo Mexico. Meanwhile, there are 37 Peruvians who own more than $100 million and at least five billionaires. Democracy is impossible and corruption is an inevitable outgrowth under such conditions of inequality and imperialist domination.

As demonstrated by the response of all governments in the region to the pandemic and inflation, there is no limit to the deaths and suffering the bourgeoisie will inflict upon the workers and rural poor to create more profitable conditions for national and global finance capital.

Department of Energy announces successful nuclear fusion ignition

Bryan Dyne & Don Barrett

On Tuesday, a joint press release from the US Department of Energy (DOE) and the department’s National Nuclear Security Administration announced that scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) have achieved a controlled nuclear fusion reaction which resulted in a net energy gain. Data from the facility show that 2.05 megajoules (Mj) of input energy—just under 0.6 kilowatt hours—was used to produce 3.15 Mj of output fusion energy.

Preamplifiers at the National Ignition Facility that are used to begin generating the energy required by the facility's lasers to initiate nuclear fusion. [Photo: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory]

To produce the results, nuclear physicists at the NIF used 192 spherically arranged lasers aimed at a half-centimeter target vessel containing deuterium and tritium, two heavy variants of the element hydrogen. An extremely brief and powerful pulse of light from the lasers is channeled by the target to produce a symmetrical explosion about the inner hydrogen fuel, imploding and heating it to the extreme conditions where nuclear fusion takes place.

This process, of “burning” hydrogen into helium, powers stars like our Sun over billions of years, but the NIF produces fusion conditions for only 100 trillionths of a second: it reaches temperatures and pressures 10 times higher than those at the center of the Sun to fuse a significant amount of its fuel during that instant, forcing an implosion of the material that ignites the material and starts nuclear fusion, the process through which the Sun and all stars shine.

The achievement is what is known as scientific breakeven, when the energy produced by the implosion is equal to or greater than the energy transferred to the capsule.

The announcement marks one of the major milestones since the NIF was established in 1997. It was developed as an arm of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to study a method of achieving nuclear fusion, known as inertial confinement fusion. Construction was completed in 2009 and NIF has been performing experiments ever since, leading up to this week’s results.

One of the major difficulties of inertial confinement fusion is that the lasers must hit the target in an exactly spherically symmetrical pattern, otherwise the precise implosion needed to produce fusion either will not occur or will only produce small amounts of energy. As recently as 2018, the NIF was only capable of producing 54 kilojoules of energy, 58 times less than the most recent results.

A major breakthrough was achieved last year when the scientists developed new techniques to more fully master the symmetries and asymmetries of the system, resulting in an energy yield 25 times greater than the results from 2018. While they at the time had yet to achieve scientific breakeven, the researchers reached 70 percent of that goal. The announcement Tuesday is a further refinement of what was developed last year.

Technicians and engineers performing repairs inside the chamber where the target capsule of deuterium and tritium is hit by 192 lasers, igniting nuclear fusion. [Photo: US Department of Energy]

And while scientific breakeven is an important success in the pursuit of controlled nuclear fusion, it is not yet the panacea of clean and abundant energy that will help abate and reverse climate change being presented in the corporate media. There is still a great deal of work to reach what is known as engineering breakeven. The main problem is that the lasers used by the NIF are inefficient. Only about 0.5 percent of the total energy powering the lasers is actually delivered to the target to kindle nuclear fusion.

In other words, the energy output needed to really start considering inertial confinement fusion as a power source for industrial, commercial and residential use needs to be more than 240 times what was reported on Tuesday. And that does not include the further efficiency considerations surrounding somehow converting the energy produced into electricity.

Inertial confinement is not generally considered the method upon which a nuclear fusion power plant will be based. The more likely strategy is a tokamak reactor, a word coined by Soviet scientist Igor Golovin in 1957 and which stands for either toroidal chamber with magnetic coils or toroidal chamber with axial magnetic field, depending on the Russian transliteration. The concept uses magnetic fields to confine and compress super-hot plasma into a toroidal (donut-like) shape.

Dozens of tokamak reactors have been built since they were first theorized in the 1950s, each generation built on engineering and physical insights gathered with the previous ones. The drive has been toward larger tokamaks, necessary to increase their efficiency in the drive towards scientific breakeven. But the costs of each generation have been sharply higher. The most successful previous tokamak was the nearly half-billion dollar Joint European Torus (JET), which first operated in 1983 and which still is used in fusion studies. Its most successful experiment occurred just last year, in which it achieved a five second operation producing about one-third the output of scientific breakeven.

The roughly $20 billion tokamak ITER, which is expected to start operations sometime in the next three years, is expected to have a minimum of a six-fold gain in energy production over the NIF result. ITER is an international collaboration that has been in development since 1979 and includes personnel and funding from China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States. The project has been compared to the Large Hadron Collider and the International Space Station in cost, scale, complexity and ambition.

The successor to ITER, “DEMO,” is already under discussion, but the international collaboration which continues in ITER has largely fallen apart under the developing world crisis and the competitive advantages for a nation-state which was able to hold the details of a functional demonstration unit closely. Given that the National Academy of Sciences outlined in 2019 a strategy for continuing development through “private-sector ventures,” future costs and timescales are now subordinate to the capitalist system, not driven by scientific planning.

There is also deeply a militaristic aspect to the research at the NIF as compared to tokamak reactors. Nuclear fusion on a vast scale by implosion was achieved in 1952 after President Harry Truman ordered the development of the hydrogen bomb in response to the first atomic bomb test by the Soviet Union in 1949. The only way to achieve the necessary physical conditions to achieve fusion was to use a nuclear fission bomb of the sort dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 to start the fusion reaction and cause a thermonuclear detonation.

The first full-scale test of such a device was the test “Ivy Mike,” a 10.4 megaton explosion. Since then, uncontrolled nuclear fusion has been the basis of every fusion nuclear weapon developed.

The mushroom cloud from the world’s first test of a thermonuclear device, dubbed Ivy Mike, over Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands on November 1, 1952. (AP Photo/Los Alamos National Laboratory) [AP Photo/Los Alamos National Laboratory]

Further research into and production of these weapons was the reason the Lawrence Livermore facility was established in the first place. Throughout the Cold War, it played a key role in developing myriad nuclear weapons, a role which continues today. The laboratory is also used to maintain and refurbish the nuclear stockpile of the US military.

Alongside this, LLNL conducts a great deal of research into the physical properties of plutonium in order to make better fission bombs to ignite fusion warheads. One such avenue uses the laser array that generates fusion energy to implode plutonium. It is a way to study and refine atomic explosions without detonating nuclear weapons, which is prohibited by numerous international treaties.

Turkish presidential hopeful sentenced to prison

Ulaş Ateşçi

A local court has sentenced Istanbul Metropolitan Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu of the Kemalist Republican People’s Party (CHP) to 2 years, 7 months and 15 days in prison and a political ban, for allegedly “insulting” public officials.

Ekrem İmamoğlu, Mayor of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality [Photo: VOA]

The prosecutor found the sentence insufficient and immediately appealed to a higher court. If the verdict is confirmed, İmamoğlu will lose his office and may not be able to run in the 2023 presidential elections. For the verdict to become final, it must be approved by higher courts.

The antidemocratic character of “defamation” cases and “political ban” decisions in Turkey is clear, and the interference of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government in İmamoğlu’s case is undeniable. Shortly before the verdict, the judge of the court was replaced; the daily Cumhuriyet published a photo of the new judge with an AKP (Justice and Development Party) executive. It was also revealed that the prosecutor is a nephew of an AKP mayor.

The Socialist Equality Group (SEG) in Turkey condemns this decision, a product of pressure from the Erdoğan government, as an obvious attack on basic democratic rights. However, our principled opposition to this decision and to Erdoğan’s police state measures in no way diminishes our opposition to the bourgeois opposition parties led by the CHP.

The conviction of İmamoğlu, a major potential rival of Erdoğan, comes as Turkey moves towards presidential and parliamentary elections in 2023 amid a deepening economic, social and geopolitical crisis.

Erdoğan, at odds with his NATO allies over the war against Russia in Ukraine, has already announced a new ground invasion against US-backed Kurdish nationalist forces in Syria—an operation backed by CHP and its official allies. Moreover, last week Erdoğan further escalated tensions with Greece by stressing that Turkey’s newly developed ballistic missiles (“Tayfun”) could hit Athens.

The government’s aim to suppress growing class tensions amid an unprecedented rise in the cost of living plays a critical role in its escalation of nationalism, militarism and police state measures. This week, workers at the Bekaert steel plant in Kocaeli went on a wildcat strike, defying Erdoğan’s presidential ban on strike action on the grounds of that it is “threat to national security.” Indeed, preventing an explosion of working class opposition is as much a concern of the bourgeois opposition as it is of the Erdoğan government.

The origins of the İmamoğlu case date back to 2019. Speaking in France that year, Imamoğlu accused the government of using public resources for its own benefit in local elections and stated that they “wanted to win the election in Istanbul by having it canceled by a Supreme Electoral Council (YSK) decision.”

As the candidate of the Nation Alliance, a coalition of the far-right Good Party and the CHP, İmamoğlu narrowly defeated his rival from Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) in local elections held on March 31, 2019. After the YSK, pressured by the AKP, ordered a re-vote of the elections, İmamoğlu won a landslide victory, raising his margin of victory from 13,000 to 800,000.

Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu targeted İmamoğlu upon his remarks in France, stating: “I am telling the fool who went to the European Parliament and complained about Turkey. This nation will make you pay for this.”

İmamoğlu responded to Soylu by saying: “Those who canceled the elections on March 31st are fools, let him focus on that first.”

A lawsuit was thereupon filed against İmamoğlu with the demand for imprisonment and political ban on the grounds that he called the members of the YSK “fools.” İmamoğlu argued that he did not mean YSK members and that he was responding to Soylu.

On Wednesday, shortly before the verdict was announced, İmamoğlu called on voters to gather in Saraçhane, where the Istanbul municipal building is located. “Istanbul and Turkey will protect its will today, just as it has protected its will before,” he declared. At the rally held after the verdict, Imamoğlu was joined on the platform by Good Party leader Meral Akşener, as well as leaders of pseudo-left groups such as Labour Party (EMEP) and the Workers’ Party of Turkey (TİP). They rallied behind the CHP in 2019 local elections.

Declaring the ruling “null and void,” İmamoğlu pointed to the presidential elections, saying: “We have hopes for 2023. In order to carry our nation to brighter days, we will defeat the mentality that is trying to damage this country in the elections in 2023. We succeeded in Istanbul, we will succeed in Turkey.”

On Thursday, in the same place, a rally titled “The nation is claiming its will” was called jointly by the bourgeois opposition (the “Table of Six,” a new name for the CHP-led Nation Alliance). Beyond İmamoğlu, CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, Good Party leader Akşener, Erdoğan’s former top leaders Ali Babacan (DEVA) and Ahmet Davutoğlu (Future Party), as well as representatives of the Islamist Felicity Party and the Democrat Party attended and spoke. Istanbul police put the number of people attending at 25,000, while Istanbul municipality claimed over 200,000 attended.

Declaring that Turkey is at a “crossroads,” İmamoğlu signaled his presidential candidacy in 2023, stating: “We have to make a choice between those who accept the sovereignty of the nation and those who have an allergy against the national will. For this, I will be the most hardworking member of the ‘Table of Six.’”

He also added, “I am not scared of them and the null-and-void decisions they dictate. I have no judges, prosecutors or courts to rely upon. I have you behind me. I have the patriotic leaders of this table and the alliance of Turkey they established … Believe me, 2023 will be very beautiful.”

These claims, supported by numerous pseudo-left organizations, have nothing to do with reality. İmamoğlu, like the “Table of Six” as a whole, does not represent a “progressive” alternative to the reactionary Erdoğan regime, but a right-wing rival. This is summarized by the fact that the alliance includes two parties that broke away from the AKP; the Good Party, which broke away from the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), an ally of Erdoğan; and the Islamist Felicity Party, from which the AKP emerged.

This alliance speaks for a rival pro-NATO faction of the Turkish ruling class and is as incapable as the Erdoğan government of solving the fundamental social and democratic problems facing the masses of workers and youth.

The political and media establishment in the US and Europe condemned the conviction. US State Department spokesman Ned Price said Washington regretted and was disappointed by the ruling, while the German Bild and the British Independent referred to İmamoglu as Erdogan’s main rival without hiding their sympathy for him.

It is a sheer hypocrisy for the US-led NATO powers and the pliant media they control to talk about “democracy.” NATO, which has been waging wars in the Middle East for thirty years with the complicity of the Turkish and Kurdish ruling class, destroying entire societies, are now threatening all of humanity with a nuclear annihilation through their proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. Moreover, these powers have been ardent defenders of the Erdoğan government for many years.

For some time they have supported the bourgeois faction opposing Erdoğan, mainly because of growing conflicts with Ankara on geopolitical issues, including the war with Russia.

Significantly, CHP leader Kılıçdaroğlu recently visited Washington, London and Berlin and met with powerful political and financial figures. The “Vision” program recently announced by the CHP was almost a repetition of the projects of TÜSİAD, Turkey’s main business confederation. The Table of Six’s newly prepared draft “constitution” still ignores fundamental democratic and social problems—especially the Kurdish question—facing millions of working people in Turkey.

Both Erdoğan and the CHP have a long history of attacking basic democratic rights and using the judiciary against its opponents. By backing Erdoğan’s proposal to lift parliamentary immunity of deputies from the Kurdish nationalist Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), the CHP paved the way for their imprisonment. Moreover, after the 2019 local elections, the CHP and its allies were largely silent as many HDP or Kurdish Democratic Regions Party (DBP) mayors elected in Kurdish provinces were undemocratically removed from office by the government.

Former HDP co-chair Selahattin Demirtaş, who has been in prison for six years thanks to CHP complicity, made a statement on the verdict, referring to the CHP’s dirty role in their imprisonment. He, however, again declared: “It is not too late. Now is the time to resist together and win together.”

Prime Minister Bainimarama under challenge in contentious Fijian election

John Braddock

Incumbent Fijian Prime Minister and former military coup leader Frank Bainimarama is fighting off a strong challenge in the South Pacific island country’s general election, which concluded on Wednesday. Final results are not due to be announced until Sunday, and official figures are only slowly being publicly released.

Fiji prime minister and FijiFirst leader Frank Bainimarama addressing climate conference in 2017. [Photo by Flickr/James Dowson / CC BY-NC-SA 2.5]

On Saturday morning, the Peoples Alliance Party (PAP) of another former coup leader and ex-prime minister, Sitiveni Rabuka, was running a close second to Bainimarama’s Fiji First Party (FFP). With votes from 717 of 2,071 polling stations officially validated, Fiji First was sitting on 40.2 percent of votes with the PAP at 36.9 percent.

Rabuka may be well placed for any horse-trading to form a coalition government. The PAP has campaigned throughout with the National Federation Party (NFP), currently third on 8.1 percent.  They are followed by the FFP-aligned Social Democratic Liberal Party (SODELPA) on 5.9 percent. Meanwhile, the Fiji Labour Party, which governed twice in 1987 and 1999, is below the 5 percent threshold required to win a seat, along with six other parties.

The credibility of the counting process has been seriously questioned after the official election app crashed on Wednesday night, only to reappear later with the figures reversed in favour of Fiji First.

Rabuka declared he had no confidence in the count and along with other opposition parties called for it to be halted. Rabuka said he would complain to the Supervisor of Elections, the Army Commander and Office of the President. He said his PAP would do “everything according to the law” and people should “remain calm.”

Nevertheless, involving the army commander raises the possibility of military intervention. The 2013 Constitution gives the commander a broad mandate to ensure the “safety and security of the country.” Commander Major General Ro Jone Kalouniwai told Radio New Zealand on Friday that he had rejected Rabuka’s request and the military would “respect” the electoral process. Rabuka was later taken in by the police and questioned over his comments.

Fears of anti-democratic manoeuvres, including another coup, have been near the surface throughout the campaign. Rabuka earlier claimed Bainimarama would try to use the courts to hang on to power if he lost. Bainimarama told an Australian Special Broadcasting Service journalist that “of course” he would respect the outcome, but he has previously been evasive over whether he would surrender office.

Fiji elections are “democratic” in name only. Fiji, an archipelago of more than 330 islands with a population of just over 900,000, has had four coups since formal independence in 1970. That is largely a legacy of British colonial policies that restricted the economic activities of indigenous Fijians while bringing thousands of indentured laborers from India. As in the 2018 poll, the election has been a contest between two parties run by former coup leaders and military strongmen. Rabuka led two coups in 1987, while Bainimarama seized power in 2006 before “legitimising” his rule with a bogus election in 2014.

Successive regimes, resting on the military, have been authoritarian and anti-working class. Harsh austerity measures that have heightened social inequality and misery have been accompanied by repressive laws, media censorship and violence by the police and military.

The final weeks of the campaign were dominated by accusations the government was taking extraordinary measures to intimidate opposition parties. Prominent Indo-Fijian lawyer Richard Naidu was found guilty of contempt of court, following a charge brought by Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, for pointing out a spelling mistake in a court document. Naidu now faces the possibility of jail.

Days out from polling, two PAP deputy leaders, Daniel Lobendahn and Lynda Tabuya, were arrested on charges by the Fiji Independent Commission Against Corruption over allegations of vote buying. The pair strenuously denied the allegations, which were purportedly connected with soliciting funds during a “Rock the Vote” campaign earlier this year. Rabuka denounced the arrests as an attempt to derail the PAP’s election campaign and “muzzle candidates.”

The election was marked by widespread voter abstention, indicating significant alienation from the official political set-up. From 692,000 registered voters, a turnout rate of just 51 percent was reported an hour before the polls closed on Wednesday, a sharp decline from 73.3 percent in 2018. Many young people aged under 40, who for the first time made up the majority of possible voters, stayed away.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that cost of living issues were “front and centre” for many voters. Two Fijian seasonal workers in Australia told an interviewer: “Our family back home have been complaining about the high food prices. Everything has been skyrocketing.” They added: “There is no money, no work. The unemployment rate is very high and everything is going up.”

Such sentiments were suppressed by the major parties. The FFP ran a fraudulent campaign, claiming an eight-year record of “growth and prosperity” and featuring vague plans for the economy, education, agriculture, health care and infrastructure. The PAP manifesto promised amendments to the Constitution, wiping out tertiary education debts for students, reinstating the privileged Great Council of Chiefs, and repealing “all decrees that suppress basic human rights.”

Fiji First warned that Indo-Fijians could face renewed persecution if Rabuka was victorious, saying he wanted to introduce discriminatory laws favouring ethnic Fijians. Rabuka has publicly apologised for his coups and declared Indo-Fijians will be treated fairly by the PAP. Rabuka quit SODELPA two years ago to form the PAP and is also in electoral alliance with the NFP, which represents the interests of the ethnic Indian business elite.

Among the working class and rural poor, a social catastrophe has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The poverty rate was nearly 30 percent in 2020, but half the population is now estimated to be struggling to put food on the table. Youth unemployment has increased since 2002, escalating from 15.6 percent in 2019 to 18.06 in 2021.

The overall unemployment rate, which hovered around 6 percent before COVID hit, increased to 35 percent. The tourism industry, the main foreign exchange earner, collapsed with the loss of 100,000 jobs. Half the country’s population experienced financial hardship and food shortages.

For a considerable period during the COVID outbreak the country’s vaccination program proved inadequate and the health system faced collapse. Bainimarama refused to implement a nationwide lockdown to control the escalating numbers, saying it would “destroy” the economy. With another COVID surge emerging, the country has recorded 68,553 COVID cases and 878 deaths.

The Economy Ministry has predicted a recovery with GDP growth of 11.3 percent for 2022. However, this follows three years of economic decline, including the largest contraction of 17.2 percent in 2020. Total debt is 88.6 percent of GDP. In line with global trends, Fiji faces escalating inflation, currently 5.2 percent.

The regional imperialist powers, Australia and New Zealand, along with Washington, are watching the situation closely. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute warned in the Strategist on December 7 that Australia “must be prepared for an undemocratic outcome in Fiji’s election.” Canberra, however, has never been concerned about “democracy” in Fiji but with its own geo-strategic interests

Fiji is pivotal in the escalating US-led geo-strategic confrontations in the Southwest Pacific against China. Over the past year, Bainimarama has played a key role in orienting Fiji and other Pacific countries to line up with the US. As chair of the Pacific Islands Forum, he was instrumental in arranging a presentation by US Vice President Kamala Harris to the organisation’s summit in July, from which China was excluded.

With Bainimarama emerging as a key ally, signing military agreements with both Australia and New Zealand and supporting the US over the Ukraine, Washington has earmarked Fiji as one of the main “hubs” of its upgraded engagement in the region. Should Rabuka take office, he will come under immense pressure to fully comply.