Statues In Defeat: The Confederacy, Treason And History

Binoy Kampmark

Statues of historical weight tend to represent heroism – of sorts. It might be of the doomed variety, and often is.  Rebellious causes assume the visage of a stony form, to gaze soullessly across promenades or parks, often ignored by many who have long lost a sense of their meaning.

In history, their removal is an act that flies directly into the wrinkled face of memory.  Sometimes, as happened in the case of the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn commemorating the Soviet “liberation” of Estonia in 2007, the figure is relocated.  The statue must change with the times.

Others, such as the defiant figure of the Hapsburg Croatian official, Ban Josip Jelačić, return to their place of erection, in his case, to a post-civil war Zagreb.  (He had been, in 1947, placed in a socialist deep freeze, an uncomfortable reminder of Croatian nationalism in Titoist Yugoslavia.)

The whole nasty business in Charlottesville, Virginia that unfolded on August 12 started with a gathering of neo-Nazis and white supremacists over a statue of the Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

The figure of the distinguished general was set for removal by agreement of the municipality, a point the protesters disagreed with.  Counter-protestors demurred.  It turned bloody, with the death of Heather Heyer, and two Virginia State Police officers, Trooper-Pilot Berke M. M. Bates and Pilot Lt. H. Jay Cullen, who perished in their helicopter after monitoring the protests.

The subsequent and desperate effort to identify some ground of equivalence between protestors (Nazis or anti-Nazis) and the premise of protest (White Supremacists or pro-Unionists), is only understandable in the context of civil war, one which forever reminds the states of the Confederacy of defeat.

That failure entails a vigorous jostle over the still smoking remains of an era where the defeated cry for some recognition, be it in their military achievements against the industrial might of the north, or the various war time heroes who did much with little.  The other, more venal element, is that of slavery, codified and structured, a so-called peculiar institution that also went with the Confederacy’s effort to secede.

The effort to mark that period with a coating of equivalence resounded with US President Donald Trump, never a history boffin, and more of its mugger.  If you were to remove General Lee from his podium, “are we going to take down statues to George Washington?”  Trump’s personal lawyer also got busy in the equivalence business: “You cannot be against General Lee and be for General Washington (because) there literally is no difference between the two men.”

Hardly very sharp observations. For one, Washington was Lee’s shadow in terms of military prowess, and fortunate to be facing forces more incompetent than his own.  (To measure achievement against an adversary such as Lord Cornwallis is setting the bar low.)  But he was saved by one point: founding father patriotism.

Some of the Confederate figures, it is true, dazzle in their competence.  To Lee’s own exploits could be added the able Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.   But both men were marked by a common cause of perfidy, that bit of treason against the Union that would have seen slavery, not merely retained, but expanded.  Brilliant they have been, but they fought for that institution, a world of plantations, cotton and pre-industrial tradition.

The modern pro-Confederate protestor finds succour in these seemingly fallen figures, suffering a perverse variant of what W.E.B. Du Bois discerned as a “double consciousness”. But this is not the consciousness of the “black soul” of Du Bois’ analysis, one where white eyes mediate a black identity. This is, rather, the plantation identity, an anachronistic, ostracised, alienated awareness that was firstly defeated in 1865, subjected to the trauma of slave emancipation and Reconstruction, then given over to the efforts of desegregation and the civil rights movement. Theirs is a consciousness of contrived victimhood, a grand failure.

For such figures, these white folk of torment, the punishment merely continued, and they, being part of the union, endured a punishment by being forced into accommodation, accord and settlement. With Trump’s victory in November last year, the waters stirred.  That forced, imposed consensus of what might be deemed wrong, inappropriate and outrageous, the views of the defeated from the Civil War, could now gradually bubble to the surface, to again be reclaimed in a public fashion.

Such reclamation has been boisterous, noisy, and ugly. It has taken the form, not of genteel Southern manners and tableside grace, but the virulence of KKK protest and neo-Nazi enthusiasts. It manifested in the form of a neo-Nazi who decided to drive into a group of countering protestors in Charlottesville on August 12, resulting in Heyer’s death and injuries to 19 others.

History is often a messy ordeal.  Reconstruction was the belt taken to the back of the southern states, and the response was one of memorial retribution.  We might have lost those pre-war institutions, went this sentiment, but we shall damn well make every effort to frustrate change.  You took away our slaves, but you won’t take away our monuments.  Jim Crow laws transmogrified into stone and reminders of heroic exploits, what might have been if only the Confederacy could have held out.

The Charlottesville echo is reverberating in other states concerned that the Confederacy matter may become a contagion.  University of Texas President Gregory L. Fenves announced late Sunday night that he would remove four Confederate statues from the Austin campus. The statues, in light of the violence in Virginia, had become “symbols of modern white supremacy and neo-Nazism.”

For Fenves, the statues depicting General Robert E. Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston, John Reagan and former Texas governor James Stephen Hogg, were reminders that had to be done away with.  “Erected during the period of Jim Crow laws and segregation, the statues represent the subjugation of African Americans.  That remains true for today for white supremacists who use them to symbolize hatred and bigotry.”

University of Houston student Mark Petersen, saw it differently.  This was an erasure, one of history one directed at his people, those “of European descent who built this country.” A history of gore, but also a history of treason.

The removal of such monuments, accompanied by such statements as those of Fenves, is the sound of the victor’s narrative favouring that side of memory.  It is the victory of the Union, with its all binding mysticism, reaffirmed, and the memory of the Confederacy revived to only remind all of what went wrong.

Shia Insurrection In Saudi Arabia; The Battle For Awamiya

Thomas C. Mountain

Since May, 2017 an ongoing insurgency has been raging in the Shia heartland town of Awamiya in eastern Saudi Arabia and its only thanks to the BBC being allowed to enter the area and film the destruction that the world can see how the House of Saud’s war against the Shia population of Yemeni has now expanded to include the Shia population of eastern Saudi Arabia.

The BBC World report shown on Wednesday, August 16, seemed to have come from Syria, with al-Zara, the ancient Shia capital of the Persian province of Bahrain and the rest the town of Awamiya showing a level of devastation resembling that in Syria or to the Kurdish cities destroyed recently by Erdogan Ottoman’s Janissarris.

Block by block destruction of the Old City with no visible signs of the Shia people who once lived here for millenia with almost 500 buildings destroyed and over 20,000 driven from their homes by Saudi airstrikes, artillery and mortar fire.

The BBC crew was only allowed there in armored vehicles, filming through bullet proof windows while traveling as a part of an armored convoy. The one time they were allowed to stop and step outside the battlewagons they were riding, firing could by heard and they were quickly ordered to return to their vehicles so they could escape.

This short view of an almost unknown urban war in the midst of the Saudi oilfields, with 2 million barrels a day being pumped via Awamiya alone (20% of total Saudi exports) with the House of Saud, after Russia, being the 2nd largest oil producer worldwide, should be sending shivers down the spines of those occupying the seats of power both east and west.

How long the Shia rebellion in eastern Saudi Arabia, home to almost all Saudi oil reserves, will be able to maintain an armed resistance to the Saudi military assault is the 10 million barrel a day question.

The excuse given by the House of Saud royal family mouthpieces is they were driving the Shia from their ancient homeland for “urban renewal” purposes. Never mind the “renewing” would destroy world heritage sites such as the ancient town of al-Zara, capital of the Shia, Persian province of Bahrain for millenia past and sacred to the Shia population and in the process “relocate” the Shia population as far a possible from the Saudi oil fields.

Wahabi is as Wahabi does with the crimes committed in the name of Sunni Islam in Yemen now being carried out next door to their cousins, the Saudi Shia. Only the silence of the media lambs internationally alongside the UN, allows this to go unnoticed, for a double standard has long existed when it comes to condemning the crimes of the House of Saud. After the latest round of beheadings of Shia leaders protests turned to gunfire in Awamiya and the fires of armed revolution have been lit for the first time in Saudi Arabia.

The Shia of eastern Saudi Arabia are cousins to their rather unorthodox Houthi neighbors in Yemen with a long history of intermarriage and commerce. The flood of small arms that has plagued Yemen for decades past have over the years made its way into the hands of the Shia population in the midst of the House of Saud’s oil fields. While many waited in vain for the armed struggle to break out in Bahrain instead it exploded in the cultural heartland of this once Persian province and in a much more strategically critical location, in Awamiya and ancient al-Zara.

While still early, for almost 4 months now the armed resistance in Awamiya appears to have fought the Saudi army into a stalemate, surviving heavy air and artillery bombardment, with shots still ringing whenever the armed might of the House of Saud ventures within range of their small arms. If this very first armed uprising is able to maintain their determination to see an end to their oppression by their Wahabi occupiers similar to the relentless fight being waged by the mainly Houthi based resistance in Yemen then all hell could break lose.

Losing control of their oil fields would inevitably bring down the Royal House of Saud, in power since their installation by the British after WWI.

If this armed uprising survives the Saudi Army onslaught and can spread to villages and towns throughout Shia eastern Saudi Arabia and the over 3 million strong Shia people take up arms against the regime similar to their cousins in Yemen those shivers running down the spines of the lords of power east and west could quickly grow to be migraine headaches as a major portion of the worlds oil supplies could be threatened if not cut off.

Supreme Court Of India Illumminates The World For Muslim Women

Moin Qazi

Of all the lawful acts the most detestable to God is divorce

 –Prophet Muhammad

(This an authentic saying recorded by Abdullah ibn Umar, a highly respected companion of the prophet in an authoritative treatise “Divorce (Kitab Al-Talaq)” of Sunan Abu-Dawud (Ref. 63-2173)

The Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down the practice of instant triple talaq, calling it unconstitutional and in violation of Article 14 of the Indian Constitution, which provides for equality before the law. The five-member bench was divided 3-2 on the matter, with the majority verdict striking the practice down. However, the expectations that a Supreme Court verdict will clear the clouds surrounding the whole issue have largely been belied. Apart from a fractured verdict the judgment shows the conflict in the judicial mind. In fact in his dissenting judgment CJI Khehar said  that talaq-e-biddat or instant divorce  is an integral part of the Sunni community and has been practiced for a 1000 years

The SC said triple talaq violates the fundamental rights of Muslim women as it irrevocably ends marriage without any chance of reconciliation .instant triple talaq, or verbal divorce, is practiced by some in the Muslim community to instantly divorce their wives by saying talaq three times.

The reason religion is so central to a Muslim woman’s rights in India is that there is no universal code for Muslim personal law, that which relates to marriage, divorce, maintenance, inheritance, and custody India has separate sets of personal laws for each religion governing marriage, divorce, succession, adoption and maintenance. While much of the Hindu law overhaul began in the 1950s and continues, activists have long argued that Muslim personal law has remained mostly unchanged. Muslim personal law in India continues to remain in the domain of the religious clerks. Two laws, the Shariat Act of 1937 and the Muslim Women’s (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Bill (1986), ensure that Muslim women do not fall under civil law in matters related to marriage, but remain under Islamic law, as interpreted and administered by the Muslim clergy.

The history of codification in India has been a contentious one and has never been addressed formally by the citizen sector or government.  A communally and politically sensitive issue, it is hard for any non-religious / secular group or the Government to take it up without being perceived as disrespectful of Muslims. As a result, India continues to remain one of only few countries yet to reform the Muslim Personal Law. By 1961, Pakistan reformed its Muslim Law, and one of the reforms introduced in Pakistan was on polygamy and divorce through arbitration. Similarly reforms in Tunisia and Turkey have led to the abolishment of polygamy in those countries. Iran, South Yemen and Singapore reformed their Muslim laws in the 1970s.

Triple Talaq is a contested Islamic way of getting a divorce where a husband can dissolve a marriage in the blink of an eye only by saying or writing the word Talaq – meaning divorce – three times in a row to his wife. Example, by saying “I reject you”, “I divorce thee”. A Talaq is unilateral divorce by a husband’s oral declaration as against Khula which is a divorce initiated on the application of the wife.

Quite apart from denying women’s rights, this custom has inherent absurdities. The moment a Muslim male utters “Talaq, Talaq, Talaq”, his wife becomes unlawful to him, even if he has uttered those words under coercion, in a fit of rage, in jest or drunken state and regrets his utterance the very next moment.

The only way out is for the woman to marry someone else, consummate the marriage, get the second husband to divorce her and then re-marry the first husband. This process is known as Nikah Halala and is actually a deterrent for men against this practice.

Several scholastic understandings of divorce within Islam do not support the notion of triple talaq in its current form and it is banned or not practised in many Muslim countries, including Algeria, Tunisia, Malaysia, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Tunisia, Algeria, Iraq, Indonesia and Bangladesh.

The position of India’s Supreme Court on the issue has been quite categorical. In Shamim Ara vs State of UP, a judgment of 2002, the Supreme Court had invalidated arbitrary triple talaq and held that instantaneous triple talaq does not dissolve a marriage. This position has been time and again reiterated by Indian courts. The Supreme Court view is a reiteration of the judiciary’s earlier views.

The practice of Talaq was most certainly not introduced by Islam; it was rampant in the Arab society of the time and Islam tried to gradually reform in a very humane way. There is nothing in the law of Islam that suggests that the husband is free to pronounce Talaq in an irrational or unreasonable manner. It allows Talaq, subject to several conditions that are of a dissuasive nature, their purpose being to discourage the husband from exercising his right without careful consideration.

The truth is that the concept of instant triple Talaq is alien to Islam as it goes against the very spirit of the procedure of divorce laid down in the Quran. Even the Prophet, when he was informed about a man who gave three divorces at a time, was so enraged that he said: “Are you playing with the Book of Allah who is Great and Glorious while I am still among you?”

In 1929, Egypt was the first country to adopt a modern perspective held by scholar Ibn Taimmiyah (1268-1328) and theologian Ibn al Qiyam (1292-1350), with regard to the personal laws on marriage and family. Both Ibn Taimmiyah and Ibn al Qiyam declared that repeating “Talaq” three times would only be considered as the first step in the overall three-step process of divorce. “

Indian Muslims would do well to adopt the rules in Pakistan’s 1961 Muslim Family Laws Ordinance. It provides for an arbitration council to attempt reconciliation and a 90-day period for retraction. Talaq must be pronounced by a notice in writing and communicated to the council’s chairman. The wife can stipulate for the right to divorce in her Nikahnama or marriage contract (Talaq Tafuriz). Additionally, she has the right to dissolve the marriage (Khula).

This is where Morocco has provided an essential lead. Its new Islamic family law was produced with the full co-operation of religious scholars as well as the active participation of women. Every change in the law is justified – chapter and verse – from the Quran, and from the examples and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad.

In 1943, Maulana Abul Ala Maududi, the subcontinent’s leading ideologue, also opined against instantaneous Talaq – or Talaq-e-Bidʿah: “[Triple divorce] is an innovation and a sin leading to many legal complications. If people knew that triple divorce is superfluous and even a single Talaq would dissolve the marriage, of course, leaving room for revocation during the next three months and remarriage thereafter, innumerable families could have been saved from disruption.”

Muslims are now certainly responsive to change and are trying to develop a more contemporary and humane interpretation of Islam, and some countries are undergoing major transformations. More and more Muslims now perceive those erroneous interpretations of Islamic law that are glaringly unjust to women to be dangerously obsolete. And these include the Ulema as well as intellectuals and the common Muslims.

For Muslims it is a good time to pause, reflect, and attempt to re-locate the main features of, and re-discover, Islam. They need to take stock, not because they have arrived at any significant stage of the Islamic journey but because the sheer range of trajectories and approaches, and consequent confusion, obliges them to attempt clarification. The problem is not that there are too few answers but that there are too many. To put it in the words of the Quran:

“Those who listen to the Word and follow the best (meaning) in it: those are the ones whom Allah has guided and those are the ones endued with understanding.” (Q39:18)

Soil, Monsanto And The Agribusiness Giants: Conning The World With Snake Oil And Doughnuts

Colin Todhunter

In their rush to readily promote neoliberal dogma and corporate-inspired PR, many government officials, scientists and journalists take as given that profit-driven transnational corporations have a legitimate claim to be custodians of natural assets. There is the premise that water, food, soil and agriculture should be handed over to powerful and wholly corrupt transnational corporations to milk for profit, under the pretence these entities are somehow serving the needs of humanity.

These natural assets (‘the commons’) belong to everyone and any stewardship should be carried out in the common interest by local people assisted by public institutions and governments acting on their behalf, not by private transnational corporations driven by self interest and the maximization of profit by any means possible.

Concerns about what is in the public interest or what is best for the environment lies beyond the scope of hard-headed commercial interests and should ideally be the remit of elected governments and civil organisations. However, the best-case scenario for private corporations is to have supine, co-opted agencies or governments. And if the current litigation cases in the US and the ‘Monsanto Papers’ court documents tell us anything, this is exactly what they set out to create.

Of course, we have known how corporations like Monsanto (and Bayer) have operated for many years, whether it is by bribery, smear campaigns, faking data, co-opting agencies and key figures, subverting science or any of the other actions or human rights abuses that the Monsanto Tribunal has shed light on.

Behind the public relations spin of helping to feed the world is the roll-out of an unsustainable model of agriculture based on highly profitable (GM) corporate seeds and massive money-spinning health- and environment-damaging proprietary chemical inputs that we now know lacked proper regulatory scrutiny and should never have been commercialised in the first place (VAN STRUM). In effect, transnational agribusiness companies have sought to marginalise alternative approaches to farming and create dependency on their products.

Localisation and traditional methods of food production have given way to globalised supply chains dominated by transnational companies policies and actions which have resulted in the destruction of habitat and livelihoods and the imposition of corporate-controlled, chemical-intensive (monocrop) agriculture that weds farmers and regions to a wholly exploitative system of neoliberal globalization. Whether it involves the undermining or destruction of what were once largely self-sufficient agrarian economies in Africa or the devastating impacts of soy cultivation in Argentina or palm oil production in Indonesia, transnational agribusiness and capitalism cannot be greenwashed.

Soil on a doughnut diet

One of the greatest natural assets that humankind has is soil. It can take 500 years to generate an inch of soil yet just a few generations to destroy. When you drench soil with proprietary synthetic chemicals, introduce company-patented genetically tampered crops or continuously monocrop as part of a corporate-controlled industrial farming system, you kill essential microbes, upset soil balance and end up feeding soil a limited “doughnut diet” of unhealthy inputs (and you also undermine soil’s unique capacity for carbon storage and its potential role in combatting climate change).

Armed with their synthetic biocides, this is what the transnational agritech companies do. In their arrogance (and ignorance), these companies claim to know what they are doing and attempt to get the public and various agencies to bow before the altar of corporate ‘science’ and its scientific priesthood.

But in reality, they have no real idea about the long-term impacts their actions have had on soil and its complex networks of microbes and microbiological processes. Soil microbiologists are themselves still trying to comprehend it all.

That much is clear in this article, where Brian Barth discusses a report by the American Society of Microbiologists (ASM). Acknowledging that farmers will need to produce 70 to 100 per cent more food to feed a projected nine billion humans by 2050, the introduction to the report states:

“Producing more food with fewer resources may seem too good to be true, but the world’s farmers have trillions of potential partners that can help achieve that ambitious goal. Those partners are microbes.”

Linda Kinkel of the University of Minnesota’s Department of Plant Pathology is reported by Barth as saying:

“We understand only a fraction of what microbes do to aid in plant growth.”

Microbes can help plants better tolerate extreme temperature fluctuations, saline soils and other challenges associated with climate change. For instance, Barth reports that microbiologists have learned to propagate a fungus that colonizes cassava plants and increases yields by up to 20 per cent. Its tiny tentacles extend far beyond the roots of the cassava to unlock phosphorus, nitrogen and sulphur in the soil and siphon it back to their host.

According to the article, a group of microbiologists have challenged themselves to bring about a 20 per cent increase in global food production and a 20 per cent decrease in fertilizer and pesticide use over the next 20 years – without all the snake oil-vending agribusiness interests in the middle.

Feeding the world? 

These microbiologists are correct. What is required is a shift away from what is increasingly regarded as discredited ‘green revolution’ ideology. The chemical-intensive green revolution has helped the drive towards greater monocropping and has resulted in less diverse diets and less nutritious foods. Its long-term impact has led to soil degradation and mineral imbalances, which in turn have adversely affected human health (see this report on India by botanist Stuart Newton – p.9 onward).

Adding weight to this argument, the authors of this paper from the International Journal of Environmental and Rural Development state (references in article):

“Cropping systems promoted by the green revolution have increased the food production but also resulted in reduced food-crop diversity and decreased availability of micronutrients. Micronutrient malnutrition is causing increased rates of chronic diseases (cancer, heart diseases, stroke, diabetes and osteoporosis) in many developing nations; more than 3 billion people are directly affected by the micronutrient deficiencies. Unbalanced use of mineral fertilizers and a decrease in the use of organic manure are the main causes of the nutrient deficiency in the regions where the cropping intensity is high.”

(Note: we should adopt a cautious approach when attributing increases in food production to the green revolution trechnology/practices).

The authors imply that the link between micronutrient deficiency in soil and human nutrition is increasingly regarded as important:

“Moreover, agricultural intensification requires an increased nutrient flow towards and greater uptake of nutrients by crops. Until now, micronutrient deficiency has mostly been addressed as a soil and, to a smaller extent, plant problem. Currently, it is being addressed as a human nutrition problem as well. Increasingly, soils and food systems are affected by micronutrients disorders, leading to reduced crop production and malnutrition and diseases in humans and plants. Conventionally, agriculture is taken as a food-production discipline and was considered a source of human nutrition; hence, in recent years many efforts have been made to improve the quality of food for the growing world population, particularly in the developing nations.”

Referring to India, Stuart Newton’s states:

“The answers to Indian agricultural productivity is not that of embracing the international, monopolistic, corporate-conglomerate promotion of chemically-dependent GM crops… India has to restore and nurture her depleted, abused soils and not harm them any further, with dubious chemical overload, which are endangering human and animal health.” (p24).

Newton provides insight into the importance of soils and their mineral compositions and links their depletion to the green revolution. In turn, these depleted soils cannot help but lead to mass malnourishment. This is quite revealing given that proponents of the green revolution claim it helped reduced malnutrition.

And Newton has a valid point. India is losing 5,334 million tonnes of soil every year due to soil erosion, much of which is attributed to the indiscreet and excessive use of fertilisers, insecticides and pesticides. The Indian Council of Agricultural Research reports that soil is become deficient in nutrients and fertility.

The US has possibly 60 years of farming left  due to soil degradation. The UK has possibly 100 harvests left in its soils.

We can carry on down the route of chemical-intensive (and soil-suffocating, nutritionally inferior GM crops), poisonous agriculture, where our health, soil and the wider environment from Punjab to the Gulf of Mexico continue to be sacrificed on the altar of corporate profit. Or we can shift to organic farming and agroecology and investment in indigenous models of agriculture as advocated by various high-level agencies and reports.

The increasingly globalised industrial food system that transnational agribusiness promotes is not feeding the world and is also responsible for some of the planet’s most pressing political, social and environmental crises – not least hunger and poverty. This system, the capitalism underpinning it and the corporations that fuel and profit from it are illegitimate and destructive.

These companies quite naturally roll-out their endless spin that we can’t afford to live without them. But we can no longer afford to live with them. As the UN’s special rapporteur on the right to food, Hilal Elver says:

“The power of the corporations over governments and over the scientific community is extremely important. If you want to deal with pesticides, you have to deal with the companies.”

As we currently see, part of ‘dealing’ with these corporations (and hopefully eventually their board members and those who masquerade as public servants but who act on their behalf) should involve the law courts.

Young doctor suicides point to deteriorating conditions in Australia’s health system

Ed Ballesteros

The tragic suicides of young doctors have highlighted the reality facing health professionals and other hospital workers. They are suffering from acute levels of physiological and psychological stress due to the dangerous conditions and excessive workloads produced by decades of cost-cutting measures by Australian state and federal governments.

In the state of New South Wales (NSW), three young physicians took their lives in the early months of this year. The most publicised case was 29-year-old podiatrist Chloe Abbott, a fourth-year doctor-in-training at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, who took her life in January. Speaking at a state government-sponsored conference on junior doctors’ mental health in June, Micaela Abbott said her sister was “eaten alive” by the medical profession.

“It’s absolutely devastating that this conversation was only generated after the loss of my sister, but we need to get these important changes in place,” Abbott said. “Chloe’s death can’t be a waste,” she said, referring to calls by her family to address the excessive hours junior doctors are forced to work, among other things.

Earlier, four junior doctors committed suicide in the state of Victoria at the beginning of 2015. A general medical intern working at Geelong Hospital died a week into his internship, while three psychiatric trainees working at St Vincent’s, the Austin and Frankston hospitals, died within weeks of each other.

In NSW, Health Minister Brad Hazzard admitted in March that coronial reports indicated that at least 20 doctors committed suicide in his state from 2007 to 2016, including two senior doctors and a medical student within the previous 20 months.

This terrible toll extends beyond doctors. In a study released last September, researchers from Deakin and Melbourne universities reported that women working in health professions have a rate of suicide more than twice that of women in other occupations. Suicide among female midwives and nurses was almost quadruple the average rate. Male nurses and midwives were almost twice as likely to commit suicide than men in other occupations.

In another report, published in 2015, the Victorian Coroners Prevention Unit found that suicide among paramedics was 35.6 per 100,000 people—almost four times higher than the average for all other jobs in Victoria.

Ostensible concern of governments for the well-being of health professionals is belied by funding cuts that have stretched public hospitals to breaking point. Waiting and treatment times in public hospital emergency departments have reached dangerous levels, due to federal health cuts under both Labor and Liberal-National governments since 2007.

As well as meeting the demands of the corporate elite for ever-deeper social spending cuts, the public hospital cutbacks are intended to coerce more people into paying for their own care, via private health insurance, driving up the profits of private hospital and health care companies.

The National Health Reform Agreement implemented by the former Labor government removed block funding for public hospitals and imposed “casemix” funding, based on each activity performed and nationally-set “efficiency” prices.

Casemix seeks to continually drive down the funding for each medical procedure. In effect, it financially penalises public hospitals, especially those treating working class, aged and psychiatric patients with complex problems and places pressure on health workers to push patients through hospitals in less time.

Same-day hospitalisations as a proportion of total hospitalisations almost doubled from 34 percent in 1994 to 59 percent in 2014, accompanied by a substantial drop in acute public bed- to-population ratios. Major public hospitals are often at overcapacity, resulting in “bed blocking” by emergency departments that can strand patients in ambulances.

The end result is that in 2017 more than half the registrars, interns and consultants in the public hospital system are working 78 hours a week, according to an Australian Medical Association (AMA) audit. The average number of hours a physician works in a shift is 18; intensive care physicians and surgeons have been recorded working unbroken shifts of between 53 and 76 hours.

Dr Tessa Kennedy from the AMA NSW Doctors in Training Committee told the junior doctors’ mental health conference in June: “Personally, I’ve worked back-to-back 16 hour shifts, 90-hour weeks and then gone home to study. I’ve felt unable to call in sick because there is no one to cover me.

“I’ve regularly stayed hours late to complete all tasks required for my patients, only to be told I can’t claim any overtime. I’ve caught myself falling asleep driving home from night shift at a rotation 90 kilometres from home … As the doctors in the room will tell you, there’s nothing remarkable about these stories.”

Such conditions help explain why one in five medical students and one in ten doctors have suicidal thoughts. And why four in ten medical students and one in four doctors suffer some form of depression or anxiety. These figures are drawn from a survey conducted on 14,000 doctors and medical students in 2013 by the beyondblue mental health advocacy group.

Doctors in training reported high rates of burnout measured across three domains covering emotional exhaustion (47.5 percent), low professional efficacy (17.6 percent) and high cynicism (45.8 percent). These were caused by excessive workloads (25.0 percent), responsibility at work (20.8 percent) and long work hours (19.5 percent).

This is an international trend. The Journal of the American Medical Association(JAMA) last December published similar results from a meta-analysis of approximately 180 studies conducted in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, South Korea, Sweden, the UK, the US and 33 other countries over the past three decades.

The study found the prevalence of depression or depressive symptoms among the 129,000 medical students surveyed averaged 27.7 percent. One in 10 reported suicidal thoughts. The study also drew on other research that found a high prevalence of depression (28.8 percent) among resident physicians, indicating that physicians at all levels of medical training were affected.

Health academics and the media generally seek to blame a damaging “culture” in the medical profession. Ute Vollmer-Conna, Associate Professor in Psychiatry at the University of NSW wrote in the Conversation last December: “Medical training continues to reinforce the idea that the profession is demanding and that doctors should be invincible and immune from the effects of stress.”

Programs, such as the Basic Physician Trainee OK pilot program at Sydney’s Royal Prince Alfred, have been initiated to “destigmatise” the notion of seeking help among medical professionals and introduce collective debriefing techniques to learn how to manage trauma and recognise signs of stress and burnout. These programs, however, do not alter the fundamental problem.

The toxic environment has not emerged out of the character traits of highly-trained health workers or a supposedly intrinsic culture of medicine. The “culture” often consists of unhealthy coping mechanisms by doctors and other health workers trying to deal with depleted staff and strained resources.

Papua New Guinea government deploys troops to quell opposition

Oscar Grenfell 

In an ominous attack on democratic rights, the newly-installed Papua New Guinea (PNG) government of Prime Minister Peter O’Neill announced last week that it will deploy additional military and police personnel to two provinces in the country’s remote Highlands region.

The move is part of a broader crackdown on widespread social and political opposition, which has intensified in the wake of last month’s national election. The polling was dominated by accusations that O’Neill’s People’s National Congress had engaged in dubious electoral practices, including outright fraud, in order to cling to office.

Troops and heavily armed police will be dispatched to Hela Province, and will conduct operations in the neighbouring Enga and Southern Highlands provinces. They will join hundreds of military personnel who were sent to Hela Province several months ago, on the pretext of combatting tribal violence.

Announcing the military call-out last Thursday, O’Neill cited reports that election-related violence, involving rival clans, had resulted in up to 20 deaths in Enga province. Fatalities and serious injuries have also occurred during clashes in the Southern Highlands.

O’Neill gave no indication of how many police and military personnel would be involved. His comments, however, indicated that the authorities are preparing a violent assault on opponents of the government.

“The behaviour we are witnessing by small groups is totally unacceptable,” O’Neill stated. He menacingly added: “I am issuing a very clear warning to people seeking to cause disruption, that you will be faced with the full effort of our disciplined services, arrested and tried for criminal acts.”

The trigger for the violence in Enga province was accusations that the dubious activities of electoral authorities were responsible for prominent opposition leader, Don Polye, losing the seat of Kandep. His supporters have claimed that as many as eight boxes containing ballots from villages supportive of Polye went missing, resulting in the victory of People’s National Congress candidate, Luke Manase.

Those claims are among a litany of accusations of electoral malpractice. These have included indications of bribery, ballot-box tampering and the wholesale omission of names from electoral rolls.

Following the closure of polls on July 8, after a two-week voting period, the entire Electoral Advisory Committee, an official watchdog body, resigned. They accused the Electoral Commission of denying them access to basic information relating to the ballot.

A detailed review of the election results by Sean Dorney, on the Australian-based Lowy Institute’s Interpreter site, raised the possibility of voter-fraud on a vast scale. Dorney noted, for instance, that 55 percent of all votes were cast in the Highlands, which, according to the 2011 census, accounted for just 39 percent of PNG’s total population.

The election has resulted in an O’Neill government that is widely viewed as illegitimate. Parliament was hastily reconvened on August 2 by Governor-General Bob Dadae, even though five of the parliament’s 111 seats had not yet been declared. Dadae had already invited O’Neill to form government on July 28, when as many as a quarter of electoral returns were still outstanding.

In parliament’s first sitting, O’Neill received 60 votes to form a new government, with 46 opposed. The result means that the government’s majority is substantially reduced, setting the stage for ongoing political crises.

Underlying the election turmoil, and widespread hostility to O’Neill’s government, is the deepening social crisis facing workers, young people and the poor throughout PNG.

Almost 40 percent of the country’s population subsists on less than $US1.25 a day. The previous O’Neill government imposed a deeply unpopular austerity agenda, which included cuts to health and education budgets of up to 40 percent in the 2016-17 financial year. Many public servants had their wages slashed, or were hardly paid at all, over that period.

In imposing this agenda, O’Neill’s government was responding to the dictates of the global corporate and financial elite for a stepped-up offensive against the social rights of workers and the poor.

The trigger was the precipitous fall in global commodity prices, which led to a decline in PNG’s economic growth from highs of over 14 percent in 2014, to just above 2 percent this year. The country’s debt has ballooned to K21.6 billion ($US6.8 billion), after the government borrowed K13 billion ($US4.1 billion) in the 12 months to June.

The new government has already indicated that it will intensify the social onslaught. On August 17, O’Neill spoke at a meeting attended by senior figures from PNG’s business establishment, and representatives of major multinational companies.

O’Neill foreshadowed a 2017 “mini-budget,” that would “make necessary adjustments to achieve the fiscal deficit target of this year’s budget.” In other words, the government will press ahead with attacks on education, health and other areas of social spending, negating O’Neill’s election promises.

O’Neill stated that his government would work closely with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, two of the key institutions of global finance, on a review of the “medium term fiscal strategy to ensure that our budgets are framed prudently.”

O’Neill also gave assurances that his government would not impose any, even nominal tax hikes on business. One newspaper, Loop PNG, summed up the tenor of the prime minister’s remarks by declaring that “investor confidence” had been “reaffirmed.”

While seeking to capitalise on the social opposition created by O’Neill’s pro-business policies, the opposition leaders, including Don Polye, have repeatedly signalled their support for the austerity agenda.

An opposition leader Mekere Morauta summed up the position of all of the opposition parties. Morauta, who oversaw the privatisation of state-owned enterprises and other pro-business policies when he was prime minister from 1999-2002, declared earlier this month that “budget repair” was the first task of the new government. He warned that it should not seek to downplay the country’s fiscal crisis.

The entire political establishment is aware the government’s pro-business program will provoke ever-greater anger.

The deployment of troops to the Highlands is a warning of how the government will respond to social protest and opposition from the working class and young people. O’Neill’s previous government oversaw substantial attacks on democratic rights, demonstrated most graphically last year by the police shooting at peaceful student protesters calling for his resignation.

Australia, which for decades controlled PNG as a colony, has already signalled its support for the new government. Foreign Minister Julie Bishop absurdly described the election as “successful” in a statement earlier this month, and declared that her government “looks forward” to working with O’Neill.

Australian authorities were directly implicated in the anti-democratic conduct of the elections. Two hundred Australian soldiers were dispatched to PNG in June to “assist” with the ballot.

Worsening hunger for older Americans

Gary Joad 

The growth of seniors who are food-insecure has seen a staggering growth in twenty-first century America. Some 14.7 percent of this age group are said to be food-insecure, totaling at least 9.8 million in the US senior population. Compared to 2001, this constitutes a rise of 37 percent, with the number of seniors increasing in the same period 109 percent.

In an update posted at Feeding America’s web site earlier this month, Professors James Ziliak from the University of Kentucky and Craig Gundersen from the University of Illinois confirmed this worsening hunger situation for Americans age 60 and over. According to the US Census Bureau, about 10,000 people a day turn age 60 in the United States, a trend that will continue through 2030.

Feeding America’s study, titled “The State of Senior Hunger in America 2015” (and updated this month), noted that the threat of hunger to older people was especially harsh in the South and Southwestern US. And the publication noted that economic hardship constituted the main reason seniors could not obtain sufficient food, despite the government’s declaration of an improved economy and the dramatic explosion of Wall Street stock valuations.

Angelo and Mina Maffucci posed for a portrait in the kitchen of their son’s apartment in 2015, where they’d been living for about five years—since they lost their house. (Photo: Ariel Min/PBS NewsHour) CREDIT: Kaiser Health News: "In Sunlit Paradise, Seniors Go Hungry” by Sarah Varney

The study also concluded that seniors living below the federally recognized poverty line have a 45.3 percent risk of hunger, and that the threat of food insecurity was significantly greater for elderly single adults than for marrieds. The threat of hunger was noted to be three times higher for the disabled elderly. If the seniors had grandchildren in the home, the risk of hunger was twice as high. The number of children living with their grandparents increased 64 percent between 1991 and 2009, to about 7.8 million. At the same time, the majority of hungry seniors live above the official poverty line, with nearly two-thirds reporting insufficient access to needed calories per day to remain healthy.

Almost three of four seniors facing hunger are white, and almost half of the retired seniors in the United States are today at risk for not having enough to eat. The top 10 states with the most persons at and over age 60 who are food-insecure are Mississippi, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Arkansas, New York, West Virginia, Indiana, Oklahoma and Georgia. The sharpest increase in all the groupings of elderly at risk for hunger came after the Great Recession of 2008-2009.

On August 12, 2014, the Annals of Emergency Medicine published the results of a two-month review of 138 senior citizens admitted to an emergency department in 2013 and noted that 60 percent were declared malnourished. The reasons included inability to buy food, poor dentition and depression.

Seniors the most food-insecure

Feeding America has referred to seniors as the most food-insecure segment of the US population, noting that one third of its food bank clients are over age 60. On the financial collapse of 2007-2008, Feeding America noted that more than half of its clients over the age of 65 appeared at food banks monthly, and that persons over the poverty line were often not eligible for the federal Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps, for food relief.

Feeding America considers SNAP, which suffers regular budgetary cutbacks, the first line of defense for all food-insecure persons.

The Feeding America studies also note that from 2001 to the present, hunger has cut into a younger and younger demographic, noting that in 2011, 65 percent of the elderly food bank visitors were under age 69. Between 2007 and 2011, the number of elderly food-insecure jumped 50 percent.

The Feeding America hunger study uses a questionnaire from the Current Population Survey (CPS) of the US Census Bureau, submitted to households each December using an 18-question survey focusing on the person’s experiences of food stress in the last 30 days and the previous 12 months. A 10-question survey is used for households without children. One to three positively answered questions categorizes a household as under food stress of varying degrees.

Data for the study was also utilized from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS/CDC), a subsidiary of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), wherein 5,000 persons, 50 percent children and 50 percent adults, with seniors purposely over-sampled, are interviewed and examined related to health.

The major findings for hungry seniors concluded that they were taking in 14 percent less iron and 12 percent less protein than their food-secure peers. Health outcomes included an increased risk of at least nine diseases, including a 53 percent increased risk of heart attacks, a 52 percent increased risk of asthma, a 40 percent increased risk of congestive heart failure, along with increased reporting of diabetes and hypertension. Depression unsurprisingly increased 60 percent with hunger. Also, the increased rate of falling and resulting injuries soared among the hungry and malnourished elderly. The measure of Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) fell dramatically, which includes eating, bathing, and dressing oneself independently.

Food insecurity exists in every county of the United States, from 3 percent in Grant County, Kansas, to 38 percent in Jefferson County, Mississippi. Poor households with children are hungry at a rate of 17 percent, and homes with a single mother are food-insecure at 30 percent; single men with children are at 22 percent.

As of 2015, 59 percent of food-insecure households participated in at least one of three federal relief food programs, including SNAP, the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC).

Feeding America provides food assistance to some 46.5 million people a year in the US, including 12 million children and 7 million seniors. Those assisted at Feeding America who also receive food stamps total about 55 percent, and 24 percent are getting food through the WIC program. Nearly all of the families, 94 percent, subscribe to the school lunch program. More than half of the persons receiving assistance had at least one employed person in the household. The median income for households is at $9,175.

550,000 very low food-secure seniors

About 48 million Americans live in food-insecure households, including 24.4 million people age 18 to 64 and 14.5 million children. The majority of people who are food-insecure, 57 percent, are not officially recognized by the US government as poor, which means living with an income below 100 percent of the federal poverty level. It is also estimated that almost 550,000 seniors are now essentially starving, with very low food security.

In 2013, one half of those on Medicare had an income below $23,500, or 200 percent of the federal poverty level of 2015. According to the US Census Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) in 2014, one out of seven persons over the age of 65 have incomes rendering them impoverished, including 45 percent of women over 65.

In a recent National Geographic article on “Hunger in America,” Janet Poppendieck, a sociologist at City University of New York, was quoted as saying, “Today more working people and their families are hungry because of wages that have declined.”

The article noted that more than half of the US hungry are white, and the total of over 48 million food-insecure people constituted a fivefold jump since the early 1960s, including a 57 percent increase since the early 1990s. The article noted that in the 1980s there existed just a few hundred food pantries in the US. Now, there are over 50,000. One in six persons runs short of food at least once a year in the US, compared to about one in 20 in the European Union.

By 2013, the federal food relief budget had reached $75 billion, or about $133.07 per hungry person a month, constituting less than $1.50 allotted for each meal, often referred to as a “minimum wage diet.” Moreover, hundreds of thousands of poor people in the US do not own or have access to a car, and live more than one half-mile from any source of food, if they had the money to buy it. In Houston, Texas, alone, at least 43,000 households reside in a so-called food desert.

As a global food availability specialist, Raj Patel, told National Geographic, “The problem can’t be solved by merely telling people to eat more fruits and vegetables, because at the heart of this [crisis] is a problem about wages, about poverty.”

Youth clashes with police in Paris suburbs point to explosive social tensions

Francis Dubois 

Clashes that erupted during an ID check last Thursday between police and youth at the Cité des 3000 urban estate in Aulnay-sous-Bois, northeast of Paris, point to enormous tensions in working class areas after two years of the French state of emergency and deepening social crisis. It was in this same neighborhood that, in February, the barbaric sexual assault by police of a 22-year-old named Théo provoked indignation across France.

During the ID check, provoked by suspicions by members of the Anti-Criminal Brigade (BAC) that “dealers” were being alerted of their presence, a youth refused to give his papers and then, with the aid of other residents, was able to flee. Policemen who tried to stop him were confronted by a large number of youth. Another group of several dozen people surrounded their car, which was guarded by a policewoman, whom they attacked. According to police, two weapons were stolen from the car: a gun firing rubber bullets and a taser-type revolver. A man reportedly fired rubber bullets at the police car with the gun, which was found on Sunday.

The press widely reported these incidents, exclusively citing police accounts. The courts rapidly swung into action: the local prosecutor’s office in Bobigny opened investigations for “assault and armed assault against individuals holding public authority,” as well as “coordinated theft and assault and degradation of public property.”

Since last Thursday, three youths aged 18 or 19 were arrested, and two are still in detention. One has been charged with “assault against individuals holding public authority” and released. Another is reportedly “implicated in the initial acts of violence against the two policemen.” The last person arrested, on Monday, is reportedly the youth who refused to give his papers.

In the same location, during a similar ID check six months ago, police had sexually assaulted a Théo, a resident of the same estate, causing a 10cm injury to the rectum that required an emergency operation. A few days later, hundreds of people marched in the neighborhood to demand “justice for Théo.” Inhabitants of the area criticized in the press daily harassment of youth in that estate by the police forces.

Numerous protests took place across France in the weeks after police sexually assaulted Théo, on slogans such as “Don't forgive, don't forget,” “Rapist cops in jail,” or “It’s impunity and injustice, so disarm the police.” The official investigation into the sexual assault of Théo is still underway, and social tensions in Aulnay are explosive.

At the time of the first protest against the assault of Théo, Abdallah Benjana, a former assistant of the Aulnay mayor, commented: “I have the impression that the population feels humiliated. All the youth in that neighborhood want is peace and quiet. What is the point of what was done? To spark something? Isn't there enough dry powder in these neighborhoods? There is unemployment, insecurity, high rents, no perspective for the future. If you do that to a youth, the only thing you will get is an explosion.”

Aulnay-sous-Bois exemplifies the social attacks that working class suburbs have suffered under a succession of governments, of the Socialist Party (PS) as of the right, over the last 30 years. The Cité des 3000 was originally built to house workers at the Citroën (PSA) plant at Aulnay. The urban estates in the north of the city housed 24,000 people, or a third of the city's population, concentrated on only four percent of its territory.

The closure of PSA-Aulnay in 2013 devastated the area. It could take place only because the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) isolated PSA-Aulnay workers in order to prevent a broader automobile strike that would have threatened the PS government of President François Hollande. The unemployment rate at Aulnay is 16.7 percent (30 percent for workers aged 19 to 30). Three years after the closure of PSA-Aulnay, many laid off workers still have no work and are running out of unemployment benefits, at €480 per month.

Newly elected President Emmanuel Macron's plan for working-class suburbs, aiming to “favor entrepreneurs,” only demonstrates his hostility to inhabitants of these suburbs.

In the legislative district including Aulnay-sous-Bois, abstention in the run-off of the legislative election reached 67.5 percent. Since 3.4 percent of voters went to the voting booths to cast blank or spoiled ballots, only 29 percent of registered voters in the area actually cast a vote in the elections. In 2012, 63 percent of voters in this district had voted for the PS and Hollande in the second round of the presidential elections.

Social inequality is exploding in Europe as around the world, and inhabitants of large impoverished estates are ever more hostile to their situation, which is correctly seen as a war of the rich against the poor. As the reaction of the London population to the social murder of the Grenfell inferno shows, those responsible for the disaster—whose victims the authorities have until now refused to count precisely—are clearly seen as the super-rich and their state agencies.

There is rising opposition to police brutality internationally. Workers, whether they live in Chicago, London, or Paris, increasingly see harassment, intimidation, and police brutality more and more as measures of class repression aimed at the population.

As the recent Aulnay incident shows, attempts at resistance to police harassment rapidly turn under these conditions into a political confrontation between the population and the state.

Polish government demands war reparations from Germany

Clara Weiss

The Polish government of the Law and Justice party (PiS) announced earlier this month that it would demand reparations from Germany for the massive damage done to the country under the Nazi occupation in World War II. Just a few days earlier, the European Union had initiated legal proceedings against Poland which could result in the country losing its voting rights in the EU. The developing conflict is symptomatic of the renewed eruption of national conflicts in Europe, which led to two world wars in the 20th century.

During World War II, some six million Poles (about 20 percent of the population) lost their lives under Nazi occupation, including over three million Polish Jews. Over 200,000 Polish civilians were killed just during the destruction of Warsaw in the summer of 1944 by the German Wehrmacht. Millions of Polish workers were employed as forced laborers in the German war economy.

Polish vice prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki has stated tht it was “clear” that the “historical accounts” had “not been settled. Our neighbors, especially the Germans, massacred Poland. I am not just talking about the six million Polish lives that were taken. Not even one percent of this was compensated.”

For decades, Berlin has been rejecting demands for reparations from Poland as well as from numerous other European countries. The German government’s vice press secretary Ulrike Demmer declared that the question of reparations to Poland had been settled, both legally and politically. Last year, former foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier had similarly stated that any kind of reparation payments to Poland were out of the question.

In rejecting any demands for reparations, the German government is basing itself on contracts from 1953 and, particularly, the so called “Treaty of Good Neighborship” between Poland and Germany from 1991. The payments which occurred based on this agreement are absurdly low. Germany paid only 750 million Deutsche Marks (about 375 million Euros) directly as reparations, in addition to a few billion Euros paid to former forced laborers. This starkly contrasts with the actual material damage that Poland suffered under the Nazi occupation, which the Polish government estimated to amount to some $850 billion right after the war.

Politicians of the ruling PiS party have repeatedly raised the issue of reparations in the past. However, previous social democratic and liberal governments deliberately avoided advancing such demands, as they are politically explosive. Thus, former Polish president Aleksander Kwaśniewski warned back in 2004: “If we were to invoice [the reparations] we would indeed destroy united Europe.”

The fact that PiS is now taking up the issue in such an aggressive manner is indicative of the renewed eruption of fundamental geopolitical conflicts between Germany and Poland. Especially since the inauguration of US president Donald Trump and in light of the growing tensions between Washington and Berlin, the relations between Warsaw and Berlin have considerably deteriorated, while the domestic political crisis in Poland has deepened.

During his visit to Poland in early July, Trump signalled open support for the so called Three Seas Initiative, a thinly veiled revival of the Intermarium project. With this project, the PiS is seeking to build an alliance of Eastern and Central European states that would be directed against both Russia and Germany.

However, the Polish bourgeoisie is deeply divided over this issue. The liberal opposition is oriented toward the EU and particularly Germany, Poland’s most important trading partner.

Donald Tusk, Poland’s former president and an influential figure in the liberal opposition party Civic Platform (PO), is playing a central role in the EU’s maneuvers against the PiS government. Only a few months ago, Tusk was reelected as the president of the European Council against the opposition of the PiS government. He is considered a close ally of German chancellor Angela Merkel.

On a formal level, the legal proceedings are directed against bills providing for changes to the country’s judicial system, which the PiS introduced in the wake of Trump’s visit. By subordinating the judiciary to the government, these bills implement the de facto end of the division of powers in Poland.

In Brussels, Tusk said of the EU’s proceedings against Poland: “Today, there is a big question mark over Poland’s European future.” Further, he cautioned that Poland could soon announce “that it does not need the European Union and that the European Union does not need Poland. I’m afraid that this moment is now drawing closer.”

For about two years, the liberal opposition has been leading a protest movement against the abolition of the separation of powers and other reactionary measures of the PiS-government, such as the undermining of the right of abortion. It is supported by sections of the urban middle class who see their future bound up with that of the EU.

In contrast, the PiS represents a wing of the Polish bourgeoisie that insists on national independence and is, for this purpose, seeking a closer alliance with Washington. To prop up its policies, the PiS is trying to mobilize layers in the rural regions and sections of the working class which have particularly suffered from the neoliberal policies of Brussels and Berlin.

The EU is exploiting the conflicts within the Polish bourgeoisie and the opposition to the dictatorial measures by the PiS to step up the pressure on the Polish government.

At this point, cracks are beginning to show within the government camp. President Andrzej Duda, who was long considered a mere puppet of Jarosław Kaczyński, the head of the PiS, vetoed two of the PiS’s judicial bills, and is now in a public feud with justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro. Several members of the government and PiS have publicly supported Duda’s steps and the PiS leadership is now fearing that the president could try and build his own movement with their support.

For all the rhetoric, what is involved for the EU is neither the “rule of law” nor “democracy. ” Rather, vicious conflicts are taking place, behind closed doors, over Poland’s foreign policy orientation.

What the EU really thinks of democracy was proven not least of all in Greece, where it pushed through brutal austerity diktats against massive protests and a referendum voicing the opposition of the majority of the population. And when it comes to undermining democratic rights and building a powerful surveillance and police apparatus, Brussels is well ahead of Warsaw.

Brussels and Berlin view with great concern the emerging alliance between the right-wing PiS government and the Trump administration in Washington. The latter is now openly backing the construction of a political and military alliance in Eastern Europe under Poland’s leadership.

The Intermarium-style alliance envisioned by the PiS would create military and political structures that are independent from the EU. The Polish government’s demands for German reparations are not least of all aimed at mobilizing the support of nationalist forces within Poland to support this policy.

The liberal opposition is oriented toward Germany and the EU and rejects this policy. The liberal Newsweek Polska, which is owned by the German publishing house Axel Springer, condemned the whipping up of “anti-German resentment” through the PiS as “extremely irresponsible and fundamentally stupid.”

The conservative newspaper Rzeczpospolita, which cautioned in an earlier commentary against an exclusive orientation toward the United States, also rejected the demands for reparations. While acknowledging that they were “morally justified,” the newspaper warned of deteriorating relations with Berlin. Further, the editors commented: “Yes, Donald Trump, who spoke so nicely about us in Warsaw, is on the other side of the ocean. But that’s precisely the problem. He is on the other side of the ocean, and recently he has been looking mostly toward Asia.... ”

The Three Seas Initiative was “interesting,” the newspaper wrote, but: “It is enough to take a look at the structure of Polish exports to notice that our current economic relations with this region are extremely loose...” On a political and military level too, the ties are rather poor, it observed.

Therefore, according to Rzeczpospolita, “an institutionalization of the Three Seas Initiative can only be realized within the framework of the EU. ” However, the PiS’s policy toward Germany, the editors stated, was undermining such a possibility. The commentary cited a well-known statement by the authoritarian inter-war dictator of Poland, Józef Piłsudski, who declared that Poland could not simultaneously fight Germany and Russia without losing its independence, and concluded: “Let’s be frank: it doesn’t look good [for us].”