The pianist Igor Levit and the defense of culture against fascism

David North & Clara Weiss

The 33-year-old Russian-German pianist Igor Levit ranks among the most important pianists and musicians of his generation. His brilliance does not consist merely of a flawless technique, which is more or less expected of keyboard artists in an age when pianists are so intensively trained that it often said, and only partly in jest, that they never learn how to make a mistake. Levit’s musical reputation rests on his immense interpretative imagination, which combines emotional subtlety with great intellectual depth. His recent recording of Beethoven’s 32 sonatas—works that stand at the pinnacle of human culture and which impose upon pianists the greatest physical and mental demands—has been welcomed enthusiastically by critics and the public throughout the world.

Russian-German pianist Igor Levit plays in Leipzig, Germany in 2018 (AP Photo/Jens Meyer)

Levit’s view of art as a force for enlightenment and human solidarity has won him the respect and affection of a global audience. During the first months of the pandemic, Levit initiated an extraordinary series of nightly “Twitter concerts,” streamed live. For more than 50 evenings in a row, Levit gave concerts that could be freely watched all over the world. He introduced each concert with a brief explanation of the significance of the compositions that were to be performed. Levit’s Twitter concerts attracted audiences that numbered in the tens of thousands.

This great artist is also active in left-wing politics. A portrait of the pianist published in the New Yorker this past May noted: “Other pianists of Levit’s generation may have achieved wider mass-market fame … but none have comparable stature as a cultural or even a political figure. In German-speaking countries, Levit is a familiar face not only to classical-music fans but also to a broader population that shares his leftist, internationalist world view.”

Levit has emerged as a powerful voice against the resurgence of neo-Nazism in Germany, which finds its most putrid expression in the growing political power of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). As a consequence of its elevation within the Bundestag—the German parliament—to the rank of official opposition party, fascism is once against being promoted by the political elites as a legitimate political force. Within this increasingly reactionary environment, neo-Nazi violence—accompanied by anti-Semitism and violent attacks on Jews—is becoming commonplace.

Levit, who is Jewish, began receiving anti-Semitic death threats last year. He refused to be intimidated and has continued to denounce neo-Nazi violence. Following an attack on a Jewish student in Hamburg on October 4, Levit tweeted: “so tired. So, so tired. And so angry.” On the following day, he tweeted: “Yesterday: Hamburg. Today: phrases. Never again hashtags. As always. Simply tiring. Fatiguing.” On October 9, Levit sent out another Twitter message: “How very, very tired this time makes you…” And on October 10, Levit wrote: “Hardly anything is more tiring these days than reading the news.”

Levit’s tweets, read by thousands, was more than the AfD and its sympathizers and apologists in the media could stand. Last Friday, October 16, Germany’s leading liberal newspaper, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), published a filthy attack on the pianist, cynically titled “Levit is tired.” The piece, by Helmut Mauró, employed literary tropes and stereotypes whose distinctly anti-Semitic connotations are immediately obvious to a German public.

Mauró began by contrasting Levit’s “theatrical pathos” to the Russian pianist Dmitri Trifonov, who “plays in an entirely different league.” Every musically educated German, familiar with Richard Wagner’s disgusting anti-Semitic tirades against Jewish musicians, knows exactly what is being implied by Mauró. Lacking genuine national roots, according to this trope, the Jew is incapable of achieving the emotional depth of a genuine Russian. (It should be noted that Trifonov, a wonderful pianist in his own right, bears no responsibility for the misuse of his name by Mauró.)

After a brief complaint about Levit’s “legato,” Mauró gets to the real source of his anger. Levit’s prominence is not due to any musical talent, but, rather, to his “connections” and his public political stance. Moreover, Levit’s denunciations of the right and anti-Semitism in Germany are part of an “ideology of claiming victimhood” and “downright emotional excesses.”

Mauró seems to have forgotten—or, more likely, he resents being reminded—that the German government in power between 1933 and 1945 organized the industrial murder of six million Jews. He proceeds to question whether Levit’s political tweets should be taken seriously. The death threats received by Levit are not mentioned. But Mauró bitterly recalls Levit’s remark in an interview published in Der Spiegel that “Germany has a contempt-for-mankind problem.” How dare he!

Finally, after denouncing the tweets about the attack in Hamburg, Mauró contrasts Levit’s political concerns to a recent tweet by Trifonov, who had informed his readers that he is playing the music of Prokofiev. How much more appropriate that is, Mauró implies, than Levit publicly complaining about a Jew being attacked in Hamburg.

The message of the piece could not be clearer: If the Jewish artist Levit does not like the fact that the AfD is sitting in the German parliament and that anti-Semitic terrorist attacks are again on the agenda in Germany, he should keep it to himself. And, the article implies, there is no place for him at the highest level of the classical music scene anyway.

Mauró’s article evokes memories of the persecution and denunciation of Jewish artists by the fascist thugs of the 1920s and 30s. Countless Jewish artists and intellectuals were forced to flee the country after the Nazi seizure of power; those who stayed were virtually all murdered in the Holocaust.

The public backlash against Mauró and the SZ has been enormous. On social media, countless users, including public figures but also many readers of the SZ and classical music lovers, denounced the piece as a vicious attack on Levit that was reeking of anti-Semitism. The Bayerischer Rundfunk, one of the most important classical music radio stations, published a principled response, pointing to the anti-Semitic connotation of the piece and stating that it had crossed all borders of what can be considered legitimate musical criticism.

After an initial statement in which the Sueddeutsche Zeitung’s editor-in-chief backed Mauro’s attack on Levit, the newspaper published on Tuesday a public apology “to Levit and readers of the SZ.” The newspaper acknowledged that an overwhelming number of its readers and a substantial portion of its own editorial board felt that the text was, in fact, “anti-Semitic.” Why then, it must be asked, was it published in the first place?

The retreat by the Sueddeutsche Zeitung has outraged two other major establishment newspapers. The editor-in-chief of the right-wing Die Welt, Ulf Poschardt, declared on Wednesday that the public controversy over Levit was a “culture war.” He accused the Sueddeutsche Zeitung of having bowed before “the first violins of the Jacobin orchestra” and the “Twitter brigade of a new left-wing thought police.” “Open season” is being declared on “right-wing figures who dare to contradict,” he fumed. Similarly, the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung echoed Mauró’s denunciations of Levit and accused the Sueddeutsche of caving in to “the pressure of the masses.”

The denunciations of Levit are reminiscent of the attacks by these same outlets on the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (SGP, the German sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International) and its youth organization, the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) which have opposed the rehabilitation of Adolf Hitler by prominent academics like Jörg Baberowski. The warnings that the SGP has issued since 2014 have been fully confirmed: the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland poses a real and growing danger to democratic rights and culture.

This growth of fascist forces in Germany is the product of a conscious political operation by the ruling class and a conspiracy at the highest level of the state. There is a stark contrast between the reactionary attack on Levit organized by powerful media outlets and the massive public defense of the beloved artist.

The attack on Levit has a political and cultural significance that extends beyond Germany. The ruling class fears socially-conscious and politically engaged artists who seek to raise the cultural level of the working class.

Levit has become the target of the right not just because of his political stance. His efforts to make the works of Beethoven and other composers accessible to broad layers of the population and thereby increase interest in culture as a whole is viewed by the ruling class not just with suspicion, but considered a threat.

Moreover, with his focus on works by composers like Beethoven, who was profoundly influenced by the French Revolution, and Frederic Rzewski’s, The People United Will Never Be Defeated, a piece on the CIA-backed 1973 coup in Chile, Igor Levit expresses a shift to the left and a turn toward politically serious thought among the most advanced sections of the cultural intelligentsia. It is this development, and its intersection with a growing movement by the working class, that the neo-fascists and the ruling class in Germany hate and fear.

For the revolutionary socialist movement, the fight for the full political emancipation of the working class and its cultural enlightenment are inseparably connected. Nowhere has this been as clearly demonstrated as in Germany, where the Marxist working-class movement emerged out of a process of profound political, intellectual and cultural progress which encompassed not just the scientific breakthroughs of Marx and Engels, but also the great works of their philosophical and cultural predecessors.

Beginning with Heinrich Heine, who was a friend of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and Ferdinand Freiligrath, major cultural figures have always had close ties to the revolutionary movement. The Nazis’ assault on the German working class and its organizations was accompanied by a barbarous destruction of all genuine culture and cultural figures.

The courage of Igor Levit and the support he has received from thousands of German working people and youth should encourage and inspire other artists to follow his example.

Discussing the relation between the crisis of bourgeois society and the arts in 1938, Leon Trotsky noted, “Art can neither escape the crisis nor partition itself off. Art cannot save itself. It will rot away inevitably—as Grecian art rotted beneath the ruins of a culture founded on slavery—unless present-day society is able to rebuild itself. This task is essentially revolutionary in character.”

These words resonate powerfully today, as the pandemic and the crisis of world capitalism have thrown the very survival of major cultural institutions and countless artists into question, while the bourgeoisie is moving to dismantle all remaining social, democratic and cultural rights of the working class.

Venezuela: Could rebellion in the ranks spell trouble for Maduro?

Federico Fuentes

Venezuela is no stranger to protests, registering thousands of demonstrations, rallies and strikes each year. As of October 1, about 7000 protests had occurred this year (roughly 25 a day), according to the Venezuelan Observatory of Social Conflicts.

Unlike before, these protests have by and large not taken place in right-wing opposition strongholds nor necessarily demanded the removal of President Nicolas Maduro.

Instead, they have focused on demands around access to basic services — electricity, domestic gas, water — and occurred in areas that traditionally voted for former socialist president Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s predecessor.

Differing from the “protests of the rich” of past years, Unitary Chavista Socialist League (LUCHAS) spokesperson Stalin Pérez Borges told Green Left Venezuela is witnessing a rise in “protests of the poor, driven by the difficult situation people face.” Their targets, in most cases, have been officials aligned with Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV).

United Left general coordinator Feliz Velasquez agrees. He told GL these protests were “very different from the protests we had in Venezuela in 2014 or 2017, which were violent protests seeking to bring down the government.

“Today, what we have are largely peaceful protests by popular sectors, organised sectors, including in some cases entire small communities, that, faced with the crisis affecting basic services, have decided to protest.”

Growing dissent

These types of protests are not entirely new. Nor are their causes.

Atenea Jiménez, from the National Network of Commune Activists (RNC), spoke to GL in early 2019 about a wave of protests that had taken place in January that year in some barrios (poor neighbourhoods) across Caracas, “including some that have historically been very [pro-Chávez]”.

This year saw a small outbreak of largely spontaneous riots and looting in April in some small towns across the country.

Once again, regional towns are the epicentre of the protests.

Neglected for decades by traditional parties, Venezuela’s countryside became — alongside the barrios — Chávez’s strongest base of support.

Life there was radically transformed under Chávez pro-poor Bolivarian revolution through the rapid expansion of education, healthcare and basic services. Important initiatives in promoting cooperatives, communes and community-owned productive enterprises also took root.

However, eight years after his death, it is here where the reversals of the revolution have been felt the most.

The Maduro government has been keenly focused on keeping the lights on and the water running in large cities — above all in the capital, Caracas. When this has failed, authorities have at times relied on state repression, and even armed thugs, to quell dissent.

But in regional towns, residents can often go days without basic services. Fed up with this situation, popular movements are taking to the streets.

Root causes

Jonatan Vargas, a member of the international relations team of Bolívar and Zamora Revolutionary Current (CRBZ), which is active inside the PSUV, told GL the crisis in basic services is “due to the economic, commercial and financial blockade that US imperialism has unilaterally imposed on Venezuela.”

Since 2014, the US has whacked more than 40 unilateral sanctions on Venezuela, in an attempt to strangle the South American country’s economy and bring down Maduro. These measures have cost Venezuela an estimated US$116 billion hit to its economy and more than 40,000 lives.

Vargas adds the crisis is also due to “the internal contradictions of the process … inefficiency, ineffectiveness, bureaucratism, indolence and corruption.”

An example of how these factors have combined to affect the country is the state oil company PDVSA, “the heart of the Venezuelan economy”.

“PDVSA has been a victim of the blockade. Its US-based affiliate CITGO, which used to supply the additives needed to process oil into petrol in Venezuela, was seized by the US government in 2019 and handed over to the imperialist puppet, Juan Guaido, in an act of blatant piracy and theft.”

Then-National Assembly president Guaido proclaimed himself Venezuela’s “interim president” in January 2019. Since then, the US has used this excuse to transfer any Venezuelan state assets and wealth it can get its hands on to Guaido and his supporters.

As a result, Venezuela has stopped producing petrol, triggering a dramatic shortage that has affected everything from daily public and private transport to agricultural production. The petrol crisis was the biggest single source of discontent in September, accounting for more than 400 protests.

“At the same time” Vargas said, “PDVSA has been the victim of internal corruption, with various former company presidents and directors having been found guilty of corruption.”

Along with basic services, there is also the issue of workers’ wages. September registered a daily average of nine protests or strikes demanding better wages.

Hyperinflation, another weapon alongside sanctions in the economic war against Venezuela, has meant workers’ wages have plummeted, leaving most essential goods out of reach for the majority.

“Right now, Venezuela has the lowest wages in the world,” Velasquez said. “A teacher, a professional, a university academic does not earn more than $2-3 a month, which of course creates a lot of hardship when a kilo of rice can cost $1.”

What this means, says Pérez Borges, is that “people have to dedicate all their time, not just to their job but to doing everything they can to help their family survive. This has become the main preoccupation of everyday life.”

COVID-19 has made all this even more difficult. While the government’s measures to contain the pandemic have been largely successful, measures such as lockdowns have made things harder for those who have to move around to buy or sell goods in the informal market to make ends meet, said Velasquez.

Right-wing opposition

Asked about opposition involvement in the protests, Vargas said divisions on the right had largely prevented it from playing any significant role.

The ultra-right faction, which has been dominant within the opposition since Maduro won the 2013 elections, has lost support due to its acts of terrorist violence in the 2014 and 2017 protests and the failure of Guaido’s strategy, Vargas explained.

This has converted them into “a minority with no connection to the popular masses.”

Velasquez added that an important section of the opposition had recently decided to break with the ultra right’s strategy of violence and pursue “its own strategy, which includes participating in the upcoming [December 6 National Assembly] elections”.

“All this has led to divisions within the opposition that have impeded it from being able to appropriate the protests for themselves.

“We saw this with the recent protest by education workers. The opposition called on people to converge in one place, but the unions decided to gather elsewhere and had a much larger demonstration.

“Like other unions, they do not want to be used by the opposition; they do not want their protests to be politicised or used by political actors.”

Another example of this was the protests in Urachiche, Yaracuy, in September.

Pérez Borges explains: “There, a peaceful protest was called by a local radio presenter and leader of the [pro-revolution] Tupamaros movement. The aim of the protest was to peacefully march and present a series of demands and solutions to local [PSUV] authorities.

“The mobilisation was very large, much larger than anything the opposition could mobilise. But the opposition began to tweet photos of the protests, saying it was them marching in the streets against the government, even though they had nothing to do with it.

“The opposition then tried to call another protest the next day, but all they could muster was a tiny group of people who set the local mayor’s office on fire in an attempt to generate greater violence.

“So you can see these were two distinct moments: first, a mass, peaceful popular protest; and then an attempt by the opposition to use that first moment for its own purposes, because they cannot mobilise people as they have lost credibility, including within their own base.”

Opening divisions

How should the left respond to these protests? In some cases, PSUV authorities have done so with repression, claiming those behind the protests represented a threat to the revolution.

Vargas notes, far from being part of a nationwide revolt against the revolution, these protests “remain disconnected from each other and are specific protests, in certain areas around particular demands and problems that people are facing.”

He believes revolutionaries have to “accompany the legitimate protests and just demands of the people, organise together with them, accumulate force and jointly come up with solutions to improve peoples’ quality of life.”

Vargas said the left has to always be on alert for attempts by the opposition to use peoples’ legitimate demands to promote violence and destabilise the country. But it also has to systematically fight corruption and transform the public powers, starting at the local level.

“These are structural problems that have not yet been resolved, but whose existence has been recognised by Maduro.” Resolving them, though, will be critical to empowering the people and constructing “a more democratic and participatory state”.

Can the Maduro government be an instrument in this fight, or has it become an obstacle to overcome? While a majority of pro-revolution forces — particularly those in the PSUV, by far the largest single political party in the country — continue to back the president, the numbers of those questioning the direction Maduro is taking the country is growing.

Velazquez — whose organisation is part of an alliance of left parties and movements running candidates against the PSUV in the coming election — believes there has been a shift in the government’s approach between Chávez and Maduro. “Chávez always sought consultation, debate. He always asked people to present proposals for overcoming problems and was willing to correct mistakes, learn together with the people.

“The style of government we have now is very different”, he said. The Maduro government has an “aristocratic vision of doing politics, where the government thinks they are the owners of the truth, that they are a government of the best, for the rest.

“This vision of politics has led them to discredit the views and opinions of other political movements, to ignore peoples’ needs and demands.”

US Alliance Covid-19 Gerocide – Intentional Mass Killing Of Elderly By US Alliance Countries

Gideon Polya

With the exception of decent New Zealand and arguably Australia, the rich, European countries of the US Alliance have been involved in  deliberate, intentional Gerocide in which their sustained, deliberate, Covid-19 pandemic policies resulted in overwhelmingly elderly “Covid-19 deaths per million of population” that were 10-180 times greater than that obtaining in New Zealand. Indict Trump and Johnson for Gerocide before the ICC!

In the Covid-19 pandemic to date about 41 million infections with the coronavirus have been detected, 31 million people have recovered, and over 1.1 million people have died worldwide. Developed  countries have had the resources to deal with the pandemic, and to develop better medical treatment protocols, medicines and, we all hope, vaccines  for protecting Humanity and allowing full economic activity to resume. However there have been huge differences in the Covid-19 death toll in Developed countries.

The countries with the lowest “Covid-19 deaths per million of population” (Covid-19 deaths/M) are notably those of East Asia, specifically (Covid-19 deaths/M in brackets) Taiwan (0.3),  China (3), Singapore (5), South Korea (9), Japan (13), and Hong Kong (14), countries notable for Confucianism-influenced cultures involving personal and collective discipline, and respect for the elderly. The only substantially European country with a Covid-19 deaths/M outcome similar to that of the East Asian countries is New Zealand with a 5 Covid-19 deaths per million of population.

In contrast, US Alliance North American and Western European countries have vastly greater “Covid-19 deaths per million of population”, to whit (Covid-19 deaths/M in brackets as of 20 October 2020): Norway (46), Germany (118),  Denmark (118), Canada (258), Netherlands (395), France (515), Italy (606), UK (643), US (649), Spain (727), and Belgium (897).

A significant outlier in this tragic  story has been the substantially European and US allied country of Australia with 30 Covid-19 deaths/M as compared to 5 for its culturally similar  neighbour,  New Zealand. Until May 2020  Australia had a similar outcome to New Zealand with only 4  Covid-19 deaths per million of population. However in the Australian state of Victoria a number of Federal and State Government blunders  meant that a “second wave” of Covid-19 occurred with a large proportion of these new Covid-19 deaths occurring among residents of Aged Care homes.

In short, the Australian Federal Government has key responsibility for quarantine (keeping traveler-borne Covid-19 out of island continent Australia) and for Aged Care (notably in Federal Government-funded Aged care nursing homes). Nevertheless, while aware of these responsibilities, the disproportionately high danger to elderly people of Covid-19, and the danger of a “second wave” of infection, the incompetent, anti-science and neoliberal Australian Coalition Government led by PM Scott “Scomo” Morrison, allowed a “second wave” to occur in Victoria. The State Government in a pervasive neoliberal environment  hired private security firms to supervise international travelers in quarantine in luxury hotels in Melbourne, but a judge-lead formal Inquiry has yet to discover who actually made the fatal decision – it seems to have somehow morphed into existence in an environment in which the “private sector” is firmly believed to do things more efficiently than the “public sector”. In the event the disease escaped due to slack security, and rapidly spread, notably into poor and vulnerable communities. Privately-owned, and for-profit but Federally subsidized Aged Care homes were particularly vulnerable, and were responsible for most of the “second wave” of Covid-19 deaths. The “second wave” spread was assisted by poverty, under-payment of casual part-time workers, and poverty-impacted non-compliance with public health instructions.

Crucially, the “second wave” in Victoria , Australia, was finally defeated over a period of about 6 months by severe ”Stage 4 lockdown” supervised by Labor Premier Daniel Andrews. Premier Dan Andrews has indefatigably  presided over daily press conferences, exhorting Victorians to obey the social distancing rules  (compulsory masks,  hand sanitizer user, no inter-person touching, a 1.5 meter inter-person spacing distance, only 1 hour of exercise daily, confinement to home except for exercise, shopping  or medical reasons, a circa 9 pm to 5 am curfew, a 5 kilometer limit to travel), and to get tested for Covid-19 infection with the slightest of symptoms. Massive testing (about 10,000-20,000 PCR-based tests daily), extensive contact tracing, and huge fines for violations finally got daily new cases down to 1 (and indeed possibly zero) in Victoria (population 6.5 million) on 20 October 2020,  as compared to an utterly shocking 23,331 new cases on the same day for the UK (population 68.0 million).

However “lockdown” at varying levels of severity has come at a huge economic cost for Victoria and for Australia as a whole. Indeed the Coalition Opposition has labelled the Premier Daniel Andrews as “Dictator Dan”,  and kept up a litany of carping abuse throughout the “second wave” rather than critically examining State measures and Federal responsibilities (actions that might actually have prevented the “second wave”). There is huge pressure on the Victorian Labor State Government from the neoliberal Right to prematurely lift a ban on “non-essential” business activities. Similar “livelihoods versus lives” pressure has lead to over 1.1million Covid-19 deaths around the world with 95% of the deaths being 50 and over people in the US and Australia.

(1). Genocide (intentional killing in whole or in part) and Gerocide (intentional killing of the elderly).

The horrible reality is that about 95% of Covid-19 deaths occur in people over the age of 50. Thus 94.5% of  Covid-19 deaths in the US (May-August 2020) were of 50 and over people. Over 95% of Covid-19 deaths were 50 or older in Australia.  Conversely, in Australia 33.7% of detected cases have been in 50 or older people, and  66.3% in younger than 50 people] (young people get out and about more than the elderly).

Lockdown stops the spread of the coronavirus and disproportionately  protects the elderly from Covid-19 death. However lockdown comes at an enormous economic cost. Thus the IMF estimates  that the economic cost to the World of Covid-19 over 2 years will be $9 trillion. Accordingly, there has been huge pressure against lockdown from the politically dominant One Percenters (notably excepting prosperous medical professionals who are on the dangerous front-line in the fight against Covid-19). This “livelihoods versus lives” campaign has been most blatant in the US as exampled by anti-science President Donald Trump and his fervent Racist Religious Right Republican (R4) supporters. Science-based rational risk management that is crucial for societal security successively involves (a) accurate information, (b) scientific analysis involving the critical testing of potentially falsifiable hypotheses, and (c)  informed systemic change  to minimize harm when mistakes inevitably happen. However Trump’s deadly anti-science record is most succinctly summarized in the carefully researched statistic that he made 20,000 false or misleading claims during his administration.

Genocide is defined by Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention thus: “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”.

However Gerocide can be similarly defined as the intentional killing of old people. Thus Italian physicians Adriana Servello and Evaristo Ettorre in a letter to the “Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics” (2020): “[The Covid-19] Outbreak has quickly became the fastest and most subtle “Gerocide” that our history as a highly developed country has ever experienced…. Our hospitals have experienced moments of extreme difficulty, in which care and assistance seemed to be never enough. In those tragic moments, we have suddenly understood that chronological data matter again, even if only in terms of access to treatment in a situation which is a real catastrophe. We have realized that our fathers, mothers, colleagues, teachers, companions and patients are the most exposed and considered the most expendable part of the population, the part that the young population had previously struggled to protect and preserve. A dramatic, unwanted, silent “Gerocide” has taken place, which will surely leave a deep and incurable wound in the ethical conscience of contemporary physicians, who have been taught to heal, operate and treat as long as possible”.

Gerocide is not just emergency doctors in overwhelmed hospitals having to make distressing ethical triage choices about applying scarce resources to saving the lives of younger people more likely to benefit from the treatment and survive. Gerocide  is also involved in the clearly intentional political choices (notably in North America and Western Europe) between the economy and the lives of old people in a Covid-19 pandemic.

For these rich, mostly European countries one can assess “avoidable Covid-19  deaths” (95% people of 50 years and older) as a result of political choices by using New Zealand  as a base-line i.e. by pragmatically and conservatively assuming that for a rich,  mostly European country the New Zealand outcome  of 5 Covid-19 deaths per million of population is as “good as it gets”. This analysis is set out below for (A) Anglosphere countries of the “5-Eyes” intelligence-sharing club (New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the UK and US), and (B) Western European allies of the US.

(A). Gerocide in the Anglosphere “5-eyes” Intelligence Club.

New Zealand: population 5.0 million, 25 deaths , and  5 deaths/million of population i.e. as good as it gets for European countries and zero (0) New Zealanders  killed  by the Jacinda Ardern Labor Government.

Australia: population 25.6 million, 905 deaths, 35 deaths/million, and 30 avoidable deaths per million  i.e. 30 x 25.6 = 768 Australians killed through incompetence by the US lackey, pro-nuclear weapons,  and neoliberal Australian Coalition Government.

Canada: population 37.8 million, 9,778 deaths, 258 deaths/million, and 253 avoidable deaths/million i.e. 253 x 37.8 =  9,563  Canadians killed by the US lackey, pro-nuclear weapons, and neoliberal Trudeau Canadian Government.

UK: (population 68.0 million, 43,726 deaths, 643 deaths/million, and 638 avoidable deaths /million i.e. 638 x 68.0 =  43,384 Brits killed by the US lackey, neoliberal, and nuclear terrorist Johnson Tory UK Government.

US: (population 331.6 million, 225,170 deaths, 679 deaths/million, and  674 avoidable deaths/million  i.e.  674 x 331.6 = 223,498 Americans killed by the neoliberal and nuclear terrorist Trump Administration.

(B). America’s Western European NATO Allies.

Norway: population 5.4 million, 278 deaths, 51 deaths/million, and 46 avoidable deaths/million i.e. 46 x 5.4  = 248 Norwegians killed by the US-allied Norwegian Government.

Germany: population 83.9 million, 9,896 deaths, 118 deaths/million, and 113 avoidable deaths/million i.e. 113 x 83.9  = 9,481Germans killed by the US-allied Merkel German Government.

Denmark: population 5.8 million, 686 deaths, 118 deaths/million, and 113 avoidable deaths/million i.e. 113 x 5.8  = 655 Danes killed by the US-allied Danish Government.

Netherlands: population 17.1 million, 5,918 deaths, 395 deaths/million, and 390 avoidable deaths/million i.e. 390 x 17.1  = 6,669 Dutch killed by the US-allied Netherlands Government.

France: population 65.3 million, 33,623 deaths, 515 deaths/million, and 510 avoidable deaths/million i.e. 510 x 65.3 = 33,303 French killed by the US-allied, nuclear terrorist Macron French Government.

Italy: population 60.4 million, 36,616 deaths, 606 deaths/million, and 601 avoidable deaths/million i.e. 601 x 60.4 = 36,003 Italians killed by the US-allied Italian Government.

Spain: population 46.8 million, 33,992 deaths, 727 deaths/million, and 722 avoidable deaths/million i.e. 727 x 46.8  = 34,024 Spaniards killed by the US-allied  Spanish Government.

Belgium: population 11.6 million, 10,413 deaths, 897 deaths/million, and 892 avoidable deaths/million i.e. 892 x 11.6 = 10,394  Belgians killed by the US-allied Belgian Government.

(2). Genocide, Gerocide and preparedness to do evil.

(1). Neutral Sweden has had  no lockdown policy with the following outcome – Sweden: population 10.1 million, 5,918 deaths, 585 deaths/million, and 580 avoidable deaths/million i.e. 580 x 10.1  = 5,858 Swedes killed by the neutral Swedish Government. The culturally similar Danes and Norwegians did have  some lockdown measures and had “Covid-19 deaths per million” values of 51 and 118, 11 times and 5 times better, respectively, than that for Sweden (585 deaths/M, similar to the 679 deaths/M  for the US).

(2). Nuclear terrorist Apartheid Israel is a covert member of the serial war criminal “5-Eyes Club” (e.g. the US shares raw intelligence on Australians with Apartheid Israel) and had lockdown measures with the following outcome – Apartheid Israel: population 9.2 million, 2,263 deaths, 246 deaths/million, and 241 avoidable deaths/million i.e. 241 x 9.2 = 2,217 Israelis killed by the US-allied, nuclear terrorist, war criminal  Netanyahu Israeli Government. The Occupied Palestinians have been in a form of highly  abusive lockdown in the 53 years since 1967, whether the presently 2 million in the Gaza Concentration Camp or the 3 million in Israeli military-guarded West Bank ghettoes. The outcome for the Occupied Palestinians – Occupied Palestine: population 5.1 million, 421 deaths, 83 deaths/million, and 78 avoidable deaths/million i.e. 78 x 5.1 = 398 Occupied Palestinians killed by the US-allied, nuclear terrorist Apartheid Israeli Government. To put this imposed Apartheid Israeli Gerocide in context, in the 21st century Apartheid Israel has violently killed an average of about 550 Occupied Palestinians each year, and a further 4,200 Occupied Palestinians have died avoidably from egregious deprivation each year. The ongoing Palestinian Genocide has involved 2.2 million Palestinian deaths from violence, 0.1 million, or from imposed deprivation, 2.1 million, since the British invasion of the Middle East in WW1.

(3). Nation-wide in Australia, 683/904 = 75.6% of Covid-19 deaths were in Aged Care facilities. In Victoria 653/817 = 79.9% of Covid-19 deaths  were in Aged Care facilities. Border Control, quarantine and the private, for-profit Aged Care homes are a responsibility of the Australian Federal Government, but the incompetent, anti-science Australian Federal Coalition Government under PM Scott “Scomo” Morrison failed in all 3 key areas. However, while the Coalition is anti-science in relation to climate change (Australia is among world leaders in 16 areas of climate criminality and indeed ranks worst in the world in 2020 for Climate Policy ) it at least took top medical advice over the Covid-19 pandemic. Further, outstanding human rights advocate Professor Gillian Triggs has commented: “[The Coalition Government] is ideologically opposed to human rights”, noting that the right to life is the most fundamental of  human rights. Racist Australian Government policies ensure a continuing 10 year life expectancy gap between White Australians and Indigenous Australians. Under the racist and pro-Apartheid Coalition Government Australia is second only to Trump America as a supporter of Apartheid Israel and hence of Apartheid (there is a 10 year life expectancy gap between Occupier Israelis and the Occupied Indigenous Palestinian.

(4).  The Anglosphere 5-Eyes Club members (with the notable and laudable exception of decent New Zealand) are intimately  involved in nuclear terrorism. Thus the UK and the US have nuclear weapons, the US has actually used them to kill 200,000 mainly women, children and elderly in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 (a huge Gerocide), and US lackeys Australia and Canada are  intimately involved in US nuclear terrorism.  New Zealand was effectively expelled from the ANZUS Treaty (Australia New Zealand and US Treaty) because  it objected to nuclear weapons-bearing US vessels in its ports. Decent New Zealand also voted for the UN General Assembly Nuclear Weapons ban (opposed by the other 5-Eyes Club members). The upper  estimates of stored  nuclear weapons  are as follows: US (7,315), Russia (8,000), Apartheid Israel (400), France (300), UK (250), China (250), Pakistan (120), India (100), and North Korea (less than 10). India, Pakistan and North Korea have not ratified the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Australia is key to US nuclear terrorism, and was critical in the UK developing nuclear weapons and missile delivery systems.

(5). More Genocide and Gerocide – the US, US-allied Western European NATO countries, Canada, Australia and New Zealand  have variously been involved in the US-imposed post-9-11 Muslim Holocaust and  Muslim Genocide in which 32 million Muslims have died from violence, 5 million, or from imposed deprivation, 27 million, in  20 countries invaded by the US Alliance since the US Government’s 9-11 false flag atrocity that killed 3,000 people.

(6). UK Gerocide exposed –  Conor Burke: “According to the data there have been 66,000 deaths of care home residents in England and Wales between 2 March and 12 June this year, compared to just under 37,000 deaths last year – as reported by the BBC. Twenty thousand of those deaths mentioned COVID-19 on the death certificate but another 10,000 of the excess deaths were registered to other, non-COVID related causes”. Thus  of  29,000 Aged Care home excess deaths in the Covid-19 pandemic only 20,000 were specifically registered as directly due to Covid-19 but a further 9,000 were indirectly Covid-19-related. Thus UK Covid-19 deaths should be more properly accounted as 44,000 + 9,000 = 53,000 Covid-19 deaths.

Final comments and conclusions

With the exception of decent New Zealand and arguably Australia, the rich, mostly European ethnicity countries of the US Alliance have been involved in  deliberate, intentional Gerocide in which their sustained, deliberate, Covid-19 pandemic policies resulted in “Covid-19 deaths per million of population” that are 10-180 times greater than that obtaining in New Zealand. Through incompetence and failure to properly fund and protect Age Care homes, Australia has ended up with 35 “Covid-19 deaths per million of population”, 7 times greater than for New Zealand.

One can speculate about why East Asian countries and New Zealand have had such successful outcomes in the Covid-19 pandemic. Thus the East  Asian countries have a strong Confucian culture of personal and collective discipline and respect for the elderly. Notwithstanding involvements in UK and thence US imperial wars, New Zealand (Aotearoa) is opposed to nuclear terrorism, has found ultimately respectful accommodation with the Indigenous Maori people, and indeed signed a Treaty with the Maori (the Treaty of Waitangi, 1840). In contrast,  Australia fervently supports nuclear terrorism, and has yet to sign a Treaty with its Indigenous People. Fundamentally, New Zealand has a much greater sense of intra-national and international altruism as exemplified by the conspicuous empathy of its globally-admired PM Jacinda Ardern. To people who say “We want politicians like Jacinda Ardern” , feminist humanitarians reply “Vote for them!”

Notwithstanding theoretical  free speech (but not effective free speech) in  the One Percenter-dominated ostensible democracies of the US Alliance, a Google Search for the term “Gerocide” yields a mere 1,700 results. Expression of a deliberate intention to cause avoidable death of large numbers of people, and specifically of elderly people (Gerocide), would be unacceptable in politically correct (PC) Western democracies. But, unspoken and publicly unacknowledged, Gerocide is what has been happening  in North America and Western Europe during the Covid-19 pandemic. US President Donald Trump and UK PM Boris Johnson should be arraigned for Gerocide before the International Criminal Court.

UK government steps up attacks on asylum seekers and refugees

Julia Callaghan

The Johnson government is escalating its attacks on the democratic rights of refugees and asylum seekers fleeing military, environmental, and economic devastation.

Coordination with Europe on “processing” asylum seekers will almost certainly cease when Brexit takes effect at the end of this year. Currently, the European Union’s (EU) Dublin Regulation allows Britain to return migrants to the European country they are deemed to have first arrived in. Without this agreement, under international law, whoever arrives in Britain has a right to stay until their asylum claim is processed.

A Border Force vessel brings a group of people thought to be migrants into the port city of Dover, England, from small boats, Saturday Aug. 8, 2020. The British government says it will strengthen border measures as calm summer weather has prompted a record number of people to attempt the risky sea crossing in small vessels, from northern France to England. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

The Conservative government has no intention of upholding the fundamental “right to asylum” section of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted in the aftermath of the Second World War. The Tories are busy putting together plans to deport migrant people as soon as they arrive. Proposals being considered include detaining them on disused ferries, disused North Sea oil platforms, or on remote islands thousands of miles away.

All options are being carefully costed and the implications assessed, with the Guardian reporting that a government source said new policies would be rolled out “to ‘discourage’ and ‘deter’ migrants from entering the UK illegally.” Legal advice to the government seen by the Guardian notes that the proposals would require “disapplying sections 77 and 78 of the Nationality Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 so that asylum seekers can be removed from the UK while their claim or appeal is pending.”

At the end of September the government stepped up its drive to deport asylum seekers, with many receiving a letter declaring that as a “failed asylum seeker” they would be evicted from the hotel accommodation they had been provided with during the pandemic. The letter from the Home Office stated that any support they received would end on October 7 and they had to take “all reasonable steps to leave the United Kingdom. If you do not take reasonable steps to leave you face action to enforce your departure.”

Thousands of asylum seekers were provided with hotel accommodation during the pandemic, with the Home Office reviewing up to 3,000 cases for possible eviction.

Due to the “hostile environment” already established by Tory-led governments over the last 10 years, in 2019 the UK offered protection—in the form of asylum, humanitarian protection, alternative forms of leave and resettlement—to just 20,703 people. Per head of population, the UK came 19th in the number of asylum claims in the EU.

Many already kicked out of hotels are being sent into even worse accommodation, threatening their wellbeing, safety, and health. Last week, at least one asylum seeker housed in the former Napier army Barracks near Folkestone in Kent tested positive for coronavirus. More than 400 asylum seekers are being detained there. Referring to comments of a charity worker, the Guardian reported, “[T]here were about 32 men in each dormitory, 16 on each side of the room in close quarters. Screens had only recently been fitted between the beds, they said.”

Home Secretary Priti Patel (left) and Prime Minster Boris Johnson (Credit: Hannah McKay Pool via AP)

On September 7, a man with a large knife entered a London law firm—whose name has not been made public--and launched what was described as a “violent, racist attack” injuring a member of staff. The person allegedly had in the bag on his person a confederate flag and far-right literature. The Law Society informed Conservative Home Secretary Priti Patel that they believed her diatribe, made only days before the attack, against “activist lawyers” who defend the rights of asylum seekers, was a main factor behind the attack. A document, including witness statement on the attack noted, “Responsibility and accountability for this attack, in the eyes of this firm, lies squarely at the feet of Priti Patel.”

The law firm wrote to the Law Society saying that Patel must end her “deliberately inflammatory rhetoric”, before, “innocent lives are taken and irreparable damage done to those who work in this field.”

Patel responded by doubling down on her rhetoric, denouncing at the Tory party conference “do-gooders” and “lefty lawyers” who are “defending the indefensible”. Prime Minister Boris Johnson followed up saying the criminal justice system was “being hamstrung by lefty human rights lawyers.”

These statements have strong echoes of US President Donald Trump’s method of “dog-whistling” to call his fascist base to action and are a chilling warning of the direction of travel in the ongoing assault on democratic rights.

Stoking up animosity to asylum seekers is taking place across the political divide. Earlier this month Labour peer Lord West, Baron West of Spithead, a retired Royal Navy admiral, said of asylum seekers during a BBC radio interview, “We can arrest as many as we like. Until we resolve the way we deal with them in this country and get agreement from France and other European nations to take them back then we’re stuck with them, and we need to deal with them in a concentrated place, whether it’s a camp or whatever.”

Many of these desperate, destitute people have had their homes demolished and lives destroyed by wars, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which Lord West played a prominent role as head of the Royal Navy at the time. Following his period as First Sea Lord, West was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Security and Counter-Terrorism at the Home Office in Gordon Brown’s Labour government.

West’s call for the building of concentration camps went unchallenged by the interviewer, compounding the outrage expressed by many on social media. One tweet read, “Horrendous broadcasting this morning as Admiral Lord Alan West of Spithead proposed in all seriousness Concentration Camps for Channel migrants prior to deportation without any challenge whatsoever. This was utterly despicable.” Another said, “How wicked to use this phrase that stirs up memories of atrocities, and to even make the suggestion. Vile, disgusting, evil.”

As well as referencing the horrors of the 20th century, others pointed to atrocities taking place today. “There are concentration camps, right now, in the USA where thousands of children have died from preventable diseases due to neglect, poor treatment and lack of medical care. That’s what Lord West is calling for because that’s what these camps always result in.”

Making a half-apology, West said later, “I was trying to get across the point that working with other EU nations will help resolve this.”

Migrants sleep on the road near the Moria refugee camp on the northeastern island of Lesbos, Greece, September 10, 2020

European leaders agree with Lord West’s thinking of how to “deal with” the refugees they are “stuck with”. The Moria Reception and Identification Centre in Lesvos, Greece was built to house 2,800 people. By the time it burned to the ground last month, it housed 13,000 in inhumane conditions—nearly five times its capacity. Jean Ziegler of the committee of experts advising the UN Human Rights Council described Moria last year as “the recreation of a concentration camp on European soil.”

The newly built “Moria 2.0” is just as unbearable, with residents say they are living “worse than animals”. With poor sanitation and little access to water, residents are forced to wash their bodies and clothes in the sea. Queues for food and provisions stretch endlessly. Tents offer barely any protection from the weather. Those designed for one family are shared by several, and single men, often victims of torture, are packed inside large 200-capacity tents. Live ammunition lies on the ground of the camp, a former shooting range, easily found by the vulnerable children who live there.

The new temporary refugee camp is seen from above on the northeastern island of Lesbos, Greece, Thursday, Sept. 17, 2020. (AP Photo/Panagiotis Balaskas)

Reflecting on the abysmal conditions, Carmen Dupont from Lesvos Solidarity, a charity working on the island, said, “There seems to be a very clear agenda linked to the migration pact and the European Union’s direction, which is of containment. Keeping people trapped and locked in inhumane camps in hellish conditions and at the same time, erasing and closing the dignified shelters that exist.”

In the UK and every country immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers are been used as scapegoats to shift the blame for the social ills of the failing capitalist system and to divide the working class. Workers in Britain must come to the defense of refugees and asylum seekers. The only way to end wars, environmental destruction and economic ruin that threatens entire populations and forces millions from their homes is though the struggle for socialism, encompassing all sections of the international working class.

Workers’ struggles grow as Turkish government pursues “herd immunity” policy

Ulaş Ateşçi

COVID-19 pandemic continues to surge in Turkey due to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government decision to effectively embrace a “herd immunity” policy since early June. Though they deliberately downplay the extent of the pandemic by various means including not reporting asymptomatic cases they detect, authorities recorded more than 2,000 COVID-19 cases for the first time in five months on Monday. The daily death toll also continued to increase, with 75 deaths.

After the government admitted in early October that it deliberately downplayed the COVID-19 pandemic in order to impose a “herd immunity” policy, there is no longer any trust within the working population in coronavirus data released by the Health Ministry.

The government’s back-to-work and back-to-school drive has been supported by bourgeois opposition parties and their allies in the trade unions. However, this homicidal policy provokes growing anger and protests among workers and youth.

Turkish Medical Association (TTB) chairwoman Dr. Şebnem Korur Fincancı stated on Monday that “although there are no exact data,” as of last month, a total of 900 health care workers had resigned from their jobs during the pandemic. At the same press conference, a doctor from the Psychiatric Association of Turkey, Kerem Laçiner, emphasized that health care workers worldwide suffer from COVID-19 disease 14 times more often than the general population.

The TTB announced Sunday that five health care workers have tragically lost their lives from COVID-19 in just the last 24 hours, increasing the death toll among them to more than 110. Nearly 40,000 health care workers have been infected in Turkey.

A group of health care workers holding petitions for resignation from the union in their hands. (Credit: @cumhuraltekin on Twitter)

As the government hides the situation and refuses all demands for lockdowns amid a raging pandemic, the class struggle is intensifying in Turkey amid a developing international movement in the working class against the global herd immunity strategy of the ruling class. Many signs confirm the prediction made by the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) in July: “The first half of the year has been dominated by the response of the ruling class to the pandemic. The response of the working class will come to the forefront in the second half.”

Amid an international wave of unrest among health care workers who have launched protests recently in France and Spain, anger is rising among Turkish health care workers against not only the state’s response to the pandemic, but also the trade unions’ reactionary collaboration with this homicidal policy. A movement is developing among health workers to resign from these corrupt unions. There have been hundreds of resignations in recent weeks.

They are resigning in protest at the lack of measures to contain the pandemic, unbearable working conditions, poverty wages barely over the minimum wage, the lack of bonuses and the violence they suffered in health care facilities. They used the hashtags “Health workers can also be without a union,” and “There is no trust in unions” on Twitter.

As another sign of a growing movement of health care workers to fight, on Monday, medicine students from Istanbul University Cerrahpaşa, Faculty of Medicine began to boycott the university cafeteria. They are demanding better quality food for students and the provision of food free of charge for intern physicians.

Growing working class militancy is not limited to health care workers. On October 12, hundreds of miners and their families from the districts of Ermenek and Soma tried to march to Ankara to demand their detained wages, compensations and other benefits owed for years. They were blocked and attacked by police and gendarmerie forces. More than 30 miners in Soma were detained on Saturday after having been kept for seven hours.

Soma saw the worst mining disaster in Turkey’s history, killing 301 miners in a May, 2014, mining massacre, which led to mass protests against the government, the company and their co-conspirators in unions across Turkey. The World Socialist Web Site stated at that time: “It was not an unexplainable ‘accident’ but the inevitable result of privatization, government neglect and the capitalist profit system, which sacrifices the lives and limbs of millions of industrial workers around the world every year.”

Today, as hundreds of miners and their families struggle to demand unpaid compensation and are attacked by police forces, the criminals responsible for this disaster, including the mine’s owners and their co-conspirators in the government, roam freely outside.

On the other hand, nearly 550 workers at Şişecam Soda Sanayi A.Ş factories in the city of Mersin stopped work in defiance of the government, which banned the legal strike action on October 9 for 60 days, claiming it harms general health and threatens national security. In the last 17 years, the Erdoğan government has banned 17 separate strike actions involving nearly 200,000 workers.

Contract negotiations failed in September, as workers rejected an offer including a pittance of a wage increase and a one-day cut in weekly vacations. A strike was scheduled for October 9, involving 550 workers. However, the company first forced all workers to take annual leave and then sent them home on unpaid leave. This unpaid leave, set up in a bipartisan law adopted after the pandemic, forces workers to survive on only 1,170 liras (€125) monthly.

Unpaid leave has increasingly become a weapon in the hands of the ruling class, as millions of workers have been forced to take it since the pandemic began. Forty-five workers at the Swedish-owned Systemair HSK Ventilation Industry factory in Kocaeli were forced on unpaid leave after they joined the Birleşik Metal-İş union of the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions (DİSK). These workers began protesting this attack in front of the workplace on Monday.

Moreover, municipal workers of Kadıköy and Kartal districts of Istanbul, which are controlled by the bourgeois opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), announced a strike next week after the contract talks between the local administration and a DİSK-affiliated trade union ended without agreement.

However, DİSK’s record shows that workers cannot trust this pro-CHP bureaucracy to fight the pandemic and for their rights. In March, it declared that it might invoke the constitutional right to not work in unsafe conditions. However, to this day it has called no strikes on this basis. Today, it is isolating the Systemair and municipality workers and will do its best to continue this, paving the way for defeat.

Canadian autoworkers’ union rams through job-cutting agreement with Fiat-Chrysler despite strong worker opposition

Roger Jordan

Unifor announced Monday that it has successfully rammed through a three-year agreement at Fiat-Chrysler (FCA) in the face of widespread skepticism and strong opposition among rank-and-file workers. Although the deal was approved by a vote of 78 percent to 22 percent, it was supported by just 59.7 percent of production workers and 57.2 percent of skilled trades at the Brampton Assembly Plant, FCA’s second largest Canadian facility.

The overwhelming support for the agreement from workers at the company’s Windsor Assembly Plant (86 percent from production and 89 percent from skilled trades respectively) reflected Unifor’s touting of a more than billion-dollar investment in the facility that the union claims will secure its future. FCA has pledged to invest between C$1.35 billion and C$1.5 billion to upgrade the Windsor plant to build hybrid and electric vehicles from 2024.

Jerry Dias (Credit: OFL Communications Department/Wikimedia Commons)

Unifor President Jerry Dias claims the plant’s retooling will create up to 2,000 jobs. However, many questions remain about the deal’s implementation, and it all depends on FCA securing hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies from the federal Liberal and Ontario Conservative governments, so as to ensure the plant’s “global corporate competitiveness”—that is, lavish investor payouts.

FCA’s letter of intent to Unifor, which was shared with workers as part of its “highlights” brochure, sums up the uncertainty that remains over the automaker’s plans. FCA asserted that any investments would be predicated on “competitive operational practices” and “appropriate government financial support to build a strong viable business case for future investments.” The letter then continued by stating that all investments “are subject to the two key conditions in the preceding paragraph and, as always, to market demand, consumer preferences, company business plan requirements, group executive committee approval and economic conditions.”

In other words, FCA has a free hand to scale back, delay, or outright cancel its investments for a whole number of reasons. Moreover, in the name of preventing this and boosting “the business case” for the investments to proceed, Unifor could, as it has done in the past, reopen the agreement and impose further concessions. Aside from the obvious references to “market conditions” and “economic conditions,” it is worth drawing special attention to the mention of “group executive committee approval.” With FCA set to merge with France’s PSA Group early next year, a global restructuring plan involving the destruction of thousands of jobs will be rapidly formulated by the auto bosses to eliminate “excess capacity” and “product duplication.”

Moreover, the FCA contract, like the deal concluded at Ford Canada, has provisions aimed at pressuring higher-paid legacy workers to retire and contains no protection against a vast expansion of low-paid, temporary part-time labour (TPTs) when the company’s operations ramp up in Windsor. FCA and Unifor agreed to offer retirement incentives to 350 workers in early 2021, including 275 production workers and 15 skilled trades in Brampton. This equates to a reduction of the current 3,400-strong workforce in Brampton of more than 8 percent.

Retirement packages have also been boosted to C$60,000 for production workers and C$70,000 for skilled trades throughout the life of the agreement.

Dias touted as many as 2,000 “new jobs” in Windsor four or more years hence. However, his calculations glossed over the fact that the workforce there was cut by 1,500 when the automaker eliminated the third shift last July, and that 425 workers remain on indefinite layoff.

Even if Dias’s pledge of 2,000 new jobs in 2024 comes true, by allowing the automakers to systematically expand their use of TPTs and perpetuating the hated multi-tier wage system, under which workers must work a full eight years before reaching full pay, Unifor has ensured that FCA will be able to profit until well into the 2030s from a large low-paid workforce.

Behind the hype about the large investment in Windsor, few details were provided on whether production will continue there at its present level throughout the life of the new agreement. If, for example, FCA decides to cut back production due to poor sales of its minivan models, an even larger number of higher-paid legacy workers could be forced out by the combined efforts of FCA and Unifor to make way for low-paid new hires and TPTs.

To secure passage of yet another concessionary contract, Unifor relied on a C$7,250 signing bonus, and modest wage increases of 5 percent over the three-year contract that will see workers’ pay stagnate at best when inflation is taken into account. The union’s promises of job security, no matter how tenuous and flim-flam, also no doubt had an impact among the Windsor workers under conditions in which millions have lost their jobs across Canada due to the pandemic.

FCA workers who spoke to the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter revealed that Unifor and Dias’s main concern at the ratification meeting, which was held online due to the pandemic, was to suppress any sign of opposition to the deal from rank-and-file workers. A veteran Windsor worker stated that workers were prevented from asking questions in real-time. Instead, they could only type the questions into the Zoom conference, provided they knew how to use it, and wait for the union bureaucrats to read them out. Predictably enough, a question he submitted criticizing the union was ignored.

Other members asked questions about pension rights, apprenticeship hiring, and the prospect of the alternative work schedule (AWS), which was introduced as part of the “pattern agreement” Unifor forced through at Ford Canada . The AWS does away with the eight-hour day and most overtime pay, and allows management to force workers to perform shifts of up to 12 hours. Unifor officials insisted that the AWS was a Ford-only issue and will not be introduced at FCA. This reassurance should be treated critically, bearing in mind that Unifor, in connivance with the company, hid from workers that it had agreed to AWS’s implementation at Ford Canada until the agreement was ratified late last month.

Another worker at Brampton told the Newsletter that Unifor officials were extremely concerned about a large “No” vote in the plant. They sought to persuade workers to vote “Yes” by claiming that six-day work weeks would continue at their plant and that more could be secured in the 2023 bargaining round when the Windsor facility has been saved.

Autoworkers also denounced Unifor’s pro-corporate strategy in a series of angry comments posted online. A Ford worker attacked Unifor’s imposition of major concessions, writing, “Ford lost overtime pay after 8 hours and shifts can be increased to 10.5 hour Mon. to Thurs. plus 10 on Friday and mandatory Saturdays. There will be a loss of thousands of full time jobs. Influx of more TPT’s, co-op, and students. 3 tiers of pay, 8 year grow-in. No gains for retirees, vacations, sub, or pensions. ‘Historic’ according to Jerry [Dias].”

“You’re supposed to be for the workers not management,” wrote a Windsor FCA worker. “It’s the same in both plants. Union sleeping with the management again. When is the union ever going to be for the workers again? Those days are lost. The union needs management so we can keep paying dues for nothing. And management needs the union to force us to do what management wants.”

This assessment is entirely accurate. Based on its corporatist, Canadian nationalist perspective, which accepts that workers’ jobs and livelihoods must be subordinated to investor profit, Unifor is conniving with the globally mobile automakers and big business federal and provincial governments to restructure the auto industry at workers’ expense. Dias’s disgusting boasts in the “highlights” brochure about “game-changing investments” and how “Canada has become a forerunner in green cars and green jobs” only goes to show that his principal concerns are the profitability and global “competitiveness” of corporate Canada and his close working relationship with the Trudeau Liberals and Doug Ford’s Conservatives.

But these developments are not just a matter of Dias personally. Over the past three decades, Unifor and its predecessor, the Canadian Autoworkers, and its US counterpart, the United Auto Workers (UAW), have participated in the whip-sawing of jobs and benefits back and forth across national borders in a race to the bottom, and suppressed rank-and-file opposition to plant shutdowns. The most recent example of this in Canada was Unifor’s bogus Save Oshawa GM campaign, during which the union suppressed all job action and promoted anti-Mexican chauvinism, before accepting a “closure agreement” that eliminated all but a few hundred jobs.

The attacks on autoworkers imposed by Unifor in the current bargaining round confirm once again that the struggle to defend decent-paying, secure jobs for all must be waged by the workers themselves. They must organize independent rank-and-file committees in the plants to seize control of the remaining bargaining round at GM and take up a fight to overturn all layoffs and other concessions across the Detroit Three’s operations. Above all, these committees must unify the struggles of Canadian, American, and Mexican autoworkers into an international worker counter-offensive against the transitional automakers, their big business allies in government, and the pro-company unions’ attempts to divide them along national lines and pit them against each other.