New revelations of FBI and New York police conspiracy in the assassination of Malcolm X

Fred Mazelis

The family of Malcolm X held a news conference on Saturday, February 20, to reveal the deathbed confession of an undercover police officer about his involvement in a New York Police Department (NYPD) and FBI conspiracy to assassinate the famous black nationalist leader.

Raymond Wood was an undercover cop with the NYPD for seven years in the 1960s and early 1970s. In 2011, after a cancer diagnosis and when he believed he was near death, he composed a letter explaining his role at the time of the assassination. He asked his cousin, Reginald Wood, to reveal the contents of the letter only after his death, which did not take place until nearly ten years later.

The elder Wood wrote, “I was a black New York City undercover police officer between May of 1964 through May of 1971. I participated in actions that in hindsight were deplorable and detrimental to my own black people. … Under the direction of my handlers, I was told to encourage leaders and members of the civil rights groups to commit felonious acts.”

Malcolm X waiting for a press conference to begin on March 26, 1964 (U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection, Library of Congress)

Wood specifically recounted that his superiors instructed him to involve two of Malcolm X’s key bodyguards in “a felonious federal crime so that they could be arrested by the FBI and kept away from managing Malcolm X’s door security on Feb. 21, 1965,” at the public meeting where Malcolm X was killed. “At that time, I was not aware that Malcolm X was the target,” Wood wrote. The two men on the security detail were charged in connection with a phony plot to bomb the Statue of Liberty. They were taken into custody days before the event.

Last weekend’s news conference took place at the site of the old Audubon Ballroom in upper Manhattan, only one day before the 56th anniversary of the killing of Malcolm X as he began to speak to the assembled audience on that Sunday afternoon. The site has since been partially restored as the Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz Memorial and Education Center.

In attendance this past Saturday were three of Malcolm X’s six daughters. The meeting was opened by Benjamin Crump, the attorney who represented the family of Trayvon Martin following his death at the hands of self-styled vigilante George Zimmerman in 2013, and who has since been prominent in many investigations of police violence, including the deaths of Michael Brown and George Floyd. The family is calling for a full probe. Ilyasah Shabazz, one of Malcolm X’s daughters, told the news conference, “Any evidence that provides greater insight into the truth behind that terrible tragedy should be thoroughly investigated.”

It has long been widely and very strongly suspected that both the NYPD and the FBI had a hand in the killing of Malcolm X, who was under massive surveillance, especially in the year since his public break with Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam (NOI). The police sent agents into the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), which he had founded after this split.

One year ago, Netflix aired a six-part series, “Who Killed Malcolm X?” which deepened suspicions of state involvement in the killing, very likely utilizing elements within the Nation of Islam. Louis Farrakhan, then a prominent young Black Muslim leader and today the leader of the NOI, had written two months before the assassination that Malcolm X was a traitor and that “such a man is worthy of death.”

At the same time, two of the three Black Muslims convicted of the killing and sentenced to long prison terms have persistently maintained their innocence. In his deathbed letter, Raymond Wood wrote that Khalil Islam, also known as Thomas Johnson, “was later arrested and wrongfully convicted to protect my cover and the secrets of the FBI and NYPD.” Johnson, paroled in the mid-1980s, died in 2009.

Wood added, “I am aging and in failing health; recently I learned about the death of Thomas Johnson and [am] deeply concerned that with my death his family will not be able to exonerate him. It is my hope that this information is received with the understanding that I have carried these secrets with a heavy heart and remorsefully regret my participation in this matter.”

It is very likely that the assassination of Malcolm X was a complex operation consisting of different elements. Wood’s role was only part of the conspiracy—the necessary weakening of door security on the fateful day. Very soon after Malcolm X began speaking there was a disturbance created in the hall, and then a man rushed forward and shot Malcolm once in the chest with a sawed-off shotgun as two others charged the stage firing semi-automatic handguns.

While the FBI declined comment, the office of the Manhattan District Attorney as well as the NYPD responded to the latest revelations with carefully worded, evasive and hypocritical statements. After the showing of “Who Killed Malcolm X?” Democratic District Attorney Cyrus Vance announced a reopening of the investigation into the murder. After the February 20 news conference, the DA’s office announced that “review of this matter is active and ongoing.”

The NYPD, meanwhile, which is directly implicated in Malcolm X’s murder, said it “has provided all available records relevant to the case to the District Attorney. The Department remains committed to assist with that review in any way.”

Alongside the necessary fight to reveal the truth about the killing of Malcolm X, some broader political conclusions must be drawn. Malcolm X was a marked man, not when he was in the Nation of Islam, but only after he left it and began, even in the most limited fashion, to acknowledge that racial separation was not the answer to racism, and that skin color was not the source of inequality and injustice. The lesson is not a new one but is underscored: Left-wing organizations must maintain the highest vigilance in relation to the various state agencies whose job is to employ infiltration, provocation and murderous violence to defend the outmoded system of capitalist exploitation.

Millions of German taxpayers to finance far right propaganda

Peter Schwarz

The German government is preparing to give 70 million euros a year to a foundation run by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). The Desiderius Erasmus Foundation will be able to spread its far-right propaganda with taxpayers’ money.

According to the guidelines of the German parliament (Bundestag), a parliamentary group is entitled to state funds for its own foundation if it has been represented in parliament for more than one legislative term. The AfD entered the Bundestag for the first time in 2017 and, according to the guidelines, is eligible for financing following the Bundestag elections to be held in September this year.

The party, which has described the Nazi regime as “a speck of birdshit in over a thousand years of successful German history” and called the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin a “monument of shame,” can use the funding to influence research and teaching at universities, promote a new generation of party leaders, spread its far-right propaganda and support its co-thinkers all over the world.

Party-affiliated foundations are not allowed to directly finance election campaigns and other party activities. They are allowed, however, to maintain their own study centres and information portals, organise training courses and meetings, and support party-affiliated students with generous scholarships. Such foundations also play an important role in foreign policy. They maintain dozens of subsidiaries internationally, sponsor co-thinkers and interfere in day-to-day politics in other countries.

The Friedrich Ebert Foundation of the SPD, for example, is active in 100 countries, employs 600 people and supports 3,000 students with scholarships every year. The situation is similar for the CDU’s Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the CSU’s Hanns Seidel Foundation, the FDP’s Friedrich Naumann Foundation, the Greens’ Heinrich Böll Foundation and the Left Party’s Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. In 2019, the German government supported party foundations with a total of 542 million euros. This is almost three times the total 194 million euros that flowed into the coffers of various Bundestag parties in the form of election campaign subsidies and other aid.

Funding for the foundations stems from the budgets of various ministries. The foreign and development ministries pay for international activities, the education ministry for scholarships, and the interior ministry for political education. In addition, the foundations receive lump-sums that are not tied to specific projects. These proceeds are used, for example, to organise “study trips” abroad, social “discussion evenings” etc.

The inclusion of the Desiderius Erasmus Foundation in the illustrious circle of government-financed party foundations will enable the AfD to spread its fascistic propaganda with state funds. There is no doubt about the extreme right-wing credentials of the foundation. According to Saba-Nur Cheema, the educational director of the Anne Frank Educational Centre, the leadership of the Desiderius Erasmus Foundation is made up of “race theorists and conspiracy ideologists, völkisch pseudo-scientists and hard-core, right-wing extremists from the milieu of the Identitarian movement and Götz Kubitschek’s Antaios publishing house.”

Foundation President Erika Steinbach (Image: German Bundestag / CC BY-SA 3.0)

The chairwoman of the foundation is Erika Steinbach, who headed the revanchist Federation of Expellees from 1998 to 2014 and sat in the Bundestag for the CDU from 1990 to 2017. At the beginning of 2017, she quit the CDU to protest against the acceptance of refugees in Germany. Steinbach is notorious for her relativisation of Nazi crimes. Last year, she attracted attention because she denounced Kassel district president Walter Lübcke on Twitter for accommodating refugees in the region. Four months later, Lübcke was murdered by a neo-Nazi. The family’s lawyer accuses Steinbach of complicity in Lübcke’s death.

With state funding, the AfD Foundation will be able to finance the work of postgraduate students and other students in departments of far-right professors—such as the Berlin historian Jörg Baberowski—who are intent on rehabilitating National Socialism. Baberowski defends the Nazi apologist Ernst Nolte, dedicated his last book to the Nazi “crown jurist” Carl Schmitt, and seven years ago declared that Hitler was “not vicious.” When the AfD Foundation was founded in 2018, it came as no surprise that Baberowski was proposed as a member of the board of trustees, along with the social democratic racist Thilo Sarrazin.

Far right professors are already mobilising at universities. Only a fortnight ago, 70 academics, including Baberowski, founded a “ Network for Academic Freedom ,” which denounces any criticism of right-wing and historical revisionist positions as an attack on academic freedom.

There is no legal basis for the financing of the AfD foundation; such funding relies only on guidelines issued by the Bundestag. A majority in the Bundestag has until now opposed any legal regulation of state subsidies to party-affiliated foundations. The decision as to whether the AfD Foundation will receive the state funds rests with the Bundestag’s budget committee and there is every indication the committee will approve the funding.

Such an approach would be in line with the previous attitude of the Bundestag parties towards the AfD, which has been deliberately built up and promoted by the ruling class. The AfD has already received huge amounts of funding from the state. In 2018 and 2019, for example, the AfD received more than 10 million euros in state support each year. This does not include the lucrative parliamentary remuneration, expense allowances, other benefits and staff salaries paid to all deputies.

The German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier (SPD) greeted the heads of the AfD’s parliamentary group to his official residence after the last federal election, and the Bundestag parties elected AfD representatives to head important parliamentary committees. Once again there was no legal basis for these measures, just as the AfD has no legal right to funding for its foundation; the only justification are the guidelines of the Bundestag.

One consequence of this support for the AfD is that the head of the Bundestag’s budget committee, which decides on funding for foundations, is the AfD deputy, Peter Boehringer. Eleven other AfD representatives also sit on the committee, including former CDU deputy Martin Hohmann, a close friend of Erika Steinbach.

The German government has failed to respond to protests against the state funding of the right-wing extremists. Meron Mendel, director of the Anne Frank Educational Centre in Frankfurt, reports in the taz newspaper that he has not even received an acknowledgement from the minister’s office in response to a petition with 6,000 signatures he sent to the Ministry of the Interior.

If, contrary to expectations, the Bundestag fails to immediately provide funding for the foundation, the AfD is likely to sue for state subsidies at the Federal Constitutional Court. It has undertaken such appeals on two other occasions, but in cases involving much smaller sums. Both of the AfD appeals were turned down by the Court, but only on purely formal grounds. The court did not rule on the substance of the cases.

Ultimately, the state funding of the far-right is not a legal, but a political question. For years, the AfD, whose leading personnel is largely recruited from other Bundestag parties and the state security agencies, has been systematically promoted by the ruling elites. The ruling Grand Coalition (Social Democratic Party and the conservative CDU and CSU) has largely adopted the AfD’s policies of repelling and repressing refugees and building up state and military forces at home and abroad. In Thuringia, the CDU and FDP formed an alliance with the AfD to elect a state premier, who only resigned following nationwide protests.

At universities, far-right professors like Baberowski are defended by all of the political parties. The Socialist Equality Party, however, which criticised Baberowski for trivialising the role of Hitler and which fights for a socialist program against capitalism, fascism and war, has been placed under surveillance by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (Office for the Protection of the Constitution, BfV).

While the AfD Foundation can look forward to receiving millions from the state treasury, the Berlin finance office has withdrawn non-profit status for the Association of Those Persecuted by the Nazi Regime (VVN-BdA), which includes Auschwitz survivors such as Esther Bejarano. Accused of alleged “left-wing extremist influence,” the existence of the organisation is now under threat.

The reason for the official support for the AfD and its foundation is growing social polarisation, which is being further exacerbated by the Corona crisis. Faced with the threat of class struggles, Germany’s establishment parties are closing ranks and moving collectively to the right. As was the case in the 1930s, the international ruling class is again turning to authoritarian forms of rule.

Australian government intent on scrapping JobKeeper and slashing JobSeeker despite mass unemployment

Martin Scott

The Australian government is about to throw more than 1.5 million workers into potential unemployment by terminating its JobKeeper COVID-19 wage subsidy scheme. Simultaneously, on March 31, it will end the “Coronavirus Supplement” on JobSeeker dole payments, throwing another 1.6 million unemployed workers into dire poverty.

Yesterday, the Liberal-National Coalition government announced a supposed $25 a week rise in the underlying JobSeeker rate. In reality, it is another cut in the benefits, which were temporarily “supplemented” last March to avoid a social explosion triggered by Great Depression levels of joblessness.

A mass unemployment queue outside a Sydney Centrelink office last March (Credit: WSWS)

The resulting pittance will leave unemployed workers and youth on the sub-poverty level of about $44 a day, designed to coerce them into low-paid and insecure employment. JobSeeker recipients also face being cut off benefits altogether if they fail onerous and usually pointless “mutual obligation” requirements, such as undertaking 20 “job searches” per month.

Combined with the shutting down of moratoriums on rent and mortgage repayments and business insolvencies, the JobKeeper-JobSeeker “fiscal cliff” on March 31 will intensify the social crisis created by the ongoing global pandemic.

In an op-ed published last week in the Australian, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg adamantly defended the scrapping of JobKeeper. He said the scheme had created “adverse incentives” that were “hampering labour mobility and the reallocation of workers to more productive roles.”

In other words, the paltry JobKeeper payment, already reduced last month to $500 a week, is enough to prevent some workers from readily accepting a further assault on their pay and working conditions.

Frydenberg claimed: “JobKeeper has to come to an end as our economy strengthens, and businesses and their staff adjust to the new economic environment.”

In fact, official statistics showed that 1.54 million workers were still receiving the JobKeeper payment in January. If Frydenberg’s further claim—that the scheme is “keeping businesses afloat that would not be viable without ongoing support”—is true, many small business operators are also set to join the unemployed.

Around 1.3 million workers currently receive payments under JobSeeker, while close to 340,000 receive Youth Allowance, a similar payment for those under 24. That means more than 3.1 million workers will be affected by the March 31 JobKeeper and JobSeeker cutoffs.

The official unemployment rate stood at 6.4 percent in January, 1.1 points higher than a year earlier, and underemployment—those seeking more hours—was at 8.1 percent, which was down slightly over the year. But these figures understate the workforce crisis.

Monthly hours worked fell by 86 million in January, and were down by 100 million over the year—the equivalent of more than 600,000 full-time jobs—pointing to a massive further shift to casual, part-time and “gig economy” work.

As measured by the Roy Morgan survey company, the actual situation is considerably worse. By its estimates, the unemployment rate was 11.7 in January, and the underemployment rate was 10 percent, also indicating that more than three million workers were either jobless or wanting more work.

The abolition of the $75 per week JobSeeker Coronavirus Supplement will cause severe hardship and homelessness. According to Anglicare Australia’s Rental Affordability Snapshot, only 13 out of 77,000 rental listings surveyed were affordable for a single person receiving JobSeeker without the supplement.

Despite the government’s media-backed propaganda, the pandemic is far from over internationally or in Australia. This year, quarantine breaches have caused outbreaks in each of the mainland state capitals, triggering limited lockdowns.

Even if the federal government’s optimistic target of vaccinating the entire adult population by the end of October is achieved, and the inoculations prove effective in preventing transmission of the coronavirus in all its variant forms, workers and small businesses face at least another six months of uncertainty and disruption.

In some industries, dependent on large crowds, open borders and long-term planning, a full recovery will not be possible this year.

Australia’s $152 billion tourism industry, which directly employed more than 700,000 workers in 2018-19, has been devastated by the pandemic. The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates that 113,100 tourism jobs were lost between December 2019 and September 2020.

Australian Tax Office figures obscure the number of tourism workers still on JobKeeper. But they show that 154,000 workers in Accommodation and Food Services, and 112,000 in Transport, Postal and Warehousing were receiving the wage subsidy at the end of 2020.

The same applied to 77,000 workers in Arts and Recreation Services—almost one third of those employed in the sector before the pandemic.

More than 3,000 music industry workers signed an open letter, published last week, calling for JobKeeper to be extended beyond the end of March. The live music sector is now operating at just 4 percent of pre-pandemic capacity, and 55 percent of respondents to a recent survey on the I Lost My Gig web site are considering leaving the industry.

While the cessation of JobKeeper will worsen the unemployment crisis, the wellbeing of the working class was never the scheme’s objective. One sharp example of this is that 2.5 million vulnerable and exploited workers, temporary visa holders and casual employees, were excluded from the subsidy.

The reality is that the scheme was a corporate bailout on a scale never seen before. At least 11 billionaires have reaped multi-million-dollar dividends from companies subsidised by JobKeeper, contributing to an average 59 percent increase in the personal wealth of Australia’s richest individuals.

Retail group Premier Investments received $70 million in wage subsidies despite recording increased profits, paying a $2.5 million bonus to its chief executive and handing out $57 million in shareholder dividends. Company chairman and major shareholder Solomon Lew pocketed $20 million, a small fraction of his 31.6 percent year-over-year gain in personal wealth to $3.72 billion.

Household goods retailer Harvey Norman received $10 million in JobKeeper payments while securing record profits and paying $74.7 million in dividends to shareholders, including $23.5 million to co-founder Gerry Harvey, helping to boost his worth to $2.57 billion.

The JobKeeper legislation, which was backed by the Labor Party opposition and formulated in collaboration with Australian Council of Trade Unions secretary Sally McManus, also granted employers a range of powers to maximise profits at the expense of workers’ pay and conditions.

This allowed big business to accelerate major restructurings, changing workers’ duties and cutting the hours of full-time staff to reduce their wages to the level of the JobKeeper payment. This “flexibility” has not prevented the destruction of thousands of jobs by major corporations, such as Qantas, Virgin and Telstra, over the past year.

With the fortunes of the wealthy elites propped up by the bailouts, the meagre JobKeeper and JobSeeker payments now stand as an impediment to the corporate drive to force workers into increasingly super-exploited employment. This marks an escalation of the decades-long assault on working class jobs and conditions, policed by the trade unions.

The Labor Party’s basic support for this offensive has been demonstrated by its refusal to promise any JobSeeker rise above the government’s proposed measly $25 a week.

Washington Post’s “Wuhan Lab” conspiracy theory stands exposed

Andre Damon

For nearly a year, the Washington Post has promoted the false claim that COVID-19 is a man-made virus released from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.

This campaign went into overdrive on February 5, when the Post published an editorial embracing the position of the Trump State Department that “a laboratory accident or leak” represents a “plausible” explanation for the pandemic.

A view of the P4 lab inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology is seen after a visit by the World Health Organization team in Wuhan in China's Hubei province on Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2021. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

That editorial was published under the headline, “We’re still missing the origin story of this pandemic. China is sitting on the answers.” It called on the World Health Organization (WHO) team exploring the origins of the virus not to discount the Trump administration’s claim that COVID-19 was a “weaponized” virus that originated in a Chinese lab.

But the WHO team did exactly that, making clear that the “Wuhan lab” theory did not meet its evidentiary criteria for further investigation—a polite way of saying that it is a lie.

The WHO’s statements have clearly thrown the Post into crisis. The newspaper, which regularly promotes internet censorship in the guise that only “authoritative sources” such as itself should be accessible to the public, found itself exposed and at odds with the entire “authoritative” scientific community.

The Post ’s response to the WHO’s findings took form in its February 22 editorial, entitled “The US should reveal its intelligence about the Wuhan laboratory,” which places the burden on the US government to back up the newspaper’s own assertions about the man-made origins of COVID-19.

The Post writes:

When a World Health Organization team recently wrapped up its initial investigative visit to Wuhan, the team leader said the laboratory leak scenario was highly unlikely. However, State Department spokesman Ned Price said Feb. 9 that the Biden administration would “draw on information collected and analyzed by our own intelligence community to evaluate the report” from the WHO. Mr. Price emphasized the need for “full transparency.”

Full transparency is needed from China but also from the United States. The intelligence behind Mr. Pompeo’s statements should be declassified, with proper protection for sources and methods. The truth matters, and the United States should not hide any relevant evidence.

This seemingly even-handed presentation conceals a damning admission. It is a tacit acknowledgment that the Post does not possess a shred of evidence to back up its previous claims that the release of the virus is a “plausible” scenario.

In fact, this is as close as possible to a climb-down that the newspaper could make, while still placing the universally accepted natural origin of the virus at the same level as Trump’s conspiracy theory.

The fact is that the Post has been caught in a lie. The newspaper insists on claiming the “Wuhan lab” theory is a viable explanation for the pandemic, even as it asks for proof from the US government to back up its own claims of a man-made origin of the virus.

In early to mid 2020, when far-right conspiracy theories first began circulating claims about the man-made origins of the disease, they were universally debunked. Asked in May, “Do you believe or is there evidence that the virus was made in the lab in China?” National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci declared, “A number of very qualified evolutionary biologists have said that everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that it evolved in nature and then jumped species.”

In March, USA Today published a fact check of the claim that “the coronavirus began in a Chinese laboratory.” It concluded, “We rate this claim FALSE, based on our research. Overwhelming scientific evidence suggests the coronavirus originated in nature, and there is no evidence to suggest otherwise.”

In the face of these categorical statements, the Post set out to rehabilitate the “Wuhan lab” narrative. On April 14, Post columnist Josh Rogin published an op-ed giving the newspaper’s imprimatur to the Trump administration’s false claims that COVID-19 emerged from a laboratory.

Under the headline, “State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses,” Rogin wrote, “One senior administration official told me that the cables provide one more piece of evidence to support the possibility that the pandemic is the result of a lab accident in Wuhan.”

He quoted the senior official as saying, “Right now, the ledger on the side of it leaking from the lab is packed with bullet points and there’s almost nothing on the other side.”

Tellingly, when the full diplomatic cable referenced by Rogin was released in July, the Post itself concluded, “The full cable does not strengthen the claim that an accident at the lab caused the virus to escape.” Any reading of the cable makes clear it says nothing like Rogin’s interpretation. Instead, it makes clear that a shortage of qualified staff had precluded the lab from operating at full capacity and importing highly-contagious diseases.

The release of the cable did nothing to discourage the Post, and it doubled down on its claims, culminating in the February 5 editorial. After its false assertions have been totally exposed before the public, the Post cannot make an honest accounting of its own claims, and it cannot admit that it was peddling lies. Instead, its demand is that the US government prove the newspaper’s own allegations!

The promotion of the “Wuhan lab” conspiracy theory expresses the deep crisis of the entire US political establishment. Facing mounting social opposition at home, the US ruling elite desperately needs to manufacture and external enemy. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the breakdown of the American imperialism’s efforts to secure its global hegemony, raising the prospect of a military solution to China’s rise.

But however much the “Wuhan lab” conspiracy theory may be necessary for US imperialism, it faces one major problem—it is an obvious lie from beginning to end, staining everyone who promotes it.

In this swamp of lies, conspiracy theories and social breakdown, one thing is clear. The Washington Post stands exposed as a purveyor of false and discredited propaganda. Its claim to be an “authoritative” source, standing above what it calls “fake news”—a term that it helped coin to discredit left-wing political opposition—is in tatters.

Right-wing defection intensifies Australian government instability

Mike Head

A vehement right-wing defender of Donald Trump quit the ruling Liberal Party yesterday, further destabilising the Liberal-National Coalition government and marking another push for the creation of a Trump-style fascistic movement in Australia.

Liberal Party backbencher Craig Kelly theatrically resigned from the party at a parliamentary caucus meeting, reportedly giving Prime Minister Scott Morrison no notice. Kelly said he defected in order to have the freedom to speak out in favour of using ivermectin, an anti-parasite drug, and hyroxychloroquine, a malaria medication, as coronavirus treatments—mimicking Trump’s anti-scientific claims.

Craig Kelly (Screenshot, ABC News)

Kelly’s move, however, is part of a wider political agenda. For months, he has backed Trump’s claims of a stolen US election used to justify the January 6 coup attempt at the Capitol in Washington. He has mirrored Trump and US far-right groups in agitating for the scrapping of all COVID-19 safety restrictions in line with the demands of big business for a fully re-opened economy to ensure corporate profit.

In the most immediate sense, Kelly’s defection robs the Morrison government of a working majority in parliament, cutting its numbers to 76 in the 151-member House of Representatives. One of its votes is held by the House Speaker, who has only a casting vote. Kelly said he would continue to support the government in no-confidence motions, but warned that he was open to opposing other government measures.

A rather stunned Morrison tried to present an image of calm, declaring that his government would continue as before in dealing with “the worst situation we’ve seen since the Second World War.” Yet he immediately underscored the government’s knife-edge situation by holding a meeting with another right-wing parliamentarian, Bob Katter, to discuss a deal on confidence motions.

Behind all these machinations are fears in ruling circles of a breakout of mounting working class discontent, the potential for which can be seen in the determined struggle of Coles warehouse workers against a protracted company lockout in Sydney. That prospect is rising amid the looming abolition of subsidies for the unemployed and underemployed through the JobKeeper and JobSeeker schemes put in place after the pandemic erupted last March.

Kelly’s move will be used to both try to further foment a far-right movement and push the increasingly unstable Morrison government to ramp up its efforts to suppress popular opposition to the corporate restructuring offensive and the lifting of pandemic public health restrictions.

The timing of Kelly’s resignation is revealing. First, it came just two days after Morrison personally took one of the country’s first vaccine injections and used the nationally-televised event to insist that the arrival of vaccines meant an end to any need for lockdowns, border closures or other COVID-19 restrictions. Kelly’s advocacy of quackery and other anti-vaccine responses became incompatible with the government’s desperate PR campaign to present vaccines as a silver bullet to end the danger of infection and secure a full return to physical workplaces.

Second, Kelly’s defection followed last Saturday’s staging of so-called Millions March Against Mandatory COVID Vaccination rallies—attended by a few thousand people. They were led by far-right groups that oppose vaccinations and depict COVID-19 as a corporate-state conspiracy. The banners featured messages such as “coronavirus is a scam” and “vaccines kill.” This is the Trump-style constituency that Kelly and others are trying to build on.

As with the US Republican Party, the Liberal-National Coalition in Australia has become an incubator of far-right elements that are seeking to exploit the historic economic and social crisis produced by the failure of the official response to the global pandemic. Other far right Coalition members, notably George Christensen, have been associated with Kelly, and former National Party leader Barnaby Joyce held talks with Kelly after his defection, reportedly seeking to recruit him to the rural-based Nationals.

Following his resignation, Kelly was also visited by Malcolm Roberts, a senator representing Pauline Hanson’s anti-immigrant One Nation, and Katter, who heads his own nationalist Katter’s Australia Party. These various formations are all trying to divert the rising political disaffection into reactionary chauvinist directions, while falsely posturing as opponents of big business.

In 2017, following Trump’s presidential election victory of 2016, another right-wing Liberal, Cory Bernardi, quit the government and sought to emulate Trump. But his Australian Conservatives party floundered after Morrison replaced his deposed predecessor Malcolm Turnbull in August 2018 and shifted the Coalition into alignment with Trump.

The political establishment has become increasingly unstable over the past decade, with one prime minister after another being deposed or defeated at the polls. This is the second time that Morrison’s government has lost its parliamentary majority. The previous occasion came just after Morrison grabbed the leadership in a Liberal Party room coup. When Turnbull quit parliament, the government lost his seat in a by-election, and a pro-Turnbull MP, Julia Banks, defected to the crossbench.

Morrison only survived the May 2019 election, despite suffering a negative swing, because the Labor Party’s vote fell to historic lows, especially in working class electorates, due to widespread disgust and hostility at its own long pro-business record.

The installation of Morrison himself represented a turn toward Trump-style right-wing populism, with Morrison enjoying the support of elements such as Kelly. Morrison rescued Kelly from party pre-selection defeat in 2019 and aligned with Kelly and Christensen in refusing to condemn Trump’s incitement of the January 6 insurrection plot. For weeks, Morrison and his senior ministers insisted that Kelly and Christensen were “entitled to their views,” thereby giving credence to their promotion of positions associated with the fascistic right.

Now, as well as the Kelly defection, Morrison’s government is being destabilised by a widening media scandal over an alleged rape and other alleged sexual assaults on female ministerial staff members. The precise political agenda behind this affair, which rests on untested accusations, is not yet clear. Yet it also plays into frustrations in the ruling class with the government’s perceived failure to aggressively end COVID-19 restrictions and pursue “industrial relations reform” to further attack working class conditions.

Monday’s editorial in the Australian Financial Review provided a flavour of this corporate agitation. It denounced “medieval lockdowns and populist state border closures.” Such COVID-19 measures had to be “a thing of the past,” as demanded by Business Council of Australia chief executive Jennifer Westacott.

Likewise, the Australian’s editor-at-large Paul Kelly today complained that the Morrison government had not done enough to counter what he called the “pandemic protectionism,” such as limited lockdowns and border closures, to which some state premiers had resorted in order to appease “popular sentiment” in favour of safety.

Kelly concluded by warning that no medical data yet existed that vaccines would halt coronavirus transmission, as the public demands. He ended his column on an ominous note for the government and the entire political establishment: “You get the message—2021 is loaded with uncertainties.”

These developments are a warning that, far from being an exception to the breakdown of democratic norms in the US and internationally, the ruling class in Australia is also turning toward authoritarian forms of rule, directed against mounting social and political opposition from the working class.

Middle East & Africa Shared History Research Program 2021

Application Deadline: 27th February 2021

About the Award: Middle East & Africa Shared History Research Program aims to increase historical researches regarding common historical, cultural, social, political and economic life in the Middle East and Africa, to enhance the common historical perception, to encourage the utilization of Ottoman archives, and to increase the number of academicians and researchers who can carry out these studies in Turkish and Ottoman Turkish languages.

Middle East & Africa Shared History Research Program consists of two phases. It offers, in the first phase, online Turkish courses from A1 to C1 level (10 months) and Ottoman Turkish courses (6 months). In the second phase, it is planned to organize a program, including a short term Ottoman Turkish specialization training at certain font types regarding participants’ research topics and the promotion of Turkish archives, for those who complete Turkish language education successfully.

Type: Research

Eligibility:

• Must be a citizen of one of the eligible countries
• Must be an academician in the field of history or a public official or a historian-researcher serves in institutions in charge of archive studies
• Must be working in a university / research center and having at least a master’s degree in history or Ottoman History departments
• For public employees working in institutions responsible for archive studies, must have worked at the relevant institutions for at least 3 years and preferably have a master’s / doctoral degree
• Must have preferably at least one academic study in the field of Ottoman History / Archives.
• Must have no obstacle to travel (For the specialization stage of Ottoman Turkish education that will be held in Turkey in the second phase of the program)
• Must be under the age of 45

Eligible Countries: Applications are open to all Middle Eastern and African Countries.

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value & Duration of Award:

• 10 months online Turkish language education free of charge
• 6 months online Ottoman Turkish language education free of charge (after completing B1 level in Turkish language)
• Round trip travel expenses (in the Turkey phase)
• Accommodation (in the Turkey phase)
• Archives and public institutions visits (in the Turkey phase)
• Social and cultural activities (in the Turkey phase)

How to Apply: Applications will be accepted online through basvuru.ytb.gov.tr

• It is important to go through all application requirements in the Award Webpage (see Link below) before applying.

Visit Award Webpage for Details

How the Modern World Started–On A foundation of Violence and Dominance, but in the Name of Civilization

Bharat Dogra

The beginnings of the modern world are generally traced to the sixteenth century. Most descriptions of the period of human history since then have described this period as a period of the greatest human progress and the special role of the countries which started playing a more leading role in world affairs in the 16th and 17th centuries is shown generally to be that of preparing the foundation for such a period of the greatest progress. However a more careful look at what actually happened would reveal a history of extreme violence and cruelty on the part of the leading forces to establish their dominance during this period of the emergence of the so-called modern world..

While earlier wars also witnessed much cruelty and distress, the scale of this was limited by the technology available at that time. From 16th century onwards new discoveries and inventions opened up the entire world to invaders, and in addition armed them increasingly with weapons of much larger-scale destruction.

The French philosopher Montaigne wrote at the end of the sixteenth century, “So many goodly cities ransacked and razed; so many nations destroyed and made desolate; so infinite millions of harmless people of all sexes, states and ages, massacred, ravaged and put to the sword; and the richest, the fairest and the best part of the world topsy-turvied, ruined and defaced for the traffic of pearls and pepper.”

Las Casas who was an eyewitness to the Spanish conquest of South America described the genocide of the native American population in Espanola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic) as follows : “As they rode along, their lances were pierced into women and children, and no greater pastime was practised by them than wagering as to a cavalier’s ability to completely cleave a man with one dexterous blow of his sword. A score would fall before one would drop in the divided parts essential to winning the wager. No card or dice afforded equal sport. Another knight from Spain must severe his victim’s head from the shoulder at the first sweep of his sword. Fortunes were lost on the ability of a swordsman to run an Indian through the body at a designated spot. Children were snatched from their mother’s arms and dashed against the rocks as they passed. Other children they threw into the water that the mothers might witness their drowning struggles. Babes were snatched from their mother’s breasts, and a brave Spaniard’s strength was tested by his ability to tear an infant into two pieces by pulling apart its tiny legs. And the pieces of the babe were then given to the hounds that in their hunting they might be the more eager to catch their prey. The pedigree of a Spanish blood-hound had nothing prouder in its record than the credit of half a thousand dead or mangled Indians. Some natives they hung on gibbets, and it was their reverential custom to gather at a time sufficient victims to hang thirteen in a row. I have been an eye-witness of all these cruelties, and an infinite number of others which I pass over in silence.”

This cruel behavior, at least for some time, had the support in the home countries at the highest levels: “In 1775 King George III of Britain in a Royal Proclamation decreed that ‘For every scalp of a male (American) Indian brought in as evidence of their being killed… forty pounds, … for every scalp of such female Indian or male Indian under the age of 12 years…twenty pounds’.” Third World Resurgence magazine has written : “Indian generosity and honour were repaid with European treachery and cruelty. The whites broke every treaty they made with the Indians to deprive them of their lands. Between 1887 to 1934 the Indians lost some 100 million acres of their land to the white man. Nations of Indians were destroyed and European diseases were used to exterminate them.”

At the time of Columbus’ first voyage in 1492 the Americas were the home, according to the most recent estimates, of some 100 million people – compared to a European population of only about 70 million (in 1500). “Within a century after 1492, the indigenous population had dropped by 90 percent – the greatest demographic collapse in the history of the planet and the proportional equivalent of nearly half a billion people today.”

In the nearly four centuries of the slave trade nearly 10 to 12 million slaves were obtained and captured from Africa and ‘exported’ mainly to the Americas to labour, and perish, there in the most inhuman conditions. About 2 million died along the way. This was the largest forced migration in history, says Chris Brazier in the New Internationalist, and adds,  “The experience of being ripped from your home, of being squeezed onto a deck with no room to move, of lying in chains for weeks amid your own excrements, of staggering out at the other end into a half-life of back breaking labour at the crack of a whip – all of this is beyond imagination.”

In the late 18th and 19th century it was the turn of the aborigines of the Australian continent to be subject to large-scale killing by the newly arriving British convicts. The British Commissioner reported from here in 1833, “I have heard men of culture and refinement, of the greatest humanity and kindness to their fellow whites… talk, not only of wholesale butchery… but of the individual murder of natives, exactly as they would talk of a day’s sport, or of having to kill some troublesome animal.” Two thirds of Koorie natives of Australia perished within a century.

Charles Darwin had observed, “Wherever the European has trod death seems to pursue the aboriginal.”

The spirit of imperialism was voiced loud and clearly by Cecil Rhodes, founder of Rhodesia, who is reported to have stated : “I would annex the planets if I could.” Rhodes explained the motivation behind British imperialism in this way : “We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labour that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories.” In 1820 the Indian, subcontinent took 11 million yards of British cotton textiles; by 1840 this had grown to 145 million yards. British goods were forced upon India without paying any duty and the foreign manufacturer employed the arm of political injustice to keep down and ultimately strangle a competitor with whom he could not have contended on equal terms. William Bentick, the British Governor General in India, reported in 1834-35, “The misery hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of cotton weavers are bleaching the plains of India.” John Sullivan, President of the Board of Revenue, Madras remarked, “Our system acts very much like a sponge drawing up all the good things from the banks of the Ganges and squeezing them down on the banks of the Thames.”

According to a study of year 1878 published in the prestigious Journal of the Statistical Society there were 37 serious famines in 120 years of British rule against only 17 recorded famines in the entire previous two  millennia in India.

However it is important to note that during the entire course of all these extreme injustices, the leaders of the dominant forces were saying that they are actually helping those whom they were plundering and killing. Joseph Chamberlain, the British Secretary of State for the Colonies , stated, “ Through our colonial policy , as soon as we acquire and develop a territory , we develop it as agents of civilization, for the growth of world trade.” This discourse on presenting themselves as harbingers of civilizations continued unabated during most of colonial violence and plunder.

Why is it important to recall this today? Because to understand the world today it is important to know and understand its roots, its beginnings in such violence and dominance. These tendencies exist to this day but it is more important today for the most powerful persons and institutions to hide them and hiding these tendencies takes very strange forms. Some of the worst and most harmful things are still being done in the name of development, help, assistance, protection, piety etc. and it is very important to understand such tendencies and forces, so that these can be checked and the creative energies and efforts and wisdom of the world can instead be channelized towards building a safe and peaceful world, a world based on justice and equality.

UK: Pandemic death toll among care home residents soars past 50,000

Stephen Alexander

The prolonged and deadlier second wave of the pandemic has had a catastrophic impact on care homes, with the UK’s overall death toll ballooning to almost 130,000 where COVID-19 is recorded on the death certificate. This is double the number of deaths in only three months since early November.

More than 20,000 care home residents, some of society’s most vulnerable, elderly, disabled and chronically ill people, lost their lives directly to COVID-19 in the first wave last year, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). As of early February 2021, this figure had shot up to 42,000, including 37,895 deaths in England and Wales, 3,189 deaths in Scotland and more than 1,000 in Northern Ireland.

The true number deaths in care settings, however, is now well over 50,000. Researchers at the University of Manchester have found that COVID-19 deaths were “hugely underestimated” in the first wave, when 10,000 fatalities went unrecorded in England alone, due to the tardy introduction of mass testing.

Clinical staff care for a patient with coronavirus in the intensive care unit at the Royal Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, England. (AP Photo/Neil Hall Pool)

The scale of death and suffering provides a grisly illustration of what the British Medical Journal (BMJ) has described as a policy of "social murder”, in a recent editorial excoriating the "herd immunity" response to the pandemic pursued by governments internationally. Predicated on mass infection and the prioritisation of corporate profits over the lives and health of millions, this policy has been aggressively advocated by Boris Johnson’s Conservative government and carried out with the full backing of the Labour Party opposition, the devolved Scottish National Party government, and the trade unions.

Notwithstanding the terrible earlier loss of life, care homes had largely recovered from the first wave by mid-September due to the UK’s first national lockdown. Weekly deaths due to the virus had fallen to a few dozen from a peak of more than 4,000 per week at the end of April 2020. Then, beginning in September, schools were reopened at full capacity for an entire term so that parents could be forced back into unsafe and nonessential workplaces. From this point, weekly coronavirus-related deaths began to surge in care homes, from an average of 115 in October in England and Wales, to 471 in November and 770 in December.

Defying repeated scientific warnings of a far deadlier second wave, the Johnson government then ended the limited regional lockdown system introduced in November and recklessly flung open the economy in the lead up to Christmas. As a result, care homes were progressively overrun by high levels of community transmission and weekly deaths more than tripled by the end of January to 2,505. More than 10,000 care home residents died of COVID-19 in the first five weeks of 2021 in England and Wales.

The first weeks of the New Year saw horrific reports of some care homes losing a large proportion of residents to the virus, as several highly transmissible mutations were allowed to spread uncontrolled. Edendale Lodge in East Sussex lost half of its residents (13 deaths) in a widely reported outbreak over Christmas. In January, the Old Hall care home in Lincolnshire suffered 18 death, two thirds of its residents; Pemberley House Care Home in Basingstoke lost 22 residents; and Thorney Croft care home located in Stranraer, Scotland, reported 14 deaths in an outbreak infecting more than 90 residents and staff.

Similar devastation has been reported up and down the country. Norfolk county in eastern England was among the hardest hit by the second wave with 253 COVID-19 care home deaths in January—57 percent of all COVID-19 deaths in care homes since the beginning of the pandemic in the region. The Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole area on England’s south coast saw a 21 percent surge of COVID-19 deaths in the last week of January and 55 percent (133 fatalities) over the course of the month.

The scrapping of lockdown restrictions in December was peddled by Conservative government Health Secretary Matt Hancock based on the lie that a "protective ring" had been erected around care homes and other vulnerable people. The truth was that reopening the economy went ahead despite the known inadequacies of the UK’s dysfunctional test and trace system and ignored widespread concerns over the inappropriate standard and low-quality of personal protective equipment procured by government.

The criminality of the British ruling class is underscored by the fact that this all unfolded during the initial rollout of the highly effective Pfizer vaccine in care homes. The inoculation provides immunity after several weeks if correctly administered with a 21-day gap between two doses. Instead, Johnson’s Tory government opened the economy even before the first dose had been administered and then instituted an improvised 12-week dosing gap against the manufacturer’s guidelines.

Speaking to the Financial Times, Professor Martin Vernon, a consultant geriatrician in Greater Manchester, likened the delay in the vaccine to the deadly decision by the Tory government to discharge masses of people from hospitals into care homes without testing for the virus during the first wave. “We are knowingly being instructed to expose one of the most vulnerable groups a second time around to a level of risk that we cannot easily quantify but can anticipate to be higher than if we had followed the available scientific evidence,” Vernon said.

The UK and devolved governments on Scotland and Wales are now in the process of ending the third national lockdown, introduced in late December, with thousands of COVID-19 deaths still reported each week and before most care home residents will have received the second dose of the vaccine. As many as 40 percent of the workforce at HC-One, the UK’s largest private care home provider, have yet to be offered the first dose, according to the Guardian. Many vulnerable groups who live in the community, including the majority of disabled people, have not yet received the vaccine despite accounting for 60 percent of all COVID-19 deaths in England last year (ONS).

The impact of the pandemic in residential care provides a partial impression of the devastation wrought in the broader social care sector. There is no comprehensive data for the prevalence or deaths of coronavirus among the much larger number of individuals dependent on or provided with home care, most of which is unpaid and provided informally by family or friends. According to Carers UK, there are currently 13.6 million informal carers—20 percent of the UK population—including an increase of 4.5 million during the first wave of the pandemic.

Decades of privatisation have reduced residential care beds to 465,000—down 55,000 since the year 2000—and the formal social care workforce stands at just 1.6 million. Care has consistently been one of the deadliest of occupations, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), with COVID-19 accounting for 109.9 deaths per 100,000 males and 47.1 deaths per 100,000 females caused by COVID-19. Overall, more than 850 health and social care workers died of the disease in England and Wales last year.

If even a fraction of the death rate among patients and carers in the formal sector exists in the informal sector, it would mean that the overall death toll in social care is considerably larger.

Spain’s PSOE-Podemos government showers arms dealers with billions in contracts

Alejandro López

Even as COVID-19 has infected over 112 million people worldwide and killed 2.5 million, the threat of a new world war that could wipe out billions, far from being diminished by the pandemic, has only escalated. In this context, Spain’s Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government is making sure its arms manufacturers cash in the global tinder box, as all imperialist powers rearm and prepare for new great-power conflicts.

According to the report “Exports of Defence Materiel and Dual Use of the Secretary of State for Commerce” presented to the Spanish parliament, between January and July 2020, the PSOE-Podemos government authorised weapons sales worth a record €22.5 billion. This is higher than the sum of 2018 and 2019 sales, which came to €21.4 billion combined.

Spain is the seventh largest arms exporter worldwide and its arms exports have seen the third-largest growth in the last four years. Its military-industrial business is a key pillar of the economy, representing 1 percent of its Gross Domestic Product.

Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez (PSOE), second left, walks next to Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias, second right, and First Deputy Prime Minister Carmen Calvo, left, at the Moncloa Palace in Madrid, Spain, Tuesday, Jan. 14 2020. (Image Credit: AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)

The PSOE-Podemos government has not simply continued the traditional policy of supporting its national weapons industry, but has worked to increase its sales and diversify its export destinations. Chief behind these efforts is Podemos, articulating the interests of the affluent, pro-imperialist, sections of the upper-middle class. As a state party that attacks workers’ living standards, supports wars and coups, attacks democratic rights and employs police state repression, its support for its weapons industry is part of its broader imperialist policy.

Last October, Podemos’ Defence spokesman Roberto Uriarte intervened during the Information Defence Forum in parliament to call for diversification and more research and development in the weapons sector.

The sector should not “put all their eggs in one basket” said Uriarte. Instead, he said, “The defence industry must base its growth on the diversification of its solutions and on the search for new markets abroad, so that the Ministry of Defence is not the only client of the weapons industry.”

Uriarte’s main concern was that the industry’s exports depend too much on the Gulf States. “We should not only sell [weapons] in monoculture to the monarchies of the Persian Gulf,” he said. Spain must “implement public policies and facilitate the internationalisation” of weapons sales. He called for investment in research and development, which requires “long-term policies, little demagogy and a lot of sacrifice and dedication.” He concluded like any arms lobbyist: "Applied research [in weapons] is the basis of the prosperity of countries.”

Last years’ authorised weapons sales contracts show that the policy advocated by Uriarte has guided the PSOE-Podemos government.

A record €19.4 billion of authorised weapons sales contracts are due to a series of orders for Airbus transport aircraft assembled in Spain and exported to Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.

During the past decades, these European countries have relied on the US for their neo-colonial wars in Africa and the Middle East. These orders aim to increase their independence from Washington, in the name of “European strategic autonomy,” to pursue their own aggressive foreign and great power policy. It is also part of a military build-up aimed at nuclear-armed Russia.

Most of Spain’s defence material, 71.5 percent, went to NATO or EU countries. Germany is the largest customer in absolute terms. In early December, the German parliament passed its 2021 budget, which includes a massive increase in military spending of at least €45 billion.

The second-largest customer is Singapore, which bought an air refueling plane. In the last years, Singapore has boosted its military engagement in the US-led military build-up in the Asia-Pacific against China. Far from opposing the militarisation of the Asia-Pacific, Madrid is supporting Australia and Washington’s fueling of an arms race and military build-up in the region, heightening the danger of conflict.

Spain’s fifth-largest buyer and the second outside NATO and the EU was Saudi Arabia, with €32.4 million. It is set to receive mortar shells of different calibres, advanced observation equipment with laser rangefinders, and targeting systems. This does not include five corvettes worth €1.8 billion that the Navantia public shipyard is building for the Saudi Navy. In addition, more than half of the 60 million in category-3 weapons (ammunition and explosive devices) in the first half of 2020 went to Saudi Arabia (€21.9 million) and United Arab Emirates (€8.2 million).

The report shows that the partial stoppage of ammunition deliveries during 2018 and 2019 to the Gulf States involved in the genocidal war against Yemen—a symbolic measure the government adopted as it took power, in response to popular anger at the war—has now ended. The war has claimed 233,000 lives over the last six years, leading to the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Millions face the risk of starvation.

This makes a mockery of the Spanish government’s response to a question on arms exports to Saudi Arabia submitted two weeks ago. It stated: “The Arab League countries that are part of the coalition against the rebels in Yemen are not subject to any embargo” by the UN or EU, adding cynically, “if there was knowledge or there was a risk of improper use of the exported materials,” an authorisation could be suspended or revoked.

The other country receiving category-3 weapons is Morocco (€3.9 million). A close US and French ally, Rabat is involved in its own military build-up aimed at becoming a major regional player in West Africa. These weapons will only fuel tensions with its neighbour, the military regime of Algeria, and the Sahrawi-led Polisario Front in Western Sahara. A three-decade ceasefire broke down last November when Rabat sent troops to crush peaceful Sahrawi protests.

Spain is also rapidly becoming a leading exporter in police and riot gear as the global financial aristocracy faces mass social opposition to its policies of austerity, militarism and malign neglect in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Exports of this materiel totalled €719,026, an increase of 931 percent compared to the same period in the previous year.

The first customer was Togo, with a €575,685 contract, or 80 percent of the total. The 10th-poorest country in the world, Togo has been ruled by President Faure Gnassingbe for the past 15 years, after his father who took power in a 1967 coup. He aims to use the new equipment to confront increasing strikes and protests against his rule.

The second customer of this equipment was Tunisia. Its ruling class is currently facing mounting protests in the 10th anniversary of the ousting of the hated corrupt dictator President Zine El Abedine Ben Ali, which sparked off the Arab Spring a decade ago. Haykal Rachdi, 21 years old, died last month when Tunisian police fired a tear gas canister at him at close range. Another young man, Aymen Mahmoudi, suffered serious injuries by another tear gas can. This ammunition was in all likelihood sold under the authorisation of Spain’s PSOE-Podemos government.

Other customers of this equipment include neighbouring Portugal and the United States.

Workers and youth should be warned that all of these weapons being produced and exported, in the false name of “creating jobs” will be used by the PSOE-Podemos government to repress domestic opposition amid growing opposition to its criminal policy of “herd immunity” and austerity.