The French army’s coup plots and the global onslaught on democratic rights

Alex Lantier

This year the day of international working class solidarity comes amid a deepening threat of far-right dictatorship. In the week before May Day, a political crisis has mounted in France over a letter by 23 retired or reservist generals in the neofascist magazine Current Values advocating a coup. Even as the defense ministry threatens to prosecute officers supporting the letter, growing numbers of officers are signing it—now over 7,000.

These statements must be taken as a warning to workers not only in France but internationally. Less than five months have passed since January 6, when then-US President Donald Trump sent thousands of his neofascist supporters to storm the Capitol in Washington D.C. to halt the certification of his loss in the presidential elections. This was clearly not a historical accident attributable to Trump’s personal recklessness, nor did the coup’s failure end the threat of fascistic rule.

As working class anger mounts at the horrific death toll of “herd immunity” policies and the enrichment of the wealthy during the pandemic, powerful factions of the ruling class in every country are contemplating military-authoritarian rule.

The letter, addressed to President Emmanuel Macron, claimed that “mortal dangers” face the French nation. It called for immediate, unspecified changes in state policy to avert “an explosion and the intervention of our active-duty comrades-in-arms in a perilous mission … on the national soil.” Also, it asserted that “the deaths, for which you will be responsible, will be counted in the thousands.”

Emmanuel Macron and French Armies Chief Staff General Francois Lecointre, left, stand in the command car as they review troops before the start of the Bastille Day military parade, Tuesday, July 14, 2020 in Paris [Credit: AP Photo/Christophe Ena, Pool]

The retired and reservist generals couched their threats in the Islamophobic rhetoric of Macron’s “anti-separatist” law targeting political Islam. Amid the debacle of France’s eight-year war in Mali and mounting anger at police violence in immigrant suburbs, they denounced “Islamism and the suburban hordes” for driving “the separation of numerous portions of the country” from state authority. They demanded that the government fight the threat of “race war” caused by “racialism, indigenous nationalism and anti-colonial theories.”

The ruling class fears not race war but class struggle. In the weeks before the letter appeared, as the COVID-19 death toll hit 1 million in Europe and 100,000 in France, Macron pledged to end social distancing, even as coronavirus variants were spreading. He bucked public expectation of a strict lockdown to halt the contagion and desperate, angry calls from medical staff for a scientific policy to halt the slaughter. He provocatively said no health statistic could change his decision to reopen schools.

On April 17, one of the leading far-right politicians behind the coup threat, far-right politician Philippe de Villiers issued a fascistic appeal in Current Values titled, “I call for an insurrection.” He demagogically blamed “Big Pharma, Big Data, Big Finance, the Bill Gates Foundation and the Davos Forum” for the pandemic.

Just four days later, on April 21, the generals’ letter appeared. Its timing was not fortuitous. It came 60 years after the Algiers putsch of April 21, 1961—which de Villiers’ father Jacques, a leader of the far-right Secret Armed Organization (OAS), supported during the Algerian war. This failed putsch, led by generals linked to wealthy French colonialists in Algeria and to General Francisco Franco’s fascist regime in Spain, aimed to topple General Charles de Gaulle as he prepared to grant Algeria independence in 1962.

Philippe de Villiers’ brother, General Pierre de Villiers, came out in 2019, after retiring as army chief of staff, to demand firmer repression of “yellow vests” protesting social inequality. After over 10,000 “yellow vests” had been arrested and 4,400 wounded by police, he called for more “firmness” against strikers. “A gulf has emerged between those who lead and those who obey. This gulf is profound. … We must restore order; things cannot continue this way.”

Amid the pandemic last year he warned of a global revolutionary crisis. “Today, beyond the security crisis, there is the pandemic, all of this against a backdrop of economic, social and political crisis with a lack of confidence in leaders,” he said. “I fear this pent-up anger will explode at once,” he warned, adding, “We must think the unthinkable. … The rule of law is obviously a good thing, but at some point, we also must develop a strategic plan.”

The “strategic plan” is clearly a military dictatorship. Against this, workers’ best allies are their class brothers and sisters worldwide. The pandemic is a trigger event in world history, vastly intensifying international class conflict driven by 30 years of imperialist war and social austerity following the Stalinist restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union in 1991. A global pandemic can only be halted by a globally coordinated health policy mobilizing world industry and science.

Similarly, the threat of far-right rule can only be opposed by the coordinated international action of the working class, independently of the pro-capitalist parties and union bureaucracies.

Democratic forms of rule, incompatible with the levels of social inequality and death produced by capitalism, are collapsing worldwide. Trump’s historically unprecedented coup—which nearly succeeded, as the Pentagon for hours refused to send troops to the Capitol—is only the starkest example, at the heart of world imperialism, of an international process. In Germany, multiple neo-Nazi networks in the army are compiling kill lists, after neo-Nazis murdered conservative politician Walter Lübcke in 2019 for his statements on migrants.

As neofascist presidential candidate Marine Le Pen appeals to the far-right generals for support in the 2022 elections, Macron is no alternative to far-right forces. Indeed, the generals’ letter is framed as advice to Macron, who is himself setting up a police state. Over the last week, he has maintained a deafening silence on the generals’ letter.

Since his election in 2017, the “president of the rich” has courted the police and army. As his polls collapsed as “yellow vest” protests began in 2018, Macron took the unprecedented step of hailing France’s Nazi-collaborationist dictator Philippe Pétain as a “great soldier.” His “anti-separatist” law—overseen by Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, an ex-member of the far-right Action française —aims to pose as tougher on Islam than Le Pen. This only strengthens fascistic forces in the officer corps, which Macron is cultivating as a base for “herd immunity” policies.

The Stalinist General Confederation of Labor (CGT) union and its ally, 2017 presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who is asking Macron to prosecute putschist officers, are aligning themselves with the Macron regime. Having backed the European pandemic bailouts of the banks and big business, which enriched Europe’s billionaires by €1 trillion, they are complicit in “herd immunity.”

Perhaps the clearest indication of their reactionary role is the record of their Spanish ally, Podemos General Secretary and ex-Deputy Prime Minister Pablo Iglesias. He helped implement “herd immunity” policies and called on workers to ignore coup threats last year from Spanish generals close to the neo-Francoite Vox party.

Wall Street margin debt surges to record high

Nick Beams

Wall Street’s S&P 500 index reached a new record high on Thursday on the back of the decision by the Fed the previous day that its continuous boosting of financial markets, through the injection of more than $1.4 trillion a year in asset purchases, would continue for a “long time.”

Trader on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange [Credit: AP Photo/Richard Drew]

The commitment came despite indications of increased US economic growth and rising inflation which, in times past, would have set the stage for a tightening of monetary policy. But such is a fear that even the hint of a move in that direction will spark a collapse of the speculative financial boom that Fed chair Jerome Powell took every opportunity at his press conference to rule it out.

The extent of the speculative mania, which goes way beyond anything seen in the past, is indicated by broad financial trends and specific events.

One of the most significant broad indicators is the escalation of margin lending in which investors borrow money from brokers to finance share purchases and trade in financial markets. The collateral for the loan is the financial asset purchased, with the broker able to demand more cash from the investor—a margin call—if its market value falls.

The perils of margin trading were revealed last month with the collapse of the previously little-known family investment firm Archegos Capital as a result of such a call. It had amassed some $50 billion in loans from some of the world’s major banks, most notably Credit Suisse, and its demise left the banks with a total loss of $10 billion.

But despite this warning sign, the escalation of margin debt is continuing. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, a supposed Wall Street watchdog operating under the supervision of the Securities and Exchange Commission, has reported that margin debt at the end of March was a record $822 billion.

This compares with the figure of $479 billion at the same time last year and more than double the peak of $400 billion in 2007 on the eve of the financial crisis of 2008.

Placing these numbers in context, the Financial Times reported calculations by the London-based fund ABP Invest showing that in the 2000 dotcom and 2007 credit booms US margin debt reached a level equivalent to around 3 percent of gross domestic production. It is now equivalent to nearly 4 percent.

But even the figures provided by FINRA are a major underestimation of the total debt involved because, through the use of financial derivatives, banks are able to further finance highly leveraged trading as was revealed in the collapse of Archegos.

The cheap money provided by the Fed is enabling the orgy of speculation which has seen the transfer of trillions of dollars into the hands of the world’s richest individuals, while millions of people in the US and around the world confront a return to conditions not seen since the days of the 1930s Great Depression.

There was a revealing exchange which took place during the CBS program “60 Minutes” earlier this month when Fed chair Jerome Powell was questioned on the escalation of margin debt.

The interviewer, Scott Pelley, noted there had been a 49 percent increase in margin debt so far this year and asked: “At what point does the Federal Reserve start to rein in this speculative bidding up of stock prices based on borrowed money?”

Powell replied: “That sounds like margin debt. I don’t know that statistic. I really can’t react to that statistic.”

The assertion by the Fed chief that he is completely ignorant of the level of margin debt, given its significance for the stability of the financial system, simply beggars belief.

Powell chose to answer in the way he did because of fear that any comment on the issue—and even the vaguest hint that margin debt was reaching dangerous levels and might need to be reined in—would set off turbulence on Wall Street, so dependent has it become on the flow of ultra-cheap money from the central bank.

Another broad indicator is the increase in the money raised by special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs). The firms, sometimes described as blank cheque companies, raise money and obtain a stock market listing with the aim of taking over another company which wants to go public and join the share market boom without having to through the often-complex procedure of making an initial public offering.

In the first three months of this year SPACs raised almost $88 billion, more than for the whole of 2020.

There are numerous individual phenomena which express the extent of the speculation. Chief among these is bitcoin, which earlier this month rose to a high of $64,000 before pulling back somewhat.

The rise and rise of Tesla shares is in the same category. The company is also tied in with the bitcoin speculation. On Thursday it announced its net income for the March quarter was $438 million, a record. The company revealed it had sold $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin which contributed $101 million to the bottom line.

As a producer of electric vehicles, Tesla also picked up $518 million in selling regulatory credits to other companies to help them meet emissions mandates. As the Wall Street Journal put in a headline “Tesla makes more money trading bitcoin than selling cars.”

The complete divorce of the share market value of the company from underlying real value—a characteristic feature of the stock market boom as a whole—is indicated by the fact that Tesla’s market value of $700 billion is more than five times the combined value of Ford and General Motors. Sales of the former in the US in the first quarter alone were more than double Tesla’s global sales for a year.

Possibly the most egregious expression of the market mania is the case of Hometown International which owns a small deli in Paulsboro, New Jersey. The deli had sales of just $21,772 in 2019 and only $13,976 in 2020 when it was closed for six months due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But recently its share market valuation topped $100 million. As one hedge fund manager commented “the pastrami must be amazing.”

The rise and rise of Hometown’s market value is indicative of a broader process. Shares and other assets, including major industrial commodities such as lumber and copper, are being purchased purely on the basis that other buyers will come in at an even higher price.

While commentators, barely able to see beyond the end of their nose and no doubt dazzled by the rise of their own portfolios, have been hailing the market rise as a resurgence of the US economy out of the pandemic, it is an expression of its deeply diseased character.

It should be recalled that the origins of the present maniacal phase of the stock market boom lie in the massive intervention by the Fed beginning in March 2020 when markets collapsed and the $21 trillion market for US Treasury bonds, the basis of the global financial system, froze.

The Fed’s intervention, amounting to trillions of dollars and supporting all financial markets, including the purchase of stocks for the first time, was an extension and qualitative development of the policies it has pursued ever since the stock market crash of October 1987 when it initiated the program of supplying ever cheaper money to the markets in response to a crisis.

The history of these interventions shows that whatever their effect in short-term stabilisation they prepare the conditions for the resurgence of the underlying crisis in even more virulent form.

All the conditions are now developing for another crisis, going far beyond the scale of the crash of 2008, in which the working class will be directly confronted with the necessary task of taking political power in its own hands in order to begin the reconstruction of the US and global economy on socialist foundations.

Madrid elections marked by mounting fascist death threats

Alejandro López

Campaigning for the May 4 regional elections in Madrid has descended into a political debacle. The month since snap regional elections were called by the ruling Popular Party (PP) has seen eight death threats on politicians, a court intervention to defend far-right Vox party’s Nazi-inspired propaganda, fascist rallies in working class areas, and trumped up accusations of mail ballot fraud. Candidates also traded accusations of provoking mass COVID-19 deaths.

The election climate testifies to the advanced breakdown of democratic forms of rule in Spain and internationally. This is the product of an immense growth of social inequality and the policy of prioritising profits over lives during the COVID-19 pandemic—the “herd immunity” policy—for which the entire capitalist political establishment is responsible.

It unfolds amid a major political crisis in neighbouring France, where a letter signed by over 20 retired generals, and since signed by over 7,000 military personnel and backed by the far-right National Rally party, has threatened a coup. It also takes place barely four months after several thousand right-wing extremists organised by US President Donald Trump and sections of the Republican Party stormed the Capitol in Washington D.C. to try to nullify the US elections.

The incumbent conservative Madrid president Isabel Diaz Ayuso speaks during an interview with The Associated Press in Madrid, Spain, April 26, 2021 [Credit: AP Photo/Bernat Armangue]

On Wednesday, a death threat letter with ammunition was sent to former Socialist Party (PSOE) Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who has been out of politics for over a decade. It was the latest incident after similar death threats with bullets were sent to regional election candidates, including Podemos candidate Pablo Iglesias and PP incumbent Isabel Díaz Ayuso. Other letters have gone to Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska, general director of the Civil Guard María Gámez, and Industry and Tourism Minister Reyes Maroto.

One of the chief targets is Iglesias, who has been hounded by far-right forces for over a year, coinciding with a rising fear in ruling circles of workers’ opposition, expressed in strikes and calls for lockdowns, to the “herd immunity” policies on the COVID-19 pandemic. The letter warned, “Your wife, your parents and you are sentenced to capital punishment, your time is running out.” It came with four CETME bullets, a rifle used by the Spanish Army, Navy, Civil Guard and National Police.

The hatred of Iglesias in sections of the security forces sympathetic to Vox emerged Thursday, when La Marea revealed a Facebook page, “Primavera Española del CENEPE” (Spanish Spring of CENEPE), with 15,000 members, most linked to the security forces, attacking Iglesias. He is attacked as “son of the great b*tch, scum, trash rat ... I’m not saying what I would do with you because I’m buckled up;” “And he will always be the parasite friend of terrorists” or “Whoever sows winds gathers storms.”

Vox has unleashed violent propaganda against migrant children, directly inspired from the Nazis. Its billboards in Madrid show a dark-skinned youth, under the name MENA—a pejorative acronym for unaccompanied foreign minors—and “your grandma” spelled on the board. It states falsely that young migrants receive €4,700 while pensioners receive €426 monthly.

The aim of this disgusting campaign is to scapegoat children fleeing imperialist war, poverty and oppression—269 are under care in the Madrid region—for social crises produced by capitalism. On Friday, the courts refused to admit a complaint that the billboards constitute hate speech, arguing it constitutes freedom of expression.

Vox has met with strong opposition in working class neighbourhoods, where it has organised small provocative rallies, protected by anti-riot police sent in by the PSOE-Podemos government. Anti-Vox protesters have faced crackdowns, arrests and, according to one report, torture in police custody.

The orgy of threats, fascistic propaganda and police violence unfolding in Madrid constitute a serious warning to the working class. Through attacks on pseudo-left politicians such as Iglesias, far-right forces are aiming at the growing anger in the working class against the deadly “herd immunity” policies in Spain and internationally.

Significantly, polls show that the incumbent PP may be reelected next week, and Vox may enter into the regional government. The latest polls show that the PP would be first with around 41 percent of the votes, followed by PSOE (21 percent), Más Madrid (16 percent), Vox (9–10 percent) and Podemos (7 precent). The PP has already promised to include Vox in a coalition government. This is in a region where PP-Vox policies have led to mass deaths. Madrid is the Spanish region with the most infections and deaths from COVID-19, around 24,000.

Internal documents showed that Madrid regional officials issued protocols with criteria to exclude nursing home residents from being transferred to hospitals at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. This has led to the deaths of thousands.

The PSOE and Podemos could not capitalise on PP-Vox crimes, having implemented the same policy at the national level, leaving over 100,000 dead and 3.5 million infected with COVID-19. This is why the pandemic was widely discussed at the start of the campaign but then quickly shelved as candidates realised that accusing each other of social murder was a zero-sum game. All of them had supported the same criminal policy.

There is deep, historically rooted opposition to fascistic forces and “herd immunity” policies in the European working class. However, the working class cannot entrust the struggle against this to the same parties, including the PSOE and Podemos that implemented this policy. Whatever “anti-fascist” rhetoric they cynically employed during the campaign, it is clear that the PSOE-Podemos government cannot and will not oppose a far-right authoritarian regime. On the contrary, it relies on far-right forces to implement its “herd immunity policy.”

Indeed, a key reason the far right feel emboldened is that PSOE-Podemos adopted the political agenda set by Vox. They worked hand in hand with the regional Madrid PP government backed by Vox to implement the EU’s “herd immunity” policy.

Last autumn, the central government threatened to deploy 7,500 soldiers against protests targeting the “restricted mobility” order imposed in the working class districts of Madrid amid the resurgence of COVID-19. The order, worked out between the Madrid regional and Spanish national governments, required workers and youth to continue reporting to work and school. It imposed lockdowns only in working class areas.

The current, fourth wave, which has now unnecessarily claimed 5,000 lives, has been completely absent from the electoral debate. Instead, all candidates have agreed to Vox’s demand to end social distancing. The PSOE-Podemos government has spent days repeating that it will not extend the state of alarm, the legal mechanism to implement social distancing. Health Minister Carolina Darias repeated Vox’ mantra that “we can’t live forever with the state of alarm.”

Vox has ended its electoral campaign with a pledge to commit to six demands of the ultra-Catholic, fascistic Hazte Oir association if it enters a PP-led regional government—including lifting all travel restrictions aiming at stopping the spread of the coronavirus.

Fascistic forces pose a very real threat, and significant sections of workers and youth—including among Podemos, More Madrid and PSOE voters—hate everything Vox stands for. However, the Madrid elections show that the working class can only fight them based on its own party and programme. It is impossible to oppose fascistic forces based on the reactionary record of the PSOE, Podemos or their allies in the union bureaucracies.

The U.S. is Trying to Light the Match of Islamic Extremism in China’s Xinjiang

Vijay Prashad & Jie Xiong

“Kashgar is a key location for the land and sea interface of the Belt and Road, connecting not only westward to West Asia, Europe, the Red Sea, and Africa, but also southward to the Indian Ocean through the port of Gwadar,” said Professor Li Bo of the China Research Institute, Fudan University. It is, he told us, “a core area of the Belt and Road strategy.” Kashgar, one of the westernmost cities in China, is the main urban area of the southern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). Traders from across Asia have assembled at its Sunday bazaar for 2,000 years.

More than 1,000 kilometers north of Kashgar is the town of Nur-Sultan, previously known as Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan. Here, in 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke about the need for a “Silk Road Economic Belt.” This Belt would include trade deals and transportation networks, cultural interactions and political connections. The project would become the One Belt, One Road initiative, which is now known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). China’s National Development and Reform Commission released a report in March 2015 that planned for six economic corridors, which would be funded by more than $155 billion from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Silk Road Fund. Since then, many of these corridors, which run from China into Central Asia and also down through Pakistan and Afghanistan, have been completed. In December 2020, a goods train traveled from Istanbul, Turkey, to Xi’an, China, covering 8,693 kilometers of this new Silk Road. The train carried Turkish appliances, which were meant for the Chinese market.

Accusations by the United States government and its allies about genocide and forced labor in Xinjiang have brought China’s westernmost province into the gaze of the international media. This approach toward Xinjiang defines the information war prosecuted by Washington. In our conversations with Professor Li Bo and Professor Wang Yiwei, director of the Institute of International Affairs at Renmin University, as well as intellectuals from Kashgar and Ürümqi (Xinjiang’s capital), we developed a storyline that includes the dynamics of Xinjiang’s social development, the threats of extremism, and the enfolding of its problems into the wider hybrid war unleashed against China.

Develop the West

“The economy of Xinjiang is not as good as that of the eastern coast [of China],” Professor Wang Yiwei told us. This reality was understood 20 years ago when the Chinese government launched the Western China Development Program (Xībù Dàkāifā) in 1999. In 2010, Kashgar was designated as a special economic zone with the intention of drawing investment into southern Xinjiang to tackle high poverty rates and to shape the province into a gateway to Central Asia and Europe.

At the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2012, the delegates made Xinjiang’s development a priority. Construction of infrastructure, development of energy sources, linkage of Xinjiang’s economy with the BRI, and the development of talent emerged as the main avenues for the province, Professor Li told us. By 2019, Xinjiang’s government announced that between 2014 and 2018, 2.3 million people had been lifted out of poverty and 1.9 million of them lived in southern Xinjiang, where the Uyghur population is concentrated. During the pandemic, the Chinese government made an effort to find a way to improve life for farmers and herdsmen in the Taklamakan Desert of southern Xinjiang. This has helped to continue a pattern of lifting most of the 6.1 percent of the province’s population who were experiencing absolute poverty in 2018 out of that state (the poverty level decreased to 1.2 percent of Xinjiang’s population in 2019 and continues to trend downward).

“When I visited Xinjiang,” Professor Li told us, “I was struck by the fact that the province is involved in a great struggle. This struggle is manifested in several ways: in the development of social and economic life, in the integration of minority ethnic groups into the broad social life of China, and in the difficult task of fighting terrorism.”

Washington’s Jihad

In August 2013, the 74-year-old imam of a mosque in Turpan, 200 kilometers east of Ürümqi, was brutally killed by extremists. These extremists—likely members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) or the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP)—killed Abdurehim Damaolla because he was part of the Islamic Association, which worked with China’s government to combat extremism. Within Uyghur society, a gulf opened up between the vast majority of the people who opposed radicalization along religious lines and those who joined the ETIM and the TIP.

The roots of the ETIM and the TIP go back to the 1960s and 1970s when Saudi Arabia’s World Muslim League began to proselytize a harsh version of Islam to counter communism. Those drawn to these views left Saudi schools—many in Pakistan—to join Washington’s jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s. There, the Uyghur extremists joined other disaffected Central Asian extremists to form various outfits that pledged jihad against communism.

When the USSR collapsed, these groups sought to use violence to advance their agenda against the post-communist states in Central Asia, the first among them all was the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which was affiliated with Al Qaeda. Uyghur militants joined the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan, the IMU, and the global platform known as Hizb-ut Tahrir (Party of Liberation). Extremists from Xinjiang cut their teeth while fighting for jihad in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and in the Central Asian states.

Xinjiang first saw a major violent attack by these militants in the 1990s in Ürümqi and in southern Xinjiang’s smaller towns. A major riot on July 5, 2009, in Ürümqi led to the death of almost 200 people. Since then, there have been many smaller attacks. “Uneven economic development,” said Professor Wang, “is the basis for terrorism and extremist religious ideology.”

Shohrat Zakir, who is the chairman of the government of XUAR, concurs, and notes that his government has put forward an agenda to “root out terrorism.” There is no point in merely treating this like a war—such as the U.S. did in Afghanistan. This is not a war that can be won by violence, said Zakir, but it must be won by education and by economic development. Asked about vocational education, Zakir explained, “Some residents there [in Xinjiang] have a limited command of the country’s common language and a limited sense and knowledge of the law. They often have difficulties in finding employment due to limited vocational skills. This has led to a low material-basis for residents to live and work there, making them vulnerable to the instigation and coercion of terrorism and extremism. There is still a long way to go for southern Xinjiang to eradicate the environment and soil of terrorism and religious extremism.”

New Cold War

In 2011, then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proposed a New Silk Road Initiative. The idea was for the U.S. to use Afghanistan as the core of a North-South axis that would break the Central Asian states away from their links to Russia and China; this axis would orient these countries to South Asia and then to the United States. Failure to settle the problems of Afghanistan led the U.S. to abandon that project. Instead, it has turned its focus to undermining China’s BRI.

The information war now conducted against China centers on Xinjiang. Once again, the U.S. uses longstanding problems—such as the rise of extremism in Central Asia (fueled to some extent by the U.S. since the 1980s)—to create problems for its adversaries. Officials in China tell us that the government has long ignored the economic development of Xinjiang and has not been able to fully handle the various grievances of the minority ethnic groups. But the answer to these problems is not to deliver Xinjiang to disaffected affiliates of Washington’s jihads. As with Syria and Libya, Washington once more plays a reckless game with Islamic extremism.

UK to send largest Carrier Strike Group since Falklands/Malvinas war to South China Sea

Robert Stevens

The British government has given details on the massive Royal Navy/Royal Air Force Carrier Strike Group being sent to the Indo-Pacific region. The mission, described as “a truly global deployment, from the North Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific,” provocatively includes sailing through the South China Sea. It could depart as early as May 18.

British aircraft carriers HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Queen Elizabeth moored at Portsmouth harbour, November 2020 (credit: WSWS media)

The NATO-backed mission is being led by the UK’s new £3.2 billion aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, on its first operational deployment. The carrier, the navy’s largest and most powerful warship ever, was launched in October 2017 and has been involved in sea trials and operational training since. It is described by the Navy as being “able to strike from the sea at a time and place of our choosing…”

No Royal Navy force has been mobilised on such a scale since the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas war. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) said it would be the 'largest concentration of maritime and air power to leave the UK in a generation. The Spectator noted the significance of the Royal Navy sending a “battle fleet to Asia for the first time since the start of the Korean War in 1950.”

With the end of the Cold War, Britain’s Royal Navy surface fleet of frigates and destroyers was scaled down and now contains just 19 vessels. But spending is being hiked up again by tens of billions of pounds across all the armed forces as part of the MoD’s “Defence in a Competitive Age” review.

The Indo-Pacific mission enlists much of the current strength of the entire navy. The aircraft carrier will have 18 F-35B stealth fighters on board and be backed by the Type 45 destroyers, HMS Defender and HMS Diamond; Type 23 anti-submarine frigates, HMS Kent and HMS Richmond; and the Royal Fleet Auxiliary’s logistics ships, Fort Victoria and Tidespring. These will be backed by a latest Astute-class nuclear submarine armed with Tomahawk Cruise missiles. Also participating will be 14 naval helicopters, eight RAF fast jets and a company of Royal Marines.

The carrier group will visit more than 40 countries over 28 weeks covering 26,000 nautical miles. It will take part in 70 engagements, including exercises with NATO and non-NATO partners when sailing through the Mediterranean to the Suez Canal. The US is participating with a destroyer, USS The Sullivans, and a squadron of 10 US Marine Corps F-35B Lightning II aircraft.

The Royal Navy strike group will stop for a week at Duqm, the UK’s Joint Logistics Support Base in Oman. It will then conduct Indian Ocean operations with the Indian navy as well as joint exercises with South Korea and Singapore. Operations will be completed with up to two weeks of joint exercises with American and Japanese armed forces. The flotilla will carry out its provocative sailing of the South China Sea.

The UK’s Integrated Review, “Global Britain in a Competitive Age,” and the Defence Review both identified China and Russia as major adversaries and economic threats. The Integration Review describes China as “a systemic competitor. China’s increasing power and international assertiveness is likely to be the most significant geopolitical factor of the 2020s”. It stated, “the UK will deepen our engagement in the Indo-Pacific…establishing a greater and more persistent presence than any other European country. The region is already critical to our economy and security; is a focal point for the negotiation of international laws, rules and norms; and will become more important to UK prosperity over the next decade.”

In line with US imperialism’s designs on the region, with the UK acting as a junior partner, the MoD said the mission was “part of the UK’s tilt towards the Indo-Pacific region… it will help achieve the UK’s goal for deeper engagement in the Indo-Pacific region in support of shared prosperity and regional stability”.

The mission was described by Defence Minister Ben Wallace as part of post-Brexit’s Britain’s strategy to secure markets: “When our carrier strike group sets sail next month, it will be flying the flag for Global Britain, projecting our influence, signaling our power, engaging with our friends and reaffirming our commitment to addressing the security challenges of today and tomorrow…” The deployment showed that Britain was ready to “play an active role in shaping the international system of the 21st century”.

Last week, after an extended campaign by leading warmongers within the political establishment, MPs voted, based on unsubstantiated claims, that China is carrying out “genocide” against Uyghur Muslims. Britain joins the US government and just three other legislatures, in Belgium, the Netherlands and Canada in accusing Beijing of genocide.

The House of Commons passed unanimously a non-binding motion put forward by Tory MP Nusrat Ghani, stating, “Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region are suffering Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide; and calls on the Government to act to fulfil its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide and all relevant instruments of international law to bring it to an end.”

Ghani was one of five UK MPs sanctioned by China last month, along with several anti-China front groups such as China Research and the Conservative Human Rights Commission. This was in response to co-ordinated sanctions by the UK, European Union, US and Canada against Chinese officials designed to escalate geopolitical tensions.

On behalf of the opposition Labour Party, Shadow Foreign Office minister Stephen Kinnock said the party backed the motion as 'genocide can never be met with indifference or inaction'.

The vote marks a new ascendency of anti-China hawks, led by former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith. They have tried without success to introduce a Bill that would empower the UK’s High Court with the right to decide whether a country is committing genocide. In March, Smith failed for the third time to secure an amendment to the Trade Bill, with the aim of using it to escalate sanctions and other measures against China based on the “genocide” claims. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s has tried to balance between Washington and Beijing.

Indicative of the escalating war fever among the imperialist powers, with China and Russia in their cross hairs, was the bellicose response of leading Tory MPs—with close connections to the military—who insisted that May’s mission to the South China Sea was not provocative enough. Chiming in with recent statements from the Biden administration and US Pacific Fleet commander, Adm. John Aquilino, that Taiwan was “the most significant flashpoint now that could lead to a large-scale war” between the US and China, the MPs insisted that the strike group also enter the Taiwan Strait as part of the onward voyage up to Japan.

Duncan Smith told the Telegraph, “I'm pleased the Aircraft Carrier is deploying in the South China Sea but they need to complete this process by letting the Chinese know that they disapprove of their very aggressive actions against their neighbours by sailing through the Taiwan Strait.”

He was backed by Tobias Ellwood, chairman of the Defence Select Committee, who said the Indo-Pacific mission had been “rolled out as such an important statement of intent” but was worried it could be “diminished” over “fear of offence”. Avoiding the Taiwan Strait defeated the operation’s “purpose”, which “is to stand up to the authoritarianism of China”.

Such comments offer insight into the unhinged thinking in sections of ruling circles and among the military top brass, who are contemplating armed conflict with nuclear powers.

Following the UK’s Defence Review, the Telegraph published a “special report” by senior foreign correspondent Roland Oliphant, “China and Russia's military arsenals are terrifying in scale—but how would they perform in combat?”

It describes China’s navy as “already the largest in the world with approx 350 ships and submarines, including over 130 major surface combatants. It is expected to have five aircraft carriers afloat by 2030 and is rapidly expanding its fleet of destroyers. It has developed long-range precision cruise and ballistic missiles, early warning radars and air defence systems to allow it to dominate airspace far into the Pacific.” Moreover, “it recently unveiled hypersonic weapons designed to take on US carrier groups.”

All this was no big deal, he added, as “the People’s Liberation Army [active personnel over 2 million and reserve personnel over 1 million] is not necessarily invincible. The military faces major personnel challenges, struggling to recruit, train and retain professional soldiers and facing down a morale problem fueled by perceived corruption. And it has not fought a war in more than 40 years.”

Human Rights Watch declares Israel has crossed apartheid threshold

Jean Shaoul

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has published a report declaring that Israel, in implementing a policy of ethnic supremacy favouring Israeli Jews over 7 million Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories, has “crossed the threshold” into apartheid.

Israeli security forces demolishing homes in Khirbet Humsah, in the northern West Bank’s Jordan Valley (credit: Sarit Michaeli, B’Tselem)

The New York-based human right organisation points out that international law, embodied in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), defines apartheid—whereby one racial or ethnic group dominates another through intentional, systematic, and inhumane acts of oppression with the intention of maintaining that regime—as a crime against humanity.

In 2000, Israel signed the Rome Statute, and supported the ICC’s establishment, saying, “As one of the originators of the concept of an International Criminal Court, Israel, through its prominent lawyers and statesmen, has, since the early 1950s, actively participated in all stages of the formation of such a court. Its representatives, carrying in both heart and mind collective, and sometimes personal, memories of the Holocaust—the greatest and most heinous crime to have been committed in the history of mankind—enthusiastically, with a sense of acute sincerity and seriousness, contributed to all stages of the preparation of the Statute.”

Defying these fine words, Israel’s government, like its chief backer the US, and along with Russia and China, refused to ratify the treaty.

Kenneth Roth, HRW’s executive director said, “While much of the world treats Israel’s half-century occupation as a temporary situation that a decades-long ‘peace process’ will soon cure, the oppression of Palestinians there has reached a threshold and a permanence that meets the definitions of the crimes of apartheid and persecution.”

He added, “Those who strive for Israeli-Palestinian peace, whether a one or two-state solution or a confederation, should in the meantime recognise this reality for what it is and bring to bear the sorts of human rights tools needed to end it.”

HRW’s 213-page report draws on years of human rights documentation, case studies and a review of government planning documents, statements by officials and other sources. It documents a catalogue of Israeli abuses committed against the Palestinians that indicate its intention of preserving it domination, including:

* Sweeping restrictions on Palestinians’ movement in the occupied territories. While most Palestinians in the occupied West Bank live in areas under the nominal control of the Palestinian Authority, they are surrounded by Israeli checkpoints and subject to Israeli military intrusion at any time, with most of the West Bank (60 percent by area) is under Israel’s full military control.

* Demolition of homes and “near-categorical denial” of building permits.

* Military occupation.

* Confiscation of one third of the land in the West Bank.

* Rejection of residency rights for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

* Suspension of basic civil rights to millions of Palestinians.

* Unrelenting settlement expansion policy.

* Israel’s 2018 Jewish State law that defined Israel as the “nation-state of Jewish people.”

Ignoring past experience of such entreaties, HRW made futile appeals to Israel’s arms suppliers to make arms sales and military assistance conditional upon Israel’s initiatives to reform the system, to the ICC to prosecute Israelis suspected of involvement in the policy, and to foreign countries to sanction individual Israeli officials who are responsible for it.

Just weeks ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that his government would not cooperate with the ICC’s investigation into potential war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Israel during its 2014 assault on Gaza, denouncing the charges as “anti-Semitic.” Both the US and UK governments issued public statements backing Israel and attacking the ICC.

The HRW report follows last January’s report by Israel’s human rights group B’Tselem that Israel is an “apartheid regime” that enforces Jewish supremacy over the Palestinians in all the land it controls, to the extent that they have far fewer rights than Jews living in the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

This echoes statements Palestinians have made since the 1967 Arab Israeli war in which Israel seized the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and Syria’s Golan Heights, subsequently occupying them and annexing East Jerusalem, in defiance of international law. It comes 20 years after a United Nations draft resolution described Israeli repression against the Palestinians on the West Bank as a “new kind of apartheid, a crime against humanity,” prompting a joint US-Israeli walkout from the conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, and 15 years after the publication of former US President Jimmy Carter’s 2006 book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

It indicates the degree to which public sentiment both within and outside Israel now recognizes Israel’s policies as apartheid.

The Palestinians have welcomed the report, isolated as they are in the face of the US’s support for Israel, and without any practical support from the Arab states, some of whom have formalized their relations with Israel after decades of backroom talks and deals. The European powers—while more eager that the US to find some means of resolving the long running conflict—refuse to do anything that alienates Israel. The European Union still views close relations with Israel, the Middle East’s most important military state, as a means of offsetting Washington’s domination of the region.

Predictably, the report met a hostile response from Israel, which likes to call itself “the only democracy in the Middle East.” The foreign ministry dismissed it as “propaganda,” saying, “Human Rights Watch is known to have a long-standing anti-Israel agenda, actively seeking for years to promote boycotts against Israel. Their decision not to share this report for review or comment with any Israeli authority is clear indication that it is a propaganda pamphlet, which lacks all credibility.”

Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, said the report bordered on anti-Semitism. He said, “When the authors of the report cynically and falsely use the term apartheid, they nullify the legal and social status of millions of Israeli citizens, including Arab citizens, who are an integral part of the state of Israel.”

Naturally, he deliberately ignored the provisions of the Jewish State Law that confer second-class status on Israel’s two million Arab citizens as well as the 60 or so laws that actively discriminate against them in housing, education, healthcare, and other areas.

HRW’s definition of Israel as a “regime of Jewish supremacy” that has become an apartheid state is a damning refutation of the Zionist-led campaign to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism to criminalise opposition to its treatment of the Palestinians.

The IHRA’s definition is the spearhead of an anti-democratic campaign by the authorities in the US and UK, in conjunction with Israel to clamp down on free speech on university campuses. It is the weapon used by the Blairite right-wing in the Labour Party to witch-hunt the left around former leader Jeremy Corbyn. The broader aim is to stifle opposition to war that is the inevitable outcome of Israel’s escalating provocations against Iran, mounted to deflect attention outwards from rising poverty and Netanyahu’s manifestly corrupt relations with the media bosses.

In the final analysis, the deepening political, economic, social and healthcare crisis of the Zionist State has made it ever more reliant on war crimes and crimes against humanity to defend its interests against threats both at home and abroad.

German actors provide fodder for far-right propaganda against lockdown measures

Johannes Stern

The online campaign “#allesdichtmachen” (“#closeitalldown”) and the reactions to it have underscored a fundamental reality.

Resistance is growing among German workers and youth to the murderous “reopening” policy being carried out in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic in the economic interests of the banks and corporations, already at the cost of over 82,000 lives in Germany alone. Yet representatives of all of the parties of the political establishment have welcomed statements by actors supporting demands for the immediate lifting of even the completely inadequate social distancing measures still in place.

Jan-Joseph Liefers (Martin Kraft, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

What has occurred?

Last Friday, 52 more or less well-known German actors posted short video statements under the hashtags “#allesdichtmachen” (“#closeitalldown”), “#niewiederaufmachen” (“neveropenagain”), and “#lockdownfürimmer” (“#lockdownforever”) cynically attacking the government’s measures to curb the virus.

Here are some examples. Felix Klare claimed that home schooling leads to more domestic violence against children. Volker Bruch suggested that the warnings about the coronavirus were pure scare-mongering. Ulrich Tukur sarcastically called for “closing down every human place of activity and every shopping centre without exception,” thus rendering “everyone stone dead” in order to deprive “the virus, together with its devious mutant baggage, of its basis of life.”

Others made fun of particular virus-related incidences (Miriam Stein), mocked social distancing measures (Heike Makatsch) or ranted, in the style of the extreme right, about the media being controlled by the same interests and not allowing any “critical dispute” (Jan-Joseph Liefers).

Shortly after the first videos were published, a storm of indignation arose on social media. Under the hashtag “#allenichtganzdicht” (“#notallthere”), tens of thousands criticised the repulsive intervention, which in the midst of mass death on a global scale aided the anti-lockdown propaganda around which the most right-wing forces were being mobilized.

On Twitter, the cochair of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) parliamentary group, Alice Weidel, congratulated the actors for their “great action.” Another well wisher was the ex-president of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, as Germany’s secret service is called, Hans-Georg Maassen, who in 2018 publicly backed the witch-hunting of immigrants in Chemnitz.

Opposition continued to grow throughout the weekend. Many artists condemned the action, including many actors. The president of the German Film Academy, Ulrich Matthes, told the news agency dpa that his colleagues’ “supposed satire” was “indirectly aiding and abetting the contrarians [coronavirus deniers] and the AfD.”

Others noted that the pandemic was having a devastating impact on cultural workers, who faced the loss of their careers and financial ruin. But the predominantly wealthy actors of “#allesdichtmachen” did not criticise the government for handing out the vast bulk of its “emergency aid” to large corporations. Instead they mocked the victims of the pandemic.

Doctors and hospital staff expressed their anger under the hashtag “#allemalneschichtmachen” (“trydoingashift”), tweeting about their dramatic experiences in hospital emergency wards. This was initiated by the well-known emergency room doctor and blogger Carola Holzner (“Doc Caro”).

She challenged the artists involved in “#allesdichtmachen” to work a shift in the emergency service or an intensive care unit. “You have crossed a threshold,” the senior consultant at Essen University Hospital explained in an Instagram video that quickly received several hundred thousand hits. “Namely, a pain threshold of all those who have been doing everything for over a year.”

Nineteen of the actors originally involved in Friday’s video event have since retracted their videos and apologised. Most have explicitly distanced themselves from the AfD and the far-right demonstrations of coronavirus deniers. This does not make their intervention any less reprehensible. The videos are all stupid, repulsive and cynical, and the artists involved have either consciously supported a right-wing campaign or allowed themselves to be utilized by it.

One of those pulling the strings behind the action is the director and scriptwriter Dietrich Brüggemann, who has previously promulgated slogans and song lyrics (“Stick your duty to wear a mask up your a***”) of right-wing extremist coronavirus demonstrators.

One would have expected at least a little more intelligence from some of the actors and hoped that they would not only perform their better roles on screen, but also think about them. Tukur, for example, who was born in 1957, became known to a wider public through the 1982 film Die Weisse Rose (The White Rose), in which he played Willi Graf, a student and member of the student resistance circle that opposed the Nazi dictatorship. Volker Bruch has since 2017 been playing the lead role of Nazi-critical detective Gereon Rath in the series Babylon Berlin, which is set in Weimar Germany. Now they both find themselves—perhaps unintentionally—in the company of the AfD and the extreme right.

However, the most repulsive role in this spectacle is being played by Germany’s leading politicians. They are the ones responsible for the mass death and the social consequences of the pandemic, including in the cultural sphere. In the end, in their supposedly “critical” videos, the actors have only reproduced what bourgeois politics and the media have been propagating since the outbreak of the pandemic. There is not a single lie or provocation in their videos that has not been previously voiced in a similar way by a representative of the establishment parties.

At the beginning of the pandemic, it was Health Minister Jens Spahn (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) who played down COVID-19 as an “ordinary flu” and spoke out against making wearing a mask compulsory in Germany. When it came to ending the first lockdown in the interests of big business, Bundestag (federal parliament) President Wolfgang Schäuble (CDU) declared—to the applause of AfD honorary leader Alexander Gauland—that the right to life was not “absolutely” protected by the Constitution.

Subsequently, representatives of all Bundestag parties supported the far-right coronavirus demonstrations, which, in contrast to most of the population, demanded the immediate ending of all restrictions and social distancing measures. Now the same politicians and parties are using the actors’ action to further push the “profits before lives” policy.

In Bild am Sonntag at the weekend, Finance Minister Scholz (Social Democratic Party, SPD) called for a definitive end to all pandemic measures by summer. “I am also tired of this pandemic and its restrictions,” he said, adding that he wanted “us as a government to define clear and bold steps for opening up things by the summer.” One needed, he declared, “the roadmap back to normal life, but one that is not revoked after a few days.”

In addition to the head of the AfD, leading representatives of the other Bundestag parties also explicitly backed the actors’ action. “That there is criticism of the measures, I find that completely normal,” said Health Minister Spahn at a press conference on Friday. He added that he could “well imagine holding talks with the initiators.”

Speaking to Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland, the cochairman of the Green Party, Robert Habeck, excused the action with the brusque statement, “After more than a year of pandemic, many people are exhausted.” He said that while the video contributions were “inappropriate,” there was a need for “space for a critical and contentious debate about something that so deeply affects all of our lives and all of our freedom.”

The Left Party’s top candidate for the state elections in North Rhine-Westphalia and former leader of the party’s federal parliamentary group, Sahra Wagenknecht, described the videos as “a classy playlist in which well-known actors express their outrage at current coronavirus policies in a wonderfully ironic way.”

On the WDR programme “3nach9,” CDU candidate for chancellor Armin Laschet expressed solidarity with Jan-Joseph Liefers, one of the few actors who still publicly defend their actions.

“One is allowed to say that in a free country,” Laschet said. “In crisis situations, the minority opinion of artists and intellectuals in particular is important.” Even if Laschet could not say it openly due to the enormous opposition within the population: The “minority opinion” that he and the entire ruling class share in relation to the pandemic is that of the fascist AfD.