WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange turns 50 today. It is an occasion to record the enormous suffering that has been inflicted on the heroic journalist by the imperialist powers, in retaliation for his exposure of their war crimes and human rights abuses.
Julian Assange in Belmarsh Prison in 2019
Assange has now spent more than one fifth of his life facing persecution by the US state and his allies, starting with the freezing of his account by Swiss bank PostFinance and the launching of a bogus sexual assault investigation by Sweden in November-December 2010. He lost seven years from June 2012 trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and has been incarcerated for more than two years in Belmarsh maximum security prison.
During this time, he has missed the birth and early lives of two sons and been kept separate from his partner of six years, and fiancée of four, Stella Moris. Prevented from travelling, and denied the most basic means of communication, Assange has had his globally significant work as a journalist brought to a halt. He has been denied the opportunity to defend himself against a relentless campaign of slander and abuse.
The effects on Assange personally have been devastating, described by UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer and campaign group Doctors for Assange as psychological torture. His UK extradition judge was forced to acknowledge that he had suffered severe depression and is at serious risk of suicide.
Far worse is planned. Assange is fighting extradition to the US where he faces charges under the Espionage Act with a possible life sentence. Assange would then be imprisoned in conditions “not built for humanity”, in the words of two former US prison wardens who testified at his trial, subjected to an effective living death—in close to continuous solitary confinement and denied almost all contact with the outside world.
There is no indication that this vicious persecution will cease. A highly calculated ruling by District Judge Vanessa Baraitser in January that Assange could not be extradited to the US on mental health grounds has not changed his conditions one iota. He remains held on remand in Belmarsh and the US Department of Justice has signaled its determination to pursue the case, even as the pack of lies it has assembled against Assange collapses .
No information has been released about the status of the US government’s appeal of Baraitser’s decision, or the counter appeal by Assange’s defence team. It remains unclear when these appeals would be heard, leaving the WikiLeaks founder in a legal limbo. The deciding High Court goes into recess at the end of July, not returning until October.
What is certain is that the ruling class still intend to make an example of Assange, whose work with WikiLeaks did them immense political damage and contributed to an upsurge of anti-imperialist sentiment across the world. WikiLeaks uncovered tens of thousands of unrecorded civilian casualties and the use of death squads and torture during the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. The organisation exposed US support for military coups and brutally repressive regimes, its rendition of innocents and minors to Guantanamo Bay and published the infamous “Collateral Murder” video.
Former CIA director then secretary for defence under Obama, Leon Panetta, summarised the American government’s response: “All you can do is hope that you can ultimately take action against those that were involved in revealing that information so you can send a message to others not to do the same thing.”
Besides the destruction of Assange’s health and denial of his freedom, his pursuit has set chilling precedents which tear to shreds legal and democratic rights. His extradition case has been characterised by the routine abuse of due process, including denying him proper access to his lawyers and key documents and the 11th hour introduction of a new indictment. He and his legal team have been subjected to surveillance by the American state, while plans have been exposed to kidnap and even assassinate him. The charges against him criminalise basic journalistic practice, placing it under the Espionage and Official Secrets Acts.
Every step of this pseudo-legal witch-hunt has been upheld by the British courts. It has proceeded with only the faintest of murmurs in the liberal media and official “left” politics. Any past commitment to democratic rights in these layers has so thoroughly collapsed that they have been able to cough up just a handful of articles and parliamentarians, offering even the most tokenistic support for Assange.
Despite the persistent efforts of the official Don’t Extradite Assange (DEA) campaign to curry favour in these circles, the sum total of their endeavours in the UK is a motley cross-party crew of 24 parliamentarians. The presence of Conservative MP David Davis in this group confirms its utterly toothless character. This right-wing backer of Boris Johnson feels perfectly at ease playing at supporting democratic rights in the company of Labour “lefts” Jeremy Corbyn, Richard Burgon and John McDonnell, who have proven themselves utterly harmless to the British state and its interests.
The 24 do not even feign confidence in their ability to set Assange free, or to build a movement which could. Instead, they have directed their attention to issuing humble appeals to Assange’s chief persecutors. On June 11, they signed an open letter to US President Joe Biden congratulating him on his election and concluding, “We appeal to you to drop this prosecution, an act that would be a clarion call for freedom that would echo around the globe.” The letter reads, “You, like us, must have been disappointed your predecessor launched a prosecution carrying a 175-year sentence against a globally renowned publisher”.
This is said of the man who labelled Assange a “high-tech terrorist” and who has seamlessly continued the Trump administration’s case against the WikiLeaks founder, as part and parcel of America’s intensifying war drive.
As far as the DEA carries out an international campaign, it is to set up similar groups of politically disparate figures in different parliaments around the world making the same lame appeals. On Thursday, an open letter signed by members of the German Bundestag representing the Left Party, the Free Democratic Party, the Greens and the ruling Christian Democratic Union and Social Democratic parties called on Chancellor Angela Merkel “to urgently advocate, during her forthcoming visit to Washington to meet with US President Biden, an end to the persecution of Julian Assange.”
None of this is politically serious or credible. Assange will not be freed by appeals to the conscience of the ruling class. The fight for his freedom depends on the mobilisation of a mass social force in defence of democratic rights and against war, the international working class, who must be alerted to Assange’s plight and organised in his defence.
On Wednesday, the last German soldiers flew out of Afghanistan. This marked the end of the biggest and longest deployment of the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) to date.
Bundeswehr soldiers from Camp Marmal on patrol (Image: ISAF / CC BY-SA 2.0)
At 20 years, it lasted more than three times as long as the Second World War. More than 150,000 German military personnel experienced their first war deployment. Fifty-nine died, thousands more were injured and traumatised. The military costs alone amounted to 12 billion euros.
In its final phase, the withdrawal resembled a desperate scramble. It came after US forces began withdrawing the bulk of their troops well before the 11 September deadline set by President Biden. The last German transport planes left Camp Marmal, their transponders switched off for fear of being shot down by the Taliban.
Observers expect the fundamentalist Islamist movement, which was ousted from power at the beginning of the war, to retake the nearby city of Mazar-e-Sharif and large parts of the country in the coming weeks. This has led to numerous German media outlets writing about a “failed mission” and a “defeat of the West.” But this is only half the truth.
For one thing, the war in Afghanistan is far from over with the official withdrawal of NATO troops. Neither Washington nor Berlin is willing to let Iran, Russia, China or any other rival exert influence over the strategically important country.
Military “advisors” and private mercenaries will stay behind. Regional allies of the “West”—Turkey, but also Pakistan, the Taliban’s protecting power—will be encouraged to keep the conflict simmering. US drones and aircraft will bomb the country, as has long been the case with other countries with which the US is not formally in a state of war (Yemen, Iraq, Syria).
German Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer has announced, “When we leave the country militarily, we must continue to stay by Afghanistan’s side, for example by talking within NATO about how we can continue to support the Afghan army.”
Washington and Berlin did not succeed in installing a stable puppet regime in Kabul, as they had originally intended. But from the German point of view, the war served a far more important purpose: it paved the way for the return of German militarism, hated by broad sections of the population after the crimes of Hitler’s Wehrmacht in the Second World War. For the ruling class, this was more than worth the high human and financial sacrifice.
In 2001, the government of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (Social Democratic Party—SPD) and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer (Green Party) had literally forced German participation in the war on the US government. At a press conference, then-US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld later confirmed that Berlin had never been asked to provide soldiers, as the German government had claimed.
President George W. Bush used the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 to implement war plans against Afghanistan that had long been worked out. As the WSWS warned just a few days after the attacks:
The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have been seized on as an opportunity to implement a far-reaching political agenda for which the most right-wing elements in the ruling elite have been clamoring for years…
Can there be any doubt that this crusade for “peace” and “stability” will become the occasion for the US to tighten its grip over the oil and natural gas resources of the Middle East, the Persian Gulf and the Caspian? Behind the pious and patriotic declarations of politicians and media commentators stand the long-cherished designs of American imperialism to dominate new parts of the world and establish global hegemony.
German imperialism did not want to be left out of this war for the re-division of the world. On 11 October 2001, four days after the start of American hostilities in Afghanistan, Chancellor Schröder announced a fundamental reorientation of German foreign policy to the Bundestag (federal parliament).
“After the end of the Cold War, the restoration of Germany’s state unity and the regaining of our full sovereignty, we have to face international responsibility in a new way,” he declared. “A responsibility that corresponds to our role as an important European and transatlantic partner, but also as a strong democracy and strong national economy in the heart of Europe.”
The period in which Germany had participated in “international efforts to secure freedom, justice and stability” only through “secondary assistance” was “irretrievably over,” the chancellor stressed. “We Germans in particular… now also have an obligation to do full justice to our new responsibility. That also includes—and I say this quite unequivocally—explicitly participating in military operations.”
One month later, the Bundestag decided to provide 3,900 Bundeswehr soldiers for the fight “against international terrorism.” Schröder linked the vote to a vote of confidence—a highly unusual procedure,especially since, due to the support of the CDU/CSU and FDP, a majority would have been guaranteed even should there be defections from within his own camp. But Schröder wanted to make sure that the SPD and the Greens would vote unanimously in favour of Germany’s largest military deployment since the Second World War. Foreign Minister Fischer threatened to resign if the Green parliamentary group turned against the Afghanistan mission.
The threats proved to be superfluous. An SPD party conference three days later approved the war policy by a 90 percent vote. At the federal party conference of the Greens, more than two-thirds of the delegates backed the decision to go to war.
Since then, more than 150,000 servicemen and women have received their baptism of fire in Afghanistan. They had to learn to risk their lives and kill in the interests of German imperialism. The statement by Defence Minister Peter Struck (SPD) at the beginning of the war that the “security of the Federal Republic of Germany” was being defended in the Hindu Kush summed this up.
In addition, it was necessary to accustom the public to the fact that German soldiers were killing again. The outcome was the Kunduz massacre.
On the night of 4 September 2009, Bundeswehr Colonel Georg Klein, in consultation with his superiors in Potsdam, gave the order to bomb a hijacked tanker truck filled with petrol. Although the truck was stuck in a riverbed and posed no danger, Klein refused the American pilots’ request that they be allowed to warn the many people around the truck of the attack. As a result, over 130 civilians, including many children and young people, met their deaths in a hail of bombs and the ensuing conflagration.
Neither Klein nor any other officers were prosecuted for the massacre. The Office of the Attorney General closed all investigations in 2010. In 2013, Klein was promoted to brigadier general and head of the department in personnel management, responsible for recruiting and leading soldiers. The relatives of the victims were fobbed off by the federal government with pittances of 5,000 euros. Lawsuits were rejected by the courts.
Militarism at home, which played such a devastating role in the Weimar Republic in the 1920s and 30s, was strengthened by the Afghanistan war. Soldiers became a commonplace sight on the streets. They were allowed to travel by train for free if they wore their uniforms. This was expanded to the development of a cult of sacrifice and the establishment of fascist and terrorist networks within the military.
The conservative press is even trying once again to create a kind of “stab-in-the-back” legend, following the example of the myth promoted by Hitler about the “traitorous” Weimar Republic. The tabloid Bild, for example, was outraged that Federal President Steinmeier, Bundestag President Schäuble, Chancellor Merkel and Defence Minister Kramp-Karrenbauer did not personally stand guard when the last soldiers returned from Afghanistan. This was “disrespectful, undignified, disrespectful.”
While hundreds of Afghan translators and civilian staff of the German troops were left behind, and now fear for their lives, at great expense the Bundeswehr flew out a 27-ton memorial stone for the fallen soldiers, which is now being rebuilt in a “forest of remembrance” at the Henning-von-Tresckow barracks in Schwielowsee. This was “an important step for the culture of remembrance of the armed forces,” commented an officer in charge.
Most significant of all, the extensive right-wing terrorist networks within the military and state apparatus are inextricably linked to the Afghanistan mission. For example, Sergeant Major André S., alias Hannibal, was a member for eight years of the Special Forces Command (KSK), which operated largely covertly in Afghanistan, hunting down and killing political opponents together with American Special Forces troops and itself suffering heavy casualties.
Hannibal, who also worked for the Military Counter-Intelligence Service, built up a nationwide network through several online chat groups and the association he founded, Uniter, which included reservists, officers of the criminal police, members of special operations units (SEKs), judges, secret service employees and members of other German security agencies. It set up weapons caches, organised shooting exercises, and drew up lists of political enemies to be killed on “Day X.” Despite this, Hannibal was neither dismissed from the Bundeswehr nor imprisoned.
Hannibal is only one of several known right-wing extremists within the KSK. The Nazi cult within the special unit took on such serious forms that in 2020 the defence minister felt compelled to dissolve one of four companies and replace the commander twice. Now, the unit is led by General Ansgar Meyer, who was the last German soldier to leave Afghanistan.
All the establishment political parties are determined to build on what has been achieved in Afghanistan. In 2014, the Grand Coalition of the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats made another attempt to strengthen German militarism. Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who, as head of the Chancellery, had presumably written Schröder’s war speech in 2001, announced in almost the same words a greater military role for Germany in world politics. Since then, military spending has risen massively—from 32 to 50 billion euros—and Steinmeier has become federal president.
If the establishment parties have learned a lesson from the Afghanistan deployment, it is that imperialist military missions should no longer be concealed with hypocritical phrases about drilling wells, building democracy and women’s rights.
On Wednesday’s “Tagesthemen” news broadcast, Defence Minister Kramp-Karrenbauer drew the lesson from the Afghanistan mission that in other international missions it was necessary to think very carefully about what were realistic political goals. It had been a mistake to give the impression that Afghanistan could quickly be turned into a state following the European model. “We must not repeat this mistake in other international missions, for example in the Sahel, for example in Mali.”
The federal government that follows this year’s general election—regardless of its composition—will intensify the militarist offensive. All parties—from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) to the Greens—have made this clear in their election programmes. Even the Left Party has repeatedly declared that its occasional critical phrases about the Bundeswehr are no obstacle to forming a joint government with the parties of war—the SPD and the Greens.
Their defence policy spokesman, Tobias Pflüger, commented on the Afghanistan withdrawal by saying, “If you read through the justifications given by Gerhard Schröder and Joschka Fischer in 2001, it is obvious that the Bundeswehr missions have not achieved their alleged goal.”
As if it was not already clear at that time what goal Schröder and Fischer were pursuing with the Afghanistan war.
Ultimately, it is the insoluble global crisis of capitalism that is driving the imperialist powers once again to militarism and war, as in 1914 and 1939. The US is intensively preparing a military confrontation with China, and neither Germany nor the other European powers want to stand aside.
Germany’s ruling Grand Coalition of the Christian Democratic Union, Christian Social Union and Social Democratic Party has used the final parliamentary sessions of the current legislative period to massively expand the powers of the country’s police and intelligence agencies. Largely unnoticed by the public, the Bundestag has passed a total of nine related laws and amendments.
Headquarters of the BND in Berlin Mitte (Image: Olaf Kosinsky / CC-BY-SA 3.0)
The new government to be formed after the federal election due this autumn will have at its disposal a technically highly equipped surveillance apparatus, with powers the likes of which have not been seen in Germany since the end of the Nazi regime. The state security apparatus (nicknamed Stasi) of the former East Germany, with its network of neighbourhood snoopers and its note box system, appears amateur in comparison.
Taken together, the legislative changes passed by the Bundestag since November 2020, and especially in the last four weeks, represent the biggest legislative complex passed since the reunification of Germany in 1990. Its main features are as follows:
Almost complete abolition of the separation of the police and secret services introduced after World War II in response to the experienceofHitler’sSecret State Police (Gestapo).
The Federal Police (Bundespolizei) now has powers equivalent to those of a secret service, while the secret services can undertake police tasks. Both agencies will in future work hand in hand.
* The Federal Police will be able to massively restrict the freedom of citizens and refugees via bans on staying, detention pending deportation and similar measures, without requiring judicial authorisation.
* The powers of the police and secret services to tap into computer systems, mobile devices and other electronic systems in order to gather and/or manipulate data on a massive scale are being legalized.
* Authorisation is being granted for the secret services and Federal Police to carry out cyber-attacks and other observation and persecution measures merely on the basis of a targeted person’s opinions, without any evidence of criminal activities.
* New powers are being authorized to comprehensively deploy automated monitoring and censorship of the internet with the help of upload filters.
* Seamless centralised collection and storage of personal and biometric data, made accessible to all state authorities, is being legalized.
Repression of the population, rather than its security, is the single purpose of the new laws. The entire state apparatus is being armed to suppress growing popular resistance to the devastating consequences of the coronavirus pandemic, attacks on jobs and social rights, militarism and war, and the threat from neo-Nazis and fascists.
The new Protection of the Constitution Law
The “Protection of the Constitution Law,” passed by the Bundestag on 10 June 2021, legalises the extensive use of so-called “State Trojans” by the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution—Germany’s domestic secret service), the 16 Landesämter für Verfassungsschutz (State Offices for the Protection of the Constitution), the Federal Intelligence Service (foreign intelligence agency—BND) and the Military Counter-Intelligence Service (MAD). All of these 19 secret services can now systematically spy on people at home and abroad. The law sets virtually no limits on the data that may be collected and the reasons for observation.
A State Trojan is malware placed by an intelligence agent on the smart phone, laptop, PC or server of a person or organisation to be observed during a clandestine invasion of his or her home, or remotely via the internet. The monitoring of an ongoing communication takes place on the targeted person’s device before the conversation, chat message or SMS is encrypted.
The operation is also referred to as telecommunication source tapping. The use of a State Trojan with the aim of transmitting stored data such as documents, image recordings and video recordings to the intelligence service is known as an online search.
In addition, State Trojans can manipulate data and programmes on other people’s computers, mobile phones and IT systems, with far-reaching, possibly fatal consequences for the persons concerned. A vehicle’s electronic control and braking systems can, for example, be manipulated to cause an accident.
Telecommunication source tapping and online searches were previously legally permitted only by the Federal Criminal Police (BKA), in the context of police investigations ordered by a judge into serious crimes. Now, all secret services have the power to conduct such operations.
According to the wording of the new law, the secret services are not permitted to carry out online searches. They are, however, allowed to extract data stored on a targeted device after a Trojan has been activated. In practice, nothing can prevent agents from collecting data stored much longer. Technically, a telecommunication source tapping operation is capable of carrying out a complete online search at the same time.
Several experts have sharply criticised the new Protection of the Constitution Law, declaring it to be unconstitutional. Dr. Matthias Bäcker, professor of public law and information law at the University of Mainz, stated in an expert opinion that all malware operations not strictly limited to an ongoing communication are online searches. If they are now carried out in the name of telecommunication source tapping, bypassing all legal hurdles, this will constitute a violation of the basic right to the integrity and confidentiality of information technology systems, he said.
The Mainz professor also criticised the fact that the latitude for hacking and spying attacks has been considerably expanded. The law allows “telecommunication surveillance in part even in the case of the planning of comparatively minor offences.” As examples, Bäcker mentions “the dissemination of propaganda material of anti-constitutional organisations, violations of a ban on associations and membership of a secret association of foreigners.”
In addition, the new law has expanded the concept of “anti-constitutional aspirations” from organisations to individuals, whereby the “target of their behaviour” is sufficient justification to start intelligence agency observations. Bäcker warns that the law “virtually invites a practice of observation based on (presumed) personal characteristics or the social ties of the persons concerned, instead of on actions objectively relevant to the intelligence agency.”
In other words, persons are observed and prosecuted not because of concrete acts, but because of their opinions.
This principle of Gesinnungsjustiz (judgement based on opinions) was the basis of the legal system of the Nazis and is also the basis for the observation of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party—SGP) by the Verfassungsschutz. When the Verfassungsschutz first included the SGP as a “left-wing extremist party” in its annual report of 2017, it justified its action by stating that the SGP defended a socialist programme, criticised capitalism and politically criticised apologists for capitalism—in particular the SPD, the Left Party, the Greens and the trade unions.
When the SGP subsequently filed a complaint against this judgement, lawyers for the Verfassungsschutz justified the persecution of the SGP not on the basis of unlawful activities, but rather on the basis of the party’s analysis of society, its Marxist stance on history, its political analyses and its socialist objective. The Verfassungsschutz lawyers stated that “arguing for a democratic, egalitarian, socialist society” contradicted “the central values of Germany’s Basic Law.”
The SGP warned at the time: “With its attack on the SGP, this criminal government agency wants to set a precedent for a new kind of legal prosecution of thought crimes that would provide the basis for the prosecution of anyone who criticises the current reactionary social and political situation… If the right-wing conspiracy in the state apparatus is not stopped and the SGP is not defended, the dam will be broken for even more far-reaching measures.”
This assessment has now been confirmed. The new Protection of the Constitution Law legalises hitherto unprecedented measures targeting broad sections of the population and all kinds of organisations and parties assessed to be undesirable by the intelligence agencies and the German government.
In order to carry out this surveillance technically, the law obliges companies active in the aviation, financial services, telecommunications and telemedia sectors to pass on the personal data of citizens under surveillance and provide technical assistance for the insertion of State Trojans for online searches and the transmission of the resulting data streams. Internet providers such as Telekom and Vodafon, but also Google, Facebook and banks, will be turned into accomplices of the secret services.
Only a few target groups, such as priests and lawyers, are exempt from secret service cyber-attacks. Journalists—despite protests from journalists’ associations—are explicitly not among them. The freedom of the press and the digital protection of its sources have been gutted.
The law also provides for networking and data exchange between all of the various secret services, Federal Police, Federal Criminal Police and other state authorities such as the country’s immigration authorities and the Federal Employment Agency.
The new Federal Intelligence Service Law
The Federal Intelligence Service Law of 25 March 2021 legalises the tapping of huge databases and data streams to monitor the communications of millions of people and search their computers, mobile phones and servers for data, photos and videos by the BND, the foreign intelligence service.
This same law was supposed to fulfil legal requirements to restrict and control the activities of the BND, as stipulated by the German Constitutional Court in May 2020. The court declared that the previous law of 2016, which legalised the mass surveillance uncovered by American whistleblower Edward Snowden, to be unconstitutional.
The court, however, did not object to mass surveillance per se, but merely insisted on compliance with a few formalities in its ordering, documenting and monitoring. It thereby provided a flimsy democratic fig leaf for mass surveillance.
But even with these formalities, the changes in the new BND law compared to the old one are minimal or simply farcical. For example, the quantitative limitation of interceptions demanded by the Federal Constitutional Court is implemented in such a way as to cover not more than “30 percent of the transmission capacities of all globally existing telecommunications networks!”
What looks like a limitation is, in reality, a licence for unlimited spying. The BND, even if it continues to greatly expand its technical capabilities, will never be able to collate the enormous amount of data associated with this “limit,” according to Klaus Langenfeld, a man who should know. He is the operator of the world’s largest Internet node DE-CIX, near Frankfurt am Main, which at peak times records a data flow of more than 10 terabits, or 10 trillion bits per second.
The new law also significantly expands the power to intercept data and spy on people. The BND is allowed to hack communication providers such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Vodafone, as well as the IT systems of foreign companies and authorities, “even without their knowledge” and “without concrete cause.” These shady and criminal operations are called “strategic telecommunications reconnaissance” in the jargon of the ministerial authors.
Significantly, not only foreign but also German citizens, companies and IT systems may be targeted by the BND. Formally, the law prohibited the surveillance and interception of the “individual communications of natural persons,” even though no one can control compliance with this prohibition. The use, however, of a smart phone, computer or even a telephone is considered communication with machines. In these cases, the BND is allowed almost unrestricted access to stored data and current traffic and content data.
For such operations, the BND is explicitly allowed to cooperate and exchange data with foreign intelligence services such as the National Security Agency (NSA) and thereby use huge secret data storage centres such as the one in Utah. As Edward Snowden has revealed, the BND has been carrying out such operations for years, without any legal basis. Now the laws have been adapted to this practice!
As already mentioned, the BND is also allowed to use State Trojans for the mass extraction of data from foreign IT systems and devices.
The range of “dangerous topics” which the BND is authorized to spy upon has also been considerably expanded. In addition to the previous topics—international terrorism, the transfer of nuclear weapons material and illegal smuggling—“crisis developments abroad,” “protection of critical infrastructures” and “cases of intellectual property theft” or copyright infringement have been added.
The latter marks the first time a secret service has been authorised by law to intervene in private legal disputes. German companies are to be strengthened against foreign competitors. Chinese companies in particular have long been accused of copying products and programmes, although no evidence of such activities has ever been provided.
Now, with the help of the BND, it is hoped that such evidence can be found or fabricated as a pretext for more aggressive action against China. US companies are also likely to appear soon as targets on the monitors of the BND. The growing tensions between Germany and the US are part of the background to the BND’s increased powers.
Particularly dangerous is the BND’s new task of monitoring, spying on, sabotaging or manipulating oppositional tendencies, organisations and individuals at home and abroad under the catchword “international extremism.” These operations are based on the same principle of a thought police utilised by the Verfassungsschutz.
The BND was founded in 1956 by Reinhard Gehlen, who was responsible for military espionage against the Soviet Union under Hitler. Its staff consisted mainly of former agents of the Nazi military espionage apparatus, Gestapo and SS. Gehlen even collaborated with war criminals and Holocaust mass murderers such as Klaus Barbie, who had gone into hiding in Bolivia.
Germany’s Grand Coalition has now turned this organisation, steeped in its Nazi past, into a kind of super-intelligence agency for use against foreign countries and against its own people. The BND reports directly to the German Chancellery and has over 6,500 official employees, as well as enormous financial resources—this year alone over half a billion euros. For the past two years, it has resided in Europe’s largest new building complex in the centre of Berlin.
Moscow officials are scrambling to repurpose thousands of hospital beds to handle a surge in COVID-19 patients. The deputy mayor revealed Tuesday that the capital city does not have enough spots available to treat even the current number of infected patients, much less should that coefficient rise. The infection rate in the metropolitan center of nearly 12 million people is triple the national average.
Patients of a COVID-19 unit in a St. Petersburg hospital lying in the corridor because of a lack of beds
As of Friday morning, Russia had recorded another 23,128 infections over a 24-hour period, of which 6,893 were in the country’s largest city . Ninety percent of the cases in Moscow are of the new, highly infectious Delta variant. There was an all-time record of 679 deaths. Children and adolescents are being increasingly affected. The Kremlin announced the release of a further 25 billion rubles, about $347 million, to treat COVID-19 patients. The Ministry of Industry and Trade just called on metallurgical enterprises to share their oxygen supplies with hospitals.
The shortages hitting Moscow are being seen elsewhere in the country, with coronavirus cases ticking up in all of Russia’s 80 regions. Several oblasts (provinces)—Voronezh, Kuzbass, Vladimirsky, and Tyumen—are reporting that their COVID-19 wards are at upwards of 80 percent capacity.
In Pskov, a city not far from the border with Estonia, the number of infections is up to what they were in February, when Russia was in the grip of its second wave. Outbreaks have hit a kindergarten, a factory and a hospital. In the far northern city of Severodvinsk, 53 incidents of COVID-19 have been reported in the last 24 hours, compared to just 276 in total since the onset of the pandemic. The majority of cases are among workers at nuclear shipbuilding plants.
Across Russia, including in the second largest metropolitan center of Saint Petersburg, medical facilities are working to rapidly free up more beds as the Delta variant hits the country. A single case of Delta plus has now also been identified in Russia.
Following the lead of every major country, several months ago Russian officials ended virtually all mandated COVID-19 health measures. As a consequence of this, COVID-19 cases in Russia barely fell below the peaks witnessed in the first wave last spring. In early June they began to rapidly climb.
Speaking to Lenta.ru, Sergei Netesov, a leading biologist at one of the Novosibirsk State University’s virology labs, made clear that government officials are to blame for the situation. “This year in Moscow everything was relaxed at the start of May. At first they announced a big vacation, and then suddenly people were allowed to go to stadiums, movie theaters, cafés, restaurants and so forth. There was no monitoring of mask wearing. Many acquaintances of mine went to Moscow. They were stunned that during the spring the city was living as if there was no epidemic,” he said.
The situation in Moscow is now “awful,” Netesov noted. “The hospitals are once again overwhelmed. Soon there will not be enough doctors to take care of all the sick. There already aren’t enough beds. People are lying in corridors.”
After failing to stem this latest surge by instituting a one-week paid holiday and imposing a number of minimal restrictions, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin declared last week that industries that serve the public, such as child care, transportation and food service, must vaccinate no less than 60 percent of their employees. All employers in the capital must shift no less than 30 percent of their employees to remote work.
Patrons at restaurants and cafes are also required to show proof of vaccination, or prior COVID-19 infection within the last six months or a negative PCR test. Masks and gloves are required in stores, on public transportation, and anywhere there are large concentrations of people. Concerned over waning immunities, revaccinations of those who already received one of Russia’s four approved vaccines started this week.
Still, sporting events and entertainment venues are allowed to host up to 500 people. Workplaces and factories are open. And mirroring the position of the Kremlin and the political establishment around the globe, Sobyanin has made clear that he has no intention of reinstituting a desperately needed lockdown.
The emphasis on vaccination as a means to control the situation in Moscow is occurring elsewhere in the country, with 23 regions announcing mandates for segments of the workforce and setting target dates to reach those goals for the late summer. Factories across the country, intent on keeping workers on the job, are following suit. The Saint Petersburg city government recently proposed a bill that will deny COVID-19 infection bonus payments, which range between 300,000 (about $4,000) to 1 million rubles (about $13,640), to unvaccinated medical personnel. With thousands of doctors and nurses having contracted the virus and dozens have died, it has provoked significant opposition.
Fear of the Delta variant and the push to vaccinate are starting to have an impact. In the last week, the number of people receiving a first dose has grown dramatically, with the government reporting a 170 percent nationwide increase in the vaccination rate last week. In the regions of Bashkiria, Khabarovsk, and Udmurtia, where that number jumped 55 percent in 10 days, injections had to be halted last weekend because of supply shortages.
However, given the authorities’ refusal to impose lockdowns, the extremely low vaccination rate in Russia—just over 12 percent—and the time that it takes for vaccines to impart some degree of immunity, the current effort will do little to arrest the crisis soon.
The Putin government’s attempt to bolster its position by being the first country to authorize a COVID-19 vaccine has been a flop. With Sputnik V approved before completing stage three trials, widespread distrust of the government existing more broadly in Russia, and officials repeatedly declaring the COVID-19 situation under control for months, tens of millions have avoided getting the shot despite it being widely available.
At the current rate, it will take seven and a half months to vaccinate 70 percent of Russia’s 144 million people. The Kremlin has made clear that it will not mandate vaccinations at the federal level.
The highly infectious Delta variant of the coronavirus, which is spreading rapidly around the globe, is fueling an unprecedented surge of cases among the more than 270 million people in Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country.
UNICEF aid workers in Indonesia [Credit: UNICEF]
For weeks, the refusal of President Joko Widodo’s administration to introduce the necessary safety measures—with Widodo saying he did not want to “kill the economy”—has created the conditions for a catastrophe on the scale of that witnessed in India this year.
Over the past fortnight, records of transmission have been broken numerous times. The Indonesian Health Ministry recorded 25,830 new COVID-19 cases on Friday, a fresh record, bringing the total tally to 2,228,938, with the death toll rising by 539 to 59,534.
Health experts are unanimous in saying these numbers are a significant underestimation, with some epidemiologists in Indonesian universities reporting up to five times the official statistics. For the entire course of the pandemic, the share of cases returning positive has hovered around 20 percent, one of the worst reported results in the world.
The impact of the Delta variant is most pronounced, but not limited to, the heavily populated island of Java and the tourist destination of Bali, which has suffered a quadrupling of cases in the past two weeks. Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan reported that 87 percent of recorded cases in the city were due to the Delta variant.
According to the Eijkman Institute for Molecular Biology (LBM), cases also have been discovered in Sumatra, Sulawesi and Kalimantan.
All the signs are pointing to a calamity because the government is still rejecting complete lockdowns and other safety measures. The Delta variant is widely considered to be 60 percent more contagious than the previous Alpha variant originating in the United Kingdom, and around four times more likely to cause hospitalisation.
Hospitals are reaching full capacity across Java, with the capital Jakarta recording a bed occupancy rate of 93 percent this week. With isolation rooms overwhelmed, makeshift tents have been erected in carparks to deal with the overflow of patients.
Many people are being turned away and forced to self-isolate in their homes, so deaths outside of hospitals are becoming more common, and families are having to bury their own loved ones. A video that went viral on social media earlier this week showed a 64-year-old man left to die outside his front door in North Jakarta waiting for an ambulance that took 12 hours to arrive. He had reportedly tested positive for the virus two weeks earlier.
Oxygen tanks—in high demand not just for hospitals but families in self-isolation—are in critically low supply in Java. The price for a tank has roughly tripled in price in some of the hardest hit areas, from $66 to $185. The health ministry claims this situation is temporary and is scrambling for all government agencies, including police, to redistribute tanks to the hardest-hit areas. Suppliers have made a belated commitment to shift their production from industrial to medical use.
At a press conference, Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin sought to blame the oxygen tank shortage on an electricity supply interruption that halted factory production in Central Java.
As elsewhere internationally, the working class and poor are the hardest-hit by the government’s pro-business program and its failure to take the necessary safety measures.
Dr Dicky Budiman, an epidemiologist now based in Australia, said: “The problem in Indonesia is that testing rates are very low because only people who present themselves at hospitals with symptoms receive free tests. Everyone else has to pay.
“Based on the current reproduction rate in Indonesia that has climbed from 1.19 in January to 1.4 in June, I estimated there at least 200,000 new cases in the country today. But if I compare that with modelling by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, it is much higher, about 350,000 new infections per day. That’s as high as India before the peak.”
It is no coincidence that Indonesia, which has seen disastrously low testing and contact tracing as well as the avoidance of lockdowns at all cost, is one of the most unequal countries on the planet, with four billionaires owning as much wealth as the poorest 100 million people.
Widodo’s administration has pinned all hopes on a vaccination rollout that is now behind schedule. The government promised to inoculate 181.5 million people by next January with China’s Sinovac vaccine but has reached just 7.5 percent of this target. Health experts have stated that it could take up to three years to reach the government’s target.
Health measures belatedly announced by the government this week were of a limited character, stopping short of a full shutdown. As of Saturday, almost all of Java will be in a partial lockdown along with only the most populated areas of Bali.
The restrictions include all non-essential workers to work from home and the reintroduction of distance learning for schools. Shopping centres, houses of worship, leisure centres and parks will be shut, and restaurants have been restricted to takeaway and deliveries. Weddings are still running with a limit of 30 people in attendance.
Those industries allowed to run at 100 percent capacity include those relating to health, security and energy, while financial services are reduced to 50 percent. The measures are currently set to run until July 20.
The inadequate nature of the restrictions is underscored by the official aim, which is to halve the current number of daily virus cases to below 10,000.
“If the government is half-hearted it will just remain the same,” Defriman Djafri, an epidemiologist at Andalas University in Padang on Sumatra island, said. What was needed, he insisted, was two weeks in total lockdown, no outside activities and no contact, with people ordered to stay at home.
Up until now, Widodo has resisted introducing any measures that might affect corporate profits. News of even the limited curbs wiped out earlier gains on Indonesia’s main stock index.
The crisis in Indonesia is part of an international resurgence of COVID-19 cases, due to the refusal of capitalist governments everywhere to take the measures necessary to prevent the emergence of new mutations.
Infections are surging throughout Southeast Asia, including in Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines. There is also a rise in Africa, with nine out of 14 African countries experiencing a resurgence. South Africa’s cases have doubled in the past week.
Auto companies reported substantial sales increases for the second quarter of 2021 compared to the same time last year, in spite of an ongoing worldwide microchip shortage which has idled much of the world’s auto production. Some corporations have reported sales numbers that reveal a closing of the gap between post- and pre-pandemic production. However, Wards Intelligence, an analytics firm which tracks auto sales, shows US light vehicle sales were down last month, with 1.3 million cars sold compared to 1.6 million in May of this year.
Ford Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan [Credit: AP Photo/Carlos Osorio, File]
The basis of the rebound in the auto industry has been levels of exploitation of autoworkers which are practically unprecedented. At major auto plants throughout the country, with the full support and collaboration of the United Auto Workers union, forced overtime has become routine as companies scramble to make up for profits lost in the early stages of the pandemic. Meanwhile, an unknown but no doubt massive number of workers have gotten sick and died of COVID-19 inside the plants.
The human toll of this breakneck pace on autoworkers was expressed in a series of tragic deaths in Detroit last week. Two autoworkers died of drug overdoses at Stellantis’ Warren Truck Assembly Plant and Warren Stamping Plant, and a third worker died outside of the company’s Jefferson North Assembly Plant when she was struck by a train in the middle of the night leaving work.
Roadside memorial for Jefferson North Assembly worker struck by a train leaving her shift last Friday [Credit: WSWS Media]
The UAW announced this week that mask requirements would end later this month for vaccinated workers in US plants, as part of its continuing collaboration with the auto companies to tear up what remains of coronavirus-related restrictions, justified by false claims by the Biden administration that the pandemic, which is still surging throughout the world, is “over.”
Toyota reported a sales increase of nearly 73 percent this past quarter compared to 2020. EVs, including hybrids, made up nearly a quarter of total sales, the company said. Toyota replaced General Motors as the top selling automaker in the US for the second quarter of 2021. Unlike the US-based corporations, Toyota had a supply of the microchips on hand when the shortage first began to affect the auto industry, but as the situation has dragged out it has also had to cut back production at its plants due to the lack of components.
Cox Automotive earlier predicted that Ford’s sales would be up by 20.5 percent compared to last year, but still down 19.5 percent from the second quarter of 2019. However, Ford missed most predicted targets for the second quarter of 2021, increasing sales by only 9.6 percent. Its June 2021 sales fell by 26.9 percent compared to May 2021, with sales of its best-selling F-series pickups declining by nearly 30 percent.
Ford’s sales and production continue to be impacted by the chip shortage. The company reported earlier this year that it expected to lose half of its projected second quarter production as a result of the lack of parts. Recently the company announced a slew of production cuts that will impact workers across its factories in the US, Canada and Mexico over the next month. Of these, Ford Chicago Assembly Plant will be impacted the most, with all production shut down for four weeks beginning July 5. Workers will have to apply for dwindling unemployment benefits through the state yet again, many who have already been temporarily laid off this year due to the ongoing chip shortages.
Stellantis, formed out of a merger in January of PSA Group and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, reported a 32 percent increase in second quarter sales compared to what the two parent corporations reported last year. The increase was driven in large part by a 47 percent increase in Dodge Ram sales.
The most popular Ram pickup truck, the Ram 1500, is built at its Sterling Heights Assembly Plant (SHAP) in Michigan, where autoworkers have been on forced overtime for the entire year. Stellantis executives have clearly made the decision to keep the plant running at full blast no matter the cost.
This breakneck pace continued throughout massive outbreaks of coronavirus inside the plant. At one point in the spring, more than 10 percent of the plant’s nearly 8,000 workers were out on quarantine. The UAW, meanwhile, has run damage control for the company by covering up the true extent of the spread.
SHAP is also one of the few major assembly plants never to have shut down or cut production due to the microchip shortage. Stellantis even shifted chips and manpower from idled plants such as Warren Truck, which is now reopened, to SHAP.
General Motors (GM) reported sales increases over 40 percent for this quarter compared to the second quarter of 2020, down only 5.8 percent compared to 2019. Sales of the Chevrolet Bolt EV, built in Orion Township, MI, went up 31 percent, and sales of its Buick SUV, built in Delta Township, MI, went up 31 percent. Its Chevrolet Silverado truck, built at its plant in Silao, Mexico, also picked up large numbers of sales. Similar to SHAP, workers at GM’s Silao plant have faced grueling conditions, including forced 12-hour shifts, and COVID-19 has infected and killed an unknown numbers of workers at the plant.
Other major automotive corporations reported high sales increases compared to the previous quarter. German auto giant Volkswagen reported sales increased of 72 percent in the second quarter of 2021 compared to 2020 and sold 5,756 EVs last quarter, up from 474 in the first quarter. Its stock price rose 1.3 percent after sales results were released Thursday. Honda recorded an overall sales increase of about 64 percent compared to the same quarter last year. The company also reported a record number of EV hybrid sales.
All-electric carmaker Tesla, which reopened its plant in Fremont, California, in defiance of stay-at-home orders in the state of California last year, recorded record numbers of deliveries in the second quarter of 2021. According to Refinitiv, the company delivered 201,250 vehicles in total during the past quarter, above its expected target of 200,258 vehicles. Tesla stock prices rose as high as 3.3 percent on Friday morning and it has reportedly increased its vehicle prices in response to the chip shortage.
Although it sells far fewer cars in comparison to its competitors, the massive wealth of the company and its billionaire CEO Elon Musk rests in large part on speculative profits and is increasingly dependent on volatile cryptocurrency investments like its $1.5 billion bitcoin investment revealed in February. The company’s productive capacity is vulnerable to the supply of microchips, and there is nervousness on Wall Street that its streak of prosperity could end if it relies heavily on cryptocurrency to shore up its financial profits.
While the auto companies no doubt had much to celebrate this week, there can be no doubt that in corporate boardrooms and in UAW offices throughout the country there is intense anxiety that rebounding profits could be jeopardized by an eruption of struggles by autoworkers. Last year, workers rejected a UAW-corporate deal to keep plants running during the initial surge in the pandemic by carrying out wildcat strikes, temporarily foiling this corporatist conspiracy and forcing a two-month shutdown. Given the pressure-cooker atmosphere inside the plants, there is every reason for them to fear a renewed upsurge.
Talk about a contrived crisis. NATO, in its ongoing struggle to create enemies and thereby provide itself with a reason to exist, is now calling Russia its greatest threat. In other words, there really is no threat, unless NATO provokes Moscow and in doing so, creates one. In the current period—one that was preceded most recently by almost complete military domination of the world by the United States—Russia’s recent and relatively mild reactions to its growing encirclement by US client regimes and NATO military forces has been ratcheted up to what NATO is calling the greatest threat faced by NATO since that its heyday. Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether the Soviet Union (SU) was ever the threat US citizens were told it was by their government, this recent statement by NATO is overblown and, more importantly, potentially quite dangerous.
During the final years of the Soviet Union, numerous discussions took place between officials of the SU under Mikhail Gorbachev and officials of the US and Germany. These discussions intensified after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany. A part of these discussions focused on the continuing existence of NATO and its eastern European counterpart, the Warsaw Pact. Although NATO survived the dissolution of the so-called Soviet Bloc, the Warsaw Pact did not. An undertone of the ongoing discussions between Moscow and Washington was an understanding that NATO would not attempt to recruit nations that were previously in the Moscow-led alliance. According to the NATO newsletter NATO Review, this understanding was never written down and was therefore essentially meaningless. In fact, here is a quote detailing this perception from the journal’s spring 2015 edition:
Thus, the debate about the enlargement of NATO evolved solely in the context of German reunification. In these negotiations Bonn and Washington managed to allay Soviet reservations about a reunited Germany remaining in NATO. This was achieved by generous financial aid, and by the “2+4 Treaty” ruling out the stationing of foreign NATO forces on the territory of the former East Germany. However, it was also achieved through countless personal conversations in which Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders were assured that the West would not take advantage of the Soviet Union’s weakness and willingness to withdraw militarily from Central and Eastern Europe. It is these conversations that may have left some Soviet politicians with the impression that NATO enlargement, which started with the admission of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland in 1999, had been a breach of these Western commitments.”
In other words, Washington lied, again. Consequently, NATO began to invite/entice several nations from the defunct Warsaw Pact into its orbit, beginning with Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland in 1999. This resulted in NATO forces moving closer and closer to Russia’s eastern flank. Anyone who suggests that there is no strategic element to the incorporation of these and several other nations bordering (or much closer to) Russia is a liar. Anyone who believes this is a fool. The facts seem pretty clear. Washington and its western allies saw the disintegration of the Soviet Union and its alliance as an opportunity to further intimidate Moscow by moving its military forces closer to Russian borders while simultaneously incorporating the economies of the new NATO nations into the neoliberal fantasy then being constructed in the banks and legislatures of the United States, Britain, and Germany.
It is now 2015. After a US-sponsored coup in Ukraine that installed a government favorable to Washington and its plans, various separatist movements coalesced in regions of Ukraine where the majority of the population favors Moscow. The coup itself was preceded by a reasonably popular movement among Ukrainians that was partially funded by western NGOs and US government agencies fronting as pro-democracy organizations. The movement organized a series of protests following election results they did not agree with. After weeks of these protests, armed elements provoked an insurrection in Kiev that resulted in the aforementioned coup. It was only a matter of days before the separatist elements opposed to the new Kiev government held protests that were attacked. The protests turned quickly to armed rebellions, most likely funded (at least partially) by Moscow. A referendum on secession from Ukraine was held in the Crimean region of Ukraine that went overwhelmingly for secession. Despite the election’s non-recognition by most of the west, Crimea remains separate from Ukraine. In the Ukrainian east, battles continue to rage between Ukrainian military units and separatist militias. Estimates of the dead from this conflict range from 6,000 to 50,000.
Europe is understandably concerned. The continent fears the battle may spread and wants the war to end. Meanwhile, Washington seems to be pushing for it to intensify. NATO is sending a total of 30,000 rapid-reaction forces to its easternmost members’ borders. In Washington, legislators from both sides of the aisle together with Secretary of State John Kerry and others in the government are lobbying to send lethal weapons to Kiev’s forces. It is fairly certain that Moscow is already arming the separatists. The possibility of a greater war is genuine.
There are those who see the conflict in Ukraine as evidence of a new “cold” war, like that between the Soviet Union and the United States after World War Two. This comparison is misleading. There were genuine ideological and economic differences that fueled the dispute between the United States and Soviet Union. These differences do not exist in the current moment. The United States operates under a monopoly capitalist economy; so does Russia. Both nations are also nominally democracies that are in reality governments run by oligarchs and banks. A better template to utilize when examining the conflict between Washington and Moscow can be found earlier in history. It is the template of inter-imperial rivalry.
To put it simply, Washington does not want its planetary hegemony challenged. Meanwhile, Russia desires to maintain its domination of the world near its borders, while perhaps also playing with the idea of its own “sphere of influence.” The encirclement of Moscow’s western flank by NATO threatens that domination in a very real way. So, Moscow is fighting back. Russia’s position is not merely a defensive one, but it is certainly the weaker player in this game. If Washington begins to arm Kiev, the stakes for Moscow become even greater.
Meanwhile, Kiev refuses to call the conflict a war. Instead, it is being termed a terrorist operation. Naturally, the reason is related to the neoliberal IMF loans Kiev has coming; such loans would be much more difficult to obtain if it was officially at war. The will of those being conscripted to fight in Ukraine’s military is less than enthusiastic, with draft resistance growing. Antiwar protests in both Russia and Ukraine are also growing in size. However, in the United States the citizens are allowing their politicians and generals to involve their nation in the conflict without any substantial protest.
There are no good guys in this conflict. The people of Ukraine are fighting battles in which they are ultimately pawns. Arming either side is cynical and manipulative and paves the way for an expansion of the war perhaps even beyond Ukraine’s borders. A truce should be agreed to that leaves all forces in place while the warring sides and their sponsors negotiate an end to the armed conflict. The motivation for this war resides in the desire to control resources and territory, directly and otherwise. Those Ukrainians desiring independence from Russia are seeing that desire being manipulated by Washington and local politicians with their own designs. Those desiring independence from the new Kiev government are experiencing a similar scenario. The longer the war continues, the more it will be influenced by Washington and Moscow. And the more blood will be spilled.
