A crime against humanity: COVID-19 has killed an estimated four million people in India

Bryan Dyne

The real toll of the COVID-19 pandemic in India is between three and five million, ten times the official figure, according to a new study by the US-based Center for Global Development. “True deaths are likely to be in the several millions not hundreds of thousands,” notes the report, “making this arguably India’s worst human tragedy since partition and independence.”

This massive death toll is a crime against humanity, in which the entire imperialist world order is implicated no less than the ruling class of India. Moreover, the massive undercount of cases and deaths in India is no doubt replicated in other countries. This means that the real global death toll from the pandemic, which stands at 4.13 million by official figures, is well over 10 million and likely far higher.

Funeral pyres of those who died of COVID-19 in New Delhi, India, April 24, 2021. (AP Photo/Altaf Qadri)

The study, released on Tuesday, estimates that there were between 1.5 and 3.4 million “excess deaths” in India during the “first wave” of the pandemic between April 2020 and March 2021. The number of deaths per day was even higher during the “second wave” between April and June of this year, as India’s hospitals collapsed in the face of a tsunami of infections. An estimated 1.4 to 2.4 million people died during in these three months, a rate of death three times higher than the previous period.

Basic and necessary equipment to fight the symptoms of the coronavirus, such as oxygen and Remdesivir were all but non-existent. Families were forced to purchase such supplies themselves from the black market, and often also forced to administer care themselves as well. Images and videos of crowds outside hospitals clamoring for assistance even as their loved ones were dying burned themselves into the minds of millions across the world.

Such mass death was spurred on by the abysmal social conditions facing hundreds of millions of India’s working poor, who are malnourished, lack access to clean water and live in cramped quarters unable to socially distance. Given these conditions, when the pandemic first emerged, it was all the more important that the government mobilize the necessary resources to contain it.

The Modi government bears responsibility for this catastrophe. Its response was guided at every step by the single-minded aim of preserving the wealth and privilege of the financial elite. It did virtually nothing to contain the pandemic until abruptly calling for a nationwide lockdown on March 24, ordered with only four hours’ notice, which was later removed before the virus was contained.

No economic assistance was provided for the hundreds of millions of informal workers rendered unable to feed themselves and their families, which induced a mass migration of workers back to rural areas, spreading the virus to every corner of the country.

Even as coronavirus cases and deaths mounted, Modi pressed forward with reopening, proclaiming that the country had to be “saved” from measures to prevent the spread of a lethal and virulent contagion. Speaking for the Indian ruling elite, he infamously declared on April 20 during a national broadcast that, “In today’s situation, we have to save the country from lockdown!”

This horrifying death toll reveals the true meaning of this declaration. In the midst of the largest surge of COVID-19 anywhere in the world, the country had been “saved” from the basic measures necessary to contain the disease, but at the cost of millions of lives. According to Forbes, in 2020 the wealth of India’s billionaires nearly doubled to $596 billion. During that same period, an estimated 230 million Indians were robbed of their livelihood and pushed below the national poverty line of 375 rupees (US $5) a day.

However, direct responsibility for this crime against humanity extends to every capitalist government—and, in particular, the United States and the major imperialist powers. The mass infection in India is the product of the decision to reject emergency measures to stop the pandemic when it first emerged, because these measures impinged on the profit interests of the corporate and financial elite.

On February 28, 2020, when there were as yet only three reported cases of COVID-19 in India, the International Committee of the Fourth International issued an urgent call for a globally coordinated emergency response to the pandemic. “The response to the coronavirus cannot be coordinated on a nation by nation level,” the ICFI wrote. “The virus does not respect borders or visa immigration restrictions. The global network of transportation and economic integration have turned the virus into a global problem.”

Instead of taking emergency action, however, the major capitalist powers, led by the United States, used the crisis to organize a massive bailout of the financial markets and the rich. This was followed by the campaign to return workers to work and remove all necessary restrictions to stop the further spread of the virus.

The consequences have been devastating for the population of the advanced capitalist countries. In the United States, more than 625,000 people are dead, according to official figures, while the real toll is likely over one million. The failure to eradicate the disease in its early stages ensured that it would spread rapidly throughout the world, including to India.

The massive loss of life, moreover, has been fueled by the policy of “vaccine nationalism,” with the major capitalist governments hoarding vaccines. India, one of the world’s leading producers of pharmaceuticals, has a vaccination rate that is one tenth of Europe and the United States. According to the Reuters COVID-19 vaccination tracker, only 6.3 percent of the country is fully vaccinated, meaning that about 1.3 billion people are still vulnerable to new and even more deadly variants.

In any rational society, the scale of social misery produced by the “second wave” in India would have evoked an enormous, globally coordinated response. India’s colossal manufacturing capacity would have turned to making equipment and medicine to fight the disease and emergency hospitals would have been erected to care for the sick. An army of testers and contact tracers would have been mobilized and financial resources provided to those who were forced to isolate to protect themselves and others from the virulent and deadly disease. Non-essential production would be halted, with full monetary compensation to the workers and small business impacted.

The collective resources of global society would have been mobilized to stop the carnage. Instead, the imperialist governments offered a pittance of assistance. Trillions are expended every year on military armaments and nuclear weapons, but almost nothing was provided to save the lives of millions of people. The multinational corporations, moreover, insisted that production continue to churn out profits.

For the capitalist oligarchs, the death of millions of people was considered—and is considered—an acceptable sacrifice.

There will be an accounting for this policy of social murder. The pandemic has exposed, through the deaths of uncounted millions, that all aspects of socioeconomic life are ultimately subordinated to profit, producing the social miseries of poverty, hunger and disease alongside the existential threats of ecological catastrophe, global pandemics and nuclear war.

Moral Intelligence or Nuclear War

Robert Koehler

One of these days, something will give — the rich, the powerful will suddenly look around cluelessly. What’s happening? Awareness will sweep across the planet: We are one, and life is sacred. This consciousness will even invade political life and what I call moral intelligence will find political traction.

This won’t mean that life suddenly becomes simple — anything but! The politics of today, nationally and internationally, is simple: somebody wins, somebody loses; war is inevitable, there are always several on the horizon, and the primary consequence of every war that is waged is that it spurs more wars, a fact that remains officially unnoticed; only some lives matter, those that don’t are collateral damage, illegal aliens or simply the enemy; nuclear weapons  (ours, only ours) are justified, necessary and must be continually upgraded; national borders, however arbitrary, are sacred (the only thing that’s sacred); if these norms are challenged, the best response is mockery and cynicism.

Transcending this mindset requires facing life in all its complexity, which is a necessary part of our personal lives. But could it be that facing the endless complexity of life is also politically possible? This seems to be the question I’ve been given to ponder — and cherish — as I step into my elder years. Come on! Politics requires simplistic public herding, does it not? You can’t steer a country without an enemy.

As a peace journalist, I usually begin by focusing on the media. Consider this recent Washington Post piece regarding the use of nuclear weapons. Even though the article is critical of the Trump administration, which in 2018 “expanded the role of nuclear weapons by declaring for the first time that the United States would consider nuclear retaliation in the case of ‘significant non-nuclear strategic attacks’,” the article remains trapped, I fear, in linear, conventional thinking.

Its focus is on the fact that, because of the Trump decision, it’s possible that the recent cyberattacks on U.S. companies, apparently the work of criminal organizations based in Russia, could be used as a justification for a nuclear response. While this is unlikely and utterly insane, “imagine,” the article tells us,

a much worse cyberattack, one that not only disabled pipelines but turned off the power at hundreds of U.S. hospitals, wreaked havoc on air-traffic-control systems and shut down the electrical grid in major cities in the dead of winter. The grisly cost might be counted not just in lost dollars but in the deaths of many thousands of people.

Wow! This is certainly cruel and evil, almost in the zone of U.S. bombing runs in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. (we’ve dropped 326,000 bombs on various countries since 2001), but the article continues to express profound concern that — in a trigger-happy administration — it could result in a nuclear retaliation, which would not only be wrong but, uh, illegal under international law. The key moral point the article makes seems to be primarily technical.

While the American public would indeed be likely to want vengeance after a destructive enemy assault, the law of armed conflict requires that some military options be taken off the table. Nuclear retaliation for ‘significant non-nuclear strategic attacks’ is one of them.

Two things about this paragraph stop me cold. First of all, the assumption that “the public” (whatever that is) would be focused on vengeance after a horrific cyberattack is simplistic, to say the least. The public — you, me, and perhaps everyone on the planet — would be in shock, wounded and grieving, and would be primarily focused on healing, help and the heroism of the many who gave their lives in rescue efforts. When I recall the days right after 9/11, what I think about are people lined up to donate blood, not shaking their fists in cartoonlike demands for vengeance against whomever.

But to slide such an assumption — the public is impulsive and stupid — into an article about nuclear weapons removes the possibility of bringing a larger awareness to the discussion, a public awareness that nuclear weapons should never be used and, indeed, should not exist, in our hands or anyone else’s. The Post appears not to want to go that far, instead presuming with its words that our national leaders are the ones keeping things calm and under control, even if they need to be kept in check by international law.

I fear there are far deeper realities loose in the world: a military-industrial complex that will do whatever it can to prevent the world from transcending war; the possibility of a president in political trouble, seeing war (even the nuclear button) as a solution; and the hidden forces of the deep state, exerting pressures on political leaders the public will never know about.

To declare that nuclear weapons can only “legally” be used in retaliation for a nuclear strike hardly leaves me feeling safe. Are we left with a world continually at war with itself, with our best hope being that all future wars will be waged legally and politely?

Regarding nukes, the Post notes, the Obama administration’s guidance document declares that “the United States will not intentionally target civilian populations or civilian objects.” And a former head of the U.S. Strategic Command under Obama told the Post the command had developed nuclear delivery “tactics and techniques to minimize collateral effects.”

“Minimize collateral damage” is a phrase you’d use only in regard to people whose lives didn’t matter. And if the weapons involved are nuclear, it sounds like a grotesque lie. All of which intensifies my outrage: We are one, and life is sacred. The game of war has been going on sufficiently long — a dozen millennia or whatever — and is at its stopping point. We can no longer create a wasteland and call it peace. The wasteland it is in our power to create is Planet Earth.

I know the human species has what it takes to reach beyond its artificial borders and refuse to let this happen. The time for the best of us to emerge is now.

The Taliban’s Dramatic Military Victory

Ted Rall

Joe Biden deserves nothing but praise and support for his decision to honor America’s commitment, negotiated between the Trump administration and the Taliban, to finally withdraw from Afghanistan. After more than 20 years of wasted lives, endless property damage and squandering of billions of U.S. tax dollars that would have been better spent on just about anything else you could think of, it’s incredible that corporate media is still giving airtime to the idiots and warmongers who want to keep troops over there. “I have heard general after general, as you have, say, just give us a little more time,” ABC’s Martha Raddatz said July 4^th.

It’s been two decades. There was no legal or moral justification for the war to begin with. They’ve had too much time as it is.

For those of us who have been closely connected to America’s longest war last week’s abandonment of Bagram airbase, the biggest U.S. facility in occupied Afghanistan, makes the long-promised withdrawal feel real.

And the hand-wringing over what comes next has built to a fever pitch. Will the Taliban come back? Will it be like 1997 all over again, with women subjugated and horribly oppressed? Will the Taliban kill the translators, fixers and other Afghans who worked for U.S. occupation forces? Will Afghanistan once again become a staging ground for terrorist attacks like 9/11?

Some of these questions are reasonable. Others couldn’t be less so, based as they are on assumptions fed by lies.

What’s important to remember is the motivation for sewing these doubts. The military industry and its pet media outlets want to change our minds about withdrawal or, if they fail to do so for now, to set the stage for ground troops to invade again in the near future.

Afghanistan will not “again” become a staging ground for terrorist attacks against the United States or any other Western power because it was hardly one in the first place. In 2001 there were four Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan; there were 6,000 in Pakistan. On 9/11 Osama bin Laden was almost certainly in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. The attacks were planned by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Pakistan. Most of the funding came from the royal family of Saudi Arabia, as did 15 of the 19 hijackers; none came from Afghanistan. It is true that the hijackers all trained in Afghanistan but that’s a distinction without a difference; they could just as easily have picked up the same education in Pakistan, where 99% of Al Qaeda’s infrastructure and personnel had been situated.

There is good reason to worry about the immediate future after we leave. It is likely that the Taliban will quickly topple the militarily inferior and wildly unpopular U.S. puppet regime installed by the George W. Bush Administration. Neighboring countries are bracing for flows of Afghan refugees; hundreds of Afghan government soldiers have already fled to Tajikistan. Violence is inevitable: military casualties in the civil conflict, reprisals against political opponents and repressive acts against women and other targets of Muslim fundamentalists. But nothing can change the truth: Afghanistan is not a U.S. colony. It is a sovereign nation. As such, it has the right and duty of self-determination. The Afghan people must sort out amongst each other what kind of future they want to have.

In the event of a Rwanda-scale genocide, intervention could be justified in conjunction with an international force under the auspices of the U.N. At this writing, however, that seems unlikely. The Taliban are far more sophisticated, younger and modern than the regime that took over Kabul in 1996. So is the population that they seek to govern. Afghans are interconnected with the wider world and its culture via the Internet and cellular phones. They are Muslim extremists, but they are far more pragmatic than ISIS. Afghanistan under the Taliban will feel more like Pakistan than ISIS-held Syria. As is currently the case, rural areas will be more conservative—burqas, girls banned from schools, the occasional stoning—than the cities.

Certainly the United States has the moral obligation not to repeat its habit of discarding its local employees after withdrawal. We should offer green cards and economic support to our Afghan collaborators on an expedited basis rather than the shameful foot-dragging that has been reported. Otherwise the Taliban may execute them as traitors.

Be prepared, as Biden’s September 11, 2021 deadline for withdrawal of the last U.S. troops draws closer, for a rising chorus of voices calling for him to change his mind. Don’t abandon Afghanistan again, the war pigs will cry.

Don’t listen to their siren song of imperialism. The invasion was a mistake, the occupation was a mistake, and so was our propping up of our corrupt puppet regime. We never should have been there in the first place and it has taken 20 years too long to get out.

Robotic Killing Machines and Our Future: Chris Pratt, Aliens and Drones

Chris Pratt of Parks and Recreation and Guardians of the Galaxy fame has a new film out. In The Tomorrow War, Pratt uses time travel to save Earth from hordes of ravenous aliens. The film ultimately is an allegory for climate change, so kudos to Pratt and all in Hollywood for a movie demonstrating that climate change will bring surprising and inevitable deadly consequences to all of us.

By no means is The Tomorrow War a masterpiece; I would give it 5 stars out of 10. It is what you would expect from a summer action-adventure blockbuster. However, one thing that stuck with me regarding this film about humans fighting aliens 30 years in the future is that there is little to be seen of drone warfare. In only a couple of scenes do we see drones fighting the aliens. The absence of drones is because Hollywood makes money off of its stars and not robots. The reality, though, is that based upon where we are in the present with robotic killing machines and the predictive course of technological progress and adaption, in 30 years from now, humans will not be present on the battlefront. The likely scenario is that the fictional aliens in The Tomorrow War would not stand a chance against the automatized warfare of the present, let alone the future. What needs to be asked is: what chance do we as non-fictional humans have?

The idea that machines may kill on their own is older than I am. Science fiction writers and futurists crafted laws in their novels and predictions that humans would program robots with constitutional instructions not to harm humans. When I was a boy in the 1980s, Arnold Schwarzenegger shot to stardom as he played the role of the assassin robot in The Terminator. At about the same time, Matthew Broderick starred in Wargames, a movie about the consequences of putting the decision to kill in the hands of computers. Frighteningly, what was once considered gist and speculation for science fiction novels and movies is now existent.

It has been more than a year since the first known autonomous drone conducted a kill mission on its own. In early 2020, a Turkish-built drone carried out a successful autonomous kill mission in Libya. As reported by the United Nations, this drone conducted its entire mission: takeoff, targeting, attack, and return, without the assistance of a human. This machine found and killed who it wanted to without a human hand or mind involved. Yes, humans instructed the machine who to look for, but once that information was provided, the machine could operate and kill independently of any additional input. Go out and look for someone who says certain words on a cellphone, wears a particular style of “uniform,” or meets a broad demographic category is what the drone is programmed to do, and once it has that input, it can kill on its own.

We now readily know machines can learn, and killer drones can incorporate that learning so that their initial target inputs are updated and adapted to allow the drones to search for expanded targets without human assistance. Drones can also be resupplied and refueled by other drones so that a drone that is hunting people needs never stop its hunt until it is successful. This near-dystopian fear of machines operating on their own, finding and killing humans, is a decades-old worry that is now true.

Drones are operating effectively and efficiently throughout war zones. In last year’s quick but bloody war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, Azerbaijan, again with Turkish drones, impressively defeated Armenia. Armenia lost hundreds of tanks, armored vehicles, and artillery pieces. The success of drones in combat has been noticed and is causing changes. After more than 100 years of tanks on the battlefield, the US Marine Corps recognizes their vulnerability, as tanks are easy things for cheap and autonomous drones to find and destroy. The US Marine Corps no longer has tanks. The Marines decided to discard their tanks before Azerbaijan’s use of drones against Armenia, but that decisive victory by Azerbaijan’s drones cleared doubts about keeping tanks that Marine leaders may have held.

One of the things necessary to understand about warfare is it is the most competitive of all human activities. When I was a Marine officer in Iraq, I was responsible for the counter-improvised explosive device (IED) operations for my regiment. My Marines and sailors went on the roads looking for those roadside bombs. After returning home, I worked for the Joint IED Defeat Organization, trying to get technology to US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan to protect them from IEDs. What I learned, and what we experienced, was that within 30 to 60 days of whatever technology or tactic we put into the field to try and protect our soldiers from IEDs, the insurgents had come up with a counter to our countermeasure. We would issue a piece of equipment that would attempt to protect our troops, but the insurgents had found a way to defeat it within a month or two. We would then produce an upgrade, a change in tactics, or another piece of equipment, and the insurgents would then find a way to counter that countermeasure. On and on it went, and, since these wars continue, on it goes. This degree of extreme competition is why the human race has often seen its swiftest and most extraordinary technological progress during warfare.

Militaries recognize the danger of drones and are trying to find ways to protect their troops from them. One such advancement that may reap horrifying effects on civilians, particularly in a country like the US, where mass shootings are daily, is a rifle that automatically tracks and fires on the target at which the shooter aims. Ostensibly created to combat drones, this rifle can be used against anything or anyone. The shooter aims at the person they want to shoot, and the computerized rifle sight follows the person selected. The shooter pulls the trigger; however, the rifle does not fire until the computer tells the rifle to fire to ensure a hit. You can buy one of these rifles for $6,000. How long until one of these is used at a church, a school, a concert…If Chris Pratt and his friends in The Tomorrow War had the weapons available today, let alone 30 years from now, that movie would not have lasted fifteen minutes.

Movies, and all art, speak to and reflect our society’s dreams, fears, obsessions, values, etc. They record our progress and attempt to tell us where we are going. Gerard Butler and Morgan Freeman in 2019’s Angel Has Fallen show quite dramatically how adversaries will use drones to overwhelm defenses and assassinate VIPs. In real life, we have seen Venezuela’s president survive a drone assassination attempt. Houthi insurgents have skillfully utilized drones to punish Saudi Arabia for its war crimes against Yemenis, and militias in Iraq and Syria, both Sunni and Shia, appear to be using more drones to attack occupying US forces. Thus the age-old question: does art imitate life, or does life imitate art?

On my TV, I watched Chris Pratt heroically battle aliens 30 years in the future. However, such a war would be fought almost entirely by robots. The idea of robots fighting aliens is no longer a purely speculative one, as the robots do exist. Autonomous robots that utilize artificial intelligence, machine learning, computerized fire control systems, and amazingly sensitive sensors are machines that do not seem to miss and never hesitate to pull the trigger. It is clear the aliens Chris Pratt fights in the future would not stand a chance against today’s robots. That is Hollywood, though. The question for us, outside of the movie theater and away from our TVs, is what chance we as human beings stand?

The Greatest Threat to Britain Isn’t China or Russia, It’s Boris Johnson

Patrick Cockburn

The lifeblood of intelligence agencies is threat inflation: exaggerating the gravity of the dangers menacing the public, and calling for harsher laws to cope with them. MI5 director general Ken McCallum did his best to follow this tradition in his annual speech this week, in which he explained the security risks facing Britain.

He spoke of threats from states such as Russia, China and Iran; from far-right activists, Islamic terrorists, and the resurgence of violence in Northern Ireland. Alongside these were the more amorphous threats posed by encrypted messaging, online spying, and cyber attacks.

Many of these developments are less threatening than they look. Russia may engage in gangster-type assassinations, such as the poisoning of the Skripals in Salisbury, but the very crudity of its attacks on its critics underlines the limitations of Russian capabilities. President Putin may relish the fact that his country is treated like a superpower – albeit a demonic one – but it has nothing like the power of the Soviet Union. The idea, for instance, that the Kremlin determined the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election was always a myth. Hillary Clinton’s dire campaign is sufficient explanation for Donald Trump’s election.

Demonising the enemy – exaggerating its strengths and its evil intentions – was central to the propaganda directed against the Soviet Union during the first cold war. Much the same kind of threat inflation is happening in the second cold war, except that this time the primary target is China, whose every action is portrayed as part of a bid for world domination. Shady authoritarian allies like Narendra Modi’s India are promoted as allies of the west in “the struggle for democratic values”.

The threat posed by al-Qaeda and Islamic State terrorism is likewise given too much importance. Savage though their attacks have been in western Europe, they were in practice vicious publicity stunts aimed at dominating the news agenda. Politically, this sort of “terrorism” only really succeeds if it can provoke an exaggerated response, as 9/11 did when the US went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq in retaliation.

Britain does indeed face increased dangers, but they have little to do with those on the MI5 list. The greatest threats in a post-Brexit Britain stem from the country being a weaker power than it was five years ago, but pretending to be a stronger one. The gap between pretension and reality is masked by slogans, and by concocted culture wars geared to divert public attention from failings and unfulfilled promises.

The success of “Little Englandism” in the referendum of 2016 and the general election in 2019 had predictable results, at home and abroad. Britain outside the EU is inevitably even more dependent on the US than before. Many will ask what is new about our reliance on Washington. Has it not been Britain’s default position since the Suez crisis in 1956, if not the fall of France in 1940?

But this time around, British dependence on the US is even greater, and comes with an extra twist. It is happening at a moment when America is moving to confront China, and to a lesser degree Russia, in a new cold war in which Britain will be a participant but will have very little influence. Theatrical antics – like sending a British destroyer through Russian-controlled waters off Crimea, and dispatching the aircraft carrier Queen Elizabeth to the South China Sea – are gestures designed to persuade public opinion at home that Britain once again has a global role.

Most of the negative consequences of leaving the EU have long been obvious. The move undermined the compromise between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland represented by the Good Friday [Belfast] Agreement of 1998. The MI5 chief McCallum, who knows Northern Ireland well, hints at this, saying that “many of the powerful aspirations of the Belfast Agreement remain unfulfilled” while insisting hopefully that “the holding of multiple identities – British, Irish, Northern Irish – is a living reality for many people, in a way it was not in my youth”.

But a Northern Ireland half-in, half-out of the EU has shifted the balance of power between the communities in the province in a way that is likely to lead to a return to political violence. We have already had a taste of this with the rioting in late March and early April, which was the most serious for years. What we have not yet seen is sectarian killings, but they could start at any moment. If they do, then peace in Northern Ireland will swiftly evaporate.

Yet the greatest risk to Britain is that it is ruled by a government that has promised far more than it can deliver. This weakness is still masked by the development of the anti-Covid vaccine and the success of the vaccination campaign, but these were achievements of scientists and the NHS. As Dominic Cummings has made clear, Boris Johnson did little but spread chaos.

The problem facing all nationalist populist leaders in the world is that they promise bread and circuses for everybody, but seldom deliver them. This is true of Trump in the US and Modi in India, and is also the case for Johnson in Britain. This was made blatantly clear yesterday when the prime minister made one of his rare public speeches – the first for 10 months – which was supposed to spell out his “levelling up” agenda, the centrepiece of his populist appeal to former Labour voters.

Except that it turns out that there is no such agenda, and his speech consisted of the usual shallow boosterism. Cummings summed it up venomously but accurately as a “crap speech (same he’s given pointlessly umpteen times) supporting crap slogan”. As with foreign policy, there is no social or economic strategy to rescue Britain’s deprived population, despite all those radical pledges.

But there is a political strategy for diverting attention away from the fact that a central plank in Johnson’s platform is missing. The plan is to talk up culture wars, exacerbate divisions, and pretend that critics are unpatriotic or treacherous. Since culture and race go together, this means none-too-subtle dog-whistle appeals to racism. “If we ‘whistle’ and the ‘dog’ reacts we can’t be shocked if it barks and bites,” said Sayeeda Warsi, a Conservative peer and former party chair.

Populist governments play the “culture card” more vigorously in times of trouble. The smallest incidents are exaggerated as threats to national identity. A piece of graffiti scrawled on a statue of Winston Churchill becomes a sign that British culture as a whole is under assault.

Critics can be demonised as unpatriotic, but a surer way of silencing them is to deny them a voice, by putting pressure on independent commentary on the BBC or threatening to sell off Channel 4. The effectiveness of these methods in suppressing criticism and dominating public opinion should not be underestimated. Most of the nationalist populist regimes in the world have a disastrous record, but very few of them have lost power.

Dangerous Games in Syria

Slavisha Batko Milacic

Just a few months since Joe Biden’s election, US idea of terrorism has radically changed. With the media having spared no effort making people believe that the real terrorists are indeed the armed supporters of the Republicans, who are ready to take on the crowd of BLM “looters” and express their right to protest by demonstrating that rights at the Capitol. As for those responsible for the events of 9/11, for the deaths of thousands of innocent people, for the chaos in the Middle East and the flows of refugees … they are now simply rebels, and not just ordinary ones, but pro-Western too.

The media has once again proved its status as the “seventh force”! All of a sudden, the remnants of the seemingly defeated ISIS and the crushed al-Qaeda have changed their names. The radical Jabhat al-Nusra suddenly turned into an authoritarian, albeit quite suitable partner for Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, whose leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, sat for a February 2021 interview with the correspondent of the “independent” and popular TV program Frontline as a completely secular man clad in a suit and talking about Islamic values. True, independent journalism is on his knees in the US, and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which distributes Frontline materials, has close links to Joe Biden’s administration. The very same Democratic administration, which brands as Western’s enemy anyone, who does not share its policy.

Why did the “Democrats” need this? After all, everyone understands that a wolf in sheep’s clothing is still a wolf, and the experience of Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden seemed to have taught the “Deep State“ controlled intelligence services a long time ago that Islamic radicals are extremely unreliable allies. But the urge to control Middle East oil and prevent the region’s return to stability under Russian patronage clearly outweighs any risks, at least in the eyes of the “Deep state“ elite.

Donald Trump wanted to withdraw US troops at least from Northern Syria, leaving it in the care of Russians and Turks, but James Jeffrey, US Special Representative for Syria and Iraq, long in the service of the “Deep State,” lied to his president, downplaying the number of troops and giving a distorted picture of what was going on in the region. This eventually cost him his job, but Donald Trump did lose his battle with the system while still in office. Trump’s pragmatic approach dictated by a desire to cut costs on unnecessary wars, were simply sabotaged. So, Donald Trump quite logically decided against providing weapons and ammunition to numerous groups fighting in Syria. He even scaled down the CIA’s supply program. However, State Department officials, not directly subordinated to the then occupant of the White House, quickly found a way to help their unreliable allies. As a result, al-Qaeda-linked jihadist groups, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham included, received via the Pentagon even such sophisticated weapons as TOW anti-tank grenade launchers, which require special training by their users. And the leader of the most powerful country around could do nothing to rein in members of his own entourage, who badly needed an ongoing war in the Middle East.

Why do they need this war so badly? There are too many reasons for this: military contracts, money, oil, and the closely intertwined interests of the “Deep State“, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, as well as the desire to put pressure on NATO partners. Trump, who has never been associated with the military-industrial complex, challenged them and lost. They won, and shortly after Biden became president they openly announced the procurement of $350 million worth of arms and ammunition for the Middle East. On the Pentagon’s websites you will find everything you need to know about this transaction, which involved eight US companies, including Sierra Four Industries Corp., Blane International group INC, Culmen International LLC and others. Since none of these weapons happens to be made in the West and as all are Soviet-style, produced in Eastern Europe, it is perfectly clear that US army don’t  need them.

These weapons will go to the “rebels” to make sure that they continue wreaking havoc in the region. The eight US companies involved in these supplies have already enlisted the services of Serbian, Bulgarian and Romanian arms factories. And all the while, no one has shown the slightest desire to answer the question being asked by journalists about “where the weapon will go.” So, the war in the Middle East will rage on and it will be a long one. This is something that even Syrians, who have long lived in America, now talk about.

Most interestingly, this situation has incensed even members of America’ Syrian community, traditionally opposed to the ruling clan of the Assads. Maram Susli, also known in international journalist and blogger community as “Syrian Girl” just issued a new short movie about situation in Syria. In her new investigation “Syrian Girl” breaks down the recent rebranding of Al Qaeda. The young blogger shows the situation in Syria without embellishment and she even present several official documents proving the ambiguous connections of the Syrian terrorists:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yptCJluGhbg

Zuma’s trial sparks fears of renewed violence in South Africa

Jean Shaoul

The long-delayed trial of former African National Congress (ANC) President Jacob Zuma on charges of fraud, corruption and racketeering has resumed, with Zuma appearing by video link from prison.

The 79-year-old Zuma, a veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle who for decades played a key role in the ANC, is serving a 15-month sentence for contempt of court. The Constitutional Court ordered his imprisonment for defying its order to appear at a separate inquiry into corruption during his presidency from 2009 until 2018, when President Cyril Ramaphosa’s faction in the ANC forced him to resign.

Jacob Zuma in 2017 (Credit: Kremlin.ru)

This trial relates to the $5 billion purchase of fighter jets, patrol boats and military gear from five European arms firms, brokered in 1999 when Zuma was President Thabo Mbeki’s deputy. The charges, that he accepted $34,000 annually from the French arms company Thales in return for protecting the company from an investigation into the deal, were reinstated after the ANC forced him out of office. The alleged bribe was part of a broader corrupt relationship between Zuma and one of the consortium members that won a major bid to provide combat suites for new navy frigates.

The resumption of Zuma’s trial has sparked fears of a resumption of the violence that followed his imprisonment on July 7. The protests by Zuma’s supporters that started on July 9 in his home province of KwaZulu-Natal escalated into a wider movement against the ANC government. The ANC has turned South Africa into the most unequal society in the world since its ascent to power in 1994, while enriching a tiny black layer, including both Zuma and Ramaphosa. As poverty escalated, the ANC turned to the tried and tested policies of divide and rule, inciting against migrant workers and exploiting divisions based on tribes.

Members of the South African Police Services on patrol outside the High Court in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, Monday July 19, 2021, where the corruption trial of former South African President Jacob Zuma resumed. The trial continued more than a week after Zuma's imprisonment for contempt of court in a separate case set off rioting. (AP Photo/Shiraaz Mohamed)

Millions are angered over the ANC’s mismanagement of the pandemic and vaccine rollout and an escalating economic crisis that has left many without jobs, income or financial support with nearly 20 percent experiencing weekly hunger. Official figures that disguise chronic underemployment show that more than half of the country’s young people, who form 50 percent of the population, are unemployed, forcing them to hawk on the streets where they face police violence. The number of people killed at the hands of the police (629) in 2019/20 was more than double that of the US on a per capita basis.

At least 212 people died during the riots that saw the destruction, damage and looting of 200 shopping malls, the plundering of dozens of food factories and warehouses and damage to hundreds of lorries and cars. The downtown areas of Durban and Pietermaritzburg, the two main cities in KwaZulu-Natal province, look like war zones. Scores of telecommunication towers have been put out of action and port facilities damaged, while attacks on chemical plants have led to dangerous and polluting spills. Damage across the country has been put at $826 billion, although the full scale of the devastation is far from clear.

The violence has reportedly affected healthcare clinics and the faltering vaccine rollout programme, with medical supplies and medications looted, even as South Africa’s third wave of Covid infections rips through the country. Armed “community groups” are barricading suburbs in some parts of the country against outsiders, raising fears of vigilantism and racial, tribal and communal fighting.

Last week, even as Ramaphosa was forced to acknowledge the atrocious social conditions that had animated the riots, he requested 25,000 troops for the three months to help the police suppress the protests and arrest looters. He made clear that that the army would act to enforce “the rule of law” and protect big business and the South African bourgeoisie from the enraged masses. At least 10,000 soldiers have now been deployed and armoured vehicles are patrolling the streets.

Since then, Ramaphosa has attacked the forces behind the protests, which he called “economic sabotage.” Speaking on television Friday evening, he declared this was an “attempted insurrection” and “an attack on our democracy.” Authorities had identified “a good number” of those who planned and coordinated the violence, although he did not say who was behind what some pro-government commentators have called an “attempted coup.”

Certainly, the scale and nature of the damage suggests that some of it was planned and organized. It included the burning of more than 30 lorries on the main roads between the commercial capital Johannesburg and the port city of Durban that blocked key supply lines, attacks on water-treatment facilities, the disabling of mobile-phone towers, the burning of a pharmaceutical factory, the busing in of impoverished people to loot food stores and the theft of 1.5 million rounds of ammunition from a storage depot. According to Daily Maverick’s associate editor Ferial Haffajee, this was orchestrated by a dozen of Zuma’s close associates in the ANC and intelligence services that he had built up during his years in office, with the aim of undermining the Ramaphosa government and securing a pardon and the dismissal of his trial.

The factional infighting within the ANC has brought it to point of civil war. It testifies to the internal decay and bankruptcy not just of the ANC but the entire South African bourgeoisie that has used the ANC to maintain its economic grip on the country.

By the late 1980s, globalisation of production had become widespread, rendering nationalist and autarkic regimes, including South Africa’s apartheid regime, obsolete. As the militancy of the South African working class in the townships against the apartheid system escalated, sparking fears that this would end capitalist rule in the country, the white bourgeoisie released Nelson Mandela from prison, made its peace with the ANC, ended apartheid and sanctioned majority rule that brought the ANC to power in 1994.

The choice of the ANC as the mechanism to rescue South African capitalism rested on its perspective and programme, based upon the Stalinist South African Communist Party’s two-stage theory, which proclaimed the formal end of apartheid as a democratic revolution and a necessary stage before any struggle for socialism. The ANC would maintain capitalist property relations and develop alliances with the capitalist class, posing no threat to the economic system.

It sought to develop a black capitalist class that would take its place alongside the white capitalists through “Black Economic Empowerment,” while suppressing the revolutionary strivings of the black working class, as expressed graphically by the career of Ramaphosa. The former head of South Africa’s largest trade union, the National Union of Mineworkers, was elected ANC general secretary in 1991 and soon became a multi-millionaire. Twenty years later, as a shareholder in the Lonmin mines in Marikana, in 2012, Ramaphosa called on the authorities to take action against striking miners, thereby sanctioning the killing 34 and wounding 78 others by the security forces.

Like its counterparts in the Middle East and Africa, the ANC was unable to provide any solutions to the social and economic problems confronting the working class and peasantry. Its only answer to the sharpening social tensions is repression, arrests and the lethal crushing of protests and strikes.

The working class must draw the lessons. It is not enough to take to the streets as repeated mass protests in Africa, including Sudan, Algeria and Nigeria, and in the Middle East during the 2011 Arab Spring, have demonstrated. Workers must be guided by their own political perspective and programme, rejecting all divisions on the basis of ethnicity, race or colour. It means breaking with the capitalist politics of the ANC and adopting a socialist and international programme in the closest unity with their class brothers and sisters in the African continent and in the imperialist centres, to take power, overthrow capitalism and carry out the socialist reorganization of society.

Spiralling COVID infections in UK schools: A warning to the world

Liz Smith

The UK education system is on the verge of collapse as schools break up for the summer term this week. Across the country, in every region, hundreds of thousands of school children and staff have been forced to isolate due to either having made close contact with someone with COVID or testing positive for virus themselves, as the Conservative government’s “let it rip” pandemic policy takes effect.

Almost 840,000 children (11.2 percent) in England’s state schools were not in class on July 8 because of COVID, according to the latest official figures. This was the highest level since March and a 31 percent increase on the week prior. Of those off school, 39,000 pupils had tested positive and 35,000 had a suspected infection. A further 630,000 were absent for other reasons.

The situation will have worsened dramatically since then. The vast majority of infections are the highly transmissible and more deadly Delta variant, which is overwhelmingly dominant in Britain. Hundreds of schools have been forced to close for the summer early, due to the lack of staff or multiple cases of the virus across several class and year group “bubbles”. About 18,000 children were at home because their schools were closed on July 8 and many thousands of parents, alarmed at the rapid rise of infections, have voted with their feet and kept children at home.

On what has been dubbed "Freedom Day", marking the end of coronavirus restrictions in England, people walk over London Bridge a popular walking route for commuters from London Bridge train and tube stations in London, towards the City of London, during the morning rush hour, Monday, July 19, 2021. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham)

This dire situation was worsening even before the July 19 lifting of all containment measures by Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government in its cynically named “Freedom Day”. The current surge among children will massively contribute to the wave of COVID-19 in the general population in the coming weeks.

Johnson said bluntly earlier this month that the UK “must reconcile [itself] to more deaths” and that infections could rise to 50,000 a day. That total has already been reached. Health Secretary Sajid Javid, who has now tested positive for the virus, also demanded the population “learn to live with the existence of Covid” and admitted that daily case totals could reach 100,000 before the end of summer. Professor Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist and modeller for the government, warned at the weekend there is “the potential for the UK to have a very large number of cases, 150,000 to 200,000 a day.”

The Guardian estimated that there could be two million cases in the remaining six weeks of summer, but this was based on a conservative estimate of an average 35,000 cases a day until July 19 and 60,000 from then until August 16. Hospitalisations from COVID are now at over 4,000, a rise of 26 percent in one week.

The schools most impacted by the surge are in the north of England, where pupils in secondary schools are three times more likely to miss classes as their peers in London. A massive 37 percent of sessions were missed in the week to July 9, with 27 percent missed due to COVID isolation and quarantine. But absences are rising in every region.

Gateshead, in the northwest, has seen its coronavirus infection rate rocket to 1,823 cases in the seven days to July 9, a rate of 902.2 cases per 100,000 people, up from 237.1 per 100,000 the previous week.

Parents take children to a primary school in Bournemouth, UK following the reopening of schools nationally. March, 2021 (credit: WSWS media)

Sarah Muckle, director for Public Health in Bradford, West Yorkshire, revealed last week that the average age of people testing positive is 28 and that there had been 126 recent outbreaks of the virus in schools and educational settings.

With the ending of restrictions July 19 and little or no guidance from the Department of Education, school leaders are deciding policy on the fly, creating more tensions among parents who have to isolate with their children. Teachers and support staff are concerned that they will spend the first weeks of the summer break isolating and caring for loved ones, in a situation where cases and hospital admissions are rising, including for children. The latest statistics show that eight percent of COVID hospital admissions are children and one in every 1000 child COVID cases results in hospitalisation. A quarter of those hospitalised experience Long COVID symptoms for an average of eight and a half months.

Sammie McFarland, from support and advocacy group Long Covid Kids UK, said, “We are sleep walking into a Long Covid Apocalypse where children are being swept aside as acceptable debris in the economic recovery.”

This is herd immunity in practice. Boris Johnson’s government pioneered this genocidal policy which has been embraced by all governments. The warning by the scientists in The Lancet of “herd immunity by mass infection” which will “place 48% of the population (children included) who are not yet fully vaccinated, including the clinically vulnerable and the immunosuppressed, at unacceptable risk” is being played out throughout the school sector.

This risk is more than acceptable to the government. One model presented to its Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (SAGE) in February suggested that continuing COVID-19 transmission until summer 2022 could contribute to more than 35 percent of overall “herd immunity”. Insufficient levels of vaccination in the UK would mean that “herd immunity is not reached without a large resurgence of transmission,” the paper speculated, with the bulk of infections to spread among young people.

The education unions are guilty of allowing this tragedy to unfold. They fully supported the reopening of schools last September, opposed any mobilisation of the widespread opposition to the government’s ending the requirement to wear face masks in schools in May, when the Delta variant was already spreading like wildfire, and otherwise subordinated all health and safety concerns of staff to the government’s agenda of profits over lives.

The National Education Union (NEU) stated this month that Education Secretary Gavin Williamson’s polices of scrapping bubbles and replacing isolation with regular lateral flow testing in schools would lead to an explosion of the virus, but then only asked rhetorically, “Are there any thresholds on case numbers, or hospitalisation or deaths that mean the DfE would do something different in schools in September?”

The pattern set in the UK is repeated in one country after another. Educators, pupils and their parents are forced into unsafe school environments by governments hellbent on reopening the economy whatever the cost. Safety measures are abandoned to reinforce the claim that everything is getting “back to normal.” Infections, hospitalisations and deaths rise inexorably. The education trade unions collaborate fully in this crime.

Gorillas’ delivery riders protest in Berlin for better working conditions

Markus Salzmann

Riders for the food delivery service Gorillas protested last week against miserable working conditions and wages.

The protest started at the warehouse in Berlin’s Tempelhof district. Around noon, the riders decided to stop work and travel from there in a bicycle protest to the next warehouse in nearby Neukölln. There, they sought to draw fellow workers into the strike and demonstration.

Bicycle protest by striking Gorillas workers

Gorillas workers were joined by supporters of the protest. There is strong support for the industrial action among workers. Several participants interviewed by the World Socialist Web Site pointed out the precarious conditions under which this section of the labour force works.

Riders criticised the lack of adequate gear which, despite the ongoing protests, has not been purchased by management on the grounds that it costs too much. Fernando, one of the riders, noted that they have not even been given proper rainwear. He also said that orders were often far too heavy for their backpacks and bicycles.

Striking Gorillas rider Fernando in conversation with Christoph Vandreier, Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei lead candidate in the federal elections

One of the organisers made clear that the protest was against the “poor working conditions” at Gorillas. She said that a list of demands had been handed to management weeks ago and “practically none of the demands have been met to date.” The list of 19 demands includes equal pay for equal work, overtime pay and better work equipment, including ventilation systems in all warehouses and bicycles more suited for deliveries. A key demand is the immediate payment of outstanding wages. Workers say they were underpaid at the end of last month.

When asked if workers from other delivery services should also join the protest, she said, “Every worker faces more or less the same problems.” This was confirmed by a participant in the demonstration who is employed by the delivery service Lieferando. He too complained about poor pay. He said a colleague had been dismissed because he had demanded that protective measures against coronavirus infections be implemented. The problems were “very similar” to those of the Gorillas riders. In his company there are long probationary periods and everything is deliberately kept non-transparent.

Gorillas workers vote on the strike

The hire and fire policy at Gorillas is no exception among delivery services. A few weeks ago, the dismissal of a rider at Gorillas led to a spontaneous protest. Two warehouses were blockaded. The Lieferando worker had come to support his colleagues and fight to extend the protests to all delivery companies.

Oguz, who works as a researcher at Berlin’s Technical University, also joined the protest to show his solidarity with the riders. He had spoken to delivery workers and they also confirmed that they do not receive their wages on time. “These people have no reserves when they have to pay their rent,” Oguz noted.

The Gorillas workers face a ruthless management. While CEO Kagan Sümer has always feigned understanding for the riders and senior leaders of the company have repeatedly stated that improvements will be made, it became clear on Saturday that these are nothing more than empty words. The billion-dollar start-up is prepared for a direct confrontation with the workers.

When the bicycle protest was supposed to move to the warehouse on Urbanstraße in the early afternoon, management intervened. The warehouse manager of the Tempelhof site refused to give the riders keys for their bikes in order to prevent them from participating in the protest. The police then also supported management and declared that the demonstration was not part of the strike and that company property could therefore not be used. This meant many participants were forced to get to Neukölln on foot or by public transport.

When the protesters arrived at Urbanstraße, the warehouse had already been closed and, according to the Gorillas app, orders were currently not possible in this neighbourhood. A city manager of the company prohibited workers at the Neukölln warehouse from participating in the strike and denied access to the warehouse to the protesters who had arrived to talk to their colleagues.

In a provocative statement, management said there was no basis for calling a strike because it was “not a works council.” The management brazenly claimed that there had been no spontaneous work stoppages and declared, “The short-term closure of individual warehouses was arranged by the company to protect our employees from hostility by a few.”

In Neukölln, the riders decided together not to undertake another bicycle demonstration, but to go in small groups to the warehouse in Muskauer Straße in Kreuzberg to call for a strike there. Here too, management had already stopped operations by then to prevent the strike from spreading. When riders then went to the Gürtelstraße warehouse in Friedrichshain, workers there also joined the strike and this warehouse also had to be closed in the early evening.

The workers at Gorillas and other delivery services are confronted with not just economic, but also political issues. In the statement, “Stop the slave labour! Build rank-and-file committees!” which was widely distributed at the demonstration, the Socialist Equality Party (SGP) states: “Such a struggle against the appalling working conditions in logistics and other industries raises fundamental political questions. Just as the enrichment of shareholders is based on the exploitation of the working class, this exploitation can only be ended by the expropriation of the big banks and corporations by the international working class.”

That such a perspective could find broad support among workers is viewed with concern by the establishment politicians. Cansel Kiziltepe, Social Democratic Party (SPD) member of parliament, was present in Tempelhof. She told the Tagesspiegel that she wanted to support the Gorillas workers in their demand for co-determination and labour protection. Kiziltepe was also the one who invited Federal Labour Minister Hubertus Heil (SPD) for next Tuesday, saying he wished to meet with riders to “talk about their work situation.”

In conversation with participants of the protest, Christoph Vandreier, the SGP’s lead candidate in the federal elections, made it clear that workers should have no illusions in the establishment parties. “It is precisely the SPD, the Greens, the Left Party and the trade unions who are responsible for the social misery and precarious working conditions. The Hartz laws [imposing welfare cuts and curtailing labour protections] are just one example.”