Six refugees die at the Polish-Belarusian border as illegal deportations in the EU rise

Martin Kreickenbaum

The plight of refugees stranded in the no man’s land on the border between Poland and Belarus is becoming increasingly dramatic. At least six people have now died of cold and hunger in the last two weeks.

Despite these deaths, the Polish government is abiding by its criminal policy of not letting any refugees into the country. The government’s announced state of emergency has been extended for another 60 days and heavily armed soldiers are sealing the border. The regime in Warsaw has the full backing of the European Union, which holds the Belarusian government primarily responsible for the humanitarian crisis.

In fact, Warsaw and Brussels bear full responsibility for the appalling suffering of the refugees stranded in the border strip between Poland and Belarus. Contrary to international obligations under the Geneva Refugee Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights, the Polish authorities have refused to even accept the refugees’ asylum applications.

Refugees in no man's land on the Polish-Belarusian border (AP Photo/Michal Kosc)

It remains unclear how many refugees are camped in the boggy forest area along the 418-kilometre borderline between Poland and Belarus in temperatures around zero. The state of emergency imposed on September 2 by the Polish government over a three-kilometre width of the border region means that journalists, refugee aid organisations and lawyers are forbidden from entering the zone. At the same time, the Polish government has imposed a news blackout. In addition to 2,500 heavily armed soldiers, 4,000 border guards and 600 police officers patrol the narrow strip.

As a result, only scraps of information about the dramatic situation of refugees have reached the public. What is known is that a camp of 32 refugees from Afghanistan—including four women, a 15-year-old girl and a 17-year-old boy—have been stranded since August near the village of Unsnarz Gorny, awaiting EU protection. Trapped between barbed wire fences and surrounded by armed soldiers, the desperate people kept shouting in English to Polish soldiers: “We want international protection!”

Amnesty International has presented evidence that this group of refugees was subjected to illegal deportation. “Our analysis irrefutably shows that their position shifted overnight from Poland to Belarus at the end of August,” said Eve Geddie, Director of Amnesty’s European Institutions Office. She went on to explain that “forcibly returning people seeking asylum without assessing their individual protection needs is a serious breach of European and international law.”

The refugees remain on bare ground without any protection and have received no assistance from the Polish side. One of the refugees told the Polish foundation Ocalenie that they had practically no drinking water and nothing to eat. Only the Belarusian soldiers were prepared to share their own food rations with the Afghans in the no man’s land. “No one is telling us how to proceed. I think they are waiting until someone dies here. If nothing happens here, people will die of hunger and cold in the next few days.”

A 52-year-old Afghan woman suffering from severe kidney disease pleaded, “Have mercy on us! Take us somewhere, just get us out of here! All we ask is that you save our lives. Even if you won’t give us shelter, at least save our lives!”

Even prior to the state of emergency, Polish border guards prevented anyone from assisting the refugees. The Tageszeitung reported that residents of a nearby village wanted to send the refugees a pot of hot soup and some pizzas, but border guards did not allow the food to be passed on. “Orders from above!” one border guard explained to justify the cruelty.

Another group of 26 Syrian refugees is stranded near Terespol, and was also surrounded by armed Belarusian and Polish soldiers. The group includes three girls aged six, seven and eleven. The refugees have also been denied any help and are forced to share a single water bottle.

Meanwhile, at least six refugees have fallen victim to this inhumane policy. On September 19, the first four Iraqi refugees were found dead from hunger, cold and exhaustion. Two more refugees were found dead between September 24 and 27.

In particular, the case of the Iraqi woman found dead a few metres across the border on Belarusian territory on September 19 highlights the brutality of the Polish soldiers and border police in the mistreatment of refugees.

The Tageszeitung reported that the young woman was already on the Polish side with her husband and three children and wanted to dry their wet jackets and shoes in a village where a family had taken them in. Police, however, had been informed about the border crossing and forced the family barefoot back towards the Belarusian side. When the woman collapsed from exhaustion, her husband and children were herded across the border. The woman’s lifeless body was dragged several metres across the border, where she was found surrounded by her family.

The Polish government has blamed the Belarusian regime of Alexander Lukashenko for the dramatic situation at the border. Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki of the right-wing populist Law and Justice Party (PiS) said that “people are being instrumentalised by Lukashenko for his foreign policy. This is an attempt to trigger a major European migration crisis.” A joint statement by the heads of government of Poland and the Baltic EU member states Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania said the sudden increase in migrants seeking to cross the EU’s eastern border was “planned and systematically organised” by Lukashenko.

Polish Interior Minister Mariusz Kaminski justifies the Polish government’s refusal to even hear the refugees’ asylum requests with allegations that the refugees have links to Islamist and terrorist organisations. According to Kaminski, “competent authorities” had found that of the 200 refugees apprehended in Poland, 50 had “a criminal past, including links to terrorist groups.”

“These are young, combat-trained men who had participated in armed formations in the Middle East,” he provocatively claimed.

Kaminski did not provide any factual evidence, however, and launched the type of accusations against the refugees that one associates with a fascist regime. He claimed that the refugees under investigation were linked to the beheadings of hostages, child abuse and paedophilia, and had sex with animals. He presented photographic material allegedly taken from the refugees’ mobile phones and declared the refugees to be “a serious threat to Poland’s national security.” In the event, his “evidence” quickly turned out to be completely fabricated.

Such false accusations are being used to introduce a harsh regime that strictly denies any refugee the right to claim asylum. Instead, people seeking protection are simply driven illegally back across the border into Belarus. Interior Minister Kaminski stated that since the beginning of August there have been “more than 9,400 attempted illegal border crossings.” Twelve hundred refugees have been taken to guarded reception camps and in 8,200 cases a crossing has been prevented.

In most cases, these were illegal deportations. “The situation is completely irregular and against the rules. And we observe with alarm that with the rules of the state of emergency, access is made even more difficult and impossible. We are trying to gain access at least for ourselves and some other organisations,” declared Rafal Kostrzynski of the Polish branch of the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR).

For its part, the Polish government is seeking to extend the state of emergency in the border region for another 60 days, thereby further excluding aid organisations and journalists. The refugees would then remain without food and protection and continue to be helplessly exposed to abuse by soldiers and border police.

This barbaric policy of refugee rejection by the Polish authorities has the full backing of the European Union. A spokesperson for the EU Commissioner for Migration, Ylva Johannson, stressed that cooperation with Poland was of great importance to ensure the protection of the EU’s external borders in the interest of all 27 EU member states. He cynically added that the Commissioner had “once again underlined the importance of protecting EU values and fundamental rights.”

In fact, Johannson also blames Lukashenko for the crisis in the border region and defames refugees as terrorists. “We should not fool ourselves about this. What Lukashenko is doing may well lead to terrorists and other criminals coming to the EU. That’s why everyone who comes to the EU must be registered and checked.”

As one of the leading European powers, the German government plays a key role in enforcing the EU’s murderous exclusion policy. In a statement reeking of cynicism, the German government spokesperson Steffen Seibert declared a week ago that “humane solutions for these people have to be found quickly… in line with European and international law.” He then repeated the mantra that the government in Belarus was responsible for “instrumentalising refugees and migrants,” in a manner that was “completely unacceptable.”

Trial of the November 2015 French terrorist attacks opens in Paris

Kumaran Ira

The trial of the November 13, 2015 Paris terrorist attacks opened in a special criminal court in the French capital on September 8.

The attacks, which killed 130 people and injured 350 in Paris and the surrounding suburb of Saint-Denis, are yet another demonstration of the bankrupt and reactionary character of terrorism. Those responsible for the attacks are guilty of mass murder. Marxists have always insisted that nothing socially progressive could emerge from the indiscriminate and arbitrary annihilation of human lives, which disorients the working class and undermines popular opposition to police state measures.

In this Nov. 13, 2015 photo, a woman is evacuated from the Bataclan concert hall after the terrorist shooting in Paris. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus, File)

For almost a month, the relatives of the victims have been taking the stand to recall the events of the attacks. Their tragic and genuine sentiments contrast sharply with the hypocrisy of the prosecution’s arguments and the media propaganda surrounding the trial, which is silent on the war waged by France and the other NATO powers in Syria.

Nonetheless, there is an insoluble link between the “war on terror” and the state of emergency imposed after the attacks of November 13, 2015, on the one hand, and the French and NATO intervention in Syria and Libya since 2011, on the other hand. These wars have cost more than 400,000 lives and forced more than 10 million people to flee their homes, leaving behind devastated societies.

Indeed, to wage wars in these two countries, the NATO powers used the same Islamist networks that committed the Paris attacks. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria soon emerged as the most powerful “rebel” militia and thus the most likely to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Already in August 2012, US officials had confessed that among the Syrian rebel forces supported by NATO were members of al-Qaeda, the network that committed the 9/11 attacks.

The political hollowness of the trial is seen in the fact that none of the officials from the NATO countries who carried out this policy will be questioned, let alone placed in the docks.

The trial, the largest criminal hearing ever held in France, will last nine months. Twenty defendants are being tried, including Salah Abdeslam, 31 years old, the only survivor of the Islamic State (IS) cell that carried out the attacks. The prosecution dossier makes up 542 volumes, or one million pages. Nearly 1,800 civil parties, including relatives of victims and survivors, are expected to testify in the trial. At least 145 days of hearings are planned.

Of the 20 defendants, 14 are present, including 11 already detained. Six more are being tried in absentia, five of them presumed dead, including the French jihadist brothers Fabien and Jean-Michel Clain, who were allegedly killed in February or March 2019 in an air strike in Syria. Fabien Clain is believed to be the man who recorded the audio message claiming responsibility for the November 13 attacks.

During the hearing, the main accused, Abdeslam, coldly justified the attacks by citing the French bombing against the Islamic State. “We attacked France, targeted the civilian population, but it was nothing personal,” he said. “The goal is not to stir the pot but to be sincere,” he added, assuring that the attacks were a response to “French bombings on the Islamic State” in Syria.

When in 2014 the Islamic State intervened militarily in Iraq against the pro-Iranian neo-colonial regime built by the US occupation of that country between 2003 and 2011, a conflict emerged between the Islamic State and the imperialist powers. The compromise between French imperialism and the Islamic State, which served as its conduit in Syria and was thus financed for these purposes by corporate giants like Lafarge, collapsed.

The United States and its allies reacted with alarm to the Islamic State’s capture of many cities in Iraq, including Mosul. They attempted to isolate IS in Syria, mobilizing other jihadist forces, including the Al Nusra Front, against Assad, and to crush the IS advance in Iraq. When NATO launched attacks against the Islamists in Iraq, it angered the IS, which felt betrayed. In retaliation, the IS planned to commit attacks on European soil, under the illusion that terrorist acts would force French imperialism to change its policy.

“Francois Hollande said we fought France because of its values, but that is a lie,” Abdeslam added, denouncing the “French planes that bombed the Islamic State, men, women, children. ... Francois Hollande knew the risks he was taking by attacking the Islamic State in Syria.”

Yet, while concentrated on utilising the Islamists for their geostrategic goals in the Middle East, European states responded to the threat posed by these same networks inside Europe only with police measures targeting democratic rights and legitimizing neo-fascism.

It is an established fact that several terrorists who committed terrorist attacks in Paris were known to European and American intelligence services. In the aftermath of the attacks, many media outlets revealed that most of the Islamists involved in the Paris suicide attacks, including their alleged organizer, were known to French and Belgian security services long before November 13, 2015. But no intelligence or police service took steps to prevent them from unleashing their murderous violence.

The United States, Turkey and Iraq all warned France before November 13 that plots were afoot; Turkey provided the name of one of the men involved, Ismael Omar Mostefai, known to French authorities since 2010. Mostefai was able to travel to Syria in 2013, despite being included on an official terrorist watch-list flagging him as a security risk, and then return to France in 2014. He was one of the attackers who massacred nearly 100 people at the Bataclan in Paris before committing suicide.

After the attacks, the PS government of President François Hollande carried out an unprecedented series of attacks on democratic rights. It declared a state of emergency and mobilized more than 100,000 security forces across the country, greatly increasing the powers of the police and the army. Hollande proposed amending the French constitution to constitutionalize the state of emergency, a measure of dubious legality imposed during the Algerian war in 1955, and the ability of the state to strip the nationality from individuals, a measure previously used to repress members of the Resistance to Nazism.

These attacks on democratic rights have gone hand in hand with the intensification of wars in Africa and the Middle East, under the pretext of fighting terrorism.

The trial will not resolve any of the questions raised by the attacks of November 13, 2015. Since then, the entire political establishment has moved rapidly towards dictatorship and the legitimisation of the far right. Under the pretext of creating “national unity,” Hollande officially invited the president of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN), Marine Le Pen, to the Élysée Palace.

Elected in 2017, Macron intensified these attacks on democratic rights. He mobilized the police to repress the “yellow vest” protests against social inequality. He imposed a charter of principles on the French Islamic council and enacted an “anti-separatist law” which, under the cover of combating “Islamist separatism,” sought to prevent Muslim criticism of French imperialism’s predatory wars.

Biden administration defends CIA against torture victim

Patrick Martin

The Biden administration argued before the US Supreme Court Wednesday that torture victim Abu Zubaydah, real name Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, should be denied the right to obtain additional information about the circumstances in which he was tortured.

The Department of Justice cited the “state secrets privilege,” an all-purpose assertion of national security interests that does not exist in the Constitution or in law, but was created by the Supreme Court in 1953, at the height of the Cold War, to assist the US military in covering up the deaths of airmen in the crash of an experimental plane.

Abu Zubaydah drawing of the CIA application of sleep deprivation during his torture at a black site in Thailand in 2002

Since then, the privilege has been steadily extended under both Democratic and Republican administrations, becoming the pretext for the government whenever it wants to use the blanket of “national security” to conceal inconvenient facts.

It is particularly flimsy in the case of Abu Zubaydah, since the facts being suppressed are well known and have been reported in the corporate media and widely discussed and commented on. Some have even been documented in the lengthy Senate report on CIA torture released, in an abbreviated form, in 2014.

Abu Zubaydah was detained in Pakistan in 2002. He was presented by the CIA as a prize catch in the early stages of the “war on terror,” supposedly a top aide to Osama bin Laden, the founder and leader of Al Qaeda. He was held in CIA torture centers in Thailand and Poland over a period of four years and subjected to a range of brutal treatment, before his interrogators concluded that he was merely a driver for Al Qaeda and had no information of any importance.

In the course of one period of particularly savage abuse, the prisoner was waterboarded 83 times in a month. He was also confined in a coffin-sized box for 11 days, and hung upside down for long periods. After the interrogators learned he had a phobia for insects, bugs were added to the psychopathic mix. In course of his detention, he lost an eye, and, by some accounts, suffered a mental breakdown. He was eventually sent to Guantanamo Bay, where, according to federal officials, he is being held incommunicado for the rest of his life.

The names of the CIA contractors who carried out the waterboarding and supervised the other torture, James Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen, have long been known. Their depositions have been taken and they have provided extensive accounts of their actions. Nonetheless, they have never been prosecuted in the United States.

The current case arises from an investigation in Poland, where prosecutors have sought to bring charges against the Polish accomplices of the CIA, but have been blocked by the US refusal to allow information on Abu Zubaydah to be turned over. The “state secrets” include official acknowledgement that the Polish government was an accomplice in establishing the “black site” at Stare Kiejkuty, even though Poland’s former president has confirmed that this was the case, and the issue has been the subject of hearings before the European Court of Human Rights.

At Wednesday’s hearing, acting solicitor general Brian Fletcher, appearing for the federal government, explained that the Biden administration was supporting a motion first brought by the Trump administration last December, seeking to quash the request by Abu Zubaydah’s lawyers that details of his confinement in Poland should be released to the Polish prosecutors.

There seemed to be general agreement among the justices that the “state secrets” privilege should be upheld, with some quibbling over whether the privilege could be applied to information that is not secret, but public knowledge. Justice Elena Kagan held Fletcher’s job in the Obama administration, and is therefore very familiar with the assertion of the state secrets privilege by the executive branch.

None of the justices expressed any concern over the savage torture of Abu Zubaydah or the likelihood that he will spend the rest of his life in the American gulag.

Instead, they focused on narrow procedural questions, such as how the state secrets privilege should be applied in the case of a motion for discovery where some of the material sought was secret and some was not. The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals overruled the assertion of then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo, finding that the CIA detention site in Poland and Zubaydah’s torture there were no longer a secret, because they had been revealed in other legal proceedings and in the Senate report.

Chief Justice John Roberts remarked that official confirmation of the existence of the torture facility in Poland would constitute a “breach of faith with our allies and friends around the world.”

At the end of the hearing, three justices, Stephen Breyer, Neil Gorsuch, and Sonia Sotomayor, asked Fletcher whether Zubaydah himself could be made available to the Polish prosecutors, as a witness to his own torture. Fletcher promised an answer to that question, as well as a follow-up question on why Zubaydah was still imprisoned, but would not respond directly.

The main significance of the case and the hearing is the continuity, over four administrations, in the defense of CIA torture and the torturers themselves, as well as their accomplices around the world. The Bush administration authorized and carried out the torture. The Obama administration refused to punish either the torturers or those, like CIA official Gina Haspel, who destroyed evidence of the torture. The Trump administration promoted Haspel to head the CIA, and Trump openly boasted of his support for torture. Biden, vice president under Obama, is going forward with the same policy.

Massive strike by steelworkers in South Africa

Patrick Martin

More than 150,000 steel and metal workers went on strike Tuesday in South Africa, demanding substantial wage increases from the employers and vowing to stay out until they achieve this goal. The strike is not a one-day or limited protest, but open-ended, to demand an immediate wage increase of eight percent this year, and inflation plus two percent in each of the next two years.

The first day of the strike, called by the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), had a celebratory character, with thousands of workers, wearing red shirts thronging the streets of Johannesburg and other cities in powerful demonstrations.

Striking members of NUMSA (Source: Twitter/Unati Msuthu)

Wednesday’s events demonstrated the seriousness of the class confrontation that has begun. In Boksburg North, 50 kilometers east of Johannesburg, private security guards opened fire and shot and wounded one striking worker, who was taken to a local medical clinic. Police claimed to be investigating a case of attempted murder. No arrests had been made but the police confirmed the shooting and that the victim “was among the people wearing Numsa T-shirts.”

In Booysens, just south of Johannesburg, a group of workers demonstrated outside a factory, and police opened fire with rubber bullets, with at least one worker taken to the hospital for treatment of their injuries. The police claimed they were reinforcing the security guards at the factory when the workers refused orders to disperse.

Another confrontation took place in Krugersdorp, 50 miles west of Johannesburg, but no shots were fired at the striking workers, according to news reports.

Strikers were active in five of South Africa’s nine provinces, and marches and picket lines were staged everywhere. The strike is expected to swell to a total of 300,000 once other workers in the affected factories, including some unions allied to NUMSA, join in.

The workers are demanding an increase of 8 percent in the first year (the official inflation rate in consumer prices was 4.9 percent as of August 2021), followed by inflation plus 2 percent in the second and third years of any agreement. If the country’s inflation rate remains at roughly 5 percent a year, this would come to 22 percent over three years.

The Steel and Engineering Industries Federation of South Africa (SEIFSA) has countered with an offer of 4.4 percent for 2021, inflation plus 0.5 percent in 2022, and inflation plus 1 percent in 2023.

The strike was virtually 100 percent effective in steel mills and metalworking factories throughout the country. The executive director of the National Association of Automotive Component and Allied Manufacturers, Renai Moothilal, warned that the auto industry would be affected soon. “We urge parties to speedily resolve the impasse and prevent long-term damage and possible line stoppages to vehicles being assembled in SA and abroad,” he told Reuters.

The auto industry directly employs 110,000 workers in South Africa and accounts for nearly 7 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). The steel industry is the largest in Africa and, together with metalworking, accounts for nearly 15 percent of the country’s GDP, some $44 billion. The largest steelmaker is ArcelorMittal of South Africa, the local branch of the global giant.

The steel and metal workers strike is the first since 2014, when the workers struck for four weeks, with a significant impact on the South African economy.

The steel and metal workers will be reinforced Thursday by millions of workers taking part in a one-day strike called by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), to pressure the African National Congress (ANC) government over its economic policies.

The one-day strike is an effort by COSATU to let off steam in what is clearly an escalating movement of the South African working class. The country was rocked by widespread rioting in July, triggered by the jailing of former president Jacob Zuma, but driven by mounting anger in the working class over inflation, the coronavirus pandemic, and decades of broken promises by the bourgeois nationalist ANC regime.

COSATU General Secretary Bheki Ntshalintshali said the purpose of the strike was to demand “urgent action from policymakers in government and decision-makers in the private sector to stop the attacks that are directed at workers. Both the public and the private sector have been blatantly undermining collective bargaining.”

The COSATU head complained that companies which had received financial incentives from the government as part of its response to the COVID pandemic were “either hoarding or exporting cash out of the country” rather than investing it within South Africa.

COSATU is part of the government against which workers are striking Thursday, alongside the ANC and the South African Communist Party. A similar one-day protest in 2020 involved three million workers, but this year some other union federations have refused to join COSATU in the one-day strike.

The steel and metal workers’ strike testifies to the explosive social and economic relations that characterize post-apartheid South Africa, the continent’s most industrialized country.

The ANC, since coming to power in 1994, has represented a corrupt layer of the black bourgeois and upper petty-bourgeois elite at the expense of the masses of workers and poor. The regime has enforced the dictates of the multinational corporations, including through the violent suppression of the working class, as seen in the 2012 Marikana Massacre when police murdered 34 striking platinum miners.

South Africa has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the world. The top 20 percent of the population take more than 68 percent of income.

Spanish authorities declare COVID-19 will become “endemic”

Alice Summers

Regional governments in Spain have declared that COVID-19 will become “endemic” in the population, in the latest escalation of the Socialist Party (PSOE)–Podemos government’s criminal campaign to abandon public health measures and force Spain’s inhabitants to “live with the virus.”

Epidemiologically, the term “endemic” describes the constant presence and prevalence of a disease within the population of a certain area. It refers to a state where a disease reaches such a level that most of the population has developed immunity. Viruses such as the common cold are considered endemic.

Regional premier of the Basque Country, Iñigo Urkullu (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

By declaring COVID-19 “endemic,” the Spanish ruling class is signaling its intention to allow the uninhibited spread of infection, and to permit seasonal surges that could strain hospitals to their breaking point. Far from being a response to the inevitable transmission of an undefeatable, if relatively benign, virus, it is a deliberate decision to let a deadly disease rip through the population, no matter the cost in health and lives.

Reporting the epidemiological situation in the northern region of Navarra, the Navarrese Institute of Public and Working Health (ISPLN) claimed the pandemic is practically over, but that the virus would continue to proliferate. “Unless new and unexpected factors emerge,” the report declared, “we could be at the end of the pandemic situation in Navarra. This doesn’t mean that COVID-19 is going to permanently stop circulating, but it will probably be incorporated into the list of infections which spread endemically or in seasonal epidemics.”

“It can’t be ruled out that COVID-19 could cause waves in autumn and winter,” the ISPLN document continued, “but they will probably have a progressively smaller health impact thanks to the high vaccination coverage and the application of other preventative measures by the population. In correctly-vaccinated people, the risk of COVID-19 is not more than that of other common diseases like flu.”

The claim that COVID-19 will naturally become less deadly and is “like flu” is a lie with no scientific basis. Further mutations made possible by the failure to contain and end the pandemic can produce yet more deadly strains, as the emergence of the much more transmissible and lethal Delta variant of the virus has shown.

Last Friday, the regional premier of the Basque Country, Iñigo Urkullu, also declared that the virus was becoming “endemic” in the region. Urkullu told the Advisory Commission of the LABI (Basque Civil Protection Plan) that “the Basque Country is moving from a pandemic situation to an endemic situation.”

“We can take a new step,” he stated, to allow the region to “move forward with the decree establishing the end of the health emergency” if the trajectory of the virus remains “positive.”

Speaking on the viral situation in the Basque Country, Urkullu stated: “It is a descending, stable and sustainable trajectory. We find ourselves in a different situation [than earlier in the pandemic] and therefore must have different responses.”

On Tuesday, the Basque government then proceeded to end the “Health Emergency” that had been in place in the region, lifting virtually all health-related restrictions other than the obligation to wear masks in crowded public spaces. It is Spain’s sixth region to remove the vast majority of measures, after Castilla-La Mancha, Castilla y León, Extremadura, Navarra and Madrid.

The announcements by the Navarrese and Basque governments exemplify the “herd immunity” policy pursued by the ruling class across Spain and internationally. It comes only a couple of weeks after Fernando Simón, director of the Centre for the Coordination of Health Alerts and Emergencies (CCAES), and one of the PSOE–Podemos government’s key advisors on the pandemic, called for the “normalisation” of the disease.

Speaking to a meeting of the Spanish Society of Epidemiology, Simón falsely presented COVID-19 as a fairly harmless disease and downplayed the risks associated with it, comparing Spain’s pandemic response to “shooting a fly with a bazooka.”

“It’s very likely that Spain will not have any more major epidemiological waves,” Simón claimed. “There could be a sixth, seventh, eighth or ninth wave, but they won’t be like the others.”

The current situation in Spain “has nothing in common with what we were seeing before,” Simón added. “There could be another ripple [of the pandemic] in some specific groups, but the situation in Spain, right now, is very favourable, making it possible, bit by bit, to normalise the situation.”

These calls to “normalise” COVID-19 or to allow it to become “endemic” come as several hundred people continue to die of the virus every week in Spain, and tens of thousands more are infected. Many thousands of these individuals will suffer from persistent symptoms of the coronavirus for many weeks or even months after infection, with serious potential long-term health consequences including multi-organ damage, cognitive impairment, severe fatigue and muscle pain.

These policies are justified with arguments that large-scale vaccination campaigns have fundamentally changed the pandemic situation—rendering the disease far less dangerous—and that it is impossible to completely eradicate the virus.

Both of these claims are lies. While immunisation is an invaluable tool in the fight against the pandemic, it is not alone sufficient to prevent serious illness, and must be combined with scientifically guided public health measures to suppress transmission.

Furthermore, the example of countries such as China—a society of more than 1.4 billion people—shows that an elimination strategy can be successfully pursued. Despite being the birthplace of the virus, China was rapidly able to bring the outbreak under control with a raft of public health measures, including widespread testing, contact tracing, safe isolation of infected patients, and strict travel restrictions.

These measures have kept deaths from the pandemic in China below 5,000—a tiny fraction of the total fatalities in Spain and in most other “advanced” capitalist countries. After eliminating the virus within its own borders, China has also fought off repeated outbreaks of the Delta variant imported via international travel.

Other countries such as New Zealand, which initially pursued a “Zero Covid” policy and had almost entirely suppressed viral transmission, have recently abandoned this strategy, turning towards the “herd immunity” policy pursued by the vast majority of capitalist governments across the world. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced on Monday that her government would be “transitioning to a new way of doing things,” arguing that the Delta variant is a “game-changer.”

There is nothing inevitable about continuing lethal waves of the pandemic in New Zealand, Spain or any other country. The successes achieved by China and a few other capitalist states show the pandemic can be fought. The potential exists to mobilise social resources to eradicate COVID-19. If measures were implemented in a globally coordinated manner across the world, the pandemic could rapidly be ended.

Spain’s PSOE–Podemos government has proven utterly hostile to a scientifically led policy to eliminate the pandemic and save lives. Like the ruling class across Europe, it has placed corporate profits and the wealth of a super-rich elite above all else, seeing over 100,000 deaths as simply the cost of doing business.

Deepening problems for Chinese economy

Nick Beams

The major economic and financial problems in the Chinese property development sector continue to mount with the announcement by Fantasia Holdings this week that it had failed to make a payment on a bond.

Just a few weeks ago, Fantasia issued an assurance that it had “no liquidity issue” but on Monday announced “that it did not make the payment” on a $206 million bond.

A man wearing a protective mask walks in front of an electronic display board in the lobby of the Shanghai Stock Exchange building in Shanghai, China, Friday, Feb. 14, 2020. (AP Photo)

Last month Evergrande, the most indebted property development company, missed a payment on a dollar-denominated bond, triggering a 30-day grace period before a default is declared.

The question being asked in Asian markets is how far the financial crisis will spread to other property developers, which account for a large portion of the high-yield or so-called junk bond market.

Dickie Wong, the head of research at the Hong-based Kingston Securities, told the Financial Times: “There’s nothing investors can do… the worst is yet to come.”

The rating agency Fitch said Fantasia has $1.9 billion due on offshore bond payments by the end of next year as well as 6.4 billion renminbi ($US992 billion) of onshore bond payments due in the same period.

The crisis goes far beyond real estate given the crucial role it has played in the 13 years since the global financial crisis in 2008 when the Chinese government turned increasingly towards property development as a central driver of economic growth.

Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf wrote yesterday that the most serious issue to arise from the crisis was that the economy’s dependence on demand from investment in real estate had to end. “That will impose a huge adjustment and create a big headache for authorities: what can replace property investment in creating demand?” he wrote.

Wolf cited statistics pointing to the fact that well before the Evergrande crisis, the Chinese growth model, based on high levels of investment, was running out of steam. Total fixed investment averaged around 43 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) between 2010 and 2019, five percentage points higher than between 2000 and 2019. But in the latter period GDP growth had started to fall, indicating a drop in investment returns so far as the overall economy is concerned.

At the same time, debt has been rising. Household debt jumped from 29 percent of GDP in 2010 to 61 percent in 2021, while non-financial corporate sector debt rose from 118 to 159 percent of GDP in the same period.

Wolf cited the finding from a 2020 paper by economists Kenneth Rogoff and Yuanchen Yang that when its flow-on effects are considered the Chinese property sector accounted for 29 percent of GDP in 2016.

He claimed that because the government controlled the Chinese financial system, a financial crisis could be averted—a position advanced by many others. But this supposition has yet to be tested by the events now unfolding.

The major impact, he said, was that property investment would collapse and this would have a “large negative effect on local government finances.” The taxing powers of local governments are restricted, and they depend on the flow of revenue from land sales to finance infrastructure projects.

According to the research by Rogoff and Yang, cited in the article, “a 20 percent fall in real estate activity could lead to a 5–10 percent fall in GDP, even without amplification from a banking crisis, or accounting for the importance of real estate as collateral.” And, according to Wolf, “it could be worse.”

He held out the prospect that growth could continue if there was a shift away from wasteful investment and increased consumption spending flowing from a redistribution of income towards poorer households. This would require “big reforms” combined with a shift away from property and a transition from high carbon emissions, also requiring “big policy changes.”

The model based on wasteful investment had reached its end and had to be replaced, he concluded.

But this fact has long been recognised by the Chinese regime and was the basis for the launching in 2015 of the Made in China 2025 plan that set out the need to develop hi-tech industries.

However, it has run into a major barrier—the domination of US imperialism over the world economy exercised through its design of vital computer chips and the pre-eminent position of the dollar in the international financial system.

The US is determined to crush Chinese high-tech development by all means necessary because it is seen as a threat both economically and militarily.

This policy, initiated under Trump, continued and deepened by the Biden administration, is exemplified most clearly in US actions against the Chinese high-tech telecommunications company, Huawei, regarded by the Xi Jinping regime as a vital component of the next stage of economic development.

Three years ago, Huawei, which had poured major investment into the development of communications technology, was on the edge of becoming the world’s leading developer of the global 5G phone infrastructure.

Last month Huawei chairman Eric Xu said the company’s revenue from the sale of smartphones will drop by $30 to $40 billion this year from the $136.7 billion of sales in 2020 with no prospect for recovering that money in the next few years. Earlier Xu had said the company’s goal was simply to survive.

The destruction of its smartphone business is seen in the fact that despite having made significant advances in the development of 5G infrastructure—many of the patents are held by Huawei—its latest smartphone will be only 4G.

The actions of US imperialism with regard to Huawei are emblematic of its position with regard to the Chinese economic development as whole—its reduction to what amounts to status of an economic semi-colony.

In the period when Chinese growth was dependent on the export of cheap consumer goods and low-tech industrial components, it was regarded by the US as a “strategic partner” summed up in the invention of the term Chimerica by the economic historian and media commentator Niall Ferguson.

Now China is a “strategic competitor.” The methods employed by the US against Huawei are a 21st century form of imperialist gangsterism. The phone company has been excluded from the development of telecommunications networks on the spurious grounds that it is a “security” threat.

US firms that supplied it with computer chips have now been banned from doing so. The ban has been extended to companies from other countries by threatening them with a cut-off of their own supplies from US firms if they continue to sell components to Huawei. And there is the ever-present threat that firms which defy US directives will be excluded from the global financial system because of the dollar’s pre-eminence.

With US firms banned from dealings with Huawei, Google stopped offering services such as Gmail, and YouTube to its phones. From a position where it was once the leading smartphone supplier in the world, Huawei has now dropped out of the top five.

The collapse of the old model of Chinese economic advance, based to a major extent on property development, and the barriers being erected by US imperialism to a model based on high-tech development contain the potential for a major economic crisis.

The perspective of the regime so-called “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” based on capitalism, has proven to be a chimera and the mounting economic problems will lead to the eruption of social and political struggles by the multi-million Chinese working class.

Nobel Prize in Physics awarded for pioneering research in climate change and chaos theory

Bryan Dyne

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for work on Earth’s climate and the theory of chaos and disordered systems. The first half of the prize was given jointly to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann for their foundational work on our atmosphere and how humanity changes it. The second half of the prize was granted to Giorgio Parisi for his contributions toward understanding chaos theory, the underlying laws governing seemingly random phenomena.

Nobel 2021 prize winners for physics Syukuru Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi (Screenshot from the Nobel Prize video presentation)

The connection between the two halves of the award is the “complexity of physical systems,” as explained in the prize’s scientific background. “[F]from the largest scales experienced by humans” down to “microscopic structure and dynamics,” there are many processes that have numerous interacting parts that have proven difficult to describe mathematically. This year’s Nobel celebrates key milestones in understanding such systems, including modeling the links between weather and climate and understanding the underlying patterns in disordered molecular structures.

The basic feature of complex systems is that even tiny changes in the initial conditions over time produce very different results. Small differences in the temperature, pressure or humidity, for example, can cause very different weather patterns to emerge. Early computer simulations that looked at this question were done in the 1960s by mathematician Edward Lorenz, who observed that weather models changed drastically when the initial conditions were rounded from 0.506127 to just 0.506. The results produced in each scenario were completely different.

Lorenz summarized this as, “Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.”

In popular culture, this is often referred to as the butterfly effect. The term was highlighted in a question asked by meteorologist Philip Merrilees in 1972, “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” Continuing the metaphor, is the tiny gust of wind from the flap of a butterfly’s wings one of the many interconnected events that ultimately leads to a tornado? Is the event part of a cascade that leads to large-scale alterations of a weather system? And if a tornado still formed without the wing flap, how would its trajectory change?

These experiments provided the backdrop for Manabe’s work. Manabe was born in 1931 and came of age during and in the aftermath of the devastation wreaked on Japan by the United States during World War II. After earning his doctorate at the University of Tokyo in 1958, he was hired by the General Circulation Research Section of the US Weather Bureau (now the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at NOAA). There, he began developing climate models studying how differences in amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere impacted global temperatures.

The very earliest climate model was developed by French physicist Joseph Fourier in the early 1800s, who studied the balance between the amount of solar radiation hitting the ground, the amount of energy reemitted by Earth’s surface, and how this balance determined the temperature of the atmosphere.

Further work was done by Svante Arrhenius in 1896, who showed that the amount of heat captured by the atmosphere is dependent on the gases present. He found that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused temperature changes of up to 6 degrees Celsius, an overestimate due to the accuracy of atmospheric measurements of the time. This process is now called the greenhouse effect.

Manabe built on this work by adding to Arrhenius’ model the vertical flow of air due to convection and the evaporation and condensation of water vapor. This involved solving the full equations for atmospheric heat, motion and radiation using a then state of the art computer that had a mere half a megabyte of RAM. This more complex but still relatively simple climate model confirmed that 1896 result, that an increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases the global average surface temperature. The more sophisticated calculations predicted a temperature change of between 2 and 3 degrees Celsius from doubling carbon dioxide.

The simulations further revealed that changing the levels of oxygen and nitrogen in the atmosphere, which comprise 99 percent of what we breath, produced negligible effects on the surface temperature. In addition, when the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases, while temperatures at the surface get warmer, temperatures in the upper atmosphere get colder, ruling out the hypothesis that increasing solar radiation causes increasing temperatures. Both these results decisively proved in 1967 that increased amounts of carbon dioxide cause increased temperatures at the Earth’s surface, what we today call global warming.

There still was not, however, a connection between rapidly changing weather conditions experienced every day to the more protracted changes to climate as a whole. In the mechanical formulation of the world’s physical laws set forth by Isaac Newton, one should be able to accurately predict both the climate and the weather. If one knows the position and momentum of every particle in the universe, according to Newton and later Pierre-Simon de Laplace, the world is linear and it should be possible to calculate exactly both what has happened and what will happen.

Yet one can at best predict the weather about ten days in advance, while changes in Earth’s climate can and have been accurately predicted for decades. There is of course the practical consideration that there is no way to know the air temperature, humidity, wind and pressure at every point. There is also a more fundamental issue, the butterfly effect described earlier: small and local changes in the atmosphere can domino into much larger changes. In mathematical parlance, the evolution of a weather system (and a great many other natural phenomena) is chaotic and nonlinear.

Klaus Hasselmann linked climate and weather by making an analogy to a signal and its noise. Hasselmann was born in 1931 in Hamburg, Germany, to a family which was politically active with the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). They fled to England in 1934 to escape the Nazi persecution of communists and social democrats, eventually settling in Welwyn Garden City, England. Hasselmann only returned to Hamburg in 1949, well after the defeat of the Nazis by the Soviet Union and other Allied powers. He completed his education at the University of Hamburg and has worked there and at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, which he founded, for most of his career.

Hasselmann’s early research was on the connection between small fluctuations on the ocean’s surface and larger waves and currents. Rather than trying to keep track of each ripple in the water, he observed that the deviations caused by these ripples, the “noise,” ultimately produced an average result for many large-scale oceanic properties, the “signal.” This stochastic (probabilistic) method was able to show that rapidly changing local conditions produce slow variations in the ocean as a whole.

He then generalized his results for climate as a whole. Instead of identifying small changes in the ocean, Hasselmann isolated changes in solar radiation, levels of greenhouse gases and other factors and treated them as noise that over time averaged out to changes in the climate as a whole. In doing so, he also provided a way to identify changes caused specifically by humans on the climate system. All subsequent climate research has used Hasselmann’s work to find many impacts of human agricultural and industrial activity on the climate through numerous independent observations.

The mathematics that connects weather to climate is not limited, however, to merely meteorological studies. They are subset of a much broader field of physics known as statistical mechanics and the mathematical studies of the disordered systems known as chaos theory.

Statistical mechanics was developed by James C. Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann and J. Willard Gibbs in the second half of the 19th century. They were driven by the inability of Newtonian mechanics to describe the motion of gases, liquids and any system that contained large numbers of particles. Rather than try to find the initial position and momentum of each particle, they treated the motion of each particle as random, and proceeded to calculate the average physical properties of the ensemble as a whole.

Temperature, for example, is a macroscopic property of a gas that can be calculated as the average energy of each microscopic gas particle. Pressure is the macroscopic property produced by the average force of numerous microscopic particles as they impact and bounce off a surface.

Chaos theory again confirms that underneath the apparent random motion of a complex system are underlying patterns and organization. It was initially largely developed by the great polymath Henri Poincaré, who showed the orbits of restricted classes of three or more planetary bodies can simultaneously constantly change in unstable ways, but within knowable bounds.

These two fields were used by Giorgio Parisi to solve the puzzle of materials known as spin glasses. Parisi was born in Rome in 1948 and received his doctorate in physics at the University of Rome La Sapienza in 1970. He has since worked as a researcher at the Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati, Columbia University and many others. He is currently a professor at the Sapienza University of Rome and is the president of one of the oldest European scientific organizations, the Accademia dei Lincei.

Parisi’s theoretical work with spin glasses made him internationally known. Consider a metal alloy of copper atoms with a few iron atoms randomly mixed in. Each iron atom acts like a small magnet, which prior physical theory suggested should align their orientation in the same direction. Iron atoms scattered throughout copper instead are frustrated—some point in one direction while others point in the opposite. Through the 1970s, while the material could be made and observed, there was no physical model that described how the orientation of the iron atoms could stay in a random stable state and not locally self-organize, as in ordinary magnets.

Parisi’s solution was simple and ingenious; rather than allow for only two states, up and down, he allowed for an infinite number of orientations of the iron atoms. And he found an ingenious mathematical simplification, known as the “replica trick,” that allowed the otherwise intractable problem to be easily solved. This technique has since been applied to many other fields of science, from quantum field theory to the development of machine-learning algorithms.

Another point arises from both statistical mechanics and chaos theory: by clearly defining the randomness and disorder of a system, one can predict certain broad outcomes of nonlinear systems. One can also measure with high precision when those predictions break down and need to be reexamined. In other words, the seemingly random evolution of and chaotic nature of matter still admits knowable properties.

This is a subtle point. These theories, and science in general, do not state that everything everywhere is known. Rather, every aspect of nature, no matter how complex, is governed by laws that can be used to understand and predict phenomena. Most importantly, these laws can be understood by human beings developing ever more correct approximations of reality, all of which have steadily increased our mastery over nature.

That nature is knowable also has social implications. The need to avert an ecological catastrophe induced by climate change is one example. The immense dangers presented by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic are another.

On the microscopic scale, the spread of the disease is governed broadly by its reproductive number, how many other people will be infected by a single person. The Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 is estimated to have an initial reproductive number of six. On the macroscopic scale, however, the fact that the deadly contagion persists nearly two years after it was first identified is bound up with the much more complex system of social ties governed by the division of the world into rival nation-states and the drive for the accumulation of private profit, capitalism.