While Germany wages war against Russia in Ukraine and supports genocide against the Palestinians in the Middle East, the militarisation of society continues, extending to the enlistment of minors. In step with the planned reintroduction of compulsory military service, the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) is targeting teenagers for recruitment.
Bundeswehr propaganda in the Berlin underground.
A response from the German government to a parliamentary question from the Left Party reveals that a total of 1,996 young people under the age of 18 were recruited by the Bundeswehr in 2023. That is just under 10 percent of the total number of new recruits this year and an all-time high.
The figures have risen sharply in recent years. In 2022, 1,773 minors were recruited, in 2021 it was 1,239, and in 2020 the number was 1,148. In 2019, the year before the outbreak of the pandemic, the Bundeswehr recruited 1,705 minors. In total, 7,861 minors have been recruited in the last five years.
The increasing recruitment of minors goes hand in hand with the growing presence of the Bundeswehr in schools and other educational and youth facilities. The Bundeswehr now has 85 youth officers, compared to 73 in 2019.
The Ministry of Defence officially defines the tasks of the youth officers as follows:
The youth officers of the Bundeswehr are available as expert speakers on the subject of defence and security policy and as discussion partners. They offer the interested public a wide range of information in the form of lectures, events and educational trips.
In other words, the youth officers act as propagandists of militarism, whose work consists of getting young people excited about the army and luring them into the barracks. In 2023, youth officers gave over 3,400 talks at schools and universities. According to the government, they reached almost 90,000 students. Almost 3,000 of these then visited Bundeswehr facilities. Personnel costs for the youth officers rose from €5.4 million in 2019 to €5.8 million in 2023.
The government justifies the recruitment of minors by pointing out that they will not be trained in the use of weapons or take part in missions abroad. But this merely postpones their possible deployment in war.
The threat these recruits face is evident in Ukraine. After two-and-a-half years of NATO warfare, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers are dead or wounded. Ukrainian labourers and now also young people are increasingly being forcibly recruited off of the street and sent to the front.
Such methods are also being prepared in Germany. Just a few days ago, Hesse became the first federal state to decide to send Ukrainian men of military age whose residency papers have expired back to Ukraine—thus forcing them to serve as cannon fodder at the front.
The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) condemns the recruitment of minors and the murderous pro-war policy in the strongest possible terms. After two world wars, in which tens of thousands of children and young people and millions of workers were sacrificed to the interests of the German ruling class, there is strong anti-war sentiment in Germany and throughout Europe. For example, 59 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds are against the return of conscription, which the German government is preparing. The number of professional and regular soldiers has been falling steadily for years.
The multimillion-euro advertising campaigns aimed at enticing teenagers and young adults to join the military have had no major impact. The Bundeswehr’s latest campaign, which is being run mainly via Tik-Tok and YouTube, is primarily intended to appeal to a young audience. In the €6 million campaign titled “Explorers—A roadtrip through the Bundeswehr,” the military is working with four influencers, who guide the viewer through various areas of the Bundeswehr. The army is presented in propaganda terms as a great adventure with excellent career and promotion opportunities.
The fact that the parliamentary question to the federal government comes from the Left Party cannot hide the fact that this party, like all other bourgeois parties, supports the militarisation of society and the Bundeswehr’s war operations. From the outset, it has backed the NATO offensive against Russia in Ukraine and supported arms deliveries to Kiev. The Left Party Youth even organised a fundraising campaign for the Ukrainian army, which is riddled with fascists.
The Left Party also supports Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. On October 10 last year, for example, a pro-Israeli parliamentary motion was passed with the support of all (!) members of the Left Party in the Bundestag. Dietmar Bartsch, then the parliamentary group leader of the Left Party in the Bundestag, celebrated the motion as “Germany’s contribution to the fight against terror.”
Tunisia’s authoritarian President Kais Saied, who has ruled by decree since suspending parliament in July 2021, has announced he will stand in the elections for another five-year term. He was answering the “country's sacred call” that left him no choice but to run for a second term.
The elections, set for October 6, are a fraud. Saied is setting himself up to be the only candidate as his tamed judiciary eliminates many of his potential opponents, disqualifying, imprisoning or holding them in pre-trial detention on an array of charges, including some under Tunisia’s counter-terrorism law carrying heavy sentences.
Saied (second right) with President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen (second left), Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (right) and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte (left), July 16, 2023 [Photo by European Union, 2024 / CC BY 4.0]
His aim is to consolidate his one-man dictatorship and impose the full burden of Tunisia’s deep-rooted economic problems on the working class on behalf of the country’s corrupt financial elite.
Among those sentenced to imprisonment are:
* Lotfi Mraihi, head of the Republican People’s Union and one of Saied’s foremost critics. Having announced his intention to stand for the presidency, he was arrested in July on suspicion of corruption and money laundering and sentenced to eight months in prison and a lifetime ban on standing for office.
* Abir Moussi, secretary general of the Free Destourian Party that reveres the autocracies of Habib Bourguiba and his successor Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who was toppled in the popular uprising of 2011. She was sentenced to two years in prison on a charge of insulting the election commission, having been held in detention since October 2013.
* Issam Chebbi, general secretary of the Republican (Jomhouri) Party. Arrested in February 2023 and detained for “plotting against the state,” he has been forced to withdraw his candidacy after the electoral commission tightened its rules on sponsorship. More than 20 other opposition figures have faced similar accusations. In February, Chebbi and five other political prisoners went on hunger strike to protest a year of “unjust detention and injustice.”
* Abdellatif Mekki, a former health minister and leader of the Islamist Ennahda Party who now heads the Amal w Injaz party. He faces charges of fraud and money laundering and has now withdrawn his candidacy. Mekki, along with activist Nizar Chaari, Judge Mourad Massoudi and Adel Dou, was sentenced to eight months in prison and banned from running for office on a charge of vote buying.
Several other candidates are facing charges such as fraud and money laundering, while Mondher Znaidi, another prominent potential candidate living in France, is facing corruption charges.
According to Amnesty International, most of the opposition parties’ senior members are being held in pre-trial detention on charges of corruption, including Ghazi Chaouachi, former secretary general of the Attayar party, Jaouher Ben Mbarek, one of the leaders of the Salvation Front, and many high-level Ennahdha leaders, including Rached Ghannouchi, Noureddine Bhiri and Sahbi Atig.
These prosecutions and arrests are part of a broader crackdown on freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly that demonstrate Saied’s refusal to countenance dissent or challenge to his rule.
In September 2022, Saied issued a presidential decree imposing prison sentences of up to 10 years for the vague charge of spreading “rumours and fake news.”
Since then, the authorities have carried out a series of arrests. They have subjected more than 70 people, including political opponents, lawyers, journalists, activists and human rights defenders, to arbitrary prosecutions and/or arbitrary detention. As of last May, at least 40 people remained arbitrarily detained for exercising internationally protected rights such freedom of expression and peaceful assembly.
The media has been all but silenced. According to a report by several journalists’ organisations, at least nine journalists faced harassment and assaults by protesters or security forces during demonstrations in the days after Saied’s power grab in July 2021 began.
Security forces, reportedly under orders from the Tunisian interior ministry, attacked newsrooms. They raided Al Jazeera’s offices in July 2021 and stormed the broadcasting rooms of Tunisian public television in January 2023. Later, police raided the home of Noureddine Boutar, head of Mosaique FM, one of Tunisia’s largest independent radio stations. He now faces charges of money laundering and “illicit enrichment.” The head of Tunisia’s Journalists Syndicate (SNJT), Mohamed Mehdi Jelassi, said he was facing a criminal investigation over his coverage of a July 2022 protest against Tunisia’s constitutional referendum.
Having signed a deal with the European Union in July 2023 worth €900 million in financial aid in return for preventing refugees from crossing to Europe, Saied has received €105 million to upgrade his border police and deport refugees. He launched a clampdown on migrants, refugees, and human rights defenders working to protect their rights, as well as journalists. It followed a meeting in April with the Italian Ministry of Interior about “migration management.”
This crackdown has included arresting, summoning and investigating the heads, former staff or members of at least 12 organizations over vague allegations, such as “financial crimes,” for providing aid to migrants. The authorities have arrested at least two journalists and referred them to trial because of their comments in the media. Tunisia’s security forces have escalated their deportations of refugees and migrants, as well as multiple forced evictions, and have arrested and convicted landlords for renting apartments to migrants without permits.
The European Union shamelessly exploited Tunisia facing economic meltdown and urgent need for financial aid. Economic growth has fallen from 3.5 percent between 2000 to 2010 to 1.7 percent between 2011 and 2019, while the COVID 19 pandemic decimated the economy which relies heavily on tourism. Around 20 percent of the workforce—and 37 percent of young workers—are officially unemployed, but the number of people hanging out in the streets of the towns and cities outside the capital Tunis suggest the reality is far worse. Over the past year, inflation rose to around 9 to 10 percent, driven by the rise in food prices by 15.3 percent in the first half of the year. Wages have remained stagnant, leading to a precipitous decline in living standards.
Hunger has increased dramatically, with two thirds of Tunisians saying they have gone without food at least once in the previous month. Nearly half, particularly the young and better educated, say they have considered emigrating. The war in Gaza has deeply affected Tunisians’ view of the US and its allies, which have backed Israel to the hilt, with favourable views of the US declining from 40 percent before the war to just 10 percent afterwards.
Western governments and think tanks had hailed Tunisia as the “success story” of the Arab Spring on the grounds that it has not been subjected to the kind of sociocide meted out to Iraq, Libya and Syria in Washington’s wars for regime change or seen the kind of mass arrests and killings that have taken place under the US-backed dictatorship of former army commander Abdel-Fatah El Sisi in Egypt.
But more than 13 years after the mass revolutionary upheavals that toppled the Western-backed dictatorship of Zine El Abidine Ben-Ali, none of the aspirations for jobs, democratic rights and social equality that brought the Tunisian working class into struggle have been realized.
The springing up of dozens of homeless encampments in large and regional cities, and even small towns across Canada is a significant indicator of the catastrophic housing crisis gripping the country. As the Liberal government, backed by the trade unions and New Democrats, spend tens of billions on waging war around the world and enriching their corporate paymasters, growing numbers of people are forced to resort to permanently living in tents with virtually none of the amenities necessary for modern living.
A homeless encampment in Kitchener, Ontario, in front of the former Krug Furniture factory
In her report, she asserts that these conditions are a violation of the human right to adequate shelter. This is all the more damning given the fact that the union-backed Trudeau Liberals enshrined housing as a basic right in the 2019 National Housing Strategy Act (NHSA), a move touted by liberal publications and union bureaucrats as an example of the Trudeau government’s supposedly progressive credentials.
Speaking to CBC last February, Houle said that the homeless encampments were “a physical manifestation of how broken our homeless and housing system is from coast to coast in Canada. It needs urgent measures … Government must act immediately to save lives.”
Her report documented that an estimated 20 to 25 percent of the homeless population in Canada lives in encampments, from the temperate south to the prairies and the Pacific Coast, to the frigid, inhospitable climes of Labrador and Nunavut. Houle has called on the federal government to implement a national encampment response plan to ensure that those living in camps would have access to potable water, food, and healthcare. She also called for an end to evictions and a strengthening of the NHSA.
Estimates of the number of homeless people in Canada vary. Statistics Canada places the number at 235,000 individuals, with an estimated 35,000 experiencing homelessness on any given night as of 2019. To put this number into perspective, it is roughly equivalent to the combined populations of Prince Edward Island, the Yukon and the Northwest Territories.
Other figures from the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness place the estimate anywhere from 150,000 to 300,000 people, larger, at the higher end, than Saskatoon, the largest city in Saskatchewan. The real number is undoubtedly much higher, if one takes into account forms of hidden homelessness, such as “couch surfing.”
An accurate count is further hampered by the fractured mosaic of government agencies at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels. Homeless advocacy groups and government agencies admit as much, noting that these figures are at best wild estimates. While unsheltered homelessness that is visible, such as those living in encampments and homeless shelters, is relatively well documented, hidden homelessness—those who “couch surf” or otherwise lack a fixed address—is less prominently covered.
However, census data, polls, and point-in-time (PiT) surveys help shed some light on the extent of the crisis. The most recent PiT survey conducted by Infrastructure Canada, the federal government agency that currently overseas national policy relating to homelessness, provides damning findings of the extent of homelessness in Canada. Published in late 2022, it provides a snapshot into the extent of the crisis in 87 communities across the country. The PiT notes that:
40,000 people experienced homelessness on any given night, up 5,000 from the 2019 figure.
Among the 67 communities and regions that participated in the survey in both 2018 and 2022, the total number of homeless people increased by 20 percent.
Unsheltered homelessness increased by an astounding 88 percent from 2018.
Highlighting the burden that the pandemic has on the most vulnerable, counts that were undertaken in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic reported a 125 percent increase in unsheltered homelessness and a 57 percent increase in the use of shelters. This is a damning exposure of the profits-before-lives strategy of the Canadian government, which is focused on keeping business booming as workers, students, the elderly and the most vulnerable, like the homeless, get infected with a debilitating and potentially fatal disease.
There was an increase in chronic homelessness, with 69 percent of respondents reporting that they had experienced the condition, up from 60 percent in 2018. Chronic homelessness is generally defined as an individual experiencing up to six or more months of homelessness.
Unsurprisingly, the main reason cited by respondents as the cause of homelessness was not having enough income to cover the costs of housing. Domestic violence, mental health, and substance abuse issues were also cited.
The PiT also included revealing demographic facts concerning homelessness. Based on 25,000 surveys covering the 87 municipalities that took part in the study, it was discovered that 55 percent of the respondents were in the 25 to 49 cohort. The second most numerous cohort were the 50 to 64 age group, accounting for 24 percent of the respondents. In other words, the largest number of homeless people are of working age, which corresponds with other research demonstrating a growing number of homeless people with a job who are unable to afford exorbitant rents and other daily living costs. Indigenous people are also overrepresented at about 30-35 percent of the homeless population, despite only accounting for 5 percent of the total population.
A cross-Canada problem
Vancouver, British Columbia, has seen a marked increase in homelessness since the beginning of the pandemic, with the homeless population rising from 3,634 in 2020 to 4,821 in 2024, a 32 percent increase in a report cited by the CBC. In the Prairies, Alberta has upwards of 8,000 homeless people in Calgary and Edmonton, Regina and Saskatoon in Saskatchewan reported at least 1,000 homeless people in recent PiT surveys, and Winnipeg, Manitoba has at least 1,000 people sleeping unhoused.
Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, has as many as 16,000 homeless people on any given night, with 8,000 of them in Toronto. Canada’s most populous city and the home to Bay Street financial speculators only has enough space in its shelters to house 2,000 people on any given night. Smaller, de-industrialized cities in the GTA have also seen a proliferation of homeless encampments, including Hamilton, Kitchener-Waterloo, and Oshawa.
There are an estimated 10,000 homeless people in Quebec, with nearly half of them in Montreal. Quebec city has seen a 32 percent increase in homelessness since 2018, according to Radio Canada. Major homeless encampments also exist across Atlantic Canada, with hundreds living in tent cities, including an estimated 800 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and 900 in St John’s, Newfoundland.
As grim as all of these figures of social distress are, they are invariably an undercount for the reasons noted above. Speaking to CBC News, Brenna Jarrar, the director of housing for the Nunatsiavut Housing Commission, commented on the underreporting of homelessness in Canada. In addition to addressing the fact that the Labrador government is short staffed, she also noted that the homeless population is not always found in shelters. Noting the lack of resources allocated to the homeless crisis, so remarked, “I think it’s a problem where you’re often screaming for attention and there’s not really enough to go around when there’s such a crisis everywhere.”
Encampments unfit for human habitation
Conditions in the encampments across Canada are universally squalid. Tents and other forms of makeshift shelters are entirely inadequate to shelter people from the elements, particularly the harsh Canadian winters. Improvised attempts to heat the encampments regularly lead to tragic deaths at homeless encampments.
A report in the Ottawa Citizen noted that two homeless people died in a homeless camp in Canada’s national capital while trying to heat their tent by burning hand sanitizer in a metal can and lighting their tent with candles. Another death related to an encampment fire was reported last winter in St John, New Brunswick. Three homeless people died at an encampment fire in a Lowes parking lot in Calgary last December.
These deaths are but a snapshot of the tragic human toll that homelessness is claiming across Canada. According to a report from the Calgary Homelessness Foundation, 436 people perished on the streets of Calgary in 2023, nearly double the toll for 2022.
Toronto reported 91 deaths in homeless shelters for 2023. The Annual Review of Homeless Deaths published by the city claims that roughly half of these deaths could be attributed to opioid overdose, down 19 percent from the preceding year.
In Vancouver, 51 people experiencing homelessness passed away last year. The problem has become so visible that the city felt compelled to declare homelessness a “civil emergency” last November.
The province of Quebec does not record statistics on the number of deaths, even for those who are housed in shelters. No central database exists tabulating the number of homeless people who die each year. Estimates can only be culled from municipal statistics and media reports. One thing is clear: this is not something that the government considers to be a significant issue.
In addition to the dismal conditions stemming from exposure, the homeless in Canada also experience significant health problems. The 2022 PiT survey notes that 85 percent of all respondents have at least one significant health challenge. Substance use issues topped the list, with 61 percent citing this as a major challenge, followed closely by mental health issues (60 percent). Struggles with addiction to crack cocaine and fentanyl further complicate the picture, frequently leading to overdoses.
Access to adequate sanitation also poses a problem, as the encampments lack the amenities that housed people would enjoy, such as potable water. Unsanitary living conditions can attract rodents. Rats, for instance, were a problem at a homeless encampment in Kitchener, Ontario, posing a significant threat to the health of the residents. The authorities invariably respond to these and other problems at the encampments not by offering homeless people much-needed help, but by deploying the police to violently disperse the camps and criminalize inhabitants.
The main contributing factor to homelessness and the rapid growth of homeless encampments is the stratospheric increase in rent across the country. The median rent in Toronto was $2,600 in July, well beyond the grasp of an individual working full time on minimum wage, which currently stands at a derisory $16.55 per hour. Simply being able to cover the cost of rent is extremely difficult for many who are on a fixed income such as a pension or disability payments, as many homeless people are.
As noted above, affordability is cited as the main reason by many respondents to the 2022 PiT survey in all but the youngest cohort. Roughly one-third of all respondents in the cohorts aged 25 to senior cited insufficient income as an impediment to procuring housing.
The increase in rents is driven by capital seeking ever greater sources of profit from as many “diversified” sources as possible. Renovictions are one form in which this is expressed. The portmanteau refers to the legal process by which a landlord can evict a tenant to “renovate” an apartment (in practice they frequently change virtually nothing) and relist it for a much higher price.
According to a report in Macleans, Hamilton saw a 983 percent increase in renoviction notices between 2017 to 2022. The tenants who were evicted included everyone from single mothers, to families, to seniors. Similar stories play out in Toronto, where homeless shelters have noticed a 30 percent increase in people entering shelters for the first time due to renovictions.
Speculation in residential properties in the form of investment vehicles such as Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) are another glaring example of the profit motive at work in housing. Halifax is a case in point, where two REITs, Killam Apartment REIT and CAPREIT dominate the rental market.
Killam Apartment REIT reported a net operating income of $15.24 million at the end of the last quarter, an increase of 12 percent year over year, while CAPREIT reported $9.24 million, up almost 14 percent from the previous year. The REITs increased rents 19.6 percent and 23 percent respectively, for new tenants.
Officials of beleaguered Paramount Global announced Thursday plans to cut 15 percent of the company’s US workforce, or some 2,000 jobs. The layoffs are part of a company plan to lower costs by approximately $500 million. The news of the job destruction, harming the lives of tens of thousands of people, caused the firm’s stock price to “surge” on Friday.
Striking writers picket in front of Paramount Pictures, Los Angeles, California, May, 3, 2023.
Paramount, which eliminated 800 positions in February, is a US-based multinational entertainment conglomerate owned by National Amusements, the billionaire Redstone family business, which was recently sold to Skydance Media, a deal scheduled to be realized in 2025. Skydance was founded by David Ellison, son of another billionaire, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, the ninth-richest person in the world.
Paramount’s assets in the US include Paramount Pictures, the CBS Entertainment Group, BET Media Group, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, CMT, Showtime and Paramount+.
The job cuts at Paramount were long expected. The workers are being made to pay for the ongoing sharp crisis in Hollywood and the profit drive of Wall Street and other financial sharks.
Also on Thursday, Paramount wrote down the value of its cable networks by nearly $6 billion. MSN noted that Paramount “reported an 11% year-over-year decline in second-quarter sales to $6.81 billion.”
According to the Hollywood Reporter, in the wake of the Skydance purchase-merger, the areas at Paramount “hit will be redundant functions within marketing and communications and in finance, legal, technology and other support functions. These actions will take place in the coming weeks and will largely be completed by the end of the year, according to management.”
Deadline writes that Paramount+, the company’s streaming service, “is likely to take some of the brunt of the latest staff reductions as media companies, including Paramount, are trying to cut streaming losses by reducing spending and original output in the push to make their platforms profitable.”
On Disney’s quarterly earnings call Wednesday, Deadline observed, “CFO Hugh Johnston hinted that new cost cuts may be in the offing, assuring Wall Street analysts that there would be more ways to do ‘more with less’ in the near future.”
The same day, Warner Bros. Discovery, which has also laid off workers this year, reported it was taking a write-down of $9.1 billion at its networks division “to align the book value of its linear television business with the reality of uncertain advertising and sports rights renewals. … The value of the linear assets when Discovery and Warner Media merged two and half year ago (sic) was significantly higher than it is now as consumers migrated and advertising dipped. That’s across the industry.” (Deadline) Since the merger of Warner Media and Discovery became final in April 2022, “shares have fallen about 70%,” comments CNBC.
Variety points out that the
cost-cutting targets of the Skydance team have been even more aggressive. Jeff Shell, set to become president of the combined company, has said Skydance, working with consulting firm Bain & Co., is aiming to achieve at least $2 billion in annualized cost synergies at Paramount.
A jobs and career bloodbath is currently going on in the entertainment industry.
California’s Employment Development Department reported more than 12,000 job losses from May 2023 to May 2024, with more anticipated at Warner Bros. and Disney, in addition now to the Paramount cuts.
But that doesn’t begin to tell the whole story, in an industry where most workers are unemployed, “between jobs,” at any given moment.
Tens of thousands have not been able to find new jobs this year in acting, writing, technical and other fields.
As a result, many in the industry are simply leaving the Los Angeles area, according to the L.A. Times. In “Hollywood’s exodus: Why film and TV workers are leaving Los Angeles,” the newspaper reported recently that as
the streaming boom has faded, entertainment companies have hemorrhaged jobs, and networks, studios and streamers have pared back their programming slates. … Some have left for work in places like Atlanta and New Mexico … Others have given up on the entertainment business altogether and are trying to forge new careers.
Driven as well by the introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI), entire crafts and professions are on the chopping block. The goal of the conglomerates is to decrease the number of productions sharply, while reducing wide layers of cast and crew to casual workers, low-paid, almost instantly replaceable, at the slavish beck and call of the companies.
One recent report (from ProdPro) notes that over
the past 6 months, the total number of productions filming globally in 2024 is still 16% lower than in 2022, and 37% lower in the US. … The lower volumes are here to stay. Comparing the number of productions that started principal photography in Q2 2024 to those in 2022, the US saw a decrease of approximately 40%, while globally there was a ~20% decrease.
Los Angeles on-location filming declined 12.4 percent year-over-year from April through June. Feature film production, FilmLA reports, fell 3.3 percent and commercial production 5.1 percent, but both figures seem “minor when compared to a steep plunge in unscripted television production. Filming of Reality TV fell -56.9 percent.”
Deadline has been running a series of articles on “Hollywood’s Mental Health Crisis.” It reports that it “has gathered a list of mental health resources for Hollywood union members who may need support during this time.”
These recent headlines provide something of a picture: “Hollywood Contraction Hits Entertainment Executive Jobs: ‘This Is A Full-Scale Depression,’” “This time last year, Hollywood writers were on strike. Now, many can’t find work,” “Why Hollywood jobs haven’t come back, in three charts,” “Hollywood execs call industry job cuts ‘full-scale depression’” and “Behind the stunning job losses in Hollywood: ‘The audience has moved on.’”
The Wrap recently described
a growing pool of Hollywood workers—both above and below the line—[who] are fighting to stay in the industry to which they dedicated their careers. With jobs drying up and the uncertainties around artificial intelligence, the competition for gigs has become fierce, with hundreds of people applying for the same positions.
It depicted what it termed an “entertainment industry apocalypse.”
Entertainment and media companies, aside from Paramount, Warner Bros. and Disney, that have carried out job cuts so far this year include Fox Entertainment, CNN, Pixar, Take-Two, Marvel, Participant, Electronic Arts, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Entertainment Tonight, Bungie (Sony-owned game developer), Rooster Teeth, Buzzfeed, PlayStation and Vice Media Group.
With the ratification of the Basic Crafts agreement, between the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) and Teamsters Local 399, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 40 (IBEW), Laborers International Union of North America Local 724 and two smaller craft unions, Hollywood has attained “labor peace” for the moment.
The Writers and Directors Guild, SAG-AFTRA, IATSE and now the Teamsters and company have helped the companies prepare for their new assault on workers’ jobs and conditions. Aside from relatively meager wage increases, which will be quickly swallowed up by rising housing, food and transportation costs, the unions obtained nothing in the negotiations. Their vaunted “protections” against AI are not worth the paper they are written on. The companies, under Wall Street’s whip, are on the warpath. They will wring “consent” from actors and others for the use of their replicas, or simply find means of going around that requirement, in the time-honored criminal manner of the studios.
Organizations that accept the present economic and cultural status quo, in which the vast film, television and media resources are the mere private playthings of pirate-parasites like Iger, Ellison, Redstone, Bezos, Zaslav, Sarandos and the others, will acquiesce in the end to every action the conglomerates take, even if it means the destruction of wide swaths of the industry.
On Monday, August 5, former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina boarded a Bangladesh Air Force C-130J military transport in a hurry and fled to Hindon Air Force base, outside Delhi. Her plane was refueled and reports said that she intended to fly on either to the United Kingdom (her niece, Tulip Siddiq is a minister in the new Labor government), Finland (her nephew Radwan Mujib Siddiq is married to a Finnish national), or the United States (her son Sajeeb Wajed Joy is a dual Bangladesh-US national). Army Chief Waker uz-Zaman, who only became Army Chief six weeks ago and was her relative by marriage, informed her earlier in the day that he was taking charge of the situation and would create an interim government to hold future elections.
Sheikh Hasina was the longest-serving prime minister in Bangladesh’s history. She was the prime minister from 1996 to 2001, and then from 2009 to 2024—a total of 20 years. This was a sharp contrast to her father Sheikh Mujib, who was assassinated in 1975 after four years in power, or General Ziaur Rahman who was assassinated in 1981 after six years in power. In a scene reminiscent of the end of Mahinda Rajapaksa’s rule in Sri Lanka, jubilant crowds of thousands crashed the gates of Ganabhaban, the official residence of the prime minister, and jubilantly made off with everything they could find.
Tanzim Wahab, photographer and chief curator of the Bengal Foundation, told me, “When [the masses] storm into the palace and make off with pet swans, elliptical machines, and palatial red sofas, you can feel the level of subaltern class fury that built up against a rapacious regime.” There was widespread celebration across Bangladesh, along with bursts of attacks against buildings identified with the government—private TV channels, and palatial homes of government ministers were a favored target for arson. Several local-level leaders in Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League have already been killed (Mohsin Reza, a local president of the party, was beaten to death in Khulna).
However, the army read the atmosphere. It was time for her to leave.
A contest has already begun over who will benefit from the removal of Sheikh Hasina. On the one side are the students, led by the Bangladesh Student Uprising Central Committee of about 158 people and six spokespersons. Lead spokesperson Nahid Islam made the students’ views clear: “Any government other than the one we recommended would not be accepted. We won’t betray the bloodshed by the martyrs for our cause. We will create a new democratic Bangladesh through our promise of security of life, social justice, and a new political landscape.” At the other end are the military and the opposition political forces (including the primary opposition party Bangladesh National Party, the Islamist party Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, and the small left party Ganosamhati Andolan). While the Army’s first meetings were with these opposition parties, a public outcry over the erasure of the student movement forced the Army to meet with the Student Central Committee and listen to their primary demands.
There is a habit called polti khawa or “changing the team jersey midway through a football match” that prevails in Bangladesh, with the military being the referee in charge at all times. This slogan is being used in public discourse now to draw attention to any attempt by the military to impose a mere change of jersey when the students are demanding a wholesale change of the rules of the game. Aware of this, the military has accepted the student demand that the new government be led by economist Muhammad Yunus, Bangladesh’s only Nobel Prize winner. Yunus, as the founder of the microcredit movement and promoter of “social business,” used to be seen as primarily a phenomenon in the neoliberal NGO world. However, the Hasina government’s relentless political vendetta against him over the last decade, and his decision to speak up for the student movement, have transformed him into an unlikely “guardian” figure for the protesters. The students see him as a figurehead although his neoliberal politics of austerity might be at odds with their key demand, which is for employment.
Students
Even prior to independence and despite the rural character of the region, the epicenter of Bangladeshi politics has been in urban areas, with a focus on Dhaka. Even as other forces entered the political arena, students remain key political actors in Bangladesh. One of the earliest protests in post-colonial Pakistan was the language movement (bhasha andolan) that emerged out of Dhaka University, where student leaders were killed during an agitation in 1952 (they are memorialized in the Shaheed Minar, or Martyrs’ Pillar, in Dhaka). Students became a key part of the freedom struggle for liberation from Pakistan in 1971, which is why the Pakistani army targeted the universities in Operation Searchlight which led to massacres of student activists. The political parties that emerged in Bangladesh after 1971 grew largely through their student wings—the Awami League’s Bangladesh Chhatra League, the Bangladesh National Party’s Bangladesh Jatiotabadi Chatradal, and the Jamaat-e-Islami’s Bangladesh Islami Chhatra Shibir.
Over the past decade, students in Bangladesh have been infuriated by the growing lack of employment despite the bustling economy, and by what they perceived as a lack of care from the government. The latter was demonstrated to them by the callous comments made by Shajahan Khan, a minister in Sheikh Hasina’s government, who smirked as he dismissed news that a bus had killed two college students on Airport Road, Dhaka, in July 2019. That event led to a massive protest movement by students of all ages for road safety, to which the government responded with arrests (including incarceration for 107 days of the photojournalist Shahidul Alam).
Behind the road safety protests, which earned greater visibility for the issue, was another key theme. Five years previously, in 2013, students who were denied access to the Bangladesh Civil Service began a protest over restrictive quotas for government jobs. In February 2018, this issue returned through the work of students in the Bangladesh Sadharon Chhatra Odhikar Songrokkhon Parishad (Bangladesh General Students’ Rights Protection Forum). When the road safety protests occurred, the students raised the quota issue (as well as the issue of inflation). By law, the government reserved seats in its employment for people in underdeveloped districts (10 percent), women (10 percent), minorities (5 percent), and the disabled (1 percent) as well as for descendants of freedom fighters (30 percent).
It is the latter quota that has been contested since 2013 and which returned as an emotive issue this year for the student protesters—especially after the prime minister’s incendiary comment at a press conference that those protesting the freedom fighter quotas were “rajakarer natni” (grandchildren of war traitors). British journalist David Bergman, who is married to prominent Bangladeshi activist lawyer Sara Hossain and was hounded into exile by the Hasina government, called this comment the “terrible error” that ended the government.
Military Islam
In February 2013, Abdul Quader Mollah of the Jamaat-e-Islami was sentenced to life in prison for crimes against humanity during Bangladesh’s liberation war (he was known to have killed at least 344 civilians). When he left the court, he made a V sign, whose arrogance inflamed large sections of Bangladesh’s society. Many in Dhaka gathered at Shahbag, where they formed a Gonojagoron Moncho (Mass Awakening Platform). This protest movement pushed the Supreme Court to reassess the verdict, and Mollah was hanged on December 12. The Shahbag movement brought to the surface a long-term tension in Bangladesh regarding the role of religion in politics.
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman initially claimed that Bangladesh would be a socialist and secular country. After his assassination by the military, general Ziaur Rahman took over the country and governed it from 1975 to 1981. During this time, Zia brought religion back into public life, welcomed the Jamaat-e-Islami from banishment (which had been due to its participation in the genocide of 1971), and—in 1978—formed the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) on nationalist lines with a strong critical stance toward India. General Hussain Muhammad Ershad, who took control after his own coup in 1982 and ruled until 1990, went further, declaring that Islam was the state’s religion. This provided a political contrast with the views of Mujib, and of his daughter Sheikh Hasina who took the reins of her father’s party, the Awami League, in 1981.
The stage was set for a long-term contest between Sheikh Hasina’s centrist-secular Awami League and the BNP, which was taken over by Zia’s wife Khaleda Zia after the General was assassinated in 1981. Gradually, the military—which had a secular orientation in its early days—began to witness a growing Islamist mood. Political Islam has grown in Bangladesh with the rise of piety in the general population, some of it driven by the Islamization of migrant labor to the Gulf states and to Southeast Asia. The latter has steadily reflected growth in observance of the Islamic faith in the aftermath of the war on terror’s many consequences. One should neither exaggerate this threat nor minimize it.
The relationship of the political Islamists, whose popular influence has grown since 2013, with the military is another factor that requires much more clarity. Given the dent in the fortunes of the Jamaat-e-Islami since the War Crimes Tribunal documented how the group was involved on the side of Pakistan during the liberation struggle, it is likely that this formation of political Islam has a threshold in terms of its legitimacy. However, one complicating factor is that the Hasina government relentlessly used the fear of “political Islam” as a bogeyman to obtain U.S. and Indian silent consent to the two elections in 2018 and 2024. If the interim government holds a fair election on schedule, this will allow Bangladeshi people to find out if political Islam is a dispensation they wish to vote for.
New Cold War
Far away from the captivating issues put forward by the students which led to the ouster of Sheikh Hasina are dangerous currents that are often not discussed during these exciting times. Bangladesh is the eighth-largest country in the world by population, and it has the second highest Gross Domestic Product in South Asia. The role it plays in the region and in the world is not to be discounted.
Over the course of the past decade, South Asia has faced significant challenges as the United States imposed a new cold war against China. Initially, India participated with the United States in the formations around the U.S. Indo-Pacific Strategy. But, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, India has begun to distance itself from this U.S. initiative and tried to put its own national agenda at the forefront. This meant that India did not condemn Russia but continued to buy Russian oil. At the same time, China had—through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—built infrastructure in Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, India’s neighbors.
It is perhaps not a coincidence that four governments in the region that had begun to collaborate with the BRI have fallen, and that their replacements in three of them are eager for better ties with the United States. This includes Shehbaz Sharif, who came to power in Pakistan in April 2022 with the ouster of Imran Khan (now in prison), Ranil Wickremesinghe, who briefly came to power in Sri Lanka in July 2022 after setting aside a mass uprising that had other ideas than the installation of a party with only one member in parliament (Wickremesinghe himself), and KP Sharma Oli, who came to power in July 2024 in Nepal after a parliamentary shuffle that removed the Maoists from power.
What role the removal of Sheikh Hasina will play in the calculations in the region can only be gauged after elections are held under the interim government. But there is little doubt that these decisions in Dhaka are not without their regional and global implications.
The students rely upon the power of the mass demonstrations for their legitimacy. What they do not have is an agenda for Bangladesh, which is why the old neoliberal technocrats are already swimming like sharks around the interim government. In their ranks are those who favor the BNP and the Islamists. What role they will play is yet to be seen.
If the student committee now formed a bloc with the trade unions, particularly the garment worker unions, there is the possibility that they might indeed form the opening for building a new democratic and people-centered Bangladesh. If they are unable to build this historical bloc, they may be pushed to the side, just like the students and workers in Egypt, and they might have to surrender their efforts to the military and an elite that has merely changed its jersey.
