German defence minister supports combat operations in Africa

Gregor Link & Peter Schwarz

Over the holidays, federal Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) reiterated her call for a massive expansion of the Franco-German campaign in the Sahel region. In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, she said the German military must “not duck away” in this region.

German soldier in Afghanistan, August 2011 (Credit US Navy, Flickr)

While the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) has so far mainly taken on logistical tasks and trained the troops of the Malian regime, the French military, she said, was engaged in “a much more robust mission.”

However, it was increasingly questionable, Kramp-Karrenbauer said, “whether this division of labour can be maintained.” Germany, according to the minister, must in future “ensure stability” in the region in its “own interest” and to do so, “needs a more robust training mandate.”

Hans-Peter Bartels (Social Democratic Party, SPD), parliamentary Commissioner for the Armed Forces, sang from the same hymn sheet, calling for “uniform coordination and leadership” of all “civil and military aid to the precarious Sahel states.” Europe must not “powerlessly watch the failure of the pro-Western governments.” Closer cooperation with the French troops was “certainly the right approach,” Bartels said.

The Bundeswehr has been stationed in Mali since 2013. Up to 1,100 German soldiers have taken on logistical tasks within the framework of the Minusma UN mission and support of Operation Serval (since 2014, Barkhane) of the French army, which defends the unpopular regime in Bamako with 3,500 soldiers against oppositional militias. A further 156 Bundeswehr soldiers are training Malian soldiers as part of the EU mission EUTM.

In neighbouring Niger, which has been armed to the teeth by Germany in particular, the Bundeswehr maintains a military base that acts as a “hub” for all German military operations in the Sahel region. Elite soldiers of the Navy’s Special Forces (KSM) have been engaged in combat operations in the country for months without a mandate and at the same time, training special units of the Nigerian military.

Minusma, with 116 UN soldiers killed between 2013 and 2017, is the most loss-prone UN mission since the Korean War.

The French military is undertaking offensive operations against the militias, triggering growing resistance. Two weeks ago, it officially deployed an armed drone for the first time, killing seven rebels in the Mopti region. A further 33 were “put out of action,” as President Macron declared during a visit to the Ivory Coast. Thirteen French soldiers were killed in November when the two helicopters they were riding in crashed in northern Mali.

The main reason for the intensification of the war in Mali and the Sahel is growing conflict between the major powers over control of resources in the region, including gold and uranium. France, the former colonial power, and other European imperialist powers are seeking to defend their interests against their international rivals. The Sahel is a focal point of growing rivalries between Europe, the US, China, Russia and even India, all of which are trying to gain a foothold in Africa.

In addition, France and Germany are trying to prevent refugees from Africa from continuing their journey towards the Mediterranean and Europe by sealing off the borders and setting up concentration camps. The United Nations estimates that a quarter of a million refugees are currently trapped in Mali and its neighbouring countries alone. The result of this neo-colonial campaign is untold suffering and thousands of deaths.

The Bundeswehr's combat mission in Mali, which Kramp-Karrenbauer and the grand coalition of the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats are planning to launch, aims to intensify the brutal war against Islamist rebels, the local population and African refugees and to press the interests of German imperialism in Africa.

As recently as November, the German government held an Africa conference in Berlin, which was attended by heads of state and government from twelve African countries. The conference’s main purpose was to pave the way for German companies to gain a foothold in Africa.

“Whoever wants to do business cannot get past Africa,” the German media commented at the time. And, “It is in our own best interests if Germany, if Europe as a whole, turns much more strongly to Africa and becomes involved there. Politically and economically.”

To achieve these goals, the grand coalition is prepared to kill civilians and sacrifice the lives of soldiers.

When asked by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, “Will our death toll be higher if we take on more responsibility,” Kramp-Karrenbauer answered affirmatively: “Every mission is dangerous. The security situation in Mali had deteriorated massively. This confronts all of us in Europe with the question of how to deal with this region in our own interest.”

“In the Sahel region,” Kramp-Karrenbauer noted, “a major hub for terrorism, organized crime, migration and human trafficking is currently emerging. We will have to consider and decide whether we want to ensure stability on the ground in our own interest and whether the Bundeswehr does not need a more robust training mandate here alongside our allies.”

Mali and the Sahel zone are only one of the regions of the world in which the Bundeswehr is to be increasingly deployed. In an “order of the day at the turn of the year” the defence minister said she was preparing “our soldiers” for a massive escalation of international operations.

“Responsible security and defence policy” meant “strengthening our partnerships and alliances,” “sharing the burden” and “deploying the full spectrum of our capabilities,” she wrote. It is “good news that the defence budget will increase for the sixth consecutive year. We have more than 45 billion euros at our disposal for 2020. That is a good 1.8 billion euros more than in 2019 for a Bundeswehr ready for action. The other milestones are clear: 1.5 percent of GDP in 2024, 2.0 percent of GDP by 2031 at the latest.”

“This is the basis for a modern and powerful force,” she concluded.

Kramp-Karrenbauer's course is supported and defended by all parties in the Bundestag.

The new SPD leader, Saskia Esken, called Kramp-Karrenbauer’s Mali initiative “unthought-out” and demanded that she develop her foreign policy proposals “together with Foreign Minister Heiko Maas (SPD) in responsible cooperation within the coalition.”

But the Social Democratic foreign minister is one of the main advocates of increased German military operations. When the Bundestag passed the new military budget, he had boasted of Germany's engagement in Syria, Libya, Ukraine and Afghanistan: “Anyone who talks about Germany's responsibility in the world must realise that in all these crises we are currently dealing with, Germany has now mostly taken the leading role in conflict resolution.

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), the Greens and the Left Party also support increased Bundeswehr deployments when it comes to representing German great power interests.

Despite the unanimity among the parties in the Bundestag, there is strong opposition from the population, the majority of whom reject such missions. In order to combat and suppress this resistance, Kramp-Karrenbauer promised in her “order of the day” to further strengthen the presence of the Bundeswehr in German society, among other things through public swearing-in ceremonies in front of the Reichstag building and in many other places.

The murder of Qassem Soleimani and assassination as state policy

Bill Van Auken

With its drone missile assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani and seven others at Baghdad’s international airport in the early morning hours of Friday, the Trump administration has carried out a criminal act of state terrorism that has stunned the world.

Washington’s cold-blooded murder of a general in the Iranian army and a man widely described as the second most powerful figure in Tehran is unquestionably both a war crime and a direct act of war against Iran.

President Donald Trump delivers remarks on Iran, at his Mar-a-Lago property, Friday, Jan. 3, 2020, in Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/ Evan Vucci)

It may take some time before Iran responds to the killing. There is no question that Tehran will, in fact, react, especially in the face of public outrage over the murder of a figure who had a mass following.

But Iran will no doubt devote far more consideration to its response than Washington gave to its criminal action. The country’s National Security Council met on Friday, and in all probability Iranian officials will discuss the murder of Soleimani with Moscow, Beijing and, more likely than not, Europe. US officials and the corporate media seem almost to desire immediate retaliation for their own purposes, but the Iranians have many options.

It is a political fact that the killing of Soleimani has effectively initiated a war by the US against Iran, a country four times the size and with more than double the population of Iraq. Such a war would threaten to spread armed conflict across the region and, indeed, the entire world, with incalculable consequences.

This crime, driven by increasing US desperation over its position in the Middle East and the mounting internal crisis within the Trump administration, is staggering in its degree of recklessness and lawlessness. The resort by the United States to such a heinous act testifies to the fact that it has failed to achieve any of the strategic objectives that led to the invasions of Iraq in 1991 and 2003.

The murder of Soleimani is the culmination of a protracted process of the criminalization of American foreign policy. “Targeted killings,” a term introduced into the lexicon of world imperialist politics by Israel, have been employed by US imperialism against alleged terrorists in countries stretching from South Asia to the Middle East and Africa over the course of nearly two decades. It is unprecedented, however, for the president of the United States to order and then publicly claim responsibility for the killing of a senior government official who was legally and openly visiting a third country.

Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s Quds Force, was not an Osama bin Laden or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. On the contrary, he played a pivotal role in defeating the forces of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which those two figures, both assassinated by US special operations death squads, had led.

Hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets of Tehran and cities across Iran on Friday in mourning and protest over the slaying of Soleimani, who was seen as an icon of Iranian nationalism and resistance to US imperialism’s decades-long attacks on the country.

In Iraq, the US drone strike has been roundly condemned as a violation of the country’s sovereignty and international law. Its victims included not only Soleimani, but also Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the second-in-command of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), the 100,000-strong coalition of Shia militias that is considered part of the country’s armed forces.

This response makes a mockery of the ignorant and thuggish statements of Trump and his advisors. The US president, speaking from his vacation resort of Mar-a-Lago in Florida, boasted of having “killed the number one terrorist anywhere in the world.” He went on to claim that “Soleimani was plotting imminent and sinister attacks on American diplomats and military personnel, but we caught him in the act and terminated him.”

Trump charged that the Iranian general “has been perpetrating acts of terror to destabilize the Middle East for the last 20 years.” He declared, “What the United States did yesterday should have been done long ago. A lot of lives would have been saved.”

Who does the US president think he is fooling with his Mafia rhetoric? The last 20 years have seen the Middle East devastated by a series of US imperialist interventions. The illegal 2003 US invasion of Iraq, based on lies about “weapons of mass destruction,” claimed the lives of over a million people, while decimating what had been the among the most advanced societies in the Arab world. Together with Washington’s eighteen-year-long war in Afghanistan and the regime-change wars launched in Libya and Syria, US imperialism has unleashed a regionwide crisis that has killed millions and forced tens of millions to flee their homes.

Soleimani, whom Trump accused of having “made the death of innocent people his sick passion”—an apt self-description—rose to the leadership of the Iranian military during the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq war, which claimed the lives of some one million Iranians.

He became known to the US military, intelligence and diplomatic apparatus in 2001, when Tehran provided intelligence to Washington to assist its invasion of Afghanistan. Over the course of the US war in Iraq, American officials conducted back-channel negotiations with Soleimani even as his Quds Force was providing aid to Shia militias resisting the American occupation. He played a central role in picking the Iraqi Shia politicians who led the regimes installed under the US occupation.

Soleimani went on to play a leading role in organizing the defeat of the Al Qaeda-linked militias that were unleashed against the government of Bashar al-Assad in the CIA-orchestrated war for regime change in Syria, and subsequently in rallying Shia militias to defeat Al Qaeda’s offspring, ISIS, after it had overrun roughly one-third of Iraq, routing US-trained security forces.

To describe such a figure as a “terrorist” only means that any state official or military commander anywhere in the world who cuts across the interests of Washington and US banks and corporations can be labeled as such and targeted for murder. The attack at the Baghdad airport signals that the rules of engagement have changed. All “red lines” have been crossed. In the future, the target could be a general or even president in Russia, China or, indeed, any of the capitals of Washington’s erstwhile allies.

After this publicly celebrated assassination—openly claimed by a US president without even a pretense of deniability—is there any head of state or prominent military figure in the world who can meet with US officials without having in the back of his mind that if things do not go well, he too might be murdered?

The killing of General Soleimani in Baghdad was compared by Die Zeit, one of Germany’s newspapers of record, to the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. As in the prior case, it stated, “the whole world is holding its breath and anxiously waiting for what may come.”

This criminal act carries with it the threat of both world war and dictatorial repression within the borders of the United States. There is no reason to believe that a government that has adopted murder as an instrument of foreign policy will refrain from using the same methods against its domestic enemies.

The assassination of Soleimani is an expression of the extreme crisis and desperation of a capitalist system that threatens to hurl humanity into the abyss.

The answer to this danger lies in the international growth of the class struggle. The beginning of the third decade of the 21st century is witnessing not only the drive to war, but also the upsurge of millions of workers across the Middle East, Europe, the United States, Latin America, Asia and every corner of the globe in struggle against social inequality and the attacks on basic social and democratic rights.

This is the only social force upon which a genuine opposition to the war drive of the capitalist ruling elites can be based. The necessary response to the imperialist war danger is to unify these growing struggles of the working class through the construction of a united, international and socialist antiwar movement.

BHW Group Women in STEM Academic Scholarship for Study in USA 2020

Application Deadline: 15th April 2020
Winner will be announced on May 15th.

Eligible Countries: All

To Be Taken At (Country): USA

Type: Undergraduate, Masters, PhD

Eligibility: Women who are pursuing an undergraduate or master’s degree and are majoring in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics during the 2018 school year.

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award: $3000

How to Apply: Interested candidates can apply on the Program Webpage (link below)

Visit the Program Webpage for Details

Government of Hungary Scholarship Program 2020/2021 for Christian Young People

Application Deadline: 31st January 2020

Offered Annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: The scholarship is announced for the citizens of following countries: Egypt, Lebanese Republic, Republic of Iraq, State of Israel, Palestine, Islamic Republic of Pakistan, Syrian Arab Republic, The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, Republic of Kenya, Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia and Nigeria.

To be taken at (country): Hungary

About the Award: The core mission of the Scholarship Programme for Christian Young People is to provide the possibility of studying in Hungary for young Christian students living in the crisis regions of the world and/or being threatened in their country because of their faith.
After completing their studies, the scholarship holders will return to help their home community with their gained knowledge, and thy will participate in the reconstruction of war-destroyed countries and contribute to improvement of social situation and preservation of culture of Christian communities.

Type: Bachelor, Masters

Eligibility: The Scholarship Programme is based on the cooperation between the Ministry of Human Capacities of Hungary and churches, pursuing humanitarian activities in crisis regions.

• The applicants may not have Hungarian citizenship.
• Local Churches are to verify and prove that the applicant belongs to their religious community. Only those applications can be awarded with scholarship, which also possess the recommendation from the local Church along with the approval of the Deputy State Secretariat for the Aid of Persecuted Christians.
• Scholarship holders must possess the relevant language and education certificates, degrees requested by the host university of the selected degree programme.
• The scholarship holders commit themselves in the scholarship agreement that after the scholarship agreement ends they return to their home countries, if the local security and political conditions allow it so.
• Scholarships are for young applicants who are older than 18 years of age by the time their education starts
• An individual may win the scholarship only one time at a study level.

Selection Criteria: Applications are considered formally eligible if all criteria are met:

• the applicant is eligible for participation in the Scholarship Programme;
• the applicant has applied for a scholarship type and study programme available within the framework of the Scholarship Programme;
• the applicant has submitted the application and all documents as required no later than the application deadline (except for cases listed in section 3.3.);
• the applicant has proved his/her language proficiency and the language skills meet the requirements of the Host Institution.

Applicants with an eligible, formally correct application can proceed to the institutional entrance examinations. Each applicant can participate in up to two institutional entrance examinations – based on the submitted application form.

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Programme: 

• Tuition-free education – exemption from the payment of tuition fee
• Monthly stipend – bachelor, master and one-tier master level: monthly amount of HUF 119 000 (cca. EUR 380) contribution to the living expenses in Hungary, for 12 months a year, until the completion of studies
• Accommodation – dormitory place or a contribution of HUF 40 000 to accommodation costs for the whole duration of the scholarship period
• Reimbursement of travel costs – HUF 200 000 /year (cca. EUR 645)
• Medical insurance – health care services according to the relevant Hungarian legislation (Act No. 80 of 1997, national health insurance card) and supplementary medical insurance for up to HUF 65 000 (cca. EUR 205) a year/person

How to Apply: The applicants must fill out and save all requested information on the online application form in English language and also present all relevant documents.

PLEASE APPLY HERE! 


Visit Programme Webpage for Details

Higher Education Scholarships in Taiwan 2020/2021 for Undergraduate, Masters and PhD International Students

Application Deadline: 15th March, 2020

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: The students of eligible countries of the region of Asia Pacific, West Asia, Africa (Burkina Faso, Republic of Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Sao Tome and Principe, South Africa, Swaziland), Caribbean, Central America, South America, Europe can apply for this scholarship.

To be taken at (country): Universities in Taiwan

Accepted Subject Areas: For undergraduate, masters and PhD courses offered at any of the participating University in Taiwan

About Scholarship: International education and training has long been one of the TaiwanICDF’s core operations, among many others. Human resources development programs play a vital role in assisting partner countries achieve sustainable development, and education is a crucial mechanism for training workforces in developing countries.
The TaiwanICDF provides scholarships for higher education and has developed undergraduate, graduate and Ph.D. programs in cooperation with renowned partner universities in Taiwan.
The scholarship recipients gets a full scholarship, including return airfare, housing, tuition and credit fees, insurance, textbook costs and a monthly allowance.

Type: Undergraduate, Masters and PhD Scholarship

Who is eligible to apply? An applicant must:

• -Be a citizen of List of Countries Eligible (including select African countries) for TaiwanICDF Scholarship, and satisfy any specific criteria established by his or her country and/or government of citizenship.
• -Neither be a national of the Republic of China (Taiwan) nor an overseas compatriot student.
• -Satisfy the admission requirements of the partner university to which he or she has applied to study under a TaiwanICDF scholarship.
• -Be able to satisfy all requirements for a Resident Visa (Code: FS) set by the Bureau of Consular Affairs, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and an Alien Resident Certificate (ARC) set by the Ministry of the Interior, of the ROC (Taiwan) government (this means that the TaiwanICDF has the right to revoke a scholarship offered if an applicant cannot satisfy the visa requirements).
• -Upon accepting a TaiwanICDF scholarship, not hold any other ROC(Taiwan) government-sponsored scholarship (such as the Taiwan Scholarship) in the same academic year in which the TaiwanICDF scholarship would be due to commence.
• -Not be applying for a further TaiwanICDF scholarship in unbroken succession — applicants who have already held a TaiwanICDF scholarship must have returned to their home country for more than one year before re-applying (note: to apply for a 2014 scholarship, an applicant must have graduated and returned to his or her home country before July 31, 2013).
• -Have never had any scholarship revoked by any ROC (Taiwan)government agency or related institution, nor been expelled from any Taiwanese university.

Number of Scholarships: Not Specified

Scholarship Benefits and Duration: The TaiwanICDF provides each scholarship recipient with a full scholarship, including return airfare, housing, tuition and credit fees, insurance, textbook costs and a monthly allowance.

• Undergraduate Program (maximum four years): Each student receives NT$12,000 per month (NT$144,000 per year) as an allowance for food and miscellaneous living expenses.
• Master’s Program (maximum two years): Each student receives NT$15,000 per month (NT$180,000 per year) as an allowance for food and miscellaneous living expenses.
• PhD Program (maximum four years; four-year PhD programs start from 2012): Each students receives NT$17,000 per month (NT$204,000 per year) as an allowance for food and miscellaneous living expenses.

How to Apply: 

• Applicants must complete an online application (found in Program Webpage link below). Then submit a signed, printed copy along with all other application documents to the ROC (Taiwan) Embassy/ Consulate (General)/ Representative Office/ Taiwan Technical Mission or project representative in their country.
• Please note that each applicant can only apply for one program at a time. The applicant also needs to submit a separate program application to his/her chosen universities.

Visit Program Webpage for the Online Application System and more details about this scholarship.

US Government Fulbright Teaching Excellence and Achievement (TEA) Program 2020/2021 for International Teachers

Application Deadline: Each country sets its own application deadlines. Please inquire from the US Embassy or Fulbright commission in your country or territory for deadline information.

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: See list of countries below.

To be taken at (country): USA

About the Award: The Fulbright Teaching Excellence and Achievement Program (Fulbright TEA) brings international teachers to the United States for a six-week program that offers academic seminars for professional development at a host university. Participants observe classrooms and share their expertise with teachers and students at the host university and at local secondary schools.

Type: Short courses/Training

Eligibility: Details for this program may vary by country. In general, applicants must meet the following criteria:

• Current secondary school-level,* full-time teacher in an institution serving primarily a local population;
• A bachelor’s degree or equivalent;
• Five or more years of classroom experience as a teacher of English, English as a foreign language (EFL), mathematics, science, or social studies, including special education teachers in those subject areas;
• Proficient in written and spoken English with a TOEFL score of 450 on the paper-based TOEFL or an equivalent English-language examination;**
• Demonstrated commitment to continue teaching after completion of the program; and
• A complete application.

*Secondary-level teachers include both middle and high school teachers working with students between approximately 12 and 18 years of age. Teachers responsible for teaching additional grade levels must teach middle school or high school students more than 50% of their work time in order to be eligible for the program.
**A limited number of participants with TOEFL scores between 425 and 450, or equivalent, will be accepted for the program in a special cohort that will include additional English-language training as part of the professional development program.

Number of Awardees: Not specified

Value of Scholarship: The Teaching Excellence and Achievement Program is fully funded pending availability of funds.

Duration of Scholarship: 6 weeks

Eligible Countries: Algeria, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Belarus, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Burma, Cambodia, Cameroon, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cote d’Ivoire, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt,  El Salvador, Estonia, Georgia, Ghana, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Iraq, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Malawi, Mali, Moldova, Mongolia, Mozambique, Nepal, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Panama, Peru, Russia, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tajikistan, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uruguay, Venezuela, Vietnam, West Bank/Gaza, Zambia, Zimbabwe. 

How to Apply: APPLY NOW


Visit Scholarship Webpage for details

The Dangers of Privatized Intelligence

Joyce Nelson

In a scathing piece about Russiagate, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern recently recalled a statement made in 1981 by then-CIA Director William Casey during the first meeting of President Ronald Reagan’s Cabinet. Casey told this gathering, “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” 

It’s a shocking statement that might be useful to keep in mind as events further unfold over the next few months. Casey, of course, would have had no way of knowing in 1981 just how far his “disinformation program” would extend.

The Rise of Russiagate

Ray McGovern once again effectively demolishes (as he has several times over the past three years) the flimsy props holding up Russiagate, especially the “Intelligence Community Assessment” (ICA) prepared in January 2017 by “handpicked analysts” from the FBI, CIA and NSA (not 17 intelligence agencies, as first claimed by National Intelligence Director James Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan).

McGovern writes: “As for the ‘Intelligence Community Assessment,’ the banner headline atop The New York Times on Jan. 7, 2017 set the tone for the next couple of years: ‘Putin Led Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Says.’ During my career as a CIA analyst, as deputy national intelligence officer chairing National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs), and working on the Intelligence Production Review Board, I had not seen so shabby a piece of faux analysis as the ICA. The writers themselves seemed to be holding their noses. They saw fit to embed in the ICA itself this derriere-covering note: ‘High confidence in a judgment does not imply that the assessment is a fact or a certainty; such judgments might be wrong’.” 

But that “derriere-covering note” didn’t stop the mainstream media from inflating Russiagate over the next three years into a self-sustaining industry that survived the report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller (which found no Trump-Russia collusion), and will likely survive the recent release of Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowtiz’s report on the FBI 2016 spying.

The Horowitz Report

As Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone puts it (Dec. 10, 2019), the Horowtiz report shows “years of breathless headlines were wrong” about Russiagate, with the report unveiling “a story about bad journalism piled on bad journalism, balanced on a third layer of wrong reporting….Holy God, what a clown show the Trump-Russia investigation was.” 

Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept (December 12. 2019) is even more thorough in his analysis of the IG Report, which shows “the FBI’s gross abuse of its power,” its “serial deceit” by which it “manipulated documents, concealed crucial exonerating evidence, and touted what it knew were unreliable if not outright false claims.” As a result, “years of major claims and narratives from the U.S. media were utter frauds.” 

He also underlines “the highly dangerous trend of news outlets not merely repeating the mistake of the Iraq War by blindly relying on the claims of security state agents but, far worse, now employing them in their newsrooms to shape the news…It’s virtually impossible to turn on MSNBC or CNN without being bombarded with former Generals, CIA operatives, FBI agents and NSA officials who now work for those networks as commentator and, increasingly, as reporters.” 

Greenwald calls the U.S. security state agencies “out-of-control, virtually unlimited police state factions that lie, abuse their spying and law enforcement powers, and subvert democracy and civil and political freedoms as a matter of course.”

But a major factor in this situation is being ignored.

U.S. Intelligence “Outsourcing”

Arguably, what we are witnessing is the result of almost 20 years of privatization of U.S. intelligence agencies, which started in the late 1990s and escalated under U.S. vice-president Dick Cheney, who utilized the 9/11 events to further outsource intelligence to the private sector under the War on Terror.

A 2011 report called “The Future of U.S. Intelligence Outsourcing,” published by the Brown Journal of World Affairs, noted that by 2006 there were some 265,000 U.S. private sector employees engaged in contracted intelligence work, compared to about 100,000 government employees in the intelligence community – outnumbering them by almost 3 to 1 (and that was 13 years ago). 

Even more worrisome, “The main intelligence contractors and suppliers of contract personnel are primarily large companies heavily entrenched in the defense and national security business, such as Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Boeing, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) and Booze Allen Hamilton, among others.” 

The author of this report, Armin Krishnan, further noted (without irony) that privatized intelligence “has a tendency to greatly overestimate threats to national security in order to sustain demand for national security-related products and services…It is completely unrealistic to expect private companies to put the public interest before their private business.” 

These private contractors can literally help to decide who the “enemy” is. The author notes, “Contractors are heavily involved in creating the most authoritative intelligence products, such as the President’s Daily Brief, and thus can influence U.S. foreign policy at the highest level.” 

Obviously, there is a crucial need for updated information, but in the meantime whenever the mainstream media (and even the alternative press) heaps praise on the “career civil servants in the intelligence community,” it’s important to recall that even the CIA has been more than 50 percent privatized, with war-machine titans like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon literally calling the shots.

The Deadly Perils of Religious Nationalism

Saad Hafiz

The deadly nexus of religion and nationalism has left a trail of violence and bloodshed in history. In the 16th and the early 17th centuries, religious nationalism pitted Catholics against Protestants. In recent times it has Jews and Muslims, Sunnis and Shiites, Hindus and Muslims, battling on opposite sides. The conflicts have worsened with struggles for power and claims on natural resources.

One would have expected that the Europeans would learn from the devastation wreaked by the Thirty Years’ War. The War had dreadful costs for central Europe, with around 20% of the German population being killed. Leaders intended the treaty of Westphalia that ended the war to be a comprehensive resolution for religion-inspired conflicts. But the support of German Protestants in the rise of Hitler wrought more devastation on Europe.

Still, Europe has enjoyed relative peace from religious wars since the end of the Second World War. The exception is the savage religious conflict in the former Yugoslavia. There is hope that Europe has put its bloody history of religious conflicts behind it. Arguably, an important reason for the reduction in religious conflicts is the diminishing influence of the Church on the affairs of state and the strengthening of secular democratic institutions.

Faith-based conflicts have largely shifted from Europe to the Middle East and South Asia. These regions can learn from the European experience. We know that religion and politics are a deadly mix and that religious nationalism can complicate matters. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute, the Iran-Iraq war, the conflicts in Iraq and Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran and India and Pakistan are examples. Sometimes, even supposedly good intentions can have negative consequences.

Take, for example, the British government’s Balfour Declaration supporting the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. A reaction to the suffering endured by European Jews during the Holocaust. The Balfour Declaration stated that a Jewish Homeland would not prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. Or, drawing lines on an empty map, leading to the creation of artificial states such as Iraq and Syria with simmering religious and ethnic tensions without getting the consent of the people. Or, dividing India into two sovereign Hindu and Muslim countries to settle the conflict between Hindus and Muslims. We know how badly those arrangements worked out.

Some additional factors have undeniably given impetus to the religious-nationalist forces in the region. One, secular nationalism espoused by early leaders in Israel, India, and Pakistan has given way to religious-nationalist policies. Second, religious nationalists have won over territorial nationalism propagated by past regimes in Iraq and Syria. Third, a clerical Shiite dictatorship replaced the despotic government of the Shah of Iran.

We know that faith-based conflicts, once started, are very difficult to stop because of the strong feelings they awaken. Today’s opportunistic leaders cynically use the slogan of God and the country. It is a divisive tool to stay in power. Religious nationalist groups globally share a common attribute. They actively encourage discrimination against religious minorities, even if it leads to chaos and disorder. Even when appealing to a sense of national community, they have the opposite effect of dividing societies.

But the current struggle against religious nationalism in India offers a forward. India’s secular nationalism, eclipsed by Hindu majoritarian nationalism, is fighting back. Indians across class, ethnic, gender, caste, and religious lines have taken to the streets in a struggle against imposing a Hindu nation. The land of Gandhi and Nehru may yet uphold its democratic, secular principles under grave threat from regressive forces.

Regrettably, it is too late for Muslim majority countries like Pakistan, who have long succumbed to the evils of religious nationalism. The dire warnings on the outcome of India abandoning its minorities, coming from Pakistan’s leaders and commentators, seem insincere and twisted. Pakistan’s poor record in the treatment of its minorities or those accused under its unjust blasphemy laws hardly qualifies it to offer advice or criticism.

Ultimately, common sense has to prevail even if genuine tolerance may prove elusive for centuries. Against all the odds, sometimes half-measures are better than none. The way forward is a global secular community with religion removed from politics. The state can serve as a neutral guardian of religious and human rights. Muslim societies, in particular, should accept the principles of separation of church and state, democracy, human rights, religious pluralism, and civil society. A tall order, but the alternative is to live with the perils of religious nationalism.

“Robodebt” regime continues to inflict suffering on Australian welfare recipients

Mike Head

After being harassed, traumatised and financially punished for more than three years, about three quarters of a million people will have to wait until 2020 to be told if they are entitled to refunds because they were unlawfully accused of welfare overpayments by the federal government’s computerised “robodebt” regime.

This is despite the Liberal-National Coalition government conceding in the Federal Court on November 27 that the entire system violated the law. With the government’s consent, the court ruled that debt orders were “not validly made,” that punitive penalty charges were unlawful, and income tax garnishee notices were not “lawfully issued.”

After receiving automated letters declaring that they owed the government massive debts, welfare recipients were subjected to harassment by profit-driven debt collectors or the tax office, which garnished their tax returns. The government threatened to jail people unless they paid the demanded amounts or produced documents to disprove any alleged over-payments.

At a Senate committee hearing last month, Department of Human Services officials refused to provide any estimate of the unlawfully-charged debts. Hundreds of millions of dollars may have been extracted from some of the most impoverished and vulnerable members of society.

The officials confirmed that no extra staff had been hired to review the many thousands of cases. This makes lengthy delays inevitable, given that the department, like other government departments, is chronically understaffed. The government has cut an estimated 14,000 jobs throughout the federal public service since 2013 and maintained a staffing freeze.

To add to the suffering, Government Services Minister Stuart Robert told parliament that “data matching” would continue, even though the government was forced to pause the use of the “robodebt” system for new alleged debts. The government is also still enforcing existing robodebts through debt collectors and garnishee orders.

The “robodebt” program (officially described as a compliance intervention system) was established in 2016 to automate the enforcement of so-called welfare fraud. Robodebt computers compared an individual’s welfare payments with their averaged historical income, according to tax returns.

If the welfare recipient had allegedly earned money above a certain threshold, the system automatically issued a debt notice. The onus was then placed on welfare recipients, with limited financial resources and often lacking documented records, to prove that they had been wrongly levied debts, going back as far as seven years.

The cruelty was magnified by the fact that it became extremely difficult to contact Centrelink, the government welfare office, to challenge the debt letters. More than 55 million phone calls to Centrelink were met with a busy signal during the 2015–16 financial year.

From the outset, the system sent out notices when no debt actually existed, causing widespread distress and outrage. An estimated 734,000 recipients of unemployment, disability or parenting payments received robodebt notices. Around 20 percent of debts issued were eventually waived or reduced, but many more people were forced to pay money they did not owe.

The callous treatment of welfare recipients was deliberate and calculated. As late as November 14, Government Services Minister Robert continued to defend the robodebt system. “Using averaging as the basis to say to a citizen, ‘There may be a debt, can you please engage with us?’ is entirely appropriate,” he declared in an address to the National Press Club.

The Labor Party’s welfare spokesman, former party leader Bill Shorten, tried to exploit the Federal Court ruling. He said hundreds of thousands of people “went through stress, trauma, administrative headache” and “if you believe some grieving families, it’s been the cause of suicide.”

But it was the last Labor government that imposed the “data-matching” and “averaging” debt collection system in 2011. Shorten, who was then assistant treasurer, declared at the time that it would see “more people being referred to the tax garnishee process, retrieving more outstanding debt.” The only difference was that a Centrelink staff member checked the debt letters before they were dispatched.

This regime, enforced by successive Labor and Coalition governments, has taken an untold human toll. Some of the poorest layers of the working class have been stigmatised as fraudsters and penalised to the tune of thousands of dollars each.

For example, in the Federal Court case, the government had added a 10 percent penalty to the debt of $2,900 that it claimed was owed by Deanna Amato, a 33-year-old local government worker, for Austudy student allowances she received while studying a diploma in 2012. The judge ruled there was no reliable evidence for that claim.

In the lead-up to her case, Amato told the media: “It felt like guilty until proven innocent.” She and her fellow robodebt victims were “people who don’t have enough money to live on, who are trying to live with self-respect and work or study… I can only imagine if you’re struggling with other things in your life, how hard it would be to deal with this and to find the evidence to support your claims.”

Via the robodebt system, an estimated $660 million was taken from people who depended on pitiful welfare payments—such as $40 a day for jobless workers—that have been kept deliberately below the poverty line. Altogether, the government’s “income compliance” measures seized $3.36 billion in alleged debts in 2018-19.

Meanwhile, the banks and finance houses that have defrauded customers of millions of dollars, via scams such as fees-for-no service, compromised financial advice and predatory mortgage defaults, have escaped with token penalties compared to their profits.

“Income compliance” programs are part of a wider drive to gut welfare spending to meet the demands of the corporate elite for lower company and income taxes, and force jobless workers into low-paid employment. Welfare recipients are also being threatened with compulsory drug-testing, as well as expanded roll-outs of “cashless welfare cards,” which restrict nearly all their spending to authorised essentials.

The dismantling of welfare entitlements is well underway. Over the past two decades, Coalition and Labor governments alike have driven thousands of people off benefits or denied them eligibility in the first place. The number of people aged 18–64 receiving income support fell from 2.6 million in 1999 to 2.3 million in 2018. From 22 percent of people aged 18–64 receiving income support in 1999, the proportion had dropped to 15 percent by 2018.

This has been achieved primarily through punitive “work tests” for unemployment benefits, harsher rules for disability pensions, and higher means tests and eligibility requirements for various entitlements, including aged pensions. In 2012, the Gillard Labor government played a key part in this process by cutting thousands of single parents off benefits.

The war on welfare is intensifying under conditions in which the ongoing destruction of full-time jobs in manufacturing, mining, retail, public services and other basic industries has created mass unemployment and under-employment in many working-class and regional areas, especially for young people.

New study shows link between auto plant closures and opioid deaths in working class America

Jessica Goldstein

A scientific study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) online this week found a direct link between auto assembly plant closures and the growing opioid epidemic in the United States.

The authors, led by Atheendar S. Venkataramani of the University of Pennsylvania, established a staggering 85 percent increase in opioid deaths above expected levels within five years in counties which experienced a plant closure.

The study represents an important contribution to an understanding of the relationship between the economic devastation of former industrial centers and the explosive growth of “deaths of despair” among the American working class, including alcohol- and drug-related deaths and suicides.

Demolition in rural Indiana

For years, health outcomes for American workers have been steadily eroding. Life expectancy in the US, the wealthiest nation in the world, has fallen for three years in a row, due primarily to the dramatic increase in deaths of working-age Americans aged 25–64 years, mainly from drug overdoses, alcohol abuse, suicide and organ system diseases.

The fall in life expectancy is by design: the ruling class is deliberately attempting to cut workers’ lives short in order to cut labor costs so that more money can be funneled into the stock markets, the banks and the military budget. Moreover, pharmaceutical companies flooded working class communities devastated by the loss of manufacturing jobs with opioids from 2006–2012 under the Bush and Obama administrations, according to the Washington Post.

However, according to the researchers, previous studies which sought to establish a link between social conditions and opioid use had produced mixed results because they used more general indices such as unemployment rates. “This lack of consensus may reflect the fact that standard economic measures do not adequately capture the fundamental and sustained decline in economic opportunity or the adverse socioeconomic and cultural climate that follows” plant closures, the authors write.

The researchers decided to focus on auto assembly plants because such closures “are often unexpected (to workers), discrete, and both culturally and economically significant events.” Moreover, the authors argue, “automotive plant closures have long been viewed as exemplars of the broader, gradual decline in US manufacturing that has occurred during the last [two] decades.” In other words, the dramatic decline in the social conditions of autoworkers is only the most striking aspect of the decline among the American working class as a whole.

The study examined public health records from 1999–2016 and used death certificate data to calculate the number of opioid deaths by county in the US. The researchers focused on the largest commuting areas with auto plants in operation during that time period, then compiled a database of all auto plants in the US and indicated the date of closure, if they closed.

The study sample focused only on the 112 US counties in commuter zones with the highest proportion of workers employed in manufacturing. Thus, those areas examined were almost exclusively small industrial cities and semi-rural areas throughout the American Midwest and South. Of these, 29 counties in 10 commuting zones were “exposed” to factory closures.

Researchers found that prior to plant closures, baseline opioid overdose mortality rates in “exposed” counties were actually lower, on average, than those in unexposed counties. But only two years after plant closures, according to the authors, mortality rates in these counties were higher.

Those most affected were non-Hispanic white men, aged 18 to 34 years, who experienced a staggering increase of 20.1 deaths per 100,000 individuals five years after a plant closure. The second-most affected group was non-Hispanic white men aged 35 to 65 years, who experienced an increase of 12.8 deaths per 100,000 individuals. However, virtually every demographic was affected to some degree.

This explodes the reactionary myth of “white privilege,” which is peddled by various Democratic Party-aligned corporate media outlets in order to recenter political attention away from social class towards greatly exaggerated notions of racial divisions. The most aggressive role in promoting race theory has been played by the New York Times, whose 1619 Project attempts to recast all of American history as the product of racism, and American society as divided by an unbridgeable racial chasm.

In reality, the entire American working class, whether white, black, Hispanic or any other race or ethnicity, has been devastated by decades of rising social inequality and stagnant or declining wages.

The Times, on the other hand, speaks for a privileged layer of executives, financial speculators and well-heeled professionals, both white and black, who view the working class with a combination of contempt and fear. They are terrified in particular of the growing wave of strikes and working-class protests extending throughout the country, including many of the states included in this study, and internationally. This includes the General Motors strike last year, in which opposition to plant closures was a key issue for striking autoworkers.

A major responsibility for the social disaster afflicting former industrial towns lies with the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the other American trade unions. Long transformed into open agents of management, they have worked hand in glove with the companies to sabotage any struggle by workers in defense of their jobs and living standards. Since it joined the Chrysler board of directors in 1979, the UAW has directly collaborated with the companies for decades in the closures of dozens of plants.

The most disorienting and cynical lie employed by the unions is the claim that plant closures in the US are the fault of foreign workers in Latin America and Asia. Opposed to the unification of American workers with their Mexican and Chinese brothers and sisters, the unions pit them against each other by demanding plant closures take place overseas instead, while arguing that cuts are necessary in order to keep product within the United States. This bankrupt strategy, far from saving a single job, has allowed the auto companies, up to now, to eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs with little organized opposition.

Trumbull County, Ohio, which was included in this study, will now be considered an “exposed” county in future research. That is because it is the home of the now-shuttered Lordstown Assembly Plant, one of four facilities the UAW agreed to close as part of its sellout of the GM strike. The bribed company agents which control the UAW will bear direct responsibility for the social consequences.

Ford assembly workers who spoke to the World Socialist Web Site about the crisis responded to the findings of the study with empathy.

“I haven’t even heard of these deaths or their connection to auto plants closing,” one worker from the Chicago area said. “I do know of people who are doing certain drugs to dull the pain of strenuous line work, but even that is sad enough.”

Another worker commented, “Substantial mental health and substance abuse treatment programs are [needed] for all workers. The automotive companies control whose [mental health and substance abuse] claim and job is saved based on the situation. There should be more alternative medical programs to deal with work-related stress rather than turning workers to opioids.”

The study’s authors suggests a national strategy to combat the crisis of opioid deaths in working class communities, including such measures as community-based interventions, providing resources to medical clinicians to “identify and address structural forces that may shape patient health,” and “increasing engagement of community agencies and healthcare systems in addressing key social determinants of health.”

But such measures are impossible within the framework of the capitalist profit system. An expropriation of the wealth of the corporations by the working class is the only way to address the crisis of job losses, lack of funding for social programs and “deaths of despair” in the US and worldwide.

British fascists join Johnson’s Conservative Party

Thomas Scripps

The character of Boris Johnson’s new government has been made clear by the entry of members of the fascist Britain First into the Conservative Party.

On December 18, the group’s leaders sent out an email to their membership stating, “If you haven’t joined the Conservative Party yet, we urge you to do so immediately, to make Boris Johnson’s leadership more secure.

“Senior Britain First officials and rank-and-file members have been receiving their Conservative membership cards in the post.

“Just as Momentum activists joined the Labour Party to solidify Jeremy Corbyn’s grip on that party, Britain First activists and members seem to be doing the same for the Tories and Boris.”

Britain First are keen to “secure” Johnson in power, declared spokesperson Ashlea Simon last week, as, “We will support a party that is willing to take a firm stance against radical Islam and it looks like the Tories are willing to do that.”

Referring to Johnson’s and Home Secretary Priti Patel’s authoritarian response to the November London Bridge terror attack, Simon said, “The majority of our followers appreciate Priti Patel’s and Boris Johnson’s hardline approach.”

According to the group, 5,000 of 7,500 members have signed up as Tory members. These numbers are clearly exaggerated, with anti-racism charity Hope Not Hate estimating Britain First’s true membership to be around 1,000. But this does not change the significance of an avowed fascist party endorsing the xenophobic and anti-socialist agenda of Johnson’s government.

Within days of winning the British general election, Johnson doubled down on his Islamophobic record—which includes referring to fear of Islam as “natural” and calling veiled Muslim women “letterboxes” and “bank robbers”—by cancelling a promised review into rampant Islamophobia in the Tory Party. His government is committed to vicious anti-migrant and law-and-order policies.

Johnson was fully aware that his anti-Muslim comments would galvanise support among far-right forces already within the Tory party and outside. This was confirmed with the statements of Britain First leader Paul Golding, who said in his statement calling for members to join the Tories’ ranks to help “solidify Boris Johnson’s control on the leadership, so we can achieve Brexit and hopefully cut immigration and confront radical Islam.” He stated, “Boris referred to Muslim women wearing the burqa and niqab as letterboxes, so he is obviously a populist nationalist under the surface, like the type of patriotism as promoted by Britain First.”

Besides Britain First, the Tories’ putrid political agenda has won the support and membership of far-right figureheads like Katie Hopkins, a former newspaper columnist for The Sun and Daily Mail who is set to embark on a speaking tour sponsored by the For Britain fascist group, and Tommy Robinson, founder of the English Defence League.

Hopkins revealed her membership of the Tory party in a tweet responding to Tory MP Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, which read, “Your party? Hold on a minute sister. I think you will find it’s OUR party now. Britain has Boris and a blue collar army. Nationalism is back. British people first.”

In a recent opinion column, Hopkins wrote, “It is not just that Boris won … It is the affirmation that the heart and soul of this country is still intact. That the British spirit is alive and kicking and that some kind of fight-back for our Judeo-Christian culture is on … Britain still has the heart of a lion. Thanks to the Great British people, Boris Johnson has a new blue-collar army—the best of us, hard-working, decent people who put family, Queen and country first.”

Robinson spoke outside the UK High Court in November—where he is being tried for libelling a Syrian child refugee—to say, “Everyone should back Boris Johnson.”

On the day of the general election, Robinson sent out a message to his supporters saying, “OK, I have just joined the Conservative Party. Good work everyone that went out and voted for the Conservatives today. We have just thwarted our country becoming a socialist dump.”

To date, no official statement has been issued by the Conservative Party about the membership status of Hopkins and Robinson. The Independent reported, “A Conservative Party spokesperson said: ‘Paul Golding’s application for membership of the Conservative Party has not been approved.’”

The Tories will have decided that, at this stage, Golding being allowed membership could be problematic given that only last year he served 18 weeks in prison for a series of hate crimes against Muslims. However, their statement did not refer to Golding’s fascist politics as a reason to bar him, stating only, “There is a process in place for local Conservative associations to approve members who apply to join, or to reject those who do not share the party’s values or objects.”

The events parallel the movement of the fascist National Front into Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Thatcher notoriously said in 1978 that “people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture,” and later, that some people “do not agree with the objectives of the National Front but they say ‘at least they are talking about some of the problems’.”

The National Front had been increasingly active throughout the 1970s and stood 300 candidates in the 1979 election as part of a planned “breakthrough.” But it was far less prominent in the years that followed as Thatcher stole its political agenda and some of its leading members found a more effective avenue for their ultra-nationalist, xenophobic, anti-socialist views as members of the Tory Party.

Johnson’s is the same breed of class war government, with its declared intention to “finish the Thatcher revolution” through a massive assault on the working class. The Johnson government is an expression of the global rise of the authoritarian far right, sponsored by the ruling class as a necessary bulwark to confront social unrest and growing socialist sentiment.

In the UK, Robinson has been treated with kid gloves throughout his political career. Nigel Farage, the former leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) which opposed Britain’s membership of the European Union (EU), has long been granted immense and unjustified political influence. Both have the support of US President Donald Trump and his fascist former adviser Steve Bannon—who has also played a key role in Johnson’s political career.

Britain First came to national prominence for the first time near the conclusion of the 2016 Brexit referendum campaign, when one of its supporters, Thomas Mair, brutally murdered Labour MP Jo Cox for her pro-EU politics. As he shot and stabbed her, Mair was heard to shout repeatedly, “Britain First!” Johnson was aligned with the whole spectrum of far-right nationalist organisations in leading the campaign for a Leave vote and has carried them with him into his “Get Brexit Done” regime.

Johnson’s government intends to enforce Minimum Service Agreements for the railways, effectively stripping thousands of workers of the right to strike, and threatening major conflicts with a workforce currently engaged in industrial action over attempts to scrap the conductor role.

Fascist mobs have already made a case for their usefulness to the ruling class in this situation. In July 2018, a group of Robinson supporters assaulted Steve Hedley, Assistant General Secretary of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT) in a London pub. Hedley was left bleeding from a gash on his head while his partner Bridget was hit with a chair and had to be admitted to hospital with problems breathing. At least one other person was cut on the head by a broken bottle.

In January 2019, another group of Robinson’s thugs surrounded and attempted to intimidate an RMT picket at Victoria station in Manchester. Racist chants were directed against London’s Labour Party Mayor Sadiq Khan and a picket of south-east Asian heritage was verbally abused as a “sex offender” and a “paedophile.”

Far-right attacks have also taken place against Karl Marx’s grave, the left-wing bookshop Bookmarks, Guardian columnist Owen Jones, and stalls of the Revolutionary Communist Group and Socialist Workers’ Party.

These are the elements being mobilised, in alliance with the police and armed forces, to intimidate and crush opposition from the working class to deepening austerity and the drive to trade and military conflict by the ruling elite. The working class must answer these dangerous political developments based on the fight for socialist internationalism and irreconcilable opposition to the capitalist social order at the root of xenophobia, nationalism and fascism.