Images of War—Sensory War 1914-2014: An exhibition at Manchester City Art Gallery

Margot Miller

Around 1,500 people passed daily through the doors of Manchester City Art Gallery in the last few months to visit its powerful Sensory War 1914-2014 exhibition.

Held to mark the centenary of World War I, the gallery assembled both contemporary and historical art, adding to its already substantial collection of WWI art exhibits from the following countries: Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, the US, Canada, Japan, Vietnam, Algeria, Ireland, Iran, Israel and Palestine. The exhibition is part of the WWI programme coordinated by the Imperial War Museum, London, in galleries and museums across the country. It was presented in partnership with the city’s Whitworth Art Gallery and the Centre for the Cultural History of War at the University of Manchester.

Visitors were able to view the works of artists as divergent as British artists CRW Nevinson and Paul Nash and German artists Otto Dix and Heinrich Hoerle, both of whose works were banned by the Nazis as decadent. Six heart-rending woodcuts by Kathe Kollwitz are on display beside the fragile depictions from Japan by the Hibakusha (the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs). The latter have never previously been seen in the UK.

The exhibits were organised non-chronologically, in themes that relate to the sensory impact of war on the artist—hence the somewhat puzzling title of the exhibition. For example, the themes were titled Pain and Succour, Rupture and Rehabilitation, and Shocking the Senses. This is a weakness in the exhibition, because it detracts from a historical understanding of the economic and political conditions that produced two world wars separated by a mere 21 years, and the succession of regional wars in Vietnam, El Salvador, Yugoslavia, Africa and the Middle East.

The viewer is invited to regard war-torn scenes ripped from their historical context, from the standpoint of the individual and how it makes him or her feel, with the reality ultimately too horrible to comprehend. The words “imperialism” and “capitalism” are absent from the captions accompanying the artworks. Despite the significant gap, the exhibition is memorable and moving.

In the first section of the exhibition, the text explains the global nature of WWI, with 4 million soldiers enlisted from the colonies. The war was fought, not just in Europe, but wherever the imperialist powers had colonies in the Middle East and Africa. Ten million soldiers and 7 million civilians died.

In another section, the text emphasises the scale of the slaughter in World War II, which amounted to the death of 2.5 percent of the world’s population. A total of 24 million military personal and 55 million civilians died from the war, disease and famine, including 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust. The exhibits are testimony to this devastation.

In Futurist style, official British war artist CWR Nevinson engraved Returning to the Trenches (1916), a small print showing a column of French soldiers returning to the front. Expressing the dehumanising effect of war in which men are just cogs in the war machine, clamouring billie cans, rifles and legs become a blur as the men march in lock-step back to battle.

CRW Nevinson: The Harvest of Battle (1918) (Art.IWM ART 1921)

By 1919, Nevinson had adopted a more realistic style to paint The Harvest of Battle. This is a painting of epic proportions in colours of mud brown and khaki, reminiscent of the dreaded mustard gas employed by both sides. Nevinson had joined the Friends Ambulance Unit and later worked for the British Red Cross at Dunkirk. He travelled to Ypres, Belgium, the site of the Christmas Truce between German and British soldiers in 1914, and was there at the beginning of the battle known as Passchendaele, one of the most intense and sustained battles on the Western Front. The barren landscape is dark, dismal and muddied, covered with stagnant pools under menacing skies. Weary stretcher-bearers tramp through the mud carrying the wounded. There is a corpse in the foreground, its mouth agape as if screaming, one arm raised in rigor mortis.

Writing to his wife from Ypres in 1917, British surrealist painter and war artist Paul Nash commented, “I am no longer an artist interested and curious, I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls.”

Paul Nash: The Landscape: Hill 60 (exh.1918 Pen and black ink, watercolour and coloured chalks on grey paper: Manchester City Galleries

No life exists in fields of mud and shell holes. The sun fails in the grey, mud-coloured sky. A ruddy pool in the centre of the picture suggests death.

In another Nash painting, Wounded, Passchendaele, he departs from his usual depiction of war-ravaged landscapes without figures. The colours evoke the horrors of gangrene and mustard gas.

The large painting L’Enfer (Hell) (1921) by French artist George Leroux depicts the slaughter at Verdun in northeast France, where the French army lost a half-million men fighting the German army in 1916. One peers as if through fire and smoke and finally discerns the dead, who have become the colour of mud, in the mud.

Particularly emotive are six black-and-white woodcuts in a series entitled The War, by German artist Kathe Kollwitz, which evokes the grief and anguish of civilians in WWI. A testimonial to her son Peter who fell in the war, this series was first exhibited in 1924 at the newly founded International Anti-war Museum in Berlin. Kollwitz was already established as an artist who portrayed the poverty of the working class and peasantry in Germany. In The War: The Parents, the grieving parents are “entwined in mutual loss.”

Also exhibited are works by two other significant German artists, Otto Dix and Heinrich Hoerle. There are four black-and-white etchings from Der Krieg (The War) series by Otto Dix. These took inspiration from Goya’s The Disasters of War, which recorded the horrors of the Napoleonic invasion of Spain and the Spanish Wars of Independence in 1808-1814. In Seen on the Escarpment at Cléry-sur-Somme, painted in 1924, a soldier slumps, dead so long that a bird has made a nest in his gaping skull. His comrade with his lower jaw blown off appears to be laughing. In the picture The Mad Woman of Sainte-Marie-a-Py, a mother driven mad by grief amid the ruins of her house bares her breast as if to feed her dead baby.

Constructivist artist Heinrich Hoerle, who was involved in the Dada movement, which believed art should serve the cause of revolution, createdThe Cripple Portfolio in 1919. This series of 12 lithographs were first published in Cologne, inspired by the 2.7 million disabled war veterans, of whom 67,000 were amputees. Hoerle explored the psychological repercussions of the trauma the veterans suffered in life and even in their dreams. In Das Ehepaar (The Married Couple), painted in 1920, a couple embrace. Their furrowed foreheads are pressed together; she is clutching his prosthetic arm that ends in a hook.

Among the other notable works dealing with WWI are nine charcoal drawings by the lesser-known Italian artist Pietro Morando. A volunteer in the Italian Elite troops, he drew on anything he could find. His work has a startling immediacy, such as 1916’s A Remnant of the Last Action, which shows a soldier leaning in death on barbed wire. The artist was captured in 1918 and imprisoned in Nagymegyer, Hungary, where thousands of Italian civilians were interned and died. Morando sketched the torture, starvation, cholera and executions in the prison camp.

Two paintings bear witness to the Holocaust by artists commissioned to record the liberation of Bergen-Belsen.

In Belsen camp: The Compound for Women, painted by Leslie Cole in 1945, the nightmare that greeted the liberators is portrayed—10,000 unburied corpses, emaciated inmates in blue-striped pyjamas wandering forlorn.

In Human Laundry (1945), Doris Zinkeisen shows barely alive female survivors lined up in beds being washed and deloused in the section of the camp known as the Human Laundry. Their skeletal frames contrast pitifully with the rounded figures of the orderlies administering to them.

Introducing the Haunted Memories of the Hibakusha, the exhibition explains that at 08:15 on August 6, 1945 (when the Japanese high command were negotiating surrender, although this is not mentioned), a US bomber dropped an atomic bomb nicknamed Little Boy on the city of Hiroshima. Between 70,000 and 80,000 died from the initial blast and many more died later from their injuries and radiation sickness. On August 9, a second, even more powerful bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.

Gisaku Tanaka (age 72 at the time of drawing) Lights blinking on in the atomic desert (1973-4 Watercolour © Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, Japan)

In 1974, a 77-year-old man named Iwachi Kobayashi gave a local TV station a drawing of the scene around the Yorozuya Bridge at about 4 p.m. on August 6, 1945. Inspired by this image, the TV station made an appeal to survivors to submit their memories of the atomic bombing. The response was overwhelming. Shown in this exhibition are 12 delicately constructed pictures portraying the horrific aftermath. Lights Blinking, by Gisaku Tanaka, was the artist’s view from Hijiyama Hill after the blast. The Red Cross hospital was painted by Fumiko Yamaoka, aged 47, in 1973-1974, when he committed his memories to watercolour.

Fumiko Yamaoka (age 47 at the time of drawing) Red Cross Hospital (1973-4 Watercolour © Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, Japan)

These pictures deserve a wide circulation, a reminder of the unspeakable horrors of nuclear war at a time when US imperialism seriously contemplates engaging in a new war against China and Russia and is fomenting war on many fronts.

More-contemporary works include three anti-war pieces by Nancy Spero, one of which shows a fleeing woman cradling her child, in the context of the death squads and the “disappeared” of El Salvador in 1986.

The image of a black, hooded figure in Abu Ghraib is an indictment of the torture carried out by the US army and CIA in the Iraq war that began in 2003. Created in 2004 by Richard Serra, there exists a larger print with the words STOP BUSH.

Problematic is the juxtaposition in the Art Gallery of Sleeping Children (2012), by Sam Saimee, with the official UK war artist for the Iraq war John Keane’sEcstasy of Fumbling (Portrait of the Artist in a Gas Alert) (1991). In just a few hours on March 16, 1988, 5,000 Kurdish civilians were killed by mustard gas, and the nerve agents sarin, tabun and vx, in an attack ordered by then-Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. The dead children lie as if sleeping. This horrific slaughter of civilians took place during the Iran-Iraq war, when the Western powers supported and armed the Iraqi suppression of the Kurdish uprising in the north, which was backed by Iran.

Without explaining this, or the causes of the first Iraq war, placing this painting next to embedded artist John Keane’s work lends justification to the US “Desert Storm” war against Iraq in 1990-1991. The UN investigation into Iraq’s supposed stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, used to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003, concluded that by 1991 Iraq had destroyed its chemical and biological weapons and had no WMDs.

Another controversial painting is a large 1994 canvass by Peter Howson called Croatian and Muslim. It portrays the rape of a Muslim woman during the Bosnian war. The Imperial War Museum, which commissioned the work, refused to show it because Keane had learned of the incident from the victim’s accounts—i.e., he wasn’t an eye witness—and it is today owned by the singer David Bowie. The artist came back from Yugoslavia traumatised.

There were atrocities on all sides in the Bosnian civil war between the rival Croat, Bosnian Muslim and Serbian cliques, following the imperialist-backed dissolution of Yugoslavia. The US cynically employed the pretext of humanitarian defence of the Bosnian Muslims to intervene militarily.

The most moving and accessible art works all tell a profound truth—that it isnot a “sweet and fitting thing to die for one’s country.” In the words of murdered German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht, who was so lovingly portrayed by Kathe Kollwitz, “Ally yourselves to the international class struggle against the conspiracies of secret diplomacy, against imperialism, against war, for peace within the socialist spirit.” With a call to disarm the war-mongering capitalist class, he said, “The main enemy is at home.”

Dawn spacecraft enters orbit around Ceres

Bryan Dyne

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft successfully entered orbit around Ceres on March 6. It is the first spacecraft to successfully orbit two extraterrestrial bodies, enabling it to provide data on two different primordial objects in the solar system.

Ceres was first discovered by Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi in 1801 as part of a broader search for a suspected planet between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. When first discovered, Ceres was believed to be the “missing planet” being searched for. However, as other objects at approximately the same orbit were discovered, it was realized that Ceres, Pallas and other recently discovered bodies were not planets but something much smaller. To classify them, astronomer William Herschel coined the term asteroids (“star-like”).

Artistic rendering of Dawn as it travels from Vesta (left) to Ceres (right).

Despite this, Ceres, Pallas, Vesta and Juno, the first four asteroids to be discovered, were still classified as planets until 1845. They appeared in textbooks across Europe and were even given their own unique symbols. It was only in the late 1840s, starting with the discovery of Astraea and a slew of other asteroids, that it was accepted that they were too small and numerous to be planets. It was around this time that the phrase “asteroid belt” was coined to describe the region between Mars and Jupiter where all these objects were housed. More than 100,000 asteroids have since been discovered.

Since then, asteroids and the larger dwarf planets have been objects of great interest to the astronomical community. Asteroids (and their larger cousins dwarf planets, such as Ceres) do not exist only in the asteroid belt. Some are in Jupiter’s orbit, locked very tightly in place by the gas giant’s powerful gravity. Others have orbits that take them inside Earth’s orbit and there is a possibility for a mission to one of these in the near future.

It is thought that during the solar system’s formation, large bodies such as Ceres acted as embryos for the creation of even larger rocky worlds, including the inner solar system planets, the Moon and the larger satellites of the gas giants. That Ceres didn’t become a planet is most likely due to the gravitational domination of Jupiter, which either caused planetary embryos to collide with each other or ejected them from the solar system entirely. Ceres escaped both of these fates.

A full rotation of Ceres as observed by Dawn from 46,000 kilometers away. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Studies of Ceres, Vesta (Dawn’s first target) and other objects in the asteroid belt provide insights into the conditions of the solar system during its formation. Ceres seems geologically unchanged since its formation and its hypothesized rocky core and icy mantle proves true, provide a glimpse of solar system temperatures from 4.6 billion years ago. On the other hand Vesta is more evolved and much more dense, providing insight into the type of primordial material that become the cores of the inner planets, including Earth. By looking at both of these bodies, Dawn allows astronomers to compare the evolutionary history of each and further refine models of the Solar System’s formation.

Both objects are also worth looking at in themselves. Vesta has an unusually large rotation rate, possibly caused by the collision that took off about one percent of its mass. It also is not in hydrostatic equilibrium, meaning that its structure is not stable.

Ceres is even more intriguing. It is the smallest known object in the solar system to have enough gravity to be spherical in shape, rather than oblate. There is a possible atmosphere caused by sublimation of ice on the surface or volcanic activity driven by internal radioactivity that spews out ice crystals. In the approach to Ceres, Dawn photographed two bright spots on the dwarf planet’s surface, which could be mineral flats, plumes of water vapor, or something else entirely. It is also suspected that Ceres may have an ocean of liquid water under its surface, which makes it a candidate for the presence of life.

Two bright spots on Ceres which apparently lie in the same basin. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Over the coming months, Dawn will provide a clearer understanding of these phenomena. On approach to Ceres, its three instruments—provided by Germany, Italy and the United States—have already provided image quality exceeding that of the Hubble Space Telescope. No doubt over the coming period, they will continue to uncover more about this rocky and icy world.

It is worth mentioning Dawn’s propulsion system. While the launch was done using a conventional chemical rocket, the engines used to propel it through the solar system are somewhat unconventional ion thrusters. Instead of directing the explosion of a chemical reaction, Dawn accelerates a stream of xenon atoms behind it, slowly but steadily changing its velocity using Newton’s Third Law of Motion. The effect is similar to pushing someone away while ice-skating. With no friction, both people move way from the original point of contact.

This is what has allowed Dawn to visit both Vesta and now Ceres. If normal rockets were used, the weight constraints needed to keep that much fuel around would have been prohibitive. On the other hand, relatively little atomic material is needed to form the thrust that is needed to maneuver a spacecraft using ion propulsion. This has allowed Dawn to change its velocity over the course of its mission by more than 10 kilometers per second, almost twice the previous record. It also means that Dawn will be able to change the size of its orbit around Ceres, which currently stands at 13,500 kilometers. By November, that orbit will be spiraled down to 375 kilometers.

Ion thrusters have been envisioned by astronomers for more than a century. Robert Goddard first postulated the idea in a notebook in 1906 while Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was the first to publish in 1911. Since then, it was realized that such a system would be ideal in a near-vacuum or vacuum environment. While research into it dropped off somewhat in the ensuing decades, both the US and Soviet Union again looked into this idea in the 1950s and 1960s. While research into this technology dropped off in the US, the Soviet Union realized that such engines were excellent at stabilizing and maintaining orbits and so deployed more than 100 throughout the Cold War. It was only in 1992 and the introduction of Soviet science into the Western world that ion thrusters were again seriously considered.

Dawn is a remarkable achievement. After more than two centuries of study, internationally organized effort has made the study of some of the oldest objects in the solar system possible. The coming months will see a dramatic increase in our understanding of how the planets came to be.

Workers Struggles: Asia, Australia and the Pacific

WSWS

Asia

Nepalese telecom workers remain on strike

Employees of the privately-owned United Telecom Ltd (UTL) in Kathmandu Valley have been on strike since February 18 over 14 demands. They are ignoring a return to work order while 198 towers and other services for about 600,000 customers in 44 districts have failed. The company tried to use scabs to restore services but workers prevented them entering the communications sites.

The All Nepal Organisation of Bank, Finance Workers’ Union—UTL Chapter said its members would not return-to-work until suspension orders against 10 union leaders were first revoked. The company is demanding that workers end their strike immediately.

The telecom workers want increased wages, the issuing of appointment letters, as per Nepal labour law, to employees who have worked for more than 240 days and for management to withdraw plans to cut 65 jobs. Their action follows protests in January that affected the company’s Kathmandu Valley telecom services, including the international gateway and internet.

Pakistan: Peshawar utility workers walkout

Administrative workers at the government-owned Peshawar Electric Supply Company (Pesco) walked off the job on February 27 and locked several Pesco’s city offices to demand bonus salaries cancelled by the utilities’ management. The strikers protested outside WAPDA House where Pesco administration is located. Protests were also held in Bannu, Hangu and Karak. WAPDA (Water and Power Development Authority) is the national body that maintains power and water across Pakistan.

Pesco administrative workers complained that employees in other WAPDA distribution companies were receiving the salary bonus. The All Pakistan Wapda Hydro Electric Workers Union called off the strike after Pesco management agreed to resolve their issues within a week. Workers reluctantly ended their strike, complaining that Pesco had previously failed to keep promises to resolve the issue.

WAPDA workers hold more protests against privatisation

Following a one-day nationwide protest on February 28, Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA) administrative workers across Pakistan held a three-day “pen-down” strike on Tuesday against government’s plan to privatise the nation’s power distribution companies. Union leaders told workers that industrial action would be escalated to include WAPDA’s 150,000-strong workforce if the government did not halt the privatisation process.

While the All Pakistan WAPDA Hydro Electric Workers Union and the WAPDA Hydro Electric Central Union have conducted a three-year anti-privatisation campaign, the unions have restricted this to demonstrations and harmless protest strikes. In line with International Monetary Fund demands, the government insists that it will continue privatising state-run utilities.

Tamil Nadu film manufacturing workers protest

Over 300 employees at the state-owned Hindustan Photo Films factory at Aruvangadu, Tamil Nadu demonstrated outside the plant on March 2 to demand last month’s salary. Around 270 employees of the company’s almost 600-strong workforce have accepted termination packages following production slowdowns. The government said it was considering whether to subsidise the company’s production under its “Make in India” program.

Karnataka heavy-machinery manufacturing workers walk out

Workers at the state-owned heavy machinery manufacturing company Bharat Earth Movers Limited (BEML) walked off the job on February 26. Hundreds of workers gathered near the factory in Bangalore and raised slogans calling for permanent employment for contract operators and technicians and other demands. The BEML Contract Workers’ Federation, affiliated with the Centre of Indian Trade Unions, want contract workers’ pay and conditions to be on par with all other company employees doing the same job.

Burmese police arrest striking garment workers

Police in Rangoon Division’s Insein township arrested at least 20 striking workers on Wednesday afternoon. They were part of a group of 200 striking workers from the COSTEC and Ford Glory garment factories in Shwepyithar Industrial Zone who began a sit-in protest after a planned march to Rangoon City Hall was blocked by hundreds of police.

On February 2, about 2,000 COSTEC and Ford Glory employees walked out to demand 80,000 kyat ($US78) per month, up from 50,000 kyat. The factories, which are owned by Chinese and South Korean firms respectively, rejected the demand and offered just 62,000 kyats. While some employees have since returned to work, about 600 remain on strike.

The strikers also want employers prosecuted who violate the law, compensation during negotiation periods and the release of arrested striking workers. The strikers said that they will not return to work until their demand for 80,000 kyat per month is granted.

Cambodian garment workers protest

About 200 garment workers from the Smart Shirt factory in Stung Meanchey district protested outside the Phnom Penh Municipal Court on February 27, after 20 colleagues were locked out of the factory. Management accused the workers of inciting other employees to strike and using violence.

On February 3, about 700 workers at the factory walked off the job demanding that management increase 300 senior employees’ wages by $28, after the government’s decision to increase the monthly minimum wage to $128 in January. While strikers ended the walkout on February 23, following a municipal court order, factory management violated the court order and prevented 20 workers from re-entering the plant.

Australia and the Pacific

Federal public sector workers apply for ballot to take industrial action

The Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU), this week lodged two separate applications to the Fair Work Commission to hold a Protected Action Ballot for industrial action in a dispute over new enterprise agreements covering public servants in the 19,000-strong Defence Department and Geoscience Australia. According to CPSU polling of members in both sectors over 90, percent wanted a ballot for industrial action. The vote will ask members to consider industrial action, including work bans and strikes up to 24 hours.

Defence Department and Geoscience Australia workers rejected so-called pay rise increases of between 0 and 1.05 percent per year over three years in return for a longer working day, the loss of time-off and a slowdown in the rate of progression up the pay scales. Workplace agreements covering 160,000 public sector workers in over 70 departments are up for renewal, with the government making similar low pay offers and reduced conditions. Workers in all departments have rejected the offers.

CPSU members in Centrelink, Medicare and Child Support—part of the Department of Human Services (DHS)—have maintained “low level” industrial action since December in their pay dispute with the government.

Despite members’ calls for strike action, the CPSU has limited action to co-ordinated lunchbreaks, reading messages of protest to call centre customers and not wearing the prescribed uniform to work. These harmless protests are aimed at dragging out the dispute and wearing down the resolve of members.

Tamil party in Sri Lanka calls for international war crimes inquiry

S. Jayanth

The Tamil National Alliance (TNA), the party of the Sri Lankan Tamil elite, has expressed “concerns” over the postponement of a report on war crimes in Sri Lanka prepared by a UN-committee.

At Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera’s request, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Raad Al Hussein, agreed to “suspend” the inquiry report for six months. It was due to be tabled at the current meeting of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC). US Secretary of State John Kerry gave the green light for the delay after Samaraweera met him in Washington last month.

A TNA delegation, including its leader R. Sambandan, met the visiting UN Under-Secretary General at the Department of Political Affairs, Geoffrey Feltman, in Colombo last Saturday and told him the party had no faith in a “domestic inquiry” by the Sri Lankan government. The TNA cited the broken promises of inquiries by the previous government of President Mahinda Rajapakse.

In requesting the report’s delay, Samaraweera promised that President Maithripala Sirisena’s new government would initiate a domestic inquiry that met “international standards.”

The TNA-dominated Northern Provincial Council passed a resolution on February 11 demanding a continued international investigation. “The UN Security Council should refer the situation in Sri Lanka to the International Criminal Court for prosecutions based on war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide,” it proposed. Alternatively, it urged a prosecution in a country, such as the US, where the courts exercise “universal jurisdiction over alleged events and perpetrators.”

This is the first time that the TNA has made such calls. It is not to champion the democratic rights of Tamil people or seek justice for war victims. Rather, the TNA is attempting to put maximum pressure on Sirisena’s new government to secure a significant devolution of power to the Tamil elite in the administration of the island’s north and east.

The UNHRC decision to delay its report has shattered illusions propagated by the TNA and other Tamil groups that the global powers have genuine interests in pursuing the war criminals and defending democratic rights. Yet again, what has been demonstrated is that war crimes and human rights issues are no more than tools in the hands of the US and its allies to advance their strategic interests.

The UNHRC inquiry was initiated last year via a US-sponsored resolution. Washington backed the military offensive against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE) to the hilt, culminating in the LTTE’s defeat in May 2009. Washington then hypocritically exploited the war atrocities and abuses committed by Rajapakse’s government to pressure it to end its close economic and strategic relations with China.

The Obama administration wanted Sri Lanka to line up behind the US military and strategic “pivot” to Asia, directed against China, along with other countries in the region. Washington was heavily involved, behind the scenes, in the regime-change machinations surrounding the presidential election in January that brought Sirisena to office. The US is now heavily supporting his government.

In its 11-page Northern Provincial Council (NPC) resolution, the TNA summed up the discriminations, pogroms, mass murders and military campaigns between 1948 and 2009 as acts of genocide by Sri Lankan governments. The resolution also noted the continuation of repressive actions after 2009.

The resolution was passed unanimously. Eelam People’s Democratic Party (EPDP) members agreed to vote for it after the TNA removed a section that pointed to the EPDP’s responsibility for war crimes. The EPDP, which was a partner in the Rajapakse government, has expressed support for Sirisena’s administration since the election.

Successive Colombo governments since 1948 have intensified the discrimination against Tamils, deprived them of their democratic rights, instigated communal attacks, killing Tamil people, triggered the war against the LTTE and maintained a military occupation of the north and east. At least 200,000 people were killed during the 26-year war, according to UN statistics, and hundreds of thousands were displaced. Systematic communal attacks on Tamils have, above all, been aimed at dividing, weakening and suppressing the working class, in order to defend capitalist rule.

However, the perspective of the TNA, which formerly acted as an LTTE mouthpiece, has always been to arrange a power-sharing deal with the Colombo ruling elite, and to win the backing of US and India for such an arrangement. In 2009, the TNA entered into discussions with Rajapakse. In the 2010 presidential election, it backed the former army commander, General Sarath Fonseka, even though he oversaw the final offensives that crushed the LTTE, killing tens of thousands of civilians.

Once the US, with India’s involvement, sponsored a regime-change operation to back Sirisena, Rajapakse’s former health minister, in this January’s presidential election, the TNA urged Tamil people to vote for him. After Sirisena’s election, the TNA joined his government’s top advisory body, the National Executive Council (NEC).

Sirisena has taken cosmetic steps to keep the TNA on board with his unstable government, which lacks a parliamentary majority. A civilian governor was appointed to replace the north’s military governor, but the military occupation remains in place.

After the NPC resolution was adopted, Chief Minister C.V. Wigneswaran met with Sirisena and reportedly told him that it was not directed against his government. Wigneswaran asked Sirisena to do something under his 100-day program that would be taken favourably by Tamils. In return, Sirisena promised to release 1,000 acres from the militarised-High Security Zones in Jaffna created during the war by seizing land from Tamil civilians.

The TNA’s stance, particularly the NPC resolution, has been seized on by parties in the Colombo elite, especially Sinhala chauvinist groups, as another occasion to stir up communalism. Opposition leader Nimal Siripala de Silva labeled the NPC resolution a “threat to national security.” A Sinhala extremist party, the Jathika Hela Urumaya, which is a partner in the government, declared it was a “blow to national harmony.” The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) condemned the resolution as an attempt to “promote communal disharmony.”

Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and State Minister for Defence Ruwan Wijewardena have repeatedly reassured these elements that the government will not reduce the military’s strength in the north or remove military camps. Thus, the military occupation will continue. Mired in Sinhala chauvinism, the Colombo establishment is hostile to making any major concessions to its Tamil counterparts, let alone to the democratic rights of working people.

At his meeting with Sirisena, Wigneswaran said the resolution was an “expression of the emotions and feelings of the Tamil people” and his party wanted to keep the Tamil question on the “international radar.” In other words, the TNA is raising the war crimes issue to deflect the anger among Tamil people while seeking the support of the international powers to advance the interests of the Tamil elites.

Canada’s Bill C-51: A sweeping assault on democratic rights and legal principles—Part 2

Roger Jordan & Keith Jones

Advocating or promoting terrorism

Another Bill C-51 measure that will grant the state significant new arbitrary powers is the new Criminal Code offense of “advocating or promoting” terrorism “in general.” Persons convicted under this provision will be liable to prison terms of up to five years.

As Ruby and Hasan have pointed out in the analysis of Bill C-51 they made for the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives, the term “in general” is “deliberately opaque and unknowable.”

It will criminalize and is expressly intended to criminalize speech not directly related to any terrorism offense, past or future.

Canada’s Criminal Code already contains 14 terrorism-related offenses. These include the direct commission, preparation or planning of a terrorist act, the financing of terrorist activity, travelling abroad to join a terrorist group, and inciting a specific terrorist act.

So sweeping is the proposed new speech-crime, even some of the government’s staunchest supporters such as the big business Globe and Mail have expressed alarm. In one of a series of editorials criticizing Bill C-51, the Globe warned that the new “advocating or promoting” terrorism offense could be used to prosecute a Canadian who expresses sympathy with the Palestinian group Hamas, which the Conservative government has declared a terrorist organization.

The scope of the new offense is made all the more chilling by the removal of the requirement of any criminal intent and by the fact that it covers all speech, whether in the public or private domain.

As Ruby and Hasan have pointed out, someone could be convicted under this offense “despite completely innocent purposes, such as attempting to provoke democratic debate or proposing a solution to an intractable international conflict. The speaker’s purpose does not matter; they are liable if they are reckless as to the risk that a listener ‘may’ thereafter commit an unspecified terrorism offence” (emphasis added).

Canadian law does ban “hate speech.” But in that case the state must prove criminal intent, and statements made in private are excluded.

If Bill C-51 becomes law, the state is arrogating the power to potentially charge and convict persons for statements not tied to any past or potential act or terrorism and made in private but recorded by state surveillance or incited by a state informant.

Ruby and Hasan draw attention to the fact that, as with criminal law in general, those who play a role in aiding someone who runs afoul of Bill C-51’s new “advocating or promoting” terrorism offense could also be charged. “Criminal culpability would extend beyond the speaker of the impugned words.... Not only the columnist, but also their editors, publishers and research assistants become criminals.”

This could enable the government to target publications that raise criticisms of its foreign or domestic policy simply by identifying a single article, news report or statement as something that “advocates” or “promotes” terrorism. The very threat of such a prosecution will be used ruthlessly as a method to intimidate political opposition. A foretaste of this has been provided by the Conservatives’ repeated smears that the NDP is being sympathetic to terrorist organizations like ISIS merely because it has raised some tactical differences with the government over its policy in the current Mideast War.

“Even,” write Ruby and Hasan, “if the government exercises restraint in laying charges and arresting people,” under the Bill C-51 provisions outlawing advocating or promoting terrorism in general, the result will be an “inevitable chill on speech.” “Students,” for example, “will think twice before posting an article on Facebook questioning military action against insurgents overseas. Journalists will be wary of questioning government decisions to add groups to Canada’s list of terrorist entities.”

Terrorist propaganda

Another section of Bill C-51 that is aimed at silencing political dissent gives the government the authority to remove material from the Internet or other forms of circulation under the guise of confiscating “terrorist propaganda.” As Forcese and Roach note, what is to be defined as terrorist propaganda is extremely unclear, given the presence of 14 separate terrorism offenses in the criminal code, and the vague reference to terrorism offenses “in general.” To obtain clearance to delete or confiscate material, it would only be necessary to prove beyond the balance of probabilities that the material was “terrorist propaganda” not beyond a reasonable doubt.

Forcese and Roach go on to identify another alarming change to customs regulations that would permit Canadian border officers to seize without a warrant material deemed to be “terrorist propaganda” when carrying out standard inspections on individuals entering the country. There is no review mechanism being put in place to examine the kinds of items considered “terrorist propaganda” by border guards.

<subhead>Preventive arrest and detention</subhead>

Bill C-51 also substantially increases the state’s powers of preventive arrest—i.e., to hold a person without charge, first introduced in the 2001 Anti-Terrorism Act

The period for which terrorist suspects can be detained without charge is to be lengthened to seven days from 72 hours, and a lower level of evidence will apply. Whereas in the past there had to be reasonable grounds to believe that a terrorist act “will be carried out,” and that the detention was “necessary” to avert such an outcome, now police will be able to take persons into preventive arrest if they believe a terrorist attack “may be carried out” and that detention is “likely to prevent the carrying out of the terrorist activity.”

As Ruby and Hasan explain, “‘Will’, when coupled with ‘reasonable grounds to believe,’ denotes evidence-based probability, whereas ‘may’ denotes mere possibility.” Likewise, the substitution of “likely” for “necessary” removes the requirement that the authorities believe that only by detaining an individual can they prevent an attack from going ahead.

Bill C-51 will also empower law enforcement officers to take preventive arrest measures without a warrant in exceptional circumstances.

Another power, National Security Certificates (NSCs), under which the authorities can indefinitely detain a non-citizen whom the government has declared a national security threat, is being strengthened. The existing security certificate legislation has been heavily criticized by civil liberty groups because the state need not divulge any of its evidence to the NSC detainee. A court-appointed special advocate selected to represent the detainee is permitted to see the evidence related to the case, but is prohibited from discussing it with his client.

Under Bill C-51, the government will be permitted to withhold all evidence that it deems not immediately relevant from these special advocates and from any court reviewing an outstanding NSC. This is in spite of a Supreme Court ruling that explicitly criticized CSIS and the government from withholding critical information in previous security certificate proceedings.

Immigration lawyer Lorne Waldman, who has experience with security certificate cases, explained to the CBC what this would mean:”That [change] gives CSIS the power to decide what part of the file is going to be disclosed, and what part of the file is not going to be disclosed.” This further entrenches a system in which individuals who have never been convicted or even charged with any crime can be locked away on the basis of the say-so of the government and intelligence agencies.

Information sharing or the gutting of a right to privacy

CSIS, the RCMP and Canada’s other national security agencies will have almost unrestricted access to information held on individuals by all government departments and agencies. Bill C-51 creates the framework for free information sharing on “activities that undermine the security of Canada.” This all-embracing category, which also underpins CSIS’s new disruption powers, is unprecedented in Canadian law. As Forcese and Roach write, “It comes very close to a carte blanche, authorizing a ‘total information awareness’ approach and a unitary view of governmental information holding and sharing. In that respect, we consider it a radical departure from conventional understandings of privacy.”

As they go on to note, this development is even more worrying given the record of the Canadian ruling elite in sharing information with foreign states to have terrorist suspects detained, held without charge, and tortured abroad. The case of Maher Arar, who was arrested on the basis of information supplied by Canada’s national security agencies and then held and tortured in a Syrian jail for more than a year, prompted an official inquiry that concluded that restrictions should be placed on the government’s ability to share information so as to avoid the repetition of such an incident. But with Bill C-51, all such qualms are being dispensed with.

Restricting freedom of movement

The ability of the state to place limits on the movements of individuals who have not been charged or convicted of any crime is also to be strengthened.

The so-called peace bond system, whereby terrorist suspects could have conditions imposed upon their behavior, is to be expanded. The evidentiary basis required to implement such an order is to be lowered as in other areas of the new law, making it easier for travel bans or other repressive conditions to be imposed.

In addition, the government will also be able to place suspect individuals on a no-fly list, which will prevent them from boarding any aircraft. This measure can be taken without recourse to the courts and is extremely difficult to reverse. According to Forcese and Roach, a minister’s decision to place someone on the list could only be overturned if that person was able to prove that the decision was unreasonable, not simply incorrect.

Polish court delays decision in Polanski extradition case

Dorota Niemitz

On February 25, a judge in the district court in Krakow, Poland, adjourned the extradition case instigated by the US government against director Roman Polanski (Knife in the Water, Chinatown, The Pianist) for several weeks in order to study documents. Polanski’s attorneys used the same documents in 2010 when Swiss authorities detained the director at the request of American authorities. That case was eventually dismissed.

Polanski pled guilty in 1977 to unlawful sexual intercourse with an underage girl and fled the US when the judge in the case threatened to renege on the plea bargain and sentence the director to years in prison.

The new Obama administration attempt to lay hands on the filmmaker is part of an ongoing effort. A government that is laying waste to much of the Middle East, has launched illegal drone strikes that have killed thousands, and systematically undermined constitutional rights at home is pursuing the 81-year-old filmmaker for entirely reactionary and hypocritical reasons. The location of the hearing, Krakow, where Polanski and his family were trapped and persecuted by the Nazis at the start of World War II, is an especially foul aspect of the case.

The Krakow prosecutor’s office refused to arrest Polanski last October, despite a US request, during his visit to Poland for the opening ceremonies of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. In January, US authorities officially applied to the Polish government for Polanski’s extradition, and justice ministry spokesman Mateusz Martyniuk asserted that Poland’s statute of limitations “does not apply to US requests,” suggesting that Polanski could possibly be returned to the US.

According to Polish law, the fact that Polanski committed his crime more than 40 years ago would have shielded him from further prosecution.

Polanski’s lawyers, Jan Olszewski and Jerzy Stachowicz, argued that the case should be dismissed based on the fact that Samantha Geimer, the victim herself, appealed to the California court to close the criminal case against the director. Other undisclosed arguments were presented during the February 25 hearing.

The Krakow court judge, Dariusz Mazur, explained that his decision to delay the final ruling was motivated by the need for a careful examination of all the preliminary documents provided by the defense, which need to be translated from English and German.

“Verification of Polanski’s testimony is necessary, and that rules out a quick resolution in the matter.” court spokesperson Barbara Górszczyk told the press. Calling more witnesses, she said, “is not out of the question either.”

Polanski’s testimony lasted close to nine hours. At the request of his lawyers, the public and press were barred from the courtroom. Visibly nervous and exhausted after the hearing, the filmmaker told reporters: “This is all very tiring and, in a sense, painful, as I am forced to return to the issues I would rather forget.”

Even if the Krakow court agrees to extradite Polanski, the final decision remains in the hands of the Polish minister of justice. The next hearing in the case is scheduled for April.

In Poland, with the exception of certain feminists, the respected artist has the support of the media and the general public, who are tired of and disgusted by his harassment. The general hope is that the extradition case will be dismissed.

Polanski plans to start filming his new movie, based on Robert Harris’s An Officer and a Spy, about the notorious Dreyfus case in France in the late nineteenth century, in Warsaw this July.

Devolution for Greater Manchester spells the end of the National Health Service

Margot Miller

Manchester, which has 95 Labour councillors out of 96, is trailblazing a measure that will lead to the further fragmentation and privatisation of the National Health Service.

Chancellor George Osborne will devolve control of the region’s £6 billion NHS budget to the Greater Manchester Combined Authorities (GMCA).

Beginning next year, local government in Greater Manchester, a conurbation of 2.7 million people with 10 Local Authorities, will have control of every penny spent on public health, social care, general practitioner services, mental health and acute services and community care.

The Conservative/Liberal Democrat government has set out to destroy all the gains in health, education and social welfare conceded to the working class after the last World War, and has found willing accomplices in numerous Labour councils.

Last fall, Osborne visited Manchester to co-sign a deal with local Labour Party leaders, devolving £1 billion from central government. The £300 million housing budget, £30 million annual business rates for building a new tramline local transport, local apprenticeship funding, and part of the Government’s Welfare to Work Programme have been devolved to the GMCA.

According to Osborne, devolution will turn Manchester into a “northern powerhouse” of economic growth. After the model of Manchester, other city-regions in the north of England, Leeds and Sheffield will follow.

Negotiations over “Devo Manc” took place in secret last summer between Osborne, Treasury Permanent Second Secretary John Klingman, the leader of Manchester City Council Sir Richard Leese and Manchester’s Chief Executive Sir Howard Bernstein.

There has been no debate on the biggest overhaul in the provision of healthcare and welfare since the foundation of the welfare state either in Manchester or nationally. Yet it is being sold as an exercise to improve local democracy and accountability.

Two years ago, Manchester voted “no” by 53 to 47 percent in a low turnout of 25 percent in a referendum on whether or not to have an elected mayor. Now an elected and extremely well-paid mayor, with power over the devolved budget, has been made part of the new package regardless.

There is every indication that London will follow Manchester’s lead.

To support devolution, London’s Mayor Boris Johnson commissioned a report on city finance by the London School of Economics that described central control of taxation as “hollowed out democracy.” This is a red herring to hide the scale of the cutbacks in services still to be implemented, and the further rollout of privatisation through “competitive tendering.” Devolution essentially enables central government to offload its responsibilities for health and welfare.

Guardian writer John Harris wrote that Leese and his fellow Labour council leaders have “radical and creative answers not just to England’s creakingly centralized system of government but to the huge questions about how to run places when money is so tight.”

Local Authority leaders played a vital role in imposing cuts in services to finance the bailout of the banks in 2008, with the full cooperation of the public sector trades unions. Last November, Manchester City Council announced £60 million of cuts, including 600 voluntary redundancies which will fall heavily on social care.

The Financial Times reported that Prime Minister David Cameron underestimated the level of cuts to be imposed by a full half. According to the Office for Budget Responsibility’s figures from March, year on year cuts of £48 billion need to be made until 2018-2019 to meet the government’s targets for getting rid of the deficit.

Leese, a likely contender for the post of mayor, has promised to deliver a “reduction in public spending not by clumsy centrally imposed cuts but by helping as many as possible of those on benefits or in poor health into sustainable independence.”

With a devolved budget of £100 million for the Welfare to Work programme and a target of getting 50,000 people, including the sick, off benefits, the mayor will be tasked with advertising Manchester as a cheap labor platform for global corporations.

Greater Manchester is one of the most popular places in the UK, outside of London, for direct foreign investment. Beijing Construction Engineering has a 20 percent stake in Manchester Airport, for example. Globalised production and finance has provided opportunities for the regional bourgeoisie to make direct links with transnational corporations, which leads to a race to the bottom in relation to wages and services, as regions compete with each other for investment.

Devolved services will facilitate the end to national pay agreements and conditions, as the trade unions offer up their workforces at competitive rates of pay.

In announcing the devolution of health care and its integration with the budget for social care, Manchester City Council says it will focus on preventative medicine. Long-term conditions like asthma and heart conditions will be treated, as much as possible, in the community—a policy that sounds good but which will, of course, be accompanied by cutbacks in hospital services. Leese said the “first big change is to make sure that a lot of people aren’t entering into needing health care that don’t need it.”

People “are spending too long in hospital,” he added.

While the coalition government is implementing the £20 billion efficiency savings initiated by the previous Labour government, the reality is that the NHS and social care have been cut to the bone, and people are sent home from hospital almost as soon as they have been operated on.

The NHS has also been bled dry by the Private Finance Initiative. A shortage of hospital beds and a lack of doctors and nurses are compounded by the fact that, when elderly people have had hospital treatment, there is nowhere to send them to recuperate due to the closure of nursing homes. Added to that, the shortage of general practitioners has led to more people presenting at hospital emergency departments. Empty pledges to ring-fence spending on health by all political parties are rendered null and void by private companies eating away at money that should be spent on essential services.

Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham said the Manchester agreement will lead to a “two-tier service and challenge the notion of a National Health Service.” Yet this is being carried out by a Labour Council.

The pro-Labour New Statesmen called the changes “a great leap forward.”

In the Guardian, Simon Jenkins made a bizarre comparison between the size of the NHS and “Russia’s Red Army,” intending that the demonization of Russia over the Ukraine will somehow rub off onto the NHS. “Big has not worked,” he declared.

The threats to health and social care posed by “Devo-Manc” underlines the warning made by the Socialist Equality Party during the Scottish independence referendum campaign of the dangers posed by regionalism, devolution and separatism as a means of dividing the working class—a policy backed by the pseudo-left Socialist Workers Party and Socialist Party.

“The aim is to transform Scotland into a low tax, cheap labour platform for the benefit of the banks and transnational corporations,” we wrote. “The victims of this will be workers on both sides of the border, who will see a deepening of the ongoing offensive against jobs, wages and conditions that has been waged by all the major parties in both Westminster and Holyrood.”

Australian Intergenerational Report: A fraudulent justification for sweeping budget cuts

Nick Beams

The Intergenerational Report released on Thursday by Australian Treasurer Joe Hockey is a contrived and concocted document aimed at trying to provide support for a program of major government spending cuts aimed against the working class.

Purportedly showing the relationship between budget projections and population changes 40 years into the future, the report is very much about the present and the impact of the deepening global economic breakdown on the fortunes of Australian capitalism.

It claims that if measures introduced in the May 2014 budget are not implemented, or cuts of an equivalent nature made, there will be a major government debt and deficit crisis. But if they are carried out, budget repair will take place within a decade, after which surpluses will be continually generated.

The report’s core argument, namely the expectation that people will live longer as a result of medical advancements—itself a progressive development—and cause a budget crisis, is a graphic expression of the perverted logic of the profit system. So is the claim that unless major cuts are undertaken the present generation will be robbing future populations.

Robbery there certainly is. But the theft involved is the contemporary cutting of social services, pensions and education in order to boost corporate and financial capital as global economic conditions worsen.

Not surprisingly, therefore, big business groups welcomed the report. The chief executive of the Australian Industry Group, Innes Willox, said it was a “sobering document” reinforcing the need for Australians to face up to slowing growth and ageing population and flat-lining productivity.

“The document paints a picture of a nation that needs to make significant and quite urgent structural changes to meet the needs of current and future generations, to ensure our standard of living continues to improve,” he said.

Structural changes are not aimed at improving living standards. Rather, as the Business Council of Australia indicated in its 2015–16 budget submission, sweeping cuts must be implemented to ensure the maintenance of Australia’s triple AAA credit rating, sustain corporate and financial viability and meet problems in any future global financial crisis—that is, the provision of funds to bolster finance houses and the banks. In addition, they are necessary to enable corporate tax cuts so that Australia can remain internationally competitive as an investment site.

However, this corporate agenda is deeply opposed by broad sections of the population, expressed in the hostility to the May budget because it targeted lower income earners, resulting in the failure of the government to secure passage of some key measures through the Senate.

Significantly, the Intergenerational Report did draw out the impact of the most important budgetary item passed with the support of the Labor party.

John Daley, the head of the Grattan Institute, which has been one of the most strident advocates of cuts, noted in a comment published on the Business Spectator that long-term projections in the report highlighted the effect of the federal government’s abandonment of its previous commitment to contribute to the long-term growth in hospital costs paid by the states. It saved an amount equivalent to 1.4 percent of gross domestic product by 2055.

“It is by far and away the largest long-term reduction in Commonwealth spending,” he wrote, adding that it transferred the deficit problem to the states to solve.

The aim of the Intergenerational Report is to try to create the political conditions whereby this already significant display of bi-partisanship can be extended.

This was the main thrust of Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s comments on the report. Abbott said he understood there might be a temptation on the part of the Labor Party to go scouring through the document looking for political ammunition. “But I think we’ve seen the better angels of the nature of the leader of the opposition [Bill Shorten] on a lot of subjects lately and I’m confident that this parliament is better than that,” he said.

Abbott did not spell it out but he was referring to the complete support by the Labor Party for the government’s bogus “war on terror” and the deployment of more Australian troops to Iraq. He is seeking to extend the bipartisanship on “national security” to the economic arena, with the support already given by the Labor Party to hospital and health cuts inspiring confidence this may be possible.

However, the achievement of this goal requires the creation of the necessary political atmospherics. It involves the promotion of a sense of “national emergency” by sections of what passes for the small “l” liberal political and media establishment—along the lines of that which followed Labor treasurer Paul Keating’s warnings in 1986 that Australia faced becoming a “banana republic” unless major economic restructuring was carried out.

Working hand-in-glove with the mass media and the trade union bureaucracy, Keating was successful in creating the conditions for sweeping changes that boosted profitability, lowered wages and attacked working conditions.

So far Hockey has not succeeded in emulating his predecessor, prompting the criticism in editorial columns that he has failed to “sell” the government’s measures.

He obviously hoped that the Intergenerational Report, which he claimed would have people “falling off their chairs” when they read it, would turn the situation around. But, at least to this point, it has not produced the desired result.

Sydney Morning Herald economics commentator Ross Gittins said the Intergenerational Report ought to be highly informative, leading to a serious debate about economic choice but “in the hands of Joe Hockey it has become a crude propaganda exercise.”

Gittins was referring to the partisan framing of the report and its projections of budget outcomes based on three scenarios: firstly a continuation of the previous Labor government’s policies, secondly the budget measures passed so far, and thirdly, measures the government would like to implement but are still blocked in the Senate. The first two portray an ever worsening position, while the third, on the basis of highly dubious and selective assumptions, sees a return to ongoing surpluses by 2030.

The political editor of the Guardian, Lenore Taylor began her comment by saying “Sorry, Joe but I’m still on my chair.” The overall scenario was an “obvious public policy challenge” and Hockey was right when he said “doing nothing” was not an option.

The “sensible response,” she continued, would be for everyone to remain in their chairs and find “sensible ways to cut spending or raise revenue for which they can win the support of the Australian people.”

In short, Taylor’s message to Hockey, delivered on behalf of a section of the liberal media, is: we are ready to come on board but give us something better to sell than this!

The importance of bipartisanship was also raised in an editorial in theAustralian, which has waged a continuous campaign in support of sweeping cuts. Describing the report as “sobering,” it said Hockey had to use it wisely “to sell a story of resolute fiscal consolidation in the whole community” before criticising the treasurer for erring on the side of political partisanship in the report’s presentation.

In many ways the report, with its fanciful attempt to track economic events 40 years out through a linear projection of present trends, is a diversion.

The working class should focus its attention on the present situation and its driving forces. The ongoing attacks on living standards, health facilities, social services and education—and the even bigger attacks to come—are not the result of an ageing population but are produced by the deepening breakdown of the global capitalist system that has the Australian economy firmly in its grip.

The working class must meet this situation through a political struggle for an independent socialist program, aimed at the overthrow of the profit system, so that the vast wealth it has created can be utilised for social and economic advancement, rather than for enhancing the profits of the corporate and financial elites.