Necropolis Now: The U.S. Assault on Iraqi Healthcare

Nick Alexandrov

The recent Baghdad hospital fire, Western reporters told Iraq, is a “you” problem. The Washington Post blamed the country’s “endemic corruption” for the 82 deaths. The New York Times denounced its “mismanagement” and “legacy of decrepit infrastructure.” And the Wall Street Journal, quoting Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi, cited “negligence.”

But Iraqi healthcare wasn’t always broken. The WHO once called its facilities “first-class.” In the 1980s, according to the UN, Iraq was “fast approaching [social development] standards comparable to those of developed countries.” Its system was the “jewel of the Arab World.”

Then Washington attacked. Operation Desert Storm killed tens of thousands of Iraqis, wrecking “bridges, roads, power and water stations.” When it ended, the UN’s Martti Ahtisaari led a mission to Baghdad. Its members were “fully conversant with media reports regarding the situation in Iraq.” But they soon realized “nothing that [they] had seen or read had quite prepared [them] for the particular form of devastation”—“near-apocalyptic”—Washington had visited. The bombing condemned Iraq “to a pre-industrial age,” and shattered the jewel.

“Destruction of the electrical grids alone incapacitated the medical system,” making hospital visits a sudden luxury. Bombing the water purification and distribution systems “led to death and suffering.” But all this only previewed the coming nightmare: the sanctions.

The New York Times calls them “international sanctions against Saddam Hussein.” They were UN in name—but “at every turn shaped by the United States,” whose “consistent policy” was “to inflict the most extreme economic damage possible on Iraq.” On its people, more precisely.

What Iraqis call al-hisar—the siege—“prohibited oil sales—Iraq’s main export—and banned imports of goods,” to the point where “food and medicine imports declined by 85-90%.” The blockade also barred Iraq “from importing material to fix its broken infrastructure.”

Some 576,000 children, by the UN’s reckoning, died as a direct result. Madeleine Albright believed this mass death “worth it,” but two successive UN Humanitarian Coordinators in Iraq disagreed. Denis Halliday concluded the sanctions were “genocidal.” And their “conscious violation of human rights and humanitarian law” repulsed Hans von Sponeck.

Omar Dewachi was equally disgusted. He started his residency at al-Madina, “Iraq’s largest teaching hospital,” in 1997. The facility was once the national “epicenter for specialized medical care,” lauded “as one of the most advanced medical monuments in the Middle East” at its 1972 opening.

But when Dewachi arrived, the building “was unrecognizable due to the lack of maintenance, the cannibalization of its physical structures, and the absence of spare parts for its outdated medical equipment.” Its physicians repurposed “nasal tubes to empty bladders,” were forced to save “sterilized disposable gloves and the remains of surgical sutures so they could be used on the next patient.” The monument, crumbling, became a necropolis: “Empty coffins went into the hospital’s morgue to come out full, accompanied with shrieking screams of mourning.”

Gruesome scenes were the norm nationwide. The siege deprived facilities of “proper illumination, hygiene, water supplies, [and] waste disposal.” Winter patients endured the “lack of heaters, heating fuel, and blankets,” while one Baghdad infirmary “got so hot in summer that ‘any child who [arrived]…without a fever end[ed] up with one.’” Nurses “reuse[d] intravenous disposable equipment,” and “postoperative care and pain management in some hospitals was limited to aspirin.” Operating theaters “provided only hand soap” for disinfectant; clinics “were cleaned only with water.” Ambulances vanished from hospital bays, leaving patients “to rely on poorly maintained taxis or coaches.”

Even cancer grew more terrible. A WHO expert, visiting Iraq in 1999, was appalled: “A cancer center without a single analgesic; a radiotherapy unit where each patient needs one hour under the machine because the radiation source is so old”; wards where “the availability of chemotherapy is essentially a lottery.”

A lottery children lost with increasing frequency. At one hospital, because of a dearth of chemotherapy drugs, “disease-free survival rates [fell] to 25 per cent [by 2002] compared to 60 per cent in 1988.” Joining them in early death, as the new millennium dawned, were “thousands of Iraqis” perishing “from malnutrition, infectious diseases,” and “shortages or unavailability of essential drugs.”

But the sanctions, like Desert Storm, just foreshadowed future horrors. Washington’s 2003 invasion—Iraq’s “biggest cultural disaster since the descendants of Genghis Khan destroyed Baghdad in 1258”—brought more ruin to medical institutions.

“Around 7% of hospitals were damaged during [2003] combat,” and U.S. forces leveled Fallujah’s Nazzal Emergency Hospital in November 2004. Paul Hunt, a top UN official, also accused Fallujah’s occupiers of “blocking civilians from entering the main hospital; preventing staff from working there or redeploying medical supplies to an improvised health facility; and firing at ambulances which they suspected were being used to transport insurgents.”

Soon infant death, cancer, and birth defects—paraplegia; a two-headed newborn—plagued Fallujah’s residents at rates above “those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs” in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

As U.S. soldiers damned Iraqis to illness and premature demise, Washington further unraveled the country’s health system. Paul Bremer’s first task, as Coalition Provisional Authority administrator, was “to fire some 500,000 state workers,” including medical staff.

Little wonder “18,000 doctors, representing over half of those who remained in the country, left Iraq” in the occupation’s first five years. Intensifying sectarian conflict—a direct consequence of Washington’s “divide-and-rule policy”—put doctors in the crosshairs. Hundreds were kidnapped and killed.

And hundreds of millions of dollars—funds meant to rebuild health centers—disappeared. The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction found, in 2006, that USAID had mismanaged two contracts. One, for $243 million, was for scores of new clinics. Few were finished. The second was for the Basra Children’s Hospital. Its construction costs tripled inexplicably, from $50 million to $150 million. But for the U.S. press, Iraq’s “endemic corruption” is the issue.

Resource-starved facilities witnessed more grisly scenes. In June 2006, a power outage at a mortuary stopped its refrigerators. “The corpses rotted because of the lack of electricity,” their “foul smell permeat[ing] through the college building” next door, into a lecture hall filled with students.

For other Iraqis, a student’s settled lifestyle was inconceivable. Some “2.7 million people were internally displaced” in the war’s first half-decade; more, years later, fled that product of the U.S. invasion: ISIS. The shelterless had little security, their new rootless lives precarious as their healthcare.

Over 2 million Iraqis, by a March 2020 count, remain displaced. Scattered among refugee camps countrywide, haunted by PTSD, depression, and anxiety, they may never be treated. Northern Iraq, for instance, has 28 psychiatrists, and 26 psychotherapists, for 6 million people.

Not our problem, reporters tell us. But history suggests otherwise.

UK billionaire wealth explodes amid devastation of the working class

Simon Whelan & Thomas Scripps

The number of UK billionaires increased by 24 to 171 last year, according to the Sunday Times Rich List. This is the biggest jump since 1989, when the Sunday Times began cataloguing the fortunes of the UK’s super-rich.

The Rich List comprises the 1,000 wealthiest people or families resident in the United Kingdom ranked by their net wealth. The list is not limited to British citizens and includes individuals and families born overseas but who predominantly work and/or reside in the UK.

Leonard Blavatnik, 2018 (credit Wikimedia Commons-Mark Neyman/Government Press Office-Israel)

Overall, the richest 250 people on the Rich List increased their wealth by 16.3 percent, up to £658.1 billion.. The 171 billionaires increased their combined wealth by £106.5 billion (21.7 percent) to £597.3 billion.

These are doubtless underestimates. The Rich List estimate subjects’ wealth from a range of public information, based on values in January each year: “We measure identifiable wealth, whether land, property, racehorses, art or significant shares in publicly quoted companies. We exclude bank accounts—to which we have no access…” In January, using last year’s Rich List, the Resolution Foundation pointed to the massive sums of wealth hidden away by super-rich, estimating that the share of the national wealth claimed by the UK’s top 1 percent was not 18 percent as previously claimed but closer to 25 percent.

The grotesque fortunes catalogued by the Rich List have swelled as the lives and living standards of vast swathes of workers have been destroyed by the pandemic and its economic fallout.

More than 150,000 people have been killed by Covid-19, nearly half a million hospitalised, and countless thousands more left with serious long-term health consequences.

Millions have been thrown out of work or seen their wages and conditions slashed.

In April 2021, there were 2.6 million people claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance, compared to 1.4 million in March 2020. By November 2020, 700,000 people were newly driven into poverty, including 120,000 children. The number of households in destitution—meaning they are unable to afford basics like food, shelter, heating and clothing—more than doubled to 421,000.

Three million more people have started claiming Universal Credit welfare payments. One in six new claimants has reported skipping meals and 30 percent said they could not afford to eat fresh fruit and vegetables daily. More than 60 percent said they would be unable to replace or repair electrical goods if they broke or put aside enough cash to save £10 a month, and over a quarter had fallen behind on housing payments.

Close to 700,000 people have been threatened with no-fault evictions, and at least 70,000 actually thrown out of their homes, despite a nominal government ban on evictions.

Large numbers of those still in work suffered massive falls in their income. According to an Office for National Statistics survey last October, 40 percent of those furloughed in the private sector did not have the 80 percent of wages paid by the government topped up by their employer. Low-paid workers were the most likely to receive no additional support from their employers, meaning that at the end of last year 2 million people were earning less than the pitifully low minimum wage of £8.72 an hour, quadruple the figure a year earlier. Even before the pandemic, in-work poverty was at a record high of 17.4 percent.

This collapse in the living standards of the working class was justified and enforced by the trade unions and the Labour Party as being in the “national interest” of shared sacrifice in response to the pandemic. As the Rich List proves, the only “sacrifice” has been on the side of the workers, in the “interest” of a super-rich fraction of society.

Direct comparisons between the fates of the two classes are stomach-turning. The more than £100 billion gained by the billionaires in 2020-2021 dwarfs the £63 billion in emergency government funding given to health and social care services to cope with the Covid-19 crisis. The windfall enjoyed by just 171 people is equivalent to the total cost of the furlough and Self-Employment Income Support Scheme.

Sir Leonard Blavatnik, the richest man on the list, with a fortune of £23 billion, saw his wealth grow by £7.2 billion last year. This alone could more than fund the government’s temporary £20-a-week increase to Universal Credit. Conservative ministers have signaled their intention to scrap this measure in September, plunging an estimated nearly one million people, including nearly half a million children, into poverty.

The devastation suffered by the working class and the ever-expanding fortunes of the oligarchy are part of the same process. Boris Johnson’s Conservative government and its de facto coalition partner—the Labour Party—responded to the pandemic by bailing out the corporations to the tune of more than £1 trillion through business loans and quantitative easing. They worked with the trade unions to enact a murderous herd immunity strategy to keep workers at their jobs producing the profits necessary to make good these vast debts.

This has opened the floodgates to an all-out assault by the employers on workers’ conditions, used to drive the fortunes of the super-rich even higher. Brutal “fire and rehire” tactics are now ubiquitous. By January this year, an estimated one in 10 workers in the UK had been forced to reapply for their jobs on worse pay, terms and conditions, according to a survey by the Trades Union Congress (TUC). Workers at British Airways, British Gas, Go North West, SPS Technologies and SAICA have already suffered thousands of job losses and thousands of pounds-worth of pay cuts under threat of this tactic—facilitated by the Unite and GMB unions. Workers at Jacobs Douwe Egberts, Argos and Weetabix are fighting the same danger. In the public sector, teachers are threatened with an unprecedented extension of the working day and nurses with an effective pay cut.

The pandemic has both exposed and deepened the extreme social polarisation in the UK. In December last year, the Resolution Foundation calculated from 2016-18 data that if the median household saved every penny of disposable income, it would take them more than 400 years to reach the current level of wealth of the richest 1 percent. An obscenely rich oligarchy and the broad mass of working people confront each other as two irreconcilably opposed classes, each of whose continued existence depends on waging war against the other.

The Go North West bus workers picket line at the Queen’s Road depot in Manchester on the first day of their strike. February 28, 2021 (credit: WSWS media)

The way the latest Rich List highlights this reality has prompted the usual insincere and impotent soul-searching in ruling circles. Robert Watts, who compiled the list, remarked in a gallingly callous understatement: “The fact that many of the super-rich grew so much wealthier at a time when thousands of us buried loved ones and millions of us worried for our livelihoods makes this a very unsettling boom”. His comments echo concerns in factions of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and International Monetary Fund that rising social inequality in the context of the pandemic threatens widespread social unrest—leading to recent less-than-half-hearted appeals for higher taxes.

Students back on UK campuses amid explosive growth of Indian covid variant

Henry Lee

University students began returning to campus on May 17, during the Johnson government’s reopening the economy while removing restrictions on the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The first reopening of campuses last September led to the massive spread of Covid-19, forcing thousands of students to self-isolate after travelling away from friends and family. The government is repeating the same reckless policy, recommending that all students be “eligible to return to in-person teaching and learning.”

A sign reading "COVID ROOMS" at the Courtrooms halls of residence at Bristol university last term (credit: WSWS)

Around one million students in England alone have been told to return to campus in every major town and city in the country. This was sanctioned by the government in the full knowledge that dangerous and highly contagious mutations of the virus were in circulation in Britain. This includes the main Indian variant, B.1.617.1, which is highly transmissible and now detected in at least 43 countries. Speaking to the BBC Today programme Thursday, Imperial College London epidemiologist Professor Neil Ferguson confirmed, “It’s now in well over the majority of local authority areas in the country and is now the dominant strain, the majority of new cases are of the variant—that is obviously concerning. It’s gone from being really a small minority a month ago to the majority variant.”

Campus returns are being sanctioned despite the government advising online Tuesday, with no announcement made, that people not even travel into and out of the eight areas hit hardest by B.1.617.1: Kirklees, Bedford, Burnley, Leicester, Hounslow and North Tyneside, Bolton in Greater Manchester and nearby Blackburn. This “advice” was changed the next day to “unless necessary” after a protest led by the Labour Party, in line with its own support for ending containment measures.

The government recommendation is that students “should get tested twice a week upon return”, with the vaccination campaign and the availability of mass testing held up as ensuring campus safety. However, more than 50 percent of the adult population have yet to receive a second dose. Office for National Statistics data show less than 21 percent of under 40s have been vaccinated, and the lateral flow tests available on campuses and widely used in schools are not authorised for “test-to-enable” purposes.

An expert on the government’s Joint Committee for Vaccinations and Immunisation has warned that lateral flow tests “are not ‘green light’ tests. You cannot be sure that if the test is negative you are not infectious and you must continue to take the usual precautions.” The use of these tests would lead to 60 percent of asymptomatic cases being missed, enabling more “super spreader” events.

While the World Health Organization recommendation was that any negative lateral flow test should be followed up with the more accurate PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) test, to enable the December return of students from campuses the government recommended that only positive lateral flow results be confirmed by a PCR test. This guaranteed that many asymptomatic students infected with COVID-19 were told it was safe to travel home for Christmas. For the latest reopening, confirmatory PCR testing has been scrapped completely.

When the promises of a “covid-secure” return in September proved to be lies, it led to a mass rebellion among students, with thousands joining rent strikes and protests to demand compensation for the way they had been treated. Many universities were forced to make concessions, offering rent rebates and refunds for students unable to travel to their accommodation.

The successes of the rent strike movement in the first term of the academic year inspired thousands more students to withhold their rent in January, but also stiffened the resolve of university management teams to avoid making further concessions, and claw back lost income. Coordinated occupations at the University of Manchester, University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University this term were met with physical violence from security teams, and were forced to end after threats of disciplinary and legal action. Students and staff have denounced the University of Bristol after it hired private debt collectors to pursue rent strikers.

In an online meeting hosted by the pseudo-left People’s Assembly during the occupations, two contrasting perspectives were put forward. Students involved in the occupations expressed hostility to the whole marketised system of education, where universities are run as businesses, opposed the reckless reopening of campuses and called for nationwide action.

By contrast, leaders of the National Union of Students (NUS) and University and Colleges Union (UCU), sought to tie students to limited protest on their own campuses. Both denounced the students for raising political issues, with UCU General Secretary Jo Grady describing their concerns about marketisation as “a bit niche”, and NUS President Larissa Kennedy bluntly claiming that “nobody cares”.

The UCU has put up no real opposition to the return to campuses, with Grady complaining only, “The decision to return to in-person teaching on university campuses when classes for the vast majority of students have already finished is a distraction, placing more workload on to burnt out staff.” She politely advised, “It would be much safer to delay any in-person teaching until September when many more students and staff will have been vaccinated.”

Scientists in the Independent SAGE group, which has criticised aspects of the government’s pandemic response, warned in February that “college campuses are at risk to develop an extreme incidence of COVID-19 and become super-spreaders for neighbouring communities.” It recommended that online teaching be maximised, to reduce transmission on campuses and to prevent the spread of variants when students travel across the country.

Announcements from universities that there will be no in-person teaching for most courses this term despite the return to campus, and that online lectures may continue into the next academic year, have been met with anger from students asking why they have been asked to return to campus.

Some have demanded a return to “normal” lectures, with a petition set up by a student at the University of Leeds signed by over 3,500 students and parents, denouncing plans for blended learning in the next academic year. Echoing government propaganda that “the cure cannot be worse than the disease,” the petition demands, “Normality must return in all areas of society, and most importantly we demand a complete return to in-person teaching for all students at the University of Leeds.”

In reality, media propaganda that young people are not at risk from the coronavirus is false, and the further removal of restrictions will put students at risk from the long-term effects of Covid-19. The full reopening of the economy is a direct attack on working class youth and students, who often pay for their studies by taking front-line jobs which expose them to infection. Universities have taken advantage of the pandemic to cut at least 3,000 jobs, degrading further the quality of education. Hypocritical statements from the government that universities must “provide consistently good courses for all students” are exposed by the proposal to halve the subsidy for arts and other courses not among “strategic priorities.”

Fourteen killed in cable car crash in Italy

Allison Smith

Three people have been arrested under suspicion of causing a cable car to crash in the northern Italian mountainside resort town of Stresa. The crash killed 14 people, including two children.

The cable car was about 300 metres from its peak when the structure’s load-bearing cable snapped at the last pillar, before the dock and the emergency brakes failed to deploy. The car that was headed in the opposite direction, down the mountain, does not appear to have had any mechanical issues; however, those passengers had to disembark using the car’s emergency stairs because the cable broke before the car was docked.

Rescuers search for evidence in the wreckage of a cable car after it collapsed near the summit of the Stresa-Mottarone line in the Piedmont region, northern Italy, Wednesday, May 26, 2021. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)

Italian Alpine Rescue and Speleological teams sent to search for survivors after the crash last Sunday morning found the cable car smashed to pieces, with only one survivor, a five-year-old Israeli boy, whose two-year-old brother, parents and grandparents were all killed upon impact.

Crash witness Grazia Aguzzi recounted to La Repubblica that, “Around 12:30 p.m., there was a loud bang, then it sounded like something was rolling, and then there was another loud bang. Finally, everything was silent.” Another witness, Vanessa Rizzo, who works at Equus Valley Riding School in Stresa, told La Repubblica, “We heard a small bang and then we saw the cables flying on the ground. We saw the other people coming down with the other cabin: they had them come down with the stairs. When the fire department arrived, they couldn’t get through because the cables were in the road.”

The survivor, whose name is Eitan, was saved by the embrace of his father. He was taken to the Regina Margherita Hospital in Turin where he is being treated for very serious injuries, including cranial and thoraco-abdominal trauma, and fractures to the lower limbs. The boy is expected to recover, and yesterday doctors began waking him from a pharmacologically-induced coma.

Lieutenant Colonel Alberto Cicognani of the Italian Carbinieri police told reporters that they arrested the owner of the company that manages the cable car service, Ferrovie Mottarone S.r.l., and the director and chief operating officer of the company that maintains the structure. This after workers and technicians interviewed by police admitted that the emergency brake system was deliberately rigged with a “fork” (spreader) on the cables to prevent the emergency break from engaging in the event of an emergency.

Had the emergency break been functioning, it would have prevented the disaster. The manager instructed that it be turned off because the cables were malfunctioning, and maintenance was unable to solve the problem, or only partially solved it.

The decision to disable the brakes was based on entirely mercenary calculations. The cable car had been put back into service on April 26, but was immediately plagued by recurring problems that hampered operations. An attempt was made to fix it in early May, but the brakes continued to lock repeatedly. To properly fix the problem would have required a more prolonged repair and shutdown, immediately after the reopening of business following the partial coronavirus lockdowns in the country.

The disaster is just one expression of the disastrous consequences of the profits-before-lives policy that has been pursued at large by the entire ruling class across Europe, who have worked to keep businesses open at all costs and permitted the deadly spread of the coronavirus.

Area residents expressed their grief for the families and their anger that the disaster could not have come at a worse time, as the country is still suffering economic devastation and massive loss of life caused by the criminal mismanagement of the pandemic by the Italian government.

There is also a massive show of support for the victims and rescuers on social media, with people from all over Italy posting via the La Tribuna di Stresa Facebook group and on Twitter, with the hashtags #stresa, #mottorone and #stressamottorne trending over the past 48 hours.

A message on the official Twitter account of Italy’s firefighters reads. “Silence and sorrow are what is left today of the cable car tragedy in Stresa. Be strong, Eitan. Italy’s firemen are all with you.”

The last Italian cable car crash—the Cavalese cable car disaster, also known as the Massacre of Cermis—occurred in 1998 when a United States Marine Corps EA-6B prowler aircraft flew too low, against Italian airspace regulations, and cut the supporting cable of a cable car. The gondola hurled 80 metres to the ground, killing all 20 people on board. The Marine captain and navigator were exonerated in a military tribunal and the charges were also dropped against the other two marines.

Italians are also still reeling from the 2018 Morandi Bridge collapse in Genoa, Italy that killed 43 people and displaced an entire neighbourhood beneath it. To date, no one has been prosecuted—including the billionaire Benetton family that owns the operational license for the toll-bridge—for this entirely preventable incident.

The Verbania public prosecutor’s office say they are continuing their investigations into the Stresa crash to “evaluate the possible involvement of other people,” verify their initial findings, collect further evidence, and ascertain the culpability of those involved.

Further complicating matters, the region of Piedmont is in the midst of taking over the ownership of the cable car, and it is unclear what liability, if any, the regional authorities will have in this incident.

Prosecutors say that documents seized from Ferrovie Mottarone will be examined, including the reports on the 2016 overhaul of the entire structure, which by law must be transmitted to the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure for approval. They will also analyze footage from surveillance cameras, which were seized, to see who was present in the days leading up to and during the incident.

In perfunctory remarks on Sunday evening, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi—best known for his draconian austerity measures against Greece, Portugal and Spain in the wake of the 2008 global economic crash—released a statement saying, “I learned with deep sorrow the news of the tragic accident of the Stresa-Mottarone cable car. I express condolences on behalf of the whole government to the families of the victims, with a special thought for the children who were seriously injured and their families.”

In response to Draghi, Corrado Guzzetti, the brother-in-law of Vittorio Zurloni, one of those killed in the crash, told ANSA news, “You can’t die taking your family to a quiet place, or fall from a bridge [a reference to the Morandi bridge collapse], the condolences of politics only make me more angry, because the responsibility for these tragedies is theirs.” Zurloni, 55, died alongside his partner Elisabetta Personini, 37, and their 5-year-old son Mattia, just one month after the two were married.

Once more on the issue of anti-Semitism in Germany

Johannes Stern

During Israel’s onslaught on Gaza this month, German politicians were in propaganda mode around the clock. They defended the murderous bombardment of Gaza with the claim that Israel has the right to defend itself. At the same time, they denounced all protests against Israel’s war policy as anti-Semitic, even when organisers explicitly spoke out against anti-Semitism.

The WSWS made clear in a previous comment that criticism of Israel’s brutal actions has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. On the contrary, the assertion that the Zionist regime’s terrorising bombardment of a largely defenceless population is taking place in the name of all Jews is drawn straight from the traditional arsenal of anti-Semitism.

Alexander Gauland (right) and Björn Höcke at the AfD election party in Erfurt after the state elections in Thuringia on Oct. 27, 2019 (AP Photo/Jens Meyer)

“An anti-Semite is not someone protesting against the crimes of the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, who has struck an alliance with extreme right-wing parties, has one foot in jail and can only stay in power through endless provocations,” we wrote. “An anti-Semite is someone who equates ‘the Jews’ with the policies of the Israeli government.”

We also pointed out that the accusation of anti-Semitism was raised by forces deeply implicated in right-wing, anti-democratic and militarist conspiracies that are the real source of the threat of anti-Semitism.

Two interviews with former German President Joachim Gauck and current Parliament President Wolfgang Schäuble underscore just how far advanced this dangerous development is. Both have played a central role over recent years in Germany’s return to an aggressive great power foreign policy. They now openly appeal for more tolerance towards and an understanding for the far-right, and thus defend forces that are, in fact, anti-Semitic.

In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Schäuble summed up the reactionary character of the entire official anti-Semitism campaign. He agitated against immigrants allegedly “calling for the destruction of Israel,” blustered about the “problem of an imported anti-Semitism from Islamic-dominated countries,” and denounced the “anti-Semitism of the far-left.” At the same time, he defended the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) against the accusation of anti-Semitism and went so far as to praise the fascist party as an ally in the struggle against it.

Over recent years, the established parties have integrated the AfD into parliamentary work and adopted its reactionary policies. Schäuble now praises them with the remark, “In parliament, the AfD is also awkwardly attempting not to be pushed into the anti-Semitic corner. Like all other parties, it voted unanimously for the establishment of an anti-Semitism commissioner for the federal government and for a resolution on anti-Semitism.”

In reality, the “anti-Semitism resolutions” adopted by parliament during the last legislative period have nothing to do with the struggle against anti-Semitism. On the contrary, like the current campaign, their goal was to support the war policy pursued by Israel and the imperialist powers in the Middle East and suppress any opposition to it.

Schäuble’s attempt to present the AfD as a spearhead in the struggle against anti-Semitism is a deliberate provocation. The party is full of racists and anti-Semites. Its leading members, including honorary chairman Alexander Gauland and the party’s leader in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, trivialise the Holocaust, praise the Nazi Wehrmacht (army), and agitate against the Holocaust memorial in Berlin.

It is a fact that anti-Semitic attacks and acts of violence in Germany, including the terrorist attack on a synagogue in Halle in October 2019, are overwhelmingly perpetrated by right-wing extremists.

In the first three months of this year, the government recorded 428 criminal acts and six acts of violence motivated by anti-Semitism, most of which were perpetrated by right-wing extremists. 378 of the crimes and five of the acts of violence were categorised as “right-wing political criminality.” By contrast, only one act of violence and one “other” crime were categorised as “political criminality: foreign ideology,” and two crimes were designated “Political criminality: religious ideology.”

Schäuble knows these numbers. He was forced to admit to the FAZ that the perpetrators are “mostly not immigrants, but right-wing extremists.” Despite this, he praises these political forces. In the interview, he even came to the defence of Gauland’s statement that Hitler and the Nazis were “bird poop in over 1,000 years of successful German history.” Gauland has “apologised for this comment so often that I must say that this is not an expression of anti-Semitism, but of a totally wrong presentation of history.”

A presentation of history that Schäuble and the ruling class are deliberately propagating. Asked by the FAZ—which regularly gives Gauland space for his Nazi agitation—whether the distancing of the AfD from these positions was merely tactical, Schäuble responded cynically, “As Parliament President, I take seriously what everyone says. By the way, I’m happier if the AfD participates in the Holocaust commemoration on 27 January than if they don’t.”

Schäuble remained silent about the fact that the AfD has repeatedly boycotted official Holocaust commemorations or used them to ridicule the victims of fascist terror and legitimise the Nazis’ crimes. In 2019, for example, Marc Jongen, the AfD’s ideological leader, justified the carefully planned war of extermination that claimed the lives of 27 million Soviet citizens and led directly to the Holocaust as a “reaction” to Stalinist acts of violence.

Significantly, Jongen based himself on the right-wing extremist Humboldt University professor Jörg Baberowski, who works closely with the government and is vehemently defended against all criticism by all parties in parliament. Baberowski justified the crimes of the Nazis and Hitler. In 2014, he declared in Der Spiegel his explicit support for the now dead Nazi apologist and anti-Semite Ernst Nolte. He stated, “Hitler was not a psychopath, and he wasn’t vicious. He did not want to talk about the extermination of the Jews at his table.”

The extent to which the top representatives of the capitalist state support the right-wing offensive was underlined in an interview with Gauck in Der Tagesspiegel. In it, the former German president and pastor railed against an alleged “intolerance of the virtuous,” which designates “valid questions or opinions too swiftly as dangerous for society or right-wing extremist.” But it is precisely “a characteristic of an open society that it can cope with differences and doesn’t prohibit people who present views that someone doesn’t particularly like or despises.”

Gauck made no secret about the “views” he was talking about. When Der Tagesspiegel reminded Gauck that he once called for this “tolerance” for AfD voters, and asked him if “this now applies to the Lateral Thinkers and anti-vaxxers,” Gauck replied, “Absolutely. But please don’t get the wrong idea. Tolerance doesn’t mean accept.” But one cannot “exclude everyone who is dissatisfied with the coronavirus policy.”

This is crystal clear. The so-called “Lateral Thinker” protests are dominated by far-right and fascist forces who explicitly declare their views by carrying the flag of the German Empire and anti-Semitic insignia. Gauck and the entire political establishment not only tolerated its protest marches in the past, but openly supported them because they serve to intimidate opponents of the government’s criminal coronavirus policies and press ahead with the reopening of the economy, which has already claimed more than 87,000 lives in Germany.

The ruling elite is also increasingly basing itself on fascist and anti-Semitic forces in its foreign policy. This was shown clearest of all during the fascist coup in Ukraine in 2014, when then-Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who has since become German President, met Oleh Tyahnybok, the leader of the far-right Svoboda Party, in the German embassy in Kiev. Tyahnybok is a notorious anti-Semite who rails against “Jewish swine and other vermin” in his speeches. His role models are Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera and Roman Schuchevytch, who were involved in the mass murder of thousands of Ukrainian Jews.

The official anti-Semitism campaign must be decisively rejected. The millions in Germany and around the world, including many Jewish workers and young people, who are horrified by the murderous wars pursued by Israel and its imperialist backers and protest against this, are not anti-Semites.

Future of Australian steelworks in doubt as UK fraud office investigates Gupta

Martin Scott

The future of the Whyalla Steelworks in South Australia (SA) hangs in the balance as the fallout continues from the recent collapse of Greensill Capital.

The Gupta Family Group Alliance (GFG), which owns the Whyalla plant, owes an estimated $6 billion to Greensill, and is now the target of a liquidation operation by Credit Suisse, a major Greensill creditor.

GFG Alliance executive chairman Sanjeev Gupta marches with union officials and ALP senator Kim Carr in Whyalla, South Australia, September 2017. (AAP Image/David Mariuz.)

The plant’s 1,500 workers, as well as around 400 workers at GFG’s metallurgical coal mine at Tahmoor in New South Wales, now find their livelihoods threatened by the speculative wheeling-and-dealing of the financial elite.

While GFG insists “significant progress” has been made in negotiations with Credit Suisse, three of its British plants have already been put up for sale, leaving the jobs of 1,500 workers in Stocksbridge, Brinsworth and West Bromwich in doubt.

The UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO) announced on May 14 that it was investigating GFG over “suspected fraud, fraudulent trading and money laundering… including its financing arrangements with Greensill Capital.”

It was also revealed this week that the Gupta-owned Wyelands Bank, which is currently being wound up, has been under investigation since 2018 by both the SFO and the National Crime Agency.

In a letter to Australian Workers’ Union members, SA State Secretary Peter Lamps rushed to quell any “unnecessary speculation and angst” among workers. Lamps assured them: “The refinancers have clearly indicated they seek to support profitable businesses and jobs.”

Immediately following the UK announcement, White Oak Global Advisors, the US-based lender hailed as a possible “white knight” for GFG, withdrew from discussions of a $777 million rescue package for Gupta’s Australian and British operations.

White Oak said it was “not in a position to continue discussions with any company that is under investigation by the Serious Fraud Office for money laundering.”

Within hours, White Oak issued a somewhat contradictory statement insisting that it would continue carrying out “due diligence” of GFG’s Australian business, keeping the door open on the refinancing deal.

Even if the White Oak deal goes through, it offers no guarantee for workers. The company has a reputation as “an aggressive fund,” taking on debt considered too risky for banks, and will demand high returns, which will only be satisfied by wage cuts or the slashing of jobs.

White Oak has been working with Gupta since at least February 2019, when it extended a $200 million borrowing facility to GFG, which was subsequently paid back (with a 10 percent yield) from the proceeds of a junk bond sale by another Gupta company, InfraBuild.

GFG’s books are replete with these sorts of complex high-risk manoeuvres that have nothing to do with the production of steel or other activities of workers, but which nevertheless expose all 35,000 of the company’s employees to the vicissitudes of financial speculation.

Primarily through Greensill, GFG secured billions of dollars in loans on the basis of “future receivables” years in advance of production. Closer scrutiny of Gupta’s enterprises following the collapse of Greensill has revealed that many of these “prospective” sales were to companies that have never had any association with GFG and which have expressed no intention of buying anything from the company.

GFG acquired Whyalla Steelworks in 2017 in a fire sale following the collapse of previous owner Arrium. In preparation for the sale, the Australian Workers’ Union rammed through a deal forcing employees to accept a 10 percent pay reduction, a 2.5 percent cut to superannuation and reduced overtime. These losses have still not been recouped.

The Whyalla and Tahmoor plants were among a large number of distressed assets acquired in a global purchasing spree that saw GFG founder Sanjeev Gupta labelled the “saviour of steel.”

At the time of the acquisition, then federal Labor Party leader Bill Shorten applauded Gupta’s “bold vision,” and said the deal promised a “bright future for Australian steel.”

Gupta promised an ambitious list of investments in Whyalla and associated businesses around the country, which were eagerly backed by the Liberal and Labor parties as well as the unions. Most of these grand plans have come to nothing.

In May 2018, Gupta announced plans to build 10 gigawatts of energy production and storage capacity—almost one fifth of Australia’s existing energy capacity. So far this has only amounted to a small test rig at Cultana, near Whyalla, which GFG has now announced its intention to sell.

The same year, Gupta unveiled a project to build electric cars at the site formerly occupied by General Motors Holden (GMH) in Elizabeth, SA. This effort was enthusiastically supported by then Labor Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis, who penned an appeal asking GMH to sell assets to GFG. Despite Gupta’s insistence in April 2019 that the company would “definitely be launching a car within this year,” no vehicle has eventuated.

A more than $A1 billion proposal to build “one of the largest steel plants in the world” at Whyalla was shelved in June 2020. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the South Australian and federal Liberal governments had offered substantial funding for the upgrade but Gupta declined to proceed.

A new plan was then unveiled for a hydrogen-powered “green steel” plant at Whyalla, part of Gupta’s aim to become the “world’s largest carbon-neutral steel producer by 2030.”

At the same time, GFG announced that it was embarking on a 30 percent cost-cutting exercise at the steelworks. While Gupta promised no jobs would be lost, he noted “Whyalla certainly has been struggling,” and that “we cannot have operations that lose money.”

This announcement appears to have headed off any negotiations for a new enterprise agreement at the plant to replace the sell-out arrangement set up after the collapse of Arrium.

Despite Gupta’s dire assessment last year, and the current perilous circumstances, the AWU continues to insist that “the outlook for the company, for the steel industry and the Australian economy more generally is positive.”

The union is in lockstep with both major parties in pointing to the implications for Australia’s “sovereign capability to make steel” if the Whyalla plant is closed, a concern closely bound up with mounting preparations for war. This raises the possibility of a government bailout, although SA Treasurer Rob Lucas has explicitly ruled out any plans to nationalise the business.

The situation confronting workers at Whyalla, Tahmoor, and other GFG-owned businesses around the world will not be resolved by an injection of cash from a “white knight” investor or a government bailout. Either will result in a boost to shareholder profits, paid for by stepped-up attacks on workers’ jobs and conditions. The unions have repeatedly enforced these attacks, as well as the destruction of entire industries, such as car production.