Omicron variant thrashes global luxury cruising industry

Tom Casey

Symphony of the Seas (Darthvadrouw/Wikimedia Commons)

The Omicron variant of the coronavirus has ripped through existing mitigation measures on cruise ships around the world, creating widespread anxiety among the industry’s customers and workforce. Beginning last week, a sharp increase in outbreaks has occurred on dozens of ships across the globe. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recently marked over 80 vessels as “yellow” in its color coding system, indicating that “[r]eported cases of COVID-19 have met the threshold for CDC investigation” on each of such ships.

The CDC’s color roster only includes vessels which are currently sailing in or plan to sail in US waters. There are likely dozens more ships around the world which are experiencing similar outbreaks. While ship operators under the CDC’s guidance are not required to document how many infections there are on board, Royal Caribbean Cruise Line’s (RCCL) Symphony of the Seas, the biggest cruise ship in the world, has reported an outbreak of 48 among approximately 6,000 occupants.

There have been widespread disruptions to the itineraries of a large and growing number of ships due to onboard COVID-19 infection. Such ships have included Carnival Cruise Line’s (CCL) Freedom, RCCL’s Symphony, Odyssey and Allure of the Seas, Holland America Line’s (HAL) MS Zuiderdam and MS Konigsdam, Norwegian Cruise Line’s (NCL) Epic and Breakaway, as well as Cunard’s the Queen Mary and the Queen Victoria.

Port governments including those of Mexico, Aruba, Bonaire and Colombia have denied entry to passengers on ships which have high levels of infection, and several vessels have opted to make changes to their routes, citing concerns of COVID-19 and related restrictions.

The health agency of Puerto Rico announced on December 26 that it would require all visitors from cruise ships to present a negative COVID-19 test within 48 hours of entry. In response, nearly a dozen calls to dock in the port of San Juan have been cancelled by the Royal Caribbean International (RCI), the umbrella corporation of several major cruise lines. The company has issued a warning to its customers of the possibility of further port cancellations and onboard activity disruptions due to Omicron.

In response to the recent surge on cruise ships, US Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal from Connecticut called for a complete shutdown of the industry. “Our warnings have proved sadly prescient & continuously compelling. Time for CDC & cruise lines to protect consumers & again pause— docking their ships. Cruises are repeating recent history as petri dishes of COVID infection,” Blumenthal posted on Twitter.

In the past week, several cruise ship passengers have taken to news outlets and social media to denounce conditions on board, with many citing a lack of accurate reporting to guests and crew. “I feel like I just spent my past week at a superspreader event,” one passenger who had recently disembarked the Carnival Freedom tweeted.

Since this summer, the global cruising industry has ramped up its testing, onboard quarantining, vaccination and masking protocols across the board since its resumption of operations after the 15-month, worldwide shutdown began in March, 2020. These safety measures, as important as they are, have largely been used as a pretext to recklessly and criminally reopen the multibillion-dollar industry without respect to the risk that it poses to the physical and mental health and safety of its customers and crew.

The cruise industry has responded to the recent surge in outbreaks with reassurances of the efficiency of their existing health procedures, as well as the announcement of limited and inconsistent measures to contain the spread of the virus onboard.

The Washington Post published an article Tuesday which backed plans by the industry to continue to operate while shipboard coronavirus cases explode around the world. The article, entitled “Covid is spreading on cruises again. This time they plan to keep sailing,” repeating hollow claims by Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA) spokeswoman Bari Golin-Blaugrund that infections on ships represented only a minority of the total number of passengers currently sailing. The publication downplayed the risks of Omicron on ships, citing the fact that many of the detected cases have been asymptomatic.

During the initial months of the pandemic, cruise ships were the scene of what former HAL President Orlando Ashford called a “humanitarian crisis” involving hundreds of thousands of cruise guests and staff. In 2020, there were over 3,000 infections and 77 COVID-19 deaths on cruise ships. After passengers were evacuated, approximately 200,000 employees remained stranded on vessels around the world, most having been stricken from their company payrolls, and with no idea of when they would be able to return to their families. Over a dozen additional non-COVID-19 related deaths among crews occurred during this period which were widely suspected to have been suicides.

To put into perspective the scope of the current crisis on cruise ships, there have been 1,300 COVID-19 infections reported on cruise ships since June 2021, a period in which the entire industry has only been operating at a fraction of its original capacity.

In concert with the approach taken by the entire American ruling class, cruise companies and the CDC are acting on the principle of “do nothing until it is too late” and sacrificing lives and public health in pursuit of private profit. The recent disruptions of cruise ships are a confirmation of the recklessness of the drive to force open the industry in the midst of a global pandemic.

An anonymous submission by a crew member on board MSC Divina to Crew-Center.com, a cruise crew-run news source, reported that there were nearly “80 positive cases for crew and guests.” The employee continued, “why [is] the CDC … still giving the right for the ship to sail away with the positive guests[?] We will be denied for sure in many ports. … The management is hiding all these positive guests from all the other guests. Why no action is being taken? We have to stay with all these positive guests for 11 days even if they are isolated [while on the ship]. … For crew, there is no shore leave, the guests can go independently in every port they want [while] they are bringing the virus [back] onboard.”

British Columbia’s New Democratic government intensifies policy of mass infection as Omicron spreads

Malcolm Fiedler

COVID-19 infections, driven by the Omicron variant, are exploding across Canada, including in British Columbia (BC). The province recorded five straight records for daily infections last week, culminating in over 2,500 cases on December 25. BC’s 7-day rolling average of cases has more than doubled in a week.

The only reason new records are not being registered this week is because BC has maxed out its COVID-19 test capacity. Young people displaying symptoms have been told not to seek PCR tests. “We won’t be seeing the rise in case numbers that we would have seen if we did not hit that testing capacity,” Caroline Colijn, the Canada 150 Research Chair in Mathematics for Evolution, Infection and Public Health at Simon Fraser University, told Global News. “Unfortunately it is going to be a struggle to interpret the data in the coming days and possibly coming weeks.”

In the face of this disastrous situation, familiar talking points are being repeated by the political establishment to downplay the crush of infections.

BC Minister of Health Adrian Dix’s declaration earlier this month that focus ought to be on the Delta variant, instead of the more transmissible and immune evasive Omicron variant, was as predictable as it was dangerous and irresponsible. It follows a pattern of deflection, lack of transparency, refusal to follow and acknowledge scientific developments and focus, above all, on the need to keep schools and nonessential businesses open in the face of thousands of deaths, that have been the hallmarks of British Columbia’s pandemic response.

The homicidal pandemic policy, spearheaded by the federal Trudeau Liberal government and implemented by provincial governments of all stripes across the country, bears chief responsibility for the rise of Omicron itself.

The provincial New Democratic Party (NDP) government’s handling of Omicron is the standard response from BC’s pandemic playbook. In March, BC suffered a devastating wave of the Brazilian Gamma variant, sparked by a massive outbreak in the international ski resort of Whistler, which local health authorities exacerbated by refusing to close until the day after the end of spring break. The resort, which has a revenue sharing agreement with the province, was kept open, with no restrictions on dining and entertainment. British Columbia’s chief Public Health Officer Bonnie Henry blamed the itinerant local working population for the outbreak. In line with the refrain of blaming sections of the public for any public health policy failures, NDP Premier John Horgan claimed that young people were “blowing it for the rest of us.” There was no mention from government or public health officials of cramped housing conditions that most workers in the resort faced, which was likely a major driver of transmission.

The summer saw a tragic replay of the spring, with the emergence of another dangerous sub-variant, AY.25. The reckless summer reopening pursued by the BC NDP government and the hard-right United Conservative Party government of Jason Kenney in neighbouring Alberta resulted in large-scale Delta outbreaks in the Interior and Northern parts of BC and a devastating surge in cases that overwhelmed Alberta’s hospitals.

The BC Centre for Disease Control’s (BCCDC) weekly public variant report initially included a mysteriously labelled AY.X variant that was rapidly growing and outpacing the original Delta lineage. After a delay of weeks in July, sequences were finally submitted to GISAID, a global science initiative and primary source established in 2008 that provides open access to genomic data of influenza viruses and the coronavirus. The sequences revealed the lineage to be predominantly the AY.25 sub-lineage. This was finally included in the public variant report in October, after health officials in Saskatchewan admitted they had identified it having a transmissibility advantage.

The lack of transparency applies to all areas of BC’s pandemic response, not just variant sequencing and disclosure. The province stopped sharing health care worker infection rates last year, according to PHAC (Public Health Agency of Canada), and then denied it had done so. When pressed by local media, Provincial Health Officer for British Columbia Bonnie Henry admitted that the province had indeed stopped sharing this key information, citing the data as “too sensitive to share.” In the spring, leaked reports showed the BCCDC deliberately withheld granular local infection rate data, despite its claims that it did not collect that type of research.

The NDP government has also been deliberately opaque in acknowledging transmission in schools. Given the central role schools play in freeing parents from child care responsibilities so they can return to work churning out profits for big business, the pro-corporate NDP’s determination to keep them open at all costs is hardly surprising. Unlike other jurisdictions, outbreaks have no set definition in BC and are declared at the sole discretion of the local health authority.

As a result, only a handful of outbreaks were declared during the 2020-21 school year. But this policy masked the true reality. For example, at Earl Marriott Secondary School there were at least 47 cases among students in the days leading up to Christmas across multiple grades. The severity of the situation was only brought to public attention when the local superintendent went public with the information, while Fraser Health Authority said nothing.

Data released in May of this year revealed that there were at least 21 different instances of school transmission in a single school district, School District #43 Coquitlam, over a two-month period, from January to March, despite the data being collected between the second and third waves when community transmission was at its lowest level since the previous spring. The report officially referred to the cases of school transmission as clusters, but those are loosely defined by the province. Any incident of transmission between two or more people is classified as a cluster. As with Earl Marriott, this definition system is able to mask precisely how many students and staff members have been infected.

Then there is the issue that has gained the province the most international notoriety: airborne transmission. The NDP and its top health officials refuse to acknowledge that the primary source of COVID-19 transmission is via aerosols, tiny particles that can float in the air like smoke for extended periods of time, even though this is the scientific consensus. Henry famously declared the issue a “tempest in a teapot” in July of 2020 and to this day continues to insist that droplets are the primary form of transmission of the virus. This dogma continues to be repeated across the top levels of BC public health, with Deputy Public Health Officer Reka Gustafson, Vancouver Coastal Health Chief Patricia Daly and BCCDC Medical Director Mel Krajdenl refusing to publicly declare aerosolized particles as the main driver of transmission.

A report released in the spring and authored by Oxford University researchers specifically called out the province, saying, “From the very beginning of the pandemic, British Colombia [sic] based its prevention measures on an explicit contact, droplet, and fomite theory of transmission,” and noting that “Bonnie Henry appears at least partly driven by the urge to quell panic and maintain calm.” The highly respected University of Colorado Chemistry Professor Jose-Luis Jimenez described BC’s attitude towards aerosol transmission as “one of the most retrograde on the planet.”

The pandemic record of the BC government over the past two years has been among the most reactionary, business-friendly and anti-worker in the country. The BC NDP repeatedly stresses its desire to protect businesses. Indeed Horgan and his ministers regularly tweet statements boasting about the province’s credit rating, while, on the other hand, refuse to acknowledge the rights of workers to a safe workplace. The pandemic has shown that the NDP’s claim to be a worker-friendly party is laughable and without any merit.

Daily COVID-19 infections near 1 million as Omicron wave engulfs Europe

Samuel Tissot & Alex Lantier

A COVID-19 patient under Ecmo (Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) remain unconscious, at Bichat Hospital, AP-HP, in Paris, Thursday, April 22, 2021. (AP Photo/Lewis Joly)

The working class faces the urgent need to mobilize to impose health policies to stop an unprecedented tidal wave of COVID-19 cases sweeping over Europe. Capitalist governments are proceeding with open contempt for human life. Even as the Omicron variant pushes infections past record levels and threatens to swamp hospitals, they are adopting minimal restrictions and pressing to limit quarantine periods for those sick with or exposed to the virus.

Yesterday, France recorded 208,099 new COVID-19 cases, Britain 183,037, Spain 100,760, Italy 98,030, Greece 28,828, and Portugal 26,867. These are all record numbers, that have, moreover, doubled in just the last two to three days. Other countries posting record numbers are Denmark, with 22,023, Ireland 16,428, and Switzerland at 16,760 Wednesday. In Germany, Health Minister Karl Lauterbach said new infections are massively under-reported, and are two or three times higher than the 40,042 cases reported Wednesday—itself a 45 percent increase over Tuesday.

Official statistics with over 830,000 new infections in Europe yesterday are gross underestimates: testing capacity has been reached in several countries, which can no longer track the contagion. The test positivity rate is above 10 percent in Germany, Norway, Spain and the Netherlands, and above 5 percent in the UK, France, Italy, Turkey and Denmark. According to the WHO, a test positivity rate of over 5 percent means the virus is infecting far more people than are being diagnosed.

On Wednesday, walk-in PCR tests were unavailable in England and Northern Ireland, UK pharmacies reported shortages of lateral flow tests, and the Republic of Ireland’s positivity rate was 45.22 percent. In India’s deadly Delta wave, as hospitals collapsed, this rate peaked at 22.3 percent.

World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned: “I’m highly concerned that Omicron, being more transmissible [and] circulating at the same time as Delta, is leading to a tsunami of cases.” He added that this will place “immense pressure on exhausted health workers and health systems on the brink of collapse.”

Operating with open contempt for human life, European governments are abandoning any pretence of limiting the spread of the virus. Only the shutdown of nonessential production and in-person schooling can stop the massive surge in illness now underway and limit the resulting surge in deaths. Yet they are rejecting such measures out of hand and loosening quarantine restrictions, so as to keep enough workers on the job even as massive numbers of them fall ill.

Yesterday, French Health Minister Olivier Véran told the National Assembly that France faces an Omicron “tidal wave.” Currently, 2 percent of the French people have COVID-19 and, according to Véran, 10 percent have recently been exposed. Nonetheless, though he admitted that hospital admissions have risen 49 percent in just one week, he claimed there is no longer “any correlation with the increase in circulation of the virus,” implying that France might be spared an increase in serious cases and deaths even if COVID-19 infections mount.

Speaking yesterday, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez all but admitted that his decision not to take action against the virus reflected his prioritizing corporate profits over human life, saying that it reflected the need “to balance public health, mental health and economic growth.”

After allowing Christmas celebrations to proceed normally, another round of super-spreader events for New Year’s celebrations are being encouraged. In the UK, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said there will be no new restrictions before the new year. Nor have additional federal restrictions been put in place in Spain or France for celebrations on December 31. In Italy, public events have been cancelled, but an unlimited number of people are permitted to meet privately.

So far, Omicron infections has been disproportionately concentrated in younger adults. The inter-generational mixing of the holiday period will allow the variant to move to older generations, among whom it will cause far more severe disease and death.

European governments’ attempts to lull workers to sleep on the severity of the crisis are exposed by the crisis in Britain, where the Omicron surge began earlier than elsewhere in Europe, Yesterday, 10,462 people were hospitalized with COVID-19, the most since March 1. In London, the epicentre of the Omicron surge, this figure is 3,310, up 63 percent week-on-week. Sixty percent of Omicron admissions are among twice- or triple-vaccinated patients.

UK authorities have told hospitals to make emergency preparations for record hospitalizations from Omicron’s “super-surge,” included converting hospital canteens and car parks into field hospitals. Already one in 10 UK National Health Service (NHS) staff are isolating. In the last week, 512 children have been hospitalized for COVID-19, a 52 percent increase and a pandemic record.

Nonetheless, throughout Europe, governments are planning a full resumption of nonessential production after the holidays, and the full reopening of schools and universities on January 3. With schools acting as vectors of contagion, this will accelerate infections, hospitalizations, Long COVID cases, and COVID-19 deaths among children, who are mostly unvaccinated.

To be able to keep children at school, workers at work and profits flowing to the banks, European governments are implementing measures that will actually increase infection rates. Authorities across Europe are following the lead of the US Centers for Disease Control’s decision to cut the isolation periods of infected individuals from 10 to five days.

In Spain, on Wednesday the national government lowered isolation time from 10 to seven days for vaccinated individuals. Similar measures are being considered in France, Italy and Greece, while the UK already reduced isolation from 10 to seven days for the double vaccinated on December 22.

These measures are flagrantly unscientific. As the pandemic began, the WHO recommended 14 days of isolation after COVID-19 infection to ensure the virus is not passed on. The CDC adopted the five-day isolation rule in response to demands from airline and other corporate executives as staff shortages due to disease cut into holiday profit-making. Looking enviously over the Atlantic, European capitalists are determined to impose the same deadly measures on workers in Europe.

Workers must be warned. After nearly 1.5 million people have died in Europe from the pandemic, there is no question that the ruling class is willing to pursue reckless policies that will cost millions of lives. Indeed, at the very beginning of the pandemic, even as German intelligence warned that letting the virus spread unhindered in Germany would cost over 1 million lives, Johnson suggested, “perhaps you could take it on the chin, take it all in one go and allow the disease, as it were, to move through the population.”

This was only prevented by an independent mobilization of workers which began in Italy in the first days of March 2020, and quickly spread throughout Europe and to the US. The resulting lockdowns stopped transmission, but cut into corporate and billionaire profits. The ruling elite vowed to never permit any such incursion again, no matter what the death toll.

Today, only the independent mobilization of millions of workers can impose a scientific policy necessary to combat the virus. The ability of a scientific policy to eliminate the virus has been shown in China, where lockdowns, contact tracing and isolation of infected people eliminated transmission of the virus inside China’s borders. In 2021, just two people have died of COVID-19 in China, a country with a population of 1.4 billion.

Rate of police killings remained unchanged in 2021

Trévon Austin

According to a New York Times analysis of Mapping Police Violence’s database on fatal police encounters, US police have killed 1,646 people since George Floyd’s murder in May of last year. Moreover, with at least 1,051 deaths recorded in 2021 alone, police continue to kill about three people per day on average.

Portland police confront May Day protesters at the ICE facility on Saturday May 1, 2021 in Portland, Ore. From Portland to Salem, May Day demonstrators were seen hitting the streets to make their voices heard. (AP Photo/Paula Bronstein)

In addition to a second year of the COVID-19 pandemic which has killed more than 400,000 people, American workers have been forced to endure another year of terror at the hands of police. Some statistics and prominent cases for the year are as follows:

• On March 29, 2021, Chicago police shot and killed Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old Hispanic boy, in a working-class neighborhood. Officers chased Toledo down an alleyway before he was shot once in the chest while attempting to surrender to police. According to Mapping Police Violence, Chicago police killed five other people this year.
• According to the Los Angeles Times, LAPD officers shot at least 37 people in 2021, killing 17 of them. LAPD officers killed two men on Christmas Day, and another man on Christmas Eve. On December 23, a Los Angeles police officer recklessly fired an assault weapon in a crowded clothing store, striking and killing 14-year-old Valentina Orellana-Peralta while she hid with her mother in a fitting room.
• Pasquotank County Sheriff deputies shot and killed Andrew Brown Jr. in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, on April 21, 2021. Brown, a 42-year-old father of seven, was killed in his driveway as deputies attempted to serve him an arrest warrant for drug-related charges. Officers ambushed Brown and shot him in the back of the head as he attempted to drive away. North Carolina’s district attorney declined to file charges against the officers involved. North Carolina police have killed 21 people this year.
• The Idaho Press reported an increase in police-involved shootings in Idaho in 2021 compared to last year. Idaho police killed 12 people this year, more than double the five recorded incidents in 2020. Boise police shot Zachary Snow, 26, after his mother called police to tell them Snow was struggling and suicidal. He was shot after threatening to jump off a building.
• The three states with the highest number of police killings in 2021 are California (140), Texas (93) and Georgia (50.) Because violent encounters with police officers are so common, Mapping Police Violence reports there have only been 12 days in 2021 where US police did not kill someone.

Recent high-profile cases involving former officers convicted of murder charges—including Derick Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, Jason Meade for the shooting of Casey Goodson Jr. and Kim Potter for shooting Daunte Wright—could give the impression that police are being held accountable for their crimes, but the numbers show the American ruling class continues to preside over a ruthless police regime.

According to Philip M. Stinson, a criminal justice professor at Bowling Green State University, despite 2021’s increase in murder or manslaughter charges against officers, the overwhelming majority of officers involved in fatal encounters never face charges, much less convictions. In fact, less than 2 percent of officers involved in the more than 1,000 killings each year are charged with murder.

Stinson told the Times 21 officers have been charged with murder or manslaughter for an on-duty shooting this year— although five of the officers charged are facing charges for the same incident. While it is an increase from the 16 officers charged last year, it remains a minute fraction of police involved in deadly incidents.

After the eruption of mass multi-racial protests against police violence triggered by Floyd’s murder in May 2020, the Democratic Party and pseudo-left have worked to redirect popular opposition to police violence into the divisive dead-end of racialist identity politics while promoting illusions that the police can be reformed. However, the experience of the last year shows just the opposite. The much-hyped George Floyd Justice and Policing Act, a collection of tepid reforms, was dropped by the Democrats after it failed to secure enough support to overcome a Republican filibuster in the Senate.

President Joe Biden, meanwhile, has given his backing to the funneling of pandemic relief funds to the police. Biden announced in June that states and localities could use any portion of the $350 million allotted to them through the American Rescue Plan to fund their police departments.

The deadly force police regularly employ against the population is an inevitable result of a society riven with inequality and social contradictions. The victims of the police are of every race, ethnicity and gender—predominantly poor and working class. As the crisis of capitalism intensifies, the ruling class will increasingly rely on its “special bodies of armed men” to repress any form of social discontent or any working-class movement that threatens its privileges.

Ghislaine Maxwell found guilty of sex-trafficking young girls for Jeffrey Epstein

Kevin Reed

After five days of deliberation, a jury in a New York City federal court found Ghislaine Maxwell guilty late Wednesday on five of six counts connected with the child sex-trafficking operations of the deceased billionaire Jeffrey Epstein.

Maxwell, the 60-year-old daughter of British media mogul Robert Maxwell, was sitting at the corner of the defense table when the jurors entered the courtroom shortly after 5 p.m. and presented their decision to Judge Alison Nathan of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The judge read the verdict aloud: guilty of conspiracy to entice a minor to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, conspiracy to transport a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, transporting a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors and sex trafficking of minors.

Ghislaine Maxwell with Jeffrey Epstein in 2005 [Photo Credit: US Justice Department]

The defendant was acquitted of the charge two of enticing a minor to travel across state lines to engage in an illegal sexual act. Counts one, three and five carry maximum sentences of five years each, count four a maximum of 10 years and count six—sex trafficking of minors—a maximum sentence of 40 years in prison. Judge Nathan has not yet determined a sentencing date.

Maxwell pleaded not guilty to all charges after she was arrested and jailed in July 2020, 11 months after her former boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his jail cell under suspicious circumstances on August 10, 2019. Epstein—who had pleaded guilty to procuring for prostitution a girl below the age of 18 in 2008—had been arrested and charged a month before his death with sex trafficking and conspiracy to traffic minors.

It was widely known within ruling-class circles for more than 20 years that the wealthy investment advisor Jeffrey Epstein was hosting social gatherings at his residences in New York City; Palm Beach, Florida; Paris; New Mexico and his private island in the Caribbean that included sex with underage girls. These events included all-expenses paid travel on Epstein’s private jet and attracted the participation of dozens of high-profile bourgeois figures such as former presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., US Senator George Mitchell and Prince Andrew, all of whom have denied participating in the sexual abuse of minors.

While the four-week trial and conviction of Maxwell is being reported as a reckoning by the criminal justice system with the monstrous abuse of underage girls by Jeffrey Epstein and his elite social circle, it has not revealed the full extent of the participation of others within the US and around the world in his sex ring.

Clearly, the jury accepted as truthful the testimony of the prosecution witnesses—some of whom testified under assumed names to avoid being publicly identified—who were as young as 14 years old when that they were befriended and groomed for sexual liaisons with Jeffrey Epstein and others by Maxwell in the early- to mid-1990s. As was articulated by prosecutor Alison Moe during closing arguments: “Ms. Maxwell was a sophisticated predator who knew exactly what she was doing. She manipulated her victims and groomed them for sexual abuse.”

The verdict was also a repudiation of Maxwell’s claims that she was being unfairly blamed for Epstein’s crimes and that the testimony of the abuse victims was inconsistent and unreliable. The jury did not accept the defense claim that accusers were motivated by the opportunity to collect money from Maxwell and Epstein’s estate. Maxwell’s personal wealth is estimated at $20 million, and the Jeffrey Epstein Victim Fund has paid out more than $120 million to more than 135 individuals to date.

It is also clear that the corporate media has deliberately muted its coverage and shown little to no interest in exploring important new facts that have emerged from the trial. For example, the 118 pages of flight logs between 1991 and 2006 that were entered into evidence during the trial show far more about who was traveling and how often they traveled with Epstein than has been previously revealed.

Although prosecutors had attempted to redact some of the information contained on these handwritten records, Judge Nathan insisted a less redacted version be published. According to analysis published by the Miami Herald, Trump flew with Epstein six more times between Palm Beach and New York City than had been previously known. The records show that Bill Clinton flew with Epstein 26 times, 15 more than instances had been previously known. These facts have been barely reported or referred to in media coverage of the trial.

To some extent, the wealthy and powerful associates of the couple are heaving, at least temporarily, a sigh of relief that the trial of Maxwell has ended with a conviction. From their standpoint, the less new information that is published and discussed about the activities of Epstein and his cohort of elites the better.

The fact remains that Epstein and Maxwell were the leaders of a worldwide sex ring that had many participants who believe they can avoid prosecution and that the full extent of their collaboration in criminal abuse of young girls will never be known publicly.

It is a widely held view that Epstein did not commit suicide in his jail cell in 2019, as determined by the New York medical examiner, but was murdered to ensure that he could never reveal details of the participation of his friends in high places in the sex trafficking operation. While the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell has pushed the door open ever so slightly on the depraved activities of the rich and famous within capitalist society, much more remains to be revealed and many more are yet to be exposed and held accountable.

Volkswagen workers kept in the dark following new union-management consultations on restructuring

Dietmar Gaisenkersting

2022 will be a decisive year for all those employed by Volkswagen. In addition to the consequences of the German government’s murderous COVID-19 policy which threatens their health and lives, workers at Germany’s largest auto company must brace themselves for attacks on their jobs and working conditions the likes of which have not been seen in decades.

Referring to VW’s headquarters and its biggest plant in Germany, VW CEO Herbert Diess told a press conference on December 9 that the executive, works council and shareholders had agreed to plans for a comprehensive restructuring of the company by 2026. “We will not recognise Wolfsburg in 10 years.” His words must be understood as a threat.

Caption: VW plant in Wolfsburg

The conclusion of the restructuring talks was preceded by a public dispute between Diess and the company’s joint works council led by its new chair Daniela Cavallo (IG Metall). There was speculation that Diess would have to vacate his post. The works council was particularly annoyed by the fact that the scenarios commissioned by Diess, envisaging the loss of 30,000 jobs, had been made public and alarmed the workforce.

Once again the works council and the executive closed ranks. Diess is being allowed to stay, albeit with slightly reduced powers. The plans for mass redundancy remain on the table but are now to be given a “positive” spin. Instead of job cuts, wage reductions and worsening working conditions, the talk now is of investment, transformation and competitiveness. What this means for workers has not been spelled out.

“I am now much more confident that we will manage the transformation and remain competitive,” Diess explained. “And we will see a new competitiveness, we have made sure of that.” He has been stressing for some months that its rival Tesla takes just 10 hours to produce a car, as opposed to around 30 hours at VW.

Everyone can work out what this means for VW. The 89 billion euros the company plans to invest in electro-mobility and digitalisation by 2026 will make tens of thousands of jobs redundant. Fewer workers and lower personnel costs means higher profits, dividends and share prices. This is what Diess, IG Metall and the works council mean by “competitiveness.”

The attacks on workers will begin immediately in the new year as the company responds to the worldwide chip shortage. Like all auto makers, the VW Group is rationing out the scarce supply of semiconductors to those brands that promise the highest profits. In the case of VW these are mainly its premium brands, Porsche and Audi. Those employed in making more popular, mass brands such as VW, Skoda and Seat are at a distinct disadvantage. The latter three brands made losses from July to September, although the company is making profits, based mainly on the profitability of Porsche and Audi.

Responding to the effects of the chip shortage, the chairwoman of the joint works council, Cavallo, declared “the worst is yet to come.” Production in Wolfsburg, she said, was at its lowest level since the late 1950s, with less than 400,000 cars made, half as many as planned. A special edition of the works council newspaper Mitbestimmen! has already prepared workers for possible cuts, noting: “The coming months will be tough.”

The workforce should not bear the burden of the semiconductor shortage “unilaterally,” Cavallo writes, i.e., workers must share the burden! On the details she is non-committal. In the meantime, workers are worried because they know that management and the works council are discussing whether the current system of paying 100 percent for short-time working will be continued or whether there will be wage cuts.

In the near future the effects of the switch to electric mobility will have much more significant consequences than the chip shortage. The special edition of the works council newspaper focuses on investments due to run to 2026 agreed to by the supervisory board on December 9. The individual factory works councils describe in detail how many millions and billions of euros will be invested in individual plants. In total, 159 billion euros is to be set aside for investment, more than half of which will go towards electro-mobility and digitalisation.

While the works council and the company’s board of directors rave about investments that are supposed to secure competitiveness, they say absolutely nothing about the effects on jobs. The works council shares the same outlook as VW management: Profits come first!

Cavallo, who announced the new plans together with Diess after their joint talks, did not say what impact the reduction of production times per auto by two-thirds would have on the number of employees. Instead, workers at the company’s various plants are, as always, being played off against each other.

In 2023 the workforce of the Wolfsburg plant is due to take over production of the e-model ID.3 from the VW factory in Zwickau, with full production planned for 2024. The works council and the company are currently devising a “location package” whereby the plant—or more precisely, the workforce—must prove that production of the ID.3 in Wolfsburg is economically viable. In 2026, the new e-model of the Trinity Project should then roll off the production line.

There are also plans to intensify production schedules. “The previous procedure is unviable, and shift models should also be reorganised for the core workforce,” Cavallo said, adding that the works council was involved in talks about such plans.

Particularly in Wolfsburg, the envisaged electric models, which require less intensive production methods and are produced with state-of-the-art robots, are likely to make jobs dispensable in the eyes of the executive and works council.

Global car companies, whose numbers are constantly decreasing thanks to numerous mergers, are conducting merciless cut-throat competition, all on the backs of autoworkers. VW, like all other manufacturers, is sticking to its profit targets despite falling sales and has even increased its targets for the coming years with a corresponding increase in share prices and dividends.

More than 1,000 temporary workers have already had to quit and are the first to lose their jobs. More than 900 workers from Wolfsburg, Braunschweig and Salzgitter have been joined by almost 150 from Emden.

Global competition has assumed brutal forms. In the important US market, Tesla has a market share of almost 70 percent for electric autos, while in China, VW competes not only against Tesla models but also with those produced by its Asian and Chinese rivals.

China is the most important market for VW, where it sells more than 40 percent of all its autos. Up until now, Chinese VW joint ventures have transferred 3 billion euros profit annually, but sales figures are currently collapsing, down by 8 percent so far this year. In November, deliveries in China slumped by 38 percent.

The working conditions at Tesla and the Chinese manufacturers are the benchmark for VW and the other auto producers. This relentless competition will have repercussions that will extend far beyond the loss of the 30,000 jobs Diess projected in September.

On December 9, the supervisory board not only decided on future investments but also relieved Diess of his responsibility for China. The current head of VW’s main brands, Ralf Brandstätter, is to move to Beijing in mid-2022 and at the same time join the company’s executive. Diess is to concentrate on the transition to electro-mobility together with the works council.

The works council, IG Metall, the executive board and shareholders—which includes the state of Lower Saxony (represented by state premier Stefan Weill, SPD)—are all closely working together. The works council has achieved what it wanted, job cuts, wage reductions and worsened working conditions, all worked out and implemented jointly with the VW executive. All this is to be done, however, with as little fuss as possible. That was the only difference the union had with Diess.

Meanwhile, workers are kept in the dark regarding the deals agreed upon between the works council and VW management. Similar to the situation in the US, the trade unions and their workplace representatives no longer communicate any information about the agreements they make behind closed doors with company management. Only self-congratulatory press releases, or works council newspapers, are issued which amount to little more than company advertising. In the US unions refer to this as the “highlights” of contracts and agreements.

Migrant workers face discriminatory policies in New Zealand

Tom Peters

Thousands of migrant workers in New Zealand continue to face major barriers to staying in the country, despite the Labour Party-led government announcing a decision to grant a “one-off pathway to residency” for 165,000 people already in the country on temporary visas.

The policy, implemented in response to business complaints about a shortage of workers, came into effect on December 1. The processing of applications, however, is extremely slow. By December 21, Immigration New Zealand (INZ) had received applications covering 27,529 people, but so far only 881 had been approved and issued residency visas. Most of these, 756, were approved in the week of December 15 to 21. At this rate, it would take more than four years to grant residency to 165,000 people.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people on temporary visas are in insecure situations, vulnerable to exploitation from employers, ineligible for welfare benefits, and fearful that they may not be able to stay in the country. Many people have already been waiting years for residency. INZ stopped processing most residency applications under the Skilled Migrant Category after the border closed in March 2020.

Protest in central Auckland on December 16, calling on the government to allow more migrants to apply for residency. (Source: "2021 Resident Visa Impacted" Facebook page)

Like governments throughout the world, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s administration has for years sought to scapegoat migrants for the housing crisis, social inequality and pressure on public services. Throughout the pandemic, it has continued a brutal policy of deportations, including for people who “overstay” the term of their visa or who commit trivial breaches of their visa conditions.

According to the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, from January 2020 to the end of September 2021, the government deported 854 people (of these, 455 were classified as “self-deportations,” meaning they left the country before they could be deported). These include 189 people sent back to India, 47 to Fiji, 35 to Malaysia and 25 to the UK—all countries where COVID-19 has overwhelmed health systems and killed thousands, or hundreds of thousands.

In one case, a Filipino couple and their young child were due to be deported on Christmas Day after the father, Jeffrey Santos, committed the “crime” of claiming emergency food grants when he was unable to find work and ineligible for welfare during the 2020 lockdown. The deportation order provoked widespread outrage, prompting Associate Immigration Minister Phil Twyford to intervene on December 24 to extend the family’s visas by 12 months.

Green Party MP Ricardo Menéndez March, who has been promoted by the Unite union as a champion for migrants, hailed the decision as a “Christmas miracle” and proof that the government, which the Greens are part of, can be swayed by public pressure. However, there is no guarantee the Santos family will be allowed to stay longer than one year, and their situation is far from unique.

On December 20, Newshub reported on the cruel decision to deport a mother, father and two children aged eight and three to India. The reason is that the father allegedly performed additional tasks for his employer outside of his role as an ICT worker—the skill for which he was granted a work visa. The family moved to New Zealand in 2013, and their children have grown up in the country.

The Immigration and Protection Tribunal dismissed the family’s appeal to be allowed to stay in New Zealand on humanitarian grounds. Advocates told the tribunal that there have been millions of deaths from COVID-19 in India, and the family would have “great difficulty” relocating to a country where the children have never lived. The family was given eight months to prepare to leave.

Migrants continue to protest against discriminatory rules that block many people on work, student and other visas from applying for the “pathway to residency.” Applicants must meet one of six criteria: have lived in New Zealand for three or more years, earn above the median wage, work in a role on the long-term skill shortage list, be registered to work in health or education, or be a worker in the healthcare or primary industry.

The recently established migrants’ Facebook page “2021 Resident Visa Impacted” organised street protests in central Auckland on December 16 and 20. In a statement, a spokesman for the group said: “All of us survived COVID-19 pandemic together, but because of holding an ineligible visa on 29 September, 2021 we are unfairly excluded… Covid-19 had been the same for all of us and many of us even risked our lives to keep the New Zealand economy growing during the lockdowns. Since this policy was designed to show gratitude to the migrant community in New Zealand, we do not deserve any less than the One-off Resident Visa 2021.”

Meanwhile, thousands of New Zealand work and student visa holders outside the country have been barred from returning since the border closed in March 2020. Most will not be able to enter until the border reopens, which is currently scheduled for April 30, 2022. The government has refused to extend the temporary visas of migrants stuck offshore, including many with long-standing ties to New Zealand.

Some New Zealand residents and citizens are also unable to return, due to the limited number of places available in the country’s managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) system. Anyone who wants to enter the country must book to spend 10 days in one of several hotels that have been repurposed as MIQ facilities.

The government has refused to expand the MIQ system for more people to enter the country and to establish purpose-built facilities to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Instead, it intends to phase out the system, in line with the demands of big business to remove public health restrictions and allow the coronavirus to spread.

Last month, the opposition National Party exploited the plight of people stuck overseas to promote a petition demanding an immediate end to MIQ. This would have allowed the extremely infectious Omicron variant to infect the community; there are 54 people with the variant in MIQ.

While thousands of migrants remain in limbo, just before Christmas the Labour-Greens government resumed a policy offering residency visas to multi-millionaire investors. On December 22, Stuff reported that “Immigration NZ has now approved visas for 32 people who agreed to invest at least $10 million each in New Zealand, and a further 76 who agreed to invest at least $3m each.” There were more than 800 other wealthy investors’ visa applications in the queue.

Omicron variant fuels unprecedented surge in Canada’s COVID-19 cases

Roger Jordan

Due to the combined impact of the highly contagious Omicron variant and the dismantling of most public health measures, Canada is now experiencing far and away its biggest-ever wave of COVID-19 infections.

Yesterday Ontario and Quebec recorded over 21,650 new infections, with Quebec reporting 12,833 additional cases and Ontario 8,825. Nationally, active COVID-19 cases stand at 175,000 or more, up by approximately 75 percent from the 103,000 reported by the federal government less than a week ago, on December 23.

As grave as the official figures of new COVID cases are, they no longer provide anywhere near an accurate indication of the extent of the virus’ spread. As a result of the federal and provincial governments’ decision to let the virus run rampant, testing capacity across the country has become overwhelmed. Both provincial and local health authorities are now urging people not to get an official PCR-test unless they are showing symptoms or, in some cases, serious symptoms.

Canadian Armed Forces personnel have repeatedly had to be deployed to assist overwhelmed health care facilities during the five waves of a pandemic that has now killed more than 30,000 Canadians and infected over two million. (CAF)

One Toronto-area emergency room doctor, commenting on the fact that Ontario’s official daily number of new infections has hovered around 10,000 in recent days, told CTV News, “It's been stuck for a while at 10,000 because that’s probably the max that our system can handle in positive results. It’s probably closer to 100,000 if I had to guess.”

This assessment is backed up by skyrocketing test positivity rates. Quebec reported Tuesday that over 26 percent of all tests performed in the province in the previous 24 hours came back positive, more than five times the 5 percent threshold beyond which the pandemic is considered to be out of control. Other provinces, including Ontario and Manitoba, have test backlogs running into the tens of thousands.

Hospitalizations, which generally lag infection rates by at least two weeks, are also starting to rise. Close to 500 people are currently receiving hospital treatment for COVID-19 in Ontario, with 187 of those in intensive care. On Tuesday Quebec recorded 88 hospitalizations over the previous 24 hours, including an increase of intensive care patients by six, to 115.

Under conditions of this mounting health disaster, the principal concern of governments and their public health officials is how to scrap the few remaining remnants of public health protections in order to safeguard corporate profits. They are following the lead of the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), which took the scandalous decision Monday to cut the isolation period for those infected with COVID-19 in half, from 10 days to just five. The CDC added that those who have received a booster vaccine will not need to isolate at all, even though preliminary evidence indicates that a booster dose only provides 75 percent protection against an Omicron infection and that this protection wanes after just 10 weeks. The CDC’s open flouting of science-based recommendations was underscored by the fact that its announcement came as a direct response to an appeal from airline executives to loosen quarantine rules so their operations could continue unhindered.

Quebec’s Health Minister Christian Dubé announced Tuesday that health care workers who have tested positive for COVID-19 will be forced to remain on the job if they are not displaying symptoms, based on new government rules for “managing” and “balancing” “risk.” Dubé said that, with more than 8,000 health care workers already off the job due to COVID-19 infection or pandemic burnout, the only alternative would have been to stop providing non-emergency care. He added that the provincial Coalition Avenir Quebec government, which like its predecessors is committed to relentless austerity, would soon present similar rules so that other COVID-infected “essential workers” can keep working.

Ontario Chief Medical Officer of Health Kieran Moore, notorious for his demand earlier in the fall to “normalize” COVID-19 infections in schools, has said that in light of Monday’s CDC decision, he will be presenting revised isolation rules for the province in the next day or two.

The chorus demanding the virtual scrapping of isolation requirements is growing. Egged on by the corporate media, various doctors and academics are being trotted out to promote what is in effect the homicidal “herd immunity” policy that is responsible for millions of premature deaths around the world. Dr. Sumon Chakrabarti, a Mississauga-based physician, told CTV News, “What this is showing is that we have this mild virus right now, for the most part, especially if you’re vaccinated, ripping through the population and that’s going to cause a lot of, and I mean this in a good way, immunity…I think that this is actually, believe it or not, good news.”

Ottawa-based epidemiologist Dr. Raywat Deonandan agreed, asserting, “We will get to the point where exposures are happening so commonly that we can’t keep people at home if they’re asymptomatic. I’m not saying blow the doors wide open. I’m not saying throw caution to the wind. I’m not saying keep everything open. I’m saying reassess isolation protocols to keep society running.”

The demand to “keep society running” is in reality a plea to keep profits flowing to Bay Street and corporate Canada, irrespective of the loss in human life and number of people crippled by the debilitating impact of Long COVID. It amounts to “blowing the doors wide open” to infection and sabotaging any coordinated public health measures to contain the pandemic.

This savage class war agenda of mass infection and death is being spearheaded by the Trudeau Liberal government, which has slashed the already meagre pandemic financial supports available to workers over recent months in order to force them back on the job. The Trudeau government has not enforced a single new public health policy to combat the rapid spread of Omicron, other than a few worthless travel restrictions adopted after the variant had already taken hold at the community level in Ontario, Quebec and other parts of the country. Its priorities throughout the pandemic have been safeguarding the wealth of the super-rich and the profits of big business.

Even though the Trudeau government’s top public health official, Dr. Theresa Tam, declared last week that hospitals would collapse in a matter of weeks if contacts are not substantially reduced, governments at all levels are doubling down on their strategy of mass infection.

For the ruling class, a critical element in keeping “society running” is ensuring schools remain open, which allows parents to be freed from childcare responsibilities so that they remain available for the “labour market,” i.e., pumping out profits for the capitalists. Quebec intends to reopen elementary schools as planned next week, with high schools returning just one week later, on January 10. Ontario is expected to finalize its decision on school reopenings later this week. Currently, schools are scheduled to open for full in-class instruction on Monday, January 3.

Opposition to school reopenings is growing under conditions in which the central role they play in driving community transmission of COVID-19 is widely understood. “As a high school student in the YRDBS (York Region District School Board), fully vaccinated, I’m terrified to go back on January 3,” a student wrote on Twitter. “For the first time, I actually want to learn online if that’s what will keep me safe.”

Responding to a group of doctors demanding that schools remain open, a teacher tweeted, “I have 25 kids in my class and see 40 different unmasked kids daily when I have lunch duty in two different classes.” A Twitter poll conducted by the biostatistician Ryan Ingrund, who has built up a large following due to his provision of data on COVID-19 outbreaks in schools, found that only 21 percent of respondents favour reopening schools in Ontario.

Russian Supreme Court orders liquidation of Memorial, the leading research center on Great Terror

Clara Weiss

Thirty years after the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian state is trying to outlaw all research into the crimes of Stalinism. On December 28, the country’s Supreme Court issued a verdict confirming a November 11 recommendation by the government that International Memorial, a human rights organization centrally involved in documenting and exposing the crimes of Stalinism, be shuttered for allegedly having violated Russia’s legislation on “foreign agents.”

Founded in the midst of the terminal crisis of Stalinism in 1987, Memorial has created several databases with the names and biographical information of over 3 million victims of the Stalinist Great Terror. Entries often also provide information about and links to related archival holdings and other source material. Memorial’s own archive includes the personal records (lichnye dela) of 60,000 victims of the terror, as well as material from members of the Soviet dissident movement; its library has over 40,000 volumes, many of them rare editions. The organization runs a museum, which has organized many important exhibitions and events over the years. All of this would be liquidated, should the ruling stand.

Tables with the names of those who were executed at the Kommunarka shooting site near Moscow (c) WSWS Media

Russia’s Supreme Court ordered the shutdown of all of Memorial’s many regional branches, which have been involved in helping survivors of the Terror, setting up local exhibitions, and excavation work at mass shooting sites. Memorial published a forceful statement opposing the ruling and announced that it will appeal the decision.

Just a day before Tuesday’s verdict, another Russian court extended the prison sentence of historian Yuri Dmitriev, who worked with Memorial’s branch in Karelia, to 15 years. Under conditions of a raging pandemic, the ruling against Dmitriev, who is 65 and in ill health, is tantamount to a death sentence.

There can be no doubt that the trial against Memorial was orchestrated at the highest levels of the Russian state. The prosecution’s case was backed by Russia’s Ministry of Justice and Roskomnadzor, the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media.

On December 9, Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose office had earlier feigned ignorance of the case against Memorial, publicly denounced the organization for allegedly supporting “terrorist and extremist” groups. Putin also accused Memorial of violating its “humanistic ideals” because the organization, which is heavily understaffed, had accidentally included the names of three Nazi collaborators on its website, an error that was quickly corrected.

In Tuesday’s court session, the state prosecutor, Alexei Zhafyarov, made no attempt to hide the political motivations behind the persecution of Memorial. He accused Memorial of committing the crime of “criticizing state authorities” and stated: “It is obvious that Memorial distorts the historical memory about the Great Patriotic War [World War II] and creates a false image of the USSR as a terrorist state by engaging in speculations about repression in the 20th century; and is whitewashing and rehabilitating Nazi criminals who have the blood of Soviet citizens on their hands” (emphasis added).

These neo-Stalinist lies and slanders must be rejected! Workers must rally to prevent the liquidation of Memorial and its invaluable archives, and demand the immediate release of Yuri Dmitriev.

The political differences of the WSWS with Russia’s liberal opposition, to which Memorial's leadership has ties, are well documented. But this is not what this case is about. With its work, Memorial has cut across the efforts of the Putin regime to rehabilitate and justify the crimes of Stalin. The defense of Memorial is the defense of access to the historical truth about the crimes of Stalinism.

The Great Terror of the 1930s resulted in the murder of more than a million people and the imprisonment of millions more in labor camps. In what amounted to political genocide, entire generations of revolutionaries were wiped out, first and foremost those who led the October Revolution and the struggle of the Left Opposition against Stalinism. Leon Trotsky, the co-leader of the revolution along with Lenin and the chief opponent of Joseph Stalin, was assassinated by a GPU agent in Mexico in August 1940.

The entry in one of Memorial's data bases for Alexander Voronsky, a leading Trotskyist and literary critic. It includes the dates of his birth, execution, and rehabilitation; his former address, occupation, previous exiles and arrests, his sentence, and a reference to archival holdings.

The Russian oligarchy traces its roots back to this violent historical reaction against the world’s first victorious socialist revolution. It fears that the resurgence of the class struggle internationally will reignite interest in the origins and fate of the 1917 Revolution and the struggle of Leon Trotsky against Stalinism. It seeks to block this by suppressing historical truth and perpetuating the Stalinist falsification of history.

At the 12th Plenum of the International Committee of the Fourth International in March 1992, David North stressed :

“If one considers the impact of the crimes of Stalinism on the political development of the working class, one must say that no political force ever had such a devastating effect on the progressive development of humanity. Hitler was what he was. He was a fascist, imperialist politician. But Stalin and the Soviet bureaucracy, as well as the mass Stalinist parties all over the world, claimed to speak in the name of the October Revolution. … What was Stalin seeking to do? One cannot explain the mass killings except as an attempt to exterminate all traces of Marxist culture within the working class and within society. … The purpose of this mass murder was the extirpation of the individuals who embodied the revolutionary political, social and cultural environment that had produced October 1917. I don’t think it’s possible to understand what has happened in the last year [in 1991] if one doesn’t grasp the enormity of this crime. … To answer the lie that Stalinism is Marxism requires that we expose the deeds of Stalinism. To know what Stalinism is one has to show whom Stalinism murdered. We have to answer the question: against what enemy did Stalinism strike its most terrible blows?”

Tens of thousands of revolutionaries, including thousands of Trotskyists who would not capitulate to Stalinism, have been erased from the historical memory of the working class. Their proud record of political struggle and their often outstanding and voluminous writings remain almost entirely unknown.

The information in Memorial’s databases, as well as the organization’s archives and library, are indispensable to research into the history of the Soviet Union and the international workers’ movement in the 1920s and 1930s.

Excavation works at the most notorious mass shooting sites of the Great Terror—including the Kommunarka burial ground—have virtually always proceeded with assistance from Memorial. And the organization has helped families of the Terror’s victims learn about their relatives’ fates and win their rehabilitation.

The Putin regime calculates that it can intimidate the working class and historians with this verdict. Further attacks on historical institutions and archives will be prepared.

The persecution of Memorial has generated outrage, including among high school and college students, artists and workers. One young woman described the liquidation of Memorial as an “attempt to erase my memory.” These stirrings of opposition to historical falsification must be linked up with the growing disgust within the population over three decades of social misery and reaction under capitalism. The historical record uncovered and preserved by Memorial is, regardless of the political outlook of the organization, essential to awakening the historical consciousness of the working class.