The official death toll in the catastrophic fire that engulfed seven
high-rise residential buildings of Wang Fuk Court in Tai Po, Hong Kong
rose to 151 on Monday.
Over 2,000 survivors have lost everything
and are now homeless. Hundreds are housed in converted COVID isolation
shelters on the runway of the old Kai Tak airport.
Fourteen people connected to the engineering company and the
scaffolding subcontractor carrying out renovation work on the exterior
walls at Wang Fuk Court have been arrested on charges of manslaughter in
an ongoing investigation into the causes of the fire.
Investigators
have determined that, among other violations, the contractors used
illegal, highly flammable netting on the bamboo scaffolding that encased
the buildings. The flames spread from the netting to styrofoam boards
covering the windows, which acted as an accelerant spreading the fire
throughout the building. The homes of thousands had been wrapped in
tinder.
Over the weekend, an unmistakable but unremarked change
swept Hong Kong. The green netting that surrounds every construction and
renovation site was being quietly taken down; bales of the stuff lie on
street corners. The skeletons of bamboo scaffolding stand stark
throughout much of the city. It is a tacit admission of the ubiquity of
the use of substandard and illegal materials, and indicates the degree
of failure of government oversight and lax enforcement.
*****
The broad democratic impulses that exist in Hong Kong are certainly
not a product of British colonial rule, nor its re-integration by the
ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) in Beijing, which implemented
modestly expanded direct legislative elections. Rather, they are the
legacy of hard-fought battles by the working class which staged general
strikes and mass protest actions in coordination with workers in
Guangzhou in the first half of the 20th century.
Beijing presides
over the reintegration of Hong Kong with the mainland under the mantra
“one country, two systems.” Under this rubric it has preserved the Basic
Law drawn up with Britain, maintaining a certain political autonomy for
the Special Administrative Region. The fundamental concern for Beijing
is that Hong Kong continue to serve as a connecting point for the free
flow of international finance capital; all other considerations are
subordinate to this.
What Beijing fears most of all is the social
contamination of unrest spilling across the border. The Greater Bay Area
of the Pearl River Delta from the Mainland of Shenzhen and Guangzhou to
the islands of Macau and down the Kowloon peninsula to Hong Kong is a
single economic unit. The spark of working class resistance at any point
could spread the conflagration of revolution throughout Southern China.
*****
While the horrors of the Wang Fuk Court fire are cloaked in the
particularities of bamboo scaffolding and green netting, it is not only a
Hong Kong event. The inferno in Tai Po is a local eruption of a global
crisis. Capitalism is producing catastrophe upon catastrophe for the
working class.
The most obvious and striking parallel is the
Grenfell Tower fire in London, the 2017 conflagration that incinerated
72 people. The green netting of Wang Fuk corresponds to the flammable
cladding of the Grenfell-encased working class housing. Both exemplify
the cramped homes of the expendable.
Engels, writing The Conditions of the Working Class in England
in 1845, coined the phrase “social murder” for the process whereby
capitalism placed hundreds and thousands of workers in conditions that
led to their “too early and unnatural death.” It is precisely apt.
The catastrophes of Wang Fuk Court and Grenfell are spectacular
eruptions of the miserable, and entirely preventable, world housing
crisis. They are not mere excesses, not simply failures of regulation.
They are an inescapable part of capitalism. For capitalism, what is an
act of murder is at the same time a routine cost of doing business. A
mass death toll is intrinsic to the functioning of the system.
Cost-cutting,
assembly line speed ups, real estate swindles and mass
evictions—capitalism is driven to these measures by its own inherent
logic of competition and profit-making. The capitalist who will not
employ these measures will be displaced by one who will, and the stock
exchange will rise.
Around the globe those that construct and tend the glittering
excesses of finance—in Hong Kong, the bank towers of Central Hong Kong
and the mansions of the Peak—these workers live in hovels, in cages.
They gather for the family dinner in homes surrounded by flammable
netting.
Capitalism has urbanized the world, but in a grotesquely unequal and irrational manner.
Around
300 human beings—fathers, grandmothers, infant children, migrant
workers—were incinerated in their homes at Grenfell and Wang Fuk Court.
How many millions more die of disease in the squalor of shantytowns and
slums of the world? The threadbare possessions of evicted tenants are
thrown into the streets in America under the watchful eye of the police.
Even
in its centers of concentrated wealth, capitalism routinely cannot
provide homes to the working class with potable water, or factory
workplaces safe from maiming and death. The infrastructure for flood
control in countries subject to the ravages of typhoons – the
Philippines, Sri Lanka, Vietnam—is criminally undeveloped and
ill-maintained, and thousands of working people die each year as floods
engulf their homes.
All is subject to the profit motive. There is
no other governing principle under capitalism. Human lives must not be
measured by its metrics.
The Gelfand Case, as an element of Security and the Fourth International
investigation more broadly, was part of a turning point in the history
of the Fourth International since Trotsky’s death. It marked the
beginning of the end of the period in which the opportunists and
revisionists had in some respects the upper hand. It was a
counter-offensive by a principled, serious, revolutionary tendency in
the process of maturing, prepared to stand its ground against the
compromised old organizations and their leaderships as well as against
the state.
*****
In the US legal system, like many others around the world, the person
who files a lawsuit is called a “plaintiff” and the people who are
being sued are called “defendants.” In his complaint, Gelfand named as
“defendants” the US government, represented by the Attorney General, the
heads of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, and the National Security Agency. He also named the SWP
and the individual SWP leaders and members who had played a role in his
expulsion.
The list of defendants in the Gelfand Case included
Griffin Bell, then the US Attorney General; William H. Webster, director
of the FBI under the Carter administration (1977–1981); Stansfield
Turner, the Director of Central Intelligence under the Carter
administration, previously the Supreme Allied Commander, NATO, Southern
Europe (1975–1977); and Vice Admiral Bobby Inman, director of the NSA
under Carter.
The
SWP leaders who were named as defendants included Jack Barnes, Larry
Siegle, and Doug Jeness. Hansen, who had been the SWP’s national
secretary, died in January 1979, after Gelfand’s expulsion and before
the case was filed. Barnes was the national secretary at the time the
case was filed, but he would go on to expressly repudiate Trotskyism by
the end of 1982.
Among the other SWP members who were named in the
lawsuit as defendants was notably Peter Camejo. Camejo had been the SWP
presidential candidate in the 1976 election, and he would go on to play
a prominent role in California politics. He ran three times for
governor on a Green Party ticket and was a vice-presidential candidate
for Ralph Nader in 2004.
Gelfand filed the case on his own behalf individually and was the only
plaintiff. If there was ever a caption to a legal case that resembled David v. Goliath,
it was this case: Gelfand, the young lawyer who had just been admitted
to the bar in 1974, versus the national leadership of the SWP together
with the leadership of the entire national security apparatus of US
imperialism.
The United Nations committee on torture has said that Israel has “a
de facto state policy of organised and widespread torture” and
ill-treatment that has gravely intensified since October 7, 2023.
It
expressed “deep concern over allegations of repeated severe beatings,
dog attacks, electrocution, waterboarding, use of prolonged stress
positions [and] sexual violence,” as well as the impunity of Israeli
security forces for war crimes.
*****
While the IDF claims that it investigates all allegations of abuse,
its top lawyer has brought no prosecutions against soldiers for killing
civilians. This is even after high-profile attacks that have prompted
international outrage and were clearly in breach of international
humanitarian law, including the killing of hundreds of medical and
health care workers and 562 aid workers, not to mention tens of
thousands of Palestinian civilians.
Only one Israeli soldier has
been prosecuted and convicted, receiving a seven-month sentence for
assaulting detainees from Gaza. Five other soldiers have been charged
with aggravated abuse and causing serious bodily harm to a detainee at
the Sde Teiman detention centre—downgraded from initial allegations of
rape—after footage of soldiers raping a blindfolded Palestinian detainee
and causing serious injuries was leaked to the Israeli media last year.
This is deliberate policy. Last month, there was uproar after Maj.
Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, the IDF’s top lawyer, revealed that it was
she who leaked the infamous video. She became the target of a right-wing
campaign of vilification, arrest and possible prosecution that had
already mobilised in defence of the IDF criminals.
That the Arab
regimes along with the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and
Fatah’s Central Committee have remained silent about Israel’s abuse and
torture of prisoners testifies to their perfidy and collusion with
Israel in suppressing the Palestinians.
The silence of world
leaders and the corporate media about Israel’s abuse and torture of
Palestinian prisoners is confirmation of their complicity in Israel’s
genocidal assault on Gaza and its escalating attacks on the West Bank.
Israel enjoys the support of all the imperialist powers that are now
themselves slashing democratic rights and freedom of speech to suppress
all opposition to their domestic and foreign policies. As far as they
too are concerned international humanitarian law and the Geneva
Convention drawn up in the aftermath of World War II are a dead letter.
Keir Starmer’s Labour government’s preparation for an assault on the
historic right of trial by jury in Britain was exposed last week in a
leaked Ministry of Justice internal briefing from Justice Secretary
David Lammy.
According to the document, Lammy, who is also the
deputy prime minister, aims to introduce legislation to end jury trials
for all cases carrying a maximum sentence of less than five years.
The proposals must be understood alongside the Labour government’s
accelerating preparations for war abroad and for major conflict with the
working class at home.
*****
Should the plans be enacted, instead of jury trials, a new tier of
courts, the Crown Court Bench Division, would be created between
magistrates courts and Crown Courts, to hear cases that did not involve
murder, rape or manslaughter charges. The proposals are based on those
floated earlier this year in a report
from retired judge, Sir Brian Leveson, and are being presented as a
response to backlogs in the legal system meaning that cases can wait
four or five years before going to court. Some 78,000 cases are reported
as currently awaiting trial.
Commissioned in 2024, Leveson’s
report complained that reduced numbers of courts and court staff, poorly
maintained court buildings, disorganisation in the justice system
exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, “pro-active policing” policies of
successive governments, along with greater complexity of cases and new
forms of evidence all combined to make jury trials take twice as long as
in 2000. The years long backlog of cases meant that “justice delayed is
justice denied.”
Leveson’s recommendations included a series of
pragmatic measures, such as more “Out of Court Settlements”, streamlined
digital processes to facilitate those, further investment in drug and
alcohol misuse rehabilitation services, more encouragement towards
rehabilitation, out of court resolutions for minor offenses and similar
measures.
Leveson also proposed restricting the “right to elect”
for a jury trial to cases with maximum sentences of over three years.
The right of appeal would also be curtailed to a more restrictive
“permission” to appeal.
Lammy’s proposals go further. The justice
secretary is seeking to increase the jury trial threshold to cases
carrying sentences of five years imprisonment or over. Leveson also
proposed that juries would be replaced by a trial judge and two
magistrates. This token safeguard, it is reported, has also been
abandoned by Lammy who is suggesting a single judge could preside over
most cases, with juries being reserved only for the most serious crimes
such as murder and manslaughter.
Lammy’s measures were denounced
from within the legal profession itself, with comments warning of the
threat to the legitimacy of the legal system itself.
The Law Society warned, “Our society’s concept of justice rests heavily
on lay participation in determining a person’s guilt or innocence.
Allowing a single person to take away someone’s liberty for a lengthy
period or decide a potentially life changing complaint would be a
dramatic departure from our shared values.”
*****
In a parallel expression of the Labour government’s anti-democratic clampdown, the Guardian reported on the removal of the judge presiding over a judicial review challenging the ban on Palestine Action.
Justice
Martin Chamberlain, described by Defend Our Juries as “widely respected
for his fairness and independence,” will be replaced by Dame Victoria
Sharp, Justices Karen Steyn and Sir Jonathan Swift.
According to Novara
media, Chamberlain has no scheduling conflicts, and the judiciary press
office refused to offer any comment when approached by the Guardian.
Swift is most known for his 2023 rejection of Julian Assange’s appeal
against extradition, and his 2022 ruling in favor of the then Tory
government’s brutal plan to deport failed asylum seekers to Rwanda.
Steyn ruled in June in favor of government exports of F-35 fighter jet
components to Israel amid the ongoing genocide. Sharp’s twin brother is a
former banker, adviser to Boris Johnson and a multi-millionaire Tory
donor. The judicial review began November 26.
London, Ontario police carried out coordinated pre-dawn raids on
November 25 against four homes across southern Ontario, targeting
members of the anti-war and Palestinian-solidarity group World Beyond
War (WBW). The raids bring to six the number of peace activists charged
in relation to a protest of more than 100 people against the Best
Defence Conference in London at the end of October, an arms-industry
gathering attended by Israeli-linked weapons manufacturers and Canadian
military officials.
The sweeping operation saw officers burst into
homes at 6 a.m., frighten children, seize personal electronic devices
and haul activists hours away from their communities.
The World Socialist Web Site
and the Socialist Equality Party (Canada) unequivocally condemn these
raids and charges. They represent a serious escalation of state
repression aimed at criminalizing anti-war and anti-genocide dissent
under conditions where the Canadian government is deeply implicated in
US-led wars around the world and Israel’s genocide in Gaza. All charges
must be dropped immediately.
*****
In its own account, WBW describes officers waking families before dawn,
crowding into small homes, harassing parents, disturbing disabled
residents and seizing every electronic device in sight. These were
intimidation raids carried out to send a message that opposition to war
will be punished.
*****
The London police statements are shot through with
politically-motivated exaggerations and insinuations. A handful of
activists allegedly damaged electronic locks or threw paint, acts that
are insignificant next to the industrial-scale violence of the
corporations and military officials being protected by the police,
companies profiting from the arming of the Zionist regime in Israel as
it commits genocide, and Canadian military officers providing training,
intelligence and logistical support.
The London raids form part of a broader pattern of repression unfolding across Canada.
*****
The Liberal government can tolerate no opposition to war under
conditions in which it is enforcing a massive increase in military
spending unprecedented since World War II. With the backing of the New
Democrats and trade unions, Carney’s government just passed a budget
containing over $80 billion in additional military spending over the
coming five years aimed at equipping Canadian imperialism to secure its
share of the spoils in a rapidly escalating third world war.
*****
The lessons of the past two years of anti-genocide and anti-war
protests in Canada and internationally must be drawn. Despite enormous
public opposition to Israel’s genocidal assault on the Gaza
Palestinians, and despite countless appeals to Liberal cabinet
ministers, NDP MPs, municipal officials and international bodies, the
slaughter and dispossession continue unabated. Protest alone, especially
when subordinated to moral appeals to the very governments and
corporate CEOs arming the Zionist state, cannot halt imperialist war and
genocide.
The working class requires its own independent
organizations of struggle. Rank-and-file committees must be established
in workplaces, campuses and neighborhoods to unite workers against war,
austerity and repression. These committees must be guided by a socialist
program that links opposition to militarism with the fight against the
capitalist system that breeds war.
The criminalization of anti-war
activism flows from the preparations of the ruling class for a global
conflict against Russia and China. The fight to defend the WBW activists
and oppose war and genocide is inseparable from the struggle to build
an international revolutionary political movement of the working class
against capitalism’s descent into barbarism.
Less than two weeks after her election as Seattle mayor, Katie Wilson
has made clear she would accept a White House meeting with President
Donald Trump if invited.
The declaration by the self-described
“socialist” comes amid mounting mass opposition to the Trump
administration’s fascistic assault on social services, healthcare and
democratic rights, along with the accelerating war drive. It reveals the
character of her politics and her administration’s accommodation to the
capitalist establishment.
Wilson made her statement welcoming a dialogue with Trump in a November 22 interview with the Seattle Times.
“I’ll meet with anyone,” Wilson said. “I mean, he’s the president of
the United States.” Her response came the day after New York Mayor-elect
Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, met
with Trump and declared a “partnership” with Trump.
*****
Wilson’s touted “bold progressive agenda” has been limited to
attempts to reforming public transit, proposing minor tax hikes and
suggesting the need for emergency housing assistance. When challenged
about her previous call for cutting funding to the Seattle Police
Department, Wilson abandoned the pledge almost immediately, stating that
she had “learned a lot since then.”
One of the initiatives with
which Wilson is associated is the effort to “Trump-Proof Seattle” in
2017, when she worked alongside Kshama Sawant,
who at the time was on the Seattle City Council and a member of
Socialist Alternative, which operates in the orbit of the Democratic
Party. With Trump’s return to power, Wilson revived the “Trump-Proof
Seattle” banner, now saying it was necessary to “think about how to
protect ourselves and our neighbors from the actions of an even more
virulent federal administration.”
Not only are such words undercut
by Wilson’s own willingness to talk with Trump, it’s undercut by the
actions of the administration to which Wilson has no answer. There have
been at least 1,000 ICE arrests in Washington this year, and the
agency’s own data shows that at least two-thirds of those picked up have
not committed a crime.
*****
Wilson’s election reflected working class anger at social inequality.
Workers and youth who supported her campaign were expressing their
hatred of the current socioeconomic order and their search for a
socialist alternative. However, they will not find it in Wilson.
While
Wilson is not a member of the DSA like Mamdani, her politics are the
same. She promotes the fiction that the interests of workers and youth
can be advanced through the Democratic Party. In class terms, these
figures represent sections of the upper middle class, not the working
class.
Amidst a broad political radicalization in the US and
internationally, the experiences of these elections must be drawn, as
part of the development of a political movement of the working class, in
opposition to the oligarchy and the entire political system, on the
basis of a genuine and revolutionary socialist program and perspective.
The Yarram sawmill, which cut softwood for products like pallets and
fencing, has been operating since 1996, passing through several
different corporate owners before AKD acquired it in 2018.
No
clear explanation has been given for the sudden shutdown of the sawmill.
The 2023 closure of the Opal paper mill an hour away in Maryvale, which
had been purchasing wood chips from the Yarram plant may well have
contributed.
*****
Yarram sawmill workers and local residents told World Socialist Web Site
reporters they had been blindsided by the sudden closure of the plant,
which had been training new staff, had recently been upgraded, and
appeared to be in full operation.
One local said the company had
“been planning it for sure. They were really holding it close to their
chest, because everyone was in the dark.”
*****
The closure of the Yarram sawmill, the second largest employer—after
supermarket chain Woolworths—in the town of over 2,000 people, threatens
to cascade through the local district, adding to the ongoing employment
crisis in the Gippsland region.
*****
The shutdown and destruction of jobs in Yarram can and must be
fought, but it will require a fight to mobilise the support of workers
at the other AKD facilities in Colac, Caboolture, Tumut and Oberon,
throughout the timber industry and more broadly.
The material
basis for this support is that the sudden Yarram closure is not a unique
phenomenon, but part of a global attack on the working class. It is a
reminder that, under capitalism, no worker is safe from being thrown on
the scrapheap without notice, according to the profit imperatives of
corporations and their shareholders.
With the votes of the governing Christian Democratic Union/Christian
Social Union (CDU/CSU) and Social Democrats (SPD), the Bundestag,
Germany’s federal parliament, passed the budget for 2026 on Friday. It
is a war budget. Eighty years after the unprecedented crimes of the
Wehrmacht and Hitlerite fascism, the ruling class is once again pursuing
a massive rearmament program that breaks with all post-war
restrictions and is systematically preparing Germany for a third world
war—with Russia as its main target.
Defense spending will rise to
€108.2 billion next year—the highest military budget in the history of
the Federal Republic. It consists of the regular defense budget of
€82.69 billion and an additional €25.51 billion from the Bundeswehr’s
(German Armed Forces) special fund approved in 2022. Compared to 2025
alone, this means an increase of more than €20 billion.
This
historic increase is the prelude to a gigantic rearmament program that, in terms of its scale and objectives, is openly modelled on the
Nazi war machine of the 1930s. By 2029, the defense budget is set to
rise to more than €150 billion. If we add the “infrastructure-related”
war expenditures in the transport, research and economics ministries,
around five percent of Germany’s gross domestic product will then be
spent on military purposes—around €215 billion annually.
*****
The biggest beneficiaries of the budget are the German arms
companies—the same ones that already armed Hitler’s Wehrmacht. According
to the latest SIPRI Arms Trade Report, the four German companies in the
ranking—Rheinmetall, Diehl, ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems and
Hensoldt—already increased their revenues from arms sales by 36 percent
last year.
*****
In his speech on the military budget in the Bundestag, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius made clear the comprehensive imperialist goals
pursued by the German government. First, in the style of a warmongering
militarist during the First World War, he railed against a “capitulation
peace” in Ukraine: “There must be no false peace, no capitulation
peace.”
This is the familiar propaganda that turns reality on its
head and obscures the predatory interests of German imperialism. As in
the German Empire and under Hitler, the aim is to dominate Europe
militarily in order to become a world power. The immediate focus is on
the escalation of war against Russia, but the conflict with the US is
also coming to a head with Trump’s Ukraine deal, which Pistorius made no
secret of in his speech.
He declared: “We must redefine our
position on the geopolitical chessboard. We do not know which alliances
we can still trust in the future and how long they will last.” NATO must
therefore “become more European” and Europeans must “do more for our defense.” In other words, Germany and the EU must build up an
independent military power that can act independently of Washington if
necessary.
The extent to which preparations for war have already progressed is underlined by a recent report in the Wall Street Journal.
Under the headline “Germany’s Secret Plan for War With Russia,” the
newspaper describes how the more than 1,200-page “Operation Plan
Germany” (OPLAN DEU) was developed.
The plan describes in detail
how, in the event of war, up to 800,000 German, US and NATO soldiers are
to be deployed to the east via ports, highways, rivers and rail lines.
Germany is being organized as the central hub of a future NATO ground
war against Russia. The concept calls for an “all-of-society approach to
war:” the merging of civilian and military infrastructure and the mobilization of the entire society for war.
The working class is
to pay for the war policy in every respect: As cannon fodder on the
battlefield and in the form of massive attacks on social and democratic
rights to finance and enforce the war policy. Nevertheless, the war
plans are supported by all parties in the Bundestag.
*****
The massive rearmament and war preparations are meeting with growing
opposition among the population. Strikes and protests are forming
throughout Europe—in Belgium and Italy, where general strikes lasting
several days took place last week, in France, and increasingly in
Germany as well.
The nominally “left” parties, trade unions and
pseudo-left organizations, which in some cases verbally support the
strikes and protests, do not represent the interests of workers and
youth, but seek to control them and subordinate them to the capitalist
governments. But the warmongering of the ruling class stems from the
capitalist profit system itself, which is in a historic crisis and, as
in the past, is relying on fascism and war.
The Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) and
its European and international sister parties in the International
Committee of the Fourth International are the only force consistently
opposing this path to catastrophe. We give voice to the opposition to
war and link it to the necessary political perspective: the building of
an international socialist movement to overthrow the capitalist
system—the only way to prevent a Third World War.
Trincomalee is a major city in the Eastern Province, where Tamils,
Muslims, and Sinhalese live. The erection of a Buddhist shrine was a
deliberate provocation with the potential to ignite communal tensions
between Sinhala-Buddhists and the Tamil and Muslim communities that form
a majority in the province.
The North and East were devastated by
the 26-year communal war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of
Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which ended in May 2009. As part of the systematic
discrimination against Tamils, successive Colombo governments
established Sinhala colonies, particularly in the East, in a bid to
change demographic patterns and foster communal tensions. Since the end
of the war, Buddhist monks have been seeking to re-establish “their
heritage” and expand their influence in the north and east.
*****
The Colombo political establishment has long used Sinhala supremacist
ideology and anti-Tamil chauvinism to bolster their support and divide
the working class, particularly in times of crisis. All of the
opposition parties immediately joined the fray, condemning the removal
of statue as an attack on Buddhism.
Speaking in the parliament,
the opposition leader Sajith Premadasa, from the Samagi Jana Balawegaya
(SJB), demanded that the government uphold the constitution and the
supremacy of Buddhism. Sections of the establishment media joined in the
filthy communal campaign.
In response, the Tamil nationalist
parties opposed the government’s actions on the basis of their own
communal politics. ITAK spokesperson M.A. Sumanthiran called on all
Tamil members of the government to resign immediately, declaring that
the government’s support for the placement of the statue exposed its
claims to be fostering equality for all.
*****
Amid the ongoing furor, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake appeared
in parliament on November 18. The Buddha statue, he said, had been
“replaced” at the original location and “everything related to this
issue has now been resolved.” The government would act according to the
verdict of the court to be delivered on December 26.
“We do not
allow communalism,” Dissanayake lyingly declared. “If someone is trying
to revive old communalism, they will not be allowed at present or in the
future.” In fact, the JVP has been steeped in Sinhala supremacism since
its formation in 1966 and an aggressive and violent “patriotic”
defender of the “Sinhala nation,” particularly during the protracted
communal war against the LTTE.
However, as it sought to win power
for the first time last year, the JVP—together with its electoral front,
the NPP—drawn from layers of the upper middle class—attempted to put on
a democratic and liberal face and whitewash its past. The aim was to
boost its vote among Tamils and Muslims and get the backing of sections
of big business.
A year on, the government’s promises about
democracy and reconciliation have been jettisoned. The North and East of
the island are still under military occupation. The political prisoners
are in jails despite JVP/NPP’s pledge to release them. Those
responsible for war crimes and atrocities of the Sri Lankan military
have not been held accountable.
*****
Now the JVP/NPP government has caved into the demands of the Sinhala
Buddhist supremacists over the statue in Trincomalee. Dissanayake’s
“opposition” to communalism is empty political posturing.
The Sri
Lankan ruling class confronts a deepening political and economic crisis.
The JVP/NPP government is intensifying the implementation of the
International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) demands for devastating austerity
measures. It will resort to anti-Tamil chauvinism to whip up communal
provocations and divisions as it faces mass opposition from workers and
the rural poor to the destruction of jobs and their living conditions.
The
Socialist Equality Party (SEP) opposes all forms of racialism and
nationalism and urges Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim workers to learn the
lessons from the bloody consequences of the past—above all the 30-year
communal war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
It is only
the working class in the fight for socialism that will defend the basic
democratic rights of all. Workers need to unite and rally the rural poor
and oppressed in the struggle for a workers’ and peasants’ government
that will restructure society from top to bottom to meet the needs of
the vast majority, not the profits of the wealthy few—that is, along
socialist lines.
Protesters thwarted a federal immigration raid in New York City on
Saturday, despite a violent crackdown by the New York Police Department
(NYPD), overseen by Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s re-appointed police
commissioner, Jessica Tisch.
The spontaneous protest erupted
outside a parking garage in Manhattan’s Chinatown, where agents from
Trump’s Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) were
preparing to launch their second large-scale immigration raid in six
weeks. A crowd of roughly 200 people formed human chains and barricades
made of trash to block the convoy of agents from exiting the garage.
The
NYPD responded by deploying its notorious Strategic Response Group,
which is known for using militarized tactics to suppress protests, to
aid the immigration Gestapo. Officers forcibly cleared a path for the
agents, violently assaulting demonstrators who refused to move,
deploying pepper spray and arresting more than a dozen people.
Ultimately, the protest succeeded in forcing the federal agents to call
off the raid and retreat to New Jersey.
Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition,
summarized the role of both federal agents and police. “The violence
that occurred today could have been avoided had ICE agents not escalated
tensions,” he said. “But instead of holding federal agents accountable
for their aggressive tactics, the NYPD instead helped facilitate ICE’s
campaign of terror. ICE must stop wreaking havoc across New
York—separating families and harming our communities. The NYPD must
immediately release the New Yorkers who they arrested, and stop all
collaboration with ICE.”
*****
The significance of Saturday’s NYPD operation under Tisch is that it
strips away the rhetorical pretense and bares the political reality of
Mamdani’s incoming administration.
As of Monday, Mamdani has made no public comment on the ICE raid or
the NYPD’s role in defending it. His transition spokesperson, Monica
Klein, told the press: “The Mayor-elect has made it clear—including to
the President—that these raids are cruel and inhumane, and fail to
advance genuine public safety.”
Tisch, meanwhile, informed the New York Times that
she had spoken with a Department of Homeland Security official and
called the federal agents’ actions “unacceptable.” Neither Mamdani nor
Tisch addressed the glaring contradiction: If ICE is a “rogue agency”
conducting “cruel and inhumane” raids in an “unacceptable” manner, why
did the NYPD, led by Mamdani’s appointee, defend it against protesters?
The attempted raid also explodes the myth that Mamdani’s meeting with
Trump at the White House was a clever political move that neutralized
the fascist president and prevented further immigration raids. Just over
a week after their meeting, federal agents were preparing a major
operation that could not possibly have gone ahead without Trump’s
approval.
*****
Saturday’s ICE raid was not stopped by Mamdani’s backroom dealings
with Trump. It was stopped by the independent initiative of ordinary New
Yorkers who took it upon themselves to defend their neighbors. That
spontaneous action is an indication of future struggles on a much
broader scale.
Trump, acting on behalf of the capitalist
oligarchy, is accelerating the drive toward dictatorship. Opposition to
Trump and fascism must be consciously organized, based in the
international working class, and completely independent of and in
opposition to the Democratic and Republican parties.
Two students from Western International High School (WIHS) in
Detroit—16-year-old cousins from Venezuela—were seized by federal
immigration agents in a predawn raid on November 20. US Customs and
Border Protection (CBP) agents swept into their home on Detroit’s east
side with a search warrant for another individual. Not finding their
target, the CBP seized the young students together with one parent from
each family.
The youths are Venezuelan asylum seekers with active
cases and valid work permits. They both worked at a Chili’s restaurant
and were described as “excellent students.” The young boys and their
family members are now imprisoned in the South Texas Family Residential
Center, an ICE facility.
*****
There is no national or statewide database of how many students or
youth have been abducted, detained or deported, although the Detroit ICE
field office oversaw the deportation of approximately 2,300 people to
more than 80 countries in the first six months of 2025. The available
information indicates that these deportees include at least 40 children
under 16, the youngest of whom is three or four years old.
“This is very wrong! Kids shouldn’t be taken,” a Western International student told the World Socialist Web Site.
“School is supposed to be a safe space. They were kidnapped by ICE even
though they were following the rules. This is kidnapping, no matter how
you cut it. Kidnapping in its finest form. Kids should be able to go to
school without having to be worried about if ICE is going to take them
or not.”
*****
The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE)
campaigned at Western International last week, alerting students of the
abduction of their classmates. Most had not yet been informed. The IYSSE
not only demanded the immediate release of the students, but put
forward a program to build rank-and-file committees among students,
teachers and workers to organize independent resistance. The IYSSE
stressed that young people had to turn to the working class—the social
force that had the power to cut off the flow of profits to the oligarchy
and drive Trump and his fascist cabal from office.
This meant
mobilizing the collective strength of workers in the auto, healthcare,
logistics and other industries fighting job cuts and deadly working
conditions, federal and other government workers fighting budget cuts
and mass layoffs and other sections of the working class.
Such a
fight could only be waged if workers organized independently of the
union bureaucracies and the Democratic Party, which have done everything
possible to block resistance by workers and young people to these
attacks. The industrial counter-offensive of the working class being
championed by the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File
Committees had to be combined a political counter-offensive against
Trump and his Democratic Party enablers and for workers’ power and
socialism.
*****
Far from opposing Trump, The Democrats have facilitated the fascist
president’s policy of mass deportations every step of the way, including
providing critical support to the Laken Riley Act,
which has normalized the criminalization of immigrant workers and
channels funding and police powers into federal immigration enforcement,
enabling mass roundups. Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer backed
federal proposals to “make it easier for immigration officers to remove
those who are here unlawfully,” and even supported deploying the
National Guard to the border—moves that politically and materially
facilitate Trump’s illegal war against immigrants and the working class
as a whole.
Several tens of thousands of young people from across Hesse and
beyond protested in Giessen on November 29 against the founding of a new
youth organization by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
Driving
the protests was an alliance called “Widersetzen” (“Resist”),
consisting mainly of groups such as “Students against the Right,”
“University Students against the Right,” “Apprentices against the Right”
and others. They had already called nationally for a school strike
against the AfD on Friday, November 28, and in the weeks beforehand.
Protected
and shielded by the state authorities in Giessen, the AfD founded its
new version of a Hitler Youth movement under the name “Generation
Germany.”
Journalists from public broadcasters, reporting from the
AfD assembly in the Giessen exhibition halls, expressed shock, saying
the new organisation was “obviously firmly right-wing extremist.” The
demand for “the mass deportation of millions” had been greeted with
frenzied applause. The delegate Alexander Eichwald, who delivered a
speech to the assembled fascists, mimicking Hitler’s distinctive verbal
style, received more than 12 percent of the votes in the preliminary
elections.
“We cannot allow right-wing extremist, fascist politics to spread
more and more in the public arena,” Zita, Leo, Felix and Jule from
Darmstadt told the World Socialist Web Site. “This also has to
be stopped when it comes in the guise of the Christian Democratic Union
(CDU) or other establishment parties.” The four agreed that capitalism
must be abolished, and that none of the establishment parties aims to do
so, not even the Left Party.
*****
The decision to hold an AfD event in Giessen, a city with a long
anti-fascist tradition, was a deliberate provocation. In the working
class city and in the neighbouring town of Wetzlar, home to the Buderus
steelworks, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Greens and the unions
have traditionally been strong; in recent years (especially since the
Nazi murder of the Kassel district president Walter Lübke) there have
been numerous large demonstrations against the AfD.
Protests
therefore had to be expected. The Hesse state Interior Ministry took
advantage of this by using the day to conduct a major police operation.
The exhibition halls were cordoned off completely and across a wide
area; police escorted AfD participants partly across the premises of the
municipal utilities towards the venue.
The city center was closed to cars, and most shops had shut. Many houses displayed banners against fascism.
*****
From the establishment parties, which attempted to co-opt the
protest, there were practically no political statements on how fascism
can actually be stopped—other than reactionary appeals to the bourgeois
state. Only the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality
Party, SGP) and its youth organisation, the International Youth and
Students for Social Equality (IYSSE), put forward a clear,
well-thought-out perspective. In the statement “The fight against the AfD requires a fight against capitalism,” which also appeared on the WSWS over the weekend, it reads:
[T]he
AfD is being ever more openly integrated into the political
establishment, and substantial parts of its programme—such as the
persecution of refugees and the massive rearmament drive—are being
implemented by all the parliamentary parties. … A serious struggle
against the fascist danger requires a clear understanding of the causes
of this shift to the right: escalating militarism and the deep crisis of
capitalism. It requires a socialist perspective that abolishes the
foundation of war and fascism: the capitalist system.
The
statement received a strong response, and many young people agreed that
the establishment parties, including the Left Party, are moving further
and further to the right in their policies. The protest in Giessen was
therefore an expression of a new movement against war, fascism and
social devastation, which is developing across Europe and must be armed
with a clear socialist perspective and leadership.
Tens of thousands are demonstrating in Giessen against the founding
of the fascist youth organization of the Alternative for Germany (AfD).
The mass protests are significant, because the AfD is being ever more
openly integrated into the political establishment. Substantial parts of
its program, such as the persecution of refugees and the massive
rearmament drive, are being implemented by all the parliamentary
parties.
However, the protest is being led politically by the very
forces that are themselves moving ever further to the right and paving
the way for the fascist AfD—the trade unions, the Social Democratic
Party (SPD), the Greens, the Left Party and even the Liberal Democratic
Party (FDP). A serious struggle against the fascist danger requires a
clear understanding of the causes of this shift to the right: escalating
militarism and the deep crisis of capitalism. It requires a socialist
perspective that abolishes the foundation of war and fascism: the
capitalist system.
In the United States, Donald Trump has already
formed a government of the financial oligarchy that suppresses all
resistance to the mass deportation of immigrant workers, to the genocide
in Gaza and to its war plans, with the help of fascist gangs and the
military.
In Germany, too, the fascists are increasingly being
integrated into parliamentary work. The Association of Family-Owned
Businesses recently announced that it will in future cooperate with the
AfD. In the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), faction leader Jens Spahn
and Bundestag (parliament) President Julia Klöckner have long been
working towards receiving support from the AfD, or even bringing it
directly into government.
For this reason, the mobilization fortoday’s
demonstration has also been massively attacked. In Berlin, students
were prohibited from holding anti-fascist assemblies in order to
mobilise for Giessen. The CDU-SPD state government in Hesse sent
thousands of police officers into the city to brutally suppress the
protests and enable the founding of the fascist youth organization.
*****
In the United States, the Democratic Party is working closely with
Trump. The newly elected “left-wing” mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani,
reconciled himself with Trump even before taking office. This shows that
the entire ruling class is committed to war and dictatorship.
Here
too, the Greens and the Left Party support the extreme right-wing
policy of the federal government on all essential points. The Left Party
approved the one-trillion-euro war credits in the Federal Council,
enabled Friedrich Merz to be elected chancellor swiftly and lends the
government its votes whenever they are required. At the state and
municipal level, it implements cuts and deportations. For the Greens,
the government’s war policy does not go far enough; they would prefer to
wage war against nuclear-armed Russia sooner rather than later.
The
formerly “left” parties are marching straight to the right because they
defend the bankrupt capitalist system, which is descending ever deeper
into barbarism. The same applies to the trade union bureaucrats. They
have degenerated into co-managers who enforce the dictates of corporate
executives against the workforce. They support the nationalist agenda of
trade war and military conflict.
Workers can halt the shift to
the right and prevent war and fascism only if they break with these
pro-capitalist organizations and organize themselves in independent
rank-and-file action committees that link the struggle against social
attacks with the struggle against war and defend democratic rights.
These action committees must unite across all national borders and join
the International Workers’ Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.
Two Palestinian children were killed by an Israeli drone strike on
the edge of the Bani Suheila neighborhood of Khan Younis in Gaza on
Saturday.
Palestinian medical officials at Nasser Hospital in Khan
Younis reported that an Israeli drone fired on two brothers in the area
east of the city, in a zone that Israel designates as being on the
Israeli‑controlled side of the ceasefire line.
Palestinian media
also reported the identities of the victims as brothers from the Abu Asi
family, Juma, aged 11, and Fadi, aged 8. International coverage noted
that the strike took place close to the mapped Yellow Line east of Khan
Younis, where the army has warned Palestinians not to approach its
forces and has used drones and live fire to enforce the boundary.
*****
Throughout the ceasefire period, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu has continued to reject any recognition of Palestinian
statehood even as the Gaza “peace” framework is pushed through the UN
Security Council, insisting that Israel’s opposition to a Palestinian
state “in any territory has not changed.” This stance is mirrored by the
murderous attacks on Palestinians that has continued and is essentially
an extension of the genocide that began more than two years ago.
Israeli
officials have paired such statements with assertions that they will
maintain full freedom of military action in Gaza throughout the
ceasefire period, openly admitting that the lines and maps published for
civilians do not restrict the army’s right to strike anywhere it deems
necessary.
According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, as many as 350
Palestinians have been killed and nearly 900 wounded by Israeli fire
since the ceasefire formally came into effect on October 10. These
figures include people killed by drone strikes, tank fire and snipers
along and beyond the Yellow and Red Lines, as well as those killed in
continued airstrikes on residential areas and camps that Israel claims
are linked to “security operations.”
*****
Parallel to the ongoing violence is the Trump administration’s
aggressive reconstruction and “stabilization” scheme that would further
partition Gaza and entrench Israeli control of Gaza. A US‑backed UN
Security Council resolution endorses Washington’s 20‑point ceasefire
strategy, calls for deployment of an International Stabilization Force
to enter, disarm and govern Gaza, and establishes a “Board of
Peace”—headed by the fascist US President Donald Trump—to oversee
Israeli control, without any genuine Palestinian representation or
commitment to statehood.
Central to this plan is the construction
of large “Alternative Safe Communities” in Israeli‑controlled areas of
Gaza, composed of dense housing compounds made of temporary structures,
each designed to hold between 20,000 and 25,000 Palestinians and to
include clinics and educational facilities.
These residential
zones would be built primarily on the eastern half of the Strip under
longstanding Israeli military control, creating a chain of isolated
settlements ringed by army positions and international forces along the
Yellow Line.
Media reports about the scheme identify senior Trump
administration official Aryeh Lightstone—previously a key aide to former
ambassador David Friedman and an architect of the Abraham Accords
economic projects—as the point man for the “Alternative Safe
Communities” initiative, publicly arguing that the compounds are the
“easiest way” to get Palestinians into housing “as soon as humanly
possible.”
Meanwhile,
Jared Kushner, Trump’s son‑in‑law, has been closely associated with
post‑war economic and real‑estate planning in Gaza and the wider region,
leveraging his ties with Gulf monarchies and his background in property
development. This is an unambiguous indication of the plan by powerful
real estate interests to make a fortune from the conversion of Gaza into
a vast wasteland of rubble where tens of thousands of Palestinians have
been killed and many thousands are still buried.
*****
By transforming Gaza into a patchwork of fenced “safe
communities”—essentially overcrowded concentration camps—and off‑limits
Red zones, the plan aims to convert a devastated, densely populated
enclave into a source of highly-exploited labor and a consumer pool
under long‑term occupation.
As pointed out by the World Socialist Web Site
since the announcement of the October 10 ceasefire, the US‑Israeli
“peace” framework is not a step toward Palestinian self‑determination or
an end to the barbaric treatment of Gazans. These are instruments for
consolidating a strategic defeat of the population while preserving the
foundations of Zionist rule and US imperialism in the region.
The
ceasefire has not halted Israeli violence; instead, it has provided a
political and legal cover for continued killings, such as the Bani
Suheila drone strike, while internationalizing the occupation through an
“International Stabilization Force” that would police Palestinians on
Israel’s behalf.
The creation of “Alternative Safe Communities”
corresponds in content to the goal of ethnically cleansing zones in Gaza
in which an uprooted people are warehoused under guard, stripped of
basic democratic rights and any genuine control over their own lives.
By
channeling reconstruction funds through US‑dominated businesses and
Gulf monarchies, the plan will tie Palestinian survival to the same
capitalist and imperialist forces responsible for their historic
dispossession and make every aspect of daily life contingent on
political oppression and subordination to the wealth accumulation aims
of the international financial oligarchy.
The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is pausing
indefinitely all decisions on asylum applications, while launching
systematic reviews that threaten the legal status of two large groups of
immigrants—the 3.3 million green card holders from 19 countries
designated by President Trump and the 180,000 people admitted as
refugees during the four years of the Biden administration.
The
Trump administration claims that these actions are in response to the
shooting Wednesday of two National Guard soldiers in Washington D.C. by
an Afghan refugee, a former participant in a CIA-run death squad in his
home country who fled after the Taliban takeover in 2021. One of the two
soldiers, Sarah Beckstrom, 20, of Summersville, West Virginia, has
died, while the other, Andrew Wolfe, 24, of Martinsburg, West Virginia,
remains in critical condition.
The shooting last week is merely a pretext, as both the selection of
the 19 countries “of concern” was announced in June and the decision to
review all refugees admitted during the Biden administration had been
made public Monday, before Wednesday’s attack.
The review of green
card holders will affect 3.3 million people, the bulk of them, 2.2
million, from three countries in the Caribbean basin—1 million from
Cuba, 700,000 from Venezuela and 500,000 from Haiti. All three countries
are subject to either US economic blockade or other forms of sanctions,
which have devastated living standards.
*****
Trump sought to justify his sweeping attack on refugees with a racist
diatribe against “Third World Countries” whose people would be
“non-compatible with Western civilization.” White House Press Secretary
Karoline Leavitt confirmed that the administration had effectively
stopped all refugee intake since taking office, “with the exception of
Afrikaners fleeing persecution in South Africa.” (In other words,
members of the white South African minority who ruled under apartheid.)
The
plan to review the cases of all 180,000 refugees admitted to the US
between January 20, 2021 and February 20, 2025 was revealed November 24
by the Associated Press, which obtained an internal memo from USCIS
Director Joseph Edlow. The memo also required that even refugees who
have already received green cards should be subjected to review.
*****
At a press conference Monday afternoon, Press Secretary Karoline
Leavitt declared, “President Trump believes that he has a sacred
obligation to reverse the calamity of mass unchecked migration into our
country. … In the wake of last week’s atrocity, it is more important
than ever to finish carrying out the president’s mass deportation
operation.”
The response of the Democratic Party to Trump’s effort
to smear all immigrants with the blood of the two National Guard
soldiers shot last week has been one of tacit acceptance. At his press
briefing Monday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries did not even
raise the issue, instead appealing for the Trump administration and the
Republicans to “actually partner with Democrats to solve problems on
behalf of the American people.”
Only when directly asked by a reporter—after a lengthy disquisition
on healthcare subsidies under the Affordable Care Act—did Jeffries
address the effective ending of asylum for refugees and the attack on
green card holders and then with another appeal for bipartisanship.
“Yeah,
our view is that, one, of course we support the notion of having strong
border security, no one ever disputes that,” the Democrat said. “We
have a broken immigration system. We need to fix it, but it should be
fixed, in a comprehensive and bipartisan way. But at the same period of
time we are going to stand up for law-abiding immigrant families and
communities who have been under assault by Donald Trump and the
so-called secretary of homeland security. They’re a disgrace.”
As to taking any action to oppose this “disgrace,” the House Democratic leader said nothing.
The
fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an
essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide,
dictatorship and fascism.
Revelations of yet another horrific war crime committed by the US
military in the southern Caribbean have surfaced, as the Trump
administration is drastically escalating its unprovoked war threats
against Venezuela.
According to multiple sources who spoke to the Washington Post,
US Special Operations troops, acting on the direct orders of Defense
Secretary Pete Hegseth, carried out a “double-tap” strike on a boat
carrying 11 people near the shores of Venezuela on September 2.
“A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern,” the Post
reported. “For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live
drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt. Two survivors were
clinging to the smoldering wreck.”
One individual involved in the strike told the Post, “The
order [from Hegseth] was to kill everybody.” This was the first in a
series of deadly missile strikes that have sunk at least 22 small boats
and killed at least 83 people from Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and
Trinidad.
*****
This show of force, which is wildly disproportionate to the stated
aim of deterring a relative handful of fishermen allegedly smuggling
cocaine in boats that could never reach the US mainland, has been
further escalated over the past few days. Trump off-handedly announced
that the strikes at sea would soon be joined by attacks on land and
issued via social media a personal decree declaring a no-fly zone over
all of Venezuela.
The clear aim of this campaign is not drug
interdiction but rather regime change in Caracas and the imposition of a
US puppet government that would clear the way for the major US-based
oil corporations to plunder Venezuela’s petroleum reserves, the largest
on the planet.
The revelations regarding the September 2 double-tap strike only
demonstrate that Washington’s predatory aims are being pursued with
entirely criminal methods. Rather than rescue the survivors left
clinging for life to the remains of their vessel, Special Operations
commanders ordered a second missile strike, blowing them to bits.
*****
Even if some of the victims of the Trump administration’s Caribbean
murder spree were transporting drugs, this is not a crime punishable by
death, and it must be proven in a court of law, not punished by means of
extra-judicial executions on the high seas. Nor is it by any stretch of
the imagination an act of war.
*****
Of course, this is not the first time that the Oval Office has been
used to plot unlawful killings. Obama orchestrated drone assassinations,
including of at least four American citizens, in meetings dubbed
“terror Tuesdays,” while Trump ordered the 2020 assassination of senior
Iranian official Qasem Soleimani, who was on a diplomatic visit to Iraq.
But
there is more than a quantitative change in the current policy. What is
unfolding is nothing less than the complete evisceration of the
country’s political, constitutional and legal foundations and their
replacement with the methods of a police state dictatorship and the law
of the jungle.
Trump represents and personifies a criminal ruling
oligarchy that wallows in filth, blood and obscene sums of personal
wealth. He himself has weaponized the presidency for the purpose of
stuffing hundreds of millions of dollars into his own pockets. According
to calculations made by the Reuters news agency, the Trump family’s
income has grown 17-fold to $864 million during the first half of this
year, compared to the same period in 2024.
This criminality at the
top finds no more telling expression than in the “full and complete
pardon” Trump announced for ex-Honduran President Juan Orlando
Hernandez, who was sentenced to 45 years in prison after being convicted
in a US court for facilitating the importation of a staggering 400 tons
of cocaine into the US. Hernandez was famously cited for telling one of
his co-conspirators that he wanted to shove cocaine “right up the noses
of the gringos.”
*****
The pardon of Hernandez makes a mockery of the Trump administration’s
claims that its Latin American policy is driven by the need to rescue
Americans from drug traffickers bent upon their destruction. No one in
Trump’s circle or the ruling oligarchy as a whole could give a damn
about overdose deaths. Rather they see drugs as a useful means of social
control over the most oppressed layers of the population, as well as a
lucrative source of profits for the financial sector.
*****
The pardon was announced on the eve of Sunday’s Honduran election,
together with Trump’s endorsement of Nasry “Tito” Asfura, the candidate
of Hernandez’s right-wing National Party. Trump has vilified the
candidate of the ruling Libre party, Rixi Moncada, as a “communist,” in
large measure because the current government has broken off ties with
Taiwan and established diplomatic relations with Beijing, an action
taken by Washington itself nearly half a century ago. Asfura has vowed
to cut off ties with both China and Venezuela if elected.
There is
an undeniably maniacal character to the policy being pursued by the
Trump administration throughout the region. Reflecting the increasing
desperation of a ruling capitalist oligarchy trapped by the
contradictions of its own failing profit system, it is trying to reverse
the loss of US hegemony and the rise of China to the position of South
America’s principal trading partner by means of missile strikes and
intimidation.
This foreign policy constitutes an extension of a
domestic policy of war against the working class. Attempting to reverse
every social gain won by workers in the course of the 20th century, the
US ruling class is turning to dictatorial methods, from the fascistic
demonization and savage persecution of immigrants to the deployment of
US troops to major American cities to fight the “enemy within.” Just as
the Trump administration is murdering fishermen and migrants in the
Caribbean, it will not shrink from deploying deaths squads to carry out
extra-judicial executions in the US itself.
*****
The war crimes being organized from the White House will be punished
only by means of a conscious political intervention by the working class
throughout the Americas to put an end to the capitalist system and
reorganize society to meet human need, not the profits of the oligarchs.
Italy’s national general strike of November 28, followed by mass
protests on November 29 coinciding with the International Day of
Solidarity with Palestine, marks the third countrywide strike in as many
months.
The two events express a rising movement of the Italian
working class against the authoritarian, pro-war policies of the Meloni
government, and more broadly of the international working class against
attacks on democratic rights, imperialist war and genocide. The proposed
2026 budget law, the “Manovra 2026,”
provided the immediate trigger, but the strike wave reflects far deeper
opposition to social inequality, wage erosion, militarization and
Italy’s role in NATO’s global war plans.
The November 28 strike,
called by the base unions USB, CUB, COBAS, SGB and others, mobilized
tens of thousands in transport, healthcare, education, public
administration and private industry across the country. Rail and air
travel were heavily disrupted, with a 24-hour rail walkout beginning the
evening of November 27 and ITA Airways canceling at least 26 flights.
Urban transit networks slowed or ground to a halt. Motorway workers
walked out. Healthcare workers stopped work while maintaining emergency
services. Schools, municipal offices and logistics hubs participated
widely.
*****
The strike is a political eruption of the working class against a
capitalist government that is dragging the population into deeper
poverty while aligning the country with ever more dangerous global
conflicts.
*****
The Italian strike wave is part of a broader international offensive
by workers against inflation, inequality and war. From Germany to
France, from the UK to the United States, from the Middle East to Latin
America, the objective conditions for a global movement against
capitalism are emerging. The potential of this movement is nothing less
than revolutionary.
In Italy the events of November 28–29
represent a political turning point. The working class has entered the
stage of history once again as a powerful force, challenging not only
the Meloni government, but the entire trajectory of war, austerity and
authoritarianism pursued by the capitalist class. The task now is to
develop the leadership and organization required to unify these
struggles, break free of the union bureaucracies and link the fight
against war with the fight for international socialism.
Rae Huang, a Presbyterian pastor, nonprofit executive and member of
the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), has announced her candidacy
for the June 2, 2026, Los Angeles mayoral election, challenging
incumbent Democratic Mayor Karen Bass.
Millions of workers and
young people are searching for an alternative to the policies of
austerity, repression and war offered from the two corporate-controlled
parties in the US. There is growing opposition to Trump’s fascistic
drive to establish a dictatorship, the war on immigrants, the
destruction of social programs and the global eruption of war and
genocide. In Los Angeles, Bass’s administration has become a byword for
austerity, law-and-order policing and unrestrained support for
real-estate developers.
Bass’s 2025-26 budget has fueled
opposition among workers facing overwork, stagnant wages and crumbling
services. Her response to January’s wildfires, after slashing fire
department funding and leaving positions vacant, intensified public
anger over the inadequate response to climate disasters.
Bass has
positioned herself as a law-and-order Democrat, denouncing the slogan
“Defund the Police” and expanding the LAPD budget, even as the
department joins federal immigration raids—exposing the fraud of her
“sanctuary” rhetoric. Her homelessness policy follows the same pattern:
while declaring a state of emergency and launching “Inside Safe,” she
has channeled funds to developers, cleared encampments and warehoused
the unhoused in overpriced private facilities.
Under these
conditions, little-known figures such as New York’s Zohran Mamdani and
Seattle’s Katie Wilson have gained sudden support. Huang is of the same
political type, and like Mamdani and Wilson, her campaign is a political
trap.
*****
The DSA currently occupies key positions within the state apparatus
in Los Angeles. The DSA-aligned city council members Huang points to as
proof of a “new kind of leadership” have, in practice, upheld the status
quo: backing developer-driven homelessness policies, supporting
giveaways to big business and standing behind the union bureaucracy as
it sabotaged the struggles of city and county workers in recent months.
The
city has four city council members who identify with or orbit the DSA.
After celebrating Mamdani’s victory in New York as a supposed triumph
for the “left,” they now line up squarely behind the political
establishment in Los Angeles. Nithya Raman and Eunisses Hernandez hail
Bass as “the most progressive mayor we’ve ever had,” while Hugo
Soto-Martínez dispenses with the pretense of independence from the
political establishment altogether and endorses Bass outright.
Indeed,
at the time of Bass’s rise to mayor, the DSA offered only mild
criticisms and even falsely portrayed her as having once been a
“socialist,” a myth used to politically legitimize her within
left-leaning circles.
More broadly, the DSA functions as a
faction of the Democratic Party and an increasingly critical role as a
bulwark of class rule.
The experience of Zohran Mamdani in New
York demonstrates the political role of these DSA-backed campaigns.
After posturing as a champion of the “left,” Mamdani appointed his
transition team: a roster of right-wing Democratic Party operatives, selected not from the working class but from the political establishment and corporate-aligned nonprofits.
Even more revealing was Mamdani’s meeting with Donald Trump,
ushering a “partnership” and legitimizing the fascistic president at
the very moment he was deepening his assault on democratic rights and
confronting growing popular opposition.
Kshama Sawant has launched her 2026 congressional campaign under
conditions of an acute crisis of American capitalism. The Trump
administration, facing mounting opposition from workers and young people
and a deepening economic crisis, is intensifying its Gestapo-like
assault on immigrants. It is escalating its trade war against the world
and overseeing mass layoffs and declining living standards for the broad
mass of the American population, alongside staggering increases in
wealth for the financial oligarchy. In line with record levels of social
inequality, it is carrying out an assault on democratic rights
unprecedented in US history.
Internationally, American imperialism
is backing Israel’s genocide in Gaza, continuing the US-NATO war
against Russia, preparing war against Venezuela, and laying the basis
for military conflict with China.
It is within this explosive
context that Sawant—long promoted by pseudo-left circles as a
“revolutionary socialist”—has stepped forward to channel working class
opposition back into the safe confines of the Democratic Party and prop
up the trade union bureaucracy.
Sawant says her campaign rests on
her “record of victories” in Seattle and that these reforms can be
“scaled up” nationally. This premise is false. Her decade on the Seattle
City Council did not secure significant improvements for the working
class and offers no strategy for confronting the oligarchy that
dominates American society. Rather, it exposes the political function of
Sawant’s entire career: to contain social anger within the dead end of
municipal reform, electoral maneuvering, and alliances with the
Democrats and the union bureaucracy, while blocking the emergence of an
independent revolutionary movement of the working class.
*****
Sawant’s political rise was facilitated by the trade union
bureaucracy. In her 2013 campaign, she secured endorsements from several
Seattle-area union locals, including American Federation of Teachers
(AFT) Local 1789, Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 37083,
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 46, and the
Greater Seattle American Postal Workers Union (APWU).
These
endorsements provided organizational resources and access to union staff
who carried out phone-banking, canvassing, and voter mobilization.
While not every major union backed her—in fact, key Service Employees
International Union (SEIU) locals endorsed her opponent—Sawant’s victory
depended heavily on sections of the AFL-CIO apparatus that were in
conflict with sections of the Democratic establishment but remained
fully committed to capitalist politics. She did not rise in rebellion
against the unions apparatus, she entered office as one of its
sanctioned political projects. Her “victories” were the product of these
same forces—and were designed to stabilize, not challenge, the existing
order.
*****
Sawant presents her political evolution as principled, but it is
defined by opportunistic shifts between organizations without
explanation or accountability.
She began as a leader of Socialist
Alternative, then joined the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in
2021—calling it “the most significant left organization in the United
States in many decades.” In 2023, she launched Workers Strike Back as a
new “independent movement.” In 2024 she endorsed Jill Stein’s Green
Party campaign. In 2016 and 2020 she campaigned aggressively for Bernie
Sanders bid to win the Democratic presidential nomination.
These
shifts were not made on the basis of a socialist program or perspective.
They reflected Sawant’s continual adaptation to shifting layers of the
middle class and to the changing tactical needs of the Democratic Party.
*****
Sawant calls herself a revolutionary while insisting that every
social issue can be resolved through electoral victories and policy
tinkering. This is not Marxism—it is liberal reformism dressed in
socialist language.
Her national program—$25 minimum wage, rent
control, Medicare for all—is presented without any strategy to confront
or overthrow the financial oligarchy. She never addresses how these
reforms can be enacted under conditions of bipartisan austerity, the
domination of Congress by corporate interests, and the escalating drive
to world war. She never raises the need to expropriate the corporations
and banks. She never explains how workers are to defeat the political
and economic power of the ruling class.
*****
Sawant’s worldview is fundamentally American nationalist. Her appeals
to “fight the billionaires” are disconnected from an internationalist
understanding of capitalism, war, and class struggle.
Her posture
on Gaza consists of moral outrage and calls for a ceasefire, not a
socialist strategy linking Israeli and Palestinian workers in a struggle
against imperialism, Zionism and the Arab bourgeoisie. She offers no
analysis of imperialism, the historical role of the US in the Middle
East, or the capitalist roots of the conflict.
Significantly, she
is silent on the US–NATO war against Russia. Silence denotes consent.
She does not expose NATO expansion or the role of US and European
imperialism in instigating the reactionary invasion of Ukraine by the
Russian bourgeoisie. This is not an oversight, but a political choice:
exposing the Ukraine war would require confronting the Democratic Party
and the trade union bureaucracy—institutions on which she depends.
Sawant
never warns of the danger of fascism or dictatorship. She does not
analyze or expose the Trump administration as fascist, and her campaign
website makes no reference to the real and growing threat of
authoritarian rule. The attacks on immigrants, the assault on democratic
rights, and Trump’s open moves to extra-Constitutional power are
treated as policy disputes, not as components of the collapse of
American democracy and the turn by the ruling oligarchy to dictatorship
and fascism. This silence is political: acknowledging the danger would
require exposing and breaking from the Democratic Party and the trade
union apparatus. As with her silence on the US–NATO war against Russia,
Sawant leaves workers unprepared for the mounting threat of
dictatorship.
Her politics, in form and content, remain within the national framework
of US liberalism in its death agony. She speaks for a privileged
middle-class layer seeking limited reforms to bolster their own
privileges within capitalism—not for the international working class.
*****
The working class confronts unprecedented dangers—war, dictatorship and
social collapse. None of these can be confronted through municipal
reforms, pressure campaigns, or appeals to “progressive” Democrats. The
decisive task is to break from all forms of middle-class pseudo-left
politics and build a revolutionary leadership rooted in the
international working class.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak
was forced to resign on Friday just hours after investigators from
Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) raided
Yermak’s apartment as part of a $100 million scheme case known as
“Operation Midas” that has shaken the crisis-ridden Zelensky government.
Yermak,
Ukraine’s most powerful political figure next to Zelensky, served as
both Zelensky’s top aide and lead negotiator in the ongoing United
States-backed plan to end the ongoing NATO-backed proxy war against
Russia.
In a joint statement, the NABU and the Specialised
Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office stated the raids were officially
“authorised” and linked to an unspecified investigation, which was
unspecified but it certainly related to the $100 million embezzlement
scandal first exposed by NABU earlier in November.
According to
the allegations, several leading members of the Ukrainian government and
a close business associate of both Zelensky and Yermak were involved in
an embezzlement scheme around Energoatom, the state nuclear company.
Energy
Minister Svitlana Hrynchuk and Justice Minister Herman Halushchenko
were already forced to resign after it was revealed they had allegedly
received kickback payments worth 10 to 15 percent of contract values
from contractors building fortifications on Ukraine’s energy
infrastructure.
Other alleged accomplices in the scheme included
former Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Chernyshov and Timur Mindich—a
close Zelensky and Yermak associate who is a co-owner of Zelensky’s own
former TV studio Kvartal95. Mindich was reportedly tipped off about the
raid and had already fled for Israel by the time investigators raided
his apartment.
In the following weeks rumors circulated that
Yermak and even Zelensky may be next, as their well-known close
association with Mindich rendered their claims of innocence in the
kickback scheme both logically and politically untenable. Yermak’s voice
also allegedly appears on recorded conversations with Mindich released
by NABU.
Mindich and his other close business associate Ukrainian
oligarch Igor Kolomoysky were instrumental in bringing the former
comedian Zelensky to power in the 2019 presidential elections and
Zelensky even traveled in Mindich’s personal armored car during the
campaign. Zelensky also owned a high end apartment in the same building
as Mindich, where NABU investigators discovered a gold plated bathroom
that Mindich had built for himself. That Yermak and Zelensky himself
were completely unaware of Mindich’s massive embezzlement scheme
involving ministers in their own government is highly improbable.
*****
The resignation of Yermak is the temporary culmination of a ferocious
battle within the Ukrainian state and ruling class. On the surface,
this struggle has been centered on a war between the Zelensky regime and
NABU, which has in the past been strongly backed by both the EU and the
United States as means to intervene directly in Ukraine’s turbulent and
clannish oligarchical politics.
Earlier in July, Zelensky—likely
aware of the massive embezzlement and robbery endemic to his
government—had moved to limit the power of NABU and SAPO, leading to the
largest protests across the country since the beginning of the
NATO-backed proxy war in February 2022.
According to Zelensky,
stripping the agency of its independence was necessary to combat
“Russian influence.” At the same time, Ukraine’s security services
(SBU), which is closely aligned with Zelensky, had carried out raids of
NABU to supposedly arrest Russian spies.
As a result of both
domestic outrage and intervention from the EU and the US, Zelensky
ultimately was forced to backtrack and withdraw his attempt to take over
NABU.
NABU was set up in the wake of the US and EU-backed coup of
elected President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, which triggered
an eight-year-long civil war in East Ukraine, leading up to Russia’s
full-scale invasion in February 2022. Founded in 2015 by the right-wing
nationalist government of Petro Poroshenko, NABU is almost entirely
created and directed by the US. Its staff is trained directly by the FBI
and European Union.
*****
It has been no secret that Washington and EU officials have long been
extremely skeptical, if not hostile, to Yermak and his immense
influence in Ukrainian politics. In July, the Financial Times
ran an extensive essay about Yermak as the “grey cardinal” of Ukrainian
politics, citing numerous officials complaining about his influence on
Zelensky.
In recent months, the Trump administration, in particular, has viewed Yermak as an obstacle to a negotiated deal—strongly opposed by its EU rivals—with
Russia that would maximize US profit from the end of the proxy war that
has already killed hundreds of thousands while at the same time
striking a long term agreement with the oligarchic Putin regime. In an
interview with the Atlantic just days ago, Yermak as the chief
negotiator outright refused to even consider conceding Ukrainian
territory—one of the main stipulations of the Trump peace plan—in order
to end the war.
With Yermak gone, the position of Zelensky has been dramatically weakened.
In the population, there is immense anger and disgust over the
corruption scandal, which reveals the shameless theft of money by the
same oligarchs and government officials who have been sending hundreds
of thousands of Ukrainians into their death, falsely promising them
“democracy” and “freedom”. Zelensky’s approval has plunged nearly 40
percentage points and is now below 20 percent—the lowest mark since his
election in 2019. For the first time since the beginning of the war,
more Ukrainians now distrust than trust him.
At the same time,
the growing popular dissatisfaction with Zelensky is exploited by
sections of the ruling class and the imperialist powers in an embittered
struggle over the country’s foreign policy and division of the spoils
of the war. Shortly after the announcement of Yermak’s resignation,
Zelensky’s arch-rival, ex-commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhny, issued a
de facto endorsement of Trump’s efforts to broker a deal. Now the
ambassador to the UK, Zaluzhny stated that “the overwhelming majority of
wars end either with mutual defeat or with both sides convinced, that
they won, or in other variants [of these scenarios].” Zaluzhny, who
maintains extensive ties to the country’s far-right, was ousted by
Zelensky in 2024 but still enjoys substantial support within sections of
the Ukrainian state and the imperialist powers, and has been widely
discussed as Zelensky’s possible successor.
Muhammed Kendirci, a 15-year-old student who was working at a
carpentry workshop in the Bozova district of Şanlıurfa within the scope
of Vocational Training Centers (MESEM), was seriously injured on
November 14 when the 20-year-old foreman, Habip A., inflated his rectum
with compressed air.
The young apprentice, who reportedly
sustained serious internal organ damage as a result of this torture,
lost his life after five days in intensive care. This raised the number
of children who have become victims of work-related homicides to at
least 16 since the establishment of MESEM.
Information obtained from the family revealed that the investigation
was handled carelessly from the very beginning. The perpetrator was
first released and then apprehended in another city while trying to flee
abroad. Muhammed’s trousers, one of the most critical pieces of
evidence, were thrown away by hospital staff.
Hundreds of people,
including Muhammed’s friends from the neighborhood, staged a protest
march on November 24 in the district of Bozova where he lived.
Muhammed’s death has brought to sharp relief the fact that children
are subjected to uncontrolled exploitation, with the cooperation of the
government and companies, and the complicity of the trade union
apparatus.
Vocational Training Centers were included in formal
and compulsory education in 2016. Through MESEM, high school-aged
students between 14 and 18, who are separated from academic education,
are made to work four days a week in a workplace for four years and
receive theoretical training at school for only one day. Children
officially receive a salary equal to just 30 percent of the minimum wage
(6,631 TL/160 USD) for the first three years and 50 percent of the
minimum wage (11,052 TL/260 USD) as a foreman in the fourth year.
In
Turkey, which has accepted international conventions on children’s
rights, the employment of children under 16 years of age is officially
prohibited. Children over 15 years old who have completed compulsory
primary education may be employed in “light work” that does not
interfere with their physical, mental, social, and moral development or
their continued schooling. But child labor, which the state denies on
paper, has gained legal status through MESEM.
The approximately
500,000 child workers within the scope of MESEM in Turkey mainly come
from poor families. Educator Nurcan Korkmaz, speaking to soL Haber,
stated that in their field studies, 58 percent of the children directly
cited “economic difficulties” as the reason for attending MESEM.
In conditions where inspection mechanisms are systematically eliminated
and occupational safety measures are non-existent, child workers are
employed in “heavy work” despite the prohibition, and are exposed to
insults, pressure, and violence. In its current form, MESEM is an
application aimed at providing cheap labor to capital rather than an
educational model. Moreover, this is the tip of the iceberg.
*****
The Education and Science Workers’ Union (Eğitim-Sen), in its
statement on November 20—World Children’s Day—explains that there are
approximately 2.3 million child workers in Turkey. A significant portion
of these children, coming from families who are refugees mainly due to
imperialist wars in the Middle East, particularly Syria, are employed
very cheaply in high-risk sectors.
According to the recent
Education Monitoring Report by the Education Reform Initiative,
approximately 804,000 children of compulsory education age are not
attending school. Including foreign nationals, open education students,
and those who have dropped out of formal education in MESEM, the total
number exceeds 1,470,000. Most poor children in this situation are
forced to become child laborers.
The working hours of child
workers, which can be up to 12 hours a day, not only keep them from
education but also exhaust them physically and mentally. This situation,
combined with a lack of supervision and inadequate occupational safety
measures, leads to fatal “work accidents”. According to the data of the
Worker Health and Work Safety Council (İSİG), at least 82 child workers
have lost their lives this year. This represents an increase of about 10
percent compared to the previous year’s data. Since 2013, at least 770
child workers have died at their workplaces.
*****
The proliferation of child labor exploitation is part of the attack
by the ruling class internationally on the conditions and living
standards of the working class. According to last estimates published by
the International Labour Organization and UNICEF on June 11, 2025,
there were approximately 138 million child laborers worldwide in 2024.
About 54 million of them are engaged in hazardous work that could
endanger their health, safety, or development.
Child labor plays a
significant role in pushing wages down. In recent years, the government
of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey has accelerated its policy
of reducing workers’ real wages under the pretext of curbing high
inflation and closing the budget deficit. The minimum wage for 2025
was increased below the official inflation rate. A similar scenario is
planned for 2026, in line with the demands of foreign and domestic
financial capital.
*****
Karl Marx
Karl Marx, who put socialism on scientific foundations, explains that
child labor is not an individual or moral issue but an inevitable
product of the development of capitalist production relations. As
capitalist industry develops, labor becomes deskilled, and capital tends
to constantly cheapen the price of labor. This deskilling facilitates
the proliferation of child labor; the child is now suitable for “running
errands” and undertaking dangerous jobs for low wages. At the same
time, the labor market expands, and average wages are pushed down.
In
the twentieth century, due to the impact of the 1917 October Revolution
and major industrial and political struggles, significant progress was
made in the conditions of the international working class and in
children’s rights. These are now being sacrificed worldwide for the
profit and wealth accumulation of capitalist oligarchy.
The way forward lies in combining the demands for the immediate
implementation of measures aimed at protecting children, and improving
the social conditions of workers, with the struggle for the
revolutionary mobilization of the working class against the capitalist
profit system, for socialism.
That Complicit has become a Sunday Times Bestseller
testifies to the widespread opposition within Britain to the support
for Israel’s ongoing genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza by
both the former Conservative government of Rishi Sunak and now Keir
Starmer’s Labour government.
Its success is all the more noteworthy because the mainstream press, including the Guardian, has not reviewed it. Yet the book’s author is a journalist who used to write for the right-wing press, including the Daily Telegraph, where he was the paper’s chief political commentator until he resigned in 2015, as well as the Daily Mail, Daily Express and Spectator. He now writes for the Byline Times, Declassified UK, Double Down News, Middle East Eye and openDemocracy.
His previous books include The Rise of Political Lying (2005), The Triumph of the Political Class (2007), and The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism (2021).
The
International Court of Justice (ICJ) made a preliminary ruling on
January 26, 2024, that Israel may “plausibly” be committing genocide in
Gaza in the case brought by South Africa against Israel under the
Genocide Convention.
Oborne explains that the ruling had serious
legal, political, and moral implications for the UK government. It
heightened the UK’s obligations under the Genocide Convention, which
Britain had incorporated into domestic law under the 2001 International
Criminal Court Act.
*****
That Complicit has become a Sunday Times Bestseller
testifies to the widespread opposition within Britain to the support
for Israel’s ongoing genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza by
both the former Conservative government of Rishi Sunak and now Keir
Starmer’s Labour government.
Its success is all the more noteworthy because the mainstream press, including the Guardian, has not reviewed it. Yet the book’s author is a journalist who used to write for the right-wing press, including the Daily Telegraph, where he was the paper’s chief political commentator until he resigned in 2015, as well as the Daily Mail, Daily Express and Spectator. He now writes for the Byline Times, Declassified UK, Double Down News, Middle East Eye and openDemocracy.
His previous books include The Rise of Political Lying (2005), The Triumph of the Political Class (2007), and The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism (2021).
The
International Court of Justice (ICJ) made a preliminary ruling on
January 26, 2024, that Israel may “plausibly” be committing genocide in
Gaza in the case brought by South Africa against Israel under the
Genocide Convention.
Oborne explains that the ruling had serious
legal, political, and moral implications for the UK government. It
heightened the UK’s obligations under the Genocide Convention, which
Britain had incorporated into domestic law under the 2001 International
Criminal Court Act.
*****
Oborne outlines how first the Tory and then the Labour government
gave their unconditional backing to the crushing of Palestinian
resistance to Israel—following decades of support for Israel against the
Palestinians—using the October 7 attack to justify the genocide.
Speaking in October 2023, Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, even
agreed with Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant that Israel had the
right to cut off power and water, only retracting his statement a week
later after it sparked an outcry and the resignations of several
councillors.
The UK provided constant political and diplomatic
support for Israel, opposing ceasefire resolutions at the UN Security
Council. The Tory government sent warships to the Middle East as Israel
began its onslaught. Since then, both governments have nodded through
the export of arms to Israel in the full knowledge they would be used
against the Palestinians. They supplied Israel with the necessary
components for the F-35 fighter jets that it used to kill civilians,
while the Royal Air Force flew near daily reconnaissance flights from
its base in Cyprus to supply Israel with intelligence. The Conservative
government never put Britain’s support for Israel to a vote in
parliament, and Labour in opposition did not call for such a vote.
The
day after the ICJ ruling, the UK government withdrew funding for UNRWA,
the agency that has for decades provided essential services for the
Palestinians who were forced to flee their homes due to ethnic cleansing
during the 1948 and 1967 Arab Israeli wars, and Israel had long
detested. Israel had alleged, with negligible evidence, that a handful
of UNRWA’s 13,000 employees had taken part in the October 7 assault. In
so doing, the government was aiding Israel in its mission to annihilate
the Palestinians.
Instead of challenging this cartel, the
mainstream media backed it to the hilt. It repeated without query or
criticism the assertions and statements put out by Israel about the
October 7 attack, including its allegations of butchered and beheaded
babies. Dissident voices were suppressed or sidelined. The truth about
the war was suppressed, the facts misrepresented.
*****
While Oborne offers a biting and passionate critique of the UK’s support
for Israel and complicity in its genocidal war against the Palestinians
in Gaza, his disgust and moral outrage is no substitute for explaining
its causes. He says that Britain’s foreign policy in the Middle
East—Conservative or Labour—flows from its support for “Atlanticism” but
does not explain either the policy or the reasons for it.
*****
Britain has long tied itself to US imperialism’s coattails as a means
of punching above its very reduced weight on the international arena
and obtaining a share in the spoils that flowed from US control over
markets and resources. It joined NATO and participated in
Washington-directed wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and
Syria, as well as backing Ukraine against Russia.
In June 2023,
the US and UK announced the “Atlantic Declaration for a Twenty-First
Century U.S.-UK Economic Partnership”. This makes clear that cooperation
between the US and Britain is based on confronting Russia and China. It
states, “We face new challenges to international stability from
authoritarian states such as Russia and the People’s Republic of China
(PRC).”
*****
Washington and London’s backing for Israel in its wars, not just against
the Palestinians, but against Iran and its allies in Lebanon and Yemen,
as well as its efforts to weaken Syria and sever Damascus’ relations
with Moscow and Tehran, is bound up with reordering the energy-rich
Middle East under the domination of US imperialism. This includes
isolating Iran—or securing regime change in Tehran that would pledge
allegiance to Washington—in preparation for war against China. Israel’s
wars in Gaza and the Middle East—ongoing despite supposed
ceasefires—form another front in an emerging World War.
*****
Oborne accuses Britain of conducting its foreign policy in “a closed
world” by a small elite and “on behalf of opaque interests”. He
continues plaintively that what is needed is “legal accountability” that
in turn requires “bringing democracy to Britain’s state and society”. He
does not explain how such a change is to be achieved because he is an
unalloyed defender of British imperialism and of capitalism.
The new film is based largely on Jack El-Hai’s 2013 book, The Nazi and the Psychiatrist,
a nonfiction work that traces the investigation by US army doctor
Douglas Kelley into the psychological state and fitness for trial of the
defendants, particularly Herman Göring, the number two figure in the
Nazi regime after Adolf Hitler.
A film that attempts to depict the
Nuremberg Trials is certainly welcome at this moment, when genocide and
fascist dictatorship have once more begun to threaten humanity. Nuremberg is
very uneven as a depiction of a vital part of the history of the
20th century. While it suffers from very serious weaknesses, it is also
necessary to recognize several important strengths.
Chief among
these are the scenes of the actual trial, including its concluding days.
Staged courtroom scenes are effectively and rapidly intercut with
80-year-old black-and-white film footage. These sequences include the
screening of imagery from the recently liberated concentration camps. As
the names Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and others flash across the screen,
we see the huge piles of corpses as well as a few survivors near death.
The film audience is stunned, as the spectators were during the
original trial. Humanity had never seen anything like this. The depths
of Nazi barbarism began, in 1946, to seep into mass consciousness. The
Nuremberg Trials were instrumental in telling the world about the crimes
of German imperialism.
It is one thing to graphically expose this history, however, and quite another to make sense of it. The principal problem with Nuremberg is
that it looks for the motive force of the Nazi Holocaust largely in the
psychology of the individual leaders, and not in the acute social
contradictions that roiled Europe, and especially Germany, in the wake
of World War One.
Consequently, Nuremberg cannot explain
why the Nazi leaders were capable of such monstrous crimes. The most
that director Vanderbilt (of the prominent Vanderbilt family) can say,
in an interview, referring to the main plot of the movie, is that
“Kelley had the highest-ranking living Nazi dropped in his lap. It was
an opportunity to dissect the nature of evil.”
*****
The Tribunal broke with earlier legal practice by allowing for the
first time those convicted of planning and waging aggressive war to be
punished in a court of law. As Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon), the
US Supreme Court Justice and lead prosecutor at Nuremberg, declares in
his opening statement: “We must never forget that the record on which we
judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge
us tomorrow.”
The trials were, nevertheless, inseparable from the
postwar settlement shaped by the victorious Allies. The political and
strategic aims of these powers, especially the US, determined which
crimes (and criminals) would be prosecuted and which would not. As the World Socialist Web Site explained some years ago, the trials
remained
silent not only about the root cause of the war, the historic crisis of
capitalism, but also the many war crimes committed by US and British
imperialism. In particular, the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese
cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was never condemned, nor was the issue
even raised.
Nuremberg served several immediate
political purposes: to legitimize the postwar settlement, and to
establish conditions for the rehabilitation of German imperialism,
including the rehabilitation of former Nazis, as part of what was almost
immediately to become the Cold War against the Soviet Union and the
imperialist drive against the threat of socialist revolution.
Internationalism was the most important question for Elli. She
participated in numerous ICFI schools and conferences, forming
friendships with many international comrades. When the British Workers
Revolutionary Party, led by Gerry Healy, broke with the ICFI in 1985/86
and adopted a nationalist course, Elli unhesitatingly supported the
ICFI, even though she had great respect for Healy.
In the years
that followed, she played an important role in educating new members in
the lessons of the split. Tamil comrades who fled the civil war in Sri
Lanka and had a nationalist background still remember today the
perseverance with which Elli convinced them of international socialism
at that time.
Her encyclopedic knowledge of the history and
documents of the ICFI also played an important role in the party’s
national committee, of which Elli was a member for many years. When
fundamental questions arose, one could always count on Elli to
contribute a historically informed perspective.
Elli also campaigned as the public face of the SGP. She ran several
times in European, federal and North Rhine-Westphalia state elections
and wrote nearly 330 articles for the World Socialist Web Site.
Her core topics were poverty and social inequality, the coronavirus
pandemic, trials of Nazi criminals, the flood disaster in the Ahr
Valley, and reports on industry, especially on the crisis in the steel
industry, which she experienced firsthand in Duisburg, where she lived.
*****
We will remember Elisabeth Zimmermann-Modler as a tireless fighter
for socialism who dedicated her entire life to serving the working class
and building a better society. Her death is a bitter loss and fills us
with deep sorrow, but her confidence in a better, socialist future is
also an inspiration.
We will publish a detailed tribute to Elli’s political life soon....
The German unions secretly sent a forty-person delegation to Israel to
demonstrate solidarity with the Zionist Histadrut amid the ongoing
genocide in Gaza. This revealing silence exposes the alignment of the
German trade unions with Berlin’s war agenda.
*****
While the German elites are reorganizing society for war, rearmament
and a war economy, the trade unions have also been transformed. Whereas
in the past they negotiated social compromises within the framework of a
so-called “social partnership”, today they are actively involved in
implementing social cuts and mass layoffs. No plant closure, no
redundancy plan, no agreement on wage cutting takes place without the
signature of a works council, of IG Metall, Verdi or another DGB union.
However,
two years of genocide in Gaza have changed the working class. More and
more workers understand the broader dimension: a ruling class that
supports such a brutal genocide will trample over the “own” working
class in pursuit of profit. To drive an unwilling population into war,
it is also prepared to revive fascism.
The struggle against social
devastation is inseparable from the struggle against war. The first
step for workers in Germany must be a break with the DGB and its member
unions.
The World Socialist Web Site and the Fourth
International, which have fought for decades, since the founding of
Israel in 1948, for the unity of Palestinian and Israeli workers, have
called for the mobilization of the international working class to stop
the genocide in Gaza. We call on workers in all workplaces to form
rank-and-file action committees independent of the DGB. Only in this way
can they defend their own interests, their workplaces and their lives.
Dr. Ralph Lee Abraham, the former Louisiana surgeon general and a
long-standing opponent of established vaccine science, has been named
principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC), the agency’s second-highest leadership post.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made the
decision three months after firing CDC Director Susan Monarez and
replacing her by making HHS Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill, who has no
medical experience, acting CDC chief. The firing of Monarez was quickly
followed by the resignation of four top CDC officials who opposed the
anti-science, anti-vaccine agenda pushed by Kennedy.
Abraham will
now become the highest-ranking figure in the CDC with a medical degree,
with outsized influence over its policies, although he has no background in
epidemiology, infectious diseases, outbreak response or the management
of scientific institutions—core qualifications for leading the nation’s
premier public health agency.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, he
heavily promoted quack treatments like ivermectin and
hydroxychloroquine, while fiercely attacking the lifesaving COVID-19
vaccines. After leaving Congress in 2020, he became Louisiana Surgeon
General, where he opposed mandatory mass vaccination for childhood
diseases.
Abraham’s elevation, which directly aligns with
Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) agenda, has drawn alarm
throughout the public health community. “My jaw hit the ground,” said
Dr. Nirav Shah, former principal deputy director of the CDC under the
Biden administration, calling the decision “unqualified” and
“atrocious.” Dr. Richard Besser, acting CDC director in 2009, said he is
“greatly concerned” that Abraham will function as an extension of
Kennedy’s longstanding hostility toward vaccines. “Rather than being
someone who will push back on that, I think he will further the
secretary’s agenda,” Besser warned.
Despite intense efforts by New Zealand’s trade union bureaucracy to demobilize and break up the strike movement that erupted in a nationwide
“mega-strike” on October 23, thousands of workers are continuing
industrial action against the far-right government’s austerity agenda.
The mass strike, the country’s largest since 1979, saw more than
100,000 public sector workers—teachers, nurses, doctors and healthcare
workers—mount a militant and unified one-day stoppage. The strike was a
demonstration of the potential power of the working class, and an
expression of enormous opposition to the attacks on wages and conditions
by the National Party-led coalition government.
The unions were
forced to call the strike due to mass anger over moves, begun under the
2017-2023 Labour government, to further cut wages across the public
sector, while starving hospitals and schools of staffing and resources.
It was part of an upsurge of workers internationally—including
millions-strong protests against US President Trump’s fascist
dictatorship, strike waves in France, Italy and elsewhere and global mobilisations against the Gaza genocide.
The
NZ union bureaucrats promptly moved to contain the developing movement
and divert it into safe parliamentary channels. They did not schedule
any further joint strikes and, while keeping each section of workers
isolated, returned to negotiations seeking deals that would freeze wages
and intensify the crisis of living costs.
The strategy has met
with fierce resistance among workers. Last Friday nearly 17,000 health
workers covered by the Public Service Association (PSA) struck over pay
and unsafe staffing levels. On the same day 2,000 firefighters walked
out in the latest of a series of one-hour stoppages in a contract
dispute that flared up in August. The unions limited both strikes to a
paltry one hour while deliberately isolating them from each other.
The repressive laws, providing the state with powers to prosecute Nazi
“ideology,” are a precedent for further attacks on the working class and
the socialist movement.
In Chicago and across the United States, the most flagrant violations of
constitutional rights are being carried out by armed teams under
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE). More than 3,000 people have been abducted from
Chicago this year, overwhelmingly with no criminal background. Chicago
Public Schools has reported a sharp drop in attendance since federal
agents surged into the city in September, as families pull children from
class out of fear of kidnappings at school entrances.
*****
In Chicago, spontaneous resistance has developed rapidly. In working
class and middle class neighborhoods, residents have formed
rapid-response teams to warn families of approaching ICE or CBP
vehicles. Teachers, school staff and parents have organized informal
patrols during drop-off and pick-up hours, intervening when agents
appear. On the Southwest Side, small businesses have prepared thousands
of meals for families too afraid to leave home. Volunteers deliver
groceries, medicine and other necessities and aid street vendors most
likely to be targeted.
This active resistance stands in stark
contrast to the posturing of local Democratic officials—Governor JB
Pritzker, Mayor Brandon Johnson and Cook County Board President Toni
Preckwinkle—who rush before cameras to associate themselves with popular
anger while insisting that the only remedies lie in court challenges or
electing more Democrats in 2026. This performance of helplessness is
not confusion or timidity. It expresses their fear—and hostility—toward
any movement of workers and youth that might slip out of their control,
unify broad layers of the working class and challenge the corporate and
financial interests they defend. Their appeals to the courts, which
Trump openly disregards, and to an electoral cycle that could occur
under martial law are aimed at diverting and demobilizing real
opposition.
A growing section of the population refuses to
recognize ICE or CBP as legitimate authorities, chanting “There is no
law” during a protest in the Chicago neighborhood of Little Village.
Their sentiment recalls an earlier turning point in American history: In
the years before the Civil War, millions in the North concluded that
the Supreme Court, Congress and the principal institutions of government
had fallen under the control of the Slave Power and that moral appeals
or legal arguments would do nothing to halt its expansion.
Today,
millions are drawing a similar conclusion about Trump—that the United
States government is headed by a lawless gangster, who treats lawsuits,
court rulings and constitutional restraints with open contempt. What is
emerging is an initial break from the political framework that enabled
these conditions in the first place and a recognition that genuine
rights can only be defended through mass, organized struggle.
*****
Chicago’s entire history of class struggle demonstrates that the
working class has never achieved anything without a politically
conscious struggle against the ruling class’s use of race, nationality
and anti-immigrant hysteria to divide them. The Haymarket affair, the
Pullman strike, the meatpacking struggles depicted in The Jungle and
the Memorial Day Massacre of 1937 were all battles in which the ruling
class accused workers of being foreigners, agitators, anarchists or
communists, weaponizing nativism to weaken resistance. Workers prevailed
only when they overcame these divisions and united across ethnic,
racial and linguistic lines.
Today’s witch-hunt against immigrants
is a continuation of the strategy of divide-and-conquer. It must be
countered consciously, through the unification of US-born and immigrant
workers in a common struggle against exploitation, repression and war.
Cyclone Ditwah, one of the worst natural disasters to hit Sri Lanka
in decades, has killed more than 334 people and affected nearly one
million across the island as of Sunday evening. With over 370 people
still missing, and search operations ongoing, the death toll is expected
to rise further in the coming days.
Cyclone Ditwah tore through
the country, unleashing devastating floods and massive landslides that
swept away entire villages and buried families alive, particularly in
the hardest-hit Central Province.
*****
The lack of timely evacuation has contributed to the high death toll. In
many cases, landslides struck without warning because authorities
either failed to issue alerts or sent them at the last minute, leaving
residents no time to flee.
*****
While the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP)
government has deployed 25,000 troops, and many civilians are
volunteering to assist, the magnitude of the catastrophe demands
coordinated efforts both nationally and internationally. So far, the
government has failed to mobilize anything close to the level of aid
required.
As public outrage over the government’s disastrous
response continues to grow, President Dissanayake invoked a sweeping
state of emergency on Saturday, granting himself vast powers—not to
address the humanitarian crisis, but to clamp down on growing social
unrest. Opposition parties, including the Samagi Jana Balawegaya and the
United National Party, had already been calling for such measures,
fearing the eruption of mass anger.
*****
In an interview with the Sunday Island, Dr. Thasun Amarasinghe,
a scientist at the Climate Research Centre in Indonesia, stated: “There
are no natural disasters. These are governance disasters. Sri Lanka
destroyed the very systems that protected it. What’s happening now is
the predictable result of political mismanagement.” While accurate as
far as they go, his remarks overlook the inadequate measures being taken
by governments internationally to stem global warming, which directly
contributed to Cyclone Ditwah’s intensity.
Last week, a powerful three-day nationwide strike movement against
austerity halted public services, logistics, and industrial activity
across Belgium.
The
fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an
essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide,
dictatorship and fascism.
