The
Great Israeli Real Estate Event” in London was part of an international
roadshow that previously visited Toronto and New York City, encouraging
prospective buyers from the United States, the UK and South Africa to
“explore the best Anglo neighbourhoods” and find their “dream home”.
The
self-serving reassurances issued by Labour government ministers and
rail executives are aimed at preventing accountability. The
investigation is assigned to the Rail Accident Investigation Branch,
whose function is to examine the causes, not assign blame, establish
liability or pursue prosecutions.
In
a conversation recorded on the margins of the G7 summit, Brazilian
President Lula assured the IMF’s managing director and German Chancellor
Friedrich Merz that he had "never" been a leftist.
DSA
member Janeese Lewis George won D.C.’s Democratic mayoral primary on a
wave of working class radicalization—which her election will serve to
contain and misdirect, not advance.
Chicago
nurses at Prime Healthcare's Saint Mary of Nazareth voted
overwhelmingly to unionize. The win against a for-profit chain with a
long record of obstruction opens a longer fight over the road ahead.
The
results reflect not a popular mandate but the determination of Peru's
ruling class and Washington to prevent even a hint of social reforms
that could feed the class struggle.
In
an transparent effort to silence opposition, UAW Local 699 officials
intend to hold the vote inside the plant where a worker was fired for
criticizing a UAW rep during a contract rollout meeting.
On Saturday, Iran’s military command declared the Strait of Hormuz
closed once again. It charged that the United States had broken its
commitment to carry out the first clause of the memorandum and that
Israel had refused to withdraw from southern Lebanon.
The US
military denied that Iran controlled the strait and said traffic
continued to flow. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said 67 tankers had
passed through on Saturday, up from 55 two days earlier, with oil
volumes “about equal to where we were before the war.” Roughly 20
million barrels of oil cross the waterway each day.
Israel
continued its assault on Lebanon over the weekend. Israeli strikes
killed 83 people in southern Lebanon on Friday, according to the
Lebanese health ministry, and more than a dozen more overnight into
Saturday. Hezbollah fired over 50 rockets at Israeli troops.
On
Sunday, Trump threatened to renew the bombing of Iran. “Iran must
immediately stop their highly paid PROXIES in Lebanon from causing
trouble,” he wrote on Truth Social. “If they don’t, we’ll hit Iran very
hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!!” He told Fox News
that Iran “won’t have a country” if it closed the strait.
As the
deal was on the verge of falling apart, the Sunday talk shows became a
forum for demands within the US political establishment for escalation
against Iran. Leading Democrats joined the Republicans in a warmongering
attack on Trump’s agreement, arguing, de facto, that the war should
resume.
*****
Oil prices had fallen sharply after the deal was signed. But after
Iran declared the strait shut again on Saturday, US crude climbed back
above $78 a barrel, with traders warning that a sustained closure of the
Gulf would drive it back toward the $118 it reached during the war.
The
unanimity of the condemnation of the agreement within the US political
establishment makes clear the bipartisan character of support for global
war. Both parties fault Trump for halting the war short of victory, and
both are pressing for it to resume on harsher terms.
Any
agreement—if an agreement is even reached—will only be the prelude to
further US military escalation, whether targeting Iran, the broader
Middle East, or Russia and China.
On
May 1, the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO), Local 3350 of the
American Federation of Teachers, extended the old contract with the
University of Michigan and announced no plans to strike for a new
agreement.
A
former United States Postal Service electronics technician says he was
exposed twice to muriatic acid at USPS’ massive Avondale, Arizona
processing hub, according to reporting last week by the Arizona
Republic.
A
parliamentary committee has been given evidence of the lack of medical
care and other shocking conditions for detainees on the remote Pacific
island.
Kast's
program represents a social counterrevolution targeting first the most
vulnerable section of the population—some 337,000 irregular immigrants
and refugees.
Efforts are underway to expand all branches of the US armed forces.
These include lowering recruitment standards, loosening age restrictions
and expanding the pipeline from middle and high schools through the
Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC). Most significantly,
there are advanced preparations to reinstate the military draft.
These
measures are in line with the January 2026 National Defense Strategy,
which calls for “nothing short of a national mobilization,” likening it
to the buildup for World Wars I and II.
Current
deployments are already stretching US forces to their limits. As Donald
Trump contemplated a US ground invasion of Iran last February, military
sources noted they were straining under the largest Middle East buildup
since 2003, alongside continued operations in Latin America and the
Caribbean.
This crisis was addressed in a 2025 report, “Drafting a
Solution: Overcoming the Existential Crisis of the Selective Service
System,” by John Markel of the West Virginia University College of Law.
The report cites war-gaming by the Center for a New American Security
(CNAS), a Democratic Party–aligned national security think tank, to
simulate a mass mobilization needed for a “large-scale combat operation
against a near-peer adversary” such as China. Based on the Selective
Service’s own planning figure that 500,000 induction notices would be
required to yield 100,000 conscripts within 193 days, CNAS found that
even under “best-case” assumptions, the current system would fail to
provide the necessary manpower.
*****
Three years ago, the World Socialist Web Site reported
on a sharp military recruitment shortfall and the role of school
authorities in forcing tens of thousands of students into the Junior
Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) through mandatory, and often
illegal, enrollment.
That crisis has officially “turned around.”
Every service met its 2025 quotas, but the ruling class has responded
not by relaxing the pressure, but by intensifying it. For fiscal 2026,
Congress raised end‑strength targets by some 26,000 troops, pushing the
active force past 1.3 million—its highest level since 2023—even as
recruiters were ordered to find still more.
What Trump officials
are now crediting to a “resurgence of pride” in a Hegseth-run military
is, in fact, the product of economic coercion: the lowering of
standards, a pay raise pegged to the wages of the working poor and,
above all, the deepening of the “economic draft.”
The mechanism the Army credits most is the Future Soldier Preparatory
Course, launched at Fort Jackson in 2022 and dubbed “Army Fat Camp.”
The program offers recruits who fail academic or fitness standards up to
90 days of remediation.
Having insisted for years it would not
lower standards, the military simply moved the threshold. In December
2025, the Pentagon’s own inspector general found that the Army and Navy
had enlisted more low-scoring recruits than the law permits, with the
Navy using “off-the-books academic and physical fitness development
programs” to lift scores past the legal cap.
As of April 2026, the
Army also raised its maximum enlistment age from 35 to 42 and
eliminated a prohibition against applicants with a marijuana or
drug-paraphernalia conviction.
The second lever was money. The
FY2025 NDAA raised junior enlisted base pay 14.5 percent—designed to
make service “financially competitive” with big-box retailers. The
military is outbidding Walmart for the labor of young workers.
*****
The collapse of options under capitalism, riven by economic crisis,
debt and social inequality, is at the heart of the matter. Youth today
face stagnant wages amid rapidly rising housing, education and living
costs.
Recent data show that unemployment among 16–24-year-olds in
the US is around 9–10 percent—roughly twice the overall rate—with even
higher rates for minority youth. Housing surveys find that majorities of
people in their 20s and early 30s spend more than 30 percent of their
income on rent. Many are convinced they will never be able to buy a home
or afford children.
Over the past decade and a half, living
standards for broad sections of the working class have been eroded as
union leaderships accepted tiered labor systems, permanent “temporary”
status, frozen or reduced wages and sweeping cuts to pensions and
healthcare to preserve corporate profits and their own institutional
position.
Nowhere was this clearer than in the Obama‑engineered
auto bailout, in which newly hired autoworkers—disproportionately
young—were brought in on a second tier with wages roughly half those of
older workers, locking an entire generation into far lower pay and worse
conditions than their parents had enjoyed.
*****
In this landscape, the military’s offer of a guaranteed
paycheck, housing allowances and education benefits operates as a
mechanism of economic conscription, drawing heavily on working class
youth who see few comparable routes to stability in civilian life.
*****
The expansion of JROTC is one of the clearest mechanisms of this
economic and political conscription, tying K-12 schools into the
recruitment system. The program, which already encompasses half a
million students in some 3,475 units, with the Army alone running about
1,700 units and 275,000 cadets, is being aggressively expanded. These
programs are immensely important to the military, as an estimated one in
four cadets enlists or commissions.
The FY2025 NDAA authorized
JROTC units at Job Corps centers for at-risk youth ages 16 to 24 and
lowered the minimum required to establish a unit. The bipartisan SERVE
Act would go further, providing recruiters with students’ names, birth
dates, phone numbers, email addresses and student-aid filer lists,
designating “military-friendly schools” and proclaiming a “National Week
of Military Recruitment.”
The Trump administration’s fascist
blueprint, Project 2025, demands mandatory Armed Services Vocational
Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) military-entrance testing for every student in a
federally funded school.
It should also be noted that ROTC,
operating at colleges and universities, has about 20,000 Army cadets and
is its largest source of officers. Campus reports consistently note
that “many” or a “vast majority” of cadets are also coerced
economically, dependent on ROTC “scholarships” to avoid student loan
debt.
*****
The offensive against youth is not just a Pentagon initiative, but a
bipartisan policy and an international trend among the imperialist
powers.
*****
... As the WSWS reported,
the German Bundeswehr made 2,013 school visits in early 2026, sending
“youth officers” into classrooms and running war-simulation games for
students nearing conscription age. The German parliament passed a
military service law in December 2025, with Defense Minister Boris
Pistorius threatening “partial conscription.”
France’s defense
chief said the country must be ready to “lose its children” in a war
with Russia. Canada’s recruitment has hit a 30‑year high amid youth
unemployment near 14 percent, while Britain openly urges jobless youth
into uniform.
*****
Anti-war sentiment among young people has erupted into mass
protests during the last two years on a scale not seen in decades. In
Germany, a sustained school strike movement against the reintroduction
of conscription has seen tens of thousands of students walk out in over
90 cities. In the United States, the “No Kings” protests against the
Trump administration drew at least eight million into the streets—with
solidarity actions in Canada, Mexico, Germany and Italy.
At every
demonstration, alongside signs opposing ICE raids and dictatorship, the
slogan “No ICE, No wars” rivaled “No Kings” in frequency, reflecting a
deepening consciousness that war abroad and repression at home are two
sides of the same class policy.
The International Youth and
Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) urges young people to join our
ranks and take up the following demands:
• The immediate repeal of
automatic Selective Service registration, and the rejection of any
conscription for the war against Iran or any other imperialist conflict.
•
The immediate withdrawal of US forces from the Middle East and an end
to the war against Iran—and to the bipartisan drive for global
domination, the arming of Israel and the escalation against Russia and
China.
• The abolition of the standing army and the dismantling of
the military-intelligence apparatus—the Pentagon, the spy agencies, the
global network of bases and the machinery of surveillance—built to wage
war abroad and repression at home.
• An end to the “economic
draft,” under which the young are driven into the military by poverty,
debt and the impossibility of affording an education. Every young person
must have the right to a decent job, free education, healthcare and
housing.
• Redirect the resources squandered on war to urgent
social needs: universal healthcare, free public education, affordable
housing and secure, well-paid jobs for all.
Every
sentence of the lead motion presented at the congress is formulated in
such a way that it combines mild criticism of existing conditions with a
policy that is compatible with that of the federal government – and in
stretches also with that of the far-right Alternative for Germany.
To mark the 85th anniversary of Operation Barbarossa—Nazi Germany’s
invasion of the Soviet Union and the start of the most barbaric war of
annihilation in history—the World Socialist Web Site republishes an article that originally appeared on the on the 80th anniversary.
*****
There had previously been horrific wars with millions of victims. The
cannons of the First World War had been silenced just 23 years earlier.
The blood-soaked fields of Verdun and the Marne, on which the flower of
German, French and British youth were mown down by machine guns, were
considered a monument of human barbarism.
But the attack on the
Soviet Union went much further. From the outset, it was planned as a war
of annihilation. It was not only a war for territory, raw materials and
markets, but also a war driven by racism and ideology. The destruction
of Bolshevism, the extermination of the Jews and the creation of living
space in the east, which Hitler had been proclaiming for 20 years, was
now put into practice.
“Contrary to the belief of many in the
West, Hitler did not blunder into the war in the east,” wrote the
historian Stephen Fritz in his landmark work Ostkrieg: Hitler’s War of Extermination in the East.
“For him, the ‘right’ war was always that against the Soviet Union, for
to him Germany’s destiny depended on attaining Lebensraum and solving
the ‘Jewish question.’ Both of these, in turn, hinged on destroying the
Soviet Union. Which of these aims was most important? Given Hitler’s
views, it would be artificial to attempt to prioritize or separate them.
For him, the war against ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ and for Lebensraum was
comprehensive and of whole cloth.”
When 3 million German soldiers, 600,000 vehicles, 3,500 tanks, 7,000
pieces of artillery and 3,900 aircraft invaded the Soviet Union at 3
a.m., they brought with them detailed orders and plans to physically
exterminate millions of people. The invasion was accompanied by four
Einsatzgruppen (operational units) whose members had been carefully
selected and trained by Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security
Agency. The task of these 3,000-member units of “stormtroopers of
genocide” (Ian Kershaw) was to immediately kill any communists,
partisans, Jews and Sinti who came into their possession.
*****
For his part, Stalin was totally surprised by the German invasion,
even though he had been warned by his own and Western intelligence
agencies. The communist spy Richard Sorge even supplied the entire plan
of attack from Japan, including the timetable. But Stalin ignored all
warnings and trusted in the non-aggression pact, which he had agreed
with Hitler in August 1939. He was convinced that Germany, which was
already at war with Britain, would not risk a war on two fronts. After
the invasion, Stalin disappeared from the scene for days, leaving the
Soviet Union practically leaderless.
But the October Revolution
remained alive in the Soviet working class. Stalin may have murdered its
leaders, but he had not destroyed its achievements: the state ownership
of the means of production and the planned economy, which now proved to
be tremendous advantages. The Wehrmacht soon realized that they were
not fighting this time against the Tsar’s army of forcibly recruited
semi-serf peasants, but against the motivated army of a workers’ state,
which despite the terror did not capitulate, and instead developed a
remarkable energy and readiness to sacrifice.
Trotsky, who had
built the Red Army, also predicted this in 1934. The Red warrior differs
sharply from the czarist soldier, he wrote. “The cult of passivity and
of submissive capitulation before obstacles has been supplanted by the
cult of political and social audacity and technological Americanism. …
Should the Russian Revolution, which has continued ebbing and flowing
for almost thirty years—since 1905—be forced to direct its stream into
the channel of war, it will unleash a terrific and overwhelming force.”
Although
the war continued for over three-and-a-half years, and over 6 million
soldiers were either killed or severely wounded on the German side, it
was already clear after the first several weeks that the Wehrmacht had
no chance of victory. “Long before the first snows of winter began to
fall, however, and even before the first autumn rains brought most
movement to a halt, in fact as early as the summer of 1941, it was
evident that Barbarossa was a spent exercise, unavoidably doomed to
failure,” wrote the military historian David Stahel.
*****
After Germany’s defeat, nobody wanted to be responsible in Germany
for the war of annihilation. There were only victims and people
following orders—no perpetrators. Hitler was to blame for everything.
The Second World War was “Hitler’s war.”
Adolf Hitler, who shot
himself shortly before the Wehrmacht’s unconditional capitulation,
possessed extraordinary powers and was personally involved in all major
political and military decisions. Despite that, he was merely supplying a
product demanded by capitalist society. The answer to the question of
how this failed Austrian artist and embittered war veteran could rise to
the position of Germany’s “Führer” inevitably leads to the conclusion
that he had powerful backers in the elites of business, politics, the
military, aristocracy, culture and the universities.
One of his
most well known promoters in early years was the general Erich
Ludendorff, the second-in-command of the army during the First World War
who co-led the 1923 coup attempt in Munich with Hitler. Others included
the industrialists Fritz Thyssen and Erich Kirndorf, Crown Prince
Wilhelm of Prussia and Cosima Wagner, the widow of the famous composer.
The media empire of the German nationalist industrialist Alfred
Hugenberg, who was economy minister in Hitler’s first cabinet, played a
major role in his rise. In January 1932, an appearance by Hitler at the
Düsseldorf industrialists’ club secured him the political and financial
backing of the most important circles of big business.
Hitler did
not have to violently seize power; it was offered to him on a silver
platter. At the time of Hitler’s accession to power, the Nazis were in a
deep political and financial crisis. In the Reichstag election of
November 1932, the party received just 33 percent of the vote—4 percent
less than in July and 4 percent less than the two large workers’ parties
combined—the Social Democrats and Communist Party. Hitler even toyed
with the idea of suicide.
The decision to appoint Hitler as
Chancellor in January 1933 was ultimately taken by a small circle of
conspirators representing the interests of the state and big business
around the elder statesman President Paul von Hindenburg. Two months
later, with the Communist Party banned and the concentration camps
filling up, all bourgeois parties voted for the Enabling Act, making
Hitler a dictator.
During the war, Hitler then found thousands of willing assistants in
the officer corps who carried out his murderous orders; among state
officials, who terrorized the population and selected the Jews for
extermination; in industry, which increased its profits through war
production and forced labor; among professors, who gave race theory and
arbitrary justice the appearance of science, and many more.
The
war of annihilation did not emerge from “the will of the Führer,” who
unquestionably desired the war. The ruling elites promoted Hitler and
placed him at the head of the state because they wanted and needed the
war. It had deep objective causes in the irresolvable contradictions of
the capitalist system.
*****
Already during the First World War, German imperialism sought to
subordinate Europe to its interests, and failed. It now attempted this
for a second time.
The First World War was an imperialist war in
which all of the major powers fought for the redivision of the world and
the subordination of the world economy to their hegemony. German
imperialism played an especially aggressive role, because capitalism
developed belatedly due to the delayed bourgeois revolution, but thanks
to modern technology enjoyed a tremendous dynamism. Confined to Central
Europe, confronted with the British and French colonial powers, and an
even more potent American rival, it could only rise to become Europe’s
dominant power and secure access to raw materials and markets by violent
means.
Germany lost the war. Weakened and heavily indebted due to
the Treaty of Versailles and shaken by class struggles, all of the
problems that drove German imperialism into the First World War were
posed with renewed sharpness. In addition, in the east, the main area of
German imperialist expansion, a workers’ state now existed which served
as a revolutionary inspiration to workers in Germany.
The only
way out of this blind alley open to German imperialism was the use of
methods that were more brutal and barbaric than anything ever before
experienced....
*****
The United States, Britain and Germany’s other capitalist opponents
in the Second World War also fought for their imperialist interests, and
not “against fascism” and “for democracy.” Only the Soviet Union fought
for its very survival. A German victory would have meant the
destruction of the workers’ state and its transformation into a slave
colony.
As long as Hitler’s regime was directed mainly against the
German working class and the Soviet Union, it enjoyed considerable
international support. Among the admirers of Hitler was the American
industrialist Henry Ford, Britain’s King Edward VIII, and his American
spouse Wallis Simpson. After Edward’s abdication, the pair visited
Hitler at his Berghof. During the People’s Front government of 1936, the
French bourgeoisie even advanced the slogan, “Better Hitler than Blum”
(Léon Blum was Prime Minister in the People’s Front). Germany’s rapid
victory over France was more a product of the defeatism of the French
generals than of the technical superiority of the Wehrmacht’s weapons.
The Vichy regime under Marshal Pétain immediately reached an
understanding with Hitler.
But American and British imperialism
could not merely look on as Germany rose to become the ruler from the
Atlantic to the Urals. In alliance with Japan, it would have become a
deadly opponent of American imperialism. This led to the United States’
intervention into the war against Hitler, which only occurred after
Germany was already on the defensive at the battle of Stalingrad.
*****
The lessons of the war of annihilation against the Soviet Union are
of contemporary relevance. The same contradictions of world
capitalism—the irreconcilability of the capitalist nation state and the
private ownership of the means of production with the social and
international character of modern production—threaten to plunge the
world into the inferno of a third world war.
The centre of the
preparations for war is the United States, which will spend $753 billion
on its military in the coming budgetary year, more than the next 10
states. Some $25 billion is earmarked for nuclear weapons, and $112
billion for the research and development of new weapons systems.
The
US emerged as the real winner from the Second World War, and its
economic power—together with the suppression of revolutionary struggles
by the Stalinist bureaucracy and Social Democratic parties—enabled it to
temporarily stabilize European capitalism.
But the weight of the
US in the world economy has declined consistently since then, and
Washington is attempting to compensate for this decline with military
force. The US has been waging war almost uninterruptedly for 30 years.
In Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, they, with their allies, have
destroyed entire societies.
The US war machine is now targeting
China, which is officially defined as a “systemic rival.” The US wants
to prevent at all costs that China overtakes it economically and rises
to become a world power. US strategists now consider a war with China to
be unavoidable.
German imperialism has not accepted its defeats in the two world wars.
The German government is pursuing the official goal of expanding Europe
into a political and military world power capable of confronting China
as well as the United States. This is intensifying conflicts within
Europe, especially with France, which is Germany’s rival for hegemony
within the European Union.
*****
A
central component of the revival of German militarism is the
trivialization and historical revision of the war of annihilation.
The
Alternative For Germany (AfD) sits in parliament, describes the Nazi
regime as mere “bird sh*t in over 1,000 years of successful German
history,” and is embraced by all other established parties.
The
Berlin-based historian Jörg Baberowski stated publicly as early as 2014
that Hitler was “not a psychopath” and “not vicious.” One year later, he
claimed the war of annihilation was imposed on the Wehrmacht. The
Wehrmacht soldiers on the eastern front were “involved in a murderous
war of partisans.” They had “no other option” but to “adapt to the
partisans’ combat style.” He continued, “The war became independent, it
freed itself from the original goals that were the pretext for the
conflict.” Numerous similar citations can be found in the works of the
right-wing extremist professor.
When the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei and its youth organization IYSSE criticized these and
similar statements, giving expression to the widespread opposition in
the population to the return of fascism and militarism, the media and
political establishment defended the right-wing extremist professor.
A third world war would mean the end of human civilization. But not a
single established party is opposing the drive to war. Like the
situation prior to the First and Second World Wars, they are lining up
all the more closely behind the warmongers as the inter-imperialist
divisions deepen. The so-called peace movement has totally collapsed.
The German Greens, which emerged from this movement long ago, have
become the most disgusting warmongers. Eighty years after the invasion
of the Soviet Union, they are leading the agitation for war against
Russia.
A renewed relapse into barbarism can only be prevented by the
international working class, which must link the struggle against
militarism and war with its source in the capitalist system, and take up
the struggle for a socialist program. This is the perspective of the
International Committee of the Fourth International and its sections,
the Socialist Equality Parties.
The diplomatic crisis over Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s
promotion of anti-Polish Nazi collaborationist forces during World War
II is stripping away the political lies in which the NATO imperialist
powers have shrouded their proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. The
NATO-backed regime in Ukraine is not a defender of democracy and
national independence but a tool of imperialism resting upon far-right
forces.
In late May, Zelensky issued a decree giving a serving
military unit the honorary title “Heroes of the UPA.” This referred to
the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the military wing of the
Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which collaborated with
Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. The OUN and its members in
the Nazi auxiliary police participated in the genocide of Soviet Jews,
including the 1941 Babi Yar massacre in Kiev. Many of these men went on
to form the UPA, which hunted down pro-Soviet partisans in Ukraine and
carried out a genocide of Poles in Volhynia in present-day western
Ukraine.
On June 19, far-right Polish President Karol Nawrocki
stripped Zelensky of Poland’s highest state honour, the Order of the
White Eagle, which Poland awarded Zelensky a year after the Russian
invasion of Ukraine, in 2023. Nawrocki said that after he “repeatedly
signaled” his government’s concerns to the Zelensky government, its
“position has not changed.” However, he added, “facts are not subject to
negotiation” and “at least 100,000 Polish citizens were murdered by the
UPA.”
The Zelensky regime responded by denouncing Warsaw and
doubling down on its promotion of genocidal pro-Nazi forces. Zelensky
mailed his medal back to Poland. Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s head of
military intelligence (HUR) now head of the presidential office, said on
June 20 that he had renounced Poland’s Golden Officer’s Cross of the
Order of Merit, charging that in Poland, “the flywheel of hatred is
unreasonably and artificially spun against our citizens.”
As a result, today, on the 85th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of the
Soviet Union, a full-throated propaganda campaign is underway defending
Zelensky and the UPA. Former Ukrainian presidents Leonid Kuchma, Viktor
Yushchenko and Petro Poroshenko have all vowed to return their Order of
the White Eagle honors in solidarity with Zelensky. Ukrainian Foreign
Minister Andrii Sybiha denounced Warsaw’s criticism as a “strategic
mistake from which only Moscow benefits.”
*****
Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, was the
most horrific expression of imperialist counterrevolution against the
October revolution and the working class. It was a war of annihilation,
planned to create Lebensraum for German imperialism by annihilating
“Judeo-Bolshevism” through starvation, slave labor, and mass murder of
Jews, partisans and communists. By the time the Nazi war machine was
crushed, 27 million Soviet citizens were dead.
Zelensky can defend
and legitimize Nazi collaborationist forces in the Soviet Union only
because he knows that he has the support for this operation from the
major NATO imperialist powers. At the same time as Washington, Berlin
and the other NATO powers poured billions of dollars into the Ukrainian
regime, in the years preceding and following the 2022 Russian invasion,
the Ukrainian regime systematically rehabilitated the fascist
collaborators of World War II.
*****
The intensifying glorification of fascism is an expression of the
deepening crisis of the NATO proxy war and the collapse of the regime’s
popular support. In these conditions, the ruling oligarchy doubles down
on a falsified national history to manufacture a chauvinist mythology
with which to drive workers and youth into a catastrophic war.
The
turn to the heroes of the OUN goes hand in hand with the turn to
dictatorial forms of rule. Zelensky’s own legal mandate as president
expired in May 2024, yet he clings to power under martial law, having
banned opposition parties, suppressed independent trade unions and
outlawed any opposition to the war from the left.
While the Zelensky regime builds a pantheon of Nazi collaborators, it
imprisons those who oppose the war from the left. Bogdan Syrotiuk, a
young Ukrainian Trotskyist and a leader of the Young Guard of
Bolshevik-Leninists, was seized by the Security Service of Ukraine in
April 2024 and charged with high treason, which carries 15 years to
life, for articles published on the World Socialist Web Site.
He opposes the war from a socialist and internationalist standpoint,
against both the NATO-backed government in Kiev and the Putin regime in
Moscow. More than two years later he remains in pre-trial detention in
Nikolaev, his health deteriorating, while the state that jails him
honors the murderers of Volhynia as national heroes.
Across Europe the imperialist ruling classes are rehabilitating the
collaborators of the Nazis, reviving militarism and falsifying the
history of the 20th century to prepare new wars. The same process is
underway in Germany, which launched the war of extermination against the
Soviet Union in 1941 and is once again rearming and reviving its
militarist traditions.
Students, workers and intellectuals who
oppose the genocide in Gaza are branded antisemites, hounded from their
campuses, fired from their jobs, arrested and deported. The charge of
antisemitism has been weaponized into a bludgeon against all opposition
to imperialist war. Yet the same governments that level this smear
against opponents of mass murder are pouring weapons into a regime that
erects monuments to the men who carried out mass murder.
The conflict between Warsaw and Kiev is a falling-out between two
capitalist governments, both subordinate to NATO and both enemies of the
working class. Emphasizing that, for now, everything must be
subordinated to the joint war effort, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk
recently stated regarding the controversy “Co-operation serves the
interest of both our states and nations, while conflict serves Moscow’s
interests.”
Workers can defend neither the Zelensky regime nor its
Polish and NATO patrons. Against the rehabilitation of Bandera and the
persecution of socialists, the international working class must advance
its own program: the unity of Ukrainian, Polish, Russian and all workers
against their own ruling classes and the imperialist war they are
waging. This is the fight led by the International Committee of the
Fourth International, which demands the immediate freedom of Bogdan
Syrotiuk. The fight against war and fascism is the fight for socialism.
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.
Jun 20, 2026
NOTICE!
A special online event to be held later this week:
Two hundred and fifty years after the Continental Congress proclaimed
the Declaration of Independence, American democracy confronts its
gravest crisis since the Civil War. The democratic principles proclaimed
in Philadelphia in July 1776—that all men are created equal, that
governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,
and that the people retain the right to abolish any government that
becomes destructive of these ends—are being trampled by a government
controlled by a financial-corporate oligarchy. At the same time,
political and social resistance to the assault on democracy is being
undermined by the claim that there is nothing in the historical legacy
of the American Revolution worth defending.
While rejecting
simplistic nationalist myth-making, the standpoint of this webinar is
that the American Revolution was a world-historic event. Despite its
historically determined limitations, contradictions, and compromises,
the American Revolution set into motion a global wave of democratic
revolutions. It led inexorably to the destruction of slavery in the
United States and the emergence of a new epoch of struggle for the
emancipation of the working class.
The webinar will feature a
distinguished panel of historians who have written extensively on the
complex legacy of the American Revolution: James Oakes, Richard
Carwardine, Sean Wilentz, Adam Hochschild, and Thomas Mackaman. The
webinar will be moderated by David North, International Editor of the
World Socialist Web Site.
Daphy Michel, a 31-year-old Haitian asylum seeker released by
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into winter weather without
adequate support, froze to death in a Pittsburgh bus shelter on March 2.
The Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office has ruled her death a
homicide.
Michel died of hypothermia three days after ICE released her from
federal custody. The ruling confirms what was already clear from the
known facts of the case: her death was not an accident or an
inexplicable personal tragedy, but the outcome of official decisions
made by the courts, Washington County Jail, ICE and the political
establishment that oversees them.
According to the medical
examiner’s statement, “Ms. Michel was a vulnerable adult, suffering from
untreated severe mental health issues and a significant language
barrier when she was released from federal custody.”
The medical
examiner concluded: “Based on all available information during the
investigation, the pathologist ruled Ms. Michel’s death a homicide.” The
ruling does not by itself assign criminal guilt, but it does establish
that Michel’s death was caused by the action or inaction of others.
David Hockney’s death at 88 closes one of the most remarkable careers in
modern art. He was admired by critics, loved by the public, and
endlessly curious about what painting could still do. Few
twentieth‑century artists combined such technical brilliance with such
broad appeal. His exhibitions, numbering over 200, drew record
audiences, his images entered everyday visual memory, and his restless
experimentation made each new phase feel like renewal rather than
repetition.
Unlike many celebrated contemporaries, Hockney never seemed remote.
Friends recall him with fond astonishment: a man whose humility survived
fame, whose quick, mischievous humour animated every room, and whose
warmth made people feel instantly recognised. To them, he was not only a
major artist but a joy to be around.
His paintings invited rather
than excluded. The Californian pools, the elegant portraits of friends
and lovers, the Yorkshire lanes and explosive spring blossom all
possessed an immediacy that made looking itself a pleasure, at a time
when much contemporary art required theoretical explanation before it
could be enjoyed.
*****
No British artist of the post‑war period looked more intently at the
visible world. He believed painting should concern itself with love,
friendship and beauty—commitments that gave his work its warmth but also
limited it. The world he chose to paint remained deliberately small.
The same anarchistic spirit, more properly the same extreme
individualism, that rejected restrictions on his life, sexuality and
methods accepted a self‑imposed limitation on content: a belief that
private experience was sufficient, even as the world around him was
reshaped by deindustrialisation, class conflict, war, economic crisis,
neoliberal restructuring and widening inequality. These forces, which
transformed the society that produced him, remain outside the frame.
Yet
what he preserved endures. Hockney’s art holds fast to moments of
attention, to the fragile brightness of things glimpsed before they
vanish. His legacy is to remind us that careful looking is the beginning
of understanding—but not its end. The task for those who follow is to
widen the gaze, to bring beauty and history back into the same frame,
and to see the world with the fullness that Hockney, for all his gifts,
chose not to claim.
Andy Burnham’s clear-cut victory in Thursday’s parliamentary
by-election in Makerfield, Wigan, has paved the way for the former
Greater Manchester mayor to launch a bid to replace Keir Starmer as
Labour leader.
Under Labour’s rules, only sitting MPs can mount a
challenge to the party leader. With Starmer polling at record lows and
despised by millions, Burnham is expected to move against him in short
order.
*****
Burnham’s landslide was, as the WSWS noted earlier, made possible by
his good fortune of having spent the past decade in the north of
England, away from too-obvious association with Starmer and his pro-war,
austerity-enforcing party.
So toxic is the Labour brand—with the
ruling party down to 18 percent in national polls—that Burnham’s centered his campaign on the message “Vote Andy for Us.”
Burnham proclaimed himself the candidate of a “new politics,” with his campaign based on “place not party.” As the Telegraph
documented, Burnham used the word “Labour” in fewer than 3 percent of
his Facebook adverts—just two of them, despite the party spending some
£36,000 on 98 posts and videos over the four-week campaign.
*****
Burnham has presented himself as the antidote to four decades of
scorched-earth policies that have left northern towns such as Wigan as
de-industrialized wastelands. But such rhetoric was reserved for his
campaign videos and social media clips. All such language will be
discarded the instant Burnham crosses the threshold of Downing Street.
In an interview with the Times
published a week before polling under the headline “Andy Burnham: I’ll
cut welfare bill to fund defense,” he declared, “I am not squeamish
about saying that the plan would be to reduce the welfare bill. Not at
all.”
The Times, which has insisted for two years that
Starmer move more quickly to slash welfare and public spending to fund
the military war chest, concluded approvingly, “Burnham’s plan is about
reducing the benefits bill, and increasing defence spending in the long
term.”
Asked by the newspaper whether he agreed with the resigned defense secretary John Healey
that the £13.5 billion pledged by the prime minister for the military
was insufficient, Burnham answered that “the world has changed” and that
“we are going to have to change the assumptions on which we’ve been
working,” adding that the priority was “defense and security but also
resilience.”
Mamdani’s
hypocrisy and opportunism are in the service of what? The promotion of
the fiction that the Democratic Party—a party of the same
corporate-financial oligarchy that controls the Republicans--can be
reformed, as can the capitalist system.
The Istanbul Anatolia Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office carried out a
wide-ranging operation against Adalar (Büyükada, and other islands)
Municipality Friday morning. More than 40 people—including the Kemalist
Republican People’s Party (CHP) Mayor Ali Ercan Akpolat, his deputy
mayors, department heads, council members and municipal staff—were
detained in simultaneous raids.
The World Socialist Web Site
and the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi–Dördüncü Enternasyonal (Socialist
Equality Party–Fourth International) condemn this police-state operation
by the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and demand the
immediate and unconditional release of all those detained, including
Akpolat. Without concealing our political differences, we stress that
this is part of the ongoing, politically motivated judicial campaign
against the CHP and demand an end to this political witch hunt.
Büyükada (Prinkipo) is an island of historical importance. It is the
island where Leon Trotsky—who, together with Vladimir Lenin, co-led the
October 1917 Revolution—spent his years of exile from 1929 to 1933,
where he wrote My Life and The History of the Russian Revolution
and his unparalleled warnings against the rise of fascism in Germany.
He issued the call to found the Fourth International in 1933 on this
island.
Since 2023, the World Socialist Web Site has
developed a principled collaboration with Adalar Municipality for the
preservation of Trotsky’s historical and cultural heritage. In the week
of August 21—the date on which Trotsky died after being assassinated by a
Stalinist agent in 1940—the “International Commemoration of Leon
Trotsky” was held, with WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman
David North as the keynote speaker. This began in 2023 under the
previous Adalar mayor, Erdem Gül, and has continued since 2024 under
Akpolat’s administration. A new commemorative event has also been
planned for this August.
Although Akpolat is a member of the CHP,
he took a stance on the historical and cultural significance of Trotsky
and the years he spent on Büyükada that went far beyond his party’s
class and historical basis. In his opening remarks at the 2024 event, he
said the following:
We
are here today for an event of historical and contemporary political
importance. It has been 91 years since Leon Trotsky, the indomitable
defender of the working class who fought for an egalitarian world and
lost his life for this cause, left Büyükada.
It is also the 84th anniversary of his assassination in 1940. On this occasion, I remember him with respect.
Trotsky
settled in Büyükada in 1929 and spent four years here on our island. He
wrote the most important of his works based on a free and egalitarian
world in his house on the island. His life was intertwined with the ups
and downs of the class struggle. And today we will talk about the world
in chaos in the light of Trotsky’s dream, struggle and works.
We
have an internationally important historical and cultural heritage left
by Trotsky that has been neglected for many years. Our aim is to restore
the house where Trotsky lived on Büyükada and turn it into an
international library and museum house. Our research and work in this
direction is ongoing. Wouldn’t it be great if this house, which has been
abandoned to its fate for years, is transformed into a cultural center
that opens its doors to the whole world?
As I conclude my speech, I
respectfully salute Leon Trotsky and all revolutionaries who fought and
paid a price for a better world.
Akpolat’s
administration became an important supporter of the project to restore
the Trotsky House in a manner worthy of this great Russian revolutionary
and to transform it into an international cultural center open to
workers, youth and intellectuals from around the world. Today’s
operation also objectively threatens this project of historical memory
and culture of international significance.
*****
In Türkiye, the ruling class is sitting on a social powder keg.
Police-state repression is increasingly targeting the emerging workers’
movement. At the same time, Erdoğan is deepening his collaboration with
US imperialism under Donald Trump, who is hated by the overwhelming
majority of the population. Preparing to host the NATO summit in Ankara
on July 7–8, the government—by preventively arresting more than 30
anti-war activists in recent days—is declaring that it will suppress
every form of opposition to imperialism.
This demonstrates that
the struggle for democratic and social rights and the struggle against
imperialism are inseparable. It is precisely for this reason that the
CHP—which has itself become a target of the Erdoğan regime’s
police-state repression—is incapable of leading this struggle: It
represents the interests of the same ruling class as Erdoğan’s AKP and
is bound to the same imperialist powers. This struggle requires the
independent political mobilization of the working class on the basis of a
socialist program, against both the Erdoğan regime and the ruling class
and imperialism behind it.
The
police attack demonstrates the Labor government’s determination to
proceed with its plan to tear down around 150 homes by the end of June,
as the first phase of demolishing all 750 homes in the Waterloo South
estate over the next six to nine months.
At
four weeks, the Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak in the DRC and Uganda is
three times larger than any previous epidemic at the same stage, with
894 cases and over 200 dead.
*****
Mass displacement is the primary accelerant. According to the United
Nations humanitarian office, nearly a million people have been displaced
by years of armed conflict in Ituri Province, forced to navigate dense
forests, poor roads and remote villages that can take days to reach.
Tracing is defeated further by the region’s mineral economy, with
thousands of artisanal miners moving constantly among remote sites, a
high-velocity movement of labor driven by extreme poverty and the
demands of global supply chains and inextricably linked to the
imperialist extraction of Congo’s wealth. The virus has now reached
locations like the Kpangba displacement camp, which traps roughly 30,000
people who have fled inter-ethnic violence. Conditions are
catastrophic, with hundreds sometimes sharing a single toilet and open
defecation common. Caitlin Brady, country director for the Danish
Refugee Council, warned that the virus will spread extremely quickly in
such cramped conditions, sparking mass panic and flight.
Prime
Minister Anthony Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers fronted a media
conference on Thursday to outline backflips on Labor’s minimal capital
gains tax tweaks.
“If
you remove a disabled person’s ability to participate in society, then
inevitably many will question whether they have value, whether they
belong, and whether there is a place for them in the wider community.”
The
first round of nuclear talks, scheduled to open in Switzerland, was
scrapped before it began after Iran refused to send its negotiator in
response to a wave of Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon.
On Wednesday, Mack Trucks worker Will Lehman was nominated as a
candidate for president of the United Auto Workers at the union’s 39th
Constitutional Convention in Detroit. The nomination of a socialist
worker, running on a program to abolish the UAW bureaucracy and transfer
power to the rank and file, is a major development with national and
global significance.
The nomination by the maximum number of two
delegates at the convention was the product of a sustained campaign to
mobilize autoworkers behind this program. In the weeks leading up to the
convention, Lehman appealed directly to workers and delegates to place
his name in nomination. Supporters—including UAW members from Nexteer,
Dana, Stellantis and Ford—campaigned for Lehman at the convention.
Workers
backed his campaign because it expressed their own experiences with the
UAW apparatus: sellout contracts, suppression of opposition, the
defense of corporate profit and the subordination of workers’ struggles
to the Democratic Party and the state.
Lehman’s nomination is the
most conscious expression of a growing rebellion. Nexteer workers in
Saginaw have rejected three UAW-backed agreements and authorized strike
action by 86 percent. American Axle workers in Three Rivers walked out
for the first time since 2008. Dana workers have resisted the same
attempt to impose concessions behind their backs. Workers at Ford,
General Motors and Stellantis are fighting massive layoffs and plant
closures, carried out with the collaboration of the UAW bureaucracy.
The
EU summit held in Brussels on Thursday and Friday was in every respect a
war summit. Behind the official formulations about “security,”
“competitiveness,” “resilience” and “migration” lies a comprehensive
program of rearmament, war escalation, social cuts and attacks on
democratic rights.
A
Munich Labor Court has rated the “business freedom” of local transit
operator MVG higher than the freedom of conscience of a driver who
refused to drive a tram covered in advertising for Germany’s armed
forces.
Ahead of her trial, Sarah spoke with the World Socialist Web Site,
outlining the significance of her case. She explained, “There’s
potentially really large and quite dangerous consequences if I get a
guilty verdict.”
Freiheit für den sozialistischen Kriegsgegner Bogdan Syrotjuk! Stoppt den Ukrainekrieg!
Freedom for the socialist war opponent Bogdan Syrotjuk!Stop the Ukraine war!
[subtitles can be configured from the YouTube tools]
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.
The publication Thursday of the terms of the memorandum of
understanding between the Trump administration and Iran is such a
moment. It has triggered an outpouring of criticism from both the
Democratic and Republican parties on the grounds that the war US
President Donald Trump launched against Iran in February failed to
secure American imperialism’s objectives in dominating the Middle East.
Republican
former Vice President Mike Pence called the deal “appeasement” this
week and demanded that, short of a harsher settlement, “we should let
our Armed Forces finish the job on our terms.”
The Democrats
joined the Republican condemnation of the agreement, criticizing it in
much the same language. Senator Adam Schiff of California called it “a
thorough capitulation,” writing that “Iran gets sanctions relief... and a
$300 billion reconstruction fund.” Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut
called it “essentially a surrender to Iran.” House Minority Leader
Hakeem Jeffries declared that “Iran is stronger and America is less
safe” as a result of the agreement.
The New York Times,
in an editorial headlined “President Trump Lost This War,” called the
agreement “a humiliating comedown” and named Iran “the strategic winner
of the four-month war.”
Jacobin magazine, the
semi-official publication of the Democratic Socialists of America,
criticized Trump’s deal with Iran in language indistinguishable from
that of the Republicans and the Democratic leadership.
Jacobin’s article,
titled “Donald Trump Has Nothing to Show for His War With Iran,” took
the form of an interview with Andreas Krieg, a professor of “defense
studies” at King’s College London. The article states that Trump “has
ended up in a weaker strategic position than when he started.”
Krieg
told the magazine the war had produced “tactical degradation but
strategic regression.” Iran, he noted, had not surrendered its
enrichment program, its government had not collapsed and “its ability to
close Hormuz has been proven rather than deterred.” It offers neither a
word of condemnation of the war itself nor any call to oppose it.
The Trump administration waged an illegal war of aggression against
Iran, in violation of international law. The war opened with a series of
assassinations, including Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
and much of the country’s military and political leadership. This act
of murder and perfidy under cover of negotiations met with approval from
both parties. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said at the time, “I
will not shed a tear for Ali Khamenei,” while Jeffries called Iran “a
bad actor” that “must be aggressively confronted.”
Throughout the
war, the Democrats sought to stifle broad popular opposition to it
through a series of meaningless procedural votes, intended to fail. In
the massive demonstrations of millions of people under the banner of “No
Kings,” Democratic Party organizers worked to deliberately exclude any
reference to the war.
But now that the war has failed to achieve Trump’s objectives, the
Democrats have found their voice, condemning his “capitulation” to Iran.
This is the same party that spent the last year and a half presenting
Trump as a colossus whose social and economic policies could not be
opposed because he had a “mandate” from the electorate.
In reality, the Democrats, who speak for the same ruling class as
Trump, agree with broad sections of Trump’s domestic agenda. Whatever
their rhetoric, they believe, together with Trump, that fundamental
social programs must be slashed to fund the expansion of the military
and the enrichment of the financial oligarchy.
It is in defense of
the interests of American imperialism that they are intractable. During
his first term, the Democrats chose to impeach Trump not over his
assault on democratic rights, but, in 2019, for his insufficient
commitment to war with Russia and his withholding of military aid to
Ukraine.
*****
The Democratic response to the agreement makes clear that their claim to
represent any sort of “progressive” opposition to the fascist Trump is a
lie. They are ferocious defenders of American imperialism, and should
they come to power, there would be no fundamental change in foreign
policy.
A world separates the working class from these parties. From the first day of the war, the World Socialist Web Site,
the organ of the International Committee of the Fourth International,
defined the war by its social character, calling it “a criminal war of
aggression by an imperialist power against an oppressed former colony,
aimed at plundering its oil wealth and establishing control of the
Persian Gulf.” The Socialist Equality Party declared in a statement that
it “condemns this war unconditionally and calls on the working class of
every country to oppose it,” insisting that “the main enemy is at home”
and that American workers “have no interest in a war against the people
of Iran.”
The Christophers is amusing at times. McKellen’s
“pyrotechnics” are entertaining, and Coel, Corden and Gunning do
perfectly well. Soderbergh makes films (he also does the actual
cinematography and editing) more stylish and “knowing” than the norm.
But the film doesn’t, in the end, add up to much. It impresses the critics because they are not difficult to impress.
In other words, it is doubtful that on viewing The Christophers, anyone’s thoughts have been “enriched by something new,” or that new human types have been “engraved upon your heart.”
According to the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, officers
from the Senatobia Police Department and the Tate County Sheriff’s
Office responded to a shoplifting call at the Walmart on US 51 and
encountered two adults and a child leaving the store and entering a
vehicle. The department press release states: “Officers attempted to
stop the vehicle, but the driver drove in the direction of the officers,
almost striking one. An officer then discharged their weapon, and the
vehicle fled the scene.”
The vehicle later reached a hospital,
where the child was pronounced dead and another occupant was listed in
critical condition. A video captured by a bystander from
the front of the Walmart and broadcast by Fox13 News of Memphis shows
officers chasing a vehicle, which then pulls away from them.
The Guardian
reported that Carlos Haynes, the child’s grandfather, described his
grandson as a happy baby and said he was looking forward to watching him
grow. “Someone ended it all before it could even start,” Haynes said.
*****
The state police account has outraged family, friends and
residents because key evidence remains unreleased, while the narrative
of an officer’s life being in danger to justify the shooting is all too
familiar. The same justification is being used by federal authorities to
clear ICE agent Jonathan Ross for murdering Renée Nicole Good during
the mass protests against the brutal treatment of immigrants in
Minneapolis last January. Family members of Kohen Kartier Wiley say the
officer should never have placed the child in harm’s way in the first
place.
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who has been hired by the
family, wrote on social media that “A 1-year-old child is dead after
police officers in Mississippi opened fire on a vehicle in a crowded
Walmart parking lot in Senatobia.” He added that the child’s mother said
she tried to tell officers there was a baby in the car.
On Tuesday, family members, friends and community supporters gathered
outside the Walmart to protest the killing, and police responded with
tear gas. Reporters at the scene said the gas affected demonstrators and
members of the press, turning the protest into a public confrontation
over the use of force. Community members were not simply mourning; they
were demanding accountability in a case that involved the death of a
child.
Aside from their self-justifying press release, state
police have provided no additional information, and they say the case is
now under investigation by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation
(MBI). MBI said its agents are gathering evidence and reviewing the
circumstances surrounding the shooting, and local officials said the
officer involved has been placed on leave.
*****
Senatobia is a small city in Tate County in northern Mississippi,
about 30 miles south of the Tennessee border and 40 miles south of
Memphis. The area has very low incomes and elevated poverty, and the
local economy is dominated by low-wage work and limited public
resources.
The state of Mississippi remains among the poorest in
the US. ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) research
found that 48 percent of households in the state were either in poverty
or financially strained in 2024.
The Mapping Police Violence website ranks Mississippi as the state
with the 12th highest number of police killings in the US, with 5.4
deaths per 1,000 people and a total of 215 people killed through June 8,
2026.
In 2025, the Police Violence Report said at least 1,201
people were killed by police in the US. Security.org’s 2026 summary put
the 2024 number at 1,202 and said gunshots caused 94 percent of
police-involved deaths in 2025. Police use of firearms remains the
dominant cause of fatal encounters between the public and law
enforcement across the country.
Mississippi also has the highest
rate of firearm mortality of any state in the country. According to the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health
Statistics, Mississippi was the only state in 2024 with a rate of 28
firearm deaths per 100,000 people.
Late Friday night, President Donald Trump announced on social media
that US Southern Command had carried out a “lethal kinetic strike”
killing Héctor Guerrero Flores—known as “Niño Guerrero” or “El
Innombrable”—the alleged leader of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
The
extrajudicial execution was carried out “at my direction,” Trump
posted, attaching a 10-second video of a structure being struck from the
air. The operation, he said, had been coordinated with Venezuelan
leaders.
In December, Guerrero had been indicted by a federal
grand jury in New York on charges of ordering, directing, and
facilitating acts of terrorism and violence in the United States. He was
never arrested, never charged in a Venezuelan court, and never tried.
The
operation had in fact been underway for days before Trump’s
announcement. On Tuesday, Venezuelan military helicopters were already
conducting attacks over the gold-mining territory of Bolívar state,
controlled by Tren de Aragua.
Residents filmed aircraft overflying
the area, firing bursts of gunfire or dropping troops. Hundreds of
men—informal miners—were seen fleeing from the open-pit mines allegedly
controlled by criminal organizations.
“Bombs and gunfire could be
heard in the jungle,” a neighbor of Las Claritas told Reuters. “There
are mines in those areas. This is bad; you can’t go out.”
Human
rights organization Provea issued a warning: “The Venezuelan Army is
deploying a massive operation in Las Cristinas and at Km 88 in Bolívar
state. We warn of the risk of extrajudicial executions and arbitrary
detentions against the civilian population in the area.”
The men
who fled through that jungle mud were not cartel commanders. They were
informal miners—workers, however entangled the criminal structures may
be in informal mining across Venezuela’s Orinoco Mining Arc, a vast
territory near the borders with Guyana and Brazil.
Tren de
Aragua, it should be noted, has no large-scale involvement in
trafficking cocaine to the United States, according to InSight Crime.
Instead, informal gold mining and local drug trafficking, and the
violence from the conflict between criminal organizations and the state,
have been fueled by the economic desperation that decades of US
sanctions deliberately produced.
The killing of Guerrero is a
dramatic escalation inland of the extrajudicial campaign the Trump
administration has been waging since September in the Caribbean and
eastern Pacific. At least 210 fishermen have now been killed in US
military strikes on small boats, accused of drug smuggling without
evidence, identification, formal charges, or trial.
*****
Six months after US special forces abducted sitting Venezuelan
President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, bringing them to the
US to face a rigged trial in New York, the Chavista government led by
Maduro’s former vice president Delcy Rodriguez is jointly operating with
the US military to execute Venezuelans under indictment in US courts.
Now,
into the territory the militaries are attempting to clear, a different
criminal cartel will move: US and Canadian mining corporations with long
histories of corruption, environmental destruction and violent
repression.
*****
The cartels hiding in the jungle are being replaced by gangsters in
Wall Street boardrooms who will manage concessions, extract the gold and
remit the profits abroad while informal miners are pushed off the
deposits they have worked for years.
This is the broader logic of
what has unfolded since January 3, when US forces abducted Maduro. The
Trump administration has seized effective control of Venezuela’s oil
exports. Nearly 100 million barrels of oil, worth an estimated $8
billion, have moved through a system Washington controls with no public
accounting for sales, revenues or expenditures.
The same opaque mechanism has been extended to gold and other mineral
exports. Acting President Rodríguez’s government submits monthly budget
requests for US approval while Washington and private traders manage
the sales, audits, and disbursements. Rodriguez has also renewed ties
with the IMF, hoping for access to billions in credits.
Trump’s
main objective was explicit: to drive out Chinese and Russian economic
and political influence and gain unfettered control over the world’s
largest proven oil reserves—a prize US and British imperialism have
coveted since Standard Oil and Shell divided Venezuela between them in
the 1920s.
*****
The conditions being imposed today recall precisely those that have
historically produced the most explosive working class resistance in
Venezuela and across Latin America.
The austerity and privatizations of the 1980s produced the Caracazo
of 1989—a mass workers’ uprising that shook the foundations of
Venezuelan bourgeois rule. The protest movements that followed were
betrayed and channeled behind the election of Hugo Chávez, whose
bourgeois nationalist program proved structurally incapable of breaking
with imperialism and ultimately handed the country back to Wall Street.
Today’s
mass struggles of the working class require a new leadership that turns
to the lessons drawn by the International Committee of the Fourth
International—the only tendency that has consistently analyzed the
betrayals of Social Democracy, Stalinism, Pabloism and bourgeois
nationalism across the region, and that fights for the revolutionary
unity of the working class across the Americas.
Autoworker, socialist, and UAW presidential candidate Will Lehman
Autoworkers continue to respond with enthusiasm to the nomination of
Mack Trucks worker and socialist Will Lehman to run for United Auto
Workers president. Lehman was nominated Wednesday by two delegates to
the UAW Constitutional Convention in Detroit, which concluded on
Thursday.
Lehman issued a statement thanking the delegates from
Florida and Michigan who rose to nominate him and every delegate who
pledged to nominate him but were denied the chance under the rule
limiting nominations to two.
The statement read in part:
I
want to thank every worker who made this nomination possible—every
autoworker, parts worker, academic worker, healthcare worker, casino
worker and retiree who shared this campaign and contributed to it… This
campaign is directed against that apparatus. It is about the fight to
transfer power from the bureaucracy that has dominated this union to the
rank and file—to the workers on the shop floor.
In attendance were former presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and
Joe Biden, along with Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush and Jill Biden. The
presence of Bush, the war criminal responsible for the invasion of Iraq,
who came to power through the theft of the 2000 election, underscored
the fundamental unity of the two parties of American imperialism.
The Democratic Party establishment was represented by figures from
every wing of the party: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, former
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former Vice President and 2024 presidential
candidate Kamala Harris, Illinois U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, Illinois
Governor JB Pritzker, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and former Chicago
Mayor Lori Lightfoot. Also present was Michigan U.S. Representative
Rashida Tlaib, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, who
joined in honoring Obama, the president who continued Bush’s “War on
Terror” and institutionalized drone assassinations of so-called “enemy
combatants,” including US citizens.
The list of foreign
dignitaries included former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau,
former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, former Chancellor of Germany
Angela Merkel and former Mongolian President Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj.
Also in attendance were Tom Hanks, David Letterman, Stephen Colbert,
Bono and the Edge of U2, Christina Aguilera, Marc Anthony, Stevie
Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Tems and Eddie Vedder.
The ceremony
lasted more than three hours and combined militarism, celebrity worship
and nationalist pageantry, overlain with identity and racial politics.
Following a benediction, the Illinois National Guard presented the
colors, and Jennifer Hudson sang the national anthem. This was followed
by a promotional film narrated by Obama, filled with the hollow slogans
of his 2008 campaign, including “Yes, we can” and calls to “imagine your
impact.”
That Valerie Jarrett, chief executive officer of the Obama
Foundation, delivered the first speech was politically significant.
Jarrett, a longtime Obama associate, is representative of the
reactionary social layer elevated through the Democratic Party and
identity politics: wealthy, corporate-connected, deeply embedded in
Chicago’s political machine and hostile to the working class.
Before
serving as Obama’s senior adviser from 2009 to 2017, Jarrett was CEO of
the Habitat Company, a major Chicago real estate firm that managed
public housing developments, including Grove Parc Plaza, where poor
residents lived in conditions marked by decay, vermin and neglect. Her
career has included leading positions on corporate, financial,
university and transit boards. Less than three weeks after the murder of
George Floyd, amid mass protests against police violence, Jarrett
rejected calls to defund the police and suggested that more money was
needed for law enforcement.
The central political purpose of the
ceremony was expressed in the speeches of Michelle and Barack Obama.
Michelle Obama’s remarks are already being hailed by the media as
“historic.” But like the rest of the event, they were aimed at rewriting
the Obama years as a kind of Garden of Eden, ignoring the social
devastation, war, police violence and corporate plunder that defined the
period.
Michelle Obama praised her husband’s “dazzling
brilliance” and “unshakable moral fiber,” declaring that he had made the
country proud by “rescuing our economy, expanding healthcare, ending a
war, ordering the Bin Laden raid, saving the auto industry, winning a
peace prize, keeping us safe from Ebola, regulating the banks, standing
up for marriage equality, listening to science, and comforting an entire
nation in the face of unspeakable tragedies.”
Every phrase in
this litany is false. “Rescuing our economy” refers to the bailout of
Wall Street following the financial crash of 2008, which was initiated
under Bush and expanded under Obama. Trillions of dollars in loans,
guarantees and cash handouts were funneled to the banks, while millions
of workers lost their homes. Not a single major Wall Street executive
was prosecuted. When measures were proposed to limit executive pay at
bailed-out firms, Obama intervened on behalf of the financial
aristocracy. During the Obama presidency, the number of American billionaires rose from 359 to 565, a 57 percent increase.
“Expanding
healthcare” refers to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, a program
modeled on Romneycare that strengthened the domination of the insurance
companies and funneled billions in public subsidies to the private
healthcare industry.
“Ending a war” is perhaps the most grotesque
claim of all. Obama expanded the war in Afghanistan, continued the
occupation of Iraq, oversaw drone assassinations across the Middle East
and Africa, initiated the CIA’s Operation Timber Sycamore in Syria and
backed the US-NATO war in Libya, which destroyed the country and helped
reintroduce open slave markets in North Africa.
The “saving” of
the auto industry meant the use of federal bailout funds to impose a
historic attack on autoworkers. In the 2009 managed bankruptcies of
General Motors and Chrysler, tens of thousands of jobs were destroyed,
plants were closed, new-hires’ wages were cut in half, strikes were
banned for six years and the United Auto Workers bureaucracy was handed a
direct financial stake in the “restructuring” through its control of
the VEBA retiree healthcare trust.
Barack Obama’s own speech was no less reactionary. He preached
“bipartisanship” and the “shared values” of the two parties of big
business and war, declaring that a “sense of duty and honor” was not
Republican or Democratic but “American,” and that every president on
stage had tried to uphold these values. He explicitly included John
McCain and Mitt Romney in this pantheon.
This was the political
essence of the ceremony. Obama presents Trump as an interloper, a
temporary departure from the “arc” of American democracy. In reality,
the fascist Trump embodies the financial oligarchy that rules the US. He
is the product of the very social order Obama rescued after the 2008
financial crash.
Obama’s reference to the United States as an
“undeniable force for good in the world” was the greatest lie of all. In
fact, US imperialism is the undeniable center of global reaction,
responsible for countless wars, occupations, sanctions, coups,
assassinations and, more recently, outright genocide by its Israeli
attack dog in Gaza.
The Obama Presidential Center is a monument to hypocrisy. Its purpose is
to provide the Democratic Party with a usable myth as it seeks to
contain popular hatred of Trump while blocking any independent movement
of the working class.
The 225th Interior Ministers’ Conference, which has been meeting in
Hamburg since Wednesday, marks a new stage in the construction of a
German police and military state. Under the slogans of “civil defense capability” and the defense against “hybrid threats,” the federal and
state governments are driving forward the systematic integration of the
police, intelligence agencies, judiciary, economy and Bundeswehr (armed
forces).
For the first time, Federal Defence Minister Boris
Pistorius is taking part in the plenary session of the Interior
Ministers’ Conference (IMK). According to the Hamburg Interior
Authority, provision is being made for the Federal Ministry of Defence
and the Bundeswehr to be permanently integrated into the structures of
the IMK in future. The aim is to build up “military and civil defense capability with equal consistency and speed by 2029.”
This
formulation is of enormous political significance. The IMK, which
traditionally sets guidelines for internal security, is being openly
integrated into military war planning. Pistorius and the military
leadership have repeatedly emphasized that Germany must be placed in a
position by 2029 to wage a comprehensive war against the nuclear power
Russia. What is being sold as the “growing together of external and
internal security” in reality means the further abolition of the
dividing lines between the police, intelligence agencies, military and
civilian administration in order to make Germany “war-ready.”
*****
This development is directly connected to the federal government’s
war and rearmament policy. While NATO and the EU in Brussels discuss new
billions for the war in Ukraine, the rearmament of Europe and the
confrontation with Russia, the Interior Ministers’ Conference in Hamburg
is organizing the domestic political side of the same development: an
apparatus that remains functional in wartime, controls oppositional
sentiment and suppresses social resistance.
This is particularly
clear in the term “hybrid threat.” It is deliberately boundless. It
includes sabotage, espionage and cyberattacks as well as
“disinformation,” “influence operations” and the shaping of public
opinion. In this way, the entire political and media sphere is declared a
security problem. Criticism of NATO, of Germany’s Ukraine policy, of
support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza, of the war against Iran or of
social cuts can at any time be defamed as part of a foreign influence
operation.
*****
Involved are intelligence services, federal and state police
authorities, cyber agencies such as the BSI, federal and state criminal
police offices, the Central Customs Authority, the Federal Prosecutor’s
Office, business associations and, depending on the occasion, the
Bundeswehr. This creates a central hub in which intelligence findings,
police measures, economic interests, prosecutorial action and military
security logic are brought together.
*****
The construction of a German police and military state is inseparably
bound up with the return of German militarism. As in the first half of
the 20th century, crisis and war are driving capitalism toward
dictatorship and barbarism. Only an international socialist program that
breaks the power of the banks, corporations and arms capitalists,
dissolves the Bundeswehr, abolishes the intelligence agencies and places
the economy under the democratic control of the working class can stop
this development.
At the EU-Western Balkans summit held on June 5 in Tivat, Montenegro,
the European Union’s leading powers—above all, Germany—pushed for the
fastest possible integration of the Western Balkan states into the EU.
The EU is accelerating the incorporation of the Balkans not for
democratic or social reasons. Under the guise of “stability,” “reforms”
and “European perspective,” the region’s states are being brought into
line with Brussels and integrated into European war policy. Under
conditions of the Ukraine war and growing rivalry with Russia, China and
increasingly also the US, the EU is seeking to bind the Balkans more
closely to its economic, military and geopolitical interests.
*****
Behind the formula of “gradual integration” lies a model that
incorporates the candidate states into central EU structures even before
full membership—but without voting rights. Von der Leyen put it
bluntly: Sectors of the internal market were being opened to companies
from the Western Balkans, and in return these countries must carry out
reforms to create “level playing field” conditions for European capital.
This effectively means their geopolitical, economic and military subordination without full political rights.
As early as 2023, the EU had promised up to 6 billion euros for
“reforms and investments” under the so-called Growth Plan. However,
these funds are tied to closer integration into the EU single market,
regional economic cooperation and comprehensive “reforms”—i.e., opening
up markets, privatization, austerity and the subordination of the region
to the interests of European capital.
Summit host Montenegro is
considered a front runner. The country is the most advanced candidate and
aims to become an EU member by 2028. It is already a NATO member and
has introduced the euro. Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda said his
country, which holds the EU Council presidency in the first half of
2027, would “do everything to promote and accelerate this process.”
Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin, whose country holds the EU Council
presidency in the second half of 2026, also hoped “to remove all
obstacles so that the remaining negotiation chapters can be closed.”
For the other five states—Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, North Macedonia and Kosovo—negotiations are less advanced.
As past EU enlargements have shown, integration on the terms of the
European powers means a further deterioration in the situation of the
vast majority of the population. These countries are already scarred by
poverty, unemployment and emigration. At the same time, the governments
of the Western Balkan states are politically extremely fragile, enjoy no
popular support for their right-wing policies and are frequently deeply
entangled in corruption and crime.
This combination repeatedly
leads to fierce social protests. In recent weeks, tens of thousands of
people took to the streets in Albania against the government. The
immediate trigger was the approval of several luxury tourism projects on
the island of Sazan in the Karaburun-Sazan Marine National Park and in
the Narta Lagoon, including at Pishë Poro beach near Zvërnec, which
belongs to the Vjosë-Narta Protected Landscape. Beneficiaries of the
project include Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and a network of
companies and corrupt Albanian politicians.
In Serbia, nationwide
protests against President Aleksandar Vučić repeatedly take place, and
in Bosnia-Herzegovina thousands of people protested for several days in
the capital Sarajevo in February. The trigger was a tram accident in
which one person was killed. This caused pent-up anger to boil over
about dilapidated infrastructure, a lack of safety checks, and the
corruption and indifference of the political elite.
The
governments, which are under enormous pressure, welcome rapid attachment
to the EU in order to preserve their own privileges and those of the
extremely narrow upper classes. Albania’s Prime Minister Edi Rama called
for a faster pace in enlargement. Last year he stated his country was
aiming for EU accession by 2030 and described himself as an “EU
fanatic.”
*****
The ruling class in Europe expects integration will bring not only new
markets, raw materials and investment opportunities. At the summit, it
became clear that this “geopolitical investment” is primarily directed
against Russian and Chinese influence in the region.
*****
Although the war against Russia was not officially on the summit
agenda, the issue was omnipresent, also in connection with a possible EU
accession of Ukraine.
Parallel to the Western Balkans summit, the
EU is pushing ahead with Ukraine’s integration. Two days before the
summit, on June 3, the new Hungarian government under Prime Minister
Péter Magyar withdrew its veto against Ukraine’s EU accession. A week
after the summit, on June 12, Council President Costa and Commission
President von der Leyen jointly declared that all member states had
agreed to open the first negotiating cluster with Ukraine and Moldova.
This is a further escalation against the nuclear power Russia.
The
EU has long regarded the Balkans as part of its geopolitical sphere of
influence. The summit was fully in line with the disastrous record of
German and EU policy in the region.
The destruction of Yugoslavia
was driven decisively by Berlin, which sought to revive its historical
sphere of influence in the Balkans after German reunification in 1990.
In 1991, the Kohl government pushed for international legal recognition
of Slovenia’s and Croatia’s secession, while knowingly accepting the
prospect of ethnic civil war.
The 1999 NATO war, in which Germany
participated for the first time since World War II with combat missions
in the Balkans, completed the destruction of Yugoslavia and subjected
the region to the dictates of the IMF and World Bank. Bosnia became a de
facto IMF protectorate. In 2006 and 2008, the EU and the US further
pushed the secession of Montenegro and Kosovo.
*****
The EU and Germany no longer view the Balkan states merely as an energy
and raw materials corridor, a reservoir of cheap labour and an
instrument to repel migrants but increasingly also as a strategic
outpost against Russia and other rival powers.
Two deaths in custody in recent months have reignited allegations of
torture, sexual abuse and fatal violence by Fiji’s police and military
forces. Similar reports involving patterns of brutality by the Pacific
Island country’s security forces have recurred repeatedly over many
years.
In the latest case, the Fiji Police Force has acknowledged
that 12 officers, including members of the Royal Fiji Military Force
(RFMF) were present during the arrest of 32 year-old Sakiasi Ose
Radravu, whose family claims he was severely beaten, resulting in his
death.
The family alleges that on the night of April 23, Radravu was tortured
during a raid at his home in Kinoya, near the capital Suva, by police
and military officers, and beaten within an inch of his life. He died on
June 4.
Police claim that the autopsy report shows the cause of death was “a pre-existing medical condition.” According to Fijivillage,
they later claimed he was under the influence of a substance when he
was taken into custody and his behaviour was “marked by distress,
including screaming.”
Radravu’s aunt, Elizabeth Kabuyawa, told
Radio NZ (RNZ) that the family is seeking a second autopsy due to
concerns about a cover-up. The death certificate lists the main cause of
death as sepsis and complications from pneumonia.
The family says
the period from the arrest to death was sudden, unexplained, and
difficult to accept. Kabuyawa declared: “I think they’re [police] trying
to masquerade it. They’re not even considering that there was an
underlying issue that he’d had from these beatings. My nephew was
sodomised, his head was stomped on, he was beaten almost to his death.”
Radravu’s cousin Buna said the raid was prompted by an accusation
that he had stolen a laptop. After being roused, family members arrived
at Radravu's nearby house to find it surrounded. “We could hear that our
cousin was actually screaming and yelling for his life,” Buna said.
Radravu’s
girlfriend was reportedly in the room as he was being beaten, “[She]
came crying home and came to inform the family of what had happened.
After they had beaten him up, they had taken him up to the [police]
station,” Buna said. The family alleges that his detention was never
recorded, and that police had not issued a warrant for the raid.
*****
Beatings and deaths are not “excesses” by rogue soldiers. They are the
product of a state built on successive military coups, rooted in the
ongoing crises of Fijian capitalism. Sitiveni Rabuka, the current prime
minister, led two coups in 1987. In 2000, an attempted coup and hostage
crisis unfolded, led by George Speight with military backing. Frank
Bainimarama came to power in a coup in 2006 and ruled the country until
2022.
Section 131 of Bainimarama’s 2013 Constitution—which has not been
altered—gives the RFMF commander unrestrained powers to ensure the
“safety and security of the country,” a blunt assertion that the
military ultimately remains in charge. RFMF officers routinely operate
alongside the police and are often appointed as heads of corrections,
police and other senior government roles.
*****
The main target of police and military repression is the working
class. Successive regimes have imposed draconian anti-union laws,
suppressed May Day protests, arrested locked-out and striking workers and trade union officials.
There
remains the real threat of another coup. Bainimarama and ex-police
commissioner Sitiveni Qiliho appeared in court earlier this month,
accused of attempting to incite a mutiny in the armed forces, which they have denied.
The latest police-military crackdowns however prove that nothing fundamental has changed under Rabuka,
despite his posturing as a liberal opponent of Bainimarama and claiming
to undo aspects of his unpopular dictatorial regime. Whatever their
differences, all factions of the ruling elite fear the rising anger in
the working class over skyrocketing inflation and a social crisis that
has worsened since the illegal US-Israeli war against Iran.
About a third of the population lives in poverty. According to the
Fijian Broadcasting Corporation, 34 percent of children aged between
five and 11 are engaged in child labor. Nearly one percent of the
population—9000 people—are HIV positive, a crisis fueled by out-of-control drug use.
Fiji’s
military-backed regimes have been protected by Australia and New
Zealand, who have accommodated themselves to every illegitimate
government. New Zealand’s announcement
in 2019 of an “enhanced partnership” between the NZ and Fiji police
forces was aimed at bolstering the repressive apparatus. Australia last
month signed an upgraded security treaty with Fiji, aimed at integrating it into US-led war plans against China.
The
principal concern of the two local imperialist powers is not democracy
and “human rights,” but stability for investment and the exclusion of
rival powers from the region, particularly China.
Residents of the Sahaspura housing complex at Borella, Colombo, in
Sri Lanka, staged a protest on the morning of June 3, demanding the
immediate repair of elevators that have been out of service for an
extended period.
Gathering in an open area adjacent to the
complex, they displayed placards bearing slogans such as, “Fulfil the
demands of all Sahaspura residents!” “Repair the lifts immediately!”
“Are the officials asleep?” and “People suffer because the elevators are
not working.”
The demonstration reflected growing frustration
among residents over the authorities’ prolonged failure to address a
problem that has severely disrupted the daily lives of hundreds of
working-class and urban poor families living in the high-rise housing
complex. It is not an isolated issue. People have been angry for years
and months over the failure to repair their houses.
Although the
14-storey complex contains 671 units housing more than 20,000 residents,
only one of its six elevators is currently operational. Elderly
residents, people with medical issues and schoolchildren have been
forced to climb multiple floors, sometimes all 14 stories, on foot.
Residents protested after repeated appeals to the authorities were
ignored.
Like successive governments, the current Janatha Vimukthi
Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) government has broken the
promises it made to residents at election time.
Officials from the
government’s Urban Development Authority (UDA), who arrived at the
protest site, urged residents to end the demonstration, claiming that
all funds required for repairs had already been approved. However, when World Socialist Web Site
reporters went to the area for the second time on Tuesday evening,
people were still impatiently waiting in front of the only working lift.
*****
Sahaspura was the first high-rise housing project built for
low-income people in Colombo, launched by the President Chandrika
Kumaratunga government under the banner of providing better housing for
shanty dwellers. As the WSWS explained at the time, the project’s real
purpose was not to solve the housing crisis but to free up valuable real
estate occupied by poor residents for industrial and commercial
development.
Constructed in 2001–2002 under the World Bank-backed
Sustainable Townships Programme, Sahaspura was managed by Real Estate
Exchange Ltd. (REEL). Company documents openly stated the government’s
objective: “To attract foreign direct investment, it is essential to
provide cheap labour and suitable land areas and infrastructure,
particularly within the city of Colombo.”
The housing units were
not intended to provide decent living conditions. The units range from
335 to 600 square feet and were allocated according to the size of
residents’ former houses. The bathrooms measure only one metre by one
metre, and there are no proper kitchens. Instead, there is only a
concrete slab for placing a gas stove and other items. In effect, the
former shanty dwellers were moved from “horizontal slums” to what can
only be described as “vertical slums.”
Far from providing safe
housing, many apartment complexes have become death traps due to poor
planning, inadequate maintenance, and the absence of basic safety
measures. In February this year, a seven-year-old boy was killed at the
Helamuthu Sevana housing complex in Mutuwal after a section of the
cement ceiling from the building’s seventh floor suddenly collapsed on
him. In November 2024, a fire caused by an electrical leak in an
elevator damaged the Laksanda Sevana apartment complex in Kolonnawa,
disrupting residents’ lives and destroying property. The incident
triggered protests by residents, who accused authorities of neglecting
essential maintenance and safety requirements.
*****
While many people now live in “vertical slums,” hundreds of luxury
condominiums and major tourist hotels were built on the land from which
they had been forcibly removed.
According to the recently
published Sri Lanka Real Estate Market Outlook 2026 by LankaPropertyWeb,
the average monthly net salary of a worker in Colombo is 70,452 rupees
($US210), while the selling price of one square foot of luxury apartment
space in the city centre is 108,442 rupees ($US324).
On June 4,
Deputy Minister of Urban Development Eranga Gunasekara held a media
conference and blamed previous governments for conditions at Sahaspura.
He declared that the apartment complexes had been built “not for humans
but for animals” and had become “hellholes.”
Under the current government of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, the
so-called Colombo Regeneration Project continues, with plans to
construct 2,000 housing units for “dwellers living in underserved
settlements.” The purpose is the same: to release real estate for
corporations and confine the poor to poorly built complexes.
Gunasekara’s rhetoric was intended to hoodwink people. His JVP/NPP
government is continuing to impose austerity measures dictated by the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and placing the burden of the economic
crisis, intensified by the US war on Iran, on working people, throwing
many more into poverty. Public health, education and housing programs
are all being starved.
More than six months after the devastating
Cyclone Ditwah, thousands of families are still living in temporary
shelters. According to UNICEF, the “National Disaster Relief Services
Center (NDRSC) reports that by the end of May 2026, approximately 1,337
people remain displaced in 18 safety centres.” As of mid-April, 150,329
displaced persons were still being housed by family members or in other
accommodation outside formal shelters.
The bitter experiences of
workers and oppressed people demonstrate that the housing crisis, like
all other social problems, cannot be solved through appeals to
capitalist governments or within the capitalist system. Poor residents
must build independent action committees and link up with the working
class to fight for a workers’ and peasants’ government that will
implement socialist policies to secure their social rights.
In
a tactical retreat, management has said that new cuts will be prepared
after consultation processes in which the National Tertiary Education
Union has signaled its readiness to play a central role.
A recently published book by University of Auckland researchers Chris
Wilson and Michal Dziwulski sheds new light on the March 15, 2019
terrorist attack carried out by fascist shooter Brenton Tarrant in
Christchurch, New Zealand.
Motivated by racist hatred of non-white
immigrants and Muslims, Tarrant massacred 51 people and severely
injured dozens more when he opened fire during Friday prayers at the
city’s Al Noor and Linwood mosques. He gunned down defenceless men,
women, and children indiscriminately; the youngest victim was three
years old. Ninety-two children lost a parent in the attack.
He Told Us: How an Australian Committed Far-Right Terrorism in Christchurch, New Zealand
(Allen & Unwin) brings together much of the publicly available
information about Tarrant’s activities in the lead-up to the attack. It
also provides new details about his radicalisation as a right-wing
extremist, based on the authors’ discovery of more than 400 messages
posted by the terrorist on far-right message-boards on the website
4chan.
Most significantly, the book highlights glaring omissions
and flaws in the report of the 2020 Royal Commission of Inquiry into the
attack. They dispute its main findings that Tarrant “was a lone actor”
and that there was “no plausible way he could have been detected except
by chance.”
In fact, Tarrant had spent years communicating with
other far-right extremists and wrote several publicly accessible
statements which made clear that he intended to commit a violent attack
against Muslims in New Zealand. While these statements were anonymous,
he did not go to great lengths to conceal his identity.
*****
He Told Us vindicates the analysis made by the WSWS that the
Royal Commission’s report was a whitewash of the police, intelligence
and other state agencies. At best, these authorities turned a blind eye
to the threat of far-right and anti-Muslim violence. New Zealand’s
intelligence agencies—the Security Intelligence Service (SIS) and
Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB)—reviewed the
Commission’s report and had the power to veto the inclusion of
information.
The report covered up the role played by successive
New Zealand and Australian governments in creating the environment which
fuelled the growth of the far-right—including both countries’
participation in US-led wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. These illegal
imperialist wars were justified by relentless demonisation of Muslims
by the media and political parties, including Australia’s One Nation and
New Zealand First. Wilson and Dziwulski’s book does not mention these
wars against majority Muslim countries, which would certainly have
influenced Tarrant during his formative years.
*****
An extraordinary level of official secrecy surrounds Tarrant and his
attack. One of the first actions of the NZ state was to ban possession
of Tarrant’s manifesto, titled “The Great Replacement,” which elaborated
his fascist ideology, hailed US President Donald Trump as a symbol of
white nationalism, and laid bare the similarity of Tarrant’s
anti-immigrant and anti-Marxist views to those of “mainstream”
right-wing politicians in Australia and NZ. As the authors of He Told Us
point out, the ban has not prevented the manifesto from being
circulated by far-right extremists internationally, but it has
contributed to suppressing public discussion and analysis of Tarrant’s
views.
*****
Former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern declared that she would never
speak Tarrant’s name and told the media to restrict reporting on his
statements in the event of a trial. Because Tarrant pleaded guilty he
was never questioned in court about how he planned the attack and
whether there were accomplices.
The Royal Commission’s
hearings—including its solitary interview with Tarrant—were held in
secret. The commissioners permanently suppressed the vast bulk of the
evidence and submissions they received, a total of over 73,500 pages,
including 15,000 pages from the police investigation. Its final report
consists largely of assertions that cannot be checked against the
evidence they are supposedly based on.
*****
The authors of He Told Us provide a scathing critique of the
Royal Commission’s narrow terms of reference, its suppression of
evidence and the gaping holes and contradictions in its report. Yet they
do not offer any explanation for why the Commission proceeded as it
did. They do not call it what it was: not a genuine inquiry but a
cover-up and a whitewash of the state agencies.
The Auckland
University researchers agree with the Commission’s most important
recommendation: that the intelligence agencies must be given more
resources. They state that if the NZSIS, the domestic spy agency, had
been given “double the number of counter-terrorism staff” then it might
have been more inclined to monitor far-right extremism, rather than
focusing mainly on Islamic extremism.
This claim is utterly false.
In actual fact, annual funding for the NZSIS increased dramatically
from $11.5 million in 2000/2001 to $68.6 million in 2017/2018—a more
than sixfold increase, which was justified on the pretext of preventing
Muslim terrorism. For the 2026/2027 financial year the agency will get
$142,196,000.
By the time the Christchurch terrorist attack
occurred, the intelligence agencies in both Australia and New Zealand
had the ability to conduct warrantless mass surveillance of
communications, as did the police.
While Muslims, environmental
groups, anti-war activists and others had all been targets of state
surveillance, the fascist networks in Australia and New Zealand were
allowed to operate without interference from the state. This remains the
case today. In Australia, the National Socialist Network, the rebranded
UPF, led by Sewell, last year led major anti-immigrant demonstrations.
The
explanation is political. The function of the state is to preserve
capitalist rule and prevent the development of a socialist movement in
the working class. The promotion of far-right extremism and fascism
serves the same purpose by dividing the working class and scapegoating
immigrants and other minorities for poverty and social inequality.
Wilson
and Dziwulski’s book briefly discusses the anti-immigrant demagogy
stoked by Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard during the early 2000s
and mentions the rise of the blatantly racist One Nation. But they say
nothing about parallel developments in New Zealand’s political
establishment—including the fact that NZ First, a far-right party which
espoused anti-Muslim and anti-Marxist views similar to those in
Tarrant’s manifesto, was a coalition partner in Jacinda Ardern’s Labour
Party-led government.
In the seven years since the Christchurch
massacre, as the crisis of capitalism has deepened, official politics in
every country has lurched even further to the right. The US-Israeli
genocide in Gaza and their criminal war against Iran are supported by
the Australian Labor government and the National Party-led coalition
government in New Zealand.
*****
The Ardern government exploited the Christchurch terror attack to
boost the intelligence agencies and the state censor’s powers. Ardern
also launched the Christchurch Call to Action, an initiative involving
dozens of governments and major tech companies, including Meta
(Facebook), Microsoft, Amazon, Google and X, to establish tighter
censorship and state surveillance of the internet.
Governments are carrying out a global war on online anonymity.
This has nothing to do with stopping the far-right, which has been
elevated to state power in the US and controls social media companies
like Elon Musk’s X. The aim is to suppress opposition to war and
inequality among ordinary people, and to monitor and stop the spread of
socialist ideas. Most notably, the WSWS has been heavily censored by
Google, Facebook and Twitter/X—all of which support the Christchurch
Call initiative.
Workers and young people must learn the great lessons of history, above
all the Trotskyist movement’s struggle against fascism in the 1930s.
This task cannot be entrusted to capitalist governments, which are the
incubators of the fascist threat. It is necessary to build revolutionary
parties in every country, as sections of the International Committee of
the Fourth International, to lead the working class in a conscious
fight to end capitalism, and in doing so put an end to nationalism, war
and social inequality.
NHS
Fightback calls on General Practitioners in England to vote NO in the referendum and
reject the BMA’s privatization blueprint for General Practices;
government attacks must be answered by the demand for full funding.
A strike, now well into its third week, by 300 signalmen and
communications workers at the Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CPKC)
railway has exposed once again the gaping, pro-company loopholes in
labour law that allow employers to subvert and even break legal walkouts
by federally regulated workers in key sectors of the economy.
After
a 96 percent vote in favour of job action, the highly skilled workers,
members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW),
went on strike on May 31 in pursuit of wage increases, expense payments
and measures to improve work-life balance.
But beginning a day
after the workers walked out, strikers began filming instances of scab
contractors illegally performing their work, in flagrant violation of
recent amendments to the Canada Labour Code. Passed in June 2024, the
amendments came into force a year ago. The have been celebrated by the
Canadian trade union bureaucracy as a “solid” piece of anti-scab
legislation shepherded through parliament by their friends in the big
business Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and now his
successor, Mark Carney.
On the afternoon of June 7, experienced hatch foreman Marc Salgado
fell roughly 50 feet from an elevated catwalk aboard the container
vessel C/V Ever Legion, moored at APM Terminals Pier 400 at the Port of Los Angeles.
Salgado
was overseeing the loading and unloading of containers on a 9,604-TEU
vessel operated by Evergreen Marine Corporation, one of the giants of
the global shipping cartel. At approximately 4:45 p.m., Salgado plunged
through an opening in the catwalk’s perimeter and struck a hatch lid
below. Preliminary reports suggest a chain guardrail either parted or
was left unsecured. Paramedics pronounced him dead at the scene.
The
International Longshore and Warehouse Union issued a brief bulletin
titled “Tragedy at APMT” the following day, and operations at the port
continued with minimal interruption. Cal/OSHA and the Coast Guard have
opened investigations.
Salgado’s death is the latest preventable
fatality in a list stretching back years across the San Pedro Bay
terminals and across the US, each one the predictable outcome of a
system that subordinates human life to the velocity of container
throughput.
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.
