Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. This week in history: April 6-12
- 25 years ago:
50 years ago:
75 years ago:
US President Truman dismisses General Douglas MacArthur
100 years ago:
2. Trump’s threats to destroy Iran and the breakdown of American democracy
On Sunday, US President Donald Trump issued a profanity-laced rant on Truth Social vowing to destroy Iran’s civilian infrastructure in a series of war crimes.
“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F****n’ Strait, you crazy b******s, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”
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The invocation of Allah—the name for God used by Muslims—in a message on Easter Sunday threatening to send the population of a predominantly Muslim country to “Hell” is an overtly Christian fascist statement, giving the war the coloration of a crusade.
The president of the United States is threatening to destroy the power grid and bridges of Iran, eliminating the basis of civilized life for 90 million people. These are statements of total criminality, within the framework of an illegal war of aggression.
Trump operates completely outside the framework of international law, of democratic conventions and basic legality. His statements and actions are a testament to the total breakdown of American democracy under the pressure of extreme inequality, endless war and spiraling social, economic and political crisis.
The overwhelming majority of the American population is disgusted by and opposes Trump’s illegal war against the people of Iran. They rightly see him as a criminal and a gangster.
But this raises the question: How, amid overwhelming popular opposition, after millions marched against the government on March 28, can this gangster regime remain in power?
The answer lies in the character of the nominal political opposition. The Democratic Party’s response to Trump’s statements has focused on the president’s personality and mental state. “These are the ravings of a dangerous and mentally unbalanced individual,” Senator Bernie Sanders wrote Sunday. Senator Chris Murphy called Trump’s remarks “completely, utterly unhinged.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Trump is “ranting like an unhinged madman on social media” and threatening “war crimes.”
Trump’s statements are indeed both criminal and insane. But the Democrats’ response is characterized by political impotence. Five weeks into the war, no congressional committee has held a public hearing. No resolution condemning the war has been brought to a vote. No investigation has been opened.
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The rise of Trump to the heights of American politics is a reflection of the historical bankruptcy of the entire social and political order. Trump is, as World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board Chairman David North wrote April 2, an embodiment of a criminal underworld that has come to power. His language expresses “the essential character of a social layer that has become habituated to criminality and no longer feels compelled to apologize for it.”
This oligarchy has amassed its wealth not through productive labor, but through fraud, speculation and theft. Its social physiognomy is epitomized by the Epstein scandal, which exposed—if only in part—the integration of high finance, state power and sexual blackmail in the operations of the American ruling class. The same networks of privilege, corruption and impunity that surrounded Epstein uphold a political system in which criminality is not an aberration, but a method of rule.
Trump did not arise out of nowhere. He articulates, in unvarnished form, a broader ruling class policy. His genocidal threats mark a new stage in a decades-long escalation of US imperialist criminality: Bush’s invasion of Iraq on fabricated pretexts; Obama’s global drone assassination program conducted outside democratic or legal restraint; Biden’s arming and funding of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The same ruling class is waging all-out war on the working class at home. On Wednesday, Trump told a White House Easter lunch audience that the government could not afford daycare, Medicaid, Medicare or Social Security because it needed the money to wage war. He called these vital programs on which tens of millions depend “little scams,” and said the federal government had one job: “military protection.” His proposed budget requests $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon—a 44 percent increase—paid for by gutting domestic spending.
Again, the Democrats oppose any popular mobilization because a movement from below would immediately raise these broader issues. Trump’s profanity-laced threats to obliterate Iran’s civilian infrastructure expose more than his personal depravity. They reveal the breakdown of democratic institutions themselves. There is no mechanism within the existing political institutions to seriously oppose him, and the regime has declared it will not accept any constraints on its actions.
Opposition cannot be entrusted to the Democratic Party. It must be developed as a class movement. Workers and young people must organize independently—in workplaces, across industries and across borders—against the war, against the destruction of social programs, and against the capitalist system that produces war, dictatorship and social inequality.
3. Danish pseudo-left lines up with European imperialism against US over Greenland
Opposition in Denmark and across Europe to the Trump administration’s brutal persecution of immigrants and political opponents, aggressive “America first” militarism, and push to establish a dictatorship is widespread.
Large sections of the Danish population have expressed particular outrage at Trump’s repeated threats to seize Greenland, an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark. Trump has made clear that controlling the world’s largest island is part of his agenda to dominate the Western hemisphere in preparations for world war with China and other US rivals.
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Opposition to imperialist war and plunder can only come from the international working class. Workers in Europe and the United States have no interest in backing one or another contending party in the imperialist redivision of the world now underway. While differences between the predators flare up from time to time, these always revolve around the question of who will control the distribution of the spoils of imperialist conquest. However, all of the European and North American imperialist powers are determined to deploy the most brutal forms of violence to secure their interests.
Workers in Denmark and throughout Europe require the program of world socialist revolution and political independence from all factions of the ruling class to put an end to imperialist war and the capitalist system that gives rise to it. The only political movement with a decades-long record of struggle in defense of these principles and against all anti-Trotskyist tendencies, like the Pabloites, who have repudiated them is the International Committee of the Fourth International. This is the movement that workers and young people ready to fight the resurgence of imperialist war and barbarism must now build in Denmark and internationally.
4. United Kingdom: Resident doctor appeals for a unified fightback against Starmer government threats
NHS FightBack spoke with a resident doctor in London, Sophie, about the upcoming six-day strike which begins on April 7, across the National Health Service (NHS) in England by 50,000 members of the British Medical Association (BMA).
This marks the fifteenth strike since March 2023 in the battle for pay restoration, with wages in real terms 20 percent lower than in 2008. Last year’s action also raised demands to tackle the jobs crisis facing tens of thousands of resident doctors, who make up half of all NHS medical staff.
The strike opposes a 3.5 percent pay award for this year confirmed by the Labour government—below RPI inflation standing at 3.6 percent and expected to rise sharply due to the war on Iran.
Doctors have also faced down threats from Prime Minister Keir Starmer demanding they suspend the action and vote on the connected deal drawn up in closed door talks between the BMA resident doctors committee (RDC), led by Dr. Jack Fletcher, and Health Secretary Wes Streeting.
Streeting’s “generous offer”—in addition to real terms pay cut—is a new contract tying progression through the pay scales with “productivity gains” claiming an average increase this year of 4.9 percent. An additional 4,500 speciality posts over three years has been touted as “progress” when 50,000 resident doctors face unemployment this year.
On Thursday, Starmer confirmed that 1,000 additional speciality posts had been withdrawn for this year following the ending of his 48-hour ultimatum to suspend the action and vote on the deal.
As NHS FightBack stated, the RDC had no mandate for a deal which abandons resident doctors core demands. Fletcher withdrew from talks last Wednesday after the government confirmed that the time span for pay progression would be spread over three years rather than implemented in 2026/27.
Fletcher insists there is still a pathway to a settlement with a government using coercion and threats and mounting a media witch-hunt smearing resident doctors are “reckless” and “absurd”.
NHS FightBack asked resident doctor Sophie to respond.
5. Book review: American Midnight: The Great War, a violent peace, and democracy's forgotten crisis
Adam Hochschild’s American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis uncovers the massive World War I-era attack on civil liberties and the violent repression of labor, socialists and immigrant communities carried out under the liberal Democratic Party administration of Woodrow Wilson.
Hochschild’s vivid, engaging account of the political subordination of the society to the needs of a ruling class waging an imperialist war deserves a wide readership. The crimes it documents, including attacks on immigrants, imprisonment of thousands for political speech, systematic use of torture, state-sponsored terrorist violence and naked profiteering, are central to an understanding of the rise of the United States to leading imperialist power—all the more timely given the return of these forms of repression under the fascistic Trump administration in the twilight of American imperialism.
Hochschild (King Leopold’s Ghost; Spain in Our Hearts) opens the book with the paradox around which the narrative is organized. The US entered World War I, as Woodrow Wilson claimed, to “make the world safe for democracy,” and yet the war became “the excuse for a war against democracy at home.” More striking still is the scale and severity of the repression that intensified after the war had already ended. This, American Midnight shows, was directed against organized resistance in the working class.
It is a history, Hochschild observes, “not marked by commemorative plaques, museum exhibits, or Ken Burns documentaries.” The author offers American Midnight as a corrective to a sanitized official memory in which the heroism of the “Great War” simply dissolves into the libertinism of “the Roaring Twenties.” In this, he has succeeded.
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American Midnight deals with a period rich in critical political and strategic lessons for the working class, extracted and explained in the great contemporary writings of Lenin and Trotsky. Among these was the insistence that there was no “progressive faction” of the ruling class. In the age of imperialism, Lenin wrote in State and Revolution, it is “political reaction all along the line.”
It was probably not Hochschild’s intention to support Lenin’s crucial point. His book offers no specific class analysis; the word “imperialism” appears only once. Perhaps unable to approach the significance of his own findings, the author limply concludes his book by calling for vigilance in defense of “America’s version of democracy.”
But whatever his intentions, Hochschild’s honest and lifelike account completely destroys the myth of a “Golden Age” of liberal reformism. Wilson sought to drape American imperialism in the mantle of “Progress,” democracy and freedom. But his response to organized working class resistance against inequality, repression and nationalist propaganda was to level the most ruthless attacks on democratic and social rights ever waged.
It must be stressed that this attack came at the near apogee of American capitalism, when it was still on the rise. Today, the American ruling class, led politically by the fascist Donald Trump, is utterly bankrupt—both morally and financially. In its unprovoked attacks on Iran, its support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza, and in aiming for the destruction of virtually all that remains of working class living standards won in the hard struggles of the last century, it has shown it is prepared to carry out crimes today that would put those of the 20th century in the shade.
When Hochschild writes that what is needed is “above all, a vigilant respect for civil rights and constitutional safeguards, to save ourselves from ever slipping back into the darkness again,” one is prompted to ask the question: From whom will come a commitment to social equality and democratic rule?
The answer to this question is the international working class, which can and must mobilize to fight this lawlessness and cruelty with the higher principle of social equality, for the expropriation of the oligarchy and the establishment of genuinely democratic forms of rule. The struggle for socialism is not just politically necessary, but remains the only humane, decent and emancipatory path left.
6. UCLA reports expose explosive growth of student homelessness in Los Angeles County
Two recent reports by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) on student homelessness in Los Angeles County constitute a devastating exposure of the social reality confronting millions of working-class families.
The reports, titled “Rising Numbers, Fading Resources” and “Hidden In Plain Sight,” provide a detailed statistical and qualitative portrait of a system incapable of meeting the most basic human needs, above all the right to stable housing and education.
The growth of student homelessness is extraordinary. Between the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years, the number of homeless students in Los Angeles County surged by 28.4 percent, a rate that far exceeds both state and national increases. More than 61,000 students were officially identified as homeless.
This figure alone is staggering, but it captures only a portion of the real scale of deprivation. The rise reflects the combined impact of skyrocketing housing costs, the rollback of limited pandemic-era protections and the intensification of economic insecurity among working-class families.
Los Angeles County, with a population of roughly 10 million, is a region marked by extreme social inequality, with dozens of billionaires alongside vast layers of the population living on the brink of homelessness.
The UCLA reports underscore the link between student homelessness and social inequality. Latino students are disproportionately affected. English Learner students in some areas comprise up to half of the homeless student population.
These patterns reflect broader social conditions, including low wages, precarious employment and the vulnerability associated with immigration status in a system that systematically exploits immigrant workers while denying them basic rights.
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The educational impact is severe: over one-third of homeless students are chronically absent due to transportation barriers, frequent moves and unstable living conditions, disrupting both academic progress and social development.
Despite some districts implementing targeted interventions that produced limited improvements in test scores or dropout rates, homeless students continue to lag behind their housed peers.
Crucially, the second UCLA report shows that even these alarming figures significantly underestimate the scale of the crisis. Large numbers of students are excluded from official counts due to narrow federal definitions and inconsistent reporting. Those who are “doubled up,” temporarily living with other families because of economic hardship, are often left out, leaving tens of thousands of students experiencing housing instability effectively invisible.
This undercounting has direct consequences. Funding for programs that support homeless students is tied to identification rates; when students are not counted, they receive no assistance. The result is a vicious cycle in which the most vulnerable are systematically denied essential resources.
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Fear plays a decisive role. Many families avoid disclosing their housing situation due to concerns about immigration enforcement, child welfare intervention or social stigma. These pressures are particularly acute in immigrant communities, which comprise a significant share of Los Angeles County. Statewide data show homeless students are twice as likely to be migrants as their housed peers, underscoring the link between immigration status and housing insecurity.
Student homelessness is not the result of individual misfortune or isolated administrative failure, but the outcome of decades of policy decisions that have systematically prioritized the interests of the financial and corporate elite over the needs of the population.
Both the Democratic and Republican parties bear responsibility, as they have dismantled social programs while directing vast resources toward war, policing and the enrichment of the wealthy. Their claim that there is “no money” for education, housing or healthcare is exposed as fraudulent when billions are routinely allocated to military spending and corporate subsidies.
While the Trump administration gives crude and open expression to this logic, insisting that social needs be subordinated to war and national security, the Democratic Party has enforced the same essential policies in a more concealed form. This is particularly evident in California, a state dominated by Democrats for decades.
The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second-largest in the United States, exemplifies this crisis. With a budget of $18.8 billion serving nearly 400,000 students, it is projecting an $877 million deficit for the 2026-2027 school year. This has already led to layoffs, program cuts and further deterioration of strained services. At the same time, city authorities are advancing plans to privatize aspects of homelessness management, turning social catastrophe into an arena for extracting profit.
7. ICE presence increasing at Michigan healthcare facilities
Michigan health care providers are now reporting that encounters with ICE are becoming routine parts of their practice, both near and within healthcare facilities. Routine checkups now include monitoring immigrant patients for a “basic fear of safety,” particularly young patients whose family members have been arrested by ICE. In addition to enforcement actions at health care facilities, there are increased reports of individuals injured by ICE during arrests being taken to hospitals and emergency departments, as well as a greater number of people requiring emergency care while in ICE detention.
On March 23, 2026, the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center and ACLU of Michigan sent guidance to more than 400 hospitals and providers in the state concerning the legal rights of immigrant patients. In this guidance, health care providers are reminded that both federal and Michigan state law, including The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, requires emergency rooms to provide necessary treatment to anyone presenting with an emergency medical condition, regardless of immigration status or ability to pay.
Thus, it is illegal to turn away or delay care to a patient based on their immigration status. Healthcare providers are further reminded that no law requires the affirmative disclosure of patients’ immigration status to law enforcement authorities. Such unauthorized disclosures run afoul of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) and the Michigan Medical Records Access Act if done absent a valid judicial warrant, court order, or subpoena. Administrative immigration warrants or subpoenas not signed by a judge are insufficient for this purpose.
The memorandum also advises that immigration officers are still constrained by Fourth Amendment bars against unreasonable searches and seizures, especially in the context of healthcare, where patients have reasonable expectations of privacy while being treated. This notice of patients’ legal rights is unfortunately required, as ICE officers have been explicitly instructed to disregard the Fourth Amendment and break into homes without a judicial warrant.
A high percentage of workers in healthcare facilities in Michigan are also immigrants, compounding the issue of ICE enforcement at healthcare facilities. An estimated 29 percent of custodial and maintenance workers, and 9 percent of hospital workers overall are immigrants.
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The Trump Administration has devastated Medicaid through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which is expected to end for 355,000 Michigan residents by 2028, including tens of thousands of immigrants. There are already widespread fears that Medicaid data is being turned over to ICE to identify undocumented immigrants.
The March 19, 2026 episode of “The Pitt” crystalizes how ICE’s expansion and its pressure on medical centers and healthcare workers transforms hospitals into instruments of state terror, with immediate consequences for both patients and staff. The episode in questions depicts masked ICE agents with a zip-tied detainee turning an emergency room into a detention area. This dramatization captures what Michigan healthcare providers are now reporting as reality: routine appointments and emergency visits are being policed and medical personnel are pressured to choose between patient care and collusion with ICE.
Tragically, this fictional scene is not hyperbole, but a reflection of current policy. DHS rescinded sensitive-location priorities, ICE has been ordered to operate aggressively in civilian spaces, and hospitals are reporting increased encounters, detainees injured by or under the watch of ICE, and healthcare workers themselves being terrorized.
The effect is to intimidate entire communities into foregoing care, subcontract medical labor and records to an immigration-surveillance apparatus, and to deepen the fragmentation of the working class. Workplace defense is thus a necessity to resist deportations, medical neglect, and the commodification of healthcare in general, and an organized socialist response must be made to these ends.
In this interview, Daszak responds to the inaugural “Scientific Freedom” lecture held at the National Institutes of Health under the sponsorship of NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, chosen for that position by vaccine denialist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. because he opposed any serious public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dr. Daszak on what we face:
We are now closing the labs and organizations that existed to prevent the next pandemic. Emerging infectious diseases are rising exponentially. We estimate a median of 66,000 people in South and Southeast Asia are infected by bat coronaviruses every year, and that number is increasing above a straight line. Every single program that John Cohen described in his recent book on new approaches to pandemic prevention has been shut down by Bhattacharya. The next pandemic will emerge from another wildlife farm, market, or shipping port soon; that’s a statistical projection from published data. And what are we doing about it? We’re defunding scientists.
Dr. Daszak on now heading a non-profit:
As CEO of a nonprofit, you have a board, and many board members come from the private sector. For many, their involvement is genuinely aimed at doing good for the public and the planet. But sometimes you go to lunch with people who are just awful, people with money who want to tell you what to do with science, who see research as an asset to be deployed. We saw this in the Epstein files, with evidence that he had repeatedly met with networks of scientists. Unfortunately, wealthy people manipulating a scientific agenda for their own personal goals is part of the reality of how research gets funded in this system. It creates dependencies that have nothing to do with scientific merit.
But scientific funding through government agencies involves a far more open process, with proposals, independent review, goals, reports and publications. It also helps demonstrate that the lab leak obsession with the DEFUSE proposal is so erroneous. We couldn’t pursue the DEFUSE line of research without funding. You can’t characterize a series of bat coronaviruses 20 percent different from SARS without the $14 million budget ahead of time. Meanwhile Ridley faces no such constraints. He’s independently wealthy, writing nonsensical books and giving lectures at NIH is just a hobby for him. A book full of innuendo doesn’t need peer review or a funding agency. That asymmetry is part of the problem. Look at who is making money from this MAHA movement, writing books, promoting supplements instead of vaccines, gaining fame through podcasts. Science is a discipline that promotes truth and rejection of false hypotheses: you are supposed to be criticized, you are supposed to be wrong sometimes, you are supposed to update when the evidence demands it. These people operate with none of those constraints.
On doing good:
Scientists who work in areas that become political targets understand it viscerally. I would never have imagined, as a graduate student, getting into this kind of political fight over my work. You’re not trained for it. And when it happens, it is devastating; your livelihood, your mortgage, your career can be demolished. But underneath all that there’s a reason we become scientists, or medical doctors, or public health workers. We want to do good. If doing good means irritating powerful people to the point of attack, then you are still doing good. That must sustain you.
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A Marxist Conclusion by Benjamin Mateus of the World Socialist Web Site:
What Daszak provides, almost without realizing it, is a materialist account of how science functions under capitalism, not as the autonomous pursuit of truth by enlightened individuals, but as an activity structurally dependent on state funding, private donors, institutional relationships and political tolerance. He describes going to lunch with “people who are sometimes just awful” because a nonprofit cannot survive without them. He describes a $14 million grant proposal as the precondition for research that could have characterized the very type of virus that caused the pandemic. He describes watching Chinese scientific collaboration built over decades, producing data that flowed to US databases because the Americans had the gold standard, collapse in months as the political relationship deteriorated.
This is not what the liberalism-of-expertise worldview expects science to look like. In that worldview, science is insulated from power by the peer-review process, the self-correcting nature of the method, and the professional integrity of researchers. What Daszak describes is something quite different: a system where the integrity of individual scientists can be fully intact while the institutional conditions allowing them to work are subject to political determination from above.
That is why his conclusion, that this is a “temporary rupture” to be reversed by removing the Trump administration, falls short of what his own testimony requires. The COVID pandemic did not begin with Trump. The normalization of mass death, the subordination of public health to economic imperatives, the transformation of science into a political sport, these have been built across multiple administrations, parties and decades. Bhattacharya and Ridley are symptoms of a structural crisis, not its cause.
The Ridley NIH lecture is not primarily an act of scientific fraud, though it is that. It is an act of class politics: the deployment of institutional authorities to protect the ruling class from accountability for the pandemic’s catastrophic management, and to dismantle the public health infrastructure that costs capital money while serving the working class. The same logic that brings Ridley to the NIH podium brings Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to HHS and CDC, Andrew Wakefield’s ghost to ACIP and mass death to communities that can no longer afford protection from preventable disease.
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Public health infrastructure was not given to the working class by enlightened elites. It was won through organized struggle, under specific historical conditions, and it is being dismantled now because those conditions have changed. Peter Daszak, despite everything, believes truth will win out. So do we. The difference is that we believe truth requires organized political force to prevail and that force will not be found in an election cycle but in the working class coming to understand what is being taken from it, and by whom, and why.
9. US, Israel wreak further damage on Iran’s cultural heritage
The atrocious character of the American and Israeli war on Iran is apparent not only in the aggressors’ murdering of civilians but also in their attacks on Iran’s cultural heritage. The latter country’s near-total internet blackout and the proverbial fog of war make obtaining a clear picture of the ongoing vandalism difficult. Nevertheless, independent reporting indicates that at least 56 Iranian cultural sites have been damaged or destroyed.
Iranian officials say that over 131 museums, historical buildings and cultural sites have been damaged. This barbarity is assaulting not only Iranian culture and history, but also the heritage of humanity as a whole.
Many UNESCO World Heritage sites have been damaged. One, as we have reported, is Golestan Palace in Tehran, a royal complex and former seat of the Qajar dynasty with roots in the 15th century. This complex sustained damage from a direct strike, as well as blast damage. Another is Chehel Sotoun, a Safavid-era pavilion in Isfahan that dates to the 17th century. The UN recognizes these sites as containing “cultural and natural heritage around the world considered to be of outstanding value to humanity.” They theoretically enjoy legal protection under an international treaty, and the attacks on them underscore the Trump administration’s open contempt for international law.
More recently, the US and Israel have damaged Saadabad Palace complex, a former royal residence in Tehran. The complex was the home of the Qajar and Pahlavi shahs, including Reza Shah, who was installed through a coup executed by the United States and the United Kingdom. After the 1979 Iranian revolution, parts of the complex became public museums. The Green Palace, one of the three palaces in the complex, has been called the most beautiful palace in Iran.
Strikes also have damaged the Marble Palace, which was built in 1933 while the Pahlavi dynasty was in power. The palace stands on lands that belonged to Qajar princes, and Iranian institutions used it for almost 40 years. It has served as the headquarters of Islamic Revolutionary Committees, the offices of senior judiciary officials and the office of President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. It also has housed the Iranian National Jewels.
Teymourtash House in Tehran, which was owned by the first minister of court during the Pahlavi era, also has been damaged. Notably, the building incorporates Iranian, Russian and Indian styles of architecture. The mansion’s first floor houses a war museum with exhibitions dating from the Safavid era to the Pahlavi era. Like Saadabad Palace and the Marble Palace, Teymourtash House is not an isolated building but a museum network. Damage to these sites has thus affected archives, collections and the ability to conduct research.
Isfahan, Iran’s third-most populous city, has suffered multiple attacks. Damage has been confirmed at several sites inside the city’s heritage complex, within and around Naqsh-e Jahan Square. These sites include the Shah Mosque and Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque, both of which date to the 17th century and are regarded as masterpieces of Persian architecture. Strikes have cracked the structures of these buildings, dislodged masonry and shattered decorative elements.
In Kashan, the historic Fin Garden sustained damage to its pavilions and water features. The garden was completed in 1590, making it the oldest extant garden in Iran.
As terrible as the damage to these sites is, even more heinous is the destruction of Rashk-e Jenan, a site that housed the Isfahan Governor’s Palace. The centuries-old complex dated to the Safavid era, was renovated during the Qajar period and was known for its gold-decorated ceilings. With characteristic, Nazi-like savagery, the Israeli Air Force destroyed the site in a direct strike in March.
The US and Israel seek to destroy not only Iran’s cultural heritage sites but also its centers of knowledge and study. Dozens of universities and research centers have been struck, according to Iran’s Foreign Ministry. Among them are the Iran University of Science and Technology and Isfahan University of Technology. As they have done in Gaza, the Zionist state and its imperial sponsor seek to obliterate the accumulated knowledge that is the foundation of civilization and progress.
The fascistic government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also has used the war on Iran as a pretext for an invasion of Lebanon, where it seeks to create a “security zone” extending north to the Litani River. Rejecting all restraint, Israel is targeting the country’s civilian infrastructure and cultural heritage.
In March, Israeli airstrikes hit the vicinity of Lebanon’s ancient city of Tyre, which is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. The airstrikes damaged the entrance to the Al-Bass archaeological site, which is centered on a 3,000-year-old necropolis. A museum under construction in that area had its windows blown out. The necropolis, the Roman-era triumphal arch, aqueducts and hippodrome were fortunately unscathed, but not because of any scruples on the part of Israel. Tyre was heavily damaged during Israel’s 2024 invasion of Lebanon.
Israeli strikes have also occurred within yards of major Roman temples at Lebanon’s Baalbek archaeological site. The large site encompasses the ruins of an ancient Roman town and is one of the most important Roman temple complexes in the world. It was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1984. The remains of a formerly massive Temple of Jupiter are one of the main structures at the site, which also is home to a Temple of Bacchus.
There can be no doubt that these sites in Iran and Lebanon were struck intentionally. “The Israelis know everything. They know your shoe size ... and they know very well this is an archaeological site,” Nader Saqlawi, an official in Lebanon’s culture ministry, told the semiofficial Saudi newspaper Asharq Al Awsat.
Nor is the US acting out of ignorance. As we previously reported, UNESCO transmitted the coordinates of every protected site in Iran to the US and Israel. Both countries confirmed that they had received the information.
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Only a social order that has exhausted its progressive role and entered a stage of terminal decline could produce a malignancy like Trump, who himself is only the most repulsive symptom of an international crisis. The illegal imperialist war against Iran proves beyond doubt that capitalism can no longer preserve human culture, let alone allow it to flourish. For the sake of humanity, capitalism must be overthrown.
10. Sri Lankan workers and students discuss the US-Israel war on Iran and how to stop it
“If workers come together, they are like a bundle of sticks. If the sticks are separated, they can be broken. What we need to do is tie the rope—unite the working class.”
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The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) will hold the second in a series of public meetings entitled “Stop the US-Israeli War on Iran!” on April 7 at 3:30 p.m at the Orient Institute of Education at Hindagala, near the University of Peradeniya in Kandy. We call on workers, youth and university students and teachers to attend.
Members of the SEP and the IYSSE have been campaigning among students, non-academic staff and academic workers at the University of Peradeniya, workers and youth in surrounding areas. Dozens of copies of the booklet titled “Stop the US-Israeli Criminal War on Iran!” were sold and thousands of leaflets distributed.
Students, lecturers and residents spoke to the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) condemning the war against Iran.
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Rosie, a third-year geography student at the University of Peradeniya, said that she does not believe the bankrupt politics of fake left parties like the Frontline Socialist Party, which peddles the myth that war can be stopped through futile appeals to the very imperialist powers who are waging war in defiance of international law.
Expressing her belief that working people have the ability to stop the war, she said, “The best example of such strength is the ordinary people—workers, farmers and youth—who rose up against the authoritarian rule of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa during the 2022 people’s struggle and forced him out of the country. In fact, workers are the ones who produce and distribute everything in the world. If they stop working, the world will stop. Accordingly, it can be understood that they have the ability to stop the war.”
11. Union pushes through pay cut for New Zealand primary teachers
On April 2, just before the Easter holidays, the media reported that primary teachers in New Zealand public schools had voted to accept a two-year deal that will significantly reduce their real wages.
The agreement, covering over 30,000 teachers, consists of a 2.5 percent pay rise and a further 2.1 percent in January next year—well below the increase in the cost of living. Annual inflation last year was 3.1 percent and is expected to rise significantly this year; food prices increased 4.5 percent in the 12 months to February, and now fuel prices are soaring due to the US-Israeli war against Iran.
This is virtually identical to an offer the teachers rejected last December, in what the union NZEI Te Riu Roa called a “resounding” No vote. The union has not revealed how many people voted in favor of the repackaged offer.
This is the latest sellout imposed on workers who took part in last October’s one-day “mega strike,” involving more than 100,000 educators and healthcare workers across several unions. The strike—the largest in New Zealand since 1979, encompassing nearly 4 percent of the country’s workers—reflected widespread opposition to the National Party-led government’s austerity measures, which are starving hospitals and schools of funding.
The union bureaucracy, however, called the strike with great reluctance and refused to organize any further joint actions—let alone broaden the strike movement to encompass other sections of the workforce who face similar attacks. Instead, the unions moved to break up and isolate each section of workers in order to convince a majority that it was impossible to fight, and that they had no alternative to accepting the government’s attacks on their wages and conditions.
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This latest sellout comes on top of effective wage cuts imposed by NZEI and PPTA in 2023, following a mass strike against the then-Labour Party-led government. At that time, the NZEI joined the government in fraudulently presenting the deal, which failed to keep up with the cost of living, as a victory for teachers.
Labour and its allies the Greens, Te Pāti Māori, and middle class, pseudo-left groups like the International Socialist Organization and Socialist Aotearoa, which act as cheerleaders for the union bureaucracy, have remained completely silent on the pay cuts pushed through by the NZEI, PPTA and PSA.
Teachers and other workers are prepared to fight, but are trapped within organizations—led by well-paid upper middle class bureaucrats—which serve as adjuncts of the state and are opposed to any real fight against capitalism.
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As long as these disputes remain isolated and under the control of the union bureaucracy, however, workers are destined for defeat. The pay cuts imposed on teachers and PSA health staff will be used by the government and the unions as a means to put more pressure on nurses, doctors and firefighters to accept the same deal or worse.
The ruling class is determined that workers must pay for the economic crisis, which is escalating due to the widening war in the Middle East. The government will ramp up its austerity program while funneling billions more dollars to the military—with the support of the Labour Party and the PSA—to prepare it to join US-led wars.
To fight this agenda, workers need new organizations that they control. The Socialist Equality Group calls on workers to rebel against the union bureaucracy by building rank-and-file committees in every school, hospital and other workplaces. These committees must be independent of the unions, Labour and all the capitalist parties. They must link up workers across the country, in the public sector and private industries, against the assault on jobs, wages and public services.
Through the International Workers’ Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, an initiative of the Trotskyist movement, workers in New Zealand should link their struggles to those of workers in Australia, and other countries who face the same attacks.
The assault on living standards and public services, including education, is inseparable from the militarization of society and the developing world war: these are all the products of capitalism, which is plunging the world into barbarism. What is urgently needed, above all, is the building of a new political party, based on a program to unify the working class and lead it in the international struggle for the socialist reorganization of society.
12. UFCW preparing to sell out 3-week strike by JBS meatpacking workers in Greeley, Colorado
Even though the company has not improved its offer by a single cent, the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7 has ordered 3,800 meatpackers at JBS in Greeley, Colorado, back to work, three weeks into a strike at one of the largest beef-processing plants in the United States.
In statements released Saturday, both the union bureaucracy and the company acknowledged that no new contract proposal exists. UFCW Local 7 announced that JBS had merely agreed “to resume contract negotiations” on April 9 and 10 and that “as such, workers will return to work for shifts starting at or after 5 am on April 7, 2026.”
Even as Local 7 President Kim Cordova claimed that the “fight will continue,” her statement admitted that workers are still seeking “a contract offer that protects them” and “pays them a livable wage.”
The company’s statement to the press was even more blunt. Reuters and the Associated Press reported that JBS had not changed its original offer. According to UFCW Local 7, JBS has insisted on wage increases of “barely 1.5 percent on average per year.” Workers on the picket line told the World Socialist Web Site the offer was 60 cents the first year and then 30 cents each year after that.
The proposal amounts to a real wage cut from a corporation that reported $415 million in quarterly profits on $23.06 billion in revenue, as rising fuel costs continued to erode workers’ incomes.
Even by the low standards of the meatpacking industry, conditions in the plant are miserable. At least six workers died in the first year of the coronavirus pandemic and another died in 2021. Last year, a whistleblower filed a lawsuit alleging systematic safety failures. Haitian immigrants have filed suit against JBS, which they say lured them to the country with promises of work and housing only to cram them into overcrowded conditions with no water or electricity.
Workers should defy the back-to-work order under conditions where nothing has been secured. Instead, they should continue the strike under rank-and-file control. They should elect a new strike committee consisting solely of workers from the rank and file.
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Around 80 percent of JBS workers are immigrants, and the strike is in defiance of Trump’s campaign to terrorize immigrants as part of his broader attack on democratic rights. More than 8 million people took to the streets on March 28 in the third “No Kings” protest against the Trump administration, indicating huge opposition to dictatorship and war.
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This is one of the biggest strikes at a US slaughterhouse since the bitter Hormel strike in 1985-1986. For four decades, the UFCW has kept workers on the job as their wages and working conditions have been thrown back decades.
In that strike, when Hormel workers in Local P-9 rejected concessions and sought to expand their struggle, the UFCW bureaucracy placed the local under trusteeship and ultimately enabled a settlement ratified with the participation of strikebreakers and workers who had crossed the picket line. Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party Governor Rudy Perpich deployed the National Guard against the strike, carrying out mass arrests.
The UFCW is trying to shut down the strike because of the possibility of it developing into a broader struggle, in other words, because of its strength. This is not the first time. Last year, UFCW Local 7 shut down and sabotaged strikes by Colorado grocery workers, sending King Soopers workers back with a “labor peace” agreement in a transparent attempt to keep them from striking the same time as Safeway workers.
The Greeley plant handles about 6 percent of total US beef slaughterhouse capacity, making these workers exceptionally powerful. The strike was beginning to exert real pressure because the workers occupy a strategic chokepoint in the food supply chain.
But the Greeley workers cannot defeat a multinational corporation by fighting alone. They need a broader strategy based on mobilizing in a class movement in defense of the strike, not only in the US but around the world, including Brazil and the two dozen other countries where JBS operates.
Rank-and-file committees, made up of trusted workers on the shop floor and entirely independent of UFCW officials, must be built to transfer control of the struggle from the bureaucracy to the workers themselves. Special efforts should be made to unite immigrant workers with their native-born brothers and sisters.
The struggle at Greeley is part of a broader fight by the working class against corporate exploitation, dictatorship and war. Workers produce society’s wealth and hold enormous power, but that power can be realized only through a rebellion against the pro-corporate union apparatus and the building of new organs of struggle controlled by the rank and file themselves.
13. Australia: Labor government conducts police raids against anti-genocide protesters in Melbourne
The Labor Party governments in the Australian states of Victoria and New South Wales (NSW) are presiding over deliberately threatening and intimidating police raids to arrest protesters against the ongoing US-Israeli genocide in Gaza and the complicity of the federal Albanese Labor government.
Early on the morning of March 27, Victoria Police Public Order Response Team (PORT) officers in full combat gear conducted eight raids upon homes around Melbourne to detain eight women who had taken part in a March 6 protest outside the Victorian Trades Hall building. Because the police went to a wrong address, one of the women was raided and arrested on April 1.
Just a day before the eight raids, on March 26, heavily-armed NSW police commandos stormed the home of a woman who had joined the large demonstration at Sydney Town Hall on February 9 against the visit by Israeli President Isaac Herzog. She was dragged out of bed at 5 a.m. and handcuffed after the police smashed open her front door. At least four similar raids were mounted across Sydney.
These developments are a warning that the Labor governments, state and federal, are escalating their assault on anti-genocide and anti-war opposition as the US offensive intensifies and extends to Lebanon and Iran, with the political and material backing of the Albanese government.
The Melbourne raids targeted women who draped a statue of 1960s and 1970s feminist equal pay activist Zelda D’Aprano at the Victorian Trades Hall in an apron that said: “Difficult Woman.” They also painted this slogan on an adjoining path. That was first an allusion to how Prime Minister Anthony Albanese personally condemned and branded Grace Tame, a sexual assault victims’ campaigner, as a “difficult woman” after she chanted “Globalise the Intifada” at the February 9 anti-Herzog Sydney Town Hall rally.
It was also an allusion to how the trade union bureaucracy had sacked and disowned D’Aprano, who had been a meatworkers union official, in 1969 after she chained herself to the federal Arbitration Commission building in Melbourne to call for equal pay for women.
Herzog had been invited by the Albanese government despite being named by a United Nations inquiry for inciting genocide against the Palestinians. The invitation was an open show of support for the US-backed Zionist regime, under the cover of mourning the December 14 Sydney Bondi Beach shootings, in which two alleged ISIS-linked gunmen killed 15 people.
Aged between 34 and 71, the eight women were then taken to various police stations, where they were held for hours before being released on anti-democratic bail conditions. The charges include criminal damage to property, behaving in a riotous manner in a public place, marking graffiti on a residence without consent, recklessly damaging part of a registered place without a permit and refusing to leave a scheduled public place after a warning.
The bail conditions imposed on the women, now known as the Zelda8, include staying away from the Melbourne city centre, the usual location of political protests, not communicating with their co-accused and not speaking to the media. These bans last at least until October, when their court cases are first listed for mention.
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The police raids in Melbourne and Sydney take further the violent police rampage against the February 9 anti-Herzog protest in Sydney. The demonstration had been joined by about 10,000 people, as part of events across Australia that also involved more than 20,000 people in Melbourne, 5,000 in Brisbane and thousands more in other capital cities and regional centers.
Albanese and NSW Premier Chris Minns defended the police violence, underscoring Labor’s support for the US-Israeli crimes against humanity and intent to shut down opposition. The Minns government had invoked two sweeping anti-protest laws to ban the demonstration and hand the police expanded powers to suppress it.
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The international working class is the only social force that can stop war. Coordinated mass strikes across ports, logistics, weapons manufacturing and more broadly would bring the machinery of war to a grinding halt. That requires building new forms of working-class organization—independent rank-and-file committees—and a new socialist movement of the working class, in opposition to Labor, the unions and the capitalist system, which is plunging humanity toward barbarism.
14. Writers Guild of America suddenly announces new contract with studios
On April 4, 2026, in the midst of Easter and Passover, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) announced a tentative agreement on a new Minimum Basic Agreement (MBA), nearly a month before the May 1 contract expiration. The WGA Negotiating Committee declared that the deal “protects writers’ health plan,” “builds on gains from 2023,” and “addresses free work challenges,” recommending it for ratification by the membership.
The so-called “early resolution,” hailed in industry publications as a success for “labor peace,” is in fact a preemptive capitulation designed to head off a broader confrontation between writers and the studios at a moment of escalating social and economic crisis.
The WGA has also emphasized a “multimillion-dollar” infusion into its health plan, which has suffered losses exceeding $120 million following the 2023 strike and industry contraction. But even taking this at face value, this is a temporary patch on a structurally underfunded system shaped by declining employment and rising costs.
The agreement’s reported AI provisions, including expanded “regulations” on the training of models on writers’ work, will fail to meaningfully protect jobs. The union’s reference to the “gains” of 2023 says more than it intends because that contract, pushed through in a sellout of an historic strike, has been followed by three years of huge layoffs across the entertainment industry.
The wage proposal is also reported as 5, 4, 3.5 and 3 percent over four years. This is totally inadequate to address soaring living costs, particularly in Los Angeles.
The most striking feature of the contract is its timing. By reaching a deal nearly a month before the contract’s expiration, the union is trying to forestall strike action. This was done without even seeking a strike authorization vote from the membership.
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Worst of all, the contract reportedly runs for four years, breaking from the traditional three-year cycle. This “de-synchronizes” the WGA contract from the SAG-AFTRA actors union, undermining the potential for coordinated industry-wide action and further isolating writers. Contract talks have been ongoing with SAG-AFTRA since late February.
The 2023 struggle mobilized tens of thousands of writers, along with SAG-AFTRA actors and performers, and won broad support across the working class, creating the objective possibility of a direct challenge to the domination of the entertainment industry by a handful of conglomerates. But the WGA leadership made no effort to unify writers with actors, directors, or crew members facing similar attacks.
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The tentative agreement has been announced as the WGA itself is ruthlessly trying to crush a strike by its own staffers, who have been out since February 17. As of April 1, workers have been stripped of their employer-sponsored healthcare. “How can we demand fair treatment from the studios when our own organization treats its staff this way?” one writer asked in comments circulating among members.
Writers must demand full transparency, including the immediate release of contract details and adequate time for discussion, while opposing any attempt to rush ratification. The contract must be rejected, and screenwriters must turn out to the working class for support.
In Los Angeles, the capital of the entertainment industry, tens of thousands of educators and school workers are moving toward a strike on April 14. Within the entertainment industry, other sections of workers are also approaching decisive struggles. Contracts covering actors, directors and crew members are set to expire, raising the prospect of a broader wave of industrial action.
Above all, initiative must be taken by the rank and file. Rank-and-file committees, independent and democratically controlled by workers, must be built to organize a fight not only against the studios but the sellout bureaucracy. Such organizations can serve as the basis for uniting with other sections of workers, laying the foundation for a broader movement against corporate domination.
15. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The sign says: "Peace for the world! Down with war!"
