Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Alexander Rabinowitch (1934-2026), historian of the October Revolution
Rabinowitch’s tetralogy consisted of 1) Prelude to Revolution, published in 1968, which concentrated on the political crisis that erupted in Petrograd in the summer of 1917; 2) The Bolsheviks Come to Power, published in 1976, which dealt with the events that culminated in the October 1917 socialist revolution; 3) The Bolsheviks in Power, published in 2007, which provided a detailed narrative of the first year of Bolshevik rule; and 4) The Bolsheviks Survive: Petrograd 1919, published in 2026, which focused on the almost miraculous victory of the Bolshevik Red Army, led by Leon Trotsky.
The substantial span of time between volumes reflected the meticulous character of Rabinowitch’s research, which was based on intense work in critical archives. The major achievement of his work was its substantiation of the mass working class base of the Bolshevik Party. It came to power not through a coup, but as the result of a massive revolutionary offensive. The Bolsheviks became a mass party because its program coincided with and clearly articulated the interests of the working class.
More than once, Rabinowitch’s honesty and principled approach to history put him at odds with the dominant moods and tendencies in his profession and personal milieu, setting his life on a course that he himself never anticipated. The works he produced as a result of this unyielding commitment to historical truth were pathbreaking and constitute an important contribution to the historical record of 1917 and the first two years of the civil war.
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Rabinowitch attended high school and college during the McCarthy era and Korean War. He later recalled about his years as an undergraduate, “As an ROTC cadet, I was trained to think and prepared to train others to think of the Soviet Union as the incarnation of evil and the ‘free world’s arch-enemy’.”
But his own research contradicted these conceptions. Having initially set out to write his dissertation about the Menshevik leader Irakli Tsereteli, a trip to Soviet Russia in 1963-64 prompted Rabinowitch to shift his attention to the July Days of 1917. His dissertation, which he defended in 1965 at Indiana University, became Prelude to Revolution: The July Days in Petrograd. A pathbreaking work, it established that, contrary to the prevailing view in the West, the July insurrection was not an early botched attempt by Lenin at a coup d’etat.
Rather, it was an uprising, originating from below, which the Bolsheviks first sought to counteract, recognizing that it was too early to succeed, and only supported as it became clear that it enjoyed overwhelming support among the most militant sections of workers and soldiers.
Rabinowitch’s book documented the Bolsheviks’ transformation into a mass organization within the few months following the overthrow of the Tsar in the February 1917 Revolution. As he explained in his 2011 lecture, “This party was deeply rooted in the masses, the factories, the residential districts and the garrisons, and exhibited great sensitivity to the prevailing political opinions and tendencies, as well as to the highly developed culture of democratic discussion in its own organization.”
Having arrived at this conclusion through the research for his first book, all of his future research would serve to substantiate and deepen it. Rabinowitch would later credit his teachers, historians Leopold Haimson and John M. Thompson, for awakening his interest in the revolution as a seminal political and social event and emphasizing that historical research must be as “objective as humanly possible.”
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Rabinowitch’s great strengths as a committed researcher were at full display in his second and perhaps most important book, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The 1917 Revolution in Petrograd, first published in 1976. It is difficult to overstate the significance of this work in countering both anti-Communist and Stalinist falsifications of history.
Given that access to Soviet archives was out of the question, he had to base himself on a meticulous analysis of published sources, especially newspapers and meeting minutes. Rabinowitch was able to trace the political conflicts within the Bolshevik Party, the relationship of the Bolsheviks to factory workers and the changing moods within the working class itself. He showed how, upon his return to Russia in April, Lenin had to wage a fierce struggle within the leadership of his own party to orient the party toward the socialist seizure of power.
Rabinowitch’s account illustrated and confirmed, in all essential elements, the analysis of the inner-party struggle provided by Leon Trotsky’s Lessons of October. His book also highlighted the decisive role of Trotsky as the head of the Military Revolutionary Organization in the planning and organization of the October 1917 insurrection. Rabinowitch’s account was also the first to establish the immense historical rule of later leaders of the Left Opposition such as Ivar Smilga in the events of 1917. Their role had been wiped from the historical records as they themselves were murdered by Stalin during the Great Terror.
Stalinist historians in the Soviet Union denounced his first two books and labeled Rabinowitch a “bourgeois falsifier.” In the West, his work dealt a devastating blow to anti-communist denunciations of 1917 as a “coup.” Despite many an effort to revive this discredited narrative—especially after 1991—Rabinowitch’s account has never been refuted. In 1989, in the final years of the Soviet Union, it became first major work of a Western historian on 1917 to be translated into Russian. More than half a century upon its first publication, his book remains an unsurpassed study of the Bolshevik Party on the eve of the seizure of power.
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With his determination to continue and deepen his important historical research, Rabinowitch demonstrated an admirable degree of intellectual and moral integrity. Like the best historians of his generation, he was motivated by the conviction that history is a science and that the historian’s principal task is the establishment of historical truth for the sake of the development of society. Underlying this work was a deeply felt concern with the fate of humanity and social progress.
He would not have been able to conduct this work without the immense support of his wife of over 64 years, Janet Rabinowitch. An accomplished and renowned academic editor who had also been trained in Russian studies, Janet Rabinowitch assisted and encouraged his work at every step, both on a personal and a professional level.
Rabinowitch’s death is a genuine loss to the historical profession and all those committed to historical truth. It speaks to the climate of reaction that prevailed after 1991 that no comparable figure emerged from later generations of historians.
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The remarkable body of historical research he produced remains an indispensable foundation for any serious study of the Russian Revolution and the civil war. As new generations of workers, principled intellectuals and young people are radicalized by the cascading crises of capitalism and an emerging global war, the intellectual appeal and political significance of his work will only grow.
2. UN Commission report finds Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, deliberately targeting children
A United Nations independent commission has issued a damning indictment of Israel’s campaign of mass killing in Gaza, concluding that Israel has committed and continues to commit genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes against the Palestinian people, especially against Palestinian children.
The 94-page report, published on June 18, 2026, by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, has the title: “The essence of childhood has been destroyed”: Israel’s deliberate targeting of Palestinian children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory since 7 October 2023.
The report covers the period from October 7, 2023, through March 31, 2026, and is a comprehensive legal and factual record of atrocities that dwarf, in duration and systematic character, virtually any comparable episode of state-directed violence against a civilian population in the modern era.
While the Commission’s findings are not new, they are devastating in their scope and accumulation. The World Socialist Web Site has tracked and reported on this genocide since its inception, documenting each massacre, each hospital destroyed, each famine deliberately induced, and each act of political cowardice by governments that claimed to oppose genocide in principle while enabling it in practice. From the earliest weeks of Israel’s assault, the WSWS called the campaign by its correct name: genocide. The UN Commission has now officially, after two and a half years, arrived at precisely the same conclusion.
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The Commission’s genocide findings, which build on a previous dedicated report, are rooted in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide’s definition. The Convention requires proof of specific acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such. The Commission provides proof that four categories of genocidal acts have been committed against Palestinians in Gaza and three of these categories relate directly to children.
First, killing members of the group: the Commission concludes that the direct, intentional killing of Palestinian children—through precision weapons, wide-area munitions, sieges and denial of medical care—constitutes killing of members of the protected group with genocidal intent. The Commission notes that Israel’s continued use of massive explosive munitions in densely populated areas, despite mounting child casualties and despite binding orders from the International Court of Justice, demonstrates that these deaths were “intentional” and not collateral.
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Second, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group: tens of thousands of Palestinian children have sustained catastrophic injuries requiring multiple surgeries and lifelong rehabilitation—services that barely exist in the destroyed Gaza healthcare system. Children who survived bombings endure amputations, burns, polytrauma and permanent disabilities. The Commission finds this harm was foreseeable, systematic and deliberately inflicted.
Third, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction: the total siege imposed on Gaza, blocking food, medicine, clean water and humanitarian aid, has produced acute malnutrition, the reemergence of diseases including polio, the collapse of the neonatal healthcare system and a measurable decline in the Palestinian birth rate.
The Commission identifies four specific indicators of genocidal intent in relation to the siege: the nature and duration of the siege itself; Israel’s awareness that it would destroy Palestinians as a group; the continuation of the siege in defiance of ICJ orders; and the “entrapment of Palestinians in Gaza, ensuring they cannot escape the violence and intended destruction of the group.”
Significantly, the Commission writes: “Having assessed as a whole, taking into account the nature and duration of these acts, their foreseeable consequences and the prolonged denial of remedial measures, the Commission reiterates its finding that Israeli authorities and security forces deliberately inflicted on the Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction, in whole or in part, with specific intent to destroy the group, as such.”
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The Israeli government did not cooperate with the Commission. The report notes that since October 7, 2023, the Commission sent 13 requests for information and/or access to the government of Israel. No responses were received. Israeli officials have repeatedly dismissed the Commission as biased, the Human Rights Council as antisemitic, and the International Court of Justice proceedings as illegitimate.
The Israeli government’s standard denial takes several forms. It claims that Gaza civilian casualties, including children, result from Hamas’s use of civilian infrastructure as cover, placing responsibility for deaths on Hamas. It invokes the right of self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter. It asserts that its military conducts operations in compliance with international humanitarian law and conducts internal investigations of alleged violations. It portrays the genocide designation as a political weapon wielded by enemies of Israel rather than a legal determination based on evidence.
Each of these denials collapses under scrutiny. The Commission examined the claim that Palestinian boys killed or arrested were “terrorists” or “fighters” and found it to be a systematic pattern of false labeling used to justify the murder and detention of children.
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The corporate media’s response to the Commission’s findings has been, predictably, to minimize and bury its meaning and significance. Mainstream outlets led their coverage with Israeli denials, gave prominent space to accusations of UN bias, and framed the genocide finding as a “controversy” rather than a legal determination. The BBC and the New York Times and comparable outlets, treated the Commission’s conclusions as one perspective in a debate, while reserving unqualified authority for Israeli military spokespeople.
The Trump administration’s response went further. Having already withdrawn US support for UN bodies critical of Israel, cut funding to UNRWA and provided unqualified military and diplomatic backing to the Netanyahu government, the administration dismissed the Commission’s report. Trump officials have called ICC arrest warrants for Israeli officials—issued for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant—an outrage and threatened sanctions against ICC personnel. The US has demonstrated that it is not a bystander but an active accomplice in the ongoing genocide.
Governments in Europe, Canada and Australia have adopted the language of “concern” while continuing arms transfers and diplomatic protection for Israel at the United Nations Security Council. The British Labour government of Keir Starmer, despite some rhetorical distancing, maintained arms sales and blocked meaningful accountability measures.
The German government, cynically invoking its post-Holocaust commitment to “never again,” provided Israel weapons used in the commission of acts that the UN now officially characterizes as genocide. This is a historical irony of grotesque proportions, but it is not inexplicable given the resurgence of fascist political organizations such as the AfD and the return of German imperialist militarism.
Political parties that have persistently argued against the genocide characterization—including representatives of both the US Republican and Democratic parties, the British Conservative and Labour parties and their counterparts across Europe—bear direct political responsibility for enabling the conditions described in this report. Their arguments—that the evidence is insufficient, that Hamas bears primary responsibility, that the conflict is too “complex” for legal determination—have been definitively refuted by 32 months of documented evidence now codified in UN commission findings.
As the World Socialist Web Site has consistently referenced, the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1945-46 established principles that remain the foundation of international criminal law. Chief among them was the recognition that crimes against humanity and war crimes do not arise in a vacuum—they are rooted in what the Tribunal designated the “supreme international crime”: the crime against peace, the planning and execution of aggressive war.
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The policies documented in the UN commission’s report, from the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure to the deliberate starvation of a population, from the mass arrest and torture of children to the bombing of hospitals, are not aberrations from an otherwise lawful military operation—they are the operation. They are the expression of an ethnic cleansing project, supported by the Israeli political and military establishment, to destroy the Palestinian people as a national and cultural group.
Political leaders who authorized, ordered or covered up these crimes—including members of the Israeli war cabinet, senior military commanders and ministers who publicly called for the destruction of Gaza—bear criminal responsibility. And accountability must extend beyond Israel’s borders, to those who enabled the genocide: political leaders who blocked UN Security Council action through vetoes, arms suppliers who provided weapons used in documented atrocities and officials who publicly denied genocide while the evidence mounted.
These principles must be applied with full force to the conduct of the Israeli state. The occupation of Palestinian territory, now in its sixth decade, constitutes a sustained violation of international law, including the prohibition on acquiring territory by force. The measures necessary to put an end to the Gaza genocide—as well as the ongoing US-Israeli war crimes against Iran and Lebanon—cannot be carried out by the UN, which is an instrument of the imperialist world order that is the source of 21st century barbarism.
While the UN Commission’s report provides a detailed factual and legal record upon which war crimes prosecutions should be built and calls for UN member states to “arrest any Israeli officials against whom arrest warrants have been issued by the ICC and extradite them into the custody of the ICC,” it remains incapable of enforcing them. The UN Commission does not, for example, reference the Nuremberg precedent nor does it discuss what, if convictions are obtained against the Israeli war criminals and their enablers, the potential sentences should be.
3. Ebola passes 1,000 cases in the Congo: Imperialism and the collapse of public health
On June 21, just 37 days after the epidemic was declared, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) surpassed the grim milestone of 1,000 confirmed Ebola cases. Official figures now record 1,003 confirmed infections and 256 deaths across the DRC and neighboring Uganda, making this the worst first month of an Ebola outbreak in recorded history.
Health Policy Watch reports that the current epidemic is three times larger than any previous outbreak at the four-week mark. By comparison, the horrific 2014 to 2016 West Africa epidemic registered only 242 cases at four weeks, and the 2000 Uganda outbreak just 281.
The catastrophic acceleration of this disease is not a natural disaster. It is a social crime. The material and scientific means to contain this epidemic exist in abundance, yet they are deliberately withheld by the major imperialist powers. The mass death now unfolding in central Africa is a clear demonstration of capitalist social murder, a conscious class policy that prioritizes private wealth and imperialist war above human life.
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The present epidemic is the 17th in the DRC alone, the second in less than a year. A 2025 study in Scientific Reports surveyed 3,752 health workers and researchers across 151 countries, who warned of a “creeping catastrophe” of escalating infectious disease driven above all by climate change, socioeconomic inequality and the emergence of pathogens resistant to antibiotics. More than 60 percent of emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic, and the rapid urbanization of Africa, mass displacement and deforestation are tearing down the barriers between human populations and animal reservoirs.
This creates a brutal paradox. Humanity knows more about the biology and transmission of these pathogens than ever before in history, yet the capitalist ruling class deliberately does less to stop them. The homicidal COVID-19 doctrine of “let it rip,” “let the bodies pile high,” and “the cure cannot be worse than the disease” has been generalized from a single pandemic to the whole of global public health. What is unfolding in central Africa is its application.
Global leaders portray a coordinated international effort, but the financial reality exposes a deliberate deception. More than $910 million was pledged to combat the outbreak, yet under $90 million, less than 10 percent, has been delivered.
The African Union’s pledge to disburse funds within four weeks remains unmet, leaving the $518 million joint continental response plan effectively unfunded. The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) urgently needs 540 personnel on the ground but has deployed only 84. Africa CDC Director General Jean Kaseya recently revealed that donor pledges were “corrected” downward as the death toll rose, with commitments quietly withdrawn by the major powers.
A major factor in this collapse is the Trump administration’s dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in July 2025. A June 2026 interim staff analysis by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, “People Are Already Dying, and More Will Die,” states that Trump’s first-day executive order dismantling the agency “has already resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and will lead to the deaths of millions more globally.” It cites a study in The Lancet by Daniella Medeiros Cavalcanti and colleagues estimating that the sudden termination of USAID has already caused more than 600,000 preventable deaths.
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There is a staggering contradiction between the pitiful sums made available for fighting Ebola and the vast accumulation of private wealth by the capitalist oligarchy. Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire from the SpaceX public offering, which added more than $500 billion to his fortune in days. That windfall is seven times the entire annual economic output of the DRC, a nation of roughly 106 million people, and 25,000 times the $23 million US emergency Ebola response.
The average Congolese citizen lives on roughly $700 a year, less than $2 a day, atop one of the most mineral-rich territories on earth, the source of the cobalt and coltan in every modern phone and battery, even as global military spending hit a record $2.887 trillion in 2025.
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There is no vaccine for the Bundibugyo strain because, like every disease of the poor, it offers no profit to develop one. This is precisely why the pharmaceutical industry must be taken out of private hands and operated as a public utility, so that therapeutics and vaccines are produced on the basis of human need. And because pathogens recognize no borders, this requires a genuine international collaboration of scientists and workers, pooling knowledge and resources across the very national and commercial lines that the profit system enforces.
Precisely because these necessities are international in scope, scientific in character, and require the planned allocation of vast resources against the profit motive, only a socialist solution is viable and practical. The only social force capable of carrying it out is the international working class. The Congolese miner, the displaced family in Ituri and the public health worker fired in the United States confront the same system.
The life-saving resources required to halt this epidemic exist in abundance, but they are concentrated at the top and spent on war. This social murder is a conscious class policy, and it will only be ended through the political mobilization of the international working class fighting for the socialist reorganization of the global economy.
Ontario’s hard-right Tory premier, Doug Ford, is seeking to place the province at the center of Canada's military-industrial buildup, unveiling a 10-year strategy aimed at rapidly transforming the country's most populous and industrialized province into a critical hub within North American and European military-supply chains.
The plan was announced in late May at the CANSEC defense trade show in Ottawa. Ontario’s new defence Industrial Strategy (ODIS) boasts of what government officials describe as a “once-in-a-generation” increase in military spending by Canada and other NATO states. In a press release, Ford stated, “Our provincial defense strategy will position Ontario to take advantage of these record investments, contributing to global security, supporting Ontario companies and bringing tens of thousands of good-paying defense jobs to our province.”
The ODIS places these initiatives within the context of the “illegal” Russian invasion of Ukraine, China’s “growing use of economic coercion,” ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, and shifting transatlantic security dynamics. The lies about Russian aggression in Ukraine, a conflict provoked by over three decades of US and NATO expansion following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the portrayal of China, rather than the US and European imperialist powers, as the driving force towards war, express the predatory interests of Canadian imperialism. Ottawa requires a war machine to enable the bourgeoisie, as Prime Minister Mark Carney put it in his Davos speech, to be at “the table” rather than “on the menu” in the imperialist redivision of the world.
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Ontario’s 2026 austerity budget, the latest in a decades-long all-party assault on public services, dovetails with the Ford government’s determination to make a major contribution to the construction of Canadian imperialism’s war machine. It promises a boon for the province’s private developers and defense contractors, and deprivation for the working class. The projected deficit of $13.8 billion—significantly higher than previous forecasts—will be used to justify further austerity for public services and public sector workers. Critical social services, like healthcare, education, and housing, are already chronically underfunded due to cost-cutting budgets enforced by Ford’s Tories since taking power in 2018. Prior to that, governments led by the Liberals, Tories, and NDP imposed strict fiscal discipline for public spending since the 1990s, while slashing taxes for big business and the rich, producing an explosion in poverty and the growth of a super-rich elite.
K-12 education funding drops 3.6 per cent this year, continuing a trend that has seen per-student funding decline by roughly $1,500 in real dollars since Ford took office. The government has seized direct control of eight school boards, installing Tory-connected supervisors to force through school closures and cuts to special education. Funding for Ontario colleges and universities will decline in real terms by almost 2 percent this year. These institutions already receive among the lowest levels of per-student public funding in Canada.
Much of the Ford government’s much-ballyhooed “historic investment” in post-secondary education will be financed through regressive changes to the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) whose impact will fall disproportionately on working-class students. The government has slashed the grant portion of student aid from 85 to 25 per cent, thereby dramatically increasing students’ reliance on loans. The student aid cuts have triggered protests across the province, as students confront rising debt-loads and the soaring cost of higher education.
Having cut government funding for colleges and universities to the bone, the government proposes in the ODIS closer integration between post-secondary institutions and the defense sector through workforce planning mechanisms embedded in the education system. It calls for a “robust pipeline of new talent” and proposes convening the Ontario Military Defense Representative (OMDR)—a Canadian Armed Forces liaison officer stationed within the provincial government—alongside administrators and industry executives to “identify defense-related training gaps.” In other words, to secure funding, institutions of higher learning will be compelled to subordinate their activities to the needs of arms suppliers and the Canadian military.
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The federal government’s sweeping military buildup takes place amid a historic breakdown in US-Canada relations, which finds expression in the trade war initiated by the fascist Trump and fuelled by the Canadian ruling class’ nationalist reaction, and the US president’s threat to annex Canada. Working in line with the Carney government, Ford recently traveled to Washington to champion “Fortress North America” and push for the retention of the US, Mexico, Canada Agreement (USMCA, the successor to NAFTA), which is due to expire in July. Canadian imperialism hopes to remain part of a US-led protectionist trade bloc directed against Washington's global economic rivals—above all China.
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Workers cannot oppose the militarization of society through the trade unions, which have emerged ever more openly as champions of exploding military budgets and wars of aggression. Unifor President Lana Payne has hailed the Bombardier Global 6500 military aircraft as a “Canadian success story” and now sits on Carney's Canada-US advisory council alongside CEOs and retired Tory politicians. Her union has discussed with General Motors converting the idled CAMI auto plant in Ingersoll, Ontario, to military vehicle production and has long campaigned for Canada to adopt national aerospace and defense strategies based on government-directed contracts for arms producers and military contractors.
At the provincial level, Ontario Federation of Labour president Laura Walton—who rose to her top position in the bureaucracy by helping sell out the 2022 strike of 55,000 education workers against poverty wages and a government-imposed strike ban—proposed a “Labour-Business-Community Anti-Tariff Task Force” with Ford’s government to promote a Canadian nationalist response to Trump’s trade war in January 2025. When Ford ignored her, she groveled publicly, declaring, “His office has my cell number, and we're ready to roll up our sleeves and get to work.”
The political alignment of the union bureaucracy and its “partners” in the Carney Liberal government with Doug Ford’s provincial government is highly revealing. Ford swept to power in 2018 as an unabashed Trump imitator—rolling back the minimum wage, imposing a public sector hiring freeze, slashing $6 billion from welfare and healthcare, and illegally capping public sector wages for over a million workers at one percent per year for three years. He invoked the “notwithstanding clause” to trample on democratic rights, prematurely ended all COVID-19 public health measures at the cost of thousands of lives, and initially allied himself with the far-right “Freedom Convoy” that occupied downtown Ottawa in early 2022. He has played a major role in backing Israel’s genocide in Gaza, banning the keffiyeh from the Ontario legislature and pressing for police action against anti-genocide, Palestine solidarity protesters.
If Ford no longer publicly touts his admiration for Trump, this is only because Canadian and American imperialism have seen their decades-long military-strategic partnership break down over the intervening years. But Ford, like the Canadian ruling class as a whole, is fully on board with large swathes of Trump’s far-right agenda, because the gutting of public spending, banning of strikes, rearmament and war, and attacks on democratic rights serve the interests of the financial oligarchy.
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Ford’s Tories and the Carney Liberal government are committed to waging global war in the interests of Canadian imperialism and making workers pay for it. The unions, the New Democrats, and their pseudo-left appendages dress up these political forces as partners in “Team Canada.” But there is no “Team”: the bosses’ wars—commercial and military—are being waged at the expense of workers' jobs, wages, and public services.
The fight for decent jobs and social services is a fight against war and the capitalist system that gives rise to it. What is required is the independent industrial and political mobilization of the working class on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program to fight for a workers’ government that will reorganize the economy to place social needs before profit, and abolish Canada’s war machine.
5. Türkiye: De facto state of emergency ahead of NATO summit in Ankara: More than 200 detained
The Erdoğan government is responding to the imperialist war on Türkiye’s borders and to the deepening class struggle at home by consolidating its construction of a presidential dictatorship.
On 8 June, Berlin's Education Senator (state minister) Günther-Wünsch (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) signed an agreement with the Bundeswehr granting youth officers exclusive access to our classrooms.
7. 450 years for Prairieland, Texas defendants as Trump expands “antifa” crackdown
Eight people convicted in connection with the July 4, 2025 protest at the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas were sentenced on Tuesday to a combined 450 years in prison in one of the most draconian political prosecutions in modern American history.The sentences expose the class character of the judicial system and the advanced stage of the assault on democratic rights under the Trump administration. The punishments handed down by federal judges in Texas far exceed those imposed on all of the fascist militants who participated in the January 6, 2021 coup attempt. While President Donald Trump pardoned more than 1,600 participants in the attack on Congress, including members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys convicted of violently assaulting police officers, anti-ICE protesters, the vast majority of whom did nothing but light fireworks and vandalize government property, have now been condemned to decades behind bars.
Benjamin Hanil Song received a sentence of 100 years in prison. Maricela Rueda was sentenced to 70 years. Cameron Arnold, Savanna Batten, Zachary Evetts, Bradford Morris, Elizabeth Soto and Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada received sentences ranging from 30 to 50 years.
The sentence imposed on Sanchez-Estrada is particularly revealing. Although he was not present at the protest itself, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison for “corruptly concealing a document” after his wife Rueda, from jail, requested he remove some anarchist magazines the couple had in their home. His punishment alone exceeds the sentences received by numerous January 6 foot soldiers who were captured on video violently assaulting police officers while participating in an effort to overturn a presidential election. Fascists seeking to establish a dictatorship are rewarded, while opponents of mass deportations and state repression are branded “terrorists” and sentenced accordingly.
Celebrating the outcome, the Department of Homeland Security declared on social media, “We have been clear: anyone who attacks law enforcement will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. This is a win for law and order.”
In a Department of Justice statement, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the sentences “make clear that Antifa terrorists who attack law enforcement and federal facilities will face swift and uncompromising justice,” and that their “violent extremism has no place in our country.”
The extraordinary punishments imposed in the Prairieland case stand in sharp contrast to the impunity enjoyed by agents of the state. More than six months after ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renée Good and Border Patrol agents Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez gunned down Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, no federal officer has been criminally charged. Instead, the Trump administration has blocked investigations, withheld evidence from state authorities and sought to shield the perpetrators from accountability. Nor have the Democratic state and local authorities brought charges against the killers.
The sentences handed down this week rest on a narrative that was never substantiated at trial. From the outset, federal prosecutors and the Trump administration portrayed the July 2025 protest as a coordinated terrorist attack aimed at carrying out a mass killing of law enforcement personnel. Yet no evidence presented during the proceedings established the existence of any such plan.
All parties agree that only two individuals fired weapons during the confrontation: Benjamin Hanil Song and Alvarado police officer Thomas Gross. No police officers, ICE agents, detention center employees or protesters were killed. The government’s own case established that Song and Gross exchanged gunfire amid a chaotic confrontation outside the detention center.
Song, a former Marine, has consistently maintained that he fired only after observing Gross raise his weapon toward a fleeing protester. According to Song, he believed the officer was about to shoot someone in the back who was running away and fired what he described as defensive shots in response. Regardless of whether one accepts Song’s account, it bears no resemblance to the government’s portrayal of a premeditated terrorist assault.
The prosecution’s “antifa terror cell” narrative rested not on evidence of a conspiracy to commit mass murder, but on guilt by association and political ideology. Defendants were prosecuted collectively for their alleged political sympathies, social relationships and participation in opposition to ICE and the government’s mass deportation apparatus. The extraordinary sentences imposed this week are aimed not merely at those convicted in the case. They are intended to intimidate all those who oppose the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies and attacks on democratic rights.
The political character of the prosecution was reflected in the conduct and backgrounds of the judges who oversaw the proceedings.
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The Prairieland prosecution is part of a broader campaign launched by the administration to expand the use of “domestic terrorism” authorities against political opposition. Last year, Trump issued his so-called “antifa” executive order, directing federal agencies to intensify investigations and prosecutions targeting alleged anti-fascist activists. This was followed by National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 and then-Attorney General Pam Bondi’s December memorandum, which vastly expanded the powers of federal law enforcement agencies while encouraging the treatment of left-wing political opposition as a national security threat.
The significance of these measures lies not only in their repressive content, but in the political fiction on which they are based. “Antifa” is not an organization. It has no membership rolls, leadership structure or national apparatus. The term denotes opposition to fascism. Yet federal prosecutors and law enforcement agencies increasingly invoke the label as though it were a coherent criminal enterprise, allowing them to transform political views and associations into evidence of conspiracy.
The Prairieland case is already being used as a model. Similar “antifa conspiracy” indictments have been brought against opponents of the federal occupation of Minneapolis and against anti-genocide protesters in Michigan. In each case, prosecutors seek to blur the distinction between protected political activity and criminal conduct, advancing the principle that opposition to government policy can itself be treated as evidence of terrorist intent.
The assault on democratic rights cannot be explained simply as the work of Trump and the Republican Party. Democratic Party officials have played an essential role in legitimizing and advancing the same framework.
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... The Prairieland sentences establish a dangerous precedent. The Trump administration is systematically seeking to transform opposition to mass deportations, war, inequality and fascism into a form of criminal conspiracy. The target today is those accused of participating in a protest against an immigration detention center. Tomorrow it will be striking workers, students, anti-war protesters and anyone who challenges the interests of the financial oligarchy.
8. Sri Lanka: Thousands of farmers protest over rising costs and low rice prices
Farmers’ fundamental problems can be resolved only through their independent mobilization against big business and finance capital, united with the rural poor and under the leadership of the working class.
9. U.S. Supreme Court issues reactionary rulings as summer recess approaches
On Tuesday, in advance of the summer recess that will start before the July 4 holiday, the U.S. Supreme Court decided five cases, four by identical 6-3 votes along the now familiar ideological lines and one unanimously. Collectively, the rulings slash protections for individuals and allow US multinational corporations to sue Cuba for billions to recoup expropriations following the revolution 66 years ago.
Another tranche of Supreme Court opinions will be released Thursday, with all argued cases likely decided by the end of next week. The 11 cases still pending include whether Trump can summarily remove without cause appointees to the Federal Trade Commission or Federal Reserve Board, the protection of transgender athletes from discrimination, the timing of mail-in ballots, and First Amendment protection for political contributions to the Republican National Committee.
All eyes are on Trump v. Barbara, however, which should decide the validity of Trump’s outrageous executive order that purportedly revokes the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. Indicating at least some measure of skepticism, the Supreme Court put the executive order on hold while the merits were briefed and argued. Trump is clamoring for a ruling in his favor on the factually incorrect basis that the Fourteenth Amendment was meant only for “babies of slaves.”
Barbara may well be the last case decided before the summer recess, and there are signs it will be authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, whose behind-the-scenes maneuvering delivered Trump the immunity decision that let him off the hook for the January 6, 2021 coup attempt.
10. Trump at Mack Trucks promotes trade war and xenophobia, hails UAW bureaucracy
In a campaign-style event at the Mack Trucks plant in Macungie, Pennsylvania on Tuesday, President Trump sought to posture as a defender of American workers in a fascistic speech that promoted his tariffs and trade war policy in front of a carefully vetted audience. A large banner in back of the stage read “American Workers First,” but few if any Mack workers were present.
In reality, Trump’s speech was aimed not at workers but directed at the trade union bureaucracy and the United Auto Workers apparatus, in particular, which has provided critical backing for the administration based on the shared program of nationalism, militarism and trade war.
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Trump’s speech lasted almost an hour and a half and was laden with its usual ballast of lies and fascistic demagogy. While presented as part of a celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Trump made no reference to the ideals of the American Revolution at the event. His only reference to the anniversary was to celebrate the deranged Ultimate Fighting Championship bloodfest staged on the White House lawn on June 14. Trump even invited UFC fighters Bo Nickal and Anthony Cassar to the stage.
Trump began his remarks by praising Mack Trucks as a great company and denouncing “illegal immigrants” and “globalist politicians that let other countries rip you off and close your factories, rob your jobs, take them away to foreign lands.” He boasted, “I stood up to the trade cheaters, their cheaters, and abusers, and violators of the world.”
In fact, workers in the US are linked with workers in other countries in a system of global production that makes it virtually impossible to determine the “nationality” of any particular vehicle. This is apparent at Mack Trucks, an “American company” owned by transnational Volvo Group, which itself is partially owned by the Chinese automotive conglomerate Zhejiang Geely Holding Group.
The president falsely claimed that his tariffs have led to a surge in manufacturing jobs in the US, a decline in the unemployment rate and the slashing of the trade deficit. In fact, unemployment is rising, and 2025 saw a net decline in manufacturing jobs and no change in the trade deficit. Earlier this year, Mack Trucks parent Volvo Group announced it planned to cut 800 jobs across North America, citing uncertainty due to Trump’s tariffs.
Most significant was Trump’s praise for the trade union apparatus. At one point, Trump declared, “I just spent time with the heads of your unions, and they are terrific. They work with us.” Trump cited by name Tim Hertzog, shop chairman of UAW Local 677 at the Mack Trucks plant in McCungie. The UAW and the leadership of Local 677 have been promoting stridently nationalist, anti-Mexican agitation over Mack Truck’s plan to open a heavy-duty truck plant in Monterrey, Mexico later this year. They are even distributing T-shirts with the logo “not made in Mexico” to Mack workers.
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In his Macungie speech, Trump spoke repeatedly of “radical leftist communists” being elected, in reference to various figures being promoted by the Democratic Socialists of America, such as D.C. mayoral candidate Janeese Lewis George. Trump’s real concern is not the fake socialists from the DSA but the radicalization of the working class, including the nomination of a socialist autoworker running for UAW president. The UAW apparatus shares this fear.
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In a statement posted on his X social media account after Trump’s visit to Mack Trucks, [the socialist autoworker running for UAW president Will] Lehman said:
As candidate for UAW president, I denounce the visit of Donald Trump to my home plant, Mack Trucks in Macungie, Pennsylvania. Trump came to stoke nationalist divisions and try to line workers up behind the interests of American corporations in competition with their rivals abroad. Workers need to understand that nationalist ideology is a poison that must be actively fought. That is shown every day in the ICE raids where our friends and neighbors are being dragged away, and in the escalating war, where working people are paying the price in lives, livelihoods and social services.
Trump told workers here that he is delivering for them. But the stock market and the wealth of the oligarchy is one thing, and your paycheck is another. Reality is the judge of this presidency, and the verdict is already in.
Trump, in his remarks, singled out UAW officials for praise—an expression of the ongoing collaboration between the union apparatus, the corporations and the state. Under Shawn Fain, the UAW has itself embraced Trump’s economic nationalism that pits us against our class brothers and sisters in Mexico, Canada and around the world. What is required is the international unity of the working class against both corporate management and the union bureaucracy that is an arm of management.
11. ASEAN and Russian leaders meet in Kazan amid global energy crisis
On June 17 and 18, leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) gathered in Kazan, Russia, for a commemorative summit with President Vladimir Putin marking 35 years of ASEAN-Russia relations. Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., as current ASEAN chair, co-chaired the proceedings alongside Putin. The summit took place as the G7 met simultaneously in Évian, France. The two gatherings—one pledging to tighten the sanctions strangling Russia, the other deepening cooperation with Moscow—capture in a single week the accelerating fracture of the postwar capitalist order.Southeast Asia produces approximately 2 million barrels of oil per day and consumes 5 million, importing the difference primarily from the Persian Gulf. When Washington’s war on Iran shuttered the Strait of Hormuz, it severed the region’s energy lifeline. Physical Brent crude hit $141 a barrel. The International Energy Agency’s director called the disruption “more serious than the ones in 1973, 1979 and 2022 together.” The net shortfall reached approximately 13 million barrels per day—roughly 13 percent of world energy supply.
The Philippines declared a national energy emergency. Indonesia faced fuel shortages threatening an already fragile economy. Workers and the poor across the region were forced to absorb the price shocks through inflation, rising transport costs and cuts to social programs. This crisis was not a natural disaster. It was the direct consequence of a war Washington launched.
For six years, ASEAN-Russia relations were suspended in near-dormancy. The global COVID-19 pandemic severed contact; the 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the Western sanctions regime that followed made engagement with Moscow politically costly. The last in-person leaders’ summit was Singapore in 2018. It is the energy shock—not any shift in political allegiance—that has reversed this separation. The pressure of the crisis drove ASEAN governments back to the table.
Against this backdrop, the Kazan summit produced four formal documents: the Kazan Declaration 2026, a Joint Statement on Energy Cooperation, a Joint Statement on Cultural Cooperation, and a Comprehensive Plan of Action for Russia-ASEAN 2026–2030. The Declaration committed ASEAN and Russia to a “just, democratic and multipolar world order” and pledged to “strengthen cooperation to enhance energy security.”
These are frameworks, not contracts. No specific volumes of oil were committed, no purchase orders signed, no delivery schedules established. The summit produced the handshakes of intended partnership, not bills of sale.
The concrete numbers tell a different story. The Philippines’ Petron Corporation—the country’s only refiner—purchased 2.48 million barrels of Russian crude, the first in five years. Two tankers docked at Limay port for the Bataan refinery. Vietnam activated a long-standing Rosneft-PV Oil supply framework and signed a new cooperation agreement with Zarubezhneft for crude, gas, and storage infrastructure. Thailand and Malaysia secured spot cargoes and bunkering flows.
Indonesia announced the most dramatic figure: 150 million barrels, agreed after President Prabowo Subianto held a three-hour meeting with Putin in Moscow on April 13. One cargo arrived. Roughly 700,000 barrels of Arctic Novy grade crude were delivered to the Cilacap refinery in late April. The gap between the headline and the reality is a measure of the difficulty every ASEAN government faces in translating political will into energy security.
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On April 23, the day Jakarta announced the 150-million-barrel commitment, the EU issued its 20th Russia sanctions package, which included Indonesia’s Karimun terminal—the first non-Russian oil terminal sanctioned by Brussels since 2022. Karimun had functioned as a hub for Russian shadow-fleet ship-to-ship transfers. Sanctioning it was a direct warning to Jakarta.
The obstacles are not only legal and political. Russia’s own export capacity is severely constrained. Ukrainian drone strikes have halted at least 40 percent of Russia’s oil export infrastructure—roughly 2 million barrels per day. By May, Russian seaborne oil exports hit a seasonal low, with diesel exports cut by 26 percent due to refinery outages. The Far East route most relevant to Southeast Asia flows through the ESPO Blend pipeline to the Kozmino terminal, which operates near its capacity ceiling of approximately 1 million barrels per day. This route is dominated by China, which absorbs roughly 58 percent of Russia’s shadow-fleet crude. The shadow fleet itself is shrinking: Sanctions and seizures eliminated 22 vessels in early 2026 alone. Russian demand from ASEAN buyers may, in the Kremlin’s own words, exceed what Moscow can supply.
The window is also closing. The US sanctions waiver that briefly allowed Russian oil purchases expired on May 16; Asian governments including the Philippines lobbied for its extension and were refused. Any transaction now structured in dollars exposes buyers to secondary sanctions risk. Washington launched the war that closed the Strait of Hormuz, opened the valve when it suited its interests, then shut it again. The EU, which decoupled from Russian fossil fuels after 2022 and faces no comparable energy emergency, sent its foreign policy chief to Brunei to tell Southeast Asian governments not to buy Russian oil—and sanctioned Indonesia’s Karimun terminal to impede the flows. The costs of the war in Ukraine—now financed and prosecuted overwhelmingly by European imperialism—are being enforced on Asian workers.
The G7 summit at Évian produced a formal statement pledging to “strengthen sanctions, including those on the oil and gas sectors.” The unity was a surface achievement. European governments spent days pushing Ukraine back onto Trump’s agenda; Washington came to Évian to announce its Iran deal. The divergence is structural. The EU has committed over $226 billion to Ukraine since 2022 and agreed on a further $104 billion loan for 2026–2027, including nearly $70 billion for military assistance. European military spending rose 14 percent in 2025. The war in Ukraine is now financed and sustained predominantly by Europe, while Washington’s strategic focus is China and the Middle East. As the World Socialist Web Site has analyzed, European capitals increasingly pursue their imperialist interests independently of—and if necessary against—Washington.
ASEAN governments are maneuvering in the space this fracture opens. Their turn toward Moscow is driven by the collapse of the order Washington built and can no longer sustain.
The Kazan Declaration’s pledge to a “just, democratic and multipolar world order” is the ideological packaging of, not a genuine alternative to, imperialism. Russia is a declining capitalist power whose export infrastructure is being destroyed by Ukrainian drones and whose shadow fleet is being seized in the North Sea. The ASEAN states are not building a new order. They are scrambling for position in the ruins of the old one.
12. NALC union prepares to deny letter carriers right to contract vote as historic USPS cuts loom
If no tentative agreement is reached, according to NALC, “unresolved issues would be addressed through an interest arbitration process,” producing “a final and binding decision on the contents of a new National Agreement.”
Locked-out workers who spoke with the World Socialist Web Site say that BP is dragging out the lockout to starve workers into submission.
Will Lehman, a rank-and-file Mack Trucks worker in Macungie, Pennsylvania who was nominated at last week's UAW convention to run for union president, condemned the UAW's in-plant vote at Nexteer as a fraud.
15. Greens deal aids Australian Labor government’s austerity budget
The Greens are aiding a Labor government that is in a deep-going political crisis, amid widespread hostility to its austerity budget.
16. Open letter to the Turkish Embassy: Freedom for Ali Ercan Akpolat!
On Wednesday, June 24, at 2:30 p.m., the following open letter from the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (SGP) and the editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site in Germany will be delivered to Türkiye’s ambassador in Berlin, Gökhan Turan.
Dear Ambassador Gökhan Turan,
We are writing to you to protest the arrest of Ali Ercan Akpolat, the mayor of the municipality of Adalar, and to demand his immediate and unconditional release.
The arrest of Akpolat and numerous other representatives and employees of the municipality of Adalar is a serious attack on democratic rights. The charges brought against him are baseless. They are clearly directed not against actual crimes but against elected mayors and opposition politicians. They are part of a broader campaign by the Erdoğan government to intimidate and disempower opposition-led municipalities through police operations, criminal prosecution and state intervention.
Akpolat is an elected mayor and is known in Türkiye and internationally for his commitment to preserving historical truth and cultural heritage. Of particular significance is his work in connection with the “Trotsky House” on Büyükada, the historic Prinkipo. There, Leon Trotsky, who together with Vladimir Lenin led the October Revolution of 1917, lived in exile from 1929 to 1933. On Büyükada he wrote some of his most important works, including his autobiography My Life and The History of the Russian Revolution, and developed his perspective for the struggle against fascism, Stalinism and imperialist war.
At the commemoration on Büyükada in 2024, Akpolat declared:
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.
These words express an understanding of the international historical and cultural significance of Büyükada that deserves recognition far beyond Türkiye. Akpolat’s arrest therefore threatens not only the democratic rights of an elected mayor and the population of Adalar. It is also directed against the defence of a historical heritage that is of significance to workers, youth, scholars and defenders of democratic rights throughout the world.
Indignation over these attacks is growing within the Turkish working class and population. Earlier this week, large protests took place on Prinkipo against the arrests. In Germany, too, the demand for the release of Akpolat and the other detainees is receiving broad support, as it becomes increasingly clear that the prosecution is politically motivated and serves to intimidate all opposition.
We call on the Turkish government to:
- Immediately and unconditionally release Ali Ercan Akpolat and all those arrested as part of the operation against the municipality of Adalar;
- Drop the prosecution of Akpolat and all others affected;
- End the campaign against elected mayors, municipal councillors and municipal employees of the opposition;
- Release all political prisoners, including the more than 200 anti-NATO activists arrested in recent days;
- Fully respect the democratic rights of the population, including the right to elect representatives to office and for them to exercise these offices without intimidation and state arbitrariness;
- No obstruction in the work of preserving Leon Trotsky’s house on Büyükada and creating an international cultural and educational center.
Mr. Ambassador, we ask you to forward this protest and these demands to your government without delay.
We will follow this case closely, inform workers, youth, intellectuals, artists and defenders of democratic rights internationally about these developments, and organize further protests.
Yours sincerely,
Christoph Vandreier
Chairman of the Sozialistische GleichheitsparteiJohannes Stern
Editor of the German-language edition of the World Socialist Web Site
17. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
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.
