Thursday, August 6, 2020
War crimes in Afghanistan covered up by UK Ministry of Defence
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/06/afgh-a06.html
By Jean Shaoul
6 August 2020
The government has been caught out lying about evidence on the killing of civilians in Afghanistan by the elite Special Air Service (SAS).
Three years into a civil case in the High Court brought by Saiffulah Yar into the deaths of four family members at the hand of the SAS, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has finally handed over a tranche of e-mails and documents revealing official concerns about the killing of Afghan civilians. The MoD previously indicated it had no such documents.
The documents, written by SAS officers and military personnel, provide evidence of war crimes. They show that while the government claimed that there was no credible evidence about these events, the evidence had been sitting in Whitehall.
It is a damning confirmation of the criminality of the 2001 US-led invasion and occupation of Afghanistan that has led to more than 175,000 deaths, hundreds of thousands of wounded, and millions forced from their homes.
The intervention in Afghanistan, planned well in advance of the bombing of the twin towers in New York in 2001, was not launched to prosecute a “war on terrorism” but rather to project US military power into Central and South Asia. The US was intent on seizing control of a country bordering on the oil-rich former Soviet republics of the Caspian Basin, as well as China. The UK joined as a willing partner on behalf of its own oil corporations in this criminal venture.
The High Court has now ordered Ben Wallace, the Secretary of State for Defence, to explain why the ministry withheld evidence suggesting SAS soldiers executed 33 civilians in Afghanistan in early 2011. He has until November to reply. The MoD claimed it was not new evidence, as it had been reviewed by the official inquiry—Operation Northmoor—into allegations of civilian killings.
Saifullah brought the case against the MoD to discover what happened to his family and whether the case had been thoroughly investigated by the British authorities. His father, two brothers, and a cousin were killed during a raid on his family’s home in Qala-e-Bost, east of Lashkar Gah in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan, under British occupation in 2011.
After the raid, Saifullah, who was 16 at the time, found his father, Haji Abdul Kaliq, 55, two brothers, Sadam, 23, and Atullah, 25, and a cousin shot dead. One of his brothers and his father had been handcuffed and hooded before being shot as they lay face down on the ground. Royal Military Police (RMP) officers had arrived at his family’s compound by helicopter and handcuffed and fingerprinted him, along with the other male members of his family, before he was taken to a barn with the women and children, where they were guarded by soldiers during the raid. He denies that his family had any weapons or were connected to the Taliban, the ostensible cause of the raid.
According to the 1977 Geneva Conventions, shooting civilians is only lawful if they are participating directly in hostilities. With no precise definition of “direct participation,” civilians are expected to be given the benefit of the doubt. Under UK domestic law, which is applicable to the armed forces, a soldier can use force to defend him/herself and others, including lethal force, only provided it is reasonable in the circumstances.
The MoD had previously maintained that it was unaware of any complaint about the raid until the family launched a legal case in 2013. But six years later, it transpired that the Royal Military Police (RMP) had interviewed 54 soldiers involved in the operation leading up to the raid on Saifullah’s family home, with the government’s lawyers claiming that none of those involved could remember very much about the operation.
The documents, first revealed by BBC TV’s Panorama and the Sunday Times, tell a different story. They confirm claims that the government covered up dozens of allegations—including by UK soldiers—of the killing of innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Philip Alston, the former UN Special Rapporteur on executions, told Panorama, “ I have no doubt that overall many of the allegations [of innocent people being killed] are justified, and that we can conclude that a large number of civilians were killed in night raids, totally unjustifiably.”
One of the e-mails, sent by an SAS officer the morning after the raid, described it as “the latest massacre!” and added, “I’ve heard a couple of rumours.” Another document revealed that there had been a secret review of suspicious killings and a string of related incidents in which the SAS had killed fighting-age men, often during a search of premises, allegedly because they had picked up a weapon.
According to the review that covered the first quarter of 2011, 23 people were killed and 10 guns were recovered in three operations. It was clear a senior officer examining the official reports filed about the SAS’s night raids was sceptical of their veracity, remarking on their similarity in that the detained men suddenly grabbed a weapon. He found at least five separate incidents where more people were killed than weapons were recovered. Taken together, this led him to conclude, “In my view there is enough here to convince me that we are getting some things wrong, right now.”
One SAS commander even wrote to London warning there was “possibly a deliberate policy” and that the SAS troops had potentially strayed into “indefensible behaviour” that could amount to being “criminal.”
His concern was that the killings were jeopardising the support of Afghan forces, which were refusing to accompany the British on night raids, and “put[ting] at risk the [redacted] transition plan and more importantly the prospects of enduring UK influence” in Afghanistan.
While the RMP had launched an investigation called Operation Northmoor into 657 allegations of abuse, mistreatment, and killings, including into the deaths of Saifullah’s family members, at the hands of British forces, the government closed it down in 2017. Once again, a three-year-long official probe, costing at least £10 million, failed to result in a single prosecution.
The corporate media had gone into overdrive, branding the investigations as a witch-hunt. The MoD filed complaints against the lawyers bringing civil suits against it, including against Saifullah’s lawyer Leigh Day. Leigh Day was cleared of wrongdoing after a six-week tribunal in September 2017.
In March, the government introduced legislation proposing a five-year limit on prosecutions for soldiers serving outside the UK. With its “presumption against prosecution” that gives the green light to future war crimes, including the mass murder of civilians, the military will now be above the law.
It was WikiLeaks publisher and journalist Julian Assange who, by publishing the Afghan war logs in 2010, a vast trove of leaked US military documents, first brought to the world’s attention evidence of the criminality of a war that has now lasted 19 years. The Afghan war logs exposed the myth that the occupation of Afghanistan was a “good war,” supposedly waged to defeat terrorism, extend democracy, and protect women’s rights. They revealed the mass killings of civilians by both US and UK forces, detailing at least 21 occasions when British troops opened fire on civilians.
It is not just those soldiers who perpetrated these crimes on behalf of British imperialism that have escaped punishment. The guilty include those at the top of the political and military ladder that planned and executed this criminal war, even as they plot new crimes, including catastrophic conflicts with nuclear-armed powers such as China and Russia.
Instead, the only two people who have faced criminal repercussions are those who reported the crimes: Chelsea Manning, who has endured a decade of persecution, and Julian Assange, who is imprisoned in Britain’s maximum-security Belmarsh Prison awaiting court hearings for his extradition to the US where he faces 175 years of imprisonment under the Espionage Act. The exposures of the horrors of both the Afghan and Iraq wars earned Assange the undying hatred of Britain’s political establishment, which is why they have hounded, intimidated, tortured and imprisoned him.
Germany: Right-wing terror in Erfurt
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/06/nazi-a06.html
By Marianne Arens
6 August 2020
In the night of August 1, three men from Guinea were brutally attacked by neo-Nazis in Erfurt and had to be taken to hospital. One of them, a 21-year-old youth, suffered such severe head injuries that his condition was still considered “critical” days later; he is still in hospital.
It was in the early hours of the morning when the three happened to pass a neo-Nazi meeting place. They did not know that the “Neue Stärke Erfurt e.V.,” a martial arts club in a former shopping centre in the south of the city, had been occupied for five years by fascists from “Der III. Weg” (“The 3rd Way”) and used as a clubhouse. Several men standing around outside on that night attacked the three passers-by without any cause, beating and kicking them most brutally.
The police arrested 12 of them, but after a few hours, the violent perpetrators, all neo-Nazis known to the city authorities and the police, were free again. Senior Public Prosecutor Hannes Grünseisen, spokesman for Thuringia’s Public Prosecutor General’s Office, reported they were under investigation for committing “grievous bodily harm and breach of the peace.” However, since there was “no danger of a cover-up or of them fleeing,” there was “no reason for their detention.”
Witnesses are still being sought to clarify the exact course of events. The injured victims, whose death the Nazi thugs had accepted, are apparently out of the question as witnesses.
The attack is only the tip of an iceberg. In Erfurt, right-wing gangs of thugs can act completely freely and uninhibitedly under the eyes of the state authorities. This is what happened just a few days earlier, on July 18, when masked right-wing extremists attacked a group of young people celebrating in front of the state chancellery, where surveillance cameras record everything, day and night. At least five of the 12 or so attacked, including young women, were left lying on the floor, some of them seriously injured. As in the case of the Guineans, the Thuringian State Criminal Office (LKA) quickly took over the investigation—and apparently, let it fizzle out.
Last Saturday, about 400 protested in an Erfurt demonstration against racism, right-wing violence and its cover-up by the state. A spokeswoman for the Thuringian Ezra victim advisory service, Christin Fiedler, described the attack in front of the state chancellery:
“This was not a ‘mass brawl’ or ‘confrontation,’ but a targeted, coordinated and insidious attack on people celebrating peacefully by right-wing violent criminals, presumably experienced in martial arts. The perpetrators were partially masked and knew exactly what they were doing. They acted without restraint and with enormous brutality and knowingly accepted causing possible fatal injuries, for example by continuing to kick people who were lying unconscious on the ground.”
For Fiedler, the fact that the attack took place in public, with video monitoring directly in front of the building of the Thuringia state government shows “how secure the perpetrators felt, who did not even stop when the police were already on the scene.”
The fascist attacks in Erfurt are part of a wave of right-wing extremist and anti-Semitic violence. These have increased considerably in Germany. Even the federal Interior Minister, Horst Seehofer, had to admit this when he spoke of a “long trail of blood” in May, when presenting the police crime statistics, which leads from the actions of the neo-fascist NSU, responsible for a series of xenophobic murders, to the attacks in Munich, Halle and Hanau, to the murder of Kassel’s district president Walter Lübcke. Seehofer said, “The greatest threat in our country comes from the right.”
But the neo-Nazis and anti-Semites have no mass support among the population, unlike the 1930s. The majority hates and despises right-wing extremism and expresses this again and again—sometimes in mass demonstrations. The fascists only feel so strong because they know that the “state within the state”—the dark channels and neo-Nazi networks in the police, the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) and the secret service—are at their side. That is why Erfurt’s well-known neo-Nazis, who are prepared to use violence, are again at large in the city, even though they have just beaten three Guineans half to death.
The decision to let them roam free evinces such open support for the right-wingers that Thuringia state interior minister Georg Maier (Social Democratic Party, SPD) felt compelled to publicly criticise it. “The Nazi thugs of Erfurt are all walking free again,” Maier tweeted. “I know it’s not my place to criticise the justice system, but it’s a disaster for the victims and the people of Herrenberg.” Herrenberg is the housing estate where the attack took place.
Like Seehofer, Maier is trying to cover his tracks. The federal interior minister showed his solidarity with radical right-wing protests in Chemnitz in September 2018, among other things. Maier is part of a state government in Thuringia, which is led by a state premier from the Left Party, Bodo Ramelow, and which courts the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and seeks to cooperate with it. This was demonstrated only a few hours after Ramelow’s re-election in the spring.
On March 6, Ramelow used his casting vote to help the AfD take over the vice presidency of the Thuringia state legislature. Ramelow then explicitly stated on Twitter that he had “very fundamentally decided to use my vote to clear the way for parliamentary participation, which must be granted to every parliamentary group.”
The Left Party, for which many voters had only cast their ballot because they wanted to set an example against the right wing, thus very consciously ensured the AfD’s “parliamentary participation”—a party that plays down Nazism, fans racism and, especially in Thuringia, has open neo-Nazis in its ranks. It is precisely this policy of the Left Party and the SPD that strengthens and encourages the extreme right-wing gangs of thugs. The SPD interior minister is only concerned because the effects of the right-wing policies of the Ramelow government are visible. He is not taking any action in the matter, despite the public prosecutor’s office being part of his department.
Nazi parties such as “Die Rechte” (“The Right”) and “Der III. Weg” have been explicitly allowed to use the building in Erfurt-South, where the Guineans were attacked, as a clubhouse for five years. Undisturbed by the authorities, they organize right-wing rock concerts, martial arts training, and party meetings there. Enrico Biczysko, is a right-wing figurehead in Erfurt’s city council for the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany, and the neo-Nazis have friends and supporters in the judiciary and police.
The first police press release after the attack was already characteristic for this right-wing swamp. In officialese, it blandly states, “On 01.08.2020 at about 03:05, a verbal dispute between a group of three foreign fellow citizens and about 10 Germans occurred, which culminated in a physical confrontation. In the course of this quarrel, two persons with a migration background were injured, some of them seriously.” The cynicism of this police communication can hardly be surpassed. Through their presence in Germany, the Guineans had put themselves in danger and ultimately brought about their own injuries.
Australia: Victorian hospital admissions soar amid warnings COVID-19 surge will continue for weeks
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/06/vict-a06.html
By Oscar Grenfell
6 August 2020
As “stage four” lockdown measures and workplace closures go into effect in Melbourne, the state of Victoria yesterday recorded its highest tally of coronavirus deaths and infections, with 725 confirmed new cases and 15 fatalities. A further 471 infections were reported today.
Of Wednesday’s 15 victims, at least 12 were linked to aged-care homes, with around 100 such facilities in Melbourne being centres of active infection. One of those who died, however, was in his 30s, tragically demonstrating the falsehood of claims that younger people are not at serious risk.
Many more deaths are anticipated, as hospitalisation rates soar, especially in Melbourne. On Tuesday, there were 456 Victorians in hospital as a result of complications from COVID-19, 35 of them in intensive care units (ICU).
Some 24 hours later, those figures had risen to 538 hospital patients, with 42 in ICU. This was the sharpest spike in hospital admissions since the pandemic began. A month ago, there were fewer than 25 COVID-19 hospital patients in all of Victoria. Graphs of hospitalisations show an exponential growth.
The increase has sparked renewed warnings from doctors and medical experts that Victoria’s entire hospital system could be overwhelmed. Speaking on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) “7:30” program last night, Dr Sarah Whitelaw, an emergency consultant at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, stated that hospital capacity would be exceeded within weeks if new infection tallies did not begin to fall.
Whitelaw commented: “We thought at the beginning of the pandemic that our problem was going to be intensive care beds and the number of ventilators that we had… we’ve all been blindsided by the fact that our problem is the workforce. I think the number of healthcare worker infections is a real concern.”
Earlier this week, it was revealed that there are more than 700 active cases among Victorian healthcare workers, including hospital doctors and nurses. That accounts for some 10 percent of all active infections, and recalls the situation in the most heavily affected regions of Italy and in New York, when they were struck by the worst of the pandemic.
Whitelaw and other doctors have noted that a substantial portion of the rise in admissions stems from the transfer of infected aged-care residents to public hospitals. For weeks, Victorian and federal authorities resisted calls from relatives for all sick aged-care patients to receive hospital-quality treatment.
As daily fatalities have risen, however, it has become clear that aged-care homes are becoming killing fields, and that there will be a large number of casualties if a substantial number of residents are not immediately provided with expert care. Low-paid casual staff have been denied the necessary training to deal with an unprecedented public health emergency, while no precautions were put in place throughout the sector for a major outbreak of a communicable disease.
This is a glaring indictment of Labor and Liberal-National governments, which have overseen the transformation of the sector into a fully-corporatised one that provides substantial profits to private owners.
The extent of the criminality was pointed to by a report in the Herald Sun yesterday, revealing that an unnamed Melbourne aged-care operator told staff members that it was impossible for them to contract the coronavirus on the job.
This was one day after federal aged care minister Richard Colbeck told a Senate committee hearing that he would be “reluctant” to release a public list of all facilities hit by COVID-19 outbreaks. Colbeck declared that some operators could not “handle a big media influx,” and warned that revealing them would result in “reputational issues.” In other words, it would affect their profit margins.
The intense strains on the healthcare system are also the result of decades of funding cuts, which have been intensified by the failure of state and federal authorities to boost spending in the sector, as they promised when they began the pro-business lifting of lockdown measures in May.
The expansion of the pandemic is directly related to the breakdown of contact-tracing, with the majority of new cases each day being reported as “under investigation,” meaning the source of infection has not been confirmed. There are well over 700 “mystery infections,” where the circumstances of transmission are completely unknown.
When the pandemic began, the Victorian public health team responsible for tracing communicable diseases had just 14 staff members, fewer than a football team. Over the following months, thousands of untrained individuals, including redundant call centre employees and military personnel were recruited.
Yesterday, Nine Media revealed that even these superficial measures were wound back in May and June, coinciding with the back-to-work campaign of the state and federal governments. Nine stated that “sources very close to the operation” said that that the decision was “catastrophic,” coming just weeks before major clusters exploded in quarantine hotels. The source stated that the authorities had relied on businesses to self-report cases and investigate them.
The consequence of these criminal decisions has been hundreds of workers contracting a potentially-deadly virus.
The ABC reported this morning that employees at the Australian Lamb Company meatworks in Colac, a regional Victoria town, waited between five and ten days for their COVID-19 test results, after the virus began circulating in the plant. Contact-tracing took even longer. The outbreak has since led to almost 90 infections.
Most explosively, the ABC cited a letter, allegedly from the Victorian deputy chief medical officer, instructing an infected worker to return to the job, despite the fact that he was only ten days through the mandated 14-day quarantine period.
The extraordinary correspondence demonstrates that while they have been presiding over a disaster in the healthcare system, Victorian authorities have been actively campaigning on behalf of big business to suppress concerns among workers and ensure that there is no disruption to lucrative corporate operations.
The prospects of a full-scale collapse of Melbourne hospitals have been underscored by modelling, indicating that infections will continue to grow under the new lockdown, for weeks or months.
Secret state government estimates, revealed by the Australian this morning, show that daily cases are predicted to increase to as many as 1,100 by the end of next week, and will remain over 1,000 for eight days. The figures indicate that infections will not decline until late August, and will continue to trend at greater than 300 per day, until mid-September, when the current measures are set to end. This will mean hundreds or thousands more people requiring hospital treatment.
The record demonstrates that the Victorian Labor government, acting in line with the homicidal back-to-work campaign supported by the entire political establishment, only introduced the new restrictions after it was clear that the state was on the precipice of a catastrophe unprecedented outside of war time.
For weeks, Labor Premier Daniel Andrews, with the support of Prime Minister Scott Morrison, rejected calls for the closure of workplaces and schools, due to the impact that this would have on corporate profits.
The “stage four” lockdown measures announced on Sunday involve substantial retail closures in Melbourne, along with the shutdown of some manufacturing, and reduced operations for other sections. The cost will be borne by the 250,000 more workers who are being sacked or stood-down, the hundreds of thousands more who are already unemployed and those who do not receive enough shifts to make ends meet.
Construction bosses, who have been given an exemption because their activities are crucial to the fortunes of the ultra-wealthy, have already begun lobbying for a further easing of any restrictions.
Meanwhile, “stage three” measures, involving retail closures and sharp restrictions on movement are coming into effect today in regional Victoria, where infections continue to mount.
Double-digit cases are continuing to be reported every day in New South Wales (NSW), the country’s most populous state, with epidemiologists giving 50-50 odds of a major surge like that in Victoria. The NSW Liberal government has declared that it will not return to even limited lockdown measures, following the same pro-business playbook that has led to the disaster in Victoria.
Far-right protest against COVID-19 restrictions in Berlin: A put-up job
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/06/demo-a06.html
By Peter Schwarz
6 August 2020
According to police reports, an estimated 20,000 participants gathered in Berlin last Saturday to protest against Germany’s Corona protection measures. The protest was a predictable, put-up job, which closely resembled the scenario of the Pegida demonstrations held five years ago.
Far-right figures and organisations that pull the strings behind the scenes and maintain close links to the Verfassungsschutz (Germany’s domestic secret service), the police and the right-wing extremist Alternative for Germany (AfD) called the protest, and mobilised a broad coalition of confused, frustrated and eccentric individuals. Political circles and the German media then inflated the whole issue, took the moral high ground and criticised the crude slogans of the demonstrators while declaring at the same time that those taking part were “concerned citizens” whose concerns had to be “taken seriously.” In so doing they were able to divert attention from their own reactionary policies and push the political climate further to the right.
The Pegida demonstrations were used in a similar way to sabotage the “welcoming culture,” whereby broad sections of the German population welcomed refugees from war-wracked countries in the Middle East and North Africa, and to intimidate all those supporting the refugees.
Journalists worked their fingers to the bone with articles which concluded that—in the words of the right-wing extremist historian Jörg Baberowski—”it naturally ends in aggression…wherever many people come from foreign contexts” and when the population is not involved. According to this logic, the refugees—i.e., the victims of the far right—were responsible for the growth of right-wing extremism.
The Corona demonstration in Berlin followed the same pattern. Many of those agitating behind the scenes were among the same people behind the Pegida demonstrations, i.e., neo-Nazis, far-right Reichbürger, supporters of the AfD, the neo-Nazi NPD and the conspiracy theorist QAnon movement, who travelled from all over Germany to Berlin. These forces were joined by opponents of vaccination, Corona deniers and so-called “angry citizens,” together with members of Berlin’s party crowd.
The police watched patiently as the participants disregarded Corona distancing and mask regulations, waved illegal Reich flags and displayed unconstitutional symbols. In contrast to the G20 protests in Hamburg or the recent demonstrations against the murder of George Floyd, where police resorted to the use of pepper spray and water cannons at the slightest opportunity, not a single police officer could be seen along broad stretches of the march. Only after half an hour of the final rally had passed did police officially declare that the protest was ended due to non-compliance with hygiene rules. At the same time, police made no move to break up the demonstration.
Afterwards, leading politicians and the media frothed at the mouth regarding the non-compliance with official hygiene regulations. Demonstrations should be possible, also in a period of Corona…”but not like this,” twittered the German Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU). Justice Minister Christine Lambrecht (SPD) declared she had no sympathy for demonstrators who high-handedly ignored Corona precautions. Economics Minister Peter Altmaier (CDU) called for tougher penalties: “Those who deliberately endanger others must expect serious consequences.” SPD leader Saskia Esken angrily referred to “covididiots.”
These expressions of outrage were aimed at diverting attention from the policies of these very same politicians. The anti-social behaviour of the demonstrators last Saturday pales in comparison with their own criminal response. Germany’s federal and state governments, run by various coalitions involving the CDU, CSU, SPD, Greens, FDP and Left Party, are all pursuing a policy of opening up society and the economy that threatens the lives of hundreds of thousands.
As the worldwide number of infected persons approaches 20 million, with the number of fatalities now exceeding 700,000, the number of cases in Germany is again rising significantly. Currently tens of thousands of holiday makers are returning home, having been encouraged to travel abroad by the lifting of travel warnings. At airports in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, where almost half of the returnees voluntarily applied for a Corona test, 2.5 percent proved positive, an extremely high figure.
Despite this, schools are opening up across the country, starting with Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania next week, although it has been proven that schools, with their cramped classrooms and dilapidated infrastructure, are an ideal environment for mass infections.
The Viennese research group Complexity Science Hub, which has statistically evaluated Corona data from 76 regions, concluded that the closure of schools, kindergartens and universities was an “extremely effective means” to limit infection. According to an analysis published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, school closures saved more than 40,000 lives and prevented 1.3 million infections in the US alone.
Conversely, a study by the Technical University of Berlin shows that aerosol concentration in the air of a classroom—critical for transmission—is reached just two minutes after a single infected person in the room coughs. Despite this fact, schools are once again commencing operations at full capacity.
The hygiene measures that have been put in place, which vary from state to state, are risible. For example, the obligation to wear masks, which Federal Education Minister Anja Karliczek (CDU) is now advocating after initially rejecting the proposal, only applies from the school gate to the classroom, but not in the classroom itself, where the risk of infection is highest.
The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) also estimates the risk of infection to be high in a full classroom where minimum distance rules are not observed. This information is contained in a letter to the Rheinische Post. The prerequisites for maintaining this distance in classrooms are almost non-existent.
The RKI also warns against studies that attribute a significantly higher resistance on the part of children to coronavirus infection. It may well be that the alleged resistance of children is merely due to the fact that they had less social contact during the closure of kindergartens and schools, the RKI notes on its website.
Meanwhile, the media are trying to portray the Berlin demonstration staged by far-right manipulators as an expression of a broad mood within the population. In its lead commentary on Monday, the Süddeutsche Zeitung claimed that when a five-figure number of people take to the streets in Berlin, “one must fear that what was being expressed were issues concerning hundreds of thousands, at least.”
Opinion polls prove the opposite. A recent survey conducted by the opinion research institute Civey for the Tagesspiegel newspaper concluded that 77 percent of those questioned would accept a tightening of contact restrictions if the number of infections rose again significantly. Only around 20 percent were opposed. According to the current Politbarometer, 77 percent also expect a second wave of coronavirus infections to occur soon.
The pressure to lift contact restrictions and open schools does not come from the population, but rather from business and finance interests together with their cronies in the media and political circles. Having transferred hundreds of billions of euros to the corporations and banks to guarantee the profits and fortunes of the rich, the government is seeking once again to squeeze these sums out of the working class. The opening up of schools is a basic condition for parents to be fully available to the labour market and able to work. The drive for profits is being placed above the lives of millions of children and their families.
The neo-Nazis and right-wing extremists who set the tone at the Berlin demonstration have been deliberately targeted to create the necessary political climate for this policy. They are closely linked to the state apparatus, as was revealed most recently by the NSU murders, the murder of the politician Walter Lübcke and the uncovering of various far-right terror networks in the German army (Bundeswehr) and police.
Protecting the health and livelihoods of the population against the effects of the Corona pandemic is first and foremost a political task. It is only possible on the basis of a socialist programme that puts human and social need above the profit interests of big business.
One can only resolve the urgent problem of education and training within such a framework. It is perfectly possible to provide education in compliance with appropriate safety measures, but this requires that the huge funds currently being diverted into the accounts of the wealthy must be redirected to renovate dilapidated schools, rent additional rooms, purchase computers and IT technology, employ more teachers to instruct small groups, etc.
There is no shortage of ideas and initiatives from committed teachers and parents, but they are being rejected on the grounds of cost or blocked by bureaucratic means.
The Socialist Equality Party (SGP) advocates the establishment of action committees in educational institutions and residential areas that function independently of the trade unions and establishment parties. Such committees are necessary to coordinate resistance to the life-threatening policy of opening up the economy.
Resistance to a system that subordinates every sphere of life to the profit interests of big business and finance is developing in factories, hospitals, transport and public services around the world. The SGP and its sister parties in the International Committee of the Fourth International are fighting to build a broad socialist mass movement.
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