It is vital that the Western left grasps the enormous stakes involved in ensuring the total defeat of US’s new cold war and discards any temptation to take a neutral position on this massive life-and-death issue.

US imperialism is desperate to contain the rise of China, retard the country’s economic development and maintain the US’s domination of world affairs.

The Covid-19 pandemic is greatly accelerating the relative economic decline of the US vis-a-vis China, and attacks on China are accelerating in step.

Should the US succeed in its cold war, the policies of an unconstrained US imperialism on pandemics, climate change, poverty, racism and war threaten to dominate the globe.

Central to the US’s cold-war effort is to attempt to paint China as the enemy on all these major questions for humanity.

The opposite is the case and to suggest that the US and China represent twin evils and adopt the slogan “neither Washington nor Beijing” is not only factually untrue, but provides support for Washington’s cold war.

The US lies being told about China are on the scale of Iraq’s WMD or the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

It is crucial to look at the reality of the contrasting approaches of US and China on the major issues facing humanity.

The US’s catastrophic response to the pandemic

As the global pandemic continues to rage, it is vital to recognise that it is the US policy on coronavirus that is the greatest threat to human life, not China.

Donald Trump has allowed Covid-19 to rip through society because of the US ruling class’s insistence that profits must be protected at the expense of human lives. The results of this policy have been nothing short of catastrophic.

At the time of writing, over 194,000 people have been killed in the US.

In China there have been fewer than 5,000 deaths. Driven by the goal of saving lives, China has adopted extremely effective public-health measures including strict quarantines, social distancing, an efficient test-and-trace system, temperature checking, masks and the use of adequate personal protective equipment.

China has effectively defeated the virus.

Taking into account population size, the coronavirus pandemic has been around 183 times more deadly in the US than in China. The Chinese authorities put public health first. The US prioritised profits.

The US leads the world towards climate catastrophe

As the global temperature rise edges towards the critical point of 1.5°C, it’s clear that the US approach to climate change is leading humanity towards catastrophe.

Trump has spent the past four years blocking progress internationally on climate change starting by withdrawing the US from the UN Paris Climate Change Agreement — the only country in the world to do so.

The US has now become the world’s number-one producer and exporter of oil and gas.

Yet the US ruling class is determined to obscure this reality by blaming China for climate change in an attempt to disorientate the environmental movement in the West.

Historically, the US is responsible for 25 per cent of all production-based carbon emissions ever released.

This is almost twice as much as China’s cumulative emissions which stand at 12.7 per cent.

The US currently emits twice as much carbon per person (16.5 tonnes) than China (seven tonnes).

China has dedicated massive state resources to building up green industries, driven by a commitment to sustainable development and building an “ecological civilisation.”

As the International Renewable Energy Agency points out, China is the world’s largest producer, exporter and installer of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and electric vehicles.

China’s huge state investments are making renewable energy an affordable alternative to fossil fuels globally.

US hypocrisy on human rights

The claims of the US government, echoed by the mainstream Western media, that the US is the “land of the free” and an international beacon of human rights, while China is the land of human rights abuses are both hypocritical and completely absurd.

This is while unarmed black people are gunned down daily by cops and Black Lives Matter protesters are brutalised by various militarised state forces in the US.

CBS reported last week that US cops have killed 288 people since George Floyd was murdered three months ago, and once again black and other people of colour are disproportionately victims.

The US-led “war on terror” over the past 20 years has led to brutal invasions, occupations and bombings of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria which have killed and displaced millions of people in the Middle East. China has done none of these.

Meanwhile at home the decades-long “war on drugs,” in reality a thinly veiled war on African-Americans, has made the US the home of the world’s largest prison population in the world, with over 2.3 million people incarcerated in 2020.

African-Americans are imprisoned at more than five times the rate of whites.

In per capita terms the US imprisons five times as many people as China does. In 2018 the US imprisoned 655 people per 100,000, whilst China imprisoned 118 people per 100,000.

Despite its own verifiable and widely understood violations of human rights, the US is leading an international campaign against China on this issue.

At its centre are fabrications over China’s treatment of Uighur Muslims. Trump’s administration claims that “millions” of Uighur Muslims are been detained in “concentration camps,” with absolutely no evidence, and even that there is “genocide.”

The facts are that the Uighur population in Xinjiang has more than doubled in the past 40 years from 5.5 million to over 11 million and there are 24,000 mosques in the province.

Any serious discussion about human rights in China should proceed from the following facts: in 1949 life expectancy in China was 36 years following a century of imperialist domination.

Today its 76 years. Over the past 40 years China has lifted over 860 million people out of poverty.

While the rise of Western imperialist countries such as the US and Britain took place as a result of colonialism, slavery, racism and imperialism, China’s rise has been achieved peacefully and without dominating other countries.

But China’s peaceful rise is being met with US aggression. The US currently has over 800 foreign military bases, 400 of which are encircling China.

China has only one foreign military base, in Djibouti. The US is increasing its military budget to $740 billion in 2021.

In 2019, the US spent more money on the military than the next nine biggest spenders combined.

US warships are roaming China’s coastline. Britain intends to send its aircraft carrier to the region.

China is offering the world a different model of international relations, based on respecting other countries’ right to determine their own affairs and “win-win” co-operation — with the offer of mutually beneficial trade and investment.

The foreign policy doctrine of China, to build multilateral co-operation towards a “shared future for humankind” contrasts very sharply with Donald Trump’s “America First” doctrine that all humanity must be subordinated to the interests of the US ruling class.

The left in the US and the rest of the West must reject the US government’s claim that our enemy is China and instead understand that the enemy is at home.

The No Cold War campaign is organising an online International Peace Forum on September 26 to discuss how to oppose the US-led new cold war. For details and to register go to nocoldwar.org.

This article was originally published by the Morning Star

Can China do much to fight back against the power wielded by the US in the world economy? At first sight, that looks unlikely. China is big, but world trade is conducted in dollars, and the US has economic, political and military influence across the globe. The usual result of a tally of US might is that its position as hegemon is unassailable. But that would overlook how measures of its strength depend upon the world staying in the form that US power has created since 1945. If it doesn’t, then these will not count for as much. As one might expect, China has been responding to US attacks, and the outcome is likely to foment a split in the world economy.

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Imagine you wanted to travel from one city to another, but the train company wouldn’t sell you a ticket. Neither would the bus company. Then you were not allowed to buy or hire a car. And anyone who sold you or lent you a bicycle would be fined, or would face imprisonment. With due allowance for analogy, that is similar to what has happened to Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, North Korea and anyone else that the US does not like.

Woe betide you if you are on the wrong side of the US. Then you will find it very difficult to ‘travel’ in the world economy, that is to have any trade or financial dealings. It is not only the sanctions the US imposes; these are also followed to varying degrees by its allies in Europe, Japan and elsewhere. Could the same thing happen to China? It already has, but so far only to a limited extent.

I begin by discussing important dimensions of US power in the world, with a focus on the economic, commercial and financial aspects. I will not deal with the mountains of US weaponry and its means of intimidation with worldwide military bases, although these are significant. The remainder of the article deals with how the rise of China is reshaping the world economy and acting as an alternative focal point to the US.[1] Many countries are paying attention to this, even if the ‘western’ powers do not like it.

Economy & trade in the US-China balance

In the past few years, the Trump-led US administration has stepped up anti-China moves. Even if Trump does not get re-elected in November, this direction of policy is not likely to be reversed by the Democrats. We have seen higher tariffs on China’s exports, attempts to block its companies from receiving any US-made (or designed) products, particularly in the technology sphere, as well as pressure on US allies to exclude Huawei and other important Chinese companies from their domestic markets on supposed ‘security’ grounds.[2]

China’s importance in the world economy means that these exclusion tactics cannot easily be extended. Although the US administration has trumpeted, so to speak, a new objective to cut China out of the supply chains that its big corporations have profitably been using for decades, even the ‘great again’ America must know that this would take many years to achieve.

The US is the world’s biggest economy. With a population of some 328 million people, its GDP in 2019 was $21,439 billion. China has a much bigger population of around 1.4 billion people, but a smaller GDP, estimated at $14,140 billion. China is nevertheless number two in the world, and would be a little bit closer to the US when Hong Kong’s $373bn is added to the mainland China number. Both countries have huge domestic markets of interest to foreign companies, and each has a relatively small volume of international trade when compared to GDP, giving their domestic economies some insulation from the vagaries of the world market. China and the US are the biggest two global exporters and importers of goods, but China is far ahead on exports and the US leads in imports.

A Bank of England report included an interesting chart of the international trade in goods, showing how China was bigger than the US in trade with Asia and South America, and the US was bigger than China with the rest of North America and with Europe. Unfortunately, Africa was left out of account in this chart, but China’s direct trade with Africa in 2019 was more than three times larger than that of the US.

China’s importance in international goods trade, 2018

The trade pattern shows there are already different relative strengths of the two countries in relation to the rest of the world. Geography goes some way to account for that difference, but one also has to take note of how US companies export from outside the US – including from China – and that many products from China will contain US components. China has a far smaller volume of foreign direct investment and ownership of foreign companies, so its role in world trade is overstated when compared to the US by this simple country-to-country trade picture.

FX power plays

US economic power in the world is shown most easily in the foreign exchange market. This comprises a multitude of transactions, usually across borders, for goods, services and flows of money to buy and sell equities, bonds, commodities, real estate and so forth. Most internationally traded commodities, like oil, copper, wheat and gold, are priced in terms of US dollars, as are many industrial goods like aircraft and chemicals, let alone weapons and illegal drugs. Many countries also have their own currencies directly tied or more loosely linked to the dollar, nearly all central banks hold reserves of US dollar-based securities, and all international companies have dollar bank accounts. As a result, the US dollar is involved in 88% of all exchanges between one currency and another on the international market.[3]

This gives the US government more power than you might think. If a person or a company receives money from selling, or pays money to buy something, then that money has to shift between the bank accounts of the buyer and the seller. When that money happens to be US dollars, the transaction has to go through the US banking system, perhaps indirectly, even if both the buyer and the seller are not located in the US. So, if the US government does not like you, your company, or your country, it can block your ability to use the US banking system.

That would exclude you from the usual channels of world trade and international business transactions. There may be other ways to avoid the dollar entirely and get a transaction done, but these will likely be more costly. And they will also run the risk of the US government using other means of intimidation – for example, when it levies a fine on any bank that processed a deal with you and threatens to stop that bank from operating in the US. This is one way in which the political objectives of the US administration are advanced by its economic power and influence, with no guns needing to be fired.

The centre of gravity

Not only is the US dollar by far the most widely used global currency, the US also has the biggest markets for financial securities, ie for bonds, equities, futures and options contracts.[4] US markets are the centre of gravity for world capitalism. Even though the bulk of transactions in such markets are done within the US itself, the linkages in the global system mean that they filter through quickly into other countries. That is why financial news reports focus most on policy decisions by the US central bank, the Federal Reserve, and the ups and downs of the US stock markets usually have knock on effects elsewhere.

The New York Stock Exchange is the biggest equity market by far, with a capitalisation of nearly $23,000bn at the end of 2019. Nasdaq, also in New York, was the second largest, at nearly $11,000bn capitalisation. Next in line was Japan’s Tokyo Stock Exchange, at a mere $5,700bn, with London at less than $5,000bn.

It is only when China’s three stock exchanges, in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Shenzhen, are taken together that they come anywhere near the US. At the end of 2019, their total market capitalisations amounted to around $10,500bn. However, the Chinese exchanges do have a slightly higher number of corporations listed, some 5,900 compared to a little over 5,300 in the two US markets.[5]

The reason for considering these things is that they are not narrowly financial. For example, a company’s market capitalisation – the total value of its shares – indicates the potential leverage the company has in the broader market. A higher capitalisation means that it can more easily borrow funds from banks, issue bonds itself to get funds, or use its own shares as a means of payment in its takeovers of other companies. Microsoft and Google stand out here, each having done more than 200 takeovers of actual or potential rivals, or of companies that will help them build up a monopolistic position in the market.

It is mostly US companies that figure at the top of the rankings for market capitalisation. In recent years, it has been the Big Tech corporations like Apple, Amazon and Microsoft, each having a number over $1,000bn. China’s Alibaba and Tencent are the only two non-US companies in this top rank, but with valuations of half that of the largest US corporations.

Financial markets magnify US economic power. Not only does the US stock market present its corporations with many billions of market value, that value is also denominated in US dollars, a currency readily acceptable in most of the world. In global terms, it is ‘real money’. Corporations wanting to takeover another will find it easier to do so with US dollars than euros, Japanese yen or sterling, let alone Australian dollars or Norwegian kroner. Apart from its size, liquidity and access to funds, that explains the attraction for companies of listing on the US equity market.

China and the US dollar

The US authorities run access to the dollar, especially the Treasury and the Federal Reserve central bank. So why is it that China, seen by the US as its most dangerous antagonist, has let its economy be dominated by dollars?

First, if China wanted to operate in the world economy, it had little choice 30-40 years ago but to accept the existing structure of world trade and finance. Asia’s economies in particular were, and still are, bound up with the US dollar, through close ties of their currencies and through flows of trade, investment and loans. China has also for a long time followed a policy of keeping its domestic currency relatively stable versus the dollar, even in the wake of the severe crisis that hit emerging markets in the late 1990s. This, along with capital controls, helped keep its economy growing steadily by curbing one source of potential instability.

Second, one method of limiting the impact of possible capital flight is to build up foreign exchange reserves. If foreign investors have assets in China, whether through direct investment in factories, in buying equities or debt securities, then little could be done about the domestic effect on market prices if they sold those assets. But this would not lead to a serious shortage of funds or a collapse of the currency if China’s central bank could sell dollars it already had to counter these flows.

This was an important rationale behind China boosting its official foreign exchange reserves from just $5bn in 1994 to a massive $3.84 trillion by 2014. Some reserves were shifted into state-sponsored purchases of foreign assets (often done using US dollars), some into covering the bad loans of domestic banks, some into offsetting downward pressure on the value of China’s currency in the FX market.

That has still left what may look like an extravagant volume of reserves, totalling $3.1 trillion by end-June 2020. However, such funds have been required on a ‘safety first’ policy.

Consider that China has received a large volume of foreign investment inflow. By the end of 2018, the cumulative amount was $2.8 trillion of direct investment in China, $0.7 trillion in equities and $0.4 trillion in China’s debt securities. Not all of this near-$4 trillion is at risk from capital flight – a chunk of it will also come from Hong Kong – but how much might be vulnerable is unknown. China also has foreign assets of its own that could be sold if necessary: $1.9 trillion in foreign direct investments, and roughly $0.5 trillion in foreign equity and debt securities. This reckoning puts in perspective what otherwise looks like absurdly big foreign exchange reserves.

If anyone thought that a country’s FX reserves had much to do with its international trade in goods and services, the previous figures should put paid to that. Or contrast what happens when you are not as much at the mercy of a potentially destabilising flow of funds. The US has foreign exchange reserves of just $129bn, less than 10% of China’s.

China’s dollar holdings at risk?

Close to half of China’s foreign exchange reserves is held in terms of US dollars,[6] from bank accounts to US Treasury bills and other interest-bearing securities, to gold.[7] The rest is held in other currency denominations, especially the euro. Not just the central bank, but Chinese state agencies, as well as non-state companies and investors, also hold US securities and dollar bank accounts, as well as having dollar liabilities. Could the US government seize China’s dollar assets, or limit China’s access to them?

If seizure of China’s assets looks implausible, consider what has happened to Venezuela’s gold reserves held in the Bank of England’s vaults, or to payments that have long been overdue to Iran! The US could, in principle, also say that the security certificates owned by China – often held in the big US-based custodian banks like Bank of New York Mellon, State Street, JPMorgan Chase, etc – are now invalid pieces of paper, or computer registered items, which belong to an enemy state and now will not be recognised. That would be an extreme measure, also undermining the US ability to attract further funds and investment, so it is unlikely. Such things are usually only done to ‘little’ countries to show them who is boss. But it remains a risk that China’s policy has to manage.

Over recent years, there has been lots of speculation that China could reduce its dollar risk by selling the Treasuries and other US securities that its government and companies own. This would be a foolish thing to do quickly on a large scale, since the prices of the securities could fall in response.[8] Much more importantly, it would also remove the easy access to US dollar funds that China has, and will continue to need, given the dollar-dominated global financial system. What China’s authorities have done instead is to cut back new dollar exposure and quietly offload dollars in the market.

A more comprehensive way of reducing the risk that China faces from US sanctions would be to build another economic, commercial and financial network. Over the past decade, that is exactly what China has been doing.

Your money is no good here

Almost all of the measures used to highlight US economic power depend upon a link to the dollar-based system, for example, the dollar’s domination of the global FX market, the huge capitalisation values of US corporations, and the scale and influence of US financial markets. But what if something shakes the foundations of this power and the global system begins to take on a different form?

Up to now, China’s rise has been evident in production and trade figures. By comparison, its development in the more financial sphere has been limited, but let’s take a look at some of these numbers and what they mean.

The US dollar rules the FX system, with 88% of the $6.6 trillion daily turnover involving the dollar on one side of the transaction. By comparison, even the euro is only at 32%, and China’s currency, the renminbi, is at just 4%.[9] Yet, 38% of the total volume of FX trading is between the dealing banks themselves, and 55% is between banks and other financial institutions, including 9% with hedge funds and other speculators. Only 7% of FX trading is with non-financial firms! What would happen if international financial dealing were less important, especially in US securities? This calls into question the solidity of the dollar’s pre-eminent position in FX markets and in the world at large.

A similar thing applies to the financial power of big US corporations. For example, with a market capitalisation of around $1.6 trillion each in mid-July, it would seem that Amazon, Apple and Microsoft can do pretty much what they like: buy up any budding rival company, run a predatory pricing policy or extend their monopolistic positions further in other ways. But just as a company’s share price can collapse when its prospects no longer look as rosy as before, so can its apparent financial power if it is not able to operate as it wants and finds its markets cut off.

So far these things have not affected the big US corporations very much, although they have faced more constraints than they would like in China’s domestic market. They have not been able to compete well with the domestic champions Alibaba (e-commerce, payments systems, finance), Baidu (a search engine) and Tencent (various operations, from video games to e-commerce, to finance). The boot has instead been on the other foot, as China’s big companies have been edged out of the US and face restrictions in the markets of US allies. Nevertheless, that could change if the US-dominated structure of world markets changes, a development that is well under way.

World in flux

China has prepared itself against US hostility for years. That didn’t take a lot of strategic insight, given the numerous reports to the US Congress complaining about the Chinese ‘threat’ – ie the threat to US hegemony in the world economy, not simply a military calculation. Three international projects have been key: the ‘One Belt One Road’ project launched in 2013, now called the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI); the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), launched by China in 2013-14, and the BRICS Development Bank, now called the New Development Bank (NDB), proposed in 2013-14 and starting up in 2015.

The NDB is headquartered in Shanghai, and initially had enthusiastic support from all its founding members, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (hence BRICS). They account for 20% of world GDP and 40% of the world’s population, and the NDB looked like it was going to become a big player in development finance. But little activity seems to have taken place in the last couple of years, although there have been important, separate bilateral deals between China and Russia and between China and Iran.[10]

At least partly, this has been due to renewed tensions between India and China, the latest being over their shared border in the north-west of India and India’s ban on the use of 59 Chinese phone apps, including TikTok. The election of Bolsonaro in Brazil, who has criticised China’s investments in the country, is another factor. More importantly, in recent years both India and Brazil have come more under the influence of the US and more anti-China in their policy stance. Bolsonaro has even tried to emulate Trump in this regard, as he has done in his disastrous handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) has had a more active time, and it now has more than 100 member countries. Not surprisingly, the US did not join, but several of its close allies did, including the UK and Australia. It is a moot point whether the latter were defying the US, or whether they saw joining as a means of keeping an eye on what China was up to – apart from also not wanting to be on the outside to tender for any new contracts. China accounts for nearly 30% of the AIIB’s capital of $100bn, and for 26% of the voting power. Since 2016, this bank has financed a number of power, energy and road projects in the Philippines, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Egypt, Turkey and elsewhere.

Belt and Road

The Belt and Road Initiative is a much more serious plan from China. It has involved more than 130 countries in its projects, and some 30 international organisations. The basic idea is to develop ports, shipping lanes, roads and other infrastructure, including high voltage electricity grids, in a vast enterprise spanning the next 30 years.

The plan’s scope can be seen in the following image, where its routes run all around Asia and Europe and extend into East Africa. It could be considered the beginning of a single market area, but it is nowhere near that yet. Although trade, investment and transit arrangements have been made with other countries along the routes, those countries may often have a cautious approach to dealing with China.

Where the Belts and Roads go

Source: Ewa Oziewicz and Joanna Bednarz, ‘Challenges and opportunities of the Maritime Silk Road initiative’, October 2019

Europe, in particular, is wary. Not only because the relevant powers are not used to a ‘developing country’ having so much leverage, but also because they have been within the US sphere of influence. Yet they are growing worried about that, given Trump’s unilateralist ‘America First’ approach that has also targeted their industries for extra import tariffs, and their fear of the role of US Big Tech corporations. While they have joined in some moves to curb Chinese companies, this has been only to a limited extent so far.

As the political leaders of the European Union, Germany and France will have to make up their minds which way to jump. Yet that process will take some time to play out. For the time being, they are working on trying to cohere the EU itself as the UK leaves, and they hope that the EU can play the role of being an independent actor in the world economy.

The UK, ex-EU and ex-much else, is far more tied to the US. It has legions of political figures and economic interests integrated with the Anglosphere global set up, from the UN Security Council, to military cooperation, to the ‘Five Eyes’ spy network, to the rules applied to finance and trade at the BIS, IMF and WTO, to deluded hopes for a special Brexity relationship with the US in the future. These things will weigh on British decision-making, and the resulting disarray in and confusion of an arrogant imperial power should be amusing to observe.

The Belt and Road project is very important for China, and opponents can easily cast it as simply a tool with which China secures safe routes for its exports and imports. It has also had negative media coverage because of signs of unequal deals, projects that have led to large indebtedness for the country concerned, or projects in which a commercial port is claimed to be a cover for a potential Chinese naval base (as in Sri Lanka), or potential Chinese takeover and ownership when the debt cannot be repaid or serviced.

Evidence I have seen points to a more positive assessment. At least some of the problems with projects have been due to local corruption as much as to any Chinese misdemeanour. It is also worth noting that China’s infrastructure development plans often include building schools and hospitals as well as improving energy supply. The BRI should act to integrate more isolated areas into the world economy, greatly speed up logistics, travel and transport, and help these regions grow. It is not in China’s long-term interests that cooperating regions and countries become mere servicing wastelands.

The Xinjian crossing

The BRI’s routes traverse areas in which US imperialism has long sought to gain influence, many of which were formerly inside the USSR – including Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Georgia – and also Iran and Russia itself. One area along the route that has been prominent in the news media recently is Xinjiang in north western China.

Xinjiang, or to give it the official title, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, is home to around 25 million people, of which 45% are of the Uyghur ethnic group, and many of these are Muslim. It is China’s largest natural gas producing region, and has been the locus for many attacks by Islamic separatists, especially since the 1990s. Plausible reports claim that this was a ‘blowback’ from previous Chinese arming and training of Islamic guerrillas to fight Russia in Afghanistan in the 1980s. China, along with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and others, cooperated with the US CIA in this period, and trouble brewed for China in this region when the guerrillas came home.

The US, UK and other western powers have a long history of using Islamic militants to do their dirty work of political disruption and destabilisation, even though it often comes back to bite them. Just think of Osama Bin Laden and the support the US also gave his organisation to attack the Russians in Afghanistan. Or the British support for Islamic militants in Egypt against Nasser and in Libya against Gaddafi.[11] It is therefore no surprise that the US has been heavily involved in promoting Uyghur separatists, and that western news media have been full of stories about Chinese ‘concentration camps’ and brainwashing centres for Uyghurs.

BRI & the Xinjiang Region

Source: World Affairs blog, see footnote 12.

It would take too long and be too off topic to cover this in more detail, but my basic view is this. China has not been kind to separatist forces in Xinjiang and may well have clamped down on them harshly. It has also encouraged Han Chinese to move into Xinjiang. But there is no evidence of actual or cultural ‘genocide’ of Uyghurs and the region has even had some autonomy from strict regulations imposed elsewhere in the country, for example, on population and family policy. The western media view of all this is readily available; for an informed alternative view, I give some sources in a footnote.[12] Surely, anyone with any sense would see that there could not possibly be a ‘Save the Muslims’ motive behind the western propaganda about Xinjiang.

Hong Kong less important for China now

As the US anxiety and near-hysteria about China has grown, another opportunity has arisen for mischief – in Hong Kong, especially since early 2019. There have been widespread protests in this ‘special administrative region’ of China against the introduction of laws that would increase mainland China’s authority and potentially suppress dissent and opposition to government policy. Although led principally by students, the protests clearly had support from a large section of the population of Hong Kong.

Beijing was obviously none too pleased with this, and its paranoia alarm bells rang loudly when some demonstrators carried US flags and called for the US to impose sanctions on Hong Kong to force China to drop its proposals. (The US has now done it.) With the CIA-backed National Endowment for Democracy supporting the protests and with Joshua Wong, one of the leading students, cosying up to arch reactionary and regime-change interventionist, US Senator Marco Rubio, the stage was set for a Chinese clampdown.

China’s political system is authoritarian, but one should not fall for the hypocrisy of western powers lamenting the threat to a tradition of democracy in Hong Kong. Prior to UK talks with China in 1984 about the handover of Hong Kong in 1997, there was no sign of democracy, but instead an oligarchic Legislative Council, an advisory body to the British Governor. Full elections to this Council only began in 1995. So ‘democracy’ began to be introduced only just before Britain was going to lose its colony after 99 years.

What will be China’s policy towards Hong Kong now? To answer this question, it is worth noting the role it has played in relation to China.

When it was a British colony, Hong Kong specialised as an entrepot centre in Asia, with a large port operation and a big financial sector. As China grew as a global production base, particularly from the 1980s, Hong Kong also thrived as the ‘western’ gateway into China, with booming cross-border deals. In turn, China used Hong Kong to gain experience of international markets, from how best to run a port to how to manage banking and finance.

Hong Kong is now less important for China than it might seem. Its GDP is less than 3% of mainland China’s, and its 7.5 million people could be seen as barely a rounding error compared to China’s total. It is nevertheless politically inconceivable that China would allow Hong Kong to become fully ‘independent’ or to secede. In the event of continued protests about rule by mainland China, a much more likely policy would be to slowly run down the remaining economic reliance China has on Hong Kong. This is no doubt on the minds of some Hong Kong residents, not all of whom are anti-Beijing.

Hong Kong’s population has significantly higher living standards than the average in mainland China, and US dollar millionaires make up a surprising 7% of the population. Such factors will have influenced the protest movement in Hong Kong, and there have also been many signs of locals resenting mainlanders. Some of the latter have been attacked for supposedly being Beijing loyalists; others have faced opposition from locals who felt their presence was driving up prices and rents. I think that fear of an economic ‘levelling down’ is at least as significant a factor in the protests as any call for democratic rights.

Top 10 World Container Ports, Volume in millions of TEU *

Source: Worldshipping.org. Note *: The data represent total port throughput, including empty containers. A TEU is a ‘Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit’. The dimensions of one TEU are equal to a standard 20-foot shipping container.

One way of judging the ability of China to sideline Hong Kong, if it wants to, is by looking at its importance as a port. A list of the top world container ports – containers are critical in the trade of goods – has mainland China with six in the top 10. Hong Kong’s port is large, but is ranked number seven and is only roughly half the size of Shanghai’s at number one. Shenzhen, at number three and also bigger than Hong Kong, is only around 15 kilometres from Hong Kong (although a bit further to travel by sea!).

Out of control

Rivalries in the world economy can bring unexpected results, especially when a former underdog can now pro-actively resist. The world order is no longer entirely one where, as Bob Dylan put it, ‘You’re dancing with whom they tell you to, or you don’t dance at all’. How far China is able to build stable alliances for an economic area that limits US interference, and whether it too becomes oppressive, remain to be seen. But in the meantime it has offered many countries an alternative to the rich country model of development, one that has left poor countries poor.

Prospects for the Anglosphere powers are not good. Political idiocy born of generations of arrogance now adds to their difficulties in navigating a world that is changing increasingly outside their control. Examples of their recent responses to Chinese technology sum up their problem. China’s Huawei produces very good, and cheaper, 4G and 5G products, including infrastructure and smartphones, and ByteDance also has a popular media app, TikTok. Instead of saying, ‘we have something even better’, the US and others respond by claiming, with no evidence, that they pose a security risk and that Chinese products should be rejected.

By contrast, Germany, the most productivist of the European powers, has shown more enthusiasm for China-led developments than others. The Belt and Road Initiative already has an important outlet in Duisburg, the world’s largest inland port, where it is the first European stop for 80% of Chinese trains:

“Every week, around 30 Chinese trains arrive at a vast terminal in Duisburg’s inland port, their containers either stuffed with clothes, toys and hi-tech electronics from Chongqing, Wuhan or Yiwu, or carrying German cars, Scottish whisky, French wine and textiles from Milan heading the other way.”[13]

Duisberg’s main problem seems to be that ‘for every two full containers arriving in Europe from China, only one heads back the other way, and the port only earns a fifth of the fee from empty containers that have to be sent back to China’.

At the other end of the line, another German company, BMW, has praised China’s technical know how:

“The auto industry is undergoing a major transformation driven by technological development. In the midst of industrial upgrading and transformation, we need to keep an open mind and to collaborate with outstanding Chinese innovation powerhouses.”[14]

To say the least, these things suggest that China’s growing importance in the world economy will be difficult for the US to curb.

Tony Norfield, 14 July 2020

[1] Other articles on this blog have also analysed US-China relationships, including one from May 2011, looking at the growing strategic tensions, one in April 2019 on the economic and technology competition and another in September 2019 on the relative positions of the major powers. I cover the coronavirus pandemic here.

[2] The US makes much of the links, actual or alleged, between top Chinese companies and the Chinese Communist Party, the military, etc. For reasons that only an evil commie would speculate upon, it seems to forget that Amazon, Google and myriads of other US corporations, not just the arms producers, derive a lot of funding and regular contracts from the US government, the CIA and the Pentagon.

[3] See the article FX & Imperialism on this blog, 7 October 2019, for further details of the role of the US dollar compared to other currencies.

[4] Although London is the biggest market for dealing in foreign currency and for interest rate swaps.

[5] Both totals will include some companies listed on more than one exchange. Nearly 20% of companies on the two US exchanges are foreign companies; there is no comparable figure available for China, but it is likely very much lower.

[6] China does not usually disclose the currency composition of its FX reserves, but China’s SAFE has reported that the dollar component of reserves fell from 79% in 1995 to 58% in 2014. It will have fallen further since 2014, and is likely now a little under 50%. The absolute volume of dollars held will have risen up to 2014, given the big rise in total reserves, but will have likely fallen since.

[7] Over the past 10-15 years, China’s central bank has boosted its gold reserves from 600 tonnes to 1,917 tonnes. At $1,700 per troy ounce, this amounts to ‘only’ $106.5bn and a little over 3% of the reserves total at present.

[8] I say prices ‘could’ rather than ‘would’ fall because of the huge size of the US interest-bearing securities market, especially for shorter-term US Treasuries and agencies, which would limit the response to any selling by China.

[9] FX deals involve two currencies, so adding the shares of all currencies traded would give 200%, not 100%.

[10] Going against US sanctions, in July 2020, China and Iran have drafted a deal covering trade, investment and military cooperation. See New York Times, ‘Defying U.S., China and Iran Near Trade and Military Partnership’, 11 July 2020. This Iran-China cooperation has been going on for several years. Notably, most of the payments between China and Iran, if not all, exclude the US dollar.

[11] For the less well known British escapades in this respect, see the book by Mark Curtis, Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam, 2010.

[12] See here, and for the more official Chinese responses, see here and here.

[13] The Guardian, Germany’s ‘China City’, 1 August 2018.

[14] Comment from Jochen Goller, president and CEO of BMW Group Region China, Asia Times, 6 July 2020.

As a candidate in 2017 AMLO had called Trump a “neofascist” and roundly condemned his anti-Mexican prejudices. Trump threatened to tear up NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994, and while AMLO like much of the Mexican Left had condemned this neoliberal treaty, it seemed likely to be replaced with something even worse if Trump got his way.

But AMLO surprised most observers, and probably the US administration, by seeking good relations from the word go. Despite the imbalance of forces, the Mexican leader and his team correctly calculated that Washington would not really want to exclude migrant workers completely or to disrupt the closely integrated economy of the border regions and of major industrial production chains like the automobile industry.

While totally opposed to neoliberalism, AMLO realised that with 80% of Mexico’s foreign trade being with its northern neighbour the idea of simply tearing up NAFTA was a non-starter. The only viable solution (although far from easy) was to seek revision of the treaty in ways beneficial to Mexico.

Rather than indulge in futile, indeed suicidal, anti-imperialist gestures, AMLO sought to engage with the vain and irascible occupant of the White House by a combination of flattery and hard bargaining. Trump’s preference for personal dialogue and deal-making could be used to Mexico’s advantage.

On his election in 2018 AMLO contacted the US President proposing a new stage in bilateral relations “based on mutual respect”, and Trump responded in kind, with warm congratulations on AMLO’s victory. Shortly afterwards a high-level US delegation arrived to push trade negotiations forward.¹ While domestically AMLO advanced with his “Fourth Transformation” (4T) agenda, he also sought rapprochement with Mexico’s hegemonic neighbour.

Two years later, in July 2020, the inconceivable has happened: a new trade treaty (USMCA, the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement) has come into force, with significant benefits for Mexico; and AMLO has just visited Washington as a favoured guest of President Trump. Moreover, despite scepticism from many on both sides of the political spectrum, this gesture may well go down in history as a triumph of Mexican diplomacy.

The Transformation of Mexican Foreign Policy

In the year and a half since his inauguration, AMLO and his remarkably capable Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard have discreetly but firmly undertaken a radical reorientation of Mexican foreign policy. Rather than a supine submission to Washington and a steady rightward drift, as had been the case with the neoliberal presidents of the previous 30 years, they have reasserted Mexico’s historic tradition of non-intervention and respect for sovereignty, and combined it with an active and protagonistic role promoting peace and multilateral cooperation on the international stage.

While quietly negotiating with Washington, Mexico showed an apparently contradictory desire for closer relations with progressive governments in Latin America. Formerly a leading member of the conservative “Lima Group” of Western Hemisphere governments (formed in August 2017 to increase hostile pressure on Venezuela in line with US policy), Mexico now withdrew from the group. This new trend in Mexican policy faced a potential crisis in late May 2019, when after months of growing Central American migration through Mexico towards the US, Trump suddenly threatened to slap 25% tariffs on all Mexican products if the flow of migrants were not halted.²

Rather than respond with hostile rhetoric, AMLO called for dialogue and sent Marcelo Ebrard to Washington for talks. A week later Ebrard emerged triumphant, with a bilateral agreement to work together to manage migration from Central America (and elsewhere), and an understanding that tariffs and trade were a separate issue.³ Trump abandoned the tariff threats and trade negotiations resumed.

Another dramatic incident which demonstrated the new direction of Mexican diplomacy was the coup in Bolivia in October 2019 and Mexico’s decisive action to grant asylum to President Evo Morales, sending an air force plane to rescue him and almost certainly saving his life.⁴ Despite evidence pointing to US involvement in the coup, open friction with Washington was avoided and Mexico insisted that this was a humanitarian gesture based on its long tradition of granting asylum regardless of political orientation.

This positive engagement with Latin American neighbours is now reflected with Mexico holding the presidency of CELAC, the Community of Latin American & Caribbean States (which includes all Western Hemisphere countries except the US & Canada) for the year 2020; Mexico is clearly proud to lead this independent regional organisation. AMLO has carefully avoided any entanglement in the bitter confrontation between the US and Venezuela, but when questioned on the subject he reasserted Mexico’s opposition to any kind of intervention and its defence of national sovereignty. In response to a specific question as to whether Mexico would sell Venezuela petrol, he declared that they would (although no request had been received): “We are free, and we defend self-determination”.⁵

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Mexico not only took the necessary domestic measures but reached out for help internationally: Marcelo Ebrard and his team quickly arranged to get ventilators and PPE from China, and AMLO personally called both Trump and president Xi Jin-ping of China to request assistance. Beyond this, Mexico also took the lead on Covid-19 internationally, with AMLO intervening in a virtual meeting of the G20 to warn that the response to the pandemic must address the problem of global inequality.⁶

In the last three months the scope and ambition of Mexico’s diplomacy has really come into its own. At the UN the Mexican delegation proposed a resolution calling for equal access to any Covid-19 vaccine or treatment and an end to speculation in medicines and equipment; it was backed by 187 of 193 member countries. This and other activities favouring international cooperation were reflected in Mexico’s election to the Security Council with a near-unanimous vote, and its appointment also to ECOSOC, the UN Economic & Social Council.

This success on the global stage was accompanied by important steps in bilateral relations, making it clear that while Mexico wants close economic collaboration, military involvement of any kind is not acceptable. Current legal action against corruption under former president Felipe Calderón has raised the issue of the “Fast and Furious” intervention in 2009, a covert raid by armed US agents which violated Mexican sovereignty and which appears to have been authorised by Calderón’s government. Marcelo Ebrard sent a diplomatic note on May 8th requesting clarification of recent revelations on the subject.⁷

Also on June 18th AMLO reminded his audience that under former president Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-18) the US had provided helicopter gunships to help Mexico in the fight against crime, but “with all due respect, we do not want this”.⁸

To Washington with Prestige and Dignity

Global diplomatic success combined with assertion of legal and military sovereignty meant that the Mexican President could arrive at the White House with his head held high, not as a supplicant but as leader of an independent country with growing prestige. His confidence was also aided by domestic success, with progressive implementation of social programmes and systematic efforts to eradicate corruption and impunity.

The visit was not generally expected until almost the last moment: for over a year into his presidency AMLO maintained that he would not engage in international travel, relating with other heads of state by phone, virtual communication or through his diplomatic service. Even when in late March 2020 both Trump and Xi Jin-ping issued invitations, he showed reluctance to travel, citing health concerns. Still as late as June 10th, in answer to a question at his daily press conference, AMLO pointed out that the UN was advising against meetings of heads of state at the General Assembly in September, and “I still think the best foreign policy is made at home”.⁹

Anyone who has observed the Mexican President carefully will realise that he keeps his cards close to his chest, and it should not have come as a surprise that only some ten days later he was talking of the visit to Washington as a strong possibility. The formal entry into force of the new USMCA Treaty on July 1st meant that early July would be an appropriate time to visit, indeed the only realistic time given the electoral calendar in the US. Critics would in any case argue that the visit would give unnecessary backing to Trump’s campaign, but AMLO could reasonably respond – as he did – that it was a state visit celebrating a major new bilateral agreement (indeed, trilateral, with Canada) regardless of party politics.

When the visit finally materialised, AMLO’s remarkable capacity for surprise and audacity was revealed yet again in the unprecedented decision to take an ordinary commercial flight. While it was well known that he was selling the presidential plane as part of his drive against official extravagance, it had widely been assumed that he would travel in a Mexican Air Force plane for security reasons.

The event itself, from the evening of July 7th to the afternoon of July 9th, followed the choreographed ritual of most such events. AMLO made formal tributes at the monuments to Abraham Lincoln and Benito Juárez, emphasising good relations at a crucial moment in the history of both countries (the US Civil War and abolition of slavery, and the French invasion of Mexico). This in itself could be seen as a subtle but significant gesture given Trump’s association with white supremacists, made more palatable by the fact that Lincoln belonged to the Republican Party. It also marked a very rare instance in which the US actually defended Mexican sovereignty.

Following the official meeting of the two presidents on July 8th, both alone and then with their respective teams, the formal speeches in the White House Rose Garden were remarkably warm and cordial. Trump spoke of “my good friend” and said the two countries now enjoyed “an outstanding relationship…which had never been so close”, praising the contribution of Mexican-Americans in many fields of US life.

AMLO’s speech also focused on the positive, but it was longer and more substantial, with emphasis on several points which are crucial to his agenda. “We want to privilege understanding…setting aside differences, or solving those differences through dialogue and mutual respect” – “Some thought that our ideological differences would inevitably lead to confrontation. Fortunately, that bad omen was not fulfilled.” He outlined the benefits of the new USMCA trade treaty, as Trump had also done, but stressed the benefits for workers and for small and medium enterprises. He also thanked the US President for assistance in obtaining ventilators for dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic.

But AMLO also politely but pointedly stressed several historical episodes: a remark by George Washington to the effect that no nation should take advantage of another’s weakness; the close relationship between Juárez and Lincoln and the rejection of the French invasion; and the good relations also between Lázaro Cárdenas and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in avoiding conflict over the 1938 oil expropriation.

AMLO repeatedly referred to friendship and good relations between the two countries “despite some grievances which cannot be forgotten”; and “what I appreciate the most is that you have never sought to impose on us anything that violates our sovereignty…You have not tried to treat us as a colony; rather, you have honoured our status as an independent nation.”¹⁰ Not surprisingly, Trump described his visitor as “tough but fair”.

The visit concluded with a gala dinner and further brief speeches; among those attending were leading business representatives, a sign of the new treaty’s real commercial and economic significance.

Critics, allies & saboteurs: what’s really at stake

As was to be expected, the Washington visit was subject to intense criticism from all sides, but particularly from the left. Those who had denounced NAFTA as a neoliberal agreement destroying workers’ rights, depressing wages, turning Mexico into a branch-plant economy and harming the environment, saw no benefit in the new treaty. They condemned AMLO for not meeting Mexican migrants and for being a pal of Trump when the US President is struggling in the polls. A typical Mexican leftist journal, La Izquierda Diario, accused AMLO of “grovelling” with a “display of flattery” in the face of Trump’s “unlimited cynicism”.¹¹ In the US the Democrats inevitably accused the Mexican President of unwarranted interference in the election campaign, and the liberal media in both the US and Mexico rehashed all of Trump’s unsavoury qualities and the alleged benefits for Mexico of a Democratic victory in the elections.

What the critics fail to consider is that a failure to engage with the US on trade when Trump was denouncing NAFTA for his own nationalist reasons, and even more when global economic crisis threatened to see Mexico crushed by US protectionism, would have been disastrous. As for migration, open confrontation with Trump could only lead to brutal retaliation which would leave the migrant community in a much worse situation.

The new USMCA Treaty also has real benefits which the critics fail to consider. Unlike NAFTA, it includes a chapter on labour which explicitly recognises union rights, calls for internal union democracy and for higher wages in Mexico. It also includes small and medium enterprises, providing for their participation in exchanges between the three countries; and it respects Mexico’s petroleum sovereignty, previously threatened by US proposals for a free energy market. To have won these concessions from Washington is no small achievement.

But where the critics are most wide of the mark is in terms of the political context, both domestic and international. Anyone familiar with US Latin American policy in recent decades will realise that the Democrats, despite their liberal rhetoric and their much more presentable manners, are in practice no less interventionist and bellicose than the Republicans. As for migration, under Obama a record number of Mexicans – nearly two million – were deported.

In Mexican domestic politics the right-wing and old-guard opposition to AMLO has been completely outmanoeuvred by the Washington visit. They have been trying desperately to tar him with the leftist brush as an irresponsible populist, an enemy of business, a castro-chavista bent on turning Mexico into another Venezuela. Now he has most of the country’s leading entrepreneurs on side, transnational companies like Walmart agreeing to pay overdue taxes to finance the 4T Transformation, a new trade treaty and a good relationship with the most notoriously unpredictable US president in living memory.

What the Mexican right wing (and much of the US establishment) wanted was to provoke AMLO into a confrontation which would enable them to generate a middle- and upper-class revolt with significant support, leading to regime change as in Brazil or Bolivia or at least serious unrest as in Venezuela or Nicaragua. Instead they are faced with a moderate consensus for real progressive change in a democratic and peaceful manner, a positive example which can only be beneficial for the entire Latin American and Caribbean region (and even – dare one hope – for the US itself).

Viewed in this context, AMLO’s Washington visit can be seen, in the words of John Ackerman, as “a strategic triumph of reason over politics” and “a diplomatic master-stroke” comparable in US politics to Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972.¹² The more thoughtful and analytical intellectuals in Mexico realise this: Victor Flores Olea writes of “AMLO’s tour-de-force in dangerous territory” and quotes veteran Senator Porfirio Muñoz Ledo: “this is the most complete and illuminating speech I have ever heard from a Mexican president in the United States…” Muñoz Ledo also points out that “Trump didn’t say what he thinks, but what he had to say, while López Obrador said exactly what he thinks and what I believe all Mexicans think”.¹³

David L Raby is a writer, political activist and retired academic living in Norwich (UK). Professor Emeritus in Latin American History, University of Toronto, and former Senior Fellow in Latin American Studies, University of Liverpool. Former City Councillor in Norwich. Executive member, Venezuela Solidarity Campaign; Chair, Norfolk & Norwich El Viejo (Nicaragua) Twinning Link. He can be contacted at [email protected] and on Twitter @DLRaby.

Rampant editorial collective statement

PostedJune 1, 2020

The UN estimates that the world now contains 71 million displaced people, 29 million of whom are refugees displaced from their home country, including 3.5 million registered asylum seekers.[1]

These are the most high-profile – and also the most vilified – of the victims of the global crisis. Their displacement is the result of some combination of four factors: war, genocide, poverty, and climate change. People leave their homes either because they are in fear of their lives or because they face destitution if they stay put. They leave their homes because they have no hope if they do not.

The world is like this because capitalism is geared to private profit, not human need or ecological balance; because it is a system of competing corporations and rival states whose purpose is to enrich the 1%. Greed and power are all that matter.

The ‘inadmissables’ are the system’s collateral damage. Not only that: they are also its ideological shock-absorbers.

As the system wrecks people’s lives, it leaves behind great pools of social despair. This might crystallise into anger against the system – against the asset-strippers, the privatisers, the landlords, and the corporate debt-collectors. So the system allocates a special role to its ‘inadmissables’. Let them, the poorest of the poor, the most powerless of the powerless, take the blame.

So important is this role that demand quickly outruns supply. So valuable are ‘inadmissables’ that more are created. Take the case of the Indian province of Assam.

Indian state fascism

The Hindu chauvinist regime of Narendra Modi has just deemed 1.9 million residents of the north-eastern province of Assam to be ‘illegal’. Hindu chauvinism – as my colleague Seema Syeda has explained in the second edition of our book Creeping Fascism – is the Indian form of fascism. ‘A new revolution, to defeat the alien enemy, is beckoning,’ proclaims a promotional song of India’s National Register of Citizens (NRC). ‘Bravely let us shield our motherland.’

The NRC leaves no-one in doubt as to the identity of the ‘alien enemy’. The official NRC Facebook page displays a message from an Israeli woman that reads: ‘This Israeli sends her love to India: I stand with India in their fight against Pakistani terror.’

Modi has just put mainly-Muslim Kashmir – a territory in dispute between India and Pakistan since Partition, and contested in three subsequent wars between the two countries – under martial law.

The NRC is turning Assam Muslims who fled Bangladesh in 1971 into ‘illegals’. At the same time, Modi’s BJP party is considering a bill to enshrine the rights of Hindu migrants in law. Pakistan is the external enemy. Muslims are the internal enemy. The long-term aim is an exclusive Hindu state.

What will happen to the newly created Assam ‘illegals’? They have been given a right of appeal – a grotesque travesty given India’s expensive, clogged-up, and increasingly chauvinist courts. ‘Everyone will be given a right to prove their citizenship,’ Assam’s BJP law minister told the BBC. ‘But if they fail to do so, well, the legal system will take its own course.’ Pressed further, he explained this meant deportation.

To where? Bangladesh has said it will not take them. So they will be locked up. The BJP regime is building new camps for the mass incarceration of Muslims deemed ‘illegal’.[2]

The regime is also giving the green light to Hindu-fascist pogroms.

An estimated 24,000 Rohingya Muslims were murdered, 18,000 raped, and 116,000 beaten in state-backed pogroms in Myanmar in 2017. Around 700,000 Rohingya fled to neighbouring Bangladesh.

A wave of Islamophobic violence by state police and communal mobs in Hindu-chauvinist India, a country of 1.4 billion people, where Muslims account for 14% of the population, could turn the Rohingya Genocide into a historical footnote.[3]

American state fascism

Take another example: Trump’s America.    The US operates the world’s largest migrant detention system. Around 20,000 people are held on the US-Mexican border by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), more than 50,000 elsewhere in the country by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and more than 11,000 children by the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).

As well as deporting around a third of a million people at the south-western border each year, the US state is currently targeting around one million ‘illegals’ inside the country in paramilitary-style raids, arresting and incarcerating hundreds of workers at a time, many of them with children at home, who are then left abandoned.   Conditions inside US concentration camps can include: families separated and children either incarcerated apart from their parents or left to fend for themselves; hundreds of sweating men held in wire pens in the heat; lack of access to showers, washing facilities, and toothbrushes; lack of access to private toilets; lack of access to clean clothes; lack of hot meals or even enough food.

At a camp in El Paso, Texas, 900 migrants were ‘being held at a facility designed for 125. In some cases, cells designed for 35 people were holding 155 people.’ One observer described the facility as a ‘human dog pound’.

Children at a facility in Clint, Texas, were reported sleeping on concrete floors. Observers described ‘children as young as 7 and 8 … wearing clothes caked with snot and tears’. A doctor described camps he had visited as ‘torture facilities’.[4]

European state fascism

Now let’s take a look closer to home.

The EU currently has around 900,000 asylum seekers in limbo, their applications for entry pending, most of them incarcerated in detention centres. The rejection rate has risen from 37% in 2016 to 64% in 2019. So a majority of the people held will, in due course, be deemed ‘illegal’ and deported back to the violence and poverty from which they have fled.

Around 9,000 of these people are living in a concentration camp at Moria on the Greek island of Lesbos. Here, people live in metal containers or tents surrounded by rubbish. More than 70 people share a toilet. Raw sewage seeps into children’s mattresses. Suicide attempts are at epidemic level. Traumatised children held in the camp draw pictures that show stormy seas dotted with terrified faces, lifeless bodies floating in the waves, planes dropping bombs, and eyes that weep blood.

Around 140,000 people reached Europe across the Mediterranean last year. But many who tried failed to make it. Some were drowned: an average of six a day. But many were herded back by EU-funded Libyan coastguards, many recruited from warlord militias, and many of these ended up among the estimated 5,400 held in Libyan concentration camps. Crowded into huge breezeblock and corrugated iron warehouses, hundreds together, they sleep on bits cardboard. Most are considered by refugee agencies to be ‘at risk’, and there are reports of murders, rapes, suicides, and deaths from disease and starvation.[5]

In another part of the Med, the EU has paid the authoritarian regime of President Erdogan £4.6 billion in aid to prevent Syrian refugees reaching Europe. Around 3.5 million are living in the country. Some have been shot dead by Turkish police and army. Thousands have been driven back across the border into the war zone. Only 200,000 are accommodated in camps, though some of these are little more than giant warehouses for surplus people. The rest are rooting for themselves on the margins of society and dodging police raids against the ‘unregistered’ (another of the terms favoured by state racism). A measure of the extreme marginalisation of the refugees is that an estimated 80% of Syrian children in Turkey do not attend school.[6]

Britain holds about 25,000 people in detention centres. The Guardian described conditions thus: ‘In some senses, they look, sound, smell, and taste just like prisons: bland food, bleak corridors, standard-issue tracksuits and blue flip-flops, and the mechanical clunk at 9pm when everyone is locked in for the night. But Britain’s network of immigration removal centres are a case apart for the 25,000-plus people who pass through one each year: there is no rehabilitation, no criminal sentence, very often no time limit on the loss of liberty. Many of those incarcerated say the conditions are far worse than actual prison.’[7]

The British state – under the Brexit regime of Boris Johnson – is promising further repression. The Tories are talking about raising the income threshold for immigrants from £30,000 to £36,700 per year – this being the amount they must earn to secure residence rights. This, one assumes, will now be applied to a new category of ‘illegals’. Around 40% of the 3.6 million EU citizens resident in Britain are being denied permanent residency in the run-up to Brexit on 31 October. Their plight was encapsulated by the televised plea on 29 August of a Portuguese woman who has lived and worked in Britain for 20 years. ‘I have no voice… The resettlement scheme is not working… I can’t just be kicked out… I am very angry,’ she told a Sky News reporter.[8]

This is the true meaning of Brexit for the working class: the division of the population into ‘nationals’ and ‘illegals’. This is the face of state fascism.

This is what fascism looks like

The ‘illegal’ Muslims of Assam and the ‘illegal’ Europeans in Britain have not actually done anything to earn their new status: it has been imposed upon them by the state. They have not murdered a black man in a cell like some police do. They have not stolen public money by fiddling their expenses like some MPs do. They have not sexually abused children like some celebrities do. They have not dodged their taxes like some corporations do. The Muslims of Assam and the Europeans in Britain have not done any of these things. Instead, simply by virtue of who they happen to be, they have been designated ‘illegal’, reclassified as ‘unregistered’, turned into ‘inadmissables’, by a nationalist-racist state.

How many people were held in Nazi concentration camps in 1939, at the beginning of the Second World War, more than six years after Hitler first came to power? Compared with what was to come, not many. One estimate puts the number at 21,000.

When the war ended, of course, there were three-quarters of a million in the camps, and some 12 million had been murdered. It was the war, and in particular the Nazi conquest of Poland and western Russia, that created the context for interwar fascism’s hideous culmination in the Holocaust.

Fascism is a process. It has begun again.

The people of the world must organise, mobilise, and fight – by any means necessary – to stop the wave of nationalism, racism, ande fascism that is now threatening to engulf us. And we must face the hard and simple fact that the main enemy is the state itself.

The upsurge of mass resistance to the Brexit Coup has to be seen as part of a global struggle to smash second-wave fascism.

Never again! Onto the streets!

Stop the Coup! Stop Brexit!

All Migrants are Welcome Here! No-one is Illegal!

Neil Faulkner is the author, with Samir Dathi, Phil Hearse, and Seema Syeda, of Creeping Fascism: what it is and how to fight it.

[1] https://www.unhcr.org/uk/figures-at-a-glance.html

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-45002549

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-49520593

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/17/world/asia/india-muslims-narendra-modi.html

3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-49460386

[4] https://www.globaldetentionproject.org/countries/americas/united-states

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/14/politics/ice-raids-undocumented-immigrants/index.html

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/12/politics/mike-pence-border-immigration/index.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/border-facilities/593239/

[5] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/25/asylum-seekers-limbo-eu-countries

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/oct/03/trauma-runs-deep-for-children-at-dire-lesbos-camp-moria

https://www.unhcr.org/uk/news/press/2019/1/5c500c504/six-people-died-day-attempting-cross-mediterranean-2018-unhcr-report.html

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/31/un-calls-for-evacuation-of-libyan-refugees-amid-dire-conditions

[6] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/pictures-of-life-for-turkeys-25-million-syrian-refugees-crisis-migrant-a6969551.html

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/07/turkey-6000-refugees-arrested-istanbul-crackdown-190724113011835.html

[7] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/oct/11/life-in-a-uk-immigration-removal-centre-worse-than-prison-as-criminal-sentence

[8] https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/priti-patel-migrant-minimum-salary-threshold-home-office-a9056846.html

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/aug/30/eu-citizens-uk-settled-status-alarm

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2019/aug/29/i-need-a-voice-portuguese-womans-brexit-plea-video

Source: RT

Trump has embarked on a trajectory which unless averted, and soon, will propel him and the United States over a cliff into a hell of his own creation.

“You are welcome, Mr President,” says the Guardian‘s Simon Jenkins: “No conceivable purpose is served by 200,000 people coming to London.” 

‘No conceivable purpose is served by 200,000 people coming to London to shout insults at him,’ he loftily intones. But the logic immediately begins to break down. ‘I cannot think what possessed Theresa May to invite Donald Trump in the first place,’ he continues. On the other hand, this, it seems, is just what Britain’s rulers do. After all, explains Jenkins, they invited Romania’s Ceausescu, Zimbabwe’s Mugabe, and Zaire’s Mobutu.

The implication is clear: entertaining dictators, bigots, and thugs is normal. A mind-spinning non-sequitur follows: ‘That is no reason for childish protests against a guest invited in Britain’s name.’

The choice of adjective is interesting. We, the anti-Trump protestors, are ‘childish’. The implication is that we are somehow infantile, in need of guidance and correction. Fortunately, we have grown-up Guardian commentators like Simon Jenkins to assist, people with the education and intellect to know better.

The quality of argument does not improve as the article proceeds. Anti-Trump demonstrations, Jenkins avers, will create a bad impression in America. ‘In my experience, Americans do not understand boorishness in foreigners. They are by nature a courteous people.’

There is so much to unpack here. Where to start? Note another term of abuse: ‘boorishness’. As in: ‘I am critical, you are intemperate, and he/she is boorish.’ When we protest against the nationalism, racism, misogyny, and creeping fascism represented by Trump, that is ‘boorish’. Unlike Jenkins’ rant against us, which, presumably, is not ‘boorish’ – just measured critique.

And I love that sweeping generalisation about ‘Americans’ – all 330 million of them. Jenkins knows them. He knows them ‘by nature’. He must have got around a lot. Because the modern United States is a complex class society criss-crossed with division and conflict, and for every Trump supporter who will be outraged by anti-Trump protests in London there will an African-American, a Hispanic migrant, a trade unionist, a feminist, or an LGBT activist who will want to punch the air if the TV shows mayhem on the streets of London in early June.

For this is a global struggle. Unlike Jenkins, we do not operate in a series of nationalist silos, making ignorant, sweeping generalisations about Americans (or Germans, or Muslims, or any other ‘imagined community’; we see ourselves as internationalists engaged in a global struggle against a rising tide of nationalism, racism, and fascism – of which Trump is the global brand leader.

The argument doesn’t improve. Next twist, we learn that demonstrations are an attack on democracy. I cannot divine any other meaning to this passage:

‘People yearn to express themselves when they feel the conduits of democracy blocked. From Sudan to Paris to Oxford Circus, the street has lost none of its potency. It appeals to the most basic social instinct, that of like minds congregating. But unless there are consequential gains to such action, it is mere self-indulgence. Those fortunate enough to live in a democracy should not lightly short-circuit its institutions.’

I will pass over the deliberate choice of language designed to imply that we, the protestors, are primitives, exercising some primeval need to ‘congregate’. What really threw me was another breathtaking non-sequitur.

I thought the threat to democracy came from the fascists. I thought that’s why we were planning to go onto the streets to contest the state visit. But no: it turns out that we are the threat. For Jenkins, those who exercise their democrat right to protest a decision imposed upon them by the political elite – for the planned state visit is a decision of the Tory regime and no-one else – apparently they are ‘short-circuiting’ democracy. Really? How does that work exactly? I thought even liberals believed that public protest is part of democracy, not its negation.

But no, I’ve obviously got that wrong: demonstrations are bad, ‘debates’ are good. ‘The operative word is debate,’ Jenkins informs us, as if these were pearls of philosophical wisdom handed down from Hegel’s Heidelberg.

‘No-platforming never wins debates. Abandoning the debating chamber is always dangerous. It invites reaction.’

Wrong, both historically and theoretically. This is the stupidity of liberalism. Unlike Jenkins, I choose my words carefully. I do not accuse him of ‘childishness’. But I do accuse him of stupidity – stupidity founded on ignorance of political history and social theory. Let me explain.

Nationalism, racism, and fascism are not rational. Nations are imagined communities founded on invented traditions. Racism is a corollary, inextricably linked to the division of the world into artificially constructed ‘nations’. Fascism is an extreme, a more proactive and threatening form of nationalism and racism. That is why you don’t ‘debate’ with the Far Right. Mussolini and Hitler, Trump and Bolsonaro, Salvini and Farage are not open to ‘debate’. They are building movements based on ignorance, bigotry, and hate.

And no-platforming is the very essence of anti-fascism. The Vienna workers’ uprising of 1934 was an entire city no-platforming the proto-fascist Dollfuss regime. The Spanish Revolution of 1936 was an entire people no-platforming Franco’s fascist coup. These struggles went down to defeat. Here, for Simon Jenkins’ education, are two no-platform struggles that did not.

In October 1936, Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists wanted to march through the Jewish quarter of Whitechapel. The East London working class mobilised to stop them. The police spent an afternoon trying to baton-charge a way through the barricades for the fascists. They were defeated. The workers, not the fascists, controlled the streets. The BUF went into decline. Britain did not go fascist – unlike virtually the whole of the rest of Europe.

In August 1977, John Tyndall’s National Front wanted to march through Lewisham, home to a large Afro-Caribbean community. Protesters mobilised to stop them and reduced their march to a shambles. The NF went into decline. The Anti-Nazi League was founded in the wake of the Battle of Lewisham. The central strategy of the ANL was no platform. The aim was mass popular mobilisation to stop the fascists marching, meeting, operating. Our aim was to destroy their organisation ‘by any means necessary’. This we did.

Jenkins ends his piece with a sentence of sickening obsequiousness: ‘You are welcome, Mr President.’

That is liberal stupidity writ large. An unopposed visit will be a carnival of reaction, giving confidence to the Tory Right, the Brexit Party, UKIP, and every flag-waving nationalist, racist, and misogynist in Britain.

Do we need lessons from Simon Jenkins in how to fight fascism? I think not. History certainly suggests not. Join the protests in June against the Trump state visit to say, not in our name.

Neil Faulkner is the author, with Samir Dathi, Phil Hearse, and Seema Syeda, of Creeping Fascism: what it is and how to fight it (Public Reading Rooms).

Creeping Fascism: What It Is and How To Fight It
By Neil Faulkner with Samir Dathi, Phil Hearse and Seema Syeda

How can we stop a ‘second wave’ of fascism returning us to the darkest times? How do we prevent the history of the 1930s repeating itself?

READ MORE…

Trump is a nationalist, a racist, a misogynist, a climate-change denier, and a billionaire corporate bully.

Typically, these pro-Nazis were hardened anti-Semites and anti-Communists. Many peddled conspiracy theories about a sinister connection between Jews and Communists to take over the world – with Fascism the only force able to prevent it.

Media baron Lord Rothermere – the Rupert Murdoch of his day – was a staunch supporter of Mussolini, Hitler, and Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. Germany had been ‘falling under the control of alien elements,’ Rothermere explained. ‘Israelites of international attachments were insinuating themselves into key positions in the German administrative machine. It is from such abuses that Hitler has freed Germany.’

Tory support for Fascism was based on class interest. Hitler had smashed the German labour movement, destroyed democracy, and created a totalitarian dictatorship in which all forms of resistance were crushed by police terror. In consequence, profits doubled and wages fell. This counter-revolutionary class war – for that is what it was – was dressed up in medieval blood-and-soil mysticism.

Except that the fancy dress took on a life of its own. Fascist fantasy about nation and race triggered a world war in which 60 million died – the great majority of them in fascist genocides in either Eastern Europe (under the German Nazis) or China (under the Japanese Militarists).

Tory ‘appeasement’ – as it was called – paved the way for Fascism’s world war on humanity. This has special relevance now. The Tories have invited Trump to Britain for the D-Day commemorations. My guess is that the irony is completely lost on them.

As Brexit Britain prepares to retreat into a nationalist-racist silo, as Fortress Europe pays Libyan warlords to operate gunboats and concentration camps to stop migrants crossing the Med, as uniformed thugs meet ‘the wretched of the earth’ with clubs, dogs, and teargas on the US-Mexican border, the Tories invite Trump to be guest of honour at their D-Day commemorations. They seem to have forgotten that in 1944 the Waffen-SS were on the other side.

Appeasement

Appeasement, of course, reflects class interest. Corporate Britain has a ‘special relationship’ with Corporate America. May has justified the invitation to Trump on the grounds that the UK and US ‘have a deep and enduring partnership that is rooted in our common history and shared interests’. And what are those ‘shared interests’? ‘The state visit,’ explained May, ‘is an opportunity to strengthen our already close relationship in areas such as trade, investment, security, and defence, and to discuss how we can build on these ties in the years ahead.’ Or, decoded, it’s about profit, empire, and the arms trade.

Forget the vexed question of whether or not Trump is a fascist. It is the wrong question. Fascism is not a thing, fixed and fast-frozen, it is a process, a political trajectory.

For one thing, in the early 21^st century, with labour movements broken-backed and the organised Left tiny, fragmented, and riddled with sectarianism, you don’t need to march down the high street in uniform with banners and clubs. You don’t need a paramilitary ‘battering-ram’ to smash the opposition. You can advance directly on state power as an elected right-wing ‘populist’ in a suit.

Except they are not ‘populists’ of course. They are the opposite. They are funded by big business, they have an ultra-neoliberal corporate programme, and they draw upon deep wells of ignorance, bigotry, and psychotic rage at the base of society. They are the diametric opposite of the common people organising, mobilising, and fighting for their own emancipation. The diametric opposite of ‘people power’.

The nationalism and racism, the xenophobia and scapegoating, the misogyny and homophobia, and all the other sewage they are siphoning from the social depths, this has as its purpose deception, disorientation, and division – so that the people do not understand their common condition and shared interests – so that they do not unite in struggle from below against the corporations, the elites, and a failed political system – so that they do not become active agents of history, but remain its passive victims.

A Clear and Present Danger

Fascism is a clear and present danger. The global surge of nationalism and racism represented by Trump has the political function of neutralising resistance on climate catastrophe, growing militarisation, and the social crisis. It has the function of further weakening the labour movement, the social movements, and the Left.

Trump is a nationalist, a racist, a misogynist, a climate-change denier, and a billionaire corporate bully. The Tories don’t care. The Tories have a long history of appeasing dictators, bigots, and thugs. What matters, in a Tory Party increasingly dominated by the Far Right, is their ‘special relationship’. So they are making a second attempt to organise a state visit.

Last time they were defeated. The people took control of the streets of the capital, and the Tories were forced to move Trump around the countryside in a helicopter.

Now they are trying again. They want the full works: Buckingham Palace reception, address to Parliament, carriage ride down the Mall. Trump is to be normalised and mainstreamed. Make no mistake: if this state visit goes ahead as planned, it will be a carnival of reaction. It will underwrite the nationalism and racism of Brexit. It will embolden the Tory Right, the Brexit Party, UKIP, and every bar-room bigot who wants to punch a Muslim, a migrant, or a feminist.

It’s our job to stop them. We must take control of our streets so they cannot use them to put Trump and all he represents on a pedestal. We must imitate the brilliant example of Extinction Rebellion, but multiply it ten-fold. We must block the streets, create mayhem, and turn Trump’s visit into a shambles for them and a carnival of diversity and resistance for us.

When the popular militias defended Madrid against Franco’s Fascists in 1936, they adopted the slogan No Pasaran! When the people of the East End – Cockney bus drivers, Irish dockers, Jewish tailors, and every other variety of the richly tapestried London working class – defended Cable Street against Mosley’s Fascists later that same year, the streets rang with the English translation: ‘They Shall Not Pass!’

Let it be our slogan in 2019. Nationalists, racists, and fascists: They Shall Not Pass! All out to Stop Trump on 4 June! See updates on Together Against Trump events…

Neil Faulkner is the author, with Samir Dathi, Phil Hearse, and Seema Syeda, of Creeping Fascism: what it is and how to fight it (Public Reading Rooms).

Creeping Fascism: What It Is and How To Fight It
By Neil Faulkner with Samir Dathi, Phil Hearse and Seema Syeda

How can we stop a ‘second wave’ of fascism returning us to the darkest times? How do we prevent the history of the 1930s repeating itself?

READ MORE…

Source: Infernal Machine

Here is the president of the United States fueling the hate chorus of his favourite news networks, using 9/11 to designate a Somali-American Muslim woman as unpatriotic and un-American.

It was clear even during his campaign that  Trump was a moral and political degenerate, devoid of any decency or scruple, who represented the American kleptocracy at its basest.  It was obvious that he was consciously summoning the darkest forces in American society onto the historical stage and weaponising hatred to propel himself to power in a way that no previous president had done before him.

You would have to be blind not to notice these things.   Nevertheless I still thought that the American system had enough checks and balances to neutralise his worst excesses, and I so hoped that his own cluelessness, arrogance, greed and impetuous bellicosity would undermine him and even bring him down.

I didn’t realise how far Trump was willing to go in order to please his political base, while he and his family used the presidential office as a vehicle for enriching themselves still further. I didn’t foresee how relentless, fanatical and devoid of even the semblance of scruple he would be, and how much he would be able to get away with.

I didn’t understand then how much of a grip the radical right had attained over the Republican Party and the American media, and how beholden Trump was to these sectors.

I certainly didn’t imagine that a sitting president would publicly set up a Muslim member of Congress for assassination.  But this is effectively what Trump did yesterday in the case of the Somali-American Democrat representative Ilhan Omar.  To understand the context we need to go back a little.

Many readers will know that Ilhan Omar is of the first two Muslim women to be elected to the US Congress, that she was born in Somalia, that she is leftist, and a strong critic of US foreign policy and of Israel.

All these qualities have made her a natural hate-figure for Trump’s base and for the media networks that feed that hatred.   On 9 March the former judge Jeannine Pirro- one of the most fanatically anti-Muslim presenters on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News – questioned Omar’s patriotism and accused her of antisemitism, in a monologue that included the following observation:

Think about this, she’s not getting this anti-Israel sentiment doctrine from the Democratic Party, so if it’s not rooted in the party, where is she getting it from? Think about it. Omar wears a hijab which according to the Quran 33:59 tells women to cover so they won’t get molested. Is her adherence to this Islamic doctrine indicative of her adherence to Sharia law, which in itself is antithetical to the United States Constitution

Many of Fox’s viewers need little encouragement to know what they think about a Muslim-American woman with strong (leftist) political views, and  many would have understood the meaning of these words: that Omar was a Muslim who obeys ‘Sharia law’ rather than the laws of her own country.

Omar has already received numerous death threats, including a phone call to her office two weeks ago which asked on of Omar’s aides

Do you work for the Muslim Brotherhood?  Why are you working for her? She’s a fucking terrorist. I’ll put a bullet in her fucking skull.

Whether Pirro’s rant had anything to do with this reference to the Muslim Brotherhood is not clear, but Pirro’s rant about Omar had already pushed even Fox News to take her off air.

Pirro loves Trump however, and he loves her.  In a series of tweets he called for her reinstatement and published a thread which declared:

Bring back [Judge Jeanine.] The Radical Left Democrats, working closely with their beloved partner, the Fake News Media, is using every trick in the book to SILENCE a majority of our Country. They have all out campaigns against Fox News hosts who are doing too well. must stay strong and fight back with vigor. Stop working soooo hard on being politically correct, which will only bring you down, and continue to fight for our Country.

In any other president this would be an unusual intervention, but in the current dystopia there is nothing outlandish about it.  Since then things have got worse.  At the beginning of this week Representative Omar told a Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) meeting

 for far too long we have lived with the discomfort of being a second class citizen, and frankly I’m tired of it, and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it.  CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognised that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose our civil liberties.

All of this was obscured in the savage backlash that followed.   Only one phrase stood from Omar’s speech ‘some people did something’ [on 9/11],  which were used to indict Omar as a terrorist apologist and an unpatriotic Muslim who minimised American suffering.  Republican congressman Dan Crenshaw and Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel both shared the clip, which McDaniel used to call Omar ‘anti-American.’

Omar’s words were not well-chosen for sure, but there is nothing in her speech to suggest the meaning given to them by her critics, whose tone can be summed up this headline from Murdoch’s New York Post:

On the internet the response was predictably more extreme.    McDaniel’s followers variously called for Omar to be ‘incinerated’, ‘eliminated with extreme prejudice’, sent to Guantanamo, or deported. On Instagram the far-right activist and former reporter for Rebel Media Laura Loomer called Islam a ‘cancer’ and told her followers that Muslims seeking public office should be criminalised.

And yesterday Trump joined this pitchfork mob, by posting this disgraceful tweet with a video showing Omar’s words played repeatedly:

So here is the president of the United States,  fueling the hate chorus of his favourite news networks, and using 9/11 to designate a Somali-American Muslim woman as unpatriotic and un-American, at a time when white supremacist violence and hate crimes have reached new heights, and when Omar has already become a prime target.

So no, I simply did not see this coming.  I did not believe that even Trump would sink this low.  And now that he has, I hope that American society pushes back hard against what is little more than incitement.

And I hope that Congresswoman Omar stays safe,  and that she receives the protection that she clearly needs.

But if anything does happen to her, the man who calls himself president will bear some of the responsibility for it.

Matt Carr is a writer, blogger and freelance print and radio journalist. He blogs at  www.infernalmachine.co.uk.

Bella Ciao is an anti-fascist Italian folk ballad, featuring vocals from Tom Waits. It is taken from Songs of Resistance 1948 – 2018, the new album by guitarist Marc Ribot, who describes it as a protest record, adding, “Every movement which has ever won anything has had songs.”

“Tom brings a certain gravitas to everything he does,” says Ribot. “My Italian friends say he sounds exactly like an old ‘partigiano’ (resistance fighter)!”

The video below is directed by  Jem Cohen and uses footage from anti-Trump demonstrations in Washington DC.

Lyrics

One fine morning
I woke up early
(bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao)
One fine morning
I woke up early
to find the fascist at my door.

O, partisano,
please, take me with you
(bella ciao, bella ciao, goodbye beautiful)
O, partisano,
please take me with you,
I’m not afraid anymore.

And if I die
a partisano
(bella ciao, bella ciao, goodbye beautiful)
bury me upon my mountain
beneath the shadow of a flower.

So all the people,
the people passing
(bella ciao, bella ciao, goodbye beautiful)
So all the people, the people passing,
they say “O, what a beautiful flower!”

This is the flower of the partisan
(bella ciao, bella ciao, goodbye beautiful)
This is the flower of the partisan
who died for freedom.
This is the flower
of the partisan
who died for freedom.

These are dangerous times, but the anti-Trump protests showed the potential power of those who champion social equality and inclusion, women’s rights and anti-racism.

We are at a crucial political turning point. Theresa May will certainly not survive and it is an open question whether the Tory government will survive.

Behind the mayhem lurks an astonishing fact: in the United States, around Donald Trump, a nationalist hard right has emerged, using its mass base to escape the immediate control and sanction of big business interests; and in Britain the nationalist hard right of the Tory party is similarly prepared to defy the immediate interests of big business to seize the leadership of the Tory party.

The resignations of cabinet ministers David Davis and Boris Johnson brought about something utterly predictable. The ultra-nationalist right wing of the Tory party will not accept anything other than a ‘hard’ Brexit. Their aim is to make a bonfire of EU labour and environmental regulations, already weak and difficult to enforce, while pushing the whole of British politics further to the right. In a parliamentary exchange last year, a laughing David Davis was happy to confirm to madcap Tory Brexiteer Peter Bone that while all EU regulations would immediately pass into UK law on the day of Brexit, the day after that parliament could repeal them all.

Beyond a hard Brexit, however, the Tory right is aiming for a harshly anti-working class, anti-immigrant, anti-welfare state and anti-multicultural government, a hugely dangerous prospect.

Of course the Tory right is pro-capitalist. But that does not mean that it is prepared to kowtow to leading companies and business people who fear Brexit will harm business interests. As Boris Johnson says, “fuck business”. Many times in history we have seen extreme right-wing forces willing to break with the immediate interests of capital to secure longer-term nationalist goals.

Theresa May’s Chequers Brexit compromise did nothing to safeguard working class interest, but attempted to position Britain ‘close to’ the single market and make some limited concessions to the EU on immigration and the rights of EU citizens here. All this is too much for the Tory hard right. Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg are doing what they planned to do all along – cry ‘betrayal’ at anything less than crashing out of the EU with no deal. The cry of ‘betrayal’, promoted by the Sun, Telegraph and Daily Mail, is also the battle-cry of UKIP, whose support in opinion polls is now climbing quickly, up 5 points in the last week alone. It will also be supported by the fascist and semi-fascist right wing organised in the ‘Free Tommy Robinson’ demonstrations.

Theresa May’s plans face another obstacle – in their present form at least they will not be acceptable to the EU itself. It would be fatal for the European Union to allow countries to leave the union and maintain crucial advantages of membership without the main obligations. This is why Theresa May is in such a dire position.

While the Labour leadership will not lend a helping hand to prevent her defeat in parliament, some people in the PLP have other ideas. MPs Ian Austin and Mike Gapes have suggested that Labour work with May ‘in the national interest’, while Tom Watson amazingly says that it is not Labour’s job to bring down the Tory government. Some Blairite MPs may harbour dreams of a National Government, but it would split the Labour Party and finish the Labour right for generations to come.

However, in the event of a split in the Tory party, the emergence of a new centre party with the Lib Dems and some sections of the Labour right should not be excluded.

The mobilisations in London and around the country against Donald Trump were extraordinary, involving hundreds of thousands. The women’s demonstration alone numbered over 20,000, with more than 250,000 on the Together against Trump demonstration in London, while women and young people were heavily represented in all the protests. These demonstrations were the largest since the Iraq war protests of the early noughties.

Most of the anti-Trump actions were on a weekday, and as Len McCluskey told the crowd in Trafalgar Square “you represent millions who couldn’t be here”. This turnout represents the Other Britain, based in the Labour Party and the Left, in the trade unions, in the peace and women’s movements, and above all among young people. Probably an overwhelming majority of people who demonstrated voted against Brexit. And this broad current in British society is fiercely anti-racist and committed to multiculturalism. While it’s true this situation is in sharp contrast to some other European countries where xenophobic Islamophobia is near-dominant, this broad Left in British society will come under heavy attack in the next period.

Donald Trump’s evident racism and sexism, and the apparent crudity of his speech and manners, make it easy to over-personalise the opposition to his politics. But if Donald Trump dropped dead tomorrow, his place would be taken by Vice-President Mike Pence, just as fiercely right wing, nationalist, xenophobic and misogynistic. Trump represents a current in American politics which is huge, and which he is building by weekly mass rallies nationwide.

The Trump visit to Europe, and Britain in particular, shows he and his advisors have broken with key planks of US foreign policy that has lasted for nearly 70 years – support for NATO, European integration and managed trade. In particular Trump’s xenophobic nationalism is sending him on a mission to crush the EU as a political and economic bloc that can defy American dominance. Several weeks ago, Trump told French president Macron that France should leave the EU and seek an independent trade deal with the US. Trump brutally intervened in the Tory conflict over Brexit to undermine May, and then told her Britain should not negotiate with the EU but “sue them”.

Undermining the EU is part and parcel of the same strategy that has led to Trump launching a trade war with China, now putting high tariffs on billions of dollars worth of trade in both directions. This is worrying US manufacturers and many farmers – large and small – who depend on the Chinese market. But most of all it causes consternation in Wall Street where falling stock prices risk becoming a torrent.

In the past you could have expected the Congress grandees from either main party to put a rapid end to anything that Wall Street deplored. Now that is not possible. Far from the Republican Senators and Congress people holding the whip hand against Trump, today it is the other way around. Trump’s mass base can be whipped up against incumbent Republicans at any time. This is a new and ultra-right wing political force, with some parallels to fascism in the 1930s, although it does not need, while it is in the government in a country with a para-militarised police and hugely repressive court system, 1930s-style stormtroopers in the streets.

Trump and his allies are consciously promoting hard right political forces internationally. An official of the Trump government, the ambassador for religious freedom (!), has complained to the British government about the imprisonment of Tommy Robinson. Trump’s unofficial outrider, Steve Bannon, is touring Europe, talking to the Front National in France, the Lega in Italy and appearing on Nigel Farage’s LBC radio show during which he called for Robinson’s release. Trump himself has no problem promoting Boris Johnson as next prime minister in the UK, or attacking Angela Merkel over immigration, benefitting her right-wing critics in the AfD (Alliance for Germany) and in the Bavarian wing of her own party coalition, the CSU.

Trump and Tommy Robinson supporters harass Muslim woman bus driver in London, 14 July 2018

On 14 July, the most recent Free Tommy Robinson demonstration took place, mobilising a few thousand. An RMT contingent from the anti-fascist counter-protest was attacked by fascist thugs and Steve Hedley and Bridget Power were hospitalised. The Left and the labour movement have to sound the alarm and organise much wider forces against the Football Lads Alliance and similar ultra-right gangs.

The hard right in Britain is now a mutually-reinforcing continuum that stretches from Jacob Rees-Mogg to UKIP, to Britain First and the Football Lads Alliance. The event that has generated this force at its present level of determination and effectiveness is the vote for Brexit. One thing that Trump said on his visit that was true was that a large part of the Brexit vote was a vote against immigration.

Anti-immigrant racism has been rampant in the base of the Conservative Party since Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech in 1968 – and before. It was fostered by Margaret Thatcher talking about the danger of Britain being ‘swamped’ by immigrants. But it was put front and centre by the campaign to ‘take back control’ during the Brexit referendum. It was what animated the main Brexit-voting areas, especially in the middle-class suburbs. And it is on the front page of the Mail, the Express, the Sun and the Telegraph every day of the week.

British politics is undergoing a sharp polarisation, caused by neoliberal austerity and the economic crisis of 2007-8. These are dangerous and difficult times for the Left, which has strong forces arrayed against it. But the anti-Trump demos showed the potential power of those who champion social equality and inclusion, women’s rights and anti-racism. A huge struggle against the racist right will be needed to ensure those values are embraced throughout society.

Source: The Guardian

It is not a time to be silent. We must all stand in active solidarity with Muslims, Jews, refugees, migrants, women, gay people, trans people and all those under attack.

It is a politics of “walls and fences” through the demonisation of black and brown people. In the past six weeks, almost 2,000 children have been forcefully removed from their parents at the Mexico-US border and imprisoned in cages. US human rights and civil liberties groups are documenting story after story of crying children being snatched from their parents’ arms by US authorities. Their parents’ crimes? They stand accused of being “illegal” migrants. Some of these children are just four years old, some even younger.

This obscenity is the manifestation of Trump’s desire to – in the words of House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi – “make America white again”. This crime of separating children from their parents can only be understood as a deliberate attempt to mirror some of the darkest moments in US history, from the forced separation of indigenous Native American peoples, to slavery, and the internment of Japanese American citizens during the second world war. But it also has global echoes, from the barbarism of Nazi Germany to the forced removal of Indigenous Australian children by successive governments.

In the UK, the government’s own morally bankrupt “hostile environment” policies have similarly created a toxic narrative around immigrants, refugees and Muslims. This has not only resulted in the Windrush scandal, which has destroyed so many lives, but also the government slamming the door on its own obligations to give safe haven to child refugees.

Meanwhile the far right is emboldened and brazen, with neo-Nazi groups once again marching on the streets of London, and fascists in the US openly flying Nazi flags and chanting antisemitic and Islamophobic hate, confident in their belief that their views are shared in the White House. Across Europe, openly fascist parties hold government office. The Hungarian parliament has just enacted laws making it a criminal offence to help illegal immigrants claim aslyum; Italy’s far-right interior minister has said no boats carrying migrants will be allowed to dock in Italian ports. These racists are emboldened because they feel that the political discourse in the west supports their views and ideologies, as mainstream politicians pander to and endorse far-right policies.

This is not a time for complacency, or for us to be apologetic about the values we hold dear, or our commitment to human rights. And it is not a time to be silent. We must all stand in active solidarity with Muslims, Jews, refugees, migrants, women, gay people, trans people and all those under attack. Bigotry does not manifest itself in a vacuum, it flourishes when the majority are silent and in denial of what is going on.

This is why it is imperative that we use Trump’s visit to the UK on 13 July as an opportunity to demonstrate the strong resistance here to the heinous policies of his administration. Not only that; we must use it to build a loud, intersectional anti-racism and pro-migrant rights movement in the UK that will not shy away from naming fascists for what they are, and will not whitewash the politics of hate, racism and misogyny. If we leave things until they get even worse, it will be too late.

Together Against Trump: National Demonstration
Friday 13 July London | Assemble 2pm
BBC Portland Place | London W1A 1AA
More info…

Source: Morning Star

Donald Trump is a hero to the growing number of Islamophobic and fascist leaders and movements in Europe and beyond.

Trump demonises Arabs, wanting to banish them from his shores, unaware that an Arab giantess in New York is welcoming all migrants.

The Statue of Liberty’s Burka

The President is obsessed with deporting Arabs
Although, by a superb comic irony,
It was an Arab who modeled for the United States’ icon –
Namely the Statue of Liberty.

The sculptor’s monument was initially designed
For the opening of the Suez canal:
The original depicted an Arab woman holding a torch.
It was destined for the canal’s southern portal.

His first drawings show “a gigantic female fellah, or Arab peasant”
With a veil modestly hiding her lips,
The sculptor told Egypt’s ruler she represented “Progress”
A beacon, to light the way for oncoming ships.

Unfortunately for the artist, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi,
Egypt’s bankrupt Khedive couldn’t afford its installation
But undeterred, Bartholdi recycled it and offered it to New York
To commemorate the American revolution.

Its first title had been, “Egypt carrying the Light to Asia’
But now the figure’s veil would be removed
And for his prospective US clients Bartholdi called it,
“Liberty enlightening the world”.

But despite Bartholdi’s tweaking the flowing Arab garments
And his turning them into Graeco-Roman dress,
It’s still a huge stone Arab that occupies New York Harbour,
Making fun of the President’s petty mindedness –

And of the President’s paranoia for far more Americans die
As a result of their falling out of bed,
Or their being stung by bees rather than being killed by terrorists
Never mind their fellow-citizens shooting them dead.

Despite the most worthless President in US history
Wishing to banish all Arabs from his shores
An Arab giantess in New York is welcoming migrants
And giving the lie to his immigration laws.

However much the President may demonise Arabs
There’s one who’s rooted to the ground,
Making a better job of symbolising American liberty
Without her having to utter a sound.

Heathcote Williams – poet, playwright, essayist, lyricist, actor, magician, political agitator… and much else besides – died 1 July 2017.

Video: The Statue of Liberty’s Burka

Words and narration by Heathcote Williams. Montage by Alan Cox. Source: BabylonRoyal

Together Against Trump
National Demonstration
Friday 13 July London | Assemble 2pm
BBC Portland Place | London W1A 1AA
More details…

Source: Counterpunch

We can’t allow Trump’s UK visit to distract us from our own shameful treatment of migrants, writes Matt Carr.

Source: Ceasefire

There is something of this trope in the response of the UK public to the political horror film starring the orange-haired beast known as Donald J. Trump.

Last week a poll revealed that 1 in 10 people would be willing to protest against a putative ‘working visit’ from Donald Trump next year on a date that has yet to be determined. It is still not certain that this visit is even going to take place. Yet already the community networks that helped organise last February’s Stop Trump/Stand Up to Trump protests are bracing themselves for the occasion and putting dates into their diaries.

On one level this response is admirable. It’s a healthy sign that so many people are willing to disregard the grovelling decision by May and her hapless cronies to invite Trump anywhere near these shores. But we should not allow the beast in the White House to distract us from our own political monsters already in our midst. Because like Godot, Trump may not come. And as far as migrants in the UK are concerned, Trump is by no means the most pressing threat that this country faces right now.

On the contrary, for the past eighteen months the lives and futures of 4.4 million people have been placed in limbo as a result of Brexit – and more particularly by the stunningly cynical decision of our own government to use EU citizens as bargaining chips in its cack-handed negotiations with the European Union.

Right now, the UK government is implementing a ‘hostile environment’ policy, which is intended to strip ‘illegal immigrants’ of the basic components of survival in a modern society, from healthcare, driving licenses, bank accounts, to the right to rent a place to live.

Until it was declared illegal by the High Court last week, this policy was extended to include EU citizens — who are not technically ‘illegal’— have become homeless. Last week, a Polish man who reported to the police that he and his wife had been terrorised by their landlord was arrested and placed in detention prior to deportation. Last week the Nigerian boxer Bilal Fawaz, who once boxed for England, was told he would be deported. Two weeks ago, the Home Office told a Jamaican woman who has been living here for fifty years that she would have to return to her “own” country. Every week — indeed, almost every day — the Home Office makes ‘mistakes’ like this.

The UK is unique in Europe in that it has a policy of unlimited detention. According to the Children’s Commissioner for England, some 15,000 children are permanently separated from their parents as members of “Skype families” — as a result of being subjected to the arbitrary income thresholds imposed on married couples by the UK government.

The vicious treatment of migrants by the British state is, to some extent, a product of a more general hostility towards immigrants and immigration that has become powerfully embedded in the British media, the public and the political class, and which reached a dismal apotheosis in the Brexit referendum.

You will have to look a long way to find much condemnation of these developments by British politicians. Even the Labour Party in its current, more leftist, incarnation, has largely kept a distance from the May government’s scandalous refusal to guarantee the rights of EU nationals, fearful as it still is of being seen as ‘soft’ on immigration or unresponsive to those famous ‘concerns’ on which Labour believes its political future will be decided.

Indeed, Corbyn and his circle often appear alarmingly willing to accept arguments from the ‘Lexit’ left, not only in regards to the EU’s supposedly ‘hardwired neoliberalism’, but also in respect to migrants and migration. A significant section of the Labour movement continues to regard EU migrants as a problem, to be dealt with by restricting or even rescinding the free movement of people — one of the great progressive achievements of the European Union — regardless of the fact that labour exploitation of migrant workers is liable to be easier without free movement.

One section of the left — most notably represented by the Communist Party and Trade Unionists Against the EU, an organisation part-funded by Arron Banks — continues to depict migrants as if they were little more than vapid commodities shifted from one country to another by ‘the bosses’ — an argument that in its worst incarnations, dovetails neatly with the UKIP narrative of a culturally beleaguered (white) working class marginalised in its own heartland by the neoliberal bureaucrats in Brussels.

We shouldn’t be entirely surprised by this. Trump and Trumpism are products of many of the same political forces that were instrumental in driving Brexit: ethnonationalism, anti-immigrationism, xenophobia, nostalgia for a vanished ‘greatness’, cultural anxieties about national identity and loss of white status, and outright racism, a populist rage against ‘elites’ that has too easily emboldened and legitimised the exclusion, persecution and ‘othering’ of foreigners – or people who ‘look like’ foreigners.

All these forces were present during the referendum and have continued to course alarmingly through our body politic. It’s not for nothing that Trump and even his failed nominee Judge Roy Moore have praised Brexit, or that Arron Banks and Nigel Farage rushed off to Trump Towers within weeks of Trump’s election, or that Farage has campaigned for Moore and idolizes Steve Bannon. These are all chips off the same old far-right bloc, lubricating fake revolts against the ‘ establishment’ by stoking a steady drip-drip of hatred — whether directed at Muslims. immigrants or foreigners — and we should not need Trump to remind us of their existence.

Many UK opponents of Trump have rightly condemned the violence and the potential for violence in Trump’s rhetoric and in the actions of some of his supporters. But over here, we have had an MP shot dead as a ‘traitor’ by a follower of the same movement whose videos Trump has just retweeted. We have regular death threats directed against any prominent figure who appears to be getting in the way of Brexit — or who even has the temerity to suggest that Brexit should be subjected to parliamentary scrutiny. When that person happens to be a woman — and a woman of colour at that, as is the case with Gina Miller — such threats come marinated in a savage mixture of sexism and racism.

Yet when Miller revealed a few months ago that she was thinking of leaving the country because of the threats made against her family, no major political figure saw fit to denounce this state of affairs. Arron Banks, the architect of Leave.eu, even joked about it.

The abuse directed against Miller, high court judges and Tory ‘rebels’ is just the most prominent expression of the rage that burst across the country during the referendum. According to a recent survey by Migrants Rights Network, hate crimes have risen by 29 percent in the last twelve months. Anecdotally, EU citizens and even third- or fourth-generation migrant-heritage UK citizens routinely report verbal and even physical violence, as well as incidents in which they have been told to ‘go back where they came from.’

Such tendencies are not entirely new. Racists may feel emboldened by the referendum, but they were not created by it. Only today, Bristol police and town council were accused by the Safer Bristol Partnership (SBP) of ‘institutional racism’ for the way they responded to the horrific murder of Iranian refugee Bidram Ebrahimi, who was beaten to death in 2013 after being wrongly suspected of paedophilia.

Once again, we should not need a ‘working visit’ from Donald Trump to galvanise us to act in response to these developments. Yet Trump’s grotesque barbarity often seems to eclipse the everyday barbarities that have become part and parcel of the post-referendum UK.

As one of the organisers of the 1 Day Without Us campaign in solidarity with UK migrants, I’ve seen how difficult it is to persuade people to stand up alongside the migrants who are already here. When we organised our first day of action, last February, the Stop Trump campaign  declared its own ‘Day of Action’ on the same day. To their credit, the organisers of the campaign went to great lengths to highlight at their event the issues we were already raising, and to include them within their own anti-Trump message. But it should not have needed Donald Trump to bring this about, and the UK’s shameful treatment of migrants should not be added as an afterthought.

Next year we are planning another day of action around the slogan ‘Proud to be a migrant/Proud to stand with migrants.’ We are asking people to join us – not just to ‘Stop Trump’ but to stand with and for the migrants who live in our communities across the country. We are asking them to help us reclaim the word ‘migrant’ from the debased coinage that it has become in UK political discourse, and turn it into a source of pride.

In the face of ever-more strident demands from the ethnonationalist right for a monocultural, migrant-free UK, we are asking the public to celebrate and embrace the society that the UK has become – diverse, open, multicultural and multi-ethnic.

If Trump is foolish enough to come to the UK, by all means let’s see hundreds of thousands of people in the streets to say that we reject his politics. But it’s worth remembering that when he has gone, this country will be the same as it was before. And, right now, as we scan the horizon for the monster who may or may not come shambling towards us, we ought to bear in mind that we have our own monsters to fight, that many people are threatened by them, and that our solidarity will always be incomplete until we stand with them.

Together Against Trump: National Demonstration
Friday 13 July London | Assemble 2pm
BBC Portland Place | London W1A 1AA
Details…

Source: Truthdig

Chris Hedges is a weekly columnist for Truthdig, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has reported from more than 50 countries. He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans, including 15 years at The New York Times as a foreign correspondent.

Source: The New Yorker

Donald Trump grew up in a wealthy white enclave in Queens, and he first came to public attention in 1973, when the Justice Department sued his father’s real-estate company for refusing to rent apartments to people “because of race and color.” (Trump strongly denied the charges, which eventually led to a consent decree.) In the nineteen-eighties, when Trump owned casinos in Atlantic City, some of his managers got the strong impression that he didn’t like black employees. In a 2015 story about the faded resort town, my colleague Nick Paumgarten quoted a former busboy at the Trump Castle, who said, “When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor.”

In a 1991 book about his experiences running Trump Plaza, in Atlantic City, “Trumped! The Inside Story of the Real Donald Trump—His Cunning Rise and Spectacular Fall,” John R. O’Donnell, a veteran casino executive, recalled a conversation that he had with his boss about an employee in the Plaza’s finance department who happened to be African-American. I cited the passage last fall, after Trump attacked Myeshia Johnson, the widow of a black soldier in the U.S. Special Forces who was killed in Niger, but it is worth reproducing it now. (The quote below begins with Trump speaking about the black employee. The “I” at the start of the second paragraph is O’Donnell.)

“Yeah, I never liked the guy. I don’t think he knows what the fuck he’s doing. My accountants in New York are always complaining about him. He’s not responsive. And it isn’t funny. I’ve got black accountants at Trump Castle and at Trump Plaza. Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. Those are the kind of people I want counting my money. Nobody else.”

I couldn’t believe I was hearing this. But Donald went on, “Besides that, I’ve got to tell you something else. I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is. I believe that. It’s not anything they can control. . . . Don’t you agree?” He looked at me straight in the eye and waited for my reply.

“Donald, you really shouldn’t say things like that to me or anybody else,” I said. “That is not the kind of image you want to project. We shouldn’t even be having this conversation, even if it’s the way you feel.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “If anybody ever heard me say that . . . holy shit . . . I’d be in a lot of trouble. But I have to tell you, that’s the way I feel.”

Is there any doubt that Trump still holds these kinds of views? Even before his latest racial slur—it was reported on Thursday that he referred to Haiti, El Salvador, and certain nations in Africa as “shithole countries” during a meeting with lawmakers in the Oval Office—the answer was clear. During the 2016 Presidential campaign, Trump described Mexican immigrants as “in many cases criminals, rapists, drug dealers, etc.”; questioned the fitness of a U.S.-born federal judge by referring to him as “Mexican”; mocked the mother of a Pakistani-American war hero; and, for a time, refused to condemn David Duke, the former Klansman.

Since taking office, Trump hasn’t changed much, if at all. He has embarked on a public crusade against black football players who kneel during the national anthem, suggested that some of the neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, were “good people,” and boasted about calling Don Lemon, the African-American CNN host, “the dumbest man on television.” While some might try (lamely) to argue that Trump took some of these steps to rile up his disaffected white voting base, no such reasoning can be applied to his statements in internal meetings, where, according to a report in the Times, he has said that recent immigrants from Haiti “all have AIDS” and that immigrants from Nigeria, once they had seen the United States, would never “go back to their huts.”

Evidently, the subject of immigration brings out Trump’s inner Archie Bunker. His latest awful utterance—the “shithole” comment—came during a meeting with Republican and Democratic lawmakers who are trying to reach a deal to extend legal protections for Dreamers, undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children. The deal being discussed would grant these protections while also including changes to the immigration system intended to attract conservative votes in Congress.

According to the Times (though it was the Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey who first broke the story), the Republican senator Lindsey Graham and the Democratic senator Dick Durbin presented Trump with a plan that would cut the current visa lottery program and reallocate some of those slots to immigrants from troubled places like Haiti, El Salvador, and a number of African nations whose citizens have been granted so-called Temporary Protected Status in the United States. The Administration has in recent months begun cancelling the protected status of several groups of immigrants—most recently, Salvadorans—and it seems that the mention of Haiti irked the President. When the discussion moved on to African countries, he reportedly said, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” And he added that the United States should admit more people from places like Norway.

Rather than denying that Trump had made these remarks, the White House press office dispatched Raj Shah, the principal deputy press secretary, who is Indian-American, to try to rationalize them. “The president will only accept an immigration deal that adequately addresses the visa lottery system and chain migration—two programs that hurt our economy and allow terrorists into our country,” Shah’s statement said. “Like other nations that have merit-based immigration, President Trump is fighting for permanent solutions that make our country stronger by welcoming those who can contribute to our society, grow our economy and assimilate into our great nation.”

In appearing to suggest that immigrants from places like El Salvador, Haiti, Liberia, and Sierra Leone couldn’t become productive and assimilated American citizens, the press-office statement demonstrated that deep racial prejudices extend beyond the Oval Office to other parts of the White House. For now, though, the focus should remain on the principal offender rather than his apologists.

On Friday morning, Trump tweeted, “The language used by me at the DACA meeting was tough, but this was not the language used.” In a subsequent tweet, he said, “Never said anything derogatory about Haitians other than Haiti is, obviously, a very poor and troubled country . . . Made up by Dems.” Neither of these tweets specifically addressed the reported use of the phrase “shithole countries.” Later in the morning, Senator Durbin told reporters that Trump said “things which were hate-filled, vile, and racist . . . You’ve seen the comments in the press; I’ve not read one of them that’s inaccurate.”

For the past year, Republicans, senior Democrats, and many media commentators have held back from applying the R-word to Trump. In some circumstances, there are good reasons for exercising such caution. Calling someone a bigot is not a step to take lightly. Often, it can shut down discourse and fuel animosity. With Trump, there is the added consideration that, as long as he’s the President, other politicians in Washington have little choice but to deal with him. Also, he runs his mouth so much that a lot of what comes out of it doesn’t merit serious consideration. After this latest outburst, however, the arguments for being reticent seem absurd. The obvious truth can no longer be avoided or sugarcoated: we have a racist in the Oval Office.

“I don’t care if a fascist once in a while says something I agree with,” says Jeremy Scahill. “No alliance with fascists.”

Source: Jacobin

The following is an adapted version of Jeremy Scahill’s remarks at “The Anti-Inauguration,” an event in Washington, DC, on January 20. It is even more pertinent 100 days into the Trump presidency.

This is not just a coincidence of history or some kind of internal escalation on the part of local law-enforcement agencies around the country. There is an actual program through the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security that sells and provides military gear to state, local, and some other federal law enforcement agencies that was used in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but the military has decided that they don’t need anymore. Because they’re getting upgrades.

So they’re providing their armored vehicles and their tactical gear to local state law enforcement agencies, so that even rank-and-file police officers look like some swelled-up Robocop version of a SWAT team. We see that now in the streets at almost any demonstration, where you have these police forces that are basically stormtroopers (and now with Donald Trump as president, they actually may become literal stormtroopers). I don’t say that jokingly, because one of Donald Trump’s first acts in office was to take down the LGBTQ and climate change sections of President Obama’s website, which says quite a bit about the values that of the man that is running the show now in the United States.

He went to the CIA on Monday. This business of there being a rift between Trump and the CIA, even though Trump compared the CIA to Nazis — there isn’t going to be a rift. There is going to be the same violence in the Trump administration as we saw in the Obama administration, and the Bush administration before it — but with added, very terrifying dimensions.

One of the most shameful legacies that President Obama leaves this country is that he used his legitimacy in the eyes of so many liberals to try to normalize assassination as a central component of US foreign policy.

Assassination has been a central component of US foreign policy since the first native people were massacred in this country. But Mr. Obama — Mr. Nobel Peace Prize-winning, constitutional law scholar — has created a large state of legitimacy for Donald Trump to come in and say, “I’m allowed to assassinate American citizens who haven’t been charged with a crime, even if they’re not posing an imminent threat to the lives of any Americans, and even if they’re not on a declared battlefield”; that drone warfare should be expanded, not limited; that the president does not need to have any effective legal oversight to a secret process of putting people on a kill list, and then run those names all the way through his chain of command, and then signing death warrants.

This amounts to the President of the United States serving as an emperor, where he is the prosecutor, the judge, the jury, and ultimately the executioner by proxy of drones that will then be used to strike and kill people across the globe. We don’t even know how many people they’ve killed through this assassination program that President Obama has expanded since the era of George W. Bush.

It’s a wonderful thing that Chelsea Manning is going to be a free woman in May. But let’s talk real for a moment. She should have had a full pardon. She should have been released yesterday.

She shouldn’t have been tortured for seven years, she shouldn’t have been vilified as a traitor — she should have been celebrated and given the prize that Obama didn’t deserve in Oslo. If there is an American who is deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize it was Chelsea Manning.

I’m sincerely thankful that President Obama commuted her sentence. I don’t think we could have gotten better than that from this particular president, and for that I think there is a limited form of credit that is deserved. Having reported on Wikileaks, having followed and advocated for Chelsea Manning, any path that leads to her freedom is worthy of our celebration, while at the same time realizing that Obama was the one who was president during the duration of her torture and imprisonment.

But at the same time that Obama moved to soon make Chelsea Manning a free woman, he sentenced Leonard Peltier, who has languished in prison for decades, to death by not pardoning or commuting his sentence. I believe that Leonard Peltier is innocent of the crimes that he was convicted of, of killing those two FBI agents, and he should be freed immediately.

I want to talk about the fascism that we are facing now in this country. But I do think it is important to talk about how we got here, with Trump, without ignoring the role that the Democrats played. Because there’s a deep lesson from this era that we are now entering that has to do with the two-party system in this country.

Donald Trump has assembled a cabal of people in his cabinet that are not just the Rex Tillersons of the oil industry who are now directly in charge of so-called US diplomacy. You have a half-literate oil man posing as energy secretary, you have Goldman Sachs taking most of the rest of the posts in that administration. But you also have Betsy DeVos, who was named as the education secretary.

Betsy DeVos is one of the wealthiest people to ever hold a cabinet position in this country. (In fact, the first seventeen people that Trump named were wealthier than 43 percent of the American population’s incomes combined.) Betsy DeVos is a radical privatization activist. She’s a Christian supremacist. She has, through her family foundation, supported gay conversion therapy. The foundation has given money to some of the most hateful LGBTQ groups on this planet, including Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council, one of which was deemed a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

But among all of those things, there is an additional layer to her vicious nature: she is the sister of Erik Prince, the founder of the Blackwater Mercenary Company.

While his sister is up for a public nomination in the cabinet of Donald Trump (and I hope the Democrats somehow find even a minuscule amount of spine to stop this), her brother Erik Prince is a secret adviser to Donald Trump, where he’s advocating the return to a Phoenix program-style assassination ring, to be run by the Central Intelligence Agency. For those of you who don’t have grey in your beard or your hair, the Phoenix program in Vietnam was a mass murder operation, coordinated by the CIA. Torture and murder were at the center of the program as part of this secret/not-so-secret US policy.

General Mike Flynn, who is Trump’s National Security Adviser, is a radical Islamaphobe and Christian supremacist who does not have to be confirmed by the Senate. He was General Stanley McCrystal’s top deputy at the Joint Special Operations Command, when they were “Murder Incorporated” under George W. Bush in Iraq and ultimately Afghanistan, then Iraq again, and then Afghanistan again, and on and on until Obama empowered them even more.

General James Mattis said it’s fun to shoot “some people.” And if you actually read the quote, those “some people” he was talking about, were men in Afghanistan whose identities he didn’t know, whose backgrounds he didn’t know. But he said it was fun to shoot them because they probably beat their wives. I don’t believe anyone should lay a hand on their spouse at all, but since when is it US military policy to extrajudicially execute people based on the presumption that they may be beating their spouse? This is the guy that they’ve put in charge of the entire US military.

And by the way, he had to get an exemption from the United States Senate in order to serve as defense secretary, because he was very recently in the military itself. Why does that matter? Because there’s supposed to be some civilian control and oversight of military entities. Trump has a whole circle of generals who represent some of the most right-wing, belligerent, hawkish, torture-loving people within the US national security apparatus.

The forces that we are up against right now, my friends, are fascists, and we need to be clear in defining that.

There is an analysis that is central to understand about segments of the population that voted for Donald Trump, including the people that voted twice for Barack Obama and then voted for Donald Trump. But that is an analysis that can inform our organizing going forward. We are in a red zone right now. We are in an emergency in which immigrants are in the crosshairs, where gay people are in the crosshairs, of an administration that intends to pull the trigger. And anyone who doesn’t make it their business every day of their lives to stand on the front lines, holding that line, defending the most vulnerable in our society, should hold their head in shame, because it is all of our responsibility.

Some people find some hope in Trump’s isolationism. They say, “Oh, well he’s less hawkish than Hillary Clinton would have been.” To be clear: Clinton was an empire politician, a corporate Democrat. But I don’t care if a fascist once in a while says something I agree with: no alliance with fascists.

Nothing in this country will fundamentally change until we get corporations out of our politics, until we stop allowing legalized bribery, and until we shatter the two-party system that gives us a choice between a corporate Democrat and a fascist minus the little mustache.

Jeremy Scahill’s speech can be watched here (6 mins)…

Creeping Fascism: Brexit, Trump, and the Rise of the Far Right

A tide of racism, nationalism, and authoritarianism is sweeping the world. With the world economy hobbled by debt and stagnation, society being torn apart by austerity and inequality, and a political system paralysed by corporate power, support for the Far Right is surging. This new book by Dr Neil Faulkner and Samir Dathi argues that we face the clear and present danger of ‘creeping fascism’.

Price £12 post free