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By Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd

Ever since the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, announced national lock down on March 24, 2020 to fight Covid–19 and declared that “Social Distancing” is the only solution to save India from the Corona Pandemic, all Chief Ministers are also using the same coinage in India. We must use ‘Disease Distancing’ not Social Distancing because India is a country of social Untouchability and caste distancing for millennia. If this goes in to the national psyche it will make Untouchability and casteism worse in future. India is not like Europe, America and China. This is a country of millennial practice of social distancing.

Unfortunately Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Bharatiya Janatha Party are claimed to be the biggest organised network in the world. But their cadre are not seen anywhere among the poor, semi-starving labour, beggers across the country when they themselves were ruling. Mohan Bhagwat and Amit Shah are not seen giving calls to nation how to save the poor, unemployed, beggars, nomads and semi-nomads by their organizations. No Hindutva organization is seen distributing food, water to beggars, destitute and to the old poor in urban slums. This is a bad nationalism to say the least. Nationalism means saving the poor’s life in a crisis like this.

I request all organizations to not to use the phrase “Social Distancing” but use Disease Distancing or Corona Distancing. With great struggles from the days of Savitribai Phule and her son Dr.Yashvantharao Phule who died in serving the dying poor in Poona in the Bubonic Plague of 1897, we struggled a lot to fight caste social distancing. We should strengthen it again. The poor must be saved from not only disease but also from hunger and drinking water. Let us serve the poorest of the poor like Karalites are doing to save the country.

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a Social Activist and Writer

28 March 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

Co-Written by Vijay Prashad & Subin Dennis

K.K. Shailaja is the health minister in the Left Democratic Front government in Kerala, the state in the southwest of India that has a population of 35 million people. On January 25, 2020, she convened a high-level meeting to discuss the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China. What had particularly worried her is that there were many students from Kerala studying in that province of China. Shailaja had won widespread praise for the swift and efficient way she had steered her department through the Nipah virus that hit Kerala in 2018. She recognized that there was no time to be lost if the virus spread from Wuhan; the government had to set up mechanisms for identifying possibly infected persons, and then for testing, mitigation, and treatment. On January 26, 2020, her department set up a control room to coordinate the work.

Kerala’s Health Department, using the precedent of the Nipah virus campaign, went into action. They set up 18 committees to get to work and held daily evening meetings to evaluate their actions; a key feature of the work was the daily press conferences after these meetings, where Shailaja calmly and rationally explained what was going on and what her department was doing. These press conferences—and later those of the Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan—provided the leadership needed for a population that first needed to be educated about the severity of the virus and then needed to participate in a mass campaign to defeat its lethalness.

A medical student who was in Wuhan who had the coronavirus returned home and was tested positive on January 30; subsequently, two more students came back with the virus. The system set up by Kerala’s Health Department located them; they were tested and put into isolation. They recovered from the virus, and there was no secondary or community spread. The government did not dismantle the system, since it became clear immediately that this virus was going to be virulent, and it would not be so easily tackled.

By March, the numbers of coronavirus positive cases increased, largely as people came to Kerala from Europe. The population of Kerala is extraordinarily mobile, with large numbers of its people studying and working across the globe. This international character of the population makes the state susceptible to pandemics.

Break the Chain

“Break the Chain” was the slogan given by the Left government in Kerala. The idea is simple: a pandemic is spread when individuals who are positive for a virus come into contact with others, who then come into contact with even more people, and then the virus spreads further very fast. If those who are carrying the virus do not come into contact with others, then the chain of dispersal is broken.

But how do you know if you have the virus? The World Health Organization said that the only way to do this is to test the population—everyone who exhibits the key symptoms—and then make sure that those who are infected quarantine themselves. For a variety of reasons, largely to do with the inefficiency of governments that are more interested in the state of the stock markets than in the state of their populations, these tests are in short supply. The government of India has been remarkably lackadaisical about health care expenditure: it has spent merely 1.28 percent of the GDP on health, which has meant that there are only 0.7 hospital beds per 1,000 people, there are only 30,000 ventilators in the country, and there are only 20 health care workers per 100,000 people (below the WHO standard of 22). It is not prepared for a global pandemic.

The government of Kerala—run by a coalition of Communist and Left parties—has tested the highest number of samples for the coronavirus in India so far. In order to “break the chain,” the government has been conducting rigorous “contact tracing,” or studying whom the infected person has been in contact with and then whom that person has been in contact with so that the entire chain of possibly infected people can be informed and put into isolation. Route maps showing the places that the infected persons have been to are being published, and people who were present at that time at those places are asked to contact the Health Department so that they can be screened and tested. The route maps are widely disseminated through social media, and through GoK Direct, the government’s phone app. Local government officials and ASHA health workers (women who are the pillar of local public health) are doing the groundwork of finding people who are infected and making sure their contacts are also in isolation.

Physical Distance, Social Unity

As soon as it became clear that the virus lingers on surfaces and carries through the air, the state government mobilized its resources to produce hand sanitizers and masks. A public sector company started producing hand sanitizer. The youth movement—the Democratic Youth Federation of India—and other organizations also began to produce hand sanitizer, while units of the women’s cooperative—Kudumbashree (4.5 million members)—began to produce masks.

Local administrators formed their own emergency committees and set up groups to clean public areas. The mass fronts of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) sanitized buses, and set up sinks in bus stations for passengers to wash their hands and faces. The largest trade union federation in Kerala—the Centre of Indian Trade Unions—has appealed to workers to disinfect public spaces, and to assist their fellow workers who face distress as a consequence of the quarantines. These mass cleaning campaigns had a pedagogical impact on the society, since the volunteers were able to instruct the population about the social necessity to “break the chain.”

In a densely populated region of the world, quarantine is not an easy matter. The government has taken over vacant buildings to set up coronavirus care centers to quarantine patients, and it has made arrangements for people who need to be quarantined at home, but are in overcrowded homes, to move to facilities set up by the government. Everyone who is in quarantine and in these centers will be fed and treated by the Local Self-Governments, and the bill for the treatment will be paid by the state.

A key problem with physical isolation and quarantine is mental distress. The government has set up call centers with 241 counselors who—thus far—have conducted about 23,000 counseling sessions for those who are afraid or nervous about the situation. Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, a politburo member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), has become a kind of head therapist. His press conferences are calm and collected. In them, he refers to people who must use the government facilities with kindness and dignity. “Physical distance, social unity—that should be our slogan at this time,” said Pinarayi Vijayan.

Relief

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi took an odd attitude toward the coronavirus. He called for a partial curfew and urged Indians to clap hands and bang pans in public, as if this would scare away the virus. In fact, followers of his right-wing party circulated messages claiming that the virus would be killed by the noise. Kerala’s chief minister, on the same day as Modi’s lackluster speech, announced a relief package worth $270 million. The package includes loans to families through the women’s cooperative Kudumbashree, higher allocations for a rural employment guarantee scheme, two months of pension payments to the elderly, free food grains, and restaurants to provide food at subsidized rates. Utility payments for water and electricity as well as interest on debt payments will be suspended.

Money was rushed to bolster the relatively strong public health system in the state, which had been revamped during the tenure of the Left government from 2006 to 2011—exactly when public health systems around the world were eroded as a consequence of bad decisions made after the financial crisis of 2008-09.

Vigilance

One of the great victories of neoliberalism has been to portray a weak state and a government only interested in war and money as democracy, and to portray a state with robust institutions that consider the betterment of the people as authoritarianism. That is why there is a failure of imagination to see how China—at a much larger scale—or Kerala—as a state in the Indian Union—has been able to fight the virus outbreak. In both China and Kerala, the institutions of society remain relatively intact; more than that, the political world in these parts of the world with active socialist parties were able to summon the spirit of volunteerism amongst party members and members of mass organizations to give their time and energy in the fight against the virus.

The fight against COVID-19 is not over. Vigilance is necessary. Vaccines need to be tested and authorized; better cures—including those used effectively by Cuban doctors in China—need to be studied and shared. But even as one is vigilant, the lessons from places like Kerala should be absorbed.

In a pandemic, a rational person would much rather live in a society governed by the norms of socialism than of capitalism, a society where people rally together to overcome a virus; than to live in a society where fear pervades and where stigmatization becomes the antidote to collective action.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Subin Dennis is an economist and a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He was the Delhi State vice president of the Students’ Federation of India.

27 March 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

By Nicolas J S Davies

The United States has become the new center of the global coronavirus pandemic, with over 86,000 cases, more than China or Italy. More than a thousand Americans have already died, but this is surely only the very beginning of this deadly collision between the U.S.’s uniquely inadequate public healthcare system and a real pandemic.

On the other hand, China and South Korea, which both have universal public health systems that cover the bulk of their people’s healthcare needs, have already turned the tide on Covid-19 through targeted quarantines, mobilization of public healthcare resources and testing programs that quickly and efficiently test everyone who may have come into contact with the virus. China sent 40,000 doctors and medical staff, including 10,000 respiratory specialists, into Hubei province in the first month or two of the epidemic. It has now gone up to 3 days in a row with no new cases and is starting to lift social restrictions. South Korea quickly tested over 300,000 people, and only 131 of its people have died.

The WHO’s Bruce Aylward visited China at the end of February, and reported, “I think the key learning from China is speed… The faster you can find the cases, isolate the cases, and track their close contacts, the more successful you’re going to be… In China, they have set up a giant network of fever hospitals. In some areas, a team can go to you and swab you and have an answer for you in four to seven hours. But you’ve got to be set up — speed is everything.”

Researchers in Italy have experimentally confirmed that up to 3 out of 4 Covid-19 cases are asymptomatic and therefore undetectable by testing only people with symptoms. After a series of deadly missteps, the U.S., which had its first case on January 20th, the same day as South Korea, has over two months later only just begun widespread testing, when we already have the most cases and the 6th highest death toll in the world. Even now, the U.S. is mainly limiting testing to people with symptoms, not doing the targeted testing of new case contacts that was so effective in China. This ensures that otherwise healthy, asymptomatic carriers will unknowingly spread the virus and keep fueling its exponential growth.

So why is the United States so uniquely incapable of confronting this pandemic as efficiently or effectively as China, South Korea, Germany or other countries? The lack of a national, publicly-funded universal health system is a critical deficiency. But our persistent inability to set one up is itself the result of other dysfunctional aspects of American society, including the corruption of our political system by powerful commercial and class interests and the American “exceptionalism” that blinds us to what we can learn from other countries.

Also, the military occupation of the American mind has brainwashed Americans with strictly military concepts of “defense” and “security,” perverting federal spending priorities in the interest of war and militarism at the expense of all our country’s other vital needs, including the health of Americans.

Why can’t we just bomb the virus?

Of course this question is ridiculous. But this is how U.S. leaders respond to every danger we face, with massive diversions of our national resources to the military-industrial complex (MIC) that leave this otherwise wealthy country starved of resources to tackle problems our leaders can’t pretend to solve with weapons and war. Depending what is counted as “defense” spending, it accounts for up to two-thirds of federal discretionary spending. Even now, a bailout for Boeing, the 2nd largest U.S. weapons maker, is more important to Mr. Trump and many in Congress than helping American families get through this crisis.

At the end of the Cold War in 1989, senior officials told the Senate Budget Committee that the U.S. military budget could safely be cut by 50% over the next ten years. Committee chairman Jim Sasser hailed the moment as “the dawn of the primacy of domestic economics.” But by 2000, the influence of the military-industrial complex had shrunk the “peace dividend” to only a 22% reduction in military spending from 1990 (after adjusting for inflation).

Then, in 2001, the military-industrial complex seized on the crime of the new century by 19 mainly Saudi young men armed only with box-cutters to launch new wars and the most expensive U.S. military build-up since World War Two. As former Nuremberg war crimes prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz said at the time, this was not a legitimate response to the crimes of September 11th. “It is never a legitimate response to punish people who are not responsible for the wrong done,” Ferencz told NPR. “If you simply retaliate en masse by bombing Afghanistan, let us say, or the Taliban, you will kill many people who don’t approve of what has happened.”

Despite the abject, bloody failure of the so-called “Global War on Terror,” the opportunistic military-build-up it served to justify still wins every budget battle in Washington. After adjusting for inflation, the 2020 U.S. military budget is 59% higher than in 2000, and 23% higher than it was in 1990.

Over the past 20 years (in 2020 dollars), the U.S. has allocated $4.7 trillion more to the Pentagon than if it had just maintained its budget at the same level since 2000. Even between 1998 and 2010, as Carl Conetta documented in his paper, An Undisciplined Defense: Understanding the $2 Trillion Surge in US Defense Spending, actual war spending was matched dollar for dollar by unrelated additional military spending, mostly increased procurement spending to develop and buy very expensive new warships for the Navy, budget-busting warplanes like the F-35 fighter for the Air Force, and a wish-list of new weapons and equipment for every branch of the military.

Since 2010, this unprecedented diversion of our national resources to the military-industrial complex has outstripped actual war spending even further. Obama spent more on the military than Bush, and now Trump is spending even more. In addition to $4.7 trillion in extra Pentagon spending, U.S. wars and militarism have cost $1.3 trillion more for Veterans Affairs since 2000 (also adjusted for inflation), as Americans predictably come home from America’s wars needing levels of medical care that the U.S. does not otherwise provide to its people.

All that money is gone now, just as surely as if it had been heaped up somewhere in Afghanistan and incinerated by a few of the 80,000 bombs the U.S. has dropped on that poor country since 2001. So we do not have it to spend on public hospitals, ventilators, medical training, Covid-19 tests or any of the things we so desperately need in this distinctly non-military crisis.

Our $6 trillion have been utterly wasted – or worse. The U.S. war on terror did not defeat or end terrorism. It only fueled an endless spiral of violence and chaos across the world. The U.S. war machine has destroyed country after country: Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Yemen – but it has never rebuilt or brought peace to any of them. Meanwhile, Russia and China have built effective 21st century defenses against America’s obsolete war machine at a small fraction of its cost.

As countries around the world face the common danger of Covid-19, perhaps the most cynical response of all has been the U.S. government’s decision to impose even more brutal sanctions on Iran, one of the worst-hit countries, already deprived of life-saving medicines and other resources by existing U.S. sanctions.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has called for an immediate ceasefire in every war during this crisis, and for the U.S. to lift its deadly sanctions on all our neighbors around the world. That should include Iran; North Korea; Sudan; Syria; Venezuela; Zimbabwe; and not least Cuba, which is playing a courageous and active role in fighting the pandemic, rescuing the passengers of an infected British cruise ship that was refused entry by the U.S. and other countries, and sending medical teams to Italy and other infected countries around the world.

The 21st Century Command Economy

The “command economy” was a derisive term used to criticize the centrally planned economies of Eastern Europe during the Cold War. But economist Eric Schutz used the 21st Century Command Economy as a subtitle for his 2001 book Markets and Power, in which he analyzed the effects of the dominant market power of monopolistic multinational corporations on the U.S. economy.

As Schutz explained, neoliberal (or neoclassical) economic theory ignores a critical factor in the “free” markets a generation of Americans have been taught to revere. This ignored factor is power.  As more and more aspects of American life are entrusted to the mythical “invisible hand” of the market, the most powerful players in every market are free to use their market power to concentrate wealth and even greater market power in their own (not so invisible) hands, driving smaller competitors out of business and exploiting other stakeholders: customers; employees; suppliers; governments; and local communities.

Since 1980, every sector of the U.S. economy has been gradually taken over by fewer and fewer larger and larger corporations, with a predictably debilitating effect on American life: fewer opportunities for small business; diminishing investment in public infrastructure and services; shrinking or stagnant wages; rising rents; privatization of education and healthcare; the destruction of local communities; and the systematic corruption of politics. Critical decisions that affect all our lives are now made primarily at the bidding and in the interests of big banks, big pharma, big tech, big ag, big developers, the military-industrial complex and the wealthiest 1% of Americans.

The infamous revolving door through which senior officials move between the military, lobbying firms, corporate boards, Congress and the executive branch is duplicated in every sector of the economy. Liz Fowler, who wrote the “Affordable Care Act” as a Senate and White House staffer, was a senior executive at Wellpoint Health (now Anthem), the parent company of Blue Cross-Blue Shield, which now rakes in billions in federal subsidies under the law she wrote. She then returned to the “industry” as an executive at Johnson & Johnson – just as James “Mad Dog” Mattis returned to his seat on the board at General Dynamics to reap the rewards of his “public service” as Secretary of Defense.

Whatever mix of capitalism and socialism each American may favor as a model for the U.S. economy, very few Americans would pick this corrupt 21st century command economy as the system they would choose to live under. How many American politicians would win election if they honestly told voters that this is the system they believe in and plan to promote?

We are living in a society in which everybody knows the deal is rotten, as the Leonard Cohen song goes, and yet we remain lost in a hall of mirrors, victims of a “divide and rule” strategy by which the wealthy and powerful control politics and the media along with every other sector of this 21st century command economy. Trump, Biden and Congressional leaders are just their latest figureheads, demonizing and arguing with each other as they and their paymasters laugh all the way to the bank.

There is a savage irony in the way the Democratic Party closed ranks around Biden just as Covid-19 appeared on the scene. A month ago, it seemed that 2020 might be the year Americans would finally blow away the well-funded smoke and mirrors of the for-profit U.S. health insurance industry and achieve universal publicly-funded healthcare. Instead, Democratic leaders appear to be settling for the lesser evil of another humiliating defeat and four more years of Trump over (to their minds) the greater danger of a Sanders presidency and universal healthcare.

But now this exceptionally dysfunctional society has run smack-bang into a real force of nature, a tiny virus that can kill millions of people. Other countries are rising to this exacting test of their healthcare and social systems more successfully than we are. So will we finally wake up from our American dream, open our eyes and start learning from our neighbors in other countries, including ones that have different political, economic and healthcare systems than ours? Our lives may depend on it.

Nicolas J S Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. He is a freelance journalist and a researcher for CODEPINK.

27 March 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

Twenty-three-year-old American peace activist Rachel Corrie was killed by an Israeli bulldozer that was preparing to demolish a Palestinian home in the Gaza Strip in 2003. The Head of the Popular Committee against the Israeli Siege on Gaza said on the occasion of Rachel Corrie’s death anniversary that the 17th anniversary of Rachel Corrie’s death should spur heightened global solidarity with Palestine. He asserted: “The world must listen to Corrie’s voice which still resonates around the world.” The 23-year-old solidarity activist confronted the ugly, cruel Israeli occupation forces in order to protect a Palestinian family from becoming homeless. Corrie’s family now calls for international solidarity movements to intensify their efforts to save the Gaza Strip from the worsening humanitarian and economic crises which overwhelm it: “We hope to see popular, institutional and parliamentarian moves having a tangible impact at the official level,” he added. “Such efforts must lead to real pressure on the Israeli government in order to end its siege imposed on the Gaza Strip. We will never forget Rachel Corrie and her sacrifice to achieve justice and protect the Palestinians.”

“Happy birthday” Rachel Corrie

Palestine remembers Rachel Corrie –
Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]

“Happy Birthday, Rachel!” This is what she would have heard in her hometown, Olympia, Washington. Her family and friends would have cheerfully flocked around her as she blew out forty candles on April 10, 2019. However, Rachel Corrie deserves a warm international celebration on this day to appreciate her dedication to expressing the value of solidarity.

Rachel Corrie, who was born to a middle-class American family on April 10, 1979, could have had a normal life in which she did not care about what was going on in her world, but she knew she had a responsibility to express and take action, imposed on her by her humanity and values. Rachel expressed her moral responsibilities as a child, as revealed in the moving speech she gave when she was 10, known as the fifth-grade speech. She talked about childhood pains in her world and the need to take action. “I’m here for other children. I’m here because I care. I’m here because children everywhere are suffering,” she said in 1990. This schoolgirl grew up with an alert human conscience, and as a university student, she joined the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). She joined at a time when the Israeli occupation forces were committing constant killings and daily widespread destruction campaigns in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

On one of her trips, the American woman travelled to the Gaza Strip. She saw the Israeli army’s armoured bulldozers destroying Palestinian homes and razing their agricultural land. On March 16, 2003, Corrie held the loudspeaker and by one of the army’s bulldozer in Al-Salam neighbourhood in Rafah, located near the Egyptian border in the southern part of Gaza. She repeatedly urged them to stop the destruction, which, throughout a few years, led to the destruction of the basic life needs for thousands of Palestinians in Rafah alone. Some Israeli commentators described the destruction of houses and civilian facilities and the bulldozing of trees and farmlands as giving the area a “zero buzz cut” because it removed everything in their path.

Rachel Corrie wore an orange high visibility vest, required to identify her as a volunteer in solidarity work, as she issued multiple appeals. However, the bulldozer continued to approach her without slowing down until it crushed this 24-year-old American civil activist. This tragedy embodied how the successive Israeli governments and its military forces typically behaved, i.e. disregard for international appeals and their continued occupation, oppression, war crimes, and countless violations without any regard for any appeals.

The Israeli occupation army resorted to its habit of evading responsibility for this crime by opening an investigation into what happened and absolved itself from causing the brutal murder of Corrie. It considered it to be an unintended accident. This conclusion was rejected by the most prominent human rights organisations in the world, including Israeli and Palestinian organisations. In 2012, an Israeli court acquitted the occupation army and the bulldozer driver of any responsibility for what happened after Rachel’s parents filed a lawsuit in this regard. This was denounced by the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Richard Falk. It is sickening that the Israeli reports continued to downplay the crime, justify it, and even blame the victim, even though the army bulldozer driver buried Rachel Corrie alive as she screamed into the loudspeaker while wearing her orange vest, visible to everyone.

Time did not stop on March 16, 2003, the day on which the tragic incident occurred in Rafah. Rachel Corrie grew in the human conscience and became a symbol of solidarity in the world after she was buried alive as the price for her solidarity. As for her family, they are no longer just the loving family living in Olympia, as Rachel has become an inspirational international icon. She has also become a Palestinian given her attachment to a fair cause that cannot be extinguished. Her name lives in Palestine in the names of many facilities.

It is true that President Donald Trump will not find time on Rachel’s 40th birthday to commemorate his fellow American who was brutally crushed by the Israeli occupation army, while the congressional sessions will avoid mentioning her name on this occasion. However, through this young brave woman, America presented a loyal face in its international expression of noble human values, as Rachel Corrie’s name inspired a generation of solidarity activists after her who then carried loudspeakers to defend human rights, justice, and the people’s freedoms and to combat injustice, aggression and war crimes.

On April 10, 2019, there will be an international celebration honouring the sacrifices of activists showing solidarity with Palestine around the world, with forty candles for Rachel Corrie.

My name is Rachel Corrie

My Name is Rachel Corrie, being showed at the Young Vic in London, is based on the emails and diary entries of the pro-Palestinian activist, which first premiered at London’s Royal Court in 2005. The play was originally put together by the late Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner, now the editor of the Guardian.

Unsurprisingly the plays reproduction has come under strong criticism from Pro-Israeli groups. Fury at the revival of the play has stirred all kinds of controversy such that supporters of Israel in the UK are piling pressure on the Young Vic for staging the play. The Vic’s artistic director David Lan, who is Jewish, felt compelled to come to the theatre’s defence saying: “Gaza is a wound to the planet from which so many people are suffering.” Aside from the nuisance of having Pro-Israeli activists shoving propaganda leaflets smearing the memory of Corrie towards you at the entrance of the theatre, the hour and half long immersion into Corrie’s mind is a memorable experience.

The play brilliantly darts through the diaries of Corrie from her early teens through to the period of her untimely death. Directed by an award winning director, Josh Roche, and wonderfully performed by British actor Erin Doherty, viewers are exposed to a visceral representation of the brutality of Israeli occupation seen through the eyes of an activist searching for her place in life. It brings to life defining moments in the campaigner’s personal journey as she grapples with her own sense of privilege in contrasted with the indignity and poverty she saw in Gaza.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20171026-my-name-is-rachel-corrie/.

22 March 2020

Source: palestineupdates.com

By Dr Ramzy Baroud

The Middle East region, battered by wars and adjoining humanitarian crises that have left millions of people stateless, hungry and diseased, is in urgent need for peace, security and reconstruction. Thanks to the US, Russian, French, Israeli and other weapons manufacturers, however, it is now the dumping ground for military hardware, an ominous sign for the years ahead.

Data released by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) on March 9, paints a grim picture of the world, in general, and the Middle East, in particular. According to the report, the demand for weapons in the warring region has increased by a whopping 61% between 2015 and 2019.

The correlation between arms, war, and casualty count needs no elaborate algorithm to be deciphered, as facts on the ground amply demonstrate. Syria remains the epicenter of conflict in the Middle East, with Libya, Yemen, Iraq, Palestine, and South Sudan trailing, but not far behind.

The top five merchants of death, according to SIPRI, are the United States, Russia, France, Germany, and China. Interestingly, while US arms exports have increased exponentially by 76% in the last five years, Russia’s arms exports fell by 18%.

The US market is in constant expansion as it now includes 96 client countries, while Russia has, essentially, lost one of its most significant clients, India.

Ruled by a right-wing Hindu nationalist government, Delhi has found in Tel Aviv a more ideologically like-minded supplier. The special ‘friendship’ between India’s Narendra Modi and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu has made India Israel’s largest weapons market.

In 2017, Israel’s arms exports reached a record high of $9 billion dollars, following the signing of a $2 billion deal with India. The contracts awarded to the Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) were considered the “single largest deal ever signed by the Israeli arms industry.”

With India becoming the largest importer of Israeli arms in the world, Israel is now a secondary party in the protracted conflict between India and Pakistan. The two nuclear-armed countries edged closer to the abyss of a full-blown war in March 2019. Naturally, Israeli weapons, now featured prominently in India’s military arsenal, will play a major role in sustaining any future conflict.

According to the newly-released data, Israel is only second to South Korea in terms of the vast expansion of weapons exports, as Israel’s weapons manufacturing industry has experienced an unprecedented boom in recent years. SIPRI puts that increase at 77%.

Last year, the International Defense Cooperation Directorate of the Israeli Ministry of Defense (SIBAT), which is the cornerstone of Israel’s weapon manufacturing, testing and export, released a comprehensive plan aimed at the expansion of Israel’s global weapons market, with due focus on the US, Finland and India.

What makes Israeli weapons more attractive than others is the fact that they are not accompanied by any political price tag. In other words, Israel is willing to sell weapons to any country, or even non-state actors, openly or secretly, regardless of how these weapons are used and whether their use violates human rights or not.

In May 2019, Amnesty International’s Israeli chapter released an in-depth report that examined Israel’s weapons export markets. Contrary to the claim by Rachel Chen, head of the Israeli Defense Export Controls Agency, that “we will carefully examine the state of human rights in each country before approving export licenses for selling them weapons,” Israel is known for peddling its weapons to the world’s most notorious human rights violators. The list includes Myanmar, Philippines, South Sudan, and Sri Lanka.

A damning proof to the above claim is a statement made by Philippines President, Rodrigo Duterte, who is known for his dismal human rights record, on September 4, 2018, during his highly touted visit to Israel. Duterte told Israeli President, Reuven Rivlin, that the Philippines “would henceforth only buy weapons from Israel due to its lack of restrictions,” ‘Times of Israel’ reported.

The US is “a good friend,” Duterte said, but like Germany and China, US weapons come with certain “limitations”.

Considering that Washington provides Israel with over $3 billion worth of weapons annually that are used freely against occupied Palestinians and other Arab nations with no regard whatsoever for international or humanitarian law, one has to marvel at Duterte’s statement.

It is logical to assume that a country that sells weapons to civil war-torn and extremely impoverished South Sudan, has not an iota of regulations, let alone moral standards.

What is unique about the export of Israel’s weapons and so-called ‘security technology’ to the rest of the world, is that they often appear in regions where people are most oppressed and vulnerable. For example, Israeli companies have for years stood at the forefront of successive US administrations’ war on undocumented immigrants.

Moreover, recent years have witnessed the infusion of brutal Israeli military tactics in many aspects of American society, including the militarization of American police, thousands of whom received training in Israel.

Similarly, in 2018, Israeli war technology was incorporated to the European Union’s security apparatus. One such contract was awarded to the Israeli company Elbit, estimated at $68 million, to provide maritime unmanned aircraft system (UAS) services. This technology, which relies on the Hermes 900 Maritime Patrol system, allows Frontex – the European Border and Coast Guard Agency – to intercept war refugees and migrants in their attempts to cross into safer European territories.

Interestingly, the EU has purchased from Israel the same deadly technology that the Israeli army has used against Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip during Israel’s so-called ‘Protective Edge’ war of 2014.

The latter fact represents the backbone of Israel’s marketing strategy. Branding its military products as ‘combat-proven’, Tel Aviv is able to obtain top dollar for its bloody technology, as it is able to demonstrate, using actual footage, how its armed drones, for example, can flatten whole Palestinian neighborhoods in seconds and return safely to their bases inside Israel.

SIPRI and Amnesty International are right in exposing Israel’s thriving weapons exports market, while emphasizing the fact that much of these weapons proliferate freely among human rights violators. But far greater focus should be placed on the fact that Israel is, itself, a notorious human rights violator that should be held accountable for its crimes against Palestinians, who are often used as guinea pigs in the testing stage of Israel’s technology of death.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle.

24 March 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

By Sally Dugman

First, this information at the link below in its second half conforms to the “secret” information that my nephew knows. His is from US government sources that indicate that half of Americans will likely get the virus.

Second, his father is writing an exam for tomorrow for some of his approximately 120 students. He is concerned that the remote viewing online might not work and that some of the students may cheat using books and such. So he is doing all that he can to make corrections for both contingencies.

Third, remember the 2008 bailout. Remember AIG throwing a big vacation overseas for executives while not helping mid and low level workers with that money? Well, it is happening again. Redux. .

Darling Donald Trump and miserable Mitch McConnell have the same plan in place with no contingency to bail out workers with corporate given funds when giving the money to corporations, and no tracking measurements for the ways that the money is used. Way to go NOT! … Absolutely no tabulations on the way that the bailout money is spent! And who is on the hook for it? Taxpayers.

Fourth, the man who owns a pizza shop was practically crying last night. He does not live high on the hog, but doesn’t have spare money to tide his family over. Yet nobody at all except a few people come to his eatery any more. … Yes, I ate pizza last night from his place that’s a few miles from my home. Nothing except takeout, of course.

Fifth, my sister daily takes a Facebook exercise class using her husband’s account since she has no Facebook account like me with none. The class comes out of NY and she is in MD. With the shelter in place conditions, it’s a case of “use it or lose it” with your body nonetheless.

Karen C. from elder services in Worcester, MA called me recently. She phoned to inquire about whether I needed food, medicine or some other critical provision such as visits for home care providers and physical therapy. This is because she was calling to all people whom she knows and will make sure that they will get whatever that they need.

She’ll even go out herself to provide whatever may be needed after she dons her mask and gloves. … Yes, we all need to step up in troubled times. Fortunately, some of us like Karen go all out. They are willing even to personally handle emergencies even when it puts themselves at risk.

At https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1239975682643357696.html:
To read more than the analysis below, please go to the link. The second half of the article is excellent and is applicable to many countries.

Excerpted:

This mitigation strategy is what you’ve seen a lot of people talking about when they say we should “flatten the curve”: try to slow the spread of the disease to the people most likely to die from it, to avoid overwhelming hospitals. And it does flatten the curve — but not nearly enough. The death rate from the disease is cut in half, but it still kills 1.1 million Americans all by itself. The peak need for ventilators falls by two-thirds, but it still exceeds the number of ventilators in the US by 8 times.

Sally Dugman lives in MA, USA.

24 March 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

By Robert Stevens

More than 10,000 people have been killed by coronavirus across the European continent. The gruesome milestone has been reached just five weeks after the first death was recorded on the continent, in France, on February 15.

With yesterday’s 1,414 new deaths, the total for the entire continent reached 10,220 deaths from 192,663 cases. Among the European Union’s 27 countries, 9,720 deaths have been recorded from 172,407 cases.

In Italy, 601 new fatalities brought the total to 6,077 deaths. Almost 5,000 new cases of the virus were reported. Many more lives are threatened even before these new cases, with 50, 418 active cases and 3,204 classed as “serious, critical.” All told 63,927 people have been infected in Italy.

In Spain, the death toll reached 2,206, with 434 new deaths reported, up from 391 the previous day. There were 4,321 new cases making for a total of 27,528 active cases. Some 2,355 are classed as serious, critical.

The inability of health and social care services across Europe to cope with the destructive impact of the virus—after decades of being underfunded, privatised and de-staffed—saw soldiers, who were drafted in to provide disinfecting and run residential homes in Spain, find elderly people dead in their beds, abandoned to their fate with the country under a strict lockdown.

In France, there were 186 new deaths, an increase over the previous day’s 112, bringing the total to 860. The deaths included another two medics, one a GP and the other a gynaecologist. There are over 13,000 active cases in the country, 8,675 people in hospital and 2,082 people in critical condition.

A further 34 people perished in the Netherlands, bringing the total to 213, and 24 people died in Germany, bringing fatalities to 118.

In the UK, after it was announced that 54 more people had died, and 335 in total, Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a lockdown of the country Monday evening. People can only leave their homes for “very limited purposes” including “shopping for basic necessities, as infrequently as possible” and “one form of exercise a day.” Only two people can be together, unless they live in the same household. Police can enforce the lockdown, “including through fines and dispersing gatherings,” said Johnson.

The Foreign Office advised the up to 1 million Britons on holiday or on business trips abroad to return to the UK immediately. They warned that otherwise there would likely be no more commercial flights available with air routes likely shutting without warning over Tuesday and Wednesday.

Johnson’s government has refused to take a number of critical measures to stop the spread of the virus. Its original plan, before being forced to retreat, was to allow the mass infection of the population supposedly in order to achieve “herd immunity.” The government still advises all who suspect they have the virus not to seek treatment in hospital, but to “self-isolate” at home—without being tested.

More evidence is emerging that those who are contracting the virus and in some cases dying are from many age ranges, including younger, fitter people, from a baby who was born with the virus to a group of three 30-year-old junior doctors in the same UK hospital who were diagnosed Sunday and required ventilators.

In response, the ruling elite is putting into operation draconian attacks on civil liberties that set a dangerous precedent, while providing no real medical assistance.

Yesterday, the Johnson government was able to pass all stages, in the House of Commons, of the Emergency Coronavirus Bill, under which he and his ministers are granted extraordinary authoritarian powers, including banning any assembly of people, at any time and place.

This week, Hungary’s parliament will hear a bill under which far-right prime minister Viktor Orbán is set to receive dictatorial powers enabling him to rule by decree. The powers provide no defined cut-off date and include imprisoning those deemed to be spreading “fake news” for prison terms of up to five years.

No government in Europe or internationally is carrying out the mass testing required to successfully quarantine and then treat those infected, who may not be showing symptoms, but who are still spreading COVID-19. Even front-line medical staff are not being tested. Due to health service cuts, there is hopelessly inadequate provision of basic medical facilities, including ventilators and personal protective equipment (PPE) for staff.

In contrast the banks, corporations and super-rich are being granted bailouts that eclipse those granted to the bankers and financial institutions after the 2008 global financial crash. In recent days, Germany, France, Britain and Spain have announced massive subventions to big business, under conditions in which millions of workers have already been laid off, with only those in essential services now employed in most European countries.

Well over a trillion euros have been made available in a matter of days to prop up the financial aristocracy and corporate billionaires. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government has made available a package worth around €750 billion to protect Germany’s banks and major corporations. Emmanuel Macron’s French government committed €300 billion and Johnson’s Chancellor Rishi Sunak £350 billion.

Spain’s Socialist Party prime minister Pedro Sánchez has committed $219 billion to the corporations, including €100 billion of guarantees for company loans. A further €17 billion of direct support for enterprises is available and €83 billion is reportedly being reserved for private sector investment.

These represent a gigantic raid on the public purse for the second time in a decade. Germany’s bailout is the equivalent of 20.5 percent of GDP, Spain’s 15.6 percent, the UK’s 15 percent.

These bailouts followed the lead of the European Central Bank, which last week announced a €750 billion new money-printing programme aimed at keeping financial markets afloat. The ECB is committed to buying government debt and private securities with the new funds by the end of this year.

These vast sums are just a down payment, with government officials in treasuries in the main European counties stressing that there will be “unlimited” funds available. This was confirmed yesterday as Johnson’s government agreed to nationalise the losses of every private rail franchise in Britain for the next six months initially. This transfers all revenue and cost risk to the government but leaves private firms able to still reap profits and to be paid a management fee under an “emergency measures agreement.”

Workers throughout Europe must demand a programme directly opposed to that of the corporations and the governments that act on their behalf. They must reject this unprecedented bleeding dry of the public purse for the purpose of funding big business and the bankers. These entities must be taken under public control and run by the working class in the interests of society.

In a statement Monday, “The spread of the pandemic and the lessons of the past week,” the WSWS proposed the measures necessary for workers to take forward the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic: “The working class must demand universal testing and free and equal access to health care; the closure of all nonessential production, with full income to those affected; safe working conditions in industries essential to the functioning of society; and an emergency program to build health care infrastructure and ensure that all medical workers have access to the necessary equipment.”

Originally published by WSWS.org

24 March 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

By Alex Lantier

The coronavirus pandemic surged across Europe this weekend, with more than 2,600 deaths, the majority of them in Italy, followed by Spain, France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. The weekend toll by itself nearly equaled the entire three-month death toll in China, where the epidemic began.

On Sunday alone there were 1,287 deaths and 17,303 new cases, with Italy, Spain and France all seeing record numbers of deaths from the epidemic. The total for the continent as a whole reached 168,803 cases and 8,785 deaths.

The toll from the pandemic in Europe has now reached more than double the impact in China, which saw 81,054 cases and 3,261 deaths. Worldwide, there have been 335,377 declared cases of coronavirus and 14,611 deaths.

A third major epicenter is Iran, where there have been at least 21,638 cases including 1,685 deaths, while the number of cases in the United States has skyrocketed to more than 32,000, with 400 deaths. There is also a rapid growth in the number of cases in Africa and Latin America.

Though Italy, Spain and France are under country-wide lockdown, as well as large parts of Germany, the contagion is spreading relentlessly across Europe, after governments refused for weeks to adopt shelter-in-place orders or make any serious effort to actually stop the contagion by combining lockdowns with testing, contact-tracing and quarantining all those either infected or in contact with the infected.

Italy, Europe’s worst-hit country for now, saw 5,560 new cases and 651 deaths on Sunday after 6,557 new cases and a record 793 deaths on Saturday, for 59,138 cases overall and 5,476 deaths. On Saturday, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte announced that all factories would close indefinitely except for those “strictly necessary … to guarantee us essential goods and services.” Officials in Lombardy, the hardest-hit region, warned that stricter measures, like a ban on anyone leaving their homes, might be taken as hospitals continue to be flooded with critically ill patients gasping for air.

While Russian military aid and a group of Cuban doctors arrived in Italy, the European Union (EU) still refuses to provide aid to the devastated country. A diplomatic incident ensued this weekend over the theft of a shipment of 680,000 Chinese face masks to Italy in the Czech Republic, whose government initially denied that anything had been stolen. The Czech government is now sending masks and respirators to Italy, however.

Italian health officials pointed to the slight fall in the number of infected and of deaths on Sunday, as well as the fact that only 30.4 percent of new cases were in Lombardy, as signs the contagion might be slowing. The incubation period of the virus typically ranges from three to seven days and can go up to 14. As confinement orders to prevent further spread of the disease took effect over a week ago, many of those already infected and incubating the virus at that time could be expected to have already started showing symptoms.

However, officials also warned not to take false hope. “I hope and we all hope that these figures can be borne out in the coming days. But do not let your guard down,” commented Italian civil protection service chief Angelo Borrelli.

In Spain, there were 3,925 new cases and 288 deaths Saturday and 3,107 new cases and 375 deaths Sunday, bringing the total to 28,603 cases and 1,756 deaths. One of those who has fallen ill is the beloved opera singer, Placido Domingo, lately a target of the right-wing #MeToo movement. Moreover, 12 percent of the confirmed cases (3,475) are doctors, nurses or health staff, devastating the health system which is already flooded with patients in key areas such as Madrid.

On Saturday, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez warned that “the worst is to come.” As confined Spanish people banged on pots and pans to protest his handling of the pandemic, Sanchez pledged to organize more mass testing for coronavirus. The Sanchez government has prolonged Spain’s state of alarm and lockdown until at least April 11.

In France, where the first doctor died of coronavirus in Compiègne, the total number of cases rose to 16,018 with 674 deaths, including 112 on Sunday alone. Health Minister Olivier Véran also said he believed the true number of cases in France is 30,000 to 90,000. However, he brazenly ignored calls from health professionals to carry out mass testing to identify and isolate all the sick before they can spread the disease to others. Instead, Véran said France would increase testing “once confinement orders are lifted,” that is, at some point in the indefinite future.

In Germany, officials are reportedly considering a nationwide lockdown as the number of sick rose 2,488 on Sunday to 24,852. Amid growing fears of coronavirus infections in rest homes, nine elderly residents of a home have died and thirty people have been infected, including some of the rest home’s staff, in the town of Würzburg, where 166 people have already fallen ill. Among those now self-isolating, moreover, is German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who reportedly came into contact with a doctor who later tested positive for the virus.

In Britain, 48 people died and 665 fell ill on Sunday, bringing the total to 281 deaths and 5,683 cases—including the first teenager to die of coronavirus in Britain, aged 18.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson came under growing criticism for his refusal to act against the pandemic. After his scientific advisor Patrick Vallance said it was “not desirable” to prevent Britons from contracting the disease—claiming this would prevent them from becoming immune—Johnson was forced to deny a Sunday Times report that his far-right adviser Dominic Cummings had argued to “let old people die.”

The pandemic is rapidly bringing to the fore deep class divisions internationally. The financial aristocracy is determined to let the disease run its course, so long as they are able to emerge richer than ever before. While the European Central Bank has printed €750 billion since the pandemic began to bail out stock markets and the super-rich, and national states are offering hundreds of billions of euros in financial guarantees for the corporations, businesses across Europe demand workers stay on the job to keep making profits for them.

Anger is mounting among health workers and industrial workers, however, at the ruling elite’s irresponsible attitude to this deadly pandemic. Amazon has stopped shipping non-essential products in Italy, after strikes last week and threats of strike action by Amazon workers in France.

After a wave of wildcat strikes in Italy forced Conte to adopt the initial confinement order, health professionals are bitterly criticizing decades-long EU austerity policies that have slashed health budgets and devastated hospitals .

In Spain, a hospital supply purchaser spoke to El Espanol to criticize Sanchez’s Spanish Socialist Party-Podemos government’s failure to order face masks and emergency respirators. “He did not buy them on time, it is a scandal,” he said. “In the meantime they were debating about local elections in the Basque Country and Galicia or asking whether the Montero law on sexual freedom was creating conflict in the ruling coalition. What stupidities, with coronavirus looming over it all! What a waste of time!”

In France, a group of 600 doctors has sued Prime Minister Edouard Philippe and former Health Minister Agnès Buzyn before the Republic’s Court of Justice (CJR) over their handling of the pandemic. They are accusing Philippe and Buzyn of having “voluntarily abstained from taking or launching measures” against “a danger for the security of persons.” After Buzyn admitted she had warned Philippe of the danger of a pandemic since January, the group is demanding a criminal investigation of Philippe and the seizure of his computers.

Amid growing class conflict, as workers clash with the state and the banks to try to secure social resources to fight the pandemic, the ruling elite—assisted by the union bureaucracy and its pseudo-left political allies—is moving to suppress opposition. Obsessed with giving handouts to the banks and the super-rich, it is preparing attacks on wages and basic social and democratic rights and accelerating moves towards authoritarian forms of rule.

As Portugal’s social-democratic government voted a state of emergency on March 18, suspending the constitutional right to strike for the first time since the fall of the fascist Salazar dictatorship in 1974, Spain deployed the army at home to enforce the state of alarm. In France, the government adopted a bill for a new state of emergency during the coronavirus crisis that allows businesses to slash a week of vacation and eliminate restrictions on the length of the workweek—even after the coronavirus crisis is over. These measures emerged from talks between business and the unions.

In Germany on Friday, the IG Metall union used the coronavirus crisis as a pretext to abandon talks with employers and accept contracts with no wage increases—claiming this was necessary to protect business activity. Left Party official Dietmar Bartsch hailed Merkel’s policies, tweeting, “The Left party fraction will support all measures that demand solidarity to avoid damage to the nation, people and the economy.”

The defense of workers’ health, livelihoods and democratic rights after years of EU austerity and police-state repression demands a social revolution and a break with this rotten establishment. The struggle to stem the pandemic, obtain decent wages during lock-downs, and obtain free and decent medical coverage for all is an international political struggle. This requires the organization of the working class across Europe and internationally in rank-and-file committees of action, independent of the unions, and a struggle to transfer political power to the working class.

Originally published by WSWS.org

23 March 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

By Arundhati Roy

Beloved friends, comrades and my fellow writers,

This place where we are gathered today is only a short bus ride away from where four days ago a fascist mob, fired up by speeches made by members of the Ruling Party, backed up and actively assisted by the police, assured of round the clock support by a vast section of the electronic mass media, and comforted by the belief that the courts would do nothing to come in their way – mounted an armed, murderous attack on Muslims in the working class colonies of North East Delhi.

The attack had been in the air for a while, so people were somewhat prepared, and so defended themselves. Markets, shops, homes, mosques and vehicles have been burnt down. The streets are full of stones and debris. The hospitals are full of the wounded and dying. The morgues are full of the dead. Both Muslim and Hindu, including a policeman and a young staffer of the Intelligence Bureau. Yes. People on both sides have shown themselves capable of horrifying brutality as well as unbelievable courage and kindness.

However, there can be no equivalence here. None of this alters the fact that the attack was begun by lumpen mobs chanting “Jai Shri Ram” backed by the apparatus of this now nakedly fascist state. Notwithstanding these slogans, this is not what people like to label a Hindu-Muslim “riot”. It is a manifestation of the ongoing battle between fascists and anti-fascists – in which Muslims are the first among the Fascists’ “enemies”. To call it a riot or a “danga”, or “Left” versus “Right” or even “Right” versus “Wrong” as many are doing, is dangerous and obfuscatory.

We have all seen the videos of the police standing by and sometimes participating in the arson. We have seen them smashing CCTV cameras, just as they did when they vandalised the Jamia Millia Islamia University library on December 15. We have seen them beat wounded Muslim men as they lay piled up against each other and force them to sing the national anthem. We know that one of those young men is dead. All the dead, wounded and devastated, Muslim as well as Hindu are victims of this regime headed by Narendra Modi, our nakedly fascist Prime Minister who himself is no stranger to being at the helm of affairs in a state when 18 years ago a massacre on a much larger scale went on for weeks.

The anatomy of this particular conflagration will be studied for years to come. But the local detail will only be a matter of historical record because the ripples based on hateful rumours fuelled on the social media have begun to eddy outwards and we can already smell more blood on the breeze. Although there have been no more killings in North Delhi, yesterday (February 29) saw mobs of people in Central Delhi chanting the slogan that built up to the attacks: “Desh ke Gaddaron ko, Goli maaron saalon ko.”

Only a few days ago. the Delhi High Court Judge, Justice Muralidharan was furious with the Delhi Police for having taken no action against Kapil Mishra, former BJP MLA candidate who had earlier too used it as an election slogan. On the night of February 26, the judge was given midnight orders to take up his new assignment in the Punjab High Court. Kapil Mishra is back on the streets chanting the same slogan. It can now be used until further notice. Fun and games with judges isn’t new. We know the story about Justice Loya. We may have forgotten the story of Babu Bajrangi, convicted of participating in the killing 96 Muslims in Naroda Patiya, in Gujarat in 2002. Listen to him on YouTube: He’ll tell you how “Narendra bhai” got him out of jail because of “setting” the judges.

We have learned to expect massacres such as this one before elections – they have become a sort of barbaric election campaign to polarise votes and build constituencies. But the Delhi massacre happened just days after an election, after the BJP-RSS suffered a humiliating defeat. It is a punishment for Delhi and an announcement for the coming elections in Bihar.

Everything is on record. Everything is available for everyone to see and hear – the provocative speeches of Kapil Mishra, Parvesh Verma, Union Minister Anurag Thakur, Chief Minister of UP Yogi Adityanath, the Home Minister Amit Shah and even the Prime Minister himself. And yet everything has been turned upside down – it’s being made to appear as though all of India is a victim of the absolutely peaceful, mostly female, mostly – but not only – Muslim protestors who have been out on the streets for almost 75 days, in their tens of thousands, to protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act.

The CAA, which offers a fast-track route to citizenship for non-Muslim minorities, is blatantly unconstitutional and blatantly anti-Muslim. Coupled with the National Population Register and the National Register of Citizens, it is meant to delegitimise, destabilise and criminalise not just Muslims but hundreds of millions of Indians who do not have the requisite documents – including those who are chanting “Goli Maaro Saalon Ko” today.

Once citizenship comes into question, everything comes into question – your children’s rights, your voting rights, your land rights. As Hannah Arendt said, “citizenship gives you the right to have rights.” Anybody who thinks this is not the case, please turn your attention to Assam and see what has happened to twenty lakh people – Hindus, Muslims, Dalits, Adivasis. Now trouble has started between local tribes and the non-tribal population in the state of Meghalaya. There is curfew in Shillong. The state borders are closed to non-locals.

The sole purpose of the NPR-NRC-CAA is to destabilise and divide people not just in India but across the whole subcontinent. If they do indeed exist, these phantom millions of human beings who India’s current Home Minister calls Bangladeshi “termites”, cannot be kept in detention centres and cannot be deported. By using such terminology and by thinking up such a ridiculous, diabolic scheme, this government is actually endangering the tens of millions of Hindus who live in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan who they pretend to be concerned about, but who could suffer the backlash of this bigotry emanating from New Delhi.

Look where we have ended up.

‘This is our version of coronavirus, we are sick’, Arundhati Roy on Delhi violence
Muslim as well as Hindu are victims of the regime headed by our nakedly fascist PM Modi, she says
File photo of Arundhati Roy/Collected

Three days after the deadly violence killed at least 42 people and injured hundreds in northeast Delhi over citizenship law, India’s acclaimed author Arundhati Roy said, “This is our version of the coronavirus. We are sick.”

She made the remark while addressing a gathering at Jantar Mantar in Delhi on Sunday, reports Scroll.

Read her full speech below-

Beloved friends, comrades and my fellow writers,

This place where we are gathered today is only a short bus ride away from where four days ago a fascist mob, fired up by speeches made by members of the Ruling Party, backed up and actively assisted by the police, assured of round the clock support by a vast section of the electronic mass media, and comforted by the belief that the courts would do nothing to come in their way – mounted an armed, murderous attack on Muslims in the working class colonies of North East Delhi.

The attack had been in the air for a while, so people were somewhat prepared, and so defended themselves. Markets, shops, homes, mosques and vehicles have been burnt down. The streets are full of stones and debris. The hospitals are full of the wounded and dying. The morgues are full of the dead. Both Muslim and Hindu, including a policeman and a young staffer of the Intelligence Bureau. Yes. People on both sides have shown themselves capable of horrifying brutality as well as unbelievable courage and kindness.

However, there can be no equivalence here. None of this alters the fact that the attack was begun by lumpen mobs chanting “Jai Shri Ram” backed by the apparatus of this now nakedly fascist state. Notwithstanding these slogans, this is not what people like to label a Hindu-Muslim “riot”. It is a manifestation of the ongoing battle between fascists and anti-fascists – in which Muslims are the first among the Fascists’ “enemies”. To call it a riot or a “danga”, or “Left” versus “Right” or even “Right” versus “Wrong” as many are doing, is dangerous and obfuscatory.

We have all seen the videos of the police standing by and sometimes participating in the arson. We have seen them smashing CCTV cameras, just as they did when they vandalised the Jamia Millia Islamia University library on December 15. We have seen them beat wounded Muslim men as they lay piled up against each other and force them to sing the national anthem. We know that one of those young men is dead. All the dead, wounded and devastated, Muslim as well as Hindu are victims of this regime headed by Narendra Modi, our nakedly fascist Prime Minister who himself is no stranger to being at the helm of affairs in a state when 18 years ago a massacre on a much larger scale went on for weeks.

The anatomy of this particular conflagration will be studied for years to come. But the local detail will only be a matter of historical record because the ripples based on hateful rumours fuelled on the social media have begun to eddy outwards and we can already smell more blood on the breeze. Although there have been no more killings in North Delhi, yesterday (February 29) saw mobs of people in Central Delhi chanting the slogan that built up to the attacks: “Desh ke Gaddaron ko, Goli maaron saalon ko.”

Only a few days ago. the Delhi High Court Judge, Justice Muralidharan was furious with the Delhi Police for having taken no action against Kapil Mishra, former BJP MLA candidate who had earlier too used it as an election slogan. On the night of February 26, the judge was given midnight orders to take up his new assignment in the Punjab High Court. Kapil Mishra is back on the streets chanting the same slogan. It can now be used until further notice. Fun and games with judges isn’t new. We know the story about Justice Loya. We may have forgotten the story of Babu Bajrangi, convicted of participating in the killing 96 Muslims in Naroda Patiya, in Gujarat in 2002. Listen to him on YouTube: He’ll tell you how “Narendra bhai” got him out of jail because of “setting” the judges.

We have learned to expect massacres such as this one before elections – they have become a sort of barbaric election campaign to polarise votes and build constituencies. But the Delhi massacre happened just days after an election, after the BJP-RSS suffered a humiliating defeat. It is a punishment for Delhi and an announcement for the coming elections in Bihar.

Everything is on record. Everything is available for everyone to see and hear – the provocative speeches of Kapil Mishra, Parvesh Verma, Union Minister Anurag Thakur, Chief Minister of UP Yogi Adityanath, the Home Minister Amit Shah and even the Prime Minister himself. And yet everything has been turned upside down – it’s being made to appear as though all of India is a victim of the absolutely peaceful, mostly female, mostly – but not only – Muslim protestors who have been out on the streets for almost 75 days, in their tens of thousands, to protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act.

The CAA, which offers a fast-track route to citizenship for non-Muslim minorities, is blatantly unconstitutional and blatantly anti-Muslim. Coupled with the National Population Register and the National Register of Citizens, it is meant to delegitimise, destabilise and criminalise not just Muslims but hundreds of millions of Indians who do not have the requisite documents – including those who are chanting “Goli Maaro Saalon Ko” today.

Once citizenship comes into question, everything comes into question – your children’s rights, your voting rights, your land rights. As Hannah Arendt said, “citizenship gives you the right to have rights.” Anybody who thinks this is not the case, please turn your attention to Assam and see what has happened to twenty lakh people – Hindus, Muslims, Dalits, Adivasis. Now trouble has started between local tribes and the non-tribal population in the state of Meghalaya. There is curfew in Shillong. The state borders are closed to non-locals.

The sole purpose of the NPR-NRC-CAA is to destabilise and divide people not just in India but across the whole subcontinent. If they do indeed exist, these phantom millions of human beings who India’s current Home Minister calls Bangladeshi “termites”, cannot be kept in detention centres and cannot be deported. By using such terminology and by thinking up such a ridiculous, diabolic scheme, this government is actually endangering the tens of millions of Hindus who live in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan who they pretend to be concerned about, but who could suffer the backlash of this bigotry emanating from New Delhi.

Look where we have ended up.

In 1947, we won independence from colonial rule that was fought for by almost everybody with the exception of our current rulers. Since then all manner of social movements, anti-caste struggles, anti-capitalist struggles, feminist struggles have marked our journey up to now.

In the 1960s, the call to revolution was a demand for justice, for the redistribution of wealth and the overthrow of the ruling class.

By the 1990s, we were reduced to fighting against the displacement of millions of people from their own lands and villages, people who became the collateral damage for the building of a new India in which 63 of India’s richest people have more wealth than the annual budget outlay for 1,200 million people.

Now we are reduced to pleading for our rights as citizens from people who have had nothing to do with building this country. And as we plead, we watch the state withdraw its protection, we watch the police get communalised, we watch the judiciary gradually abdicate its duty, we watch the media that is meant to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted do the very opposite.

Today is the 210th day since Jammu and Kashmir was unconstitutionally stripped of its special status. Thousands of Kashmiris including three former chief ministers continue to be in jail. Seven million people are living under a virtual information siege, a novel exercise in the mass violation of human rights. On February 26, the streets of Delhi looked like the streets of Srinagar. That was the day that Kashmiri children went to school for the first time in seven months. But what does it mean to go to school, while everything around you is slowly throttled?

A democracy that is not governed by a Constitution and one whose institutions have all been hollowed out can only ever become a majoritarian state. You can agree or disagree with a Constitution as a whole or in part – but to act as though it does not exist as this government is doing is to completely dismantle democracy. Perhaps this is the aim. This is our version of the coronavirus. We are sick.

There’s no help on the horizon. No well-meaning foreign country. No UN.

And no political party that intends to win elections will or can afford to take a moral position. Because there is fire in the ducts. The system is failing.

What we need are people who are prepared to be unpopular. Who are prepared to put themselves in danger. Who are prepared to tell the truth. Brave journalists can do that, and they have. Brave lawyers can do that, and they have. And artists – beautiful, brilliant, brave writers, poets, musicians, painters and filmmakers can do that. That beauty is on our side. All of it.

We have work to do. And a world to win.

Arundhati Roy is an Indian novelist, political activist.

1 March 2020