As COP29 begins, some voice concerns over religious freedom in host country Azerbaijan

(RNS) — When RNS reached out to the faith groups that have had a leading presence at recent COPs for comment on how they would approach their work given religious liberty violations, most were silent.

Activists demonstrate for climate justice and a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas conflict at the COP29 U.N. Climate Summit, Monday, Nov. 11, 2024, in Baku, Azerbaijan. 

(AP Photo/Peter Dejong)

Aleja Hertzler-McCain
November 11, 2024

(RNS) — Global leaders, diplomats and climate advocates are gathering to hammer out climate finance agreements at the latest U.N. climate summit being held today (Nov. 11) through Nov. 22 in Baku, Azerbaijan. But the host country for the annual summit has come under international scrutiny for human rights and religious freedom violations, leading some activists to question why there has not been more pushback from the global climate advocates, including faith organizations.

Days before COP29, the climate summit, began, the Azerbaijani government held a summit of religious leaders working on climate issues, calling itself “well-known for its traditions of tolerance, multicultural values and inter-civilizational and inter-religious cooperation,” even as outside observers have repeatedly raised concerns about religious freedom in the former Soviet country.

The government, led by President Ilham Aliyev, part of a family that has led the Muslim-majority country since 1993, requires religious groups to register with the government in order to operate legally. In the last two years, the number of religious activists who are being held as political prisoners has sharply increased, according to Azerbaijani watchdog Institute for Peace and Democracy, part of a broader escalation of a campaign of repression that has also led to the arrests of journalists and other opposition figures.

The country, funded in large part by fossil fuel revenues, has strengthened its army and recently carried out what the European Parliament called an “ethnic cleansing” of the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which though internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, had been governed by ethnic Armenians since the fall of the Soviet Union. Armenians, who trace their heritage to the establishment of the oldest Christian nation, have called attention to Azerbaijani destruction of their religious sites in the region, even as the Azerbaijani government has said Armenians have destroyed Azerbaijani religious sites.

These concerns helped Azerbaijan land on the U.S. Commission of International Religious Freedom’s 2024 “countries of particular concern” list, its designation for governments that engage in or tolerate “particularly severe” violations of religious freedom.

But when RNS reached out to the faith groups that have had a leading presence at recent COPs for comment on how they would approach their work given these concerns over religious liberty, most were silent.

Azerbaijan, red, is located at the boundary of Eastern Europe and Western Asia.

 (Map courtesy Wikimedia/Creative Commons)

Of the core team of faith groups organizing faith activities at the last COP, the World Evangelical Alliance, the Episcopal Diocese of California and the Muslim Council of Elders, none responded to requests for comment.

(After this story was published, the Episcopal Church issued a press release saying it “seeks to balance the urgency of climate change with concerns about ongoing human rights violations in Azerbaijan,” and noting that its government relations office sent an action alert urging Episcopalians to ask their congressional representatives to vote for the Supporting Armenians Against Azerbaijani Aggression Act of 2023.)

The Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development and the Partnership on Religion and Sustainable Development declined to respond to requests for comment, with PaRD citing its small team and limited resources. Several other faith groups that took secondary roles also did not respond.

The Rev. John Pawlikowski, a professor emeritus of social ethics at Catholic Theological Union, said that in the months leading up to the U.S. election, “there’s a fear right now on the part of some in the religious community to publicly criticize the COP” because it might encourage now President-elect Donald Trump to pull out of the process.

The Servite priest, also a member of the climate action task force of the Parliament of the World’s Religions, said he knew of religious actors who had boycotted previous COPs where there were limits on what participants could say about local human rights and intended to boycott the summit in Azerbaijan. Nonetheless, he said the majority believe in continuing with some level of involvement.

As a formal party to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Vatican, Pawlikowski said, “could raise the human rights issues more strongly and the religious liberty issues more strongly than it has.”

However, Pawlikowski said that the religious groups that participate in the COPs are not ignoring religious liberty but simply making a strategic decision not to pursue the issue during COP.

For some of the religious groups impacted by the Azerbaijani government’s repression, the silence of faith groups attending COP29 is a bitter betrayal.

“When something is happening to the first Christian nation in the world, they don’t care,” said Arshak Makichyan, an ethnic Armenian climate activist who lost his Russian citizenship after speaking out against the war in Ukraine. The Armenian Apostolic Christian, who said his faith sustains his activism, is an icon of the Russian climate movement because of his solo protests as part of Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future movement and his arrest in Russia for those protests after attending COP25 in 2019.

“What is happening to Armenians is really terrible and we need international solidarity,” he said, warning he worries that Azerbaijan will be emboldened to go to war with Armenia.

The activist sees Armenian issues as a natural part of the COP discussion of Indigenous issues. “If you have been colonized by Western countries, then it is colonization, but if you were colonized by Turkey or Azerbaijan, then it’s not colonization,” he said of Western people’s ignorance of Armenian history, which included centuries of Ottoman control and repression before between 600,000 and 1. 5 million Armenians were killed by the Ottoman Empire during World War I, in what is widely considered a genocide.

Makichyan had planned to go back to COP this year, but he said Azerbaijan denied his visa, even after he said the United Nations had approved his accreditation for the event.

Mukhtar Babayev, COP29 president, speaks during an opening plenary session at the COP29 U.N. Climate Summit, Monday, Nov. 11, 2024, in Baku, Azerbaijan. 

(AP Photo/Peter Dejong)

The U.S. embassy of Azerbaijan and the U.N. Framework Convention of Climate Change offices did not respond to RNS’ requests for comment on the denial of Makichyan’s visa.

Makichyan explained, “I think it’s really important to raise the Armenian issue at the conference,” saying he was motivated to go “even though my grandfather’s uncle was killed in Baku, and though my grandparents, they were deported from Nakhchivan,” part of modern-day Azerbaijan.

Makichyan is part of a group calling for the international community at COP29 to demand the release of Armenian and other political prisoners held by the Azerbaijani government, sanctions, the right of return for “Artsakh Armenians to Indigenous lands,” an end to anti-Armenian destruction of cultural heritage and propaganda and divestment from Azerbaijani oil, in addition to a commitment to cease holding COPs in countries with political prisoners.

Azerbaijan has dismissed international concerns about religious freedom in the country as holding pro-Armenian bias.

Kamal Gasimov, a researcher on Islam in Azerbaijan who is currently visiting assistant professor of Arabic at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, said the USCIRF report should have cited third-party sources instead of relying on Armenian scholars to write about Armenian monuments.

Gasimov said the USCIRF report is a “political document,” which is indicative of relationships between Azerbaijan and the U.S. Some Azeris see the document as evidence of U.S. imperialism, while others whose family members are imprisoned are grateful for it, he said.

Mohamed Elsanousi, a commissioner who joined USCIRF after the most recent report’s deliberation process had been completed, said, “Our aim here is not really to blame and shame countries. Our aim is to improve religious freedom.”

USCIRF is made up of appointees by the U.S. president and congressional leaders. A minority of four dissented the Azerbaijan decision, expressing concerns that the country should be given a less severe designation for its religious freedom violations.

Despite controversy over the report, Gasimov said the Azerbaijani government plays a significant role regulating religion in the Muslim-majority country, adapting an approach from the Soviet Union that is common across post-Soviet countries.

“If you are a registered religious community within the state institution, the state gives you a passport, then you exist. If the state refuses your registration, then you don’t exist,” he said.

The goal is “making Islam part of the state bureaucracy, which makes Islam predictable,” as well as “easily observed” and “controlled.” They also accomplish this by “controlling books” and “trying to co-opt the religious leaders, charismatic leaders, (by) offering them jobs in the government.”

RELATED: USCIRF chair rebukes Azerbaijan for imprisoned Jehovah’s Witness conscientious objector

Other religious groups, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, have not been able to register. Jehovah’s Witnesses also highlight that the state has not followed through on its stated exemptions to compulsory military service for conscientious objectors, with some believers experiencing beatings and legal sentences.

While USCIRF cites the 2009 Azerbaijani law requiring registration as a major source of the violation of international human rights standards, Gasimov said the Arab Spring protests motivated the government to double down on control in the name of preventing radicalization and legitimized those actions by juxtaposing “the security of Azerbaijan with what’s happening in the Middle East.”

Azerbaijani watchdog Institute for Peace and Democracy says that the majority of the 319 political prisoners in the Muslim-majority country are “peaceful believers,” coming in at 228, which includes members of the Muslim Unity Movement and other Muslim theologians. Before early 2023, the number of religious political prisoners had been below 100.

Elsanousi said USCIRF had some documentation that “law enforcement also utilized and threatened torture, sexual assaults, and other mistreatment toward non-conforming Shia Muslims in the state custody.”

The Muslim Unity Movement, a Shia group, gained popularity, according to Gasimov, by mixing their religious discourse with concerns about social issues, like bribery and police violence.

Makichyan said that Azerbaijan has previously used “greenwashing,” or a type of spin that portrays the country as an environmental protector, to get away with human rights violations, including against ethnic Armenians.

Looking forward, he emphasized the importance of religious pluralism. As a Christian who knows of genocides that Muslim Indigenous groups have lived through, “it’s really important to be against Islamophobia because we Armenians, hopefully we will be able to return to western Armenia also and try to coexist with other people,” he said.

This story has been updated.

Why The Climate Movement Is Actually Close To Winning

Despite widespread discouragement among climate activists, a tested blueprint for successful movements shows immense progress being made.

By Nick Engelfried

July 11, 2024
Source: Waging Nonviolence

Credit: Chris Yakimov / Flickr

In January, U.S. climate activists prepared for one of the largest direct action protests against fossil fuels in years. The plan was for people to descend on the Department of Energy headquarters for three days of sit-ins protesting a series of massive liquefied natural gas, or LNG, terminals up for approval on the Gulf Coast. If built, the projects would dramatically increase the amount of fossil natural gas being burned around the world. Hundreds of activists readied themselves to risk arrest.

The sit-in never happened, but not because activists lost their nerve. Rather, just a couple weeks before it was to begin, the Biden administration announced it would delay its review of the LNG projects to look at their climate impacts. The eventual fate of the terminals remains uncertain, in light of court challenges and Biden’s shaky re-election prospects. However, the fact that activists moved the administration without one actual arrest represents a remarkable win.

Successful social movements — especially big, complex ones like the climate movement — are messy affairs. Victories are hard-won, and sometimes the end goal seems unreachable. However, there are patterns movements follow as they expand from the political fringes to start shaping national decisions. One framework for identifying these is the eight-stage “Movement Action Plan,” or MAP, articulated by activist and scholar Bill Moyer in 1987.

Trying to fit the whole climate movement, with its many sub-movements, projects and campaigns, neatly into the MAP isn’t simple. After all, it is arguably really a composite of movements for fossil fuel divestment, community-centered clean energy, and just solutions, as well as against coal, oil and gas development.

Still, preventing the worst effects of climate change is a definable goal, requiring a set of policy wins that no single one of the smaller movements above can accomplish fully on its own. For this reason, there’s value in taking a big-picture look at the larger climate movement through the lens of the MAP. Doing so helps show how we got to a point where activists dealt a major blow to one of the biggest fossil fuel build-outs in history with relatively little effort. It also suggests possible paths forward for the movement.

Today, many climate activists seem discouraged, unable to appreciate how successful their own efforts have been. Putting their work in the context of the MAP’s eight stages suggests there is more reason for hope than some realize.

Stage One: Normal Times

According to Moyer, during Stage One of the MAP unjust conditions “are maintained by the policies of public and private powerholders, and a majority of public opinion.” This applies to the state of affairs for climate issues in the U.S. through the early 2000s, before there was a national, grassroots climate movement. Frontline communities resisted the fossil fuel industry and some explicitly connected their struggles to climate, but without the support of a national uprising. Large environmental organizations supported curbing carbon emissions, but the issue had yet to become a top priority even for them.

The science of climate change has been well established since the 1970s, but its implications were largely ignored by policymakers, the media and the public. Occasionally, events like Dr. James Hansen’s 1988 testimony to Congress elevated the issue in the news, but without much lasting impact. Public confusion about climate science was partly by design, as fossil fuel companies deliberately sowed misinformation.

Stage One is a demoralizing time for movements, when success may seem unimaginable. During this period for the climate movement the scattering of frontline communities, scientists and a few writers seeking to call attention to the crisis seemed to be shouting into a void.

Stage Two: Prove the Failure of Institutions

During the MAP’s Stage One, the status quo is reinforced by the public’s misconception that if something were seriously amiss, officially sanctioned forms of advocacy like lobbying should be sufficient to rectify the problem. Stage Two is about shattering this illusion.

Traditional advocacy organizations, which Moyer called “professional opposition organizations,” or POOs, play a key role during this stage. By trying to fix a major societal problem through official channels, POOs end up demonstrating the inefficacy of this approach. Thus, in the ‘90s and 2000s, environmental nonprofits with paid staff and substantial — but largely passive — memberships lobbied, petitioned and pleaded with policymakers to act against climate change. These efforts were not entirely without results; for example, investments in clean energy were included in the Obama administration’s 2009 economic stimulus. Yet, there were limits to what they could achieve.

In late 2009, activists hoped the world would adopt a legally binding climate treaty at U.N. talks in Copenhagen. Instead, the talks collapsed, with the Obama administration expending minimal capital to change the outcome. Efforts to pass domestic climate legislation unraveled around the same time. By mid-2010, it was clear lobbying and petitioning would not, on their own, turn the tide on climate.

Becoming disillusioned with institutions is painful, and during this stage activists may lash out not just at government decision makers, but POOs whose efforts failed to achieve the needed change. This anger is useful when it motivates people to try new approaches to activism. However, POOs serve a necessary function during Stage Two by demonstrating the limitations of official advocacy channels. And, to the extent that they achieve some partial wins, their work may lay a foundation for broader change.

Stage Three: Ripening Conditions

The next stage of the MAP involves conditions aligning to create a political environment where the birth of a broad-based movement becomes possible. This may involve national or global events over which activists have little control. For the climate movement, these included:Awareness raising events like Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which demonstrated the potential for extreme weather to cause havoc; the 2006 release of Al Gore’s massively popular film “An Inconvenient Truth;” and the publication of a key Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 2007.
A new and seemingly more hopeful political environment following Barack Obama’s election in 2008, which inspired POOs and grassroots groups to “field test” diverse approaches to activism. Some of these, like fossil fuel divestment and the direct action campaign against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, won important victories that eroded the fossil fuel industry’s power.

The advent of a new age of mass protests following Trump’s election in 2016, which saw historic demonstrations in support of women’s rights, racial justice, immigrants and gun control. All of these demonstrated a readiness on the part of progressives to take action in huge numbers.

According to Moyer, in response to external events during Stage Three, “growing numbers of discontented local people across the country quietly start new autonomous local groups, which as a whole form a ‘new wave’ of grassroots opposition [to status quo policies], which is independent from the established POOs.” This takes thousands of volunteers pitching in to hold meetings, build supporter lists, and train others in organizing.

In the 2000s and 2010s, a diversity of decentralized, mostly volunteer-run climate organizations took root in the U.S. These included climate justice groups tied to specific communities, such as the Black Mesa Water Coalition in the Navajo Nation, and national projects like 350.org, Rising Tide, Zero Hour and Sunrise Movement. Some eventually developed large paid staffs and now straddle the line between POO and outside agitator group. Others have remained volunteer-run.

Stage Four: Social Movement Take-Off

All successful movements experience a moment when they enter the public consciousness and become a potent political force, usually after a trigger event that grabs people’s attention. History is full of such moments, from the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott to mass protests against the 1999 World Trade Organization in Seattle. Large movements may involve multiple trigger events that reinforce one message. For example, the civil rights movement was propelled into the spotlight by not just the Montgomery bus boycott, but the 1960 Greensboro sit-in and 1961 Freedom Rides.

Identifying a take-off for the climate movement is complicated because many of its branches can be said to have had their own take-off moments. For instance, the campaign against Keystone XL exploded during a series of mobilizations that began in 2011 and included mass direct action at the White House. Still, it’s possible to point to a period from late 2018 through early 2020 when the broader climate crisis became a national political issue in a way it never had before.

In late 2018, young activists from Sunrise Movement called for a Green New Deal during sit-ins at the offices of Congressional Democrats, who had just won a House majority. Images of young people being led out in handcuffs spread across the internet, forcing Democratic leaders to respond to the activists’ demands. The following year, Sunrise joined forces with the climate school strike movement that spread from Europe, generating an unprecedented display of public support for climate action. That September, over seven million people around the world joined climate protests.

In Stage Four, mass media begin paying serious attention to activists, and casual observers may get the impression this is when the movement began. However, it’s important to understand that while movements seem to spring from nowhere at this stage, this happens thanks to years of work creating conditions where such a take-off became possible.

Stage Five: Identity Crisis of Powerlessness

The MAP’s greatest paradox is that the moment a movement achieves unprecedented recognition, it is followed by discouragement and even despair for activists, who come to believe over a period of months or years that their best efforts are failing. Yet, according to Moyer, the problem “is not that the movement has failed to achieve its goals, but that expectations that its goal could possibly be achieved in such a short time were unrealistic.”

School strike leader Greta Thunberg captured this sense of powerlessness at COP25 in 2019, claiming her movement had “achieved nothing.” Months earlier, climate activists had brought millions of people into the streets. U.S. presidential candidates were signaling support for a Green New Deal and polls showed a clear uptick in public concern about the crisis. Yet, leaders like Thunberg seemed to feel their work had been for naught.

It is understandable that activists want to see immediate results from their efforts. However, there is a lag time between when a movement begins shifting public consciousness, and the translation of public concern into policy. Success may depend on a movement’s ability to prevent activists from becoming burnt out and overly discouraged during this period, so they can carry momentum into the final stages of the MAP.

Stage Six: Majority Public Support

This stage occurs concurrently with Stage Five, as public opinion shifts to align more closely with that of the movement. Public support for climate action in the U.S. has long hovered somewhere over 50 percent, but the years following the school strikes and Sunrise Movement’s sit-ins saw the issue become a larger priority for more people.

Polling from Yale last December showed 72 percent of respondents believe climate change is happening, while 55 percent think it should be a high priority for political leaders. An AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released in April showed 45 percent of respondents becoming more worried about climate change over the past year. The shift in public opinion is reflected in political rhetoric. While Republicans plan to roll back many Biden administration climate policies if they win the presidency and Congress this November, obstructing progress has not become a conservative rallying cry to the degree it did after climate legislation failed in 2010.

In Stage Six, activists’ efforts to elevate an issue lead to a durable shift in public opinion. This can translate into policy wins — if the movement presses its advantage.

Stage Seven: Success

In Stage Seven, movements see at least some major goals translated into government policy. This may be achieved through a dramatic showdown, where activists proactively force powerholders to make concessions; a quiet showdown, in which new political realities cause policymakers to reverse previously held positions; or attrition, where victory results from small wins accumulated over years.

Current trends suggest the climate movement is now in Stage Seven, even if many activists don’t yet realize it. Climate provisions in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act helped tip the balance decisively toward renewable energy in the U.S., while similar transitions are underway in other countries. In the U.S., final victory will likely come through either a dramatic showdown or attrition — however, the unique nature of the climate crisis means these two pathways will produce very different results. This makes for unusually high stakes in the final stages of the movement’s fight.

The latest International Energy Agency World Energy Outlook report states current government policies will result in an unstoppable shift toward renewables, amounting to a victory through attrition for climate activists. The risk of backsliding exists, but the energy transition is too far underway to be easily derailed. Even the election of Donald Trump to another term as president would slow, but not stop the shift away from fossil fuels. However, when it comes to climate change, victory by attrition will come too slowly to prevent enormous damage.

The International Energy Agency predicts current government policies will limit global temperature increases to 2.4 degrees Celsius by the end of this century — much higher than the 1.5 degrees beyond which many catastrophic, irreversible impacts become likely. Substantially speeding up the clean energy transition will likely require a series of dramatic showdowns between activists and governments. Fortunately, there are signs this could happen under the right conditions.

A dramatic showdown “resembles the take-off stage” in that activists use trigger events to force policymakers to the table. However, now political leaders respond to activists’ demands much more quickly than after the initial trigger event. Meanwhile, POOs push for change through traditional channels with more success than during Stage Two. The Biden administration’s decision to put LNG projects on hold in response to the mere threat of mass protests — when the campaign against Keystone XL, for example, took years to achieve similar results — gives us a hint of what a dramatic showdown for the climate movement in the U.S. could look like.

For the broader movement, such a showdown could take the form of widespread direct action protests against fossil fuel infrastructure, at the offices of elected leaders and following extreme weather disasters. The goal would be to spur Congress and the federal executive branch to take additional action that builds on the climate provisions of the IRA and significantly hastens the phasing out of fossil fuels.

Stage Eight: Continuing the Struggle

The work of fighting for a more just, sustainable world is never over. If and when major economies fully move off fossil fuels, activists will need to ensure the transition is permanent while also pushing for government policies that remove carbon from the atmosphere by allowing ecosystems to regenerate. How much planetary “repair work” remains to be done at this stage — and how much of the damage becomes irreversible — depends largely on whether the energy transition happens through a slow process of attrition, or a faster victory through dramatic showdowns.

An unstable political situation in the U.S. and other countries means activists must prepare for multiple future scenarios. Should President Biden win another term, it will be incumbent on climate groups to organize dramatic protests that force the administration into taking additional action — as happened successfully in the case of the Gulf LNG projects. If Donald Trump wins in November, a different path forward will be necessary.

In the event of a second Trump presidency, climate activists should still organize dramatic protests, but with the goal of isolating the administration and creating a political environment where other policymakers — including future presidential candidates — feel an urgent need to act. Based on Trump’s first term, we can be confident of the administration responding to protests in ways that may ultimately tarnish the president’s image; recall members of the National Guard tear gassing peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters in Lafayette Park for a Trump photo op. Protests should seek to make the administration draw attention to its own incompetence and lack of concern about the climate crisis.

Of course, during a Trump presidency, climate groups can also pressure other policymakers who might be more responsive, as they did with Congressional Democrats in 2018. Precious time to avoid the worst effects of the climate crisis will be lost while the administration roles back pollution regulations, fast-tracks approval of the Gulf Coast LNG terminals and similar projects, and attempts to repeal or stymie climate provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act. However, a clear path forward exists for the climate movement.

The MAP helps us understand how social movements successfully capitalize on the political and social influences of their time to achieve a more just world. That said, using the MAP to examine the climate movement is far from a merely academic exercise. Realizing this movement has already progressed through most stages of the MAP can provide activists with a sense of clarity about what work has already been done. It also shows how to increase the likelihood that final victory comes not through slow attrition, but a series of dramatic showdowns that force action fast enough to prevent the worst irreversible impacts of the climate crisis.

Capitalism’s Deepening Crisis and the Coming Fightback

BY JEFF MACKLER

 JANUARY 5, 2024
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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

We are horrified to daily witness the monstrous deeds of a crisis-ridden world capitalism that knows no way out other than by inflicting new waves of catastrophe on the world’s people. Today’s US-backed and orchestrated Zionist genocide of the Palestinian people is but one more glaring example. But a broader assessment is essential.

President Biden repeatedly sends to Tel Aviv his top imperial agents of doom – Secretary of “Defense” Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, General CQ Brown Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and National Security Council adviser, Jake Sullivan. They take turns in photo ops advising Israel’s neo-fascist Zionist murderer, Benjamin Natanyahu, on how to prettify his army’s ever-intensifying genocide in Gaza.

Before the corrupt corporate media, whose twisted accounts are routinely overseen by CIA censors or imbedded US government agents, they counsel the butcher Natanyahu to demonstrate a modicum of “restraint” while instantly replaces every 2,000 pound bunker-buster bomb and all other advanced weaponries Israel deploys to pulverize defenseless people.

Sullivan claimed last week that Israel would be “transitioning to another phase of the war focused on more precise ways of targeting the leadership of Hamas.” Netanyahu instantly denied Sullivan’s assertion, emphatically repeating Israel’s position that all Palestinians are in the daily crosshairs of the Zionist killing machine, literally among the most powerful in the world.

That two-thirds of Gaza has already been obliterated/leveled and three quarters of its 2.3 million inhabitants made homeless does not factor into US empty calls for “restraint.” Neither does the fact that 70 percent of the Palestinian dead are women and children.

The genocide continues uninterrupted. 20,000+ innocent Palestinians have been slaughtered to date. Multiple thousands more are buried beneath the rubble of a carpet-bombed obliterated Gaza. 72,000 more are wounded. The great majority is starving. Infectious disease is rampant.

Yet, the US bans all measures of relief as the world’s working masses observe in horror and contempt the US-promoted genocide. A new generation of radicalizing youth is on the march across the country and worldwide. The vast majority of humanity condemns the Zionist regime. Unprecedented mass mobilizations are the norm around the world.

History of Zionist mass murder outside Palestine

Israel is no newcomer to genocidal warfare. When a mass US antiwar movement forced the Jimmy Carter administration in 1978 to bar all Defense Department sales of military equipment to Guatemala, Israel was there to fill the gap, providing the death squad regime of Rios Montt with Israel’s state-of-the-art automatic rifles to secretly continue the US-backed genocide.

400,000 indigenous Mayan Guatemalans were murdered. One million more were forced to flee for their lives. (See: “Israel and Genocide: Not Only In Gaza,” Mark Lewis Taylor, CounterPunch, Dec.  22, 2023.)

A few years later, under the Reagan administration, following Congress’s Boland Amendment to a finance bill banning US aid to the Honduras-based Nicaraguan Contras and to El Salvador’s death squad regime, Zionist Israel was again called on to do US imperialism’s dirty deeds. This time out they surreptitiously provided funds, along with the Saudi monarchy, to buy crack cocaine from the Colombian Medellín Cartel, wherein the CIA’s National Security adviser Oliver North smuggled it into Los Angeles’s Black community and other US cities. The profits collected by North and his CIA agents were sent to the Nicaraguan Contras in the infamous “Contragate Affair.” [See “CIA, Crack in America,” By Jeff Mackler, Socialist Action Books, 1986].

US vetoes UN ceasefire resolution

Biden’s words of “restraint” notwithstanding, his US representative to the now, for all critical purposes, defunct United Nations, cast the sole Security Council VETO blocking a UN call for a Ceasefire.

And even if a Ceasefire resolution had passed, who would enforce it? Would the world’s military superpower and Israel’s near total military and financial benefactor, turn on a dime and deploy its forces against its Zionist Middle East gendarme killer ally? Would the US withdraw its fleet of aircraft carriers aimed at delivering more weapons to Israel and blocking humanitarian aid to Palestine?

A toothless “ceasefire” resolution was approved by the UN General Assembly with 153 in favor, 10 against and 23 abstaining. Widespread applause was reported to have engulfed the General Assembly Hall. Those voting against were the US, Israel, Austria, Czechia [formerly Czech Republic], Guatemala, Liberia, Micronesia, Nauru, Papua New Guinea and Paraguay.

The United Kingdom, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Argentina, Malawi, the Netherlands, Ukraine, South Sudan, and Uruguay abstained. But the UN General Assembly’s sound and fury came to nothing. The US imperialist beast and its Middle East military enforcer prevailed. The horror continues.

US passes largest military bill in history

The US Congress soon after passed the largest military appropriations bill in history. At $886 billion, “official” US annual military expenditure – three percent more than the previous year – the figure does NOT include hundreds of $billions more for the CIA and related military expenditures. A total of $1.4 trillion is spent annually on the US imperial war machine, or better, for the largely-monopolized military-industrial complex that registers corporate profit rates in the high heavens and rains death and destruction on the world’s people. The maxim, “war is good for profits,” has always been Congress’s guiding principle.

The $886 billion was approved by the House of Representatives by a vote 310 to 118, with 73 Republicans and 45 Democrats opposed. It passed the Senate a day earlier by a vote 87-13. Today, the US spends more on the military than the rest of the world combined! With 1100 US military bases in 110 countries US imperialism is truly “The Cop of the World,” the self-appointed gendarme/defender of the “national security interests” of the US ruling class.  Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, left no doubt, stating that the bill would assure that, “America’s military remains state-of-the-art at all times all around the world.”

A product of the usual back room deals, the bill, in the name of “fighting terrorism,” continues various programs that allow US intelligence agencies to secretly spy on the entire world’s population, civil liberties be damned!

The failure of COP28/Dubai

After nearly three decades of UN-sponsored deliberations over the oncoming and ever-accelerating climate crises, this year’s COP28 (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change), Nov. 30. – Dec. 13, once against registered zero progress, indeed a regression.

The Dubai, United Arab Emirates-based COP28 was chaired by UAE politician Sultan Ahmed Al-Jaber, who also heads the UAE’s National Oil Company (ADNOC). Al Jaber is also the UAE’s special envoy for climate change. Prior to the conference he made clear his orientation when he publicly debunked as “fake science” the base findings of the world scientific community that absent a massive and immediate coordinated worldwide effort to eliminate all fossil fuel use in the next few decades, only catastrophic and irreversible consequences will result.

Replete with literally thousands of top representatives of the world’s fossil fuel corporations, the conference once against failed to announce a single binding resolution limiting fossil fuel production!

Indeed, the facts demonstrate that every leading fossil fuel producer in the world, headed by the US and China, has significantly increased fossil fuel drilling and production!

The final COP28 text vaguely called for “winding down” and transiting away” from deadly fossil fuels.

In 2023, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, our planet recorded its warmest November ever with 2023 on track to be the hottest on record.

COP25‘s Paris goal to stay below an increase of 1.5°C warming over pre-industrial levels – the worldwide temperature increase over which only deepening and irreversible climate catastrophe will inevitably result – has been essentially abandoned. With zero concrete implementation measures, the conference, as with all UN climate deliberations, left the field once again wide open to the world’s corporate elite to pursue profits above all else, the world’s people, as with imperialist war, be damned.

And, again, the world’s poorest nations are the hardest hit, with small island nations sinking, if not disappearing into ever-rising seas and devastated by murderous hurricanes, while imperialist-dominated continents in the “Global South” are subjected to capitalist-induced killer heat waves, deforestation, desertification, and massive pollution of vital water supplies.

Demise of COP

The COP process today has devolved into an annual stocktaking exercise, at best a review of what all nations contemplate they might do to mitigate climate catastrophe. In fact, “Global Stocktake” is the official name of COP’s final empty declaration. With the adoption of the 2018 Paris Agreement – which abandoned the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and its so-called binding emission targets and timetables – the battle for any legally binding agreement on the international level has been tragically abandoned.

Once again, capitalism’s inherent contradictions are fully operative.  Ever-intensifying economic competition, over time, invariably reduces average profit rates, compelling all the leading players to resort to endless horrific measures to survive. All these measures are focused on making working people pay.

While the European Union is said to have legally binding emission “targets,” the U.S. has none and indeed is the world’s number one polluter, not to mention the climate horrors it imposes on its virtual neo-colonies and poor nations the world over.

US imperialism knows no limits

Venezuela, Iran, Russia and Syria are apt examples. While all are daily demonized by the corporate media, there is a deadly logic to US policy. Fossil fuel exploitation and war are at its center. Today, US troops occupy almost one-third of Syria, the portion that includes Syria’s rich fossil fuels and agricultural reserves. The same with Iraq. Following the 2003 US war and invasion/conquest, US diplomat Paul Bremmer was appointed Iraq’s de facto head of state and leader of the US-imposed Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).

That President Biden later stated that the Iraq war was a “mistake” and that its central thesis – that Iraq President Saddam Hussein was preparing to use “weapons of mass destruction” against the US – turned out to be a blatant lie – made no difference to the outcome. Iraq’s massive fossil fuel reserves were essentially turned over to US corporations. I would add only that two million Iraqis were killed in the intense saturation bombing and economic sanctions employed against that country. At that time, the terror bombing was the most intense since WWII. One wary British politician, commenting on the fact that Bremmer took over some UK-owned Iraqi fossil fuel reserves stated, “I too am for world peace, but not for a Pax Americana.”

The US-orchestrated Ukraine coup had as a central imperialist objective replacing Russia’s relatively cheap massive fossil fuel deliveries to Europe via its Nord Stream pipeline – obliterated by CIA operatives – with US-expensive fracked liquid natural gas, a multi-trillion dollar fossil fuel war in disguise. We must add that fracking’s chief bi-product is the deadly methane gas (CH₄), whose greenhouse gas heat-trapping capacity is 120 times greater, moment to moment, than carbon dioxide (CO2). The imperialist designation of natural gas as a “clean fuel” is an oxymoron if there ever was one.

US denunciations of Venezuela and Iran as “dictatorships,” similarly mask the indisputable fact that these nations’ fossil fuel reserves today rank first and second in the world. When revolutionary developments in these nations deposed the previous US-backed dictatorships and moved to end those nations’ subordination to US oil corporations, US imperialism instantly moved to a warlike footing.

In Iran, following the 1979 Iranian Revolution that removed the 1954 US-installed Shah Reza Pahlavi dictatorship, the US orchestrated and financed the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, 1980-1988, aimed at keeping both nations’ massive fossil fuel resources off world markets, not to mention taking the lives of one million Iranians and 800,000 Iraqis! US imperialism “supported both sides of that war!

Heading toward irreversible climate disaster

The most recent UN assessment published in November 2023 sees “no credible pathway” to keep global warming below an 1.5°C increase unless drastic measures are taken to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 43 percent by 2030 and by 60 percent by 2035, compared with 2019 levels. Reaching the UN’s net zero CO2 emissions target by 2050 is similarly a pipedream. Not a single COP28 proposal moved one inch toward any of these deadlines, portending catastrophe for the world’s people, if not all life on the planet!

To make matters worse, if that’s possible, COP28 concluded with a photo [above] of representatives of 22 nations posing under a banner with the pledge to triple producing energy via nuclear power, a doomsday promise guaranteed to further poison the earth and its ecosystems with deadly nuclear waste ever seeping into the world’s lakes, streams, rivers and oceans, not to mention repeats of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi power plant disaster in Japan.

Twelve years after Fukushima’s triple reactor meltdown, Japan this year, for the first time, released unprecedented and massive amounts of “treated” radioactive wastewater into the ocean. And dealing with Fukushima’s wastewater is considered qualitatively less difficult than decommissioning the plant itself.  That process has barely begun; the removal of Fukushima’s melted nuclear fuel, still requiring massive amounts of cooling seawater to be pumped daily into the destroyed reactor structures, hasn’t even started! And we are informed at COP28 that nuclear power production will be tripled!

If nothing else COP28 will be marked by that single concluding pledge from the world’s elite ruling rich.

Immigration crisis deepens

Capitalism’s endless wars, its wanton environmental destruction, its economic rape of poor nations, its privatization of the lands of the poor, its punishing economic sanctions imposed on 55 nations, and its endless substitution of high technology manufacturing for human labor, have combined to create a worldwide immigration crisis, wherein the world’s poor are increasingly driven from their homelands in search of a better life elsewhere.

And when they arrive, if they are not instantly deported to the growing refugee camps around the world, they are systematically shunted into their new nation’s lowest wage level jobs and living conditions. They are subjected to corporate media sponsored racist tirades aimed at characterizing them as stealing jobs and otherwise being responsible for all the ills of failing capitalist societies.

Indeed, the ruling elite everywhere consciously use the plight of immigrants to fuel support for overtly racist and increasingly neo-fascist policies and parties, blaming capitalism’s most oppressed victims for the ever-deepening assaults that a crisis-ridden capitalist system imposes on the broad working class.

Rising unemployment and social cutbacks

The “official” US government unemployment rate is 3.9 percent, a figure that has zero correspondence to reality.

The figure includes insufficient part-time work and poorly paid jobs. Adding those who are working less than 35 hours a week, but want more, or who make less than $20,000 annually, boosts the government’s  “functional unemployment rate” to almost 23 percent, according to the Ludwig Institute for Shared Prosperity (LISEP).

Working people understand full well that the “low” unemployment rates touted by the twin parties of US capitalism bear no relationship to the truth. Many work two or three low wage, zero benefit part time jobs in the “gig” economy as so-called independent contractors, that is, for corporations that have fewer and often no obligation to provide benefits. Workers are increasingly hard pressed to pay daily-inflated food prices and ever-escalating rents and fuel costs.

Stock market reaches all-time high

Needless to say the US ruling class measure of success is not the well-being of its “subjects” but rather its bottom line, that is, its profits. When profits are threatened in the face of ever-rising national and international competition, as is the case today, all matters of hell are let loose. From endless wage, healthcare, pension, and other social benefit cuts to speed up, layoffs, part-time/zero benefit work, substitution of machines/computers/robots and now AI (Artificial Intelligence) for workers, offshoring jobs to low wage countries, use of near slave wage prison and low wage immigrant labor, increasing taxes on working people, to endless wars and environmental destruction, nothing is excluded.

More recently, the ruling elite have found some new ways to bolster flagging balance sheets, including rigging the stock market via insider-trading schemes, turning it into a casino-like venture, where the house always wins, or reducing government interest rates charged to large corporations, which in turn “invest” this “free” money into instant stock market and other speculative ventures, for record profits.

Such is today’s prime explanation for the US market’s dramatic rise to all-time highs. When the Federal Reserve chair a few weeks ago announced the likelihood of three corporate interest rate loan reductions in the months ahead, the stock market profit spigot was turned wide open. Nothing can be excluded when the multi-billionaire few set out to game the system.

The system’s base corruption

Whether it be momentary flights to “cryptocurrency” speculation to everyday rigging the tax codes to escape taxation outright [Among President Biden’s 2020 campaign pledges was one to guarantee that the rich, “who don’t pay taxes,” according to Biden, “pay up.”] or simply offshoring profits, as with Apple Computer’s English Channel Island of Jersey [See NYT, Nov. 7, 2017, “Apple has accumulated more than $128 billion in profits offshore, and probably much more, that is untaxed by the United States and hardly touched by any other country. Nearly all of that was made over the past decade.] or establishing corporate headquarters in foreign countries, a la Sam Bankman-Fried’s Nassau, Bahamas FTX, nothing is overlooked by the very people who the super rich assign to write the “laws” that guarantee corporate profits.

All of the above are daily orchestrated by the elite, who fund and control the basic levers of power via their twin capitalist parties and their rigged electoral system. Their corporate-dominated mass media operate to create a “Truman Show” or “Potemkin Village” fake world based on the manufactured illusion of common acceptance of the status quo, ever embedded with racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-immigrant scapegoating.

Nothing is sacred for this elite, including their touted “democracy” replete with billionaire-orchestrated periodic “elections” where their ever-malleable petty-millionaire candidates are “elected” to pretend to run the government. Even capitalism’s touted heads of state Presidents, whether a Biden or Trump or Obama, Clinton or Bush, etc., fully understand their limits, albeit the “moron” egomaniac Trump, as he was described by former Secretary of State and Exxon Mobile chief, Rex Tillerson, momentarily believed that he actually ran the country and could game it at will.

Today’s Joseph Biden is nothing more than the ruling class choice of a hack politician with a half-century service to the ruling rich, including his role in “keeping peace” a half century ago between the Democratic Party’s then overtly racist segregationist Southern wing and its “Northern capitalist liberals.”

Indeed, the ruling rich pulled out all the stops soon after the 2020 primary election season began, near instantly withdrawing support to all the multiple contending candidates and uniting big capital behind Biden’s lagging candidacy.

This included quashing any notion of a “reform” wing in the Democratic Party via the Bernie Sanders candidacy and limiting Republican Trump’s neo-fascist demagogic appeals. They judged that there was no need or room for any serious concessions in economic or social policy with regard to the deepening degradation of the quality of working class life. This was to be continued and intensified, as with Biden’s tax breaks for the rich, his reneging on promises to unions to ease collective bargaining union recognition restrictions, his dramatic expansion in granting offshore drilling permits, imposition of new and brutal anti-immigration measures and his promoting increased funding for killer police departments.

Biden’s response to the Bernie Sanders $16 trillion Green New Deal global warming abatement legislation was a paltry $1.3 trillion omnibus bill, most of which went to “infrastructure” improvement projects largely benefitting the corporate elite. But, the ruling rich also saw no need to echo Trump’s too overtly reactionary language and touted anti-social measures, including his racist and sexist rants against “woke” politics. Biden and his slick team saw no need for book-burning or firing educators for teaching about the Civil War and slavery, or banning abortion as murder, at least for now! But neither Biden nor his Democrats ever legislated the right to abortion into federal law, or abolished the reactionary anti-abortion Hyde Amendment, when the Democrats controlled both house of Congress and the presidency.

The ruling class backs Biden’s candidacy

With the aid of their tightly-controlled and ever-monopolized corporate media, the real US ruling class, perhaps the one-hundredth, if not one-thousandth of one percent of the population, turned their attention to corralling capitalism’s compliant allies among the “Black mis-leadership class” – a term so aptly coined by Black Agenda Report’s former and deceased editor, Glen Ford – into the Democratic Party. They did the same with the largely corrupt AFL-CIO labor bureaucracy and with a compliant Bernie Sanders, and with the largely fractured and demoralized reformist “left” and its largely Democratic Party-associated Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and with the largely corporate-funded NGOs of the environmental movement. Their prime objective was to place the reliable ruling class stalwart, Joe Biden in the presidency. Once again, the ruling rich employed their “lesser evil” charade to the hilt and Trump was their perfect foil.

Three years later, as we have amply demonstrated, capitalism’s inherent crises show no sign of abatement. Biden has maintained Trump’s tariffs on competitive foreign imports. He imposed new sanctions aimed at nations that don’t comply with US demands. US military interventions have reached new heights. Biden’s congressionally-required annual report listing every country with ongoing US military operations revealed that the US military was operating in 139 nations!

Inter-imperialist rivalry, especially between US and China for new markets and control of the old, has intensified. Zionist Israel’s genocide in Gaza has undermined US imperialism as never before. [See: China’s Imperialism Abroad: “The Belt and Road Initiative” September, 2023 at socialistaction.org,]

Today’s youth radicalization

A broad youth radicalization in unfolding today, influenced by deep anti-racist sentiments of solidarity with the oppressed in the US and worldwide, and especially with the beleaguered masses in Palestine. Originally expressed in the unprecedented Black Lives Matter (BLM) mobilizations of a few years ago, today it has taken giant leaps forward with the almost daily youth-led and often massive and increasingly coodinated protests against US complicity with the ongoing genocide in Gaza. But unlike the BLM protests, that at one point saw five million in the streets protesting racist police murders of unarmed Blacks and exposing US capitalism’s systemic racism, today’s mobilizations, with a new and independent and ever broadening leadership, are unlikely to be coopted into capitalist politics and the Democratic Party, as was the case with the almost instant demise of the BLM movement.

The roots of this new radicalization were evident a few years before BLM, when repeated Pew Polls showed that the majority of youth today preferred socialism to capitalism, a reflection of the fact that today’s youth see their future prospects as significantly dimmer than their parents in capitalist America . In contrast, they see socialism, however it’s defined, as a fundamentally more democratic, humane, anti-authoritarian society aimed at social equality and at advancing human rights in all their manifestations.

Capitalism’s past cooptation response to any youth radicalization has been via its Democratic Party political appendages like the DSA or through the myriad of corporate-financed NGOs, including the Ford Foundation that largely financed the key organizations of the loosely-organized and near leaderless Black Lives Matter movement.

A new youth radicalization unlikely to be stifled [Photo above: mass largely youth mobilization in Washington,D.C.]

A similar cooptation of today’s inspiring youth militancy is unlikely, especially when capitalism’s first cards played aimed at stifling the current and growing passionate youth rebellion against US imperialism’s chief Middle East ally with not only threats of repression but with outright persecution and punishment. This now includes suspensions and expulsions from colleges and universities, threats to ban protesting students from future industry employment, mass arrests of protestors and more.

The government-legislated witchhunt begins

Today’s new witchhunt also includes efforts to force the resignation or pressure administrations to fire prestigious college presidents. Such efforts have already been undertaken at Harvard, MIT, Rutgers and the University of Pennsylvania, to name few. The recent congressional hearings on this issue saw well-known university presidents, including Harvard’s Dr. Claudine Gay – prepared with a statement drafted in collaboration with prestigious attorneys – defending the basic free speech rights of students and the university itself. But Gay, bending to the government’s spurious accusation that anti-Zionism was anti-Semitism, not to mention that advocacy of anti-Zionism was akin to advocacy of genocide, later publicly apologized for some of the language in her statement even though her defense of free speech was fully in accord with all current free speech interpretations of the US Constitution.

On December 13, the House of Representatives approved a bipartisan resolution calling for Gay’s resignation.  Her forced semi-apology notwithstanding, 700 Harvard faculty members defended her remaining president and her defense of free speech. Harvard’s board unanimously affirmed her presidency, despite massive threats from major donors to withdraw their financial support. The reactionary House resolution was effectively deemed dead on arrival, but not before once again revealing the Democratic Party witchhunt complicity.

But University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill, who also testified before congress along with Gay – under pressure from her own governing board – did resign. Both Gay and Magill refused to directly answer NY Republican congresswomen Elise Stefanik hypothetical question as to whether a student’s advocacy of genocide of Jews violated their universitys’ policies on bullying and harassment. Neither Stefanik nor any other congressional inquisitor charged that any student had advocated genocide of Jews. But for today’s witchhunters opposition to racist, colonial, settler Israeli Zionism is considered advocacy of genocide and must be a punishable offense!

Legislation equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism

The congressional attacks on a handful of university presidents have not ended the matter. They have been accompanied by reactionary state and national legislation equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. A December 5, bi-partisan House bill (H.R. 894) explicitly designated anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism. The vote was 311-14 with 92 members voting “Present.” All but one Republican voted in favor. Nearly half of the Democrats followed suit. Most of the rest’s “Present” vote, indicating their “declining to take a position,” were Democrats, yet another deadly affirmation that the Democratic Party has never been and never will be a bulwark against reaction.

Another bill (H.R. 6578) introduced last week aimed at establishing the “Commission to Study Acts of Anti-Semitism in the United States,” perhaps a modern-day version of the McCarthy-era, House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). The proposed bill authorizes the Commission to hold HUAC witchhunt- type hearings with the power to subpoena, and therefore, intimidate witnesses, including perhaps threats of imprisonment levied against those subpoenaed who refuse, “to name names” of their political collaborators. Yesteryear’s “Are you now or have you ever been member of the Communist Party?” may well be converted today to, “Are you now or have you ever been an anti-Zionist?”

America’s mini-experiment with fascism

US capitalism’s 1950s and 60s resort to McCarthy-era repression and imprisonment of political dissidents was considered by experienced activists at that time, the US ruling class’s mini-experiment with fascism. It came at a time when the post-WWII mass revulsion against the just-defeated Nazis occupation of Europe, especially in France and Italy, focused on mass Communist Party-led mobilizations that extracted major concessions from the largely discredited post-war governments. These near working class rebellions extracted a broad range of unprecedented social democratic, wage, labor and employment security victories from these weakened capitalist states, whose wartime governments were Nazis collaborators. At that time the French and Italian Communist Parties were the largest in the country.

A fearful US ruling class, especially in the context of the 1946 US strike wave that saw the largest number of workers on strike in US history, calculated that fascist-like repression in the US itself might be a pre-requisite to continued ruling class stability.

But, the post-WWII period essentially left US capitalism intact, with its wartime industrial infrastructure massively expanded, while its former European competitors’ economies lay in ruins. The US dominated the world economy as never before, with both its wartime allies and enemies largely destroyed.  This led the US elite to at least in part back off from implementing the more virulent forms of brutal fascist rule, but not before a frightened ruling class enacted over the course of a decade and longer a body of reactionary legislation aimed at essentially terrorizing, if not effectively outlawing Communist Party members and their associated organizations. The Constitutional protections of civil liberties were shredded in the name of subordinating free speech and the right to association to so-called US national security interests. This was codified in the US Supreme Court majority decisions authored by Chief Justice Felix Frankfurter wherein the First Amendment’s guaranteed free speech and free association rights had to be “balanced” against the “national Security interests” of the US government. Frankfurter’s court “balancing” scale always came down on the side of the government’s “national security.” Subpoenaed HUAC witnesses who, citing the First Amendment, refused to
“name names” or admit membership in the CP, were cited for “contempt of congress” and often jailed. The witchhunt was on.

Immediately prior to the witchhunt, the Stalinist-led US Communist Party led some one-third of the US labor movement organized in the powerful Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). “Peaceful co-existence” with capitalism was the CP credo. In 1945 the USSR’s head of state, Joseph Stalin, the US wartime ally, appeared on the front page of the popular Life magazine and was endearingly referred to as “Uncle Joe.” Moreover, the CP itself proposed continuing its wartime patriotic, pro-employer  “no strike pledge” into the postwar period, again, at the time of the largest strike wave in US history! This, is itself, helped to discredit the CP in the eyes of many workers. Further, on Stalin’s orders, in 1946, under Earl Browder’s leadership, the CP itself was formally dissolved!

Origins of the Cold War

None of this, however, convinced US imperialism to back off from its witchhunt. Rebuilding and re-arming European capitalism and restoring its badly tarnished Nazis collaborationist image became US imperialism’s major focus. A “Cold War” was decreed; at its center was bringing down the “Iron Curtain,” that is, the pro-Russian governments that were established across Eastern Europe following the USSR’s Red Army victories that were centrally responsible for Hitler’s defeats. With 90 percent of Hitler’s armies on the Russian front, the USSR’s losses, at 27 million dead, came close to exceeding the total losses of the entire world. Smashing Russia’s credibility became US imperialism’s central priority. The witchhunt was critical to this US objective. The US establishment of NATO in Europe aimed at challenging the Soviet-backed and established deformed workers’ states in Eastern Europe that a few years after the end of WWII, abolished capitalism via the election of various indigenous Communist Parties that replaced the largely discredited parties that had collaborated with the Nazis occupation.

But with CPUSA’s acquiescence and its consciously posing zero threat to US imperialism at home, the ruling class saw no need for a US fascist repression of the Hitlerian type to defend its interests.

McCarthy himself, a rightwing Wisconsin US Senator, was quickly discredited. He was publically pilloried during the widely televised Army-McCarthy congressional hearings, isolated and removed from office. But the McCarthy-era’s witchhunt, anti-democratic, anti-labor and anti-civil liberties laws that his generation introduced were allowed to linger for decades. The capitalists of that era, and today, had no reason to chaage or remove any repressive legislation that aided their ”right to profit.” “Anti-communism” and fear of dissent was drilled into the consciousness of millions and remained there for decades until a new youth rebellion combined with the dramatic Black-led Civil Rights and Vietnam antiwar movements to fundamentally break with the witchhunt’s “better dead than red” mentality.  It was only during this period, some two decades later, when the new mass movements once again dominated public life, that the US Supreme Court, via Chief Justice Earl Warren’s 5-4 majority, repeatedly ruled that most of the McCarthy-era legislation was “unconstitutional.”

Today’s ruling class faces qualitatively less of a threat from the organized labor movement than during late 1930s and 40s. That labor upsurge raised trade union membership from an all tine low to some 36 percent of all US workers, and especially the workers in basic industry.

Today, organized labor, with a largely corrupt mis-leadership, subordinate to the Democratic Party, stands once again at an historic low, at best representing six percent of the private sector workforce. The fight today is not only to restore basic democratic functioning and rank-and-file union control to the existing unions but to massively “organize the unorganized” working class and unite this consequently reinvigorated fighting labor movement in struggle with the growing movements of all the oppressed and exploited.

Today’s intra-capitalist debates

The capitalist elite are no newcomers to their history. The debates today among and between its different components – openly racist and covertly racist, pro-war and “antiwar/Trump,” “pro” or anti-abortion, for or against free speech, for or against Trump’s January 6, 2022 coup attempt, for or against seriously addressing the climate crisis, endemic unemployment, poverty, etc. all reflect the base uncertainly among capitalism’s US rulers as their rotten system confronts or fails to confront one crisis after another.

We can only speculate today what forms of capitalist repression and violence will be deployed by the ruling class, whether from the Trump minority wing that increasingly spouts fascist-type rhetoric , or from the Democrats, who are skilled at orchestrating every form of horrific violence against working people the world over, and in the US too, if they deem it necessary.!

Both wings of capitalism’s twin parties of war, racism, repression and poverty are closely watching today’s unfolding youth radicalization, more fearful than in decades that it cannot be reined into the safe channels of capitalist electoral politics.

In the face of their own inexorably deepening crises, resort to violent repression can never be excluded. Indeed, it is the iron rule deeply-imbedded in all capitalist minority ruled societies.

The ruling elite understand full well that a consciously-organized working class led by experienced revolutionary fighters deeply embedded in every struggle of the day poses the only serious threat to its future capacity to exploit and oppress to keep their system of minority rule intact and in power.

Socialist politics

The alternative society that revolutionary socialists aim to help construct begins with organizing and empowering the vast majority of capitalism’s victims in all their varied races, creeds, sexes, sexual orientations, and national origins. Revolutionary socialists aim at organizing this vast majority into a disciplined deeply-rooted mass revolutionary socialist party aimed at ending capitalist minority rule. We also aim at helping to construct a mass independent, democratically-organized union-based Labor Party to carry workers’ battles at the point of production into the electoral arena. Such a Labor Party, armed with a socialist program, can help lead the fight for a workers’ government aimed at the abolition of capitalist corporate rule.

We aim at ushering into being a new and egalitarian society free from every form of discrimination and inequality.

Today, much of the “old left” has tragically been decimated, demoralized, and/or demobilized under the pressures of relative capitalist stability, and especially via the constant pressures to be drawn into capitalist “lesser evil” electoral politics, whether it be of the DSA, or Bernie Sanders, or corporate-funded NGO-financed projects aimed at channeling promising movements back into “the system.” As the 2024 elections approach we are once again presented with the “choice” between electing the corporate Democrat’s reactionary, racist, Biden over the corporate Republican’s reactionary, racist Trump! We reject this “choice” and instead stand proudly among today’s champions of independent mass mobilizations against capitalist injustice and genocide in Gaza and in solidarity with the world’s people fighting for freedom and liberation.

The connection between Palestine and Ferguson

Today’s courageous US youth are highlighting the connections between fighting racism at home and abroad, between solidarity with Palestine and solidarity Ferguson, between opposition to the US-backed Zionist genocide in Gaza and opposition to the US war machine everywhere and against US systemic racism at home.

Jeff Mackler is a staffwriter for Socialist Action. He can be reached at jmackler@lmi.net  socialist action.org