Red Army liberated Auschwitz
On the seventy-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the bourgeois media seemed to overstrain itself in its attempt to erase the basic fact that the camp was liberated by the Red Army. In Germany, the website of popular current affairs magazine Der Spiegel went so far as to falsely claim that the liberators were the US army, before facing a backlash. The goal of this revisionism is not only to erase the role of the Red Army, but also to conflate communism with Nazism – in order to tarnish the former and rehabilitate the latter.
In Ukraine, Nazi collaborator and murderer of hundreds of Jews Stepan Bandera is being increasingly hailed as a national hero for fighting the ‘Soviet invasion’, complete with his own statue; while in 2018 the European Parliament passed a resolution which stated that World War Two was caused by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact – an absolute falsification which shifts the blame for Nazism’s genocidal war onto its main target. No effort at rewriting history will change the fact that throughout the 1930s Soviet efforts to create an anti-Nazi pact were rebuffed by the European imperialist powers, including Britain, whose policy of ‘appeasement’ – collaboration – was designed to encourage genocidal Nazi aggression against the Soviet people. Nor will it change the fact that twenty-seven million Soviet citizens gave their lives in the fight against fascism. And nor indeed that Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army – whether the bourgeois press likes it or not.
Séamus Padraic
Nottingham
Syria ‘chemical attack’ and imperialist propaganda
In April 2018, Britain, France and the US used an alleged chlorine gas attack by Syrian government forces on the town of Douma as a pretext for an air strike. The whistleblowing organisation Wikileaks has revealed that original documents from investigators for the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) found no clear evidence of a chlorine attack. One leaked report says ‘the experts were conclusive in their statements that there was no correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure’. However, the OPCW’s final report concluded that there were ‘reasonable grounds that the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon took place. This toxic chemical contained reactive chlorine’.
Writing in Counterpunch, the journalist Jonathan Steele revealed that three American personnel from unidentified agencies ‘told [the investigators] emphatically that the Syrian regime had conducted a gas attack, and that the two cylinders found on the roof and upper floor of the building contained 170kg of chlorine. The inspectors … [felt] that the invitation to the Americans to address them was unacceptable pressure and a violation of the OPCW’s declared principles of independence’. Similar doubt about the so-called chlorine attack were voiced by others who spoke to senior investigators, including Peter Hitchens of the Daily Mail and Robert Fisk of The Independent – although The Guardian published only one short article, highlighting the OPCW’s official refutation of any cover-up. Meanwhile, the BBC has deemed the whole scandal unworthy of coverage – even though one of its own producers based in Syria conducted a six-month investigation after which he concluded that widely-circulated video hospital footage of victims of the Douma ‘gas attack’ had in fact been staged.
MATT GLASS
Nottingham
NHS mental health crisis
A mental health nurse once gave me some advice on dealing with depression, which was to say that I was a burden on the staff and people who were close to me. This was after two weeks of my being a patient in the mental health ward, and from that moment I began to understand the true nature of the NHS. As I remained there for nearly two more months, there were multitudes of men and women wandering around the white corridors of the hospital, wondering when they would get out. When I was readmitted, months later, I would see the same faces. They had not got better – because the help they needed on the inside was rarely made available or did not exist.
There is no mystery here. The NHS mental health sector receives a distinct lack of attention, making it a prime candidate for spending cuts. Since 2009, there has been a 13% decrease in mental health nurses with one in ten posts remaining empty as we are told there isn’t a ‘magic money tree’. The result is patients who wait months for treatment to come if it comes at all, undertrained staff with a distinct lack of understanding of mental illnesses and due to this, a constant, festering climate of abuse.
Patients are advised to seek aid for their ailments but when they do they are repeatedly ignored or dismissed. A fellow patient was told she was ‘ungrateful’ for expressing suicidal thoughts; another patient who suffered from horrifying delusions at night was practically advised by the nurse to ‘man up’ and go back to sleep. I was told I would get a great deal of help as an inpatient. However in reality most people’s days consisted of doing nothing in the ward while being served medication by staff who belittled and mocked you for it. There is so much focus in the media on mental health and illness, but it simply masks the gaping wounds within the NHS where the true treatment should be. What use is ‘mental health activism’ when treatment is near impossible to find? How are people without the income to pay for treatment meant to access it?
AMEER KHAN
West London
The criminalised will be the forces of revolution
The rise of populist nationalism throughout Europe and the US, and now manifested in England by the recent general election, evidences a fundamental shift in the political centre of gravity to the extreme right and the irrevocable demise of social democracy, as the balance of social and political power tips massively in favour of the wealthy and privileged. Inevitably, as poverty massively increases, so too will the number of the imprisoned, especially as social unrest and the struggle for basic survival intensify. Already the Tories have pledged to increase police numbers and prison places as the carceral state replaces the welfare state, camouflaged by the rhetoric of ‘getting tough on crime’ and maintaining ‘Law and Order’. As microcosms of wider society, prisons reflect the hard-edged reality of the power relationship between the state and the most disempowered in that society, and conditions within most British jails, which are now brutalising ghettos surrounded by high walls, are a physical prophecy of conditions for the poor in a society dominated by the jungle law of unrestrained neo-capitalism.
Malcolm X described prisons as ‘universities of revolution’ and the state itself has described them as ‘sites of radicalisation’. Within the enclosed totalitarian society of prison the seed of political consciousness in some prisoners is nourished daily by the direct experience of repression and powerlessness. This is an experience that will increasingly characterise the lives of the poorest and most disadvantaged groups more widely as the social and political climate in Britain becomes more repressive.
The criminalisation of the poor, already apparent in the treatment of state benefit claimants as virtual offenders on probation or parole, and the racial targeting by the police of deprived ethnic-minority communities, will increasingly dissolve the walls between prisons and poor communities, and create a relationship of power between the state and poor almost identical to that which exists between jailor and jailed. It is amongst the most disadvantaged and marginalised that resistance to that state will originate and grow.
JOHN BOWDEN A5026DM
HMP Warren Hill
Brazil: the persecution of Glenn Greenwald
On 21 January 2020, US journalist Glenn Greenwald, founder of The Intercept Brazil in 2016, was charged with cybercrimes in Brazil for publishing mobile phone messages that exposed former judge, Sérgio Moro, now rewarded with the position of Justice minister in Bolsonaro’s government, is advising prosecutors who worked on investigations. That allowed him, as judge in the case, to put ex-president Lula in prison. This guaranteed Bolsonaro the presidential election victory.
Greenwald first came to prominence in 2013 when he played a major role in publicising Edward Snowden’s leaks detailing US state surveillance activities. Greenwald called the cybercrime charges ‘an obvious attempt to attack a free press in retaliation for the revelations we reported about Minister Moro and the Bolsonaro government’. Six other individuals have also been charged. Nothing in the 95-page criminal complaint actually shows that Greenwald helped the hackers who provided the information. Case law establishes journalists can’t be punished for divulging documents obtained through ‘criminal’ means. In July, Bolsonaro insulted Greenwald and said the journalist ‘might wind up in jail’. A court order previously barred the federal police from investigating Greenwald’s role in reporting the hacked messages. A vindictive and angry neo-fascist Bolsonaro and lackey Moro have pushed past this to threaten journalists’ freedoms and reassert control over the news.
ALVARO MICHAELS
London
