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Queen Elizabeth IIs funeral is anticipated to be the most watched event in history, with an estimated global audience in the billions. In the UK, millions will be in London to line the route of the funeral procession.

It will not be so very long before many of those who do, will look back and wonder, What was I thinking?

Many people have been convinced that they should grieve over the death of a 96-year-old monarch who embodies class oppression and hereditary privilege. Such a mass phenomenon requires explanation.

In Britain above all, the ruling class has attributed extraordinary historical significance to the late queen, designating her as the representative and even grandmother of the nation, the embodiment of duty and personal sacrifice who supposedly shared the painful experiences of generations, beginning with World War II. The queen was a fixed point of grace and civility in the consciousness of nation and Commonwealth, the Observer editorialises. The publics remarkable reaction to the death of Elizabeth II is a corrective to the myth of British decline, to the fantasy that we are irreconcilably divided, declares the Telegraph.

This is an appeal to confused emotions designed to rally workers behind a myth of national unity and an equally mythical version of the queen, to buttress their own fractured rule in the face of the unprecedented class divisions tearing society apart.

Likewise, the worlds media and politicians have combined to portray this event as one of major import. Elizabeth Windsor served as monarch and head of state in Britain for 70 years. But anyone watching TV or reading a newspaper could be forgiven for thinking she was honorary queen of the world.

Almost 100 presidents and heads of government will be in Westminster Abbey for the one-hour funeral ceremony, including US President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden. The list of attendees betrays the imperialist character of the entire affair.

Right-wing political filth including Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe will be honoured guests, while no invite was extended to Russia, Belarus, Myanmar, Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan and other regimes targeted for hostile action by British, US and European imperialism. Chinese Vice President Wang Qishans attendance provoked howls of outrage at appeasement from within the Tory government and from Labour peers.

It is in pursuit of the shared interests of the imperialist powers that world leaders have lined up behind the British bourgeoisie in its efforts to assign world historic significance to the death of the queen. She has come to symbolise for them what the monarchy has always symbolised in the UKthe representative not of feudalism but of the existing capitalist social order, of inherited wealth and privilege amid vast social inequality, of stability, order, patriotism and every form of political backwardness.

The assembling of members of mostly long deposed royal families from across Europe and around the world is not merely a survival from the past, but proof that monarchs still play a political role for the bourgeoisie even in the 21st century.

Millions in the UK have been made a captive audience, with hagiographic media reports, delivered in the necessary solemn tones, forcing the entire country to show their respects whether they like it or not. State-orchestrated intimidation has therefore played an essential role in reinforcing the apparent national consensus that the queens passing must be mourned by allexemplified by the arrest of several people protesting peacefully against the institution of monarchy.

There is, in addition, the assiduous manipulation of confused popular sentiment. Among most workers, nostalgia, misplaced empathy, and respect for the queen as an individual are more significant elements than patriotism, nationalism, and support for the monarchy as an institution in shaping identification with the rigamarole surrounding her death.

There is also a definite element of genuine but misdirected grief in a country that has lost over 200,000 loved ones to the pandemic, without any of the official national mourning afforded to Elizabeth Windsor, who died peacefully in her bed from old age. The hundreds of thousands queueing to see her lying in state have passed by the UKs NationalCOVIDMemorial Wall, covered in hand-painted hearts representing lives lost needlessly to COVID-19.

Even so, many workers remain indifferent, or hostile to the spectacle proffered. And many have bridled at the excesses imposed on themincluding the cancellation of flights to and from Heathrow, along with thousands of medical procedures including for cancer and heart disease, and the postponement of private funerals, all as a supposed mark of respect.

The most politically significant expression of opposition is the anger aroused among more class conscious workers at the suspension of national strikes by the rail and postal unions for the whole of September. This action, taken without consultation within an hour of the queens death, comes after a summer of the most explosive class struggles in almost four decades. Led by the Rail, Maritime and Transport union, the bureaucracy has done all it can to suppress and contain social anger by limiting workers to sporadic and isolated strikes while preventing millions more from acting through an endless round of balloting.

Above all, it must be understood that if sections of workers have proved susceptible to the propaganda of the bourgeoisie, this is the product of the decades-long offensive against the socialist traditions of the workers movement by the Labour and trade union bureaucracy and the worldwide impact of Stalinism in discrediting socialism and then carrying through the restoration of capitalism. Not a single Labour politician, from Sir Keir Starmer to Jeremy Corbyn, has not grovelled before the royal family since the queens death.

Ultimately, however, the 9 million spent on the funeral and the countless millions lavished on the promotion of national unity around the monarch will come to nothing. It should be recalled that the last such great occasion of manufactured national grief, following the death of Princess Diana in 1997, is now looked on with a sense of bafflement even by those who lost their critical faculties at the time.

The project will crash on the rocks of social reality, including the greatest cost-of-living crisis since the Great Depression and malignant growth of social inequality. The UK now has a record number of billionaires, 177, with a combined wealth of 653 billion, a rise of 10 percent over the past year. Workers have suffered the longest sustained fall in wages since the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

No wonder support for the monarchy is at an all-time low and declining. The National Centre for Social Research (NCSR) has been charting attitudes towards the monarchy since 1994. Its most recent survey found that the core group who believed the monarchy was very or quite important was down to 55 percent. Fewer than half of people in Scotland said they supported retaining it, while most importantly only 40 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds and 37 percent of people from an ethnic minority, many of whose families will have suffered the realities of brutal rule by British imperialism, did so.

In a 2021 YouGov poll, 41 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds thought there should now be an elected head of state. During the weeks of official mourning, the hashtag #AbolishTheMonarchy has been viewed over 26 billion times on TikTok and has consistently trended on Twitter.

Surveys of popular opinion never factor in the most crucial social distinction in determining attitudes to the monarchy, social class. Nevertheless, the young are the most accurate representatives of contemporary social relations and a pointer to the future. Their growing hostility to the monarchy reflects a society characterised by hardship for millions, of long hours of work for little reward, and only the prospect of things getting worse. To ask young workers to identify with an ossified caste of spongers who live lives of fabulous unearned wealth and privilege is regarded as both insulting and a bizarre anachronism.

Not only to them. In the period ahead, the realities of life under capitalism will assert themselves after their temporary burial beneath a deluge of royal propaganda.

A particular warning must be sounded at the incessant promotion and glorification of the military. Members of the Royal Family have appeared in full military dress, their chests emblazoned with medals, emphasising the monarchs role as Head of the Armed forces. Fully 6,000 members of the armed forces will take part in Mondays state funeral in full dress uniform.

This coincides with Britains escalating participation in NATOs proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. The British working class is being dragged ever deeper into a conflict that is leading to world war, under a government they despise, led by a psychopath who boasts she is ready to initiate nuclear Armageddon. Politicians and generals calmly discuss the likelihood of a nuclear exchange in Ukraine, while a deranged media eggs them on.

Scientists and health officials are warning of a winter resurgence of the pandemic coinciding with an early and doubly large flu seasona twindemic that will devastate an already overloaded National Health Service.

The position of the working class is ever-more intolerable, as the economic crisis deepens and millions are forced to pay for bailouts to the pandemic profiteers, the cost of war in Ukraine, and sanctions on Russia. The latest report from the Living Wage Foundation found that of the 4.8 million people earning less than the supposed real living wage of 9.90 an hour, or 11.05 in London, 42 percent had skipped meals for financial reasons, and more than half had used a food bank in the last year.

The trade union bureaucracy and its parliamentary allies in the Labour Party will be unable to suppress the coming eruption of class struggle. Such is the strength of feeling in the working class that strikes by 2,500 dockworkers in Liverpool and Felixstowe begin on September 19 and 27. On October 1, they will be joined by tens of thousands of rail and postal workers who begin a new round of one-day strikes that will see 170,000 workers act.

This emerging movement will pit workers directly against the Labour and trade union bureaucracy in the fight for social equality, against capitalism, war and class privilege, and will be international in scope.

After the mawkish and socially obscene celebration of royalty comes the inevitable hangover. Britains rulers must face their nemesisthe working class.

Rail Workers: Tell us what you think. What are conditions like at your work place? All submissions will be kept anonymous.

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After the queen's funeral: the class struggle returns - World Socialist Web Site - WSWS

Upon returning home from the reunion with the alcoholics, John went straight into the bathroom to take a nice cold bath to cool down his heated body from walking under the sun. He quickly finished and went to his bedroom to put on some clothes; thereafter, he went to the kitchen to gather something to eat. After satisfying his stomach, he lay in his hammock on the veranda, where he recalled that a work companion by the name of Charles had given him a December 22, 2014 edition of the countrys most widely read newspaper of Belize, the Amandala, so he got up and obtained it. He lay back down and began to read page by page until he stumbled upon an article which was recommended to him by Charles, entitled The Satanic Philosophy of Neo-Liberalism. John was intrigued by such a title and decided to continue reading. It stated:

After two hundred years of the introduction of Christianity in Belize, it is to be assumed that the majority of its inhabitants would have embraced the socialist spirit, since the basis of the teachings of Jesus Christ is a form of socialism. For this reason, the behavior of those who have taken the reins to direct the destiny of this nation is inexplicable. The name social member (social partner) has been given to each organization that participates in favor of the interests of those who manage the finances of the governments in turn, since each one has its own enrichment interests. As for the public treasury, benefits or gifts from other countries for the eradication of extreme poverty in which the weakest live, this sector of the population has remained in the same historical conditions. This practice by some who believe they are Christians have fallen into the satanic philosophy of neo-liberalism, a system that has benefited a few and not the majority of society, which still lacks the most essential: Social Justice.

But unfortunately, it seems that the two political parties with the greatest presence in Belize have not yet realized their mistakes, which have caused the continuation of discrimination, repression for not belonging to the same organization, oppression by not allowing an environment to live in harmony. The leaders have implemented the corrupt policy to follow with those recommendations that they think will be used to eradicate bullying in the educational sector and other bureaucratic dependencies. It does nothing to benefit a society that lacks justice against political parties that share the same neo-liberal philosophy. Saying that one is going to be better than the other is a fallacy and an insult to intelligent minds. For the leaders of the UDP and PUP, they believe that the neo-liberal system is perfect, and this also includes the small political parties, who cannot or do not want to see the injustice that the majority of society goes through.

At the moment the one in power is the United Democratic Party (UDP), which has nothing of Socialism, but with a blind belief that everyone has achieved social welfare. Unfortunately, the executive politicians of the Peoples United Party (PUP), who are responsible for the political leadership of that organization, are of the same philosophical belief as the one in power. For this reason, the people have become skeptical, and the culture of buying votes has become unimportant, because the citizens have already learned that after the government is formed, be it from either of the two political parties, they will not be seen again, proselytizing face until after five years. It is necessary for the Peoples United Party (PUP) to change their strategy and political philosophy from neo-liberal to Democratic Socialism, which is a humanist system, since we have the right. Otherwise, they will have to wait until 2022, moreover, to see if the majority of citizens are encouraged. We can see how the propagandist political machinery works, trying to make believe that everything is going great, when in reality a real transformation is needed in national life in favor of the majority classes and social sectors of the country For a better future.

[emailprotected]September 11, 2022Finca SolanaCorozal Town

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John has big dreams! (Part 13) - Amandala

The Irish coalition government made up of Fianna Fil, Fine Gael, and the Green Party has seized on the humanitarian crisis generated by the Russia-Ukraine war to intensify efforts to abandon Irelands formal neutrality and lead the country into the imperialist war fighting alliance, NATO and related European Union (EU) military structures.

Over 47,000 Ukrainian refugees have now arrived in Ireland. This has emboldened mainstream media efforts to echo the remarks of Irelands former Taoiseach and deputy premier Leo Varadkar, who branded Russian premier Vladimir Putin the Hitler of the 21st century'. A wave of anti-Russian hysteria has been whipped up, sanctioned by the government and encouraged and egged on by the state broadcasting service RTE.

In April, US puppet and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told Irelands Dil (parliament), Although you are a neutral country, you have not remained neutral to the disaster and to the mishaps that Russia has brought to Ukraine.

There has been a backlash from right-wing pro-NATO members of the Dil and media over remarks made by Sabina Higgins, the wife of President Michael D. Higgins, who wrote a letter to the Irish Times at the beginning of August calling for peace talks between Ukraine and Russia. Higgins letter enraged those leading the pro-NATO campaign, particularly as her proposal for talks had avoided the requisite anti-Russian rhetoric.

The move to formally abandon neutrality coincides with decisions by Sweden and Finland to join NATO. The Irish shift is part of the massive escalation in efforts by the US and European imperialist powers to encircle Russia and accelerate the drive to all-out war. The Irish ruling elite want to show just how loyal they are to their imperialist allies.

This is in defiance of overwhelming opposition from working people. A recent Irish Times/lpsos poll showed that 66 percent of Irish people do not want any change in Irelands current position. Only 24 percent supported change, while 11 percent did not know. Irelands currently policy precludes the country from joining any military alliance and requires a United Nations Security Council resolution for Irish troops to be committed abroad.

Popular support for military neutrality is bound up with hostility among Irish workers to the horrors of imperialism. By contrast, the Irish ruling class has for decades employed neutrality as a tactic to advance its own class interests by attempting to use one or other imperialist power as a counterweight to Britain.

The Irish Free State (later the Republic of Ireland) was founded one hundred years ago in 1922 based on crushing all working class demands that went beyond the interests of the Irish bourgeois nationalists. These later founded Fianna Fil and Fine Gael, still the two main bourgeois parties.

The intention of those who took control of the 26-county state in the South of Ireland, after bloody partition by Britain, and having suppressed the working class, was to keep the South of Ireland subordinate to imperialist interests. The Irish Free State came into existence as a mechanism by which the British ruling class could rely on the weak Irish bourgeoisie to prevent opposition to British domination of the island spilling over into a struggle for socialism in Ireland and Britain itself.

The 1922 Constitution of the Irish Free State stated that Save in the case of actual invasion, the Irish Free State shall not be committed to active participation in any war without the assent of parliament.

The Free State remained a dominion of the British Commonwealth with the UK remaining in control of marine defence as well as three naval bases known as the Treaty Portsat Berehaven, Loch Swilly and Spike Island.

The Treaty Ports were handed back to the Irish government as part of a 1938 settlement. This followed five years of the Anglo-Irish Economic War in which Eamonn de Valeras new Fianna Fil government implemented, at great social cost, protectionist measures against Britain designed to foster Irish capitalism. In consequence, the Irish government remained at least nominally neutral during World War Two, although neutrality in practice had a pro-British bias.

British wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill was urged by Northern Ireland Prime Minister Lord Craigavon to invade the South. Churchill in the end relied on agreed military overflights of Donegal to Northern Ireland during the Emergency of world war. Close co-operation with Britain against a possible German invasion was also prepared.

There were limits, however. In 1940 a British delegation floated the possibility of ending partition if the Irish government would fully support the British war effort. De Valera refused, seeking to advance Irish capitalism by balancing between the imperialist combatants. Relations were maintained with Japan and Nazi Germany, while close relations with the US also served as a growing counterweight to British influence.

Ireland eventually joined the United Nations in 1955, having been blocked by the Soviet Union in 1945, although Ireland refused to join NATO due to British membership of the anti-Soviet alliance. The Irish government sought an alliance with the US outside the confines of NATO, but this was refused by Washington. Cooperation was nevertheless continually deepened with the US on security matters.

Irelands formal neutrality, and history of brutal national and class oppression, was used by the US and other powers to obscure the barbaric aims of imperialism, particularly in Africa. Between 1960 and 1964, for example, over 6,000 Irish soldiers served in the Congo, in a brutal war following Congolese independence from Belgian colonialism. Subsequent UN deployments saw Irish troops dispatched to many of the worlds poorest countries, including Haiti and Angola, seeking to secure imperialist interests.

By the 1960s, Ireland had abandoned its protectionist experiments, reducing tariff barriers on trade and opening up the economy to US capital and investment. The South became a hub for multinational companies attracted by low taxes and compliant unions. The integration of the ruling elite as junior partners of the imperialists was accelerated by accession to the European Community in 1973. Today more than a thousand large global American companies have operations in Ireland, paying one of the lowest corporation tax rates in Europe at 12.5 percent, and enjoying access to the EUs huge single market.

Irish integration into Europe also drew Ireland into European and NATO mechanisms. In 1999 Ireland was accepted into NATOs Partnership for Peace programme (PfP), which serves as a waiting room for NATO membership. Candidate countries are set targets in terms of military organisation, spending and equipment. As of July 2022, Ireland was deemed to have 15 of 27 set goals outstanding.

In 2003, to stress its loyalty to the US, the Fianna Fil government supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq, assisting US shock and awe bombing by offering Shannon Airport in the west of Ireland as a hub and refuelling depot. The invasion resulted in the death of more than a million people and the destruction of an entire society.

By 2006 the airport became one of the main locations for rendition flights carrying prisoners held by the CIA to countries where they were subsequently tortured. Shannon is currently used to refuel daily arms flights to Ukraine.

By June this year, the Irish government was also considering joining the joint NATO/EU hybrid and cyber warfare thinktank based in Helsinki, Finland, and has already joined the NATO Co-operative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence in Tallinn, Estonia.

Taoiseach Martin has been floating plans to avoid a referendum on NATO membership, which would stand a high chance of losing. In June, Martin declared, We need to reflect on military non-alignment in Ireland and our military neutrality. We are not politically neutral. He continued, We dont need a referendum to join NATO. Thats a policy decision of government.

Ireland is also integrating its forces into the EUs own military apparatus. In 2006, Willie ODea, then the Minister of Defence, announced that Ireland would seek to join European Union battle groups. It has subsequently participated in a succession of battle groups involving up to 1,500 troops.

In 2017, the Dil voted to join the European Unions Permanent Structured Co-operation (PESCO) Agreement, made up of 25 of the EUs 27 member states. Thus far, the country has only participated in one of PESCOs 60 projects. In June, however, the Dil voted to participate in four more, including work against cyber threats, medical training, disaster reliefboth within and outside EU territoryand sea mine clearance.

Also driving the ruling elite in Ireland towards NATO militarism is the very real threat from the working class, which has seen living standards plummet and poverty increase.

More than 781,794 people are experiencing deprivation in Ireland, with 660,000 people now living in poverty, of which 210,000 are children. Over 133,000 people living in poverty are in employment. According to the latest data produced by Eurostat, energy prices have risen by 39.1 percent in the past twelve months, driving overall yearly price inflation to 7.3 percent.

The housing and rental crisis has extended its shadow over the whole country, particularly in larger towns and cities. The latest figures released by the Department of Housing show that the number of homeless people increased in June to 10,492, up more than a quarter on the same period last year. The number of homeless families has now increased to 1,385 and there are over 3,000 children homeless. The NATO-Russian war crisis serves to divert class tensions against an external foe.

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Irish government moves nearer NATO and war with Russia - WSWS

As an Alabama high school student, I was chosen to travel to the Soviet Union for the People to People international student exchange program, as part of the first delegation from my home state. It shocked me to see the oppression and hopelessness of the people and their lack of choices and freedoms that most Americans take completely for granted.

That experience, at such a young age, shaped my worldview and deepened my love and appreciation for the United States. After three long weeks in a communist country, when our plane touched down at John F. Kennedy Airport, the first thing a few of my travel companions and I did was get down on our hands and knees and kiss the ground! I had never been so grateful to be an American.

So why should you as a Christian care about this, and how does socialism deviate from Christian values?

For a start, socialism destroys religious freedom. It destroys creativity, innovation and ingenuity. Today, most Americans do not know the history of the death and destruction communism caused in the twentieth century. Most American college students can answer correctly when asked how many Jews died in the Holocaust. They know it is six million people because they have learned this in our schools, through popular movies, stories like The Diary of Anne Frankand because of ongoing campaigns from organizations like the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, the Holocaust Museum, and others, who remind Americans about this history.

But if you ask the average American how many victims communism has claimed, very few would respond with the correct answer. Some sources report that it is over 100 million.

Many young people today seem to be confusing socialism with social justice, even though the two are completely dissimilar. Socialism in most countries does nothing to help the poorit often actually creates more poverty!

The people who fought for our country to establish the freedoms we enjoy today suffered enormous hardship. Many of them died fighting to protect our religious freedom especially. If you are a Christian, the choice that faces you is not whether you are willing to fight for what you believe. Instead, it is this: Do you want to fight right now while it may be uncomfortable and unpleasant, but you will be fighting to preserve what freedoms we already have? Or do you want to wait and fight later to regain what we had before we lost our freedom?

Long hours volunteering on a campaign, giving up a little extra money each campaign season, taking time out of your busy schedule to attend town hall meetings and dealing with the unpleasant nature of politics pales in comparison to what people who fought in the Revolutionary War and other battles for freedom endured. Never before in our nations history have we been so close to adopting a way of life that will eventually lead to everything we hold dear being completely stripped away. Socialism is a political and economic system with roots in the ideas of Karl Marx. In socialism, the government owns all means of generating wealth, but individuals can own property. It is often thought of as the period between the overthrow of the capitalist system and the implementation of communism.

Communism is the full implementation of government control and exists when there is no class, no money and no private ownership whatsoever. The government runs everything, and all property is communally owned. All one needs to do is look at how their local US Postal Service office or their DMV operates, and then imagine that style of service applied to every single aspect of life. It is beyond imagination how anyone could think that this would improve things in our country. If the United States were a communist country, the iPhone would most likely never have been invented because all of the government regulations and lack of incentives would most likely have stifled someone like Steve Jobs and the rest of his teams creativity.

Under free-market capitalism, there is free competition and no government regulation or interference. Entrepreneurship, hard work and innovation are incentivized, and people are free to own property.

The recent rise in socialism coming from the fringe Left should be deeply troubling to all because at its core, socialism is about replacing God with government and freedom with tyranny. America is the greatest land of opportunity the world has ever known because Americans are free to practice their own beliefs, speak their own minds, protect their own lives, pursue their own dreams and enjoy the fruits of their own labor. Socialism directly opposes the American dream.

Advocates for socialism see Christianity as a threat and therefore believe it must be silenced, canceled and eliminated. Socialism has been tried all over the world and has never worked, but somehow people keep getting deceived into adopting this approach. The truth is, in socialist countries, most people of faith suffer tremendously. One of the greatest ways they suffer is by having God stripped out of everything.

Right now, in America, socialism is on our doorstep. As one major donor at a fundraising event recently said to me, My husband and I can either get involved in politics now and give away some of our money to help get the right kinds of candidates elected, or we can wait, hold on to our money and then risk our kids having nothing to inherit. If our country gives in to full-scale socialism or communism, the government could easily come in and just take it all! This may sound extreme, but for anyone who remembers what happened in Cuba when Castro took power and converted them to full-scale communism, or if you have studied places like Venezuela, there are horror stories of things just like that occurring.

We as Christians and people who love God, love our country and love the very things that make life precious must rise up. We must choose God over government and faith over fear. If not now, when? If not us, then who?

The preceding is excerpted from chapter 13 of Terri Hasdorffs book, Running Into the Fire (Charisma House, Sept. 2022). For more information on Running Into the Fire, or to order the book, visit shop.charismamag.com.

Terri Hasdorffis a former congressional candidate and an executive-level leader with over twenty years experience in government and politics. She began her career in 1991 in what is now called the White House Office of Public Engagement, where she had the honor of working with faith leaders from across the country. She later served on Capitol Hill for six years, then ran for a seat in the US House to represent Alabamas second congressional district. She has a bachelors degree from Samford University, is a graduate of the senior executives program at Harvard Universitys John F. Kennedy School of Government and is currently in the executive MBA program at Oxford University.

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The Dangers of Socialism: Is It Coming to America? - Charisma Magazine

These remarks were delivered by Christoph Vandreier to the Seventh National Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (US), held from July 31 to August 5, 2022.

Vandreier is the national secretary of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei(SGP), the German section of the International Committee of the Fourth International.

Read the full report on the Congress and the resolutions adopted at it.

I am very pleased to bring to this Congress the revolutionary greetings of the Socialist Equality Party in Germany. The Congress is a truly international event. Not only because we have large delegations from all sections and groups, but above all because this Congress is based on an internationalist perspective that arms the working class around the world and guides the work of all sections.

That the Congress is dedicated to our unforgettable comrade Wije Dias is a testament to this perspective. As Comrade David North noted, Wijes life represents the historical depth of our world party. Starting from the struggle against the betrayal of the LSSP, the RCL/SEP based its work on the historical and political principles of the International Committee. This can be seen in the extremely strong statement of the Sri Lankan comrades intervening in the explosive situation and giving leadership to the working class based on these principles.

This is the essence of what we have called the fifth phase of the development of the Trotskyist movement. Our historical principles intersect with the growing class struggle internationally. And as Comrade David North put it, the more intensive the class struggles break out, the more significant is it to base our party on our historical heritage.

Every single report on the extremely strong resolutions showed how we are basing our analysis on exactly this heritage, a very fundamental understanding of our epoch and a decades long analysis. All the central issues we were discussing over the last days are fundamental features of the development in every country in the world.

As far as the pandemic is concerned, Germany is a hotspot of the BA.5 wave. Infection rates, hospitalization and death rates are rising rapidly, clinics are at their absolute limit as thousands of doctors and nurses are down due to infection. Even the Minister of Health, Karl Lauterbach, is warning of a collapse and catastrophic development, but at the same time has thrown all protective measures overboard. The government is pursuing a deliberate policy of mass social murder and destruction of the public health system.

While millions of workers are threatened with death and illness in order to increase the profits of the banks and corporations, radical real wage cuts are being organized with inflation. The same nurses that fought two and a half years at the forefront against the pandemic are getting now wage cuts by 10 to 20 percent!

All social spheres are now subordinated to the war against Russia. In Germany, natural gas prices have tripled. And now the government has also passed a law introducing an additional levy to protect the profits of the energy companies. Workers are to be forced to freeze in order to be able to wage the war against Russia.

Under these conditions, Comrade Will Lehmans campaign is also arousing great interest among German workers. This is because the trade unions have completely backed the war policy and are enforcing the wage cuts and price increases against the workers. With the war against Russia, the German Labor Front is also coming back.

In point 15 of the resolution against imperialist war we declare, The conflict with Ukraine has provided German imperialism with an opportunity to implement the largest rearmament campaign since the collapse of the Nazi regime.

This is very true. Seventy-seven years after the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht, German tanks are rolling again against Russia. By tripling the military budget, the ruling class in Germany is pursuing the declared goal of once again building the largest military power in Europe. All restrictions imposed on Germany after the greatest crimes in human history are being stripped away and the whole society is being militarized.

The same arms companies that supplied the total war and earned their profits with forced labor and in the concentration camps are now again multiplying their production and mass-producing weapons for the war against Russia. After the German government has already delivered weapons worth 600 million euros to Ukraine so far, an additional 100 self-propelled howitzers worth 1.7 billion euros are now to be sent.

We had already shown in 2014 how this return of German militarism goes hand in hand with the trivialization and ultimately the justification of the crimes of German imperialism. This has been more than confirmed. The falsifications of history by Professors Mnkler and Baberowski, which we pointed out and fought against, are today the official government line.

For example, the Social Democratic Chancellor Olaf Scholz has called the Russian invasion of Ukraine a war of extermination and a breach of civilization, terms that were so far in Germany exclusively used for the Eastern Campaign and the Holocaust. Using these terms for the war in Ukraine is an incredible trivialization of the Nazi crimes. The daily newspaper taz even claimed in an article that Stalin had planned the Second World War before Hitler had even come to power. The old Nazi lie of a preventive war and thus the justification of the war of extermination is now being revived in the house paper of the Greens.

With our struggle against this falsification of history, we have linked ourselves to the historically deeply rooted opposition to war in the German working class. This was only possible on the basis of the decades-long struggle of the International Committee for the Defense of Historical Truth and the struggle against subjective-idealist ideology. Based on this, the SGP is the only party in Germany today that opposes militarism and arms the working class with a socialist perspective. As Johannes pointed out yesterday, the Greens are the most aggressive pro war party today and also the left party and its pseudo-left satellites are supporting the war against Russia.

As comrades have already explained, the same applies to all central questions of political development. Our World Party is the only political tendency that has a progressive answer to war, mass social murder in the pandemic and to the danger of fascism.

This is also the reason why the German state is waging its furious campaign against us under the banner of anti-communism. The Verfassungsschutz, the German secret service, makes it clear that it views the SGP and ICFI as the standard bearers of contemporary Marxian socialism, as comrade David North put it in his opening report to the SEP (US) Summer School in 2019. They put us on the list of extremist organizations because they understood that our program has the greatest objective significance.

The government justified naming the SGP explicitly because we agitated against nationalism and militarism and argued for an egalitarian, democratic and socialist society. It developed an argumentation that declared any criticism of the state organs, and especially of the army and the secret service, to be anti-constitutional and illegal. Two courts have since blessed this scandalous revival of the Nazis Gesinnungsjustiz, which is why we have now filed a constitutional complaint.

Our complaint is not a defensive act and is certainly not based on illusions in the Federal Constitutional Court. Rather, with our complaint, we are going on the offensive and putting the Verfassungsschutz on trial. We put ourselves at the forefront of the struggle against the radical right-wing conspiracy in the state apparatus and the return of fascist methods.

The ruling class is turning to authoritarian and fascist forms of rule all over the world because its policies of war and social attacks are met by enormous opposition in the working class. The fight against fascism is therefore inseparably linked to the fight against war, the pandemic and the social attacks. The only way to defend democratic rights is to mobilize the international working class on the basis of a socialist program.

This perspective is now very concrete. The class struggle is developing rapidly, and the interventions of our party are of the greatest objective importance. These interventions must be based on our living historical principles and experiences in order to actually bring to bear the objective power of the working class. This congress is without any question an essential step in this direction.

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The revival of German militarism and the fight for socialism - WSWS