In “My Thoughts on Handagama’s Rani,” published in Daily FT on March 281, Jagath Weerasinghe—artist, archaeologist, and cultural commentator—extends, rationalises, and legitimises the central reactionary thesis of Asoka Handagama’s recent film Rani. This is a film whose underlying narrative, presented in the guise of artistic subtlety and aesthetic ambiguity, represents a deeply ideological falsification of history. Weerasinghe’s endorsement of the director’s central proposition2—reproduced in Sinhala translation in Anidda on March 30 by Vidura Munasinghe—is emblematic of a broader trend among the middle-class intelligentsia and the pseudo-left, who serve as ideological apologists for the crimes of the capitalist state.
A scene in the film “Rani” by Asoka Handagama
The core thesis promoted by both Weerasinghe and the film is that the atrocities carried out during the 1988–90 period—enforced disappearances, state death squads, mass graves, torture camps, and extrajudicial killings, as well as the fascistic violence perpetrated by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)—were not the products of concrete political decisions, class interests, and specific agencies of state and party power. Instead, they were the result of a society in which “violence had become systemic and normalised.” Weerasinghe writes: authoritarian regimes perpetuate brutality “for political gain and self-preservation, creating an environment where violence is not only carried out by those in power but is also internalised, accepted, and even participated in by ordinary citizens. In such a climate, even those with moral integrity can find themselves complicit—whether through silence, fear, or the gradual erosion of ethical boundaries.”
This pseudo-sociological claim—that violence was embedded in the very fabric of society and was collectively enacted by the masses—leads to a profoundly reactionary conclusion: that there is a shared moral guilt for the crimes of the period, borne by everyone, without any class distinction. Rani—the eponymous protagonist, who is portrayed as initially a passive observer of the surrounding terror but who gradually becomes emotionally and psychologically implicated—and every other defenseless rural man and woman, the worker, the unemployed youth, who were terrorized for their lives both by the fascism of the JVP and by state repression, are depicted as responsible for and willing participants in the atrocities.
Was this culpability moral, political, or both? While Weerasinghe leaves no doubt that he intends to assign moral culpability to the masses—an implication clearly shared by the director—this vulgar theory leaves the spectator wondering who bears political accountability. That is precisely the issue at hand. The film and its director’s apologetics place the blame on the “ordinary” masses. Political responsibility follows moral culpability. Consequently, the oppressed are identified with the oppressor, giving rise to a vision of a society that is hopeless, anarchic, and devoid of historical or scientific grounding. This approach is crudely ahistorical, impressionistic, and unscientific—and it serves a definite class interest.
The capitalist state agents of terror, its political leadership, the military-intelligence apparatus, and the misdirected cadre of the JVP are equated, and these contradictory forces are placed on the same grounds as the poor and the working people, constituting a homogeneous society of “ordinary citizens.” They are all morally and indiscriminately dissolved into an amorphous, classless “we.” The final anecdote of the film, which Weerasinghe refers to, is founded upon this proposition and leads to the conclusion that the director wanted the viewers of his film to read into as the alternative narrative: the killing of Richard de Soysa was not necessarily ordered by President R. Premadasa, nor did it serve the interests of the latter or the ruling class. This is a liquidationist proposition that casts doubt upon many other suspected assassinations and abductions of the period, getting the political leadership of the state off the hook. In conclusion, this is where the “broader and more layered exploration of the underlying social and political realities,” which Weerasinghe claims the purported “fiction” allows its viewer to delve into, lands.
Such a political framework is not new. It has appeared time-to-time in bourgeois and petty-bourgeois historiography, where the responsibility for state crimes—pogroms, wars, genocides—is shifted onto “society” or “human nature.” One prominent historical analogue is Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996), which absurdly claimed that the Holocaust was not the outcome of a historically developed political program of German imperialism and the fascist state of the Nazi Third Reich, but the result of a deep-seated, inherent antisemitism among the German people3. Thus, the “ordinary” Germans were willing accomplices in the Final Solution, the extermination of over six million Jews. Hitler was only the final executioner of this ideology. This deadly distortion of history has been widely discredited by serious historians, not only for its factual inaccuracy, but for the reactionary political implications it carries4.
Weerasinghe offers no sociological or historical research to substantiate his claims—nor does the director, who admits to conducting little serious investigation prior to the making of the film. However, similar arguments have been advanced internationally through certain psychological and sociological theories that lack rigorous empirical grounding. Chief among these are the studies of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, whose respective experiments on obedience to authority and simulated prison environments have been widely cited to suggest that ordinary individuals can become complicit in acts of cruelty under systemic pressure. Both studies have come under sustained criticism for methodological shortcomings, ethical violations, and issues of reproducibility. More importantly, when abstracted from their immediate experimental context and applied uncritically to complex social phenomena like mass political violence, these theories devolve into a kind of psychological determinism. They obscure the class forces and political programs that shape historical events and instead offer a right-wing, pseudo-scientific narrative in which atrocities are the inevitable result of human nature or diffuse social norms—thereby absolving the state and the ruling elite of political responsibility.
In the Sri Lankan context, this argument has especially reactionary consequences. It leads to the notion that the Sinhalese majority are collectively responsible for the 1983 pogrom against Tamils, and ultimately, for the genocide in Mullivaikkal in 2009. A section of the middle class of the country harbours this ideology, which was once starkly expressed by Pubudu Jayagoda, a leader of the pseudo-left Frontline Socialist Party (FSP), who claimed that racism is deeply ingrained in the Sinhalese “society”5, reducing complex political phenomena to abstract moral failures of entire ethnic groups of conflicting classes6. This is not only unscientific and historically false, but it plays directly into the hands of the capitalist state and chauvinist forces, who exploit communalism to divide the working class on racialist lines to prevent unified struggle.
Marxism begins not with moralism, but with the concrete analysis of social relations and historical processes. The essential questions that must be addressed in any serious assessment of the 1988–90 period are the following: What were the objective causes of the JVP-led insurrection and its fascistic methods? What class forces were involved in the repression? What was the role of imperialism, the IMF, and the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie in creating the social crisis that produced this violence? And above all, was there an alternative revolutionary leadership that could have mobilized the working class against both the JVP and the capitalist state?
The JVP uprising was not a spontaneous eruption of madness, nor was it the inevitable product of a culture of violence. It emerged from a deep social crisis rooted in the failure of the post-colonial bourgeoisie and the betrayal of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) in 1964, which had entered into a class collaborationist coalition with the bourgeois Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). In the aftermath of this betrayal, tens of thousands of rural youth—disillusioned by the parliamentary left and devastated by the economic liberalization policies of the J. R. Jayewardene regime—were drawn to the radical rhetoric of the JVP.
The JVP, despite its populist posture, was never a Marxist organization. It rejected the class struggle, dismissed the internationalism of the Fourth International, and relied on petty-bourgeois nationalism and adventurist terror. In 1987–89, it launched a campaign of assassinations and fascistic violence that paralyzed the working class and the middle class. The response of the state was a campaign of ruthless repression. Death squads, torture camps such as Batalanda, and state-sponsored terror claimed the lives of an estimated 60,000 youth.
A scene of mass killings and daily-life in rural Sri Lanka in September 1989. Photo by Prasanna Hennayake
This was not a case of generalized ”ideology of violence” within society. It was class warfare, waged from above by the capitalist state to defend private property, intimidate the working class, and preserve bourgeois rule. It was facilitated by the political vacuum created by the betrayals of the old left and the inability of the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL), the predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), to politically break the working class and the rural poor from the grip of the petty-bourgeois JVP and other Stalinist and Maoist organizations in time to develop an alternative mass leadership.
However, it was only the RCL, the Sri Lankan section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), the world party of the working class, which alone insisted that the fascist violence of the JVP and the state terror could only be opposed by the independent political mobilization of the working class on a socialist and internationalist program. In November 1988, in order to mobilize the independent power of the working class, it called for a united front of working-class organizations to fight both state repression and JVP fascism, as an immediate practical measure. Instead of supporting this effort, the LSSP, the Communist Party (CP), Nawa Sama Samaja Party (NSSP), and Ceylon Workers’ Congress (CWC) aligned themselves with the terror of the UNP regime, which armed them against the JVP. This betrayal aided the state in unleashing mass repression on the rural poor of the South and launching its racist war against the oppressed Tamil people.
None of these dynamics are on the historical balance sheet of those who seek to “push” the contemporary youth “to the very edges of these established frameworks.”
Today, the pseudo-left has once again emerged as a shield for the ruling class, which has endorsed the JVP/NPP as its saviour. The JVP-led NPP is using its parliamentary position not to uncover or prosecute the war crimes of the past, but to bury them. Its recent tabling and debating of the Batalanda Commission report—gathering dust for over two decades—is a cynical gesture meant to divert public attention from IMF austerity measures. The NPP is objectively poised not to challenge the military, nor the UNP, nor the interests of imperialism. It fears that any real reckoning with the crimes of 1988–90 will expose not only the state, but the politics of the JVP itself.
The working class and rural poor must reject the “common guilt” thesis advanced in Rani and promoted by figures like Weerasinghe. They must demand justice based not on emotional reconciliation, but on historical truth and political accountability7.
Neither of these are possible within the capitalist state. It requires the building of a revolutionary socialist movement of the working class to finally break the grip of imperialism, overturn the legacy of terror, and unify the oppressed—Sinhala, Tamil, and Muslim—on the basis of a common struggle against exploitation.
The film’s thesis, and Weerasinghe’s article by extension, constitute an aestheticized historical falsification, a rebranding of a reactionary historical revisionism in the garb of “critical reflection.” The function of art, if it is to be progressive, is not to obscure these truths but to clarify them. Rani fails in this most fundamental task. It replaces history with impressionism, class analysis with pseudo-science, and revolutionary clarity with reactionary confusion.
Anidda, February 2, 2025, A discussion with Ashoka Handagama by Upali Amarasinghe, p19. ↩︎
‘[A]ntisemitism moved many thousands of “ordinary” Germans—and would have moved millions more, had they been appropriately positioned—to slaughter Jews. Not economic hardship, not the coercive means of a totalitarian state, not social psychological pressure, not invariable psychological propensities, but ideas about Jews that were pervasive in Germany, and had been for decades, induced ordinary Germans to kill unarmed, defenseless Jewish men, women, and children by the thousands, systematically and without pity.’ Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), p. 9. ↩︎
Ever since the global financial crisis of 2008, market analysts, regulators and media commentators have been pondering the question of what might be the next sub-prime.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell addresses House Financial Services Committee hearing in Washington, Wednesday, June 21, 2023. [AP Photo/Andrew Harnik]
The crisis in the US sub-prime mortgage market was the trigger for the 2008 crisis in which a total collapse of the financial system was only averted by a massive intervention by the US Federal Reserve and the government. It was an expression of rampant speculation and in some cases outright criminal activity by some of the largest American banks.
In the years since 2008, one of the issues of greatest concern has been the rise and rise of the largely unregulated non-banking financial institutions (NBFIs). As so often happens when regulators try to fix a problem in one part of the capitalist system, the supposed solution creates another. This has been the case with regard to NBFIs.
The extraordinary growth of private credit, especially over the past decade, was the result of efforts to more tightly regulate the banks and prevent a recurrence of the bailouts in the wake of the 2008 crisis. Finance capital responded by extending the role of credit outside the traditional banking system.
However, as has been acknowledged by the International Monetary Fund and other international bodies, regulators have very little idea of the activities of these organisations, such as hedge funds, family companies and other funds operating in the world of private credit. The word most often used in reports is “opaque.”
Of particular concern is the connection of private credit to the banking system as a whole. While the private credit markets operate outside the banking system, they depend on it for the supply of funds. This has been increasing at an exponential rate.
According to a report in the Financial Times this week, the amount of lending which the big US banks have provided for private capital firms has risen 30-fold over the last decade, from $10 billion to $300 billion in 2023.
In an attempt to find out what is going on, the US Fed earlier this month announced that it would carry out an “exploratory analysis” to be conducted alongside its stress tests of the major banks with the aim of providing an insight into the “resiliency of the US banking system.” It hastened to assure the large banks that the exploration “would not affect large bank capital requirements.”
The major banks are intensely hostile to any measures that compel them to increase their capital reserves to cover potential losses because this means the withdrawal of funds that would otherwise be employed to make profit.
The Fed statement announcing the investigation, which will report its findings in June, said it would “examine the risks posed to banks” by NBFIs. It noted that US bank exposures to them had grown rapidly over the past five years and that the banks’ credit commitments to them totalled $2.1 trillion in the third quarter of 2024.
“This growth poses risks to banks, as certain NBFIs operate with high leverage and are dependent on funding from the banking sector.”
The exploratory analysis would examine two issues: credit and liquidity shocks in the NBFI sector during a global recession; and the effect of a market shock. The latter was defined as “a sudden dislocation to financial markets resulting from expectations of reduced global economic activity and higher inflation expectation” with distress in equity markets leading to defaults by major hedge funds.
While no one can forecast what exactly might set off a crisis, there are any number of potential triggers.
The Fed statement pointed to some of them, including a sudden dislocation to markets caused by reduced growth expectations and higher inflation, and an appreciation in the value of the US dollar against other major currencies. Others were a rise in yield on short-term US Treasury bonds, and an increase in expected defaults leading to a widening of credit spreads—a divergence between interest rates for private credit compared to the rate on Treasury bonds.
Potential triggers not mentioned include a rapid fall in the stock market valuation of a major corporation.
Last month, for example, the market capitalisation of the AI chip maker Nvidia, at one stage the biggest company by this metric in the world, fell by $600 billion in a single day. This resulted from the announcement by the Chinese firm DeepSeek that it had found a cheaper way of developing AI without using top-end chips.
Since then, the total market capitalisation loss by Nvidia has reached $850 billion, sliced off its market high of $3.66 trillion at the beginning of January.
What are initially paper losses for investors who bought at the height of the market frenzy have the potential to translate into real losses if the assets have to be sold to meet debt obligations and to set off a chain reaction.
There are also issues of concern in the very foundations of the bond market. What has been characterised as a conundrum has emerged since the Fed began cutting its interest rate last September. Over a period of three months, the Fed rate fell by 1 percentage point. However, instead of falling, as expected if “normal” conditions prevailed the yield (interest rate) on the 10-year US Treasury bond, the benchmark for the financial system, has risen by a percentage point.
A number of short-term issues have been put forward as the reason, including fears of renewed inflation fuelled by lower interest rates, and the effect of tariffs.
An analysis issued in January by Rashad Ahmed, an economist with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Alessandro Rebucci, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, pointed to deeper processes.
They suggested that it may reflect “waning official demand for dollar-denominated safe assets, possibly driven by geopolitical concerns including fear of sanctions and asset freezes.”
As they pointed out, the “rise in 10-year yields coincides with a substantial reduction in dollar reserve assets held by foreign official institutions.”
The authors said that foreign official buyers may be shifting to fiat currencies other than the US dollar and also into gold, the price of which has risen by nearly 30 percent over the past year.
They concluded by saying the jury was still out on whether the dollar’s status as the dominant reserve currency was being undermined. However, they noted that “it is possible for even a small reduction in the US dollar share of foreign reserves to have a significant short-run impact on US Treasury markets.”
One of those impacts could well be in the private capital markets which have gorged themselves on low rates, building up debt to finance their speculative ventures, but now confronting a higher interest rate environment.
[This article was originally published in the World Socialist Web Site here on 14 February 2025]
Statement of the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), the Revolutionary Left Faction (RLF) of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) of Sri Lanka.
Sri Lanka’s general election concluded with a landslide victory for the ruling National People’s Power (NPP), which secured more than a two-thirds majority in Parliament. The NPP is a coalition consisting of the anti-Marxist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), the party of the Executive President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who was elected in the September elections. The result highlights the centripetal power of the executive presidency, which has been central to Sri Lanka’s capitalist rule since the adoption of the 1978 Constitution.
President Anura Kamara Dissanayake (second from the right) stands with other leaders of NPP at an election rally on November 11, 2024 at Gampaha. Courtesy: X profile of Dissanayake.
Over six million people have opted to vote for the NPP, which is what they viewed as the most pragmatic choice within the country’s presidential-parliamentary system. This decision reflects the people’s choice for a “stable government,” a slogan promoted by the NPP, and was driven by their past experiences of political instability caused by factional conflicts between the interests of a president and a parliament dominated by a different party. People have expressed a preference for a strong NPP government over a strong or “changed” opposition, as no political alternative was presented by the right-wing opposition parties.
The SLPP-UNP (Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna-United National Party), the previous ruling coalition, and the SJB (Samagi Jana Balawegaya), the former opposition, were thoroughly discredited in the eyes of the electorate. Largely an expression of mass protest over the parasitic elite class that had long ruled the country, people converted the general elections into a platform to translate the 2022 mass struggle’s slogan, “No to the 225” (referring to the 225 members of parliament), into action. The NPP capitalized on this sentiment, framing it as a call for a “cleansing” of Parliament.
However, in spite of all the false promises and popular rhetoric of Dissanayake, the election result does not necessarily indicate widespread trust in the NPP leadership. JVP has a history of partnering with various governments of the capitalist elite since early 1990s, when they entered into parliamentary politics, and supporting their austerity and anti-democratic measures. JVP leaders held ministerial portfolios under former president Chandrika Kumaratunge and fervently supported the renewed communal war of former president Mahinda a Rajapaksa against the country’s Tamils in the North and East, which ended with a massacre of an estimated 40,000 Tamils during the final phase of the war.
During the elections, the NPP/JVP leadership barred their largely unknown candidates from campaigning for preferential votes, promoting only those the leadership clique has chosen, and claiming that people are encouraged to vote for the party rather than the individuals. The party sought to persuade the people that it would establish a “government of the people” and of all ethnicities. This posture is deceptive.
The working class, the urban middle class, peasants, small traders, and youth were largely led by the NPP leadership into believing that there was no solution to reviving Sri Lanka’s economy other than implementing the dictates of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The NPP/JVP leaders sought to keep the people in the dark over the real implications of this pro-market program: sweeping austerity, renewed commercialization and privatization, shrinking wages, and the suppression of workers’ strikes – measures that the working people rejected under the government of the previous president, Ranil Wickremasinghe. Dissanayake, too, will rely on dictatorial presidential powers, a parliamentary majority, the courts, the prison system, and the military to suppress workers’ struggles.
Dissanayake and his circle within the NPP/JVP have undertaken the task of salvaging the capitalist economy, which was declared bankrupt in early 2022. Once the NPP government is established, it is poised to function as a right-wing and communalist administration aligned with international financial capital and as a subservient partner to American imperialism in its geopolitical conflicts with China, Russia, and Iran in the Middle East. Dissanayake has already signalled his willingness to collaborate with U.S. interests, even expressing support for the fascistic U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, who has trade and military plans for war with China, and approved actions of the Zionist Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, which is waging a genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, backed by all Western imperialist powers.
The election also has highlighted the bankruptcy of the programme advanced by the pseudo-left Front Line Socialist Party (FSP), a faction of JVP which broke away in 2012 on purely tactical grounds. The FSP was one of the main stakeholders in the betrayal of the unprecedented mass struggles of 2022, which demanded a “system change”. Staunchly opposed to the independent mobilisation of the working class against the ruling class to take power and implement socialist policies, the FSP supported an interim government proposed by JVP and opposition SJB and campaigned under the slogan of a “power outside the parliament”. Taking a pragmatic turn during the general elections, the FSP called for a “changed opposition”, seeking representation in the parliamentary opposition, while cynically portraying the election of the JVP leader as a fulfilment of the demand of the mass struggles.
In the North and the central hills, the Tamil minority largely voted for the NPP. In the Jaffna District, where Sri Lankan Tamils are the majority, NPP presidential candidate Dissanayake secured only a 7.29% of the votes (27086) in the presidential elections, while in Thursday’s elections the same people propelled the NPP to the top, giving it 24.85% of the votes (80830). This increase of votes partly reflects their discontent with Tamil communalist parties, which were cohabiting with the Sinhala chauvinist governments of the South for decades, and failed to fulfill their promises. Nevertheless, this vote does not signify approval for the chauvinist politics of the JVP, but rather a misguided response to Dissanayake’s false promises and vague threats of marginalization.
Likewise, in many parts of the country, minority Muslim communities also have placed their hopes in the promises of the new government, only to be bitterly disillusioned sooner rather than later.
Throughout the last two elections, all the political parties, including the JVP/NPP, FSP, SJB, and various communal parties, were dedicated to misleading the people by focusing on the issues of corruption, mismanagement, or communalism in successive governments, while concealing the global and class roots of the socio-economic crisis. As a class, they were also careful to distract the working people from pressing global geo-political issues: the imminent threat of nuclear war, the genocide in Gaza, the rise of fascism and dictatorship, and the deepening economic crisis in the major capitalist countries in Europe, in USA, and China and the impending health and environmental catastrophe.
The working class will find no solace in the NPP government, which has no connection to Socialist reforms, contrary to the false portrayals by local and international media outlets. With sweeping political power in the parliament, the NPP/JVP government will not hesitate to enact laws curtailing the democratic rights of the working class, including their right to strike. Beyond the traditional mechanisms and methods of state oppression used by successive governments, including communalism, the NPP government will wield two more tools of its own: the trade union bureaucracy and the well-networked petty-bourgeois elements of NPP/JVP, prevalent in the country’s rural and urban areas. These forces could be mobilized as fascistic forces against political opponents and the working class, replicating their dark history of the late 1980s. This is a stark warning to the working class.
The world has entered an epoch of nuclear war, dictatorship, fascism and austerity – global issues that workers in countries are confronted with and will be determined to fight against. The everyday problems faced by the people of Sri Lanka and the region are not fundamentally homemade but stem from the contradictions of the global imperialist system, led by the US financial aristocracy. These issues are global and need international solutions.
The people of the world, including those in Sri Lanka and South Asia, need a mass party of the international working class to lead them against the imperialist system and mobilise their industrial power to win political control from the capitalist class, in order to reorganize the global economy along socialist lines. Establishing independent workers’ committees against the trade union bureaucracy affiliated with the NPP/JVP, other right-wing political parties and the pseudo-left, and uniting these committees democratically across national divisions and international borders is the task before the working class, youth and the oppressed masses today.
It was only the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and its Sri Lankan section, the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) of Sri Lanka, that advanced and campaigned for this programme during the elections. To fight for this programme – against austerity, danger of dictatorship, war, and fascism and for socialist policies – the SEP must be built as the mass revolutionary party of the workers of Sri Lanka and the region.
The two priorities of the incoming administration are preparing for war with China and arresting and deporting millions of migrants.
In a rapid-fire series of appointments and announcements, fascist President-elect Donald Trump is assembling an administration in his own image. There are only two criteria for the nominees so far announced: complete alignment with the fascist policies Trump seeks to put into place and unquestioning personal loyalty to the would-be dictator.
President-elect Donald Trump with Florida Senator Marco Rubio [AP Photo/Evan Vucci]
January 20, 2025 will thus mean not merely the re-entry of the former president into the White House but the installation of a regime with his aides and stooges in charge of all the levers of power, committed to using these powers against all domestic opposition from the American people and against whatever countries Trump chooses to target for subversion, blockade or open warfare.
As Trump prepares to rapidly implement his plans, the Biden administration, which is in power for another two months, is doing absolutely nothing to alert the population, let alone take measures to stop the massive assault on democratic rights. Biden, who is welcoming Trump to the White House on Wednesday, is acting as if it is his responsibility not only to guarantee Trump’s succession but to help implement his policies.
The contours of the new Trump-led regime are demonstrated in the nominations made public or leaked to the media over the past three days. Nearly all of Trump’s top national security appointments have been made public:
For secretary of state, US Senator Marco Rubio of Florida
For national security advisor, Representative Michael Waltz, also of Florida
For Ambassador to the United Nations, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York
For CIA director, former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, a Republican congressman from Texas before he joined the first Trump administration
For secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, former head of the ultra-right Concerned Veterans of America (funded by the Koch Brothers) and longtime co-host of the Fox News program “Fox & Friends”
From a policy standpoint, all are fervent advocates of confrontation with China and giving the US military a “free hand” in any open conflict: opposing any restrictions on the use of violence against targeted populations, including civilians and children.
This is particularly apparent in the surprise selection of Hegseth, who went unmentioned in media speculation about Trump’s potential pick to head the Pentagon. Now a major in the Army Reserve, Hegseth deployed to the US military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba during the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” then volunteered for the war in Iraq, where he commanded platoons in Baghdad and Samarra. He later served as a counterinsurgency instructor for the Army in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Having previously led groups of 50 to 100 soldiers, Hegseth is now being tasked to run the Pentagon, the largest military organization in the world, with 3.5 million people, including 2.1 million active duty and reserve soldiers, 750,000 civilian staff and 650,000 contractors. His qualification, however, is his role as an advocate for military war criminals.
In 2019, while on the “Fox & Friends” talkshow, the ultra-right program of which Trump is an avid viewer, Hegseth led a campaign for the exoneration of three soldiers convicted or awaiting trial before military courts for war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. The crimes included the summary execution of unarmed prisoners and the murder of children and old men.
After meeting with Trump, Hegseth summarized the president’s approach as follows: “The benefit of the doubt should go to the guys pulling the trigger.” Trump issued pardons, called each murderer personally to commiserate with the “injustice” done to them, and boasted publicly of overriding the decisions of top military commanders, who had felt it necessary to mount a few token prosecutions to offset revelations of the avalanche of atrocities committed by US forces in both wars.
This will be the administration’s approach, not just to individual soldiers who commit war crimes but to policies that require war crimes for their implementation. The incoming president signaled this by announcing the appointment of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee as US Ambassador to Israel. Huckabee is a Christian fundamentalist, who has provided religious justification for the crimes committed by the state of Israel, declaring in the past, “There’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.” He is an all-out supporter of the genocidal policies of the Netanyahu government, which seeks to make “no such thing as a Palestinian” a brutal reality.
The other group of nominees announced this week will be tasked with carrying out Trump’s planned war at home, which involves the rounding up of millions of undocumented immigrants, imprisoning them in concentration camps and deporting them as quickly as possible. The principal perpetrators of this dictatorial policy include:
For “border czar,” a new White House position, Thomas Homan, the former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the first Trump administration and a longtime advocate and defender of mass deportations
For deputy White House Chief of Staff for Policy, Stephen Miller, who was responsible for immigration policy in the first Trump administration. Miller spearheaded such measures as separation of children and families, mass detention, and the “Remain in Mexico program,” which effectively blocked asylum seekers
For Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem. The Republican governor, a one-time hopeful to become Trump’s running mate, is a vehement advocate of violence against migrants crossing the US-Mexico border, once sending dozens of South Dakota National Guard troops to Texas at the request of that state’s governor. She will be in overall charge of repressive agencies, such as the Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Secret Service.
The regime that Trump and Miller are devising and that Homan and Noem will enforce will make the detention camps used against Japanese Americans during World War II look like child’s play. According to Homan, the problem of separating children and their parents, which aroused fierce popular opposition during Trump’s first term, will be solved by deporting entire families, whether or not some of the family members are American citizens.
Trump aides were already reportedly drafting executive orders that he will sign on January 20, 2025, as soon as he is inaugurated, to establish a terror regime directed against migrants. This will include revoking Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Haiti and Central America, many of them longtime residents of the United States with American citizen children.
The incoming administration plans to use military resources in the anti-migrant campaign, meaning that migrants could be detained by military personnel on military bases, and that military flights could become a major factor in transporting migrants to their countries of origin or other countries willing to accept them.
Trump is also seeking to push through his appointments without Senate confirmation. The New York Times reported that “Mr. Trump insisted on social media that Republicans select a new Senate majority leader willing to call recesses during which he could unilaterally appoint personnel, a process that would allow him to sidestep the confirmation process.”
A report Tuesday in the Washington Post, headlined, “Trump is planning a border crackdown. Biden already started one”, traces the continuity between the two administrations:
Trump stands to inherit enforcement tools from the Biden administration that are even more powerful than the policies at his disposal last time. Biden administration officials, for example, have implemented emergency border controls this year that essentially ban asylum for migrants who enter unlawfully. While Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy provided asylum seekers with access to U.S. courts, President Joe Biden’s asylum restrictions afford no such process, allowing US officials to summarily deport migrants and threaten them with criminal prosecution if they return.
Just four years ago, the Republicans responded to the defeat of Trump with ferocious denunciations, followed by an attempted coup. The Democrats, in contrast, are doing everything they can to chloroform the population and prevent at all costs a popular mobilization against the incoming administration. On Tuesday, the day before Trump’s visit to the White House, Biden issued a few anodyne tweets on Veterans Day, while saying nothing about the fascists Trump is planning on putting in charge of the state apparatus.
From the standpoint of the Democratic Party, what Obama referred to as the “intramural scrimmage” within the ruling class is over, and it is the task of the Democrats to ensure, as former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it in an interview with the New York Times, the “success” of the new president.
There is no suggestion that the Biden administration should take any action to defend the rights of the more 70 million people who voted against Trump, or for that matter the more than 70 million people who voted for him. Their sole concern is to ensure the continuation of the central policy of the Biden administration itself: the escalation of war against Russia in Ukraine.
Indeed, according to White House aides, the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine will be the sole focus of the meeting between Biden and Trump in the White House. The Democrats want to ensure that the pipeline remains open for billions in US military and economic aid, and continuing to permit the Kiev regime to engage in provocative strikes with US and NATO weaponry on targets deep within Russia, including Moscow, despite the risk of a widening and even nuclear war.
In the final weeks of the failed presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democrats would make noises about Trump as a threat to democracy, and highlight the threats of mass roundups, the targeting of political opponents, and the policy measures outlined by the Trump-backed 2025 Project, a 900-page manual for social counterrevolution.
Now that Trump is moving rapidly to implement these plans and has appointed two top aides, Stephen Miller and Thomas Doman, who actually contributed to the 2025 Project, the Democrats have dropped such protests and declared themselves committed to a “peaceful transfer of power.” This really means: We will do nothing to oppose the implementation of dictatorship against the American people.
There must and will be mass opposition to the policies Trump is preparing. But this opposition must not be straitjacketed by the Democratic Party, which like the fascist Republican Party, is an instrument of Wall Street and American imperialism. The opposition to Trump must be led by the working class, based on a socialist program, and spearheaded by the building of a new revolutionary leadership, the Socialist Equality Party.
[This article was originally published in wsws.org here Here on October 13, 2024]