Category: Uncategorized

It remains to be seen how successful such projects will turn out to be, as well as how long it will be possible to carry them out while ignoring Washington’s warfare against Germany.

The Defense Ministry is busing people elsewhere in the country, where they are being put in hotels, hostels and guesthouses for the next few days.

By JNS

Thousands of Israelis living near Gaza have been evacuated since Tuesday’s targeted killings of three top Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists in the Strip.

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant approved the evacuation in anticipation of retaliatory rocket fire from terrorist factions in Gaza.

Evacuees are being bused to hotels, hostels and guest houses throughout Israel, where they will be able to stay for three days, with the possibility of an extension depending on the security situation.

Many other Gaza-area residents have temporarily relocated to other parts of the country on their own initiative.

“The program is operated by the local authorities and allows every resident of the localities near the Gaza border to go on a respite with the aid of the state in guesthouses, specified in advance by the authorities,” the Defense Ministry said in a statement.

According to the Israel Defense Forces, no rockets were fired from Gaza overnight. The army said, however, that restrictions would remain in place for residents close to the coastal enclave.

The Education Ministry on Wednesday announced that no classes would be held in communities within 45 km. (25 miles) of the Gaza Strip. The directive affects about 300,000 students in 35 local authorities.

According to the instructions of the IDF Home Front Command, public gatherings in these areas near the Gaza Strip will remain limited to 10 people in an open area and up to 100 people in a building.

With the possibility that rocket fire could again reach central Israel, public bomb shelters were opened in Tel Aviv as well as Givatayim, Ramat Gan and other municipalities.

The post Israeli military evacuates thousands of Gaza-area residents appeared first on World Israel News.

Despite the danger to himself as well, an Arab-Israeli truck driver made fun of Jewish Israeli civilians running for cover during a rocket attack from Gaza. (Courtesy Abu Ali Express)

The post WATCH: Arab driver mocks Israeli civilians running for shelter appeared first on World Israel News.

The Iron Dome defense system intercepted dozens of rockets aimed at southern and central Israel, including Tel Aviv, on Wednesday afternoon.

Rockets barrages launched at the center of Israel, the Dan district.

Attached: Iron Dome’s interceptions in Tel-Aviv. https://t.co/8ltNrojRRf pic.twitter.com/G9mY09XlN9

— Adam Albilya – אדם אלביליה (@AdamAlbilya) May 10, 2023

The post WATCH: Rockets aim at central Israel, sirens blare in Tel Aviv appeared first on World Israel News.

Western disinformation agents claim that Moscow would be militarily weakened, which obviously does not correspond to the reality of the current conflict.

With the support of the GMB union, British workers at Amazon’s Coventry fulfilment center have turned a wildcat strike into a fight for a collective bargaining agreement.

Amazon workers hold placards on a picket line during a strike over pay at the Amazon fulfillment center in Coventry, England, on Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2023. (Darren Staples / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

On a mid-April morning, hundreds of workers from Amazon’s Browns Lane fulfillment center in Coventry, England, formed a picket outside of the warehouse before marching to the front gate. “What do we want? £15! When do we want it? Now!” they chanted. The scene, reminiscent of the heyday of industrial conflict in the 1970s, marked a sea change in attempts to organize at the world’s second most valuable company.

Five years ago, Amazon set up shop in Coventry, erecting a humongous site the size of eight soccer fields. Housing nine miles of conveyor belts and anywhere between twelve hundred and eighteen hundred workers, depending on the time of the year, it is comparable in scale to the Jaguar motor factory that previously occupied the site.

Browns Lane is one of two “cross-dock facilities,” or fulfillment centers for fulfillment centers, in the UK, a fact which underscores the strategic importance of unionization drives at the site. There are twenty fulfillment centers across the UK, and fifty-four more in Europe. Through a network of logistics subcontractors and “flex” workers (a gig-work platform for self-employed drivers), they process and deliver a huge volume of goods. In 2021, turnover in the UK alone topped £6 billion with pretax profits at over £200 million. Amazon UK Services Ltd employs over fifty-one thousand managers and administrative employees and an army of self-employed subcontractors. It’s owned by Amazon EU, which is incorporated in Luxembourg, a fellow monarchy and tax haven in Europe.

Pay rates for Amazon warehouse workers vary by location but the minimum hourly wage is between £10.50 and £11.45 ($13.24 and $14.44). Amazon is notorious for its use of anti-union consultants and other intelligence operatives to counter labor “organizing threats.” Despite these efforts on the part of the company, the ground that workers have gained at Browns Lane might mean that the warehouse is set to be the first unionized Amazon facility in the nation. After decades of defensive struggles, the trade union movement is back on the offensive, with the GMB union in Coventry likely just one of many new collective bargaining agreements to come.

From Motor City to Ghost Town

The Browns Lane site is a case study in the deindustrialization and recomposition of the UK economy. Like many industrial powerhouses of the postwar era, Coventry’s “golden age” was bound up with automobile production, which boomed throughout the 1950s and ’60s. Built as a World War II shadow factory by the Daimler Company Ltd, Browns Lane was taken over by Jaguar Cars in 1951. The site remained the company’s home and employed around two thousand workers until 2005.

Even within Coventry the factory was not exceptional but instead part of a manufacturing-heavy economy that hubs across the country. In 1960, over eighty-one thousand people were employed in the production of motor vehicles, tractors, and aircraft in Coventry. Deindustrialization was a process that affected all the Western European economies from the 1950s onward.

In 1960, over eighty-one thousand people were employed in the production of motor vehicles, tractors, and aircraft in Coventry.

Postwar Britain adopted a policy of industrial protectionism that enabled the growth of a social democratic welfare state. The opening up of the British economy to international competition as the rest of the world industrialized, the introduction of labor-substituting technologies, and the dismantling of state support for industry championed by free market fundamentalists and the turn to monetarism meant that by 1981, Coventry was in an economic crisis, with one in six of its residents unemployed.

The last cars rolled off the line three years before Tata Motors, an Indian multinational corporation, bought Jaguar in 2008. The last strike on the site was in 2010, when three hundred fifty Unite union members took part in a ballot in which 66 percent voted in favor of industrial action. The workers lost and the site was gradually sold off and demolished. But soon Amazon, which was already steamrolling through Europe, would arrive and see opportunities for profit-making in and amongst the rubble. In 2017, the company purchased the former Jaguar site and built a forty-thousand-square-meter warehouse on the same land.

Like many other urban areas, Coventry has evolved to be primarily driven by services, particularly the two universities in the area, but now also Amazon. A demographic transformation has accompanied this economic transformation. From 2011 to 2021, the population increased by 8.9 percent to around 345,300. The “Black, Black British, Black Welsh, Caribbean, or African” population rose from 5.6 percent in 2011 to 8.9 percent, the most significant increase in ethnic groups in the area. The “Asian, Asian British, or Asian Welsh” also rose from 16.3 percent to 18.5 percent.

The changes in Coventry’s demographics reflect the evolving nature of the working class in the midlands and the trade union movement more broadly. White British people are still the majority, accounting for 65.5 percent of the population in 2021, but at Amazon warehouse and on the picket they are underrepresented.

The workers I met whilst standing in front of delivery trucks and cars attempting to enter the site were majority non-native English speakers. The scene was the opposite of the clichéd “white working class” imagery that persists in the cultural imaginary of uninformed so-called supporters of the labor movement. This demographic shift has not been lost on the GMB, who have been teaching and training the leaders at the fulfillment center, moving toward an organizing model of industrial relations.

Dark Satanic Fills

Amazon’s control over its workforce relies on its use of algorithmic tracking systems. Such highly Taylorized systems make it difficult for employees to organize because they are denied any explanation of how the technology works. Managers control information about packing rates, numbers of boxes, objects sorted, and other tasks that comprise the logistics labor process. The only information that management shares with workers is their relative intensity of performance in comparison to their colleagues. Such an opaque system renders discussions regarding working conditions and the firm’s mistreatment of its workforce very difficult.

Amazon simply doesn’t seem to care about the health of their labor force. Ambulance visits to the site are so frequent that the paramedics know workers by name.

The role of a picker, whose duty entails collecting goods from arbitrarily stored shelf stacks, exemplifies this problem. The picker is provided directions via a portable radio data terminal, and the scanner can exhibit a timer indicating the period that the worker must devote to locating and scanning each item. The algorithmic system’s optimal scenario is one in which employees never cross paths or impede each other’s progress. Consequently, Amazon’s employees are thrust into a solitary and disconnected work environment, completing a series of seconds-long tasks throughout their shifts, striving to attain performance targets that are unsustainable.

The labor scholar Michael Burawoy coined the term “making out” to describe how workers in manufacturing used to coordinate to adjust their effort and game piece-rate pay systems. However, Amazon’s system destroys any capacity for workers to control or mediate their effort according to their needs. The algorithm and target rate varies by the size of the item. Workers have to maintain their rate over a ten-hour period and are under constant threat of warnings if they fall below 10 percent of what other workers are doing. According to Mick, a seasoned Amazon worker and GMB member who preferred not to give his real name:

Managers come around with sheets in the morning and afternoon that give you a rough rate per day. It will tell me what percentile I’m in compared to other workers, say 60-70 percent, but it doesn’t show me where I am in the order or any absolute numbers for the day that others did. Sixty to seventy percent is meaningless unless you know what 100 percent is. They never really tell you. The target changes daily because the algorithm changes, and they’ve never really told us what that algorithm is.

In theory, workers could break the algorithm by slowing down, but the weighting of different items makes it difficult. Without a union to bargain for information about the company’s processes and metrics, workers have limited leverage. A collective bargaining agreement would give them the power to take back control over their labor process and break the hold of the algorithm over their time. This would help make the work more sustainable, but also militate against the high rates of injury on the job.

While it’s no secret that Amazon’s attitude toward workers and their safety is notoriously poor, stories from workers themselves are nevertheless shocking. Amazon simply doesn’t seem to care about the health of their labor force. Ambulance visits to the site are so frequent that the paramedics know workers by name. Management accused Mick, who suffered from cancer, of fraud and refused him pay, despite the fact that he was “on his deathbed” when out of work for surgery. Amazon’s automated HR system rejected a letter from the hospital explaining his circumstances because it was programmed to only allow letters from a GP that had a return date to work, which he couldn’t provide due to his cancer treatment.

A worker sorts out packages in the outbound dock at Amazon fulfillment center in Eastvale, California, on Tuesday, August 31, 2021. (Watchara Phomicinda / MediaNews Group / The Press-Enterprise via Getty Images)

Such brazen disregard for worker welfare is common. Mick said that “there’s all their quotas that they literally say is Amazon policy, but it’s just a tick box system,” that many managers are “fresh out of university, never dealt with any of this stuff in the past,” and that they “don’t want to think” and just “follow the computer.” More than a few workers mentioned that “management keeps trying to pin things on you to get you in trouble.”

However, the tide has been turning as the union gains strength. Workers have the legal right to bring a GMB representative to any meeting with management and feel more confident standing up for themselves to say “no, this is not allowed — you’re breaking all sorts of laws here.”

The Union Strikes Back in the Black Country

As the UK cost-of-living crisis pushed working-class people to the breaking point during the second half of 2022 and into 2023, Amazon offered pennies on the pound, despite record profits. According to Rachel, a GMB union organizer, “it was just the perfect storm.” Amazon workers had been highly productive, meeting and exceeding their targets, and even receiving bonuses as a result. However, workers felt that they deserved more pay than what was offered to them, especially in the context of rising UK inflation — for food, gas, and electricity, the inflation figures are 19, 28.1, and 18.8 percent, respectively. Despite Amazon’s record-breaking profits and Jeff Bezos being one of the richest men in the world, the pay rise offered to the workers was woefully inadequate.

The Amazon site in Tilbury, Essex, saw unofficial strike action first, before the unrest spread across the country through Rugby, Rugeley, Doncaster, Bristol, and now most forcefully, Coventry. At Coventry, pay was the main pressure point that led to the walk out of workers in August 2022. The company had offered workers small pay rises of between 20 and 40 pence ($0.25 and $0.50) every April in previous years, but in 2022, there was no pay rise — only a promise of a review in October.

When the company finally offered a paltry pay rise of 50p ($0.63) in August, workers decided they had had enough. Mick and his colleagues found this offer particularly offensive because, “prices are through the roof! Everything, interest rates, petrol prices, food prices, everything’s gone up. You’re killing us on cost of living here!” In response, warehouse workers went to canteen, rallied their colleagues and walked out. As Rachel, a GMB organizer said:

Workers just decided to hold these kind of wildcat strikes. And then, via social media, that just spreads across lots of different fulfillment centers and across the UK — we had a period of a couple of days in August 2022 where people were just, you know, walking out and holding protests. And what happened was there were members there that reached out to us.

Before the wildcat, only around twenty to thirty workers had already joined the GMB union and reached out to the union for support in addressing the pay issue. The wildcat strike didn’t last, however, since workers couldn’t afford to take the cut in pay. The union then stepped in to offer workers money from the strike fund and, as Mick told me, “From that point onward, the numbers have grown.”

‘People would say you can’t strike in an unrecognized workplace,’ Rachel says. ‘But you can.’

When the GMB called the first official strike, they only had a couple hundred members, but they’ve since more than doubled to over 700 workers out of roughly 1,250 at the Browns Lane site. Most workers were recruited on the picket line, stopping cars in the middle of the access road and signing them up with the GMB’s membership app to provide strike pay directly, which contrasts to the US system that requires mediation through the employer’s payroll.

“People would say you can’t strike in an unrecognized workplace,” Rachel says. “But you can.” The GMB is filing for statutory recognition and will likely get it, which builds momentum as part of a broader wave of unionization across the country. Amazon workers at the JFK8 Amazon fulfillment center in Staten Island won a vote to unionize through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on April 1, 2022. Europe has seen strikes for over a decade in Germany, France, Italy, Poland, and Spain. Despite the concerted efforts of management prevent it for years, thirty-five employee representatives across Europe and Amazon management finally established a European Works Council on May 12, 2022.

The unionization of Amazon warehouses on both sides of the Atlantic defies the defeatist arguments that insist that secular economic decline makes impossible victories for workers. The productivity gains from Amazon logistics service are plain to see and through the strength of organized labor, they can be redistributed to benefit workers.

Last week Serbia was rocked by two mass shootings. President Aleksandar Vučić has responded by announcing a vast expansion of police powers, using “war on terror” rhetoric to ramp up his assault on civil liberties.

Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić during a panel session on day three of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on January 19, 2023. (Stefan Wermuth / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

On Wednesday, Serbia’s capital Belgrade was shocked by a rare shooting in one of the city’s elementary schools. The shooter, aged just thirteen, killed eight of his peers and a security guard before calling the police to report himself.

A day later, apparent copycat crimes began in five other schools: four in Belgrade and one in Bihać, in neighboring Bosnia, where children either drew up kill lists, made threats with toy guns, or assaulted their teachers and peers with knives. Then, on Friday, a second shooting spree occurred, this time to the south of the capital, killing another eight and wounding fourteen.

In both cases, some survivors are still in critical condition and it’s not yet clear if the death toll will rise. In total, the police intervened in twenty-five alleged cases of copycat crimes in Serbia alone. Two further threats were reported in Trbovlje, Slovenia, and two others in Skopje, North Macedonia — confirming fears that the crime will spread across the Western Balkans.

Previously, mass school shootings had never occurred in Belgrade, nor were they common in the region. But these events have changed everything. From Zagreb to Priština and Novi Sad candlelit masses for the victims were accompanied by warnings that the same could repeat itself outside of Belgrade. And authoritarian politicians are now using this to their advantage.

For nonlocal readers, it should be kept in mind that violence itself isn’t so new: mass shootings by adults have previously occurred, and Serbia has experienced several wars in the last few decades, starting with the breakup of Yugoslavia and Slobodan Milošević’s effort to maintain control. His friends and colleagues run the country even today; Aleksandar Vučić, the current president, was minister of information in Milošević’s government, through which he suppressed free reporting, especially during the NATO bombing campaign in 1999. In line with its belligerent record, Serbia is third in the world for gun ownership, right after Yemen and the United States.

Previously, mass school shootings had never occurred in Belgrade, nor were they common in the region. But these events have changed everything.

Social Decline

However, this isn’t just about guns, but also a society torn between extremes. Serbia is one of Europe’s most unequal countries by income, with 85 percent of the population receiving less than the average wage. It also boasts, by far, the largest ruling party in Europe, with over 750,000 members. The media are not free but party-controlled, much like the public utilities, and even schools.

The country’s educational institutions have also faced market-oriented reforms, which include priming children in “entrepreneurship” from an early age. High-school kids are subjected to so-called dual education, in which they may be posted to a private firm (in Bor, they even send teenagers to work in the mines) in which they have little to no legal protection, given that they are underaged. If the age of criminal responsibility is lowered, as proposed following the first killing, we may expect this already-vulnerable group to be liable to selective state manipulation.

But beyond the data, if you ask any teenager about their experience of Serbia, you will get a story of social decline. Today’s teenagers are those that were brought up with nothing but the post–2008 crisis period. They’ve seen not only falling social standards but increasing political tensions due to the ruling party’s attempt to strengthen its grip on all aspects of society and to restore power to the ruling classes — often meaning those that profited from armed conflicts in the wars following Yugoslavia’s destruction. It is thus no wonder that May’s events have been recognized by an association of high-school students as a consequence of a broader social malaise.

One might think that government leaders would be shaken by all of this. But President Vučić, a corrupt career politician, found a silver lining: free rein to strengthen police surveillance and state control, all in the name of children’s safety.

Serbia is one of Europe’s most unequal countries by income, with 85 percent of the population receiving less than the average wage.

When the first shooting took place, the president dedicated special attention to how “well-off” the Belgrade school was, how well the perpetrator did in class, how respectable his father (a physician) is, and announced several measures on gun control. The reaction to the second shooting on the periphery of Belgrade, however, was in complete contrast. In this second case, the Minister of Internal Affairs Bratislav Gašić labeled the attack a “terrorist act,” albeit without any legal justification. Vučić soon followed, and the state media began widely using this label.

The police then arrested a member of the Muslim community in Belgrade, describing him as an Islamist terrorist, because of a few ambiguous Facebook statuses (such as “Sometimes you have to take justice into your own hands”). But, an association of professional legal practitioners from the Belgrade Chamber of Advocates spoke out against labeling the second shooting as a “terrorist threat” without any official reason. That was a quick escalation which, as we shall soon see, led to unheard of levels of state control, even compared to those reached during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Second Killer

The suspect in the second killing, a twenty-one-year-old living on Belgrade’s periphery, was captured wearing a “Generation 88” T-shirt (the number eighty-eight labeling the eighth letter in the English alphabet — HH, a shorthand for “Heil Hitler”). The police found several firearms such as bombs, an automatic rifle, and ammunition in his grandfather’s apartment, where he went into hiding while fleeing from the police. Few details about his past have been made public, but he admitted his guilt during interrogation.

While he was not formally apprehended on terrorism charges, both the government and the police were quick to label the attack as an ideologically motivated act of terror: that is, a political action requiring a strong political response. It can indeed hardly be ruled out that he is a Nazi. But legal experts and criminologists have pointed out that mass murder and an act of terrorism are not the same crime and ought to be treated differently. According to the law, the prosecutor’s office should initiate the classification of a perpetrator as a terrorist, which means that it proposes to put him on the state’s list of terrorist organizations, similar to what happens in the United States. The state should then issue a decree that he be designated as such, and the judge should accept or reject such an appellation.

While the suspect was not formally apprehended on terrorism charges, both the government and the police were quick to label the attack as an ideologically motivated act of terror.

What has instead happened is an ad hoc labeling of the crime by the president and the interior ministry. This had, indeed, happened already. Even the recent arrest of a Muslim — who had no relation to the crime — on terrorism charges was based on his Facebook posts (no public information has been shared since). This tells us that the Serbian state currently allows for a fairly liberal interpretation of what constitutes an act of terrorism. This leaves much room for a possible abuse of the category “terrorist,” as for instance practiced by the United States. For now, much depends on whether the state can extract sufficient information to legally label the second shooting as a terrorist act.

Repressive Apparatus

For now, it is likely that we shall see a rise in short-term policing measures in response, with longer-term “solutions” to be expected in the future.

From this point of view, we can understand the state’s initial reactions. Following the second shooting, Vučić announced several measures, including increasing police-force numbers by 1,200 people, stationing them “at all times” in each and every school in Serbia, and carrying out a “disarmament” of the population, with illegal firearms expected to be confiscated without consequences by mid-June, and with legal persecution afterward. On May 5, the government rapidly accepted most of these measures. On May 8, the interior ministry began to issue internal communiques to schools, asking them to draw lists of pupils considered a) possible perpetrators, b) possible targets, and c) to be expressing “asocial behavior.” It has also announced teams to be dispatched for school inspections.

But more will likely follow: Vučić has also announced that the members of the police force would be able to enter into people’s homes at will and without a court order — something that was repelled twice in the previous attempts to reform policing law. In response to the first shooting, the age of legal prosecution will also be lowered from fourteen to twelve, which caused widespread opposition. Yet, it seems that Vučić has the upper hand, in arguing that the security concerns now require increased measures. Moreover, recent proclamations of the Serbian police union also go in the same direction, with short-term demands for the introduction of a police curfew.

The role of the media in escalating these concerns should also not be forgotten. In reporting full names of victims, pictures, data, and bombastic headlines, the majority of the sensationalist media has portrayed the crime as another commodity to be sold on the market of information. According to some, this has only added fuel to the fire, as the likelihood of copycat crimes increased to the extent of “generalized imitation” — thus helping to escalate the situation in reality, and not only in reports. Hence, the fear and concern that the liberal media had spread then, in turn, fueled Vučić’s ambitions for state control.

Vučić’s “Anti-Fascism”

Vučić’s desire for more state control has its obvious roots in his formation as a politician. As mentioned, he was an active politician already during the war of the 1990s, and was even a member of Milošević’s government.

Nor did his repressive ambitions wane over the years. Following his last election, he put the pro-Russian Aleksandar Vulin at the head of the secret services (Bezbednosno-informativna agencija, or BIA). Vulin is simultaneously the head of the so-called Serbian Socialist Party — in reality, the residue of Milošević’s cadres from the 1990s, with a friendly eye toward Moscow. Vulin was put at the head of the secret services based on his supposed specialism in preventing “color revolutions.” According to local media, he has even established a “working group for suppressing color revolutions” with Russia’s Security Council, with whose high representatives he has previously met. In addition, pro-state media have started to target individual journalists and activists just a few years back, and there was already an escalation of mass police repression under the COVID-19 pandemic. Notably, Serbia has the only ruling party in Europe that has openly supported Putin and not induced sanctions on Russia, and the country has also seen pro-Putin protests.

It seems this tragedy has afforded Vučić the chance to do what he failed to achieve with the police-reform law.

It is worth noting that Vučić’s “police state” agenda would have been set in place even sooner, had not an earlier police-reform bill — allowing police the right to remain anonymous, the right to use more personal data more freely, and even legalizing police informants — been repelled faced with both criticism by experts and public protests.

As social tensions grew stronger in recent years, the lack of such extra policing powers repeatedly hurt Vučić. The peak came with the massive protest movement against lithium mining, right after a host of laws were changed to accommodate multinationals like Rio Tinto at the expense of local populations. Faced with this movement, this government was visibly shaken — and almost brought down entirely. While the Rio Tinto project was thwarted early in 2022, there were fears that Vučić might set it back on track, even by means of increased repression.

It seems this tragedy has afforded Vučić the chance to do what he failed to achieve with the police-reform law, offering him a pretext to step up earlier attempts to expand the repressive apparatus.

Regional Significance

If the labeling of a school shooting as an act of terrorism is accepted — as justified by Vučić’s alleged fight against fascism — it can set in motion a US-style war on terror, with a Russian-style justification. In the long run, it is not unrealistic to assume further experiments of this kind. This is especially important since last week Vučić reportedly asked prime minister Ana Brnabić to reintroduce the death penalty. His request was apparently denied, and it currently seems that he will not go through with introducing a state of emergency. But this still speaks volumes about what his intentions are.

All of this happened within just a few days, and the full array measures and their implementation will become clearer in some days’ or weeks’ time. However dangerous the short-term escalation of the state response may seem, the measures taken so far do point to a more long-term development of untrammeled police powers, which we have reasons to fear will become the new norm.

Given the pro-Russian mood in the police and the rise in repression in recent years, it is not hard to imagine a dystopian future for Serbia’s citizens.

There is an added danger in this: that he may influence other states to follow in the same direction. To grasp this trend, one doesn’t need to travel further than neighboring Hungary, or further west to Slovenia. This latter country’s former premier, right-wing leader of the Slovenian Democratic Party Janez Janša, has used the shootings as a pretext for attacking — of all people — the Slovenian left. He made his comments while he was a guest of Viktor Orbán at a meeting of global conservatives in Budapest, Hungary, at which Steve Bannon also gave an online keynote.

Ultimately, this week’s events again pose questions about which direction Vučić plans to steer Serbia. Given the pro-Russian mood in the police and the rise in repression in recent years, it is not hard to imagine a dystopian future for Serbian citizens, with stagnant wages, rising inflation, and increasing social tensions.

Whether Vučić does indeed need more police repression will be decided soon enough, especially with mounting opposition. Over the weekend he raised talk of possible future elections — promising a “fateful decision” for Monday, May 8. It would appear that raising talk of his resignation so as to appease the opposition was a media stunt to do some damage control — the same thing Vučić has traditionally done before each previous election, only to play dumb afterward.

The following day, however, the Serbian minister of education, Branko Ružić, resigned — which was what the opposition wanted, meaning that Vučić had sacrificed at least one minister. Other demands by the opposition also included the resignation of the head of the secret services, Vulin, and a ban on tabloids’ and pro-state media’s promotion of violence. On Monday, instead of Vučić’s announcement, one part of the opposition and the so-called Sloga trade unions held a mass protest in Belgrade, marching in silence through the capital’s streets (about fifty thousand people, according to media estimates). Yet, Vučić did not announce his decision as to who would resign, despite his promise to do so, alongside building tensions.

Ultimately, much will depend on how this month’s events are interpreted — and if further escalation follows. But ultimately, if these attacks are labeled as terrorism, at a time when several Balkan states are already laying the groundwork for targeting other political actors, the future for the wider population is uncertain, at best.

No matter how stressful the situation, we must resist the temptation to call for a “state of emergency.” It is worth underlining that at least some effort is being devoted to concrete help and solidarity (some individuals have offered blood donations and financial help to victims’ families). With professional educational organizations already organizing pressure and protesting violence, a message of mutual aid could go a long way. In any case, it will do much more than reactionary calls for state interventionism that fuel the violence they seek to prevent.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Click the share button above to email/forward this article …

The post Unmasking the Truth appeared first on Global Research.

The political West is decades behind Russia in hypersonic weapons development, so this propaganda story accomplishes at least two objectives – promotes US-made air defenses after humiliating failures and “tarnishes” the reputation of Russian hypersonic missiles.

Poland deepens servitude to Washington in delusional bid to attain great power status.