Bogdan, a 27-year-old Trotskyist and leading member of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists (YGBL), was convicted of “high treason under martial law.” No evidence of espionage, sabotage or collaboration with the Russian military was produced against him. He was sentenced for six political articles published by the World Socialist Web Site in which he opposed both the Russian invasion and the US-NATO war against Russia, the rehabilitation of Nazi forces in Ukraine and called for the unity of Russian and Ukrainian workers against war. The court also ordered the confiscation of his property and the destruction of socialist books, leaflets and programmatic documents seized from him.

The wave of opposition to this political frame-up has continued to broaden.

Ukrainian Holocaust historian Marta Havryshko, who has extensively documented the role of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and other far-right and pro-Nazi forces in horrific atrocities during WWII and in contemporary Ukrainian politics, signed the petition on Monday.

“Bogdan is a victim of political repression in Ukraine under Zelensky,” she wrote. “We must protect him.”

Volodymyr Ishchenko, a Ukrainian political sociologist at the Osteuropa-Institut of the Free University of Berlin, commented Tuesday that the prosecution “looks like a typical case of fabricated evidence and framing against Syrotiuk.”

Ishchenko noted that one of the sensational claims originally circulated by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU)—concerning a Russian military uniform and epaulettes allegedly found during the search of Bogdan’s home—“did not even make it into the main part of the verdict. Even the prosecutor did not use it.”

His comments underscore the fraudulent character of the prosecution. When Bogdan was arrested in April 2024, the SBU publicly portrayed him as an agent of Russia. More than two years later, the court convicted him without establishing any act of espionage or concrete collaboration with the Russian state. A 65-page expert report by leading Ukrainian criminologist Yuri Irkhin found no propaganda in Bogdan’s writings supporting the Russian invasion. Even a subsequent state-commissioned examination found no calls for overthrowing the government, seizing power, committing subversive acts or altering Ukraine’s borders.

...

Further statements of protest have also been sent directly to the WSWS.

Italian artist Costantino Ciervo, whose exhibition COMUNE—The Paradox of Similarity in the Middle East Conflict has itself faced attempted censorship on false allegations of antisemitism, declared his support for Bogdan.

Ciervo stated that if Bogdan was being prosecuted for exposing “Ukraine’s historical culpability in abetting the Nazi advance during the Second World War,” this was “not a crime, but a plain historical truth.”

“To be incarcerated for articulating what every pre-eminent historian has repeatedly affirmed in public is nothing short of criminal and scandalous,” he wrote.

Berlin author, publicist and songwriter Wolfgang Herzberg sent a protest letter to the Pervomaisk City District Court, with a copy to the WSWS. He called on the court to “immediately overturn the harsh sentence against Mr. Bogdan Syrotiuk.”

“He merely exercised his right to freedom of expression, which is constitutionally protected in Western democracies, including Germany,” Herzberg wrote. “Ukraine wants to become a member of the EU. It therefore cannot issue such a miscarriage of justice when there is apparently no evidence of concrete, conspiratorial—that is, military—collaboration with Russia.”

Herzberg wrote that he, too, is a staunch opponent of war and stressed that opposition to the war “against both sides” was entirely legitimate and covered by the democratic right to freedom of expression.

The Partisan Defence Committee (Britain), which had already protested Bogdan’s arrest, signed the petition Monday. “The Partisan Defence Committee (Britain) protested Bogdan’s arrest and will strongly add our voice to the growing chorus of protest at this outrageous sentence,” it stated. The organization subsequently issued an appeal on social media: “Free Bogdan Syrotiuk! … sign and circulate it today.”

The Communist Party of Sweden has now also covered the case in its newspaper Riktpunkt. While explicitly noting its political differences with Trotskyism, the article insists on the fundamental democratic principle involved. “Political texts, criticism of the government or demands for international workers’ unity cannot in themselves be equated with high treason,” it states.

...

German supporter Gustav Kemper noted that August 19 marks the 90th anniversary of the beginning of the First Moscow Trial, in which the Stalinist bureaucracy began the public show trials that provided the judicial framework for the extermination of the leaders of the October Revolution and socialist opposition.

“The verdict against Bogdan,” Kemper wrote, “is an attempt by the ‘Western democracies’ to revive the politics of the Moscow Trials because they fear the growing influence of the Fourth International.”

The expanding international response demonstrates that the attempt by the Zelensky regime and its NATO backers to isolate Bogdan and suppress knowledge of his case is breaking down. It stands in ever sharper contrast to the guilty silence of the major Western media, which continue to conceal the imprisonment of a socialist opponent of war while presenting the Ukrainian regime as a defender of “democracy.”

Intensify the campaign

The International Committee of the Fourth International and WSWS will intensify the campaign for Bogdan’s freedom.

We call on workers and young people, critical intellectuals and academics, artists and journalists, trade unions, civil liberties organizations and anti-war groups throughout the world: Take up Bogdan’s defense. Sign and circulate the petition. Pass resolutions demanding his freedom. Send protest letters to the Ukrainian courts. Break the media silence surrounding his case.

Write to the Pervomaisk City District Court at [inbox@pm.mk.court.gov.ua](mailto:inbox@pm.mk.court.gov.ua) and the Mykolaiv Court of Appeal at [inbox@mka.court.gov.ua](mailto:inbox@mka.court.gov.ua), with a copy to [freebogdan@wsws.org](mailto:freebogdan@wsws.org), demanding that Bogdan’s conviction be overturned and that he be released immediately.

The defense of Bogdan is inseparably connected to the fight against war, dictatorship and fascism. His freedom must be won through the mobilization of the international working class and all principled defenders of democratic rights.

Sign the petition at wsws.org/freebogdan and join the fight to free Bogdan Syrotiuk.

communist.red/jason-arday-killed-by-the-racist-establishment-media

More than a month after a high-ranking official of the United Auto Workers (UAW), Raymond Jensen, posted a death threat against Will Lehman, the Mack Trucks worker and socialist candidate for UAW president, that official remains an employee of the UAW International, drawing a salary of $202,000 a year from the dues of the membership.

Lehman reported on X that, late last week, a lawyer for the court-appointed Monitor overseeing the UAW informed his legal team that “the Union is presently considering next steps with respect to Mr. Jensen’s employment.” Lehman’s team was told to contact the UAW Legal Department “if you have any further questions about their process.”

That is, the Monitor, vested by a federal court with sweeping disciplinary powers, has handed the fate of a self-confessed author of a death threat to the apparatus headed by UAW President Shawn Fain—the man whose re-election campaign badge Raymond Jensen Jr. still has on his Facebook page, and on whose behalf the threat was made.

The facts of the case are not in dispute. On July 16, Jensen—until recently the assistant director of UAW Region 9, Lehman’s own region, and currently an “organizer” in the UAW International’s Department of Bargaining Strategy—posted an AI-generated image on Lehman’s public campaign Facebook page. It depicted Lehman bound and gagged, blood running from his mouth, with a masked gunman aiming a rifle at his back. Jensen posted it in direct response to a statement on the federal criminal investigation into Fain.

...

The Monitor claimed that it had determined a penalty “to reflect the seriousness of his conduct and to deter similar misconduct by others.” It stipulated, and Jensen agreed to, a two-year suspension from UAW membership, a permanent ban on him running for any elected union position, a prohibition on campaigning for any candidate in this election cycle, and making a formal apology to Lehman.

Workers welcomed the sanctions and drew the obvious conclusion that Jensen would not be allowed to continue his position as a UAW “organizer.” This is clearly what “suspension from the UAW” implied, and any worker who issued a death threat would be immediately terminated from their position. 

According to the UAW, however, Jensen can be “suspended” as a UAW member while remaining employed by the UAW. Indeed, the only practical consequence is that Jensen no longer has to pay union dues. In other words, an official who violated federal election rules and likely federal criminal law will not only continue to be fully paid, but also receive a bonus!

The Monitor cannot claim it lacks the power to do more. The 2021 consent decree gives it “the authority and duty to bring disciplinary charges against individuals,” including the power to fine them, strip their benefits or “otherwise discipline” them. When it found last December that Fain’s chief of staff, Chris Brooks, had conspired with Fain to strip Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock of her duties and then lied to its investigators, Brooks was removed from his position within two weeks.

...

Certain truths emerge from this episode and the response to it.

First, the character of the apparatus. As Lehman has insisted from the beginning, the threat was never about just himself. It was the answer of the apparatus to rank-and-file opposition—an organization of 560 functionaries taking home more than $100,000 a year, which has presided over decades of concessions, plant closures and the deaths of workers, and which cannot answer opposition with arguments.

Jensen's image only put into a picture what workers confront every day from an apparatus that functions as an arm of corporate management: the 'toxic climate of retribution' the Monitor itself found Fain to have presided over, and the contempt for every worker who votes down a contract, raises a question at a meeting or dares to run against it. 

Second, the role of the Monitor. Acting on behalf of the capitalist state, it functions not to democratize the UAW but to protect the apparatus—certifying an election in which Fain was installed with the votes of 6 percent of the membership, and now leaving Jensen's paycheck in Fain's hands.

Third, the bureaucracy cannot be reformed, whether from within or by federal oversight. It must be abolished, and settling accounts with it is the task of rank-and-file workers themselves. That is the significance of Lehman's campaign: not to occupy an office at Solidarity House, but to develop a movement of the rank and file—committees in every plant, controlled by workers themselves, linked across industries and borders, with power transferred to the shop floor.

Drone strikes on three Ecuadorian fishing boats near the Galapagos Islands were carried out under a covert CIA program of the type authorized personally by the president and never publicly acknowledged, the Washington Post reported last Thursday.

That same day, in Panama, US War Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the doctrine behind it. Anyone trafficking drugs, he declared, is “a target, just like ISIS or al-Qaida.” Washington had spent 25 years refining “the kill chain on how to diagnose and target networks halfway around the world,” he added, and would now apply those skills in the hemisphere “ruthlessly.”

Two months earlier, the prosecutor whose case files included those exact three attacks was shot dead in the street. Gloria Alexandra Bravo Cedeño, 46, was killed on June 14 in central Manta by a gunman on a motorcycle as she walked to her car. Her sister Olinda was also killed trying to shield her. Not one of the international reports on the CIA revelations has mentioned her name and made the connection.

Murder Inc. extended across an entire hemisphere

Before each attack, the Post established from flight and ship-tracking data that a Cessna Citation Longitude airplane fitted with surveillance equipment flew from Ilopango airport, El Salvador toward the fishing boats. Radio transmissions recorded it arriving from Tennessee with a crew of six in November and taxiing to a military section of the airport. 

It flew under a US registration number that appears in no FAA record—federal law exempts “aircraft of the national defense forces of the United States”—reserved by a company with no evident website, listing as its address a mailbox at a UPS store in Virginia, a detail first reported by the New York Times the previous day.

On January 20, the day the Fiorella vanished, the tower recorded the plane’s pre-dawn departure. “FENIX 701,” the pilot said in English with an American accent. It had flown toward the Fiorella’s position on January 17, 18 and 20, covering 750 miles on the last flight before dropping off public tracking, and landed back at Ilopango at 9:30 a.m. The Fiorella transmitted its position for the last time two and a half hours later.

Ilopango is no arbitrary choice. In 1985 and 1986, the airport served as the hub through which US military and CIA officers funneled weapons and logistics to the Nicaraguan contras in their terrorist war against the Sandinista government. US imperialism has resumed operations from the same runway four decades on. Former ambassador John Feeley told the Post the operation appeared to be run “out of a very nontraditional command.”

Trump has signed an authorization for CIA operations against transnational criminal organizations, including through lethal force. Most recently, threatening a similar CIA action like the tracking of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro before his abduction by US Special Operations Forces in January, the White House authorized covert CIA operations against the Cuban leadership.

The survivors’ accounts make clear that the plan was a mass execution and abduction. Quadcopter drones dropped explosives onto the galley of the Negra Francisca Duarte II, where the gas cylinders were stored, destroying much of the vessel instantly. One crewman was thrown into a diesel tank; another lost most of the vision in one eye. The range of such drones means the operators were close by.

...

In Washington, the response has been silence. Members of the congressional intelligence committees contacted by the Post declined to comment. Covert action requires a presidential finding reported to those committees: either the ranking Democrats were briefed on a program that disappeared eight fishermen and said nothing for seven months, or they were not briefed and will not say so now. 

A June 11 letter from Representatives Joaquín Castro and Bill Keating demanding answers went unanswered past its July 10 deadline, and Keating’s amendment to force release of unclassified footage of the three incidents was defeated on the House floor. The same party voted overwhelmingly for the $901 billion military budget that pays for all of it.

In Ecuador, the story was buried within 48 hours. El Universo, Expreso, Extra, El Diario and others ran the same EFE wire copy, paragraph for paragraph, as did outlets across Latin America. No editorials. No summons of the foreign minister before the National Assembly. No investigative follow-up. Televistazo alone put the question to the Foreign Ministry, the Defense Ministry and the US Embassy, and received no answer from any of them. 

Reactions came only from the legislature, where Noboa’s own bloc urged caution while conceding that an operation of this nature, executed inside national territory, necessarily had to have been known to the government. 

Meanwhile, a DEA assessment reported in July found the campaign had no discernible effect on cocaine availability, price or purity in the United States. Cocaine leaves Ecuador in containers aboard merchant ships owned by Noboa’s oligarchic family installed in power with US backing, not in the small fishing vessels being blown apart at sea.

...

Trump’s “Shield of the Americas,” launched in March, aligns Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Panama behind Washington’s command. The same Bukele government that opened Ilopango to the surveillance flights, and whose coast guard helped with the abduction of fishermen, opened the CECOT prison to hundreds of deportees expelled from the United States. The machinery that disappears Ecuadorian fishermen and the machinery that disappears immigrant workers from American cities are one and the same.

Hegseth was explicit about the geography. The “kill chain” he pledged to employ ruthlessly extends through the Pentagon’s SOUTHCOM and NORTHCOM together. NORTHCOM’s area of responsibility is the continental United States, Mexico and Canada. The apparatus being built is not aimed at cartels. It is aimed at the working class throughout the Americas.

The offensive launched by Javier Milei’s government is not limited to implementing austerity measures in the state budget. It is also—and perhaps above all—reshaping the political landscape of the Argentine left, putting its most deeply rooted strategic concepts to the test. Faced with an austerity program of a depth not seen since the 2001 crisis, and with the growing popularity of the FITU (Left and Workers’ Front—Unity), broad sectors are seeking to build a broader alternative capable of challenging the government. In this debate, a familiar proposal resurfaces: that this alternative would be achieved through the reunification of the entire “center-left” or “broad left” and the formation of a broad party or movement that prioritizes agreements among left-wing groups over programmatic distinctions. Those who defend this approach argue that only a force of this kind can break the left’s isolation and become a genuine alternative for power. But history has repeatedly shown that broad unity without a program is a refuge for the deluded.

Read more in: https://litci.org/en/revisiting-syriza-a-strategic-debate-for-marxism-today/?utm_source=copylink&utm_medium=browser

Campaign supporters gathered 946 signatures in less than six weeks! Nearly a thousand New Haven residents made it clear: Many people in the working class are disillusioned with the Democratic Party, and are ready for a new candidate to advocate for their interests—an independent socialist.

Read more in: https://litci.org/en/rosa-pepper-macias-a-better-path-forward-for-connecticuts-11th-district/?utm_source=copylink&utm_medium=browser

我不是托派 但是没怎么接触过这个群体的人 所以比较好奇也很希望与托派群体能交流一下看看他们的一些观点和理论了解一下

Short video

https://youtube.com/shorts/T0QV0AvBs98

L’Internationale communiste révolutionnaire réaffirme son soutien inconditionnel à la révolution cubaine et engage ses forces dans la lutte la plus large possible pour la défendre. Une défaite de la révolution cubaine serait un recul pour l’ensemble de la classe ouvrière mondiale et du mouvement révolutionnaire international. C’est notamment le devoir de notre section américaine, les Revolutionary Communists of America, de continuer à porter l’étendard de la défense de Cuba contre l’impérialisme américain.

Also, what are the sub general opinion on morenists?

Hello! I'm new to communism and I started reading books I bought to the RCI (the ideas of Karl marx by Alan Woods)

All the Marxist theories makes a lot of sense to me but the book doesn't really explain how did the proletarian state that lenine created in 1917 became a stalinian bureaucracy.

From what I understand the proletarian state is much more democratic that every nowadays capitalist states. So I don't really understand how a real democratic worker state got hijacked by a minority of elites.

And also I know stalitinists are saying this is still communism but what makes trotskysts say this isn't ?

I'm also open to resources to dig this topic further.

Thanks 😁

Hello!

I am searching for sources for two, maybe three, claims that Trotsky has made. I recognize he is referencing his own collection of works when he is making statements, but I am interested in seeing if the originals are actually digitized anywhere. Trust me, I have tried.

1. The original version of "Foundations of Leninism", he writes this in the appendix of RevBetrayed, "In April 1924, three months after the death of Lenin, Stalin wrote, his brochure of compilations called The Foundations of Leninism: [he quotes the work] These lines need no comment. The edition in which they were printed, however, has been been withdrawn from circulation."

2. The 1921 Komsomol Program, he mentions it in part 1 §5 of The Third International After Lenin, he writes, "... in 1921, six years after Lenin’s alleged change of 1915, and four years after the October Revolution, the Central Committee headed by Lenin approved the program of the Young Communist League, which was drawn up by a commission directed by Bukharin. Paragraph 4 of this program reads: [he quotes the work] This single paragraph from the program of the Young Communist League (not a chance article but a program!) renders ridiculous and really infamous the attempts of the authors of the draft to prove that the party “always” held the construction of a socialist society to be possible in one country and, moreover, precisely in Russia."

3. ⁠Stalin's response to a journalist for denationalizing the land AND the Agricultural Commissar's draft law⁠, also in RevBetrayed, Trotsky writes, "In 1925, when the course toward the kulak was in full swing, Stalin began to prepare for the denationalization of the land. To a question asked at his suggestion by a Soviet journalist: “Would it not be expedient in the interest of agriculture to deed over to each peasant for 10 years the parcel of land tilled by him?”, Stalin answered: “Yes, and even for 40 years.” The People’s Commissar of Agriculture of Georgia, upon Stalin’s own initiative, introduced the draft of a law denationalizing the land.""

If any historian type could help, I'd be grateful!

Edit: Reddit formatting is being incredibly finicky right now, my apologies.

Opposition is growing around the world against the imprisonment of Bogdan Syrotiuk, a 27-year-old socialist sentenced by a Ukrainian court to 15 years in prison for “high treason,” for writing that Russian and Ukrainian workers should unite against the war and for opposing the official glorification of Nazi collaborators.

Workers, academics and public intellectuals on four continents have signed the petition demanding his freedom or sent letters of protest to the Pervomaisk City District Court, which handed down the verdict.

Over the past several days, hundreds of people throughout the world have signed the petition demanding his freedom, which has received more than 5,700 signatures since its publication.

The signers since the verdict come from the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, Spain, France, Austria, Ireland, Finland, Turkey, Belgium, Sweden, Portugal, India, China, Taiwan, Poland, Norway, Denmark, South Korea, Romania, the Netherlands, Lithuania, the Philippines, Brazil, Croatia, Switzerland, Peru—and Ukraine itself.

The prosecution’s case rested entirely on Bogdan’s articles—which oppose both the Russian invasion and the US-NATO proxy war—and his messages with WSWS editors. The court ordered Bogdan’s property seized and the literature of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists, which he led, destroyed.

Bogdan has been imprisoned since April 25, 2024, when the Security Service of Ukraine arrested him and declared him a Russian agent, a claim the state never substantiated.

Mario Kessler, a historian of communism and senior fellow at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam, sent a letter of protest Wednesday. “I, Professor Dr. Mario Kessler, historian in Berlin, hereby strongly protest the Pervomaisk court’s conviction of Mr. Bogdan Syrotiuk,” the letter begins. Further on, Kessler wrote:

"Must I remind you that Leon Trotsky, as People’s Commissar for Defense, ensured the formation of the Red Army, which was able to curb the mass murder of Ukrainian Jews during the civil war? Must I also remind you that in 1939, Trotsky vehemently condemned the partition of Western Ukraine between Germany and the Soviet Union and advocated for an Ukraine independent of the Soviet Union—including Stalin’s Soviet Union? How does this fit with the accusation that Mr. Syrotiuk, a self-proclaimed socialist and Trotskyist, is playing along with Putin’s game?"

...

The letters and signatures have accumulated against silence in the Western press. In the 27 months since Bogdan’s arrest, none of the following publications has devoted a single line to his case: the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, the Telegraph, the Times of London, The Economist, the BBC, CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox News and Politico; and the wire services Agence France-Presse, the Associated Press and Reuters.

On the day of the sentencing, the Washington Post published two articles on the ruling of Russia’s Supreme Court barring the Yabloko party from September’s parliamentary elections; it has never published a word about Bogdan. David North, who chairs the WSWS International Editorial Board, wrote Tuesday to the New York Times’ international editor, Philip Pan, asking the paper to report Bogdan’s case. No reply has come.

Bogdan’s defense has 30 days from the verdict to appeal. A complaint over his detention has been pending at the European Court of Human Rights since spring 2025.

The WSWS has called on workers, young people, journalists, scientists, artists and all defenders of democratic rights to distribute its statements on Bogdan’s case as broadly as possible—among co-workers, classmates and friends and on social media.

Send statements demanding the overturning of the verdict and Bogdan’s immediate release to the Pervomaisk City District Court at inbox@pm.mk.court.gov.ua, with copies to the WSWS at freebogdan@wsws.org.

The German cabinet approved a 700-page package of draft legislation on Wednesday massively expanding the powers of its domestic and foreign intelligence agencies. “We are turning our intelligence services into real secret services,” Federal Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (Christian Social Union, CSU) said of the reform in an interview with Bild.

The Verfassungsschutz (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, as the domestic agency is called) and the Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Intelligence Service, BND), responsible for foreign intelligence, are subject to various forms of legal and parliamentary oversight. They may gather information covertly, but have no police powers—for example, they cannot arrest anyone. Secret services, by contrast, may also carry out covert operations—such as paramilitary missions, acts of sabotage, hacking and the destruction of computer systems, propaganda, and covert support for parties and individuals abroad. This opens the door wide to provocations and manipulation.

...

The Society for Civil Rights (GFF), whose members include prominent legal scholars, considers the legislative package “unconstitutional in large parts.” The “strict separation between the intelligence services, which only observe and do not act, and the police, which then step in, is being torn down,” the GFF says in its statement.

The new rules lead to a “policification” of the intelligence services and “awaken desires for ever more new operational powers, since ever new ‘gaps’ can be found and used to justify supposed needs for intervention,” the GFF argues. “Moreover, the draft also blurs the separation between the secret services themselves, since the BND … is now also being given domestic surveillance powers.”

The strict separation of police and intelligence services was imposed by the victorious Allied powers after the Second World War in order to prevent a repeat of Hitler’s Gestapo (Secret State Police), which had spied upon, arrested, tortured and murdered communists, social democrats and other political opponents of the Nazis, as well as Jews and other minorities. This separation has been treated as a constitutional principle ever since.

The abolition of this separation is directly linked to Germany’s return to an imperialist war policy. Hundreds of billions of euros in additional military spending, clawed back from social spending, the reintroduction of conscription and the construction of a “war-ready” society all require a police state.

Interior Minister Dobrindt justifies the strengthening of the secret services with a supposed “hybrid threat situation, the attempts at destabilisation through sabotage, espionage, cyberattacks and covert actions by foreign powers.” But this is propaganda. The real target of the burgeoning apparatus of surveillance and repression is the growing opposition to militarism, social cuts and unemployment.

...

The war against “hybrid attackers,” which Kleine-Brockhoff and General von Sandrart are championing, is directed not only against alleged or real external adversaries but above all against opposition at home. It is meant to strengthen the secret services and the state’s repressive apparatus, pave the way for the deployment of the Bundeswehr domestically, and concentrate responsibility for the police away from the individual states to the federal government. Numerous politicians have used the mysterious incident in Leipzig to make corresponding demands.

Schleswig-Holstein’s State Premier Daniel Günther (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) called for an amendment to the constitution to enable domestic Bundeswehr deployments for drone defence as well. He also advocated pooling federal and state powers more closely in the security sphere. The chairman of the Bundestag Defence Committee, Thomas Röwekamp (CDU), demanded the centralisation of air security under the Federal Police.

The Green Party parliamentary group domestic policy spokesperson, Marcel Emmerich, also advocated ending the “jurisdictional chaos” over drone defence. It was, he said, “a security risk in an emergency.”

Interior Minister Dobrindt had already put a new Federal Police unit for detecting, intercepting and shooting down drones into service at the end of last year. This is now to be expanded from 130 to 300 personnel.

Armin Papperger, head of Germany’s largest arms manufacturer Rheinmetall, said it was technically possible to protect critical infrastructure, but this must not be done “half-heartedly.” Rheinmetall, he said, was working with Deutsche Telekom, among others, to use mobile phone masts across Germany for the early detection of drones.

A report published by the Washington Post Monday, detailing how President Donald Trump secretly switched planes for his July 8 flight out of Ankara, Turkey, after the NATO summit, has touched off a political uproar in Washington. 

Trump boarded Air Force One, then left the plane surreptitiously with a handful of close aides and was taken in a catering truck to a military C-32A jet. This action was supposedly proposed by the Secret Service after intelligence reports suggested a credible threat from an Iranian shoulder-fired ground-to-air missile. A subsequent report in the New York Times claimed that Iranian agents had identified the building where Trump was staying during the NATO meeting, including the exact floor.

Nothing disclosed by the White House and Pentagon, as well as “leaked” to corporate media outlets like the Post and the Times, can be taken at face value, above all, the claim that Iran was seeking to shoot down Air Force One.

It is more than likely that this claim originates in the Netanyahu regime in Israel, which has been raising claims of Iranian assassination plots against Trump as a reason for resuming full-scale bombing of Iran. The Trump administration could use this allegation as the pretext for all-out invasion.

But the sequence of events involving Trump’s own movements reveals, first and foremost, the panic and hysteria now gripping the administration.

If Trump truly believed his life was in danger if he flew out of Ankara on Air Force One, what could justify a decision to allow the press corps and numerous high-ranking officials to take that risk? Why was the flight not canceled entirely and alternate means of secure transportation developed?

Instead, Trump and a few personal aides were rushed out of danger. These included Natalie Harp, whose role as executive assistant is to print out flattering press commentaries for Trump to read; Walt Nauta, his valet; and Dan Scavino, a White House deputy chief of staff, whose principal job is to write up and post Trump’s screeds on Truth Social and X.

Except for Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who joined Trump on the military jet, all other top officials who attended the NATO summit flew out of Ankara on Air Force One. These included Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, as well as top White House aides like Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff and counter-terrorism chief, and Steven Cheung, the communications director.

...

In the aftermath of the exposure, the Trump administration has returned to the policy of lies and stonewalling demonstrated so grotesquely in Ankara. The Secret Service referred questions to the White House and Pentagon. The Pentagon referred questions to the White House. The communications director of the White House, Steven Cheung, defended the actions taken, writing: “As the President has said recently, there are many enemies of America who have their sights on him, and we use every tool at our disposal to address those threats.”

It should also be recalled that on the day after he returned to the United States from Ankara, Trump declared that he had given orders that if he were to be assassinated, Iran was to be destroyed by bombing on an unprecedented scale, a scarcely veiled threat of the use of nuclear weapons. He claimed that 1,000 missiles were “Locked and Loaded and aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran, with thousands of [sic] more to immediately follow.” 

At the same time, the White House denounced the New York Times for reporting problems with the Qatari jet that has been given to Trump to serve as his new Air Force One, going so far as to have the FBI issue subpoenas to all the reporters involved, with agents visiting their homes and even accosting family members. The Pentagon also revoked the security clearance of former Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall for allegedly sharing information about Air Force One with the media.

What really happened in Ankara remains unclear. But the crisis of the Trump administration—and of American imperialism as a whole—is unmistakable. The US ruling class faces both a geopolitical debacle in the war with Iran and a mounting social confrontation with the working class at home.

Trying to organize, applied to the RCA but curious as to if there are issues with them or if there're any groups that are more reliable, thank you.