Emmanuel Macron’s address to a joint session of the US Congress on Wednesday was one of the most belligerent public statements ever made by a French president. Hailing the unprovoked bombing of Syria on April 14 by Washington, London and Paris as a model for a new world order in the 21st century, Macron declared his support for US war threats against Iran, North Korea and beyond.

The address capped off Macron’s three-day state visit to Washington, amid the deepest crisis of the trans-Atlantic alliance since the end of World War II. Panic is mounting in European ruling circles over US moves to slap trade tariffs on European and Chinese goods, threatening a spiral of retaliation and a global trade war, and Washington’s announced plans to cancel the Iranian nuclear treaty, threatening the eruption of war throughout the entire Middle East. Yet Macron had nothing to propose save more calls for aggressive military action, covered over with hollow bombast about the defense of democracy.

“Our two nations are rooted in the same soil, grounded in the same ideals of the American and French revolutions,” Macron declared. “The strength of our bonds is the source of our shared ideals. This is what united us in the struggle against imperialism during the First World War, then in the fight against Nazism during the Second World War. This is what united us again during the era of the Stalinist threat, and now we lean on that strength to fight against terrorist groups.”

Macron’s rhetoric about Washington and Paris carrying out an eternal war for democracy, which takes the form in our epoch of a “war on terror” against Islamist groups, is a pack of lies. The trade rivalries between major US and European corporations, and US-European conflicts over whether to break Europe’s economic ties with Iran and risk war in the Middle East, are not conflicts to save democracy from terrorism. They are inter-imperialist conflicts rooted, as the great 20th century Marxists explained, in the violently clashing interests of rival nationally based capitalist ruling classes.

Macron proceeded to contradict his own fraudulent presentation. He appealed to Washington to drop its threats of trade war and coordinate its war policies more closely with Europe—not in order to fight terrorism, but to preserve the dominant role played in world politics by the imperialist powers against unnamed great-power rivals.

He said, “We have two possible ways ahead. We can choose isolationism, withdrawal and nationalism. This is an option. It can be tempting to us as a temporary remedy to our fears. But closing the door to the world will not stop the evolution of the world… Other powers with a stronger strategy and ambition would then fill the void we would leave empty. Other powers will not hesitate once again to advocate their own model to shape the 21st century global order.”

The better way, Macron claimed, is to “build a 21st century world order based on a new breed of multilateralism.” As an example of this, he said: “In Syria, we work very closely together. After prohibited weapons were used against the population by the regime of Bashar al-Assad two weeks ago, the United States and France, together with the United Kingdom, acted to destroy chemical facilities and to restore the credibility of the international community. This action was evidence of this strong multilateralism.”

Macron’s hailing of the April 14 bombing of Syria as a model for the future constitutes a warning to workers and youth internationally. Behind empty rhetoric about democracy and the rule of law, the ruling classes in the imperialist centers act ruthlessly, with utter contempt for international law, in order to assert and maintain their dominant world position against their geostrategic rivals such as China and Russia.

The April 14 attack was a war crime, based on NATO lies that Assad regime forces had used chemical weapons in the city of Douma. As Moscow presented evidence that the attack was staged by the NATO-backed White Helmets militia to provide a pretext for bombings, Washington, London and Paris launched missile strikes on Syrian state buildings, preempting UN investigations of the alleged chemical attack. Macron’s praise for this attack underscores that the 21st century order he foresees would be based on endless, lawless violence by the imperialist powers.

On this basis, Macron endorsed US threats against targets across Eurasia. “The terrorist threat is even more dangerous when combined with the nuclear proliferation threat,” he said. “France supports fully the United States in its attempts to bring Pyongyang through sanctions and negotiations towards denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. As for Iran, our objective is clear: Iran shall never possess any nuclear weapons: not now, not in 5 years, not in 10 years, never.”

Having already indicated yesterday that he would accept Trump’s cancellation of the Iranian nuclear treaty, paving the way for renewed economic sanctions and a likely US war against Iran, Macron nonetheless issued the following pathetic proviso: “But this policy should never lead us to war in the Middle East. We must ensure stability and respect the sovereignty of the nations, including of Iran, which represents a great civilization. Let us not replicate past mistakes in the region.”

Macron’s argument is a hypocritical fraud. On the one hand, he gave a blank check to Trump, who has threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” and is backing Israeli threats of military action against Iran; on the other, he insisted that he did not support the war that flows from such policies. Then he tacked on an impotent appeal to avoid repeating “past mistakes,” that is, imperialist wars and military occupations in the Middle East over the last 25 years, without saying what these were.

Following the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the imperialist powers were freed from any effective military counterweight to their neocolonial interventions in the Middle East. A series of bloody imperialist wars in the strategic and oil-rich region—from Iraq to Afghanistan, Libya and Syria—claimed millions of lives and forced tens of millions to flee their homes. The class interests driving these wars were obscured, however, by imperialist lies that they were motivated by the need to fight terrorism and save democracy. The Big Lie of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction set the pattern for the succeeding neocolonial wars.

The geopolitical crisis provoked by these decades of war is escalating into a military confrontation between the major world powers. As Russian and Iranian forces fight in Syria against NATO-backed “rebels,” and China seeks closer ties with Russia to protect itself from US threats over trade, the South China Sea and North Korea, the danger of the eruption of a war directly between major nuclear armed powers is growing. The April 14 attacks were stunningly reckless precisely because of the danger of their provoking a clash between Russian and NATO forces.

The attack on workers’ living standards necessary to finance these wars is now provoking a growing fightback in the working class. Mass strikes by teachers are proceeding in the United States as rail workers strike and university students occupy their classrooms in France to protest Macron’s drastic reforms, which he has pursued despite broad popular opposition.

This growth of working-class struggle is itself a major factor driving the ruling classes in both France and the US to escalate their military aggression abroad in an attempt to divert social tensions outward against a foreign “enemy” and create conditions for the use of state violence and censorship to crush opposition at home.

Appendix
Bonus feature

By Andre Damon, wsws.org

Zuckerberg—We'll say this for him: The new policies are basically imposed on the company by Congressional and media intimidation, spearheaded by the CIA Democrats, and for a man without any particular principle, except freedom to make a lot of money, this clueless billionaire has just simply gone along. The whole thing is disgraceful, one more reason to despise Democrats and the masses of idiots that keep enabling them.

Facebook, the world’s largest social media company, spelled out for the first time the criteria it uses to censor speech on its platform, purely at its own discretion, and with no legal oversight or recourse.

Its “community guidelines” are so sweeping and broad that effectively any statement expressing any critical political view can be constrained as violent, defamatory, “extremist,” “bullying” or—in the most sweeping catchall—“fake news,” and flagged for removal or undetectable censorship.

These “community guidelines” are used by the 20,000 in Facebook’s “security” and “moderation” departments—constituting the absolute majority of the company’s employees—to shape political discourse and block content the massive and unaccountable technology monopoly deems objectionable.

The centerpiece of this censorship apparatus is Facebook’s policy regarding “fake news.” In its newly released community guidelines, the social media monopoly made clear that it would not let users know their content is being blocked from distribution as “fake news” because such censorship is a “sensitive issue”:

Reducing the spread of false news on Facebook is a responsibility that we take seriously. We also recognize that this is a challenging and sensitive issue. We want to help people stay informed without stifling productive public discourse. There is also a fine line between false news and satire or opinion. For these reasons, we don’t remove false news from Facebook but instead, significantly reduce its distribution by showing it lower in the News Feed.

The campaign against “Fake News” was initiated in November 2016, immediately following the 2016 election, by the US intelligence agencies, the Democratic Party, and the major technology giants. This cabal, shocked by the electoral defeat of Hillary Clinton, the favored candidate of the military/intelligence apparatus, and the widespread support for socialist ideas reflected in broad support for the campaign of Bernie Sanders, initiated a media offensive aimed at pinning the growth of social opposition on an amorphous, and rarely defined, concept called “fake news.”

Although the hundreds of accounts in major newspapers devoted to the topic never defined what “fake news” is, Hillary Clinton, in her memoir of the 2016 election, put the genesis of “fake news” with WikiLeaks and its release of documents revealing the Clinton campaign to have rigged the 2016 primary and engaged in corrupt relations with Wall Street.

Given that no one has ever pointed out any inaccuracies in WikiLeaks’ reporting, the clear implication is that the definition of “fake news” is any information, whether true or false, that is damaging or discrediting to the state.

In other words, the blocking of “fake news” by the major technology giants, working on behalf of the US intelligence agencies, is nothing but political censorship.

Given this fact, Facebook’s wording is highly significant. Because the suppression of “fake news,” i.e., censorship, is a “sensitive issue,” the company will do it secretly, by “significantly reduc[ing] its distribution by showing it lower in the News Feed.”

La Rochefoucauld’s maxim that “hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue” applies here. Since journalists, publishers and users would raise a hue and cry over their content being censored, Facebook simply carries out its censorship in secret. By blocking distribution on the Facebook news feed, the company’s actions have the same effect as simply deleting content, but without any legal proof that the company violated its users’ First Amendment rights.

While Facebook is the only technology company that has spelled out these actions with such directness, Google and Twitter have both admitted, via legal representatives in congressional testimony that they follow a similar policy to suppress “fake news”—i.e., oppositional viewpoints.

Facebook’s admission is yet another vindication of the campaign launched by the World Socialist Web Site to expose political censorship by Google and other technology giants, an allegation in an open letter published August 25 that the company was engaged in “enforcing authoritarian-style direct and deliberate blacklisting.”

The World Socialist Web Site published its letter in response to the revelation that leading left-wing, anti-war, and socialist web sites had their search traffic from Google fall by up to 75 percent after the company announced measures to “improve” its search system.

It is now clear that the WSWS’s allegations were entirely correct. The technology giants, unbeknownst to their users, are blocking “alternative” news sources and promoting “trusted” news outlets, including, as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg put it earlier this year, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal .

The measures taken in secret to limit the distribution of critical political viewpoints are accompanied by more explicit censorship measures. In a quarterly report published Monday, Google bragged that it removed over 8 million videos from YouTube, of which the great majority—some 6.7 million—were “first flagged for review by machines rather than humans.” More than three quarters of the videos flagged by Google’s AI systems “were removed before they received a single view.”

The company declared, “Deploying machine learning actually means more people reviewing content, not fewer. Our systems rely on human review to assess whether content violates our policies.” Like Facebook, Google has hired an army of censors, aiming to employ 10,000 people in this department by the end of the year.

Facebook and Google are under no legal obligation to police its content. As communications companies, they are not responsible under US law for what its users say or do on its platform. They have, rather, voluntarily become an arm of the US police and law enforcement agencies, but with one caveat: as a private corporation, they claim exemption, speciously, from the protections under the First Amendment barring the state from impinging on the freedom of expression.

The real target of the crackdown by the technology giants on the freedom of speech is not “fake news,” “extremist content,” or any other of the myriad catchphrases used to justify censorship. It is, rather, the growth of oppositional sources of news and political analysis, and the use of social media to organize political resistance. As the strike movement by workers in the United States and internationally continues to grow, the technology giants will only expand their assault on the freedom of expression.

As shown by the powerful response by workers to the meeting held by the World Socialist Web Site and Socialist Equality Party at Wayne State University last weekend, a growing section of workers sees the defense of the freedom of expression on the Internet as an urgent task. We urge workers and young people to contact the WSWS and join the fight against Internet censorship!

The UK government responds to each exposure of its fabrications regarding the Skripal affair by concocting and promoting additional ones. Any evidence or argument that points to the ludicrous nature of the official line is denounced as the work of a dupe or a traitor.

On March 4, Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were taken to hospital after being found unconscious on a bench in Salisbury. They have now recovered, with Yulia already discharged from hospital before being spirited away to a secret location, despite having supposedly been poisoned with one of the most fatal military-grade nerve agents.

RF's Foreign Minister Lavrov: Everything that Russia says is dismissed with contempt out of hand. The impudent insolence of the British, and the West in general, have destroyed the rules of international diplomacy. But the British ruling class, for all their haughty pomposity and rude manners, is just a yapping dog—a very nasty yapping dog— hiding behind the skirts of the Big Bully. It is Washington that approves and initiates these ugly moves.

Without revealing any evidence, Britain accused Russia of being responsible for an “attempted murder.” While failing to provide any convincing explanation as to why Russia would target a superannuated ex-spy and his daughter, the resulting hysterical anti-Russian campaign played a critical role in preparing the US, British and French bombing of Syria.

As the Skripal campaign unravelled, the British authorities have stepped up their claims. At an emergency meeting of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) on April 18, British ambassador to the OPCW, Peter Wilson, accused Russia of “multiple narratives” and of having “no credibility.”

Wilson demanded that Russia “end its offensive chemical weapons programme” and “declare its programme of novichoks.” He accused Moscow of a “brazen disinformation campaign” to “attack the reputation and expertise of the OPCW” and “distract and brazenly misrepresent facts.”

The May government continues to refuse to adhere to basic international standards in depriving Russia of any information about the investigation into how two of its citizens became ill.

This deliberate ratcheting up of tensions on the part of the UK authorities is aimed at diverting from its own campaign of disinformation, misrepresentation and outright lies. Central to this has been the willingness of the official media to regurgitate without hesitation, the latest propaganda from the government, intelligence agencies and police.

The summary findings of the OPCW made no mention of novichok —the Russian name for a family of nerve agents whose incessant repetition is meant to provide irrefutable proof of Moscow’s involvement. Nor did it mention Russia. The one time the OPCW referenced a “nerve agent,” it was prefaced with the caveat “allegedly.” The term used throughout is “toxic chemical.”

The OPCW report was thrown even further into question by Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. The Swiss state Spiez Laboratory had conducted tests, Lavrov said, and contrary to claims that the Skripals were poisoned by a novichok nerve agent, it found the “substance used on Sergei Skripal was an agent called BZ” ( BZ or 3-Quinuclidinyl benzilate).

BZ is a hallucinogenic incapacitating agent that afflicts both the peripheral and central nervous systems. Lavrov said this information was not included in the OPCW report. The OPCW subsequently rebutted Lavrov’s claim, asserting the non-presence of BZ and its precursors in the March 23 blood samples taken from the Skripals.

Russia has demanded full disclosure of all information related to the Skripal case. The full OPCW report was made available to all governments who are signatories to the Chemical Weapons Convention. There is no prohibition on any of those governments from publishing the full report or parts thereof.

If Lavrov’s statement accurately reflects the scientific findings and if the Skripals encountered BZ in some form, this could account for both the state in which they were discovered on March 4, and the fact that they have now recovered. It would also seem to explain Yulia’s disorientation, which she mentioned in a statement, supposedly issued on her behalf by the Metropolitan Police.

On Saturday, the Russian Embassy in London said it asked the UK government to explain a statement from private individuals as to the origins of claims they made about the case. The Embassy’s press secretary said, “Yesterday we learned from the BBC that the self-proclaimed inventor of the so-called ‘Novichok’ Mr Vladimir Uglev was sure that the Skripals had been poisoned with A-234 [another name for novichok]. He comes to this conclusion ‘from all the spectrum data [he] was sent recently’…This is quite an extraordinary statement. It essentially means that a private citizen has been provided with the information that the Russian side has not been able to obtain from the British authorities for weeks.”

The Embassy also pointed out that Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, the former commanding officer of the UK’s chemical regiment, had made statements attributing blame to Russia based on access to “intelligence data.”

“Of course, these allegations cannot be verified. But if we are to believe them, it looks like the British authorities share highly confidential data with private individuals. This is another gross violation of the OPCW rules. We have asked the FCO [Foreign and Commonwealth Office] to confirm or deny this, and to provide us access to the files that these gentlemen refer to.”

The contradictions continue to mount. On April 17, the UK government’s Department of Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) announced that the nerve agent supposedly used to poison the Skripals was delivered “in a liquid form,” with only “a very small amount” used.

Only days earlier, police said the nerve agent had been deployed by smearing it on the front door handle of Sergei’s house. No explanation was offered as to how this amateurish and unsophisticated ruse remained undiscovered for weeks or why no one other than the Skripals and a police officer had been apparently affected.

But the claims about front door handles and “liquid form delivery” are contradicted by the OPCW report summary on the case, which notes that there were no additives in the substance they analysed—which would have been necessary for it to adhere to the Skripal’s front door.

More inconsistencies are revealed in the details of the cleaning of nine sites in Salisbury on Saturday to supposedly decontaminate them. There is no explanation as to why this is taking place six weeks after the Skripals were found. Stories in the media of how the deadly poison was washed off the Skripals’ door and diluted by the rain—just another of the implausible attempts to explain how the Skripals managed to survive a potentially deadly attack—have been shelved.

Now it is claimed that, far from it being diluted, there are potentially still “toxic” levels of the poison in isolated “hot spots.” The government has mobilized 200 military personnel, who will be involved in a “decontamination” operation that could last months.

Moving swiftly over to the new narrative, the BBC reported, “The nerve agent does not evaporate or disappear over time, experts have said, and intense cleaning with caustic chemicals is required to get rid of it.”

This was after Defra’s chief scientific adviser, Ian Boyd, had told a public meeting that the nerve agent remained in high concentrations in “very specific locations” and could still be harmful. However, Boyd’s remark was contradicted by a Defra spokesperson who insisted that the city “is safe for residents and visitors.”

Residents have complained about the mixed messages. Although the government was quick to claim that a military nerve agent had been used against the Skripals, it was almost a week before Public Health Britain issued any safety advice to those who had visited the pub or the restaurant that the Skripals had visited. Even then Public Health England stated only that people who had visited those places should wash their clothes and merely “[w]ipe personal items such as phones, handbags and other electronic items with cleansing or baby wipes and dispose of the wipes in the bin (ordinary domestic waste disposal).”