San Francisco (USA) January 6, 2024—Healthcare workers protest against US-funded Gaza genocide in front of San Francisco General Hospital.
I was among twenty comrades who met in New Delhi with our comrade from the US and discussed deadly air pollution here. Capitalist governments are hiding the human costs of pollution. So, I did research to shed light on it.
But before that, I want to let readers know that I was a medical student in Sumy, Ukraine when the war broke out there. We were evacuated to India. At the airport, a comrade gave me Red Flag. Months later, after a persistent struggle with comrades, I joined ICWP.
However, returning with no medical degree brought shame and disappointment to my family. My parents had taken out a huge loan to pay for my degree. I was unable to find a job. I became very depressed. I became less active in politics as I lived far from Delhi.
Then came the devastating Gaza war. I saw civilians, including women and children, brutally bombed in hospitals. I finally got a job in a hospital as a physician assistant. I had finished four years of medical school but had to accept much lower pay. But the Gaza war woke me up. What capitalism does to humanity is incomprehensible.
Red Flag letters and articles about the imperialist wars in Gaza inspired me to be active again. I circulated our Gaza pamphlet to my co-workers and staff. They, too, were very impressed, and we formed a small circle of ICWP friends.
After our meeting in Delhi, I researched what capitalist media will not publish as headlines. In Delhi alone, 170,000 children under the age of five die because of severe AQI (air pollution). According to a Swiss study, India has forty-two out of fifty cities with the highest AQI in the world.
The source of this deadly pollution is particles smaller than 2.5 microns from car pollution, industrial waste, and demolitions from construction sites. Life expectancy is reduced by an estimated twelve years. In North India, 2.1 million people die annually as a result of capitalist-generated pollution. In pregnant women, pollution penetrates the uterus and permanently damages the lungs, liver, and brain of the fetus.
Nobody has studied what happens to the dust created by daily bombing in Gaza. But with severe winters and a total lack of clean water, electricity, and food, along with the dust, it is becoming a brutal gas chamber. This capitalist-created system has to go. We must fight for communism now. There is no time for depression.
I am not allowed to do certain tasks and procedures in my hospital because I am not a physician. But I do care deeply about the patients. I reach out to them. All of them suffer in one way or another from diseases created by capitalism.
I visit my patients every day on my rounds. My patients and staff, even some doctors, address me as ‘Doctor’ because I can do anything and, above all, I care for the patients. I politely tell them that I am not a ‘Doctor,’ I am a communist. I organize for communism, and they should join us.
—Comrade in North India
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