Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it. Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review
Subscriptions  £20p.a.    [P&P Bulletin Publications, PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.]          
No 1031  February 22nd 2000                                                                                                                               10p 

Blairism's Ireland fiasco is part of wider ideological turmoil as imperialist exploitation outlives its usefulness to world development. Attempted diversions away from Marxist-Leninist science, from SLP/Lalkar opportunism to Guardian bourgeois single-issue individualism, - show through aggressive lies that politically-correct fantasies are just not working. Real world developments will re-establish the need for objective theory.

The chaos and confusion over Ireland, imminent world economic crash, the collapse of Blairism and political correctness, and much else, well signpost the continuing crisis of the capitalist system but also underline how the surge of argument being provoked will need to reassess major questions of history in order to make sense.

From the tiniest to the largest issues, the free-market system keeps going laughably wrong, but the universal cynical response cannot remain just festering and stationary.

As trying as it has always been for Marxist farsightedness, the capitalist 'democracy' racket has, by-and-large, commanded enough grudging toleration hitherto in Britain and elsewhere in the West to constitute a cohesive 'philosophy' of sorts, and one which almost unconsciously was comfortably able to dismiss or ignore all challenges to the main status quo. 

Basically, capitalism has still been winning.

	And in some respects, 	the 'triumph of history' for the West has never looked more unassailable than recently, with booming 	stockmarket hysteria and takeover fever surrounding the supposed 'new technology revolution' which is meant to be 'transforming our lives' and ushering in the 'greatest prosperity and changes of any of the previous industrial revolutions', etc, etc; while at the same time, nothing but abuse and scorn, together with an unending torrent of lies and distortions now rarely challenged anywhere, in commensurate volume pour out about the 70 years achievements of the Soviet workers state, with only slightly lesser contempt for socialist developments in China and Cuba, etc, which have so far provided together the only alternative to capitalism.

But not only is all not what it seems, but increasing signs hint that the very mechanisms of control propaganda and brainwashing in the 'free world' are under scrutiny as well as the wilder claims for the system, even as it seems currently to be superficially more on-top than ever before, and the 'only possible way of life', etc.

New Labour's Ireland hiccup is of particular domestic interest but some of the features of this astonishing mess have a potential universal explosive significance.

More confirmation is emerging of the farcical propaganda essence of the deliberate disruption of the New Ireland government system by the diehard 'No Surrender' colonist minded Unionists, easily bouncing the lightweight Blairite regime into being fooled.

Embarrassed by this silly dangerous game that reactionaries are playing just to save face and prestige in their own small-minded social, business and political circles, the Guardian champions of everything supposedly enlightened (of individualistic, single-issue, politically-correct self-righteousness, in reality) have produced a complex 'clever' editorial pretending to 'see through' Trimble's agitation as essentially only a stunt to get something on record that can be presented as an IRA surrender, and objecting to it.

But objecting on what sick sad basis? By implying in the most oblique style possible that the IRA has already surrendered in reality, and is already regarded by national-liberation struggle veterans as only an Old Soldiers social association now, and that therefore no further shaming or humiliation is called for of the kind that Trimble is currently campaigning for, etc, etc, etc. In Guardian speak:

Sinn Féin has stuck by the letter of the Good Friday agreement and considers May, not mid-February, to be the relevant date for demonstrating a credible and concrete commitment to decommission. Moreover, most close observers of nationalist communities in Northern Ireland believe the issue to be irrelevant. They point to recent pronouncements by Mr McGuinness which state as clearly as possible - to those who want to listen - that the IRA accepts that the war is over. In an interview in the Observer last week Mr McGuinness implied that the IRA would continue to exist in the North as it did in the South - as a kind of old soldiers' organisation rather than as an army. This is felt to reflect the overwhelming majority of Republican opinion on the ground. But the same body of opinion is vehemently opposed to giving out any signals that this acceptance of democratic politics amounts to surrender. Peter Mandelson's suspension of the Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive meeting was understandable - and doubtless necessary - in the context of Mr Trimble's difficulties with the hardliners within his own party. Mr Trimble is a vital part of the peace process. But so is Mr Adams. Mr Mandelson must now show an equal understanding of the difficulties the Sinn Féin leader will now have in advocating a political path where "normal" politics has been suspended.

What unbelievably condescending twaddle, - the kernel of every petty-bourgeois mentality active in politics - from the ultra-'left' to the far right,- most of them catered for by the progressive self-interest single-issue concerns of the Guardian, - implacably 'revolutionary' when it comes to championing any kind of individual lifestyle, but more relentlessly and single-mindedly anti-communist (in more subtle ways than all of the rest of the capitalist press put together) when it comes to the Soviet workers state (or the Chinese) and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The Irish question is a simple one of a national-liberation class struggle using revolutionary political and guerrilla-war means. How can such a heroic, unequal minority fight against bigoted British-colonialist tyranny for Irish basic democratic rights in Occupied Ireland be so misunderstood by a Guardian mentality which devotes enormous time, space, and resources to championing the cause of supposedly unfairly-treated sectors and minorities like women, immigrants, homosexuals, etc, - all allegedly persecuted by bigotry, too???

Because BOTH attitudes serve the same anti-communist purpose! The middle-class Guardian HATES the faintest suggestion of there being anything remotely worthwhile or even excusable in MASS revolutionary struggle such as led by Sinn Féin and the IRA, which is far too redolent of proletarian-dictatorship methods of organisation, fighting, and philosophy. Add in the natural national-chauvinism of EVERY Britain-born native who is not a serious, conscious, consistent Leninist, - and the Guardian's unalterable reactionary condescension towards the Irish national-liberation becomes obviously inevitable, - and obviously acceptable too to the petty-bourgeois fake-'left' hordes who wallow in the 'progressive' individualism of single-issue self-righteousness, and would lobby Parliament to protest about Clause 28's non existent 'persecution of homosexual behaviour' but utter not a peep as the Good Friday Agreement's self-determination course for the whole Irish nation is kicked into the gutter by vicious British-colonial reaction.

At the same time, promoting these individualist diversions about women who would rather blame men for life's problems under capitalism rather than fight the class war to end capitalism,- is of equal service to the Guardian's anti-communist crusading.

The biggest irony is that Sinn Féin is just as full of subjective-idealist illusions as is the Guardian's stifling petty-bourgeois politically-correct orthodoxy, and a Sinn Féin revolution would be infinitely more digestible to the Scott Trust than proletarian dictatorship.

But what these 'progressive' middle-class reactionaries fear, of course, - - and probably rightly, - -is that if the arms-in-hand revolutionary contagion goes too far and becomes too successful, it could set an indelible pattern for future struggle as the later-on difficulties of imperialist crisis come onto the agenda requiring purely class-war solutions.

At the same time, always at the back of every middle-class mentality that has ever 'progressively' postured is the clinging-on suspicion/fear that maybe the big bourgeoisie is not done-for yet at all, that maybe there will be no Great Crash followed by worldwide revolutions, - ever; and that maybe in Ireland, the essence of all the Good Friday Agreement theatricals and propaganda posturing is NOT at base just a cosmetic way of dressing up the only REAL development which is the DEFEAT and HUMILIATION of the Partition colonial nightmare, and its snail's-pace dismantling via all the GFA power-sharing and cross-border new institutions towards an eventual reunited Ireland.

These cowardly shameful REACTIONARY reservations about tackling bigoted backwardness and built-in sectarian injustice in the Occupied Zone of Ireland are shared by the entire Trotskyite petty-bourgeois fake-'left' in Britain, who are equally hesitant about pronouncing death and destruction on the imperialist crisis racket in general for the same reasons. Accepting that monopoly capitalism MUST end in crash, slump, inter-imperialist war, and destruction, ALSO implies that the dictatorship of the proletariat MUST be the only possible force that could end such catastrophe of 'democratic' lunacy. The Trotskyite petty-bourgeoisie, living in the fantasy world of 'consistent' or 'pure' or 'multinanimous' so-called 'democracy' HATE such conclusions worse than the Guardian bourgeoisie do.  They have never accepted Marxist-Leninist science which plainly postulates that in this modern world, there can EITHER exist in any one country a state-structure of bourgeois dictatorship OR a state-structure of proletarian dictatorship, - one or the other, essentially, and with nothing stable in between. The petty-bourgeois mentality of Trotskyism, - hovering in between the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the proletariat, - invented the original THIRD WAY when finding the Soviet workers state uncomfortable to live in, - fantasising about yet a further historic period of 'world revolution', carried out by some new form of 'working class' against the existing Soviet workers state, in order to replace some new class structure called 'degenerated Stalinist caste', previously totally unknown and totally unpredicted by Marxist-Leninist science, - with an equally novel 'alternative' proletarian dictatorship (presumably,- Trotskyite literature being notoriously reticent on this question.)

It is fear that this total general historical confusion, sheltering every last sect of bourgeois and petty bourgeois opinion, is what is really being shaken up behind the collapsing chaos of all the individual calamities which capitalist 'democracy' struggles pathetically to 'solve' (like Ireland, Palestine, Third World debt, imminent international markets collapse, etc), if the 'New World Order' is going so laughably wrong so relentlessly, how long before every single historical assumption which gave bourgeois propaganda the chance to fantasise about a 'New World Order' in the first place, is up for re-examination too?

Especially worrying for every sect of petty-bourgeois mentality is the growing philosophical aspect of mass popular doubt that capitalist 'democracy' can provide answers or satisfaction to ANY deeper human or social problem or aspiration.

What is being questioned is the very nature of the capitalist system itself, the essential nastiness, inadequacy, and corruption of all human relationships within the 'free market' of labour exploitation, profiteering, rip-offs, vast criminal/mafia business crime, largescale corporate corruption, the mercenary arms race, and finally all-out trade war which has never ended in anything other than wholesale inter-imperialist shooting war. In such a world of constant cost-saving shortcuts, and penny-pinching permanently endangering health and environmental standards, and of misleading or often possibly harmful advertising hype, etc, social trust and respect for government is plunging towards zero. Widespread cynicism says that everyone is on the make or protecting their backs, and that gullible fools who get shafted by the system should have been more alert to such capitalist ethics as 'Blow you Jack, I’m alright' and 'The devil take the hindmost'.

Over the entrails and endless aggro of such an inhospitable society as this, no wonder that early 19th century 'moral' questions are all now roaring back into fashion asking whether the game of cut-throat capitalist competition is really the best way for human beings and societies to exist and get along with each other. Inevitably before long, a huge re-think is going to begin about exactly what positive experiences in planned rational existence were achieved by the USSR and the workers states, - especially if and when parts of East Europe do not just vote to make the former communist parties the biggest current parliamentary vehicles of people's hopes and aspirations, but opt to go ALL the way back to re-forming workers states. The brain-washing tide of endless anti-communist propaganda will never cease to flow, but solid developments on the ground ultimately make the most persuasive eloquence, - as, hopefully, Ireland will once again be proving during this present turmoil.

The national-liberation movement’s greatest power lies not in its IRA guerrilla-war army as such (whose military feats against colossal odds are already the stuff of popular legend, and far beyond Ireland's shores too), but in the organised Republican movement as a whole, - its highly-trained and superbly-motivated people at every level and in every area of political and social work. Sinn Féin are an outstanding advance in rational disciplined seriousness in politics, and despite the ferociousness of past 'anti-terrorist' propaganda and disinformation stunts, and despite the difficulty of Sinn Féin’s message of unrelenting revolutionary struggle and self-sacrifice,— this mass popular movement is bound to make an even greater impact on the political world in the near future. Yet the crucial thing is that Sinn Féin’s triumph is based on scientifically correct historical perspectives (about British imperialist decline) and on a rational revolution-building response to specific REAL (revolt-breeding) conditions, - all matters totally beyond imperialism's control.

The circumstances which produced Sinn Féin are obviously universally applicable at some stage. Already, the Irish national-liberation struggle itself is having some sort of indirect spin-off benefit, judging by the continued spread of spontaneous rational response to Unionist disruption and IRA vilification which can be found in the normally ultra-reactionary and highly irrational Times correspondence column:

Sir, The Unionist ministers in Northern Ireland, including Mr Trimble, signed up to an agreement, which, as far as I can see, did not include any
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          date other than May 22, 2000, for the total decommissioning of all paramilitary organisations in Northern Ireland. Had decommissioning been required to be done in stages before this date, then that ought surely to have been put into the agreement.

I wholeheartedly wish that the IRA and other paramilitaries would assure us that they will decommission their arms, but I cannot see that they are contravening the agreement. On the contrary, it appears to me that it is the hardline Unionists who are in contravention, by demanding that decommissioning takes place before the date agreed.

After centuries, peace was in our grasp. Was it too much to ask the Unionists to wait another four months to give the IRA a chance to prove or disprove its commitment to peace? Or is it something simpler than that—that they cannot stomach, even now, the idea of sharing power?

I have come to regard Mr Trimble as a genuine seeker of peace, but not so the hardliners who surround him, who would apparently prefer to put at risk the chance of peace rather than endanger their supremacy.

There is another aspect to this. As a British taxpayer, I am reluctant to continue to support the subsidy of £8 billion which is paid to Northern Ireland each year, only to be used in a profligate manner by those, of both sides, who would put peace at such risk. Far better that we keep our £8 billion to be used for our underfunded national services. We on this side of the Irish Sea ought to be consulted on the matter of subsidy, perhaps by referendum. 
Yours faithfully,

Sir, I suspect the IRA could exchange access to weapons for access to government. But it is perhaps unreasonable to ask them to destroy weapons in exchange for access to government that could be revoked.

So either the weapons have to be removed from the island in exchange for access that can be withdrawn, or weapons destroyed in exchange for government that cannot be removed.

Hoping for peace,

Observer readers too are failing to chime in with that paper's normally sour petulance:

Andrew Marr (Comment, last week) writes that the peace process is on the brink of collapse 'because the IRA will not keep its promise about decommissioning'. That view cannot be justified for the simple reason that the IRA has never promised to decommission any of its arms. Nor has Sinn Féin promised to get the IRA to decommission any of its arms.

The Good Friday agreement commits all parties to the agreement (including Sinn Féin) 'to use any influence they may have' to achieve the decommissioning of all paramilitary arms within two years following endorsement in referendums North and South of the agreement [that is, 22 May this year].

That does not require the actual decommissioning of IRA weapons prior to Sinn Féin’s participation in the Executive. All it requires is that Sinn Féin, and all other parties to the Agreement, "use any influence they may have" to achieve decommissioning. It does not require the use of influence on anybody’s part to be successful.

Your review of arms in Northern Ireland (News, last week) fell short of being complete. There are five 'groups' holding arms at present - the British Army, the RUC, the Catholic terrorist groups, the Protestant terrorist groups, and approximately 9,500 individuals, all of whom legitimately carry handguns for self defence.

The last group includes many if not all of the Protestant politicians involved in the current processes. When Trimble, and every other high-profile Northern Ireland politician, holds forth on disarmament one cannot help wondering if he has a loaded handgun tucked in his belt!

Now, apart from marking a clear break from the usual anti-terrorist mindlessness over Ireland, do these letters indicate possibly deeper processes at work which are unconsciously (so far) challenging the very pattern of government chauvinist flag-waving, routinely whipping unthinking public opinion up into easily swallowing the latest state foreign policy propaganda (or whatever) on virtually any issue? Are capitalism's disinformation stunts beginning to shoot themselves in the foot in virtually every question now?

The shallow silly Dome might yet prove to be something far more significant than just a great farce and a good belly laugh. Not only are New Labour inextricably hooked on daft stunts but they also seem literally incapable of calling a halt even when a project looks doomed to total failure and humiliation because it was an impossible idea in the first place (for reasons precisely to do with, once again, an unbridgable gap between the illusions of small-minded opportunists proudly telling themselves that they are now running something called British Imperialism, - and the actual realities of the modern-day world of imperialist CRISIS where Britain’s decadent ruling-class-role is one of the first in line to go down the plughole).

So now it looks as if troubled British imperialism's position in the world is under the government of an outdated 'reformist'-opportunist mentality which has
not the faintest notion of what is really going on in the world.

Already, the latest Blairite posturing on Ireland, wrecking the peace process under the sick goading of the moribund Orange-colonist mentality which never wanted anything but 'No Surrender' siege-war (for ever) in any case, - is being almost universally regarded with horrified bafflement.

In Europe, Blair & Co pose noisily as the "key players" to the absolute bemusement of the real European Union whose project to rival US imperialism in the long term is plainly no part at all of British imperialist establishment perspectives, and probably could never be even really comprehensible to the Anglo-Saxon alliance.

But in global matters, - for all the British boasting about still being one of the greatest capital-investment powers on earth and still being one of the most vital financial centres in the world, - the reality is that British imperialism is no longer in any kind of commanding role anywhere, and can only become an ever smaller and weaker voice in the terrifying turmoil building up for the very near future.

The Guardian-loving petty bourgeois of the 'anti-imperialist' fake-'left' ludicrously respond to this as though it were to do with innate NATIONAL abilities or characteristics, or whatever, and therefore they all gullibly piled in behind Blairism briefly in the ridiculous illusion that 'Britain could play the star role in a completely new kind of with-it world order' (unspecified), etc.

But, of course, the imperialist-crisis problems of ANY country have very little to do with national worth, and EVERYTHING to do with a rigid WORLD SYSTEM of ever-greater monopoly-capitalist exploitation and domination WHICH VIRTUALLY DICTATES WHAT ANY REGIME CAN OR CANNOT DO, - including US imperialism itself. What Blairism could do offered one chance only in reality, - making complete fools of themselves. And inevitably, they have taken it with aplomb. Government by 'New Labour - New Britain' public-relations gimmicks such as the Dome is in confused retreat. Control-freak organisational domination by spin-doctoring and arbitrary focus-groups, etc, is in disgrace and over a far wider field than just the pantomime of failing to rig control of intended showpiece 'democracy'-froth such as the London mayor election, the Welsh Assembly, etc, etc. All New Labour lobbying, influence-peddling, and propaganda is now suspect. And the 'ethical' foreign policy is now in complete tatters after the scandals of the continuing arms supplies to the Indonesian dictatorship; the pointless NAZI blitzkrieg destroying Serbia; the humiliation of being ordered by Washington to let the fascist-tyrant Pinochet go free; and now the sordid involvement in trying to assassinate the hero of the Libyan revolution Gaddafi; etc, etc, etc.

In this bewildering depth of crisis far, far greater than is commonly remotely suspected at this stage, confused and worried Guardian petty-bourgeois just turn to more aggressive PC nonsense than ever before, pretending that all who attack Blairism's shallow 'political correctness' are just extreme rightwing lunatics. Because they are so loath to abandon the daydream that the nastiness of the rampaging crisis of the world imperialist system can all be 'nicely' solved by that 'nice' Mr Blair's 'nice' new politics, - they just do not want to even consider the only thing that really matters about all of the PC personal posturing in politics, - which is that the whole thing has just one objective historical role in reality, - and that is to act as a DIVERSION away from people being forced to consider a serious Marxist-Leninist scientific analysis of society as being on the brink of the most cataclysmic communist revolutions ever feared or dreamed of, demanding enthusiastic enlightenment about the epoch-making role the dictatorship of the proletariat MUST play, and alone can play.

But just as this crucial role for revolutionary theory starts becoming clearer, up pop the middle-class Revisionist relics in Lalkar and the SLP to try to queer the pitch for a return to Marxist-Leninist science by putting new life into their deliberate OBSTACLE to theory. Feigning total commitment to the headline notion that "The 21st century belongs to communism", this museum-Stalinism puts the SLP's contribution to working-class politics as the central plank in the fight for theory!!! The crude manipulations of proceedings by Scargill's trade-union mafia at the Conway Hall in November are reported as having made it "abundantly clear that the overwhelming sentiment at the Congress was that not only was Marxism a science but also that the SLP was a party subscribing to the philosophy of Marxism."!!! And this is claimed in the same paragraph admitting that an amendment from Wansdyke (rebutting an anti-Marxist motion from Colne Valley anti-communists) had been rejected by Congress (overwhelmingly) on the NEC's (i.e. Scargill's) recommendation!!

This lunatic deception of the working class is accompanied by routine museum-Stalinist gibberish devoting pages to praise of Stalin as a theoretical genius continuing the work of Marx and Lenin but passing over the post-1945 climax of Stalinist Revisionist stupidity (which finally destroyed all REVOLUTIONARY understanding for defeating imperialist crisis) in just a few deliberately vague phrases, blaming Kruschev's subsequent continuation of all Stalin's collaborationist delusions as the CAUSE of the problem instead of the CONSEQUENCE.

This longstanding criminal nonsense helps no one and is a continuing disaster for the working class. Stalinist party remnants continue everywhere to repeat exactly the same Revisionist mistakes which finally led the Third International to disastrous failure and collapse, - for example mouthing useless 'No to war' social pacifism at NATO's nazi blitzkrieg on Serbia instead of concentrating minds on imperialist DEFEAT which alone can be the next great development in the international class struggle; but at the same time declaring 'Defend Yugoslavia' solidarity with the hopeless Milosevic bonapartist-gangster regime which can only add to the deepening confusion in the international workers movement relentlessly sown by bourgeois propaganda.

If no working class party is allowed the truth, being fed still on Stalinist lies and Revisionist distortions,- then the ruling-class lies about Ireland, Palestine, and the world economic crisis, etc, can never be successfully challenged. The hope of these anti-theory opportunist petty-bourgeois circles is that the small voice of the EPSR, exposing their Revisionist-censorship steamroller as it tries to cover up for Stalinist and Scargillist backwardness, - will never be heard widely, and will never matter therefore. But it is not a numbers question. Only a correct UNDERSTANDING of world imperialist crisis, - far removed from Revisionist-collaborationist muddleheadedness on these questions bequeathed by Stalin, - can inspire eventually the REVOLUTIONARY struggle to resume further historical advances for the working class. And all the centrist/Revisionist numbers in the world, getting in the way and protecting sectarian paralysis via bureaucratic stitch-ups, will be unable to block such understanding for ever. Build Leninism. Roy Bull

World Revolutionary Socialist Review 
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).

The injustice endured by northern nationalists since partition has been criminal. It remains to be seen if the review of the criminal justice system commissioned by the Agreement will provide the impetus for the kind of fundamental change required

Last week’s decision not to prosecute the RUC officers who threatened Rosemary Nelson’s life is the most recent in a long history of anti-nationalist actions by the Director of Public Prosecutions. But the office of the DPP hasn’t failed in its duty; it’s much worst than that; the DPP has seen its role as supporting the British/unionist status quo and it has been vigorous in pursuit of that goal.

Almost every decision taken by the office of the DPP in the last 30 years has reflected the agenda of its political masters. On the rare occasion the DPP’s office has stepped outside the fold, it has been swiftly brought back into line. An early case exposed the myth of the political independence of the DPP.

Unlike the vast majority of state killings, the DPP decided to pursue prosecutions of RUC officers involved in five of the six deaths investigated by the Stalker inquiry into shoot to kill. The RUC officers were acquitted but evidence was uncovered which, in the view of the DPP, justified bringing charges of perverting the course of justice.

However in a statement to the British House of Commons, the then Attorney General, Patrick Mayhew, announced that he had brought a number of matters to the attention of the DPP including matters relating to the public interest and national security and the Director had in the lights of this decided “it would not be proper to institute criminal proceedings”.

There have been over 350 nationalists killed by the British crown forces, many in disputed circumstances. Fewer than 30 cases have been taken up by the DPP and only a handful were successfully convicted. Even when a conviction has been secured, as in the case of paratrooper Lee Clegg, political lobbying has ensured either minimal punishment or the overturning of conviction on appeal.

The DPP was a key player in the cover-up which ensued after the role of British Military Intelligence agent Brian Nelson was inadvertently exposed by the Stevens’ inquiry into crown forces collusion with loyalist death squads. In a last-minute deal, the DPP dropped the most serious charges against Nelson for guilty pleas on lesser charges. A trial which had threatened to expose the British Army's role in loyalist killings was effectively curtailed.

Most recently, the role of the DPP has come under scrutiny in relation to the prosecution of William Stobie, UDA quartermaster and RUC Special Branch informer. During a court hearing it was revealed that almost all the evidence against Stobie was contained in RUC interview notes taken in 1990. Stobie has admitted supplying and disposing of the weapons used in the murder of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane.

The DPP suggested there had been insufficient evidence to prosecute Stobie in 1990, but the only substantive difference between then and now is an admission by Stobie that he knew Finucane was the target. As Sunday Tribune journalist Ed Moloney pointed out, knowing the identity of the victim has never been decisive in murder convictions.

The DPP's refusal to prosecute agents of the state has been compounded by the vigour with which opponents and perceived opponents of the state have been pursued. Thousands of nationalists have faced prosecution on the basis of uncorroborated confession evidence, often obtained through the brutal interrogation methods of the RUC.

The willingness of the DPP to pursue prosecutions was compounded by the willingness of a judiciary, often presiding over non-jury courts, to convict. The vast majority of convictions in non-jury Diplock Courts were based solely on so-called confessions. At one stage, the conviction rate reached an astonishing 90%, No wonder nationalists referred to the system as conveyor belt justice.

World Revolutionary Socialist Review 
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).

ONE MORNING in July 1981, West Belfast housewife Nora McCabe was fatally injured by a plastic bullet fired from an RUC Land Rover. The RUC denied firing a plastic bullet in the street in which Nora had been struck and claimed that they were under attack by petrol bombers.

Despite the fact that film footage, inadvertently taken by a visiting Canadian television crew, exposed the RUC patrol’s claims as a tissue of lies, the DPP announced there would be no prosecutions of RUC officers for either killing Nora McCabe or for committing perjury at the inquest.

In the early hours of a Sunday in April 1997, Portadown Catholic Robert Hamill was fatally injured by a loyalist mob in view of an armed RUC mobile patrol. Despite warnings of an impending sectarian attack and pleas for help by Hamill’s companions during the attack, RUC officers made no attempt to intervene.
Initial RUC claims that the patrol attempted to intervene but came under attack were totally discredited as was the reference to the clash of two rival factions. In October 1999, the DPP announced the members of the RUC patrol would not face prosecution.

Any part of the system could have called a halt to the whole farce. If the British Government had fulfilled its international human rights obligations, if the DPP had refused to pursue cases or had the courts refused to convict cases where the torture and ill treatment of detainees were evident, RUC brutality might have been curtailed overnight. They did not and thousands of nationalists suffered as a consequence.

“Every major human rights agency in the world, from Amnesty International to Helsinki Watch, has accused Britain of torture, summary execution and extensive violations of human rights. London holds the distinction of having been found guilty before the European Court of Human Rights more often than any other signatory since 1950," says Sinn Féin.

It is against this backdrop that next month, nationalists will assess the publication of a review of the criminal justice system in the Six Counties. The review was commissioned as part of the Good Friday Agreement, but unlike the Patten Commission on policing, this review has been low key.

Headed only by an NIO official, the composition of the review lacks an international dimension and has tittle human rights expertise. The limited remit of the review has also attracted criticism. The specific exclusion of emergency legislation has widely been identified as a fundamental flaw.

As the Committee for the Administration of Justice (CAJ) points out: “A key part of the criminal justice system in Northern Ireland over the course of the last 30 years is the history of emergency law and procedure."

In a consultative paper issued by the review team, the then British Secretary of State, Mo Mowlam, concluded that the criminal justice system had “served Northern Ireland well" over the last 30 years.

It has certainly served the British Government well.

“Successive governments made such inroads into the safeguards normally associated with a criminal justice system that the system effectively lost its most important aspect, its independence from government,” says the CAJ.

In a submission, Sinn Féin argues that matters outside the remit of the review which need to be addressed include not only emergency powers, but also killings by state agencies, the use of plastic bullets, the murders of Pat Finucane and Rosemary Nelson, collusion, torture and ill-treatment during interrogation, curfews, and the operation of the RUC and British Army.
“The Six-County state has never been able to afford its citizens the justice and equality fundamental to a peaceful and democratic society,” says Sinn Féin. The consequence has been a cycle of repression, conflict and resistance. Unionists cannot be solely held responsible for this. Britain’s policy created a sectarian state. The excesses of the British state in defence of the northern statelet have been well documented."

The CAJ points out that the role of the judiciary will become even more significant under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. With the introduction of the Human Rights Act and the new Bill of Rights envisaged by the Agreement, the courts will be able to strike down Assembly legislation if it conflicts with these standards.

“The judiciary in a modern democratic state should act as the most significant protector of the rights of the citizen against the violation by the state," says Sinn Féin. “Instead, in the North of Ireland they have generally given the stamp of legal approval to widespread violations of the rights of all citizens, but particularly nationalists. The northern judiciary are in the eyes of the nationalist community as discredited and unacceptable as the RUC."

The judiciary in the North, from county court upwards, is currently made up of 24 men and one recently-appointed woman. Catholics are significantly under represented within the judiciary and there are no nationalists. Other groups such as the Chinese, Traveller and the Disabled communities, have no representation either.

At least four of the most senior judges, including the current Chief Justice, have previously acted as advisors to the crown. This “creates at the very least a perception of bias, particularly given the fact that as senior crown counsel they have often acted in the most controversial of cases”, says the CAJ.

But it's not just the personnel; the whole ethos of the courts is anti-nationalist. Every time a nationalist enters a court in the Six Counties, he or she is confronted with symbols of British royalty and sovereignty.

Sinn Féin has called for a neutral environment. The courts should cease to be known as the “royal" courts. Royal insignia should be removed and the trappings of unionism associated with the opening of court terms should be removed.

Individuals should no longer be summoned to the court in the name of the British Queen. Senior barristers should be known as Senior Counsel not Queen’s Counsel and oaths of allegiance to British sovereignty should not be required for officers of the court.

Sinn Féin points out the sectarian and racist ethos of the loyal orders. “It is inconceivable that members of the orders could impartially and in a politically neutral manner administer the criminal justice system."

Sinn Féin advocates the establishment of an all-Ireland constitutional court which would be the supreme court for the 32 Counties. The dependence of Irish jurisprudence on two routes, towards the Supreme Court in the south and the British House of Lords in the North, is illogical.

The party says that: “In case after case, the House of Lords sided with the military and political authorities. It widened the scope of the British military in terms of the use of lethal force and it prevented disclosure in inquests into disputed state killings. It failed to tackle torture in Castlereagh and prevented effective protection of detainees. It also failed to challenge the wide array of emergency legislation."

Participants to the Good Friday Agreement indicated that a criminal justice system should:

■ Deliver a fair and impartial system of justice to the community;
■ Be responsive to the community's concerns and encouraging community involvement where appropriate;
■ Have the confidence of all parts of the community; and
■ Deliver justice efficiently and effectively.

The injustice endured by northern nationalists since partition has been criminal. It arose not simply out of the state’s failure to protect its nationalist citizens but out of a proactive anti-nationalist agenda. The criminal justice system, from the lawmakers to the RUC, from the DPP to the judiciary, all played their part in that agenda. It remains to be seen if the review of the criminal justice system commissioned by the Agreement will provide the impetus for the kind of fundamental change required. •

World Revolutionary Socialist Review 
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).

Last-ditch heels digging in won't save dying Orange-colonial supremacy.

The only way to successfully remove the gun from Irish politics is to demonstrate that politics can work in addressing the problems faced by society.

The IRA has stated that it poses no threat to the peace process. IRA guns are silent. Despite this fact, unionist leaders are prepared to dash the hopes of the Irish people, ostensibly over those silent guns.

David Trimble should be told that enough is enough. It must be made clear that it is unionist leaders who are threatening to destroy the current process. Neither the Dublin nor British governments should bow to their threats.

AFTER 70 YEARS of partition and sectarian discrimination, people in the Six Counties have now been treated to 60-odd days of a new power-sharing executive and all-lreland institutions. If the Ulster Unionist Party leaders have their way, that will be the extent of the experience of those institutions and of moves towards equality and democracy.

Republicans have moved again and again in this process in an effort to accommodate others.

It was the IRA cessation of 1994 which laid down the challenge for politicians to devise a means to establish new political structures to bring a permanent end to political violence on this island. That organisation suffered defections by a minority within its ranks as a result of its quest to build a peace process.

Sinn Féin convened its membership to change its own party constitution in order to enter an Assembly which republicans never sought during negotiations, itself risking internal stresses and difficulties.
At the end of last year, the IRA appointed a representative to meet the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning (IICD) and General John de Chasteliain.

Republican leaders have patently stretched their constituency to the limit in an effort to meet British and unionist concerns.

Despite all of this, David Trimble has repeatedly moved the goalposts in relation to the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement He successfully prevented the implementation of that Agreement for over 18 months.

Last year, after reaching agreement on a way forward with both governments and the other parties at Downing Street he effected a u-turn two days later and sought further preconditions.

After the subsequent Mitchell Review, when there was clear agreement between all sides or the way forward, he called a meeting of the Ulster Unionist Council and imposed new preconditions including his own arbitrary deadline for decommissioning.

Trimble is now threatening to collapse everything that has been built up and he seeks to pin the blame on Sinn Féin.

That unionists have been allowed to turn the issue of decommissioning into an entirely one-sided process now threatening everything that has been built up is an indictment of elements of the media and of other participants in the political process.

The Irish peace process has been, in essence, an inclusive process which has sought to address the causes of conflict, not through apportioning all the blame to one side of the conflict but by recognising that the conflict involved several sides; not through seeking the military defeat or surrender of either of the participants but by removing political violence of any kind through addressing its causes and providing a peaceful political alternative.

That process (and the thinking which underpins the peace process) is now being turned on its head through a self-serving unionist desire to rewrite not only the terms of the Good Friday Agreement but the history of the past 30 years of conflict as well. What David Trimble seeks is not a genuine resolution of the arms issue but the public indictment of three decades of republican struggle. Unionists wish to achieve in a time of peace something that the British state could not achieve during 30 years of war. The IRA has made it clear on several occasions, most recently on Saturday 5 February, that what it will not do is jump to unionist and British dictats on the issue of decommissioning. This issue will not be resolved on British or unionist terms.

With each statement issued by the Ulster Unionist Party, including comments this week, their overall gameplan has become clearer. John Taylor has said that the best option for unionism is to opt tor a better form of direct rule by pocketing the removal of Articles Two and Three and the end of the Anglo-Irish Agreement.

For two years, unionism has been consistently trying to rewrite and renegotiate the Good Friday Agreement. The British and Dublin Governments have a responsibility to ensure that this does not happen. If the British continue to acquiesce in the unionist veto it will undermine the principles of equality, inclusiveness and justice that are the bedrock of the Good Friday Agreement.

FOR THE PAST two weeks, the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) has successfully mounted pressure on the political process in the run-up to a report by General John de Chastelain, Chairperson of the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning (IICD).

Gerry Adams said it would be a mistake if the Six-County Executive collapsed and the First Minister and other UUP members resigned over the decommissioning issue.

"But non-republicans need to see this issue from the IRA’s point of view, it is not easy to get the IRA, or indeed any of the armed groups, to do this speedily. This is the reality. So there is a need for unionism to be patient and for people to have faith.’ 

Adams insisted that he had never misled anyone into thinking Sinn Féin alone could deliver decommissioning. The UUP’s decision to set its own arbitrary deadline for decommissioning, he said, had made any progress on the matter even more difficult.

"There should be no doubt of how badly the February deadline damaged our efforts,’ said Adams.

"It is a fundamental mistake in strategy to try and force decommissioning by seeking to marginalise a political party and its electorate.

"I remain committed to decommissioning as an essential part of the peace process and I will continue to work to try and bring this about. But I have to say that the achievement of this objective has been set back by the way it is being used as a political football by unionists at this time."

Reacting to speculation that the British Government would suspend the Executive and re-introduce direct rule, Adams said it would only create a dangerous political vacuum, encouraging anti-Agreement unionists, placing the entire peace process in jeopardy and making decommissioning even more difficult.

And responding to further speculation that the British Government was considering another review of the Good Friday Agreement, Adams said the only basis for this would be if there had been a default, which there had not been.

Adams also said that the political vacuum which would be created in a scenario of collapsed institutions would leave everyone hostage. "And remember the huge amount of military forces on the ground in places like South Armagh and other parts of the North, remember the unionist-loyalist factions are still engaged in terror campaigns.”

The reality at the heart of the current political crisis is that it is not decommissioning which is the problem but the unionist approach to the Good Friday Agreement. Having effectively broken through every political-deadline and successfully held up the implementation of the Agreement for 18 months, David Trimble and his party are now threatening to collapse the entire process.

Either David Trimble himself was never serious about his engagement with the Good Friday Agreement and concurs with John Taylor’s strategy of seeking a return to direct rule while pocketing the end of Articles Two and Three and the Anglo-Irish Agreement, or else he is prepared to bring the whole show down at the behest of Jeffrey Donaldson and Ian Paisley. Either way, the Ulster Unionists have this week brought the process to the brink. 

World Revolutionary Socialist Review 
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).

Gun rule by British Army and colonial vigilantes reimposed to enhance the "decommissioning of weapons" principle?

The last line of the 1997 Firearms Act, which was brought into force by the newly-elected Labour Government in Britain in response to the killings at Dunblane, states that: This law does not apply to Northern Ireland."

According to the Northern Ireland Office, this was because of the “special circumstances" of the “province”. The then Secretary of State Mo Mowlam apparently spent a year or so "looking into ways of applying the firearms law to Northern Ireland", but the aforementioned “special circumstances' proved too difficult to overcome, one of the most difficult being the "need for members of the RUC to carry personal protection weapons". 
What the NIO overlooked, however, is that of the 87,000 licences for 139,885 weapons currently in issue, not one single licence is for a member of the RUC, for the simple reason that police officers in the Six Counties do not need a licence to own or carry a weapon, any weapon, even when off duty.

It is the case that only some 9,000 of the total of around 155,000 legally held guns are for ‘personal protection’ and those, like the rest, are overwhelmingly in the hands of the unionist population. David Trimble fought ferociously with the Labour Government for the right of his friends to retain their weapons, and as a consequence was assured by Tony Blair that the Act would not be applied to the Six Counties, now or at any time.

But this habit of taking refuge under the protective arm of British law — most of it unjust and much of it in contravention of human rights standards — is where the UUP will finally begin to come unstuck. Having comprehensively lost the legal arguments on IRA decommissioning, the British Government, the UUP and the media have now had to resort to the imaginary “moral" case for the IRA to unilaterally lay down its own arms, at the behest of Mr Trimble and outside the scope of the Good Friday Agreement.

Perhaps it is too much to hope for that the issue of legally-held weapons, and the unionist obsession with holding on to them, would be addressed by other the British Government or its obedient media as part of the vast acreage of print devoted to decommissioning over the last fortnight. “Betrayal" said Peter Mandelson to republicans last week because they refused to dance to David Trimble’s tune. "Betrayal" shouted the headlines and increasingly pompous editorials.

Those attempting to argue that Sinn Féin have adhered precisely to the requirements of the Good Friday Agreement were silenced, censored and marginalised as the goal posts moved, again, in the face of an artificially created crisis, the terms of the debate were changed; the matter stopped being a legal one and became an entirely spurious ‘moral’ one. Suddenly, those for whom historically the letter of the law was paramount — because the law was contrived to facilitate their corruption, and who used the law as a weapon of war — suddenly sought to brush away the law and offer their own highly subjective and legally unsustainable interpretation the Good Friday Agreement.

A few days later, in a lecture at Liverpool University, Tony Blair with no doubt unintentional irony, urged the Republican Movement to abandon their supposed obsession with “old symbolism’ and in the same breath, paradoxically, demanded a “symbolic* gesture from the IRA on arms. A symbolic surrender; a little carefully-scripted play which would say to the world that all though the past 30 years republicans were criminals, and that unionists and the British state were blameless, righteous — and moral.

“For you" the BBC's Dennis Murray gently inquired of David Trimble, head inclined sympathetically, “decommissioning is a supremely moral issue, isn't it?" David, one-time member of the neo-fascist Vanguard, enthusiastic participant in one of the most corrupt and discredited political administrations in Europe, defender of a police
force with the worst human rights record in Western Europe, agreed that indeed it is, basking in the portrayal of both he and his party as the standard-bearers of this newly-discovered political morality.

But if, for a moment, we indulge the British/unionist/ media troika and agree to join this dubious debate on morality, then how can it be moral that political representation for the people of the Six Counties has, legally, become a gift which Trimble and Mandelson can bestow and then remove at will. The legislation which has been passed this week permits the Secretary of State to rule by decree — he can suspend the Assembly now, tomorrow, next week or whenever he wants to, at any time in the future. Those with a vote count for nothing.

Further, how is it that unionists have been allowed to define the moral parameters of this debate? After all, it was the immorality of British unionist rule, which included most of the present unionist leadership, that brought us to armed struggle and the horrors which flowed from it. This alone should exclude them from the moral high ground. And it is their political immorality which is behind their determination to disenfranchise those who voted for genuinely democratic new institutions. The British state, in its unionist guise, has a long and ignominious history of denying the nationalist community its electoral rights whilst issuing pious sermons on the values of democracy, and it is coming perilously close to repeating the mistakes of the past. Morally, it should not be the case that Sinn Féin is in the Assembly under the sufferance of David Trimble and his cohorts and at the legislative whim of the Secretary of State, but the British Government have ensured that it is. Morally, it should be that Sinn Féin is there by absolute right of its electoral mandate, but the British Government have ensured that it is not. To wilfully deny this mandate and bring down the Assembly by disgraceful parliamentary machination may in some perverted way be legal, but it is not moral.•