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No 1653 14th February 2025

Trumpite turmoil and international aggression, and Musk’s domestic demolition job on federal standards are the face of raw capitalism, tearing up every reformist regulation and protection which has ever deluded and misled the working class. A century of illusion in "democracy, freedom and rule of law" is thrown out of the window because capitalism is in crisis and must turn up its exploitation. Brute dictatorship is the new norm at home and barbaric repression, with belligerence against all comers, “allies” included, for world war conflict abroad. No need then for the USAID charity bandages, feeble United Nations “legalities” and subversive NGOs as a stunned “liberal” elite is finding out. From now on the path is fascist terrorising, just as imposed by US-backed Zionism on Middle East revolt. Washington reliance on the Jewish occupation fanaticism signals weakness of imperialism’s grip but it will not stop until stopped by defeat and revolutionary overthrow. Leninist leadership and science urgent – taking on Trot and revisionist fake-’leftism’

The dizzying deluge of belligerent reaction and degenerate threats of violence pumped out in all directions by the new Trump regime is the most obvious confirmation yet of the US Empire’s desperation and failure as the great capitalist crisis plunges into Catastrophic collapse.

Its fascist coup-like rampage tears the mask right off every lying pretence about “freedom, democracy, justice and the rule of law” which the bourgeoisie normally skulks behind as it plies its bullying and plundering tyranny across the planet, exploiting the vast mass of humanity abroad and at home for its own ever more grotesque and degenerate privilege, wealth and power.

And in doing so it demolishes every variety of fake-“left”ism, trampling right across every cynical and hypocritical reformist pretence about steady improvement for working class lives, or “defence” of conditions by “left” pressure, within capitalism, and every revisionist delusion in or reluctance to challenge the cynical nonsenses of “democracy”, peaceful coexistence, pacifist “ceasefire” calls, and a “multipolar future”.

Tearing up those delusions and confusion will exact a huge price from the ruling class eventually, which has benefited for decades from the debilitating effect on working class consciousness of every kind of fake-“left” class collaboration, revisionist pacifism and Trotskyist anti-communism, all serving bourgeois control purposes by hamstringing and hampering proletarian efforts to see the world clearly and to especially to see the need for revolution as the only path to progress.

Now things are clearer and what Marxist science alone has always been warning is made explicit and obvious – that imperialism is heading for the greatest meltdown failure in all history, and necessarily (by ruling class needs) imposing ever worsening brutal repression and speed-up on the working class to stay afloat, while whipping up chauvinist hatreds for the inter-imperialist warmongering that is unfolding into World War as cut-throat trade war competition reaches white heat.

Only defeat and humiliation for this disaster ridden system, followed by complete revolutionary overthrow of its disgusting bourgeoisie, to end its planet-threatening class domination, can save humanity and move society forwards.

Necessarily that means mass class war struggle to impose a new forceful class domination on society, that of the majority, the working class, initially under the scientifically-led dictatorship of the proletariat and then steadily drawing in more and more of the population as society is educated and led into a rational, self-disciplined cooperative planned future in harmony with nature.

That must be a consciously led struggle, possible only by building a Leninist revolutionary party to expose every muddle brained or slyly opportunist misguidance that has been generated during nearly 200 years of confusion, revisionist retreats and bourgeois anti-communist brainwashing, and particularly since the fallback from the mid-1920s from Lenin’s genius understanding that revolution alone will solve workers' problems.

Urgently needed socialism will not come any other way, by reformism or deluded Stalinist/Trotskyist revisionist notions of “peacefully outcompeting capitalism” in a multipolar world, all of which express the fearfulness of the middle-class at the firmness and discipline that the workers states are obliged to impose (and not even firmly enough under past or current revisionist leaderships).

The Trumpite counter-revolution is making that sharply clear with its lurid, racist and fascistic crudeness and intimidation as vile and vicious as anything ever generated by the German Nazis, Japanese imperialists and Italian fascists in the last great Depression and its inevitable decline into world war.

Everything about the great “freedom and democracy” fraud of capitalist-imperialist rule is now being ripped up; a century plus of domestic reformist regulation, union agreements, welfare cushions, state provision, and control and limitation on the exploitation of workers is abandoned; all fair dealing, balance and even legality in international trade (between the big powers – the relentlessly exploited Third World has hardly ever seen any fair trade anyway) is abandoned; the international “aid and assistance” reformist charity bandages of USAID, the United Nations and World Bank “investment aid” is ended along with their and other agencies’ “soft power” subversion and skulduggery (-even the CIA is being cut back (!!)); and all humanity and restraint (such little as there has ever been under imperialist colonial tyranny) is now abandoned in the smiting and genocidal blitzing of constantly rising and intensifying “terrorist” anti-imperialist resistance, notably in the Middle East, but throughout Africa and elsewhere, and against every other aspect of resistance and revolt through the ruthlessly and tyrannically exploited Third World, as well as that now stirring and bubbling in various forms into the heart of the imperialist countries.

Raw capitalist dictatorship is the order of the day, along with inflaming of the most putrid and degenerate chauvinism and fear-wracked crisis hatreds in popular opinion, whipping up every backward and hate-filled prejudice to hoodwink and split the working class (and petty bourgeoisie) at home and against foreign bogeymen and hyped-up “enemies” with non-stop lies and fabrications.

Only with a deep Marxist grasp of society’s economic processes and the pattern of intractable ever-deepening class war contradictions driving forwards mankind’s historical development can any sense be made of these seemingly sudden lurches into trade war aggression, domestic speed-up and repressive dismantling of labour protection, vicious xenophobic scapegoating and neo-colonial blitzkrieg and genocide in the Middle East.

They are not happening because Donald Trump is a weird orange reactionary, or a maverick or a “loose cannon” (the shallowly impressionistic and misleading “explanations” given by assorted fake-“lefts” who long ago abandoned Marxism and treacherously disarm workers’ understanding).

They are happening because of the law-governed material realities of always deepening class conflict and the contradiction-driven revolutionary historical movement of society from mankind’s earliest climb into sentient community and then class-divided but ever advancing civilisation (slavery, feudalism, capitalist exploitation) to the coming rationality and reason of communism.

Nor are they that sudden. Trumpism is nothing new. Despite the bluster, this reaction is only magnifying and carrying through the warmongering and belligerence which has been underway for 25 years, beginning with the foul NATO lie-laden bombing onslaught on tiny Serbia in 1999 and escalated in non-stop wars ever since from Afghanistan and Iraq to Somalia, Yemen, Libya and Syria, and of course Ukraine and the endlessly blitzed and horribly suffering dispossessed Palestinian people.

It is a continuation and intensification of the drive into Slump collapse and Catastrophe caused by the inevitable and always recurring crisis of overproduction built into the capitalist pursuit of profit, as identified and analysed by Karl Marx in his titanic works (3 volumes of Capital and much else, and further elaborated in all its significance by Frederick Engels and taken forwards for the imperialist epoch by Lenin’s Bolsheviks – see economics box and multiple other works).

Despite its driving motivation, world expansion and glittering “entrepreneurial” achievements, the profit system always over-extends, producing and accumulating “too much” (in bourgeois profitable sales terms – not relative to the needs of the world’s poor) and then diving into resultant Slump disaster and mass social devastation and unemployment for the already put-upon and ruthlessly exploited working class.

The end point of repeated unstoppable crisis collapse is bankruptcy and closures for “loser” enterprises, first in the regular cycle of disastrous slumps in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when newly rising capitalism routinely suffered the insane contradictions of “over production” and “want in the midst of plenty”, (as already spelled out by 1848 in the “Communist Manifesto”), and then on to the far worse disasters of the great crashes of the 20th century imperialist monopoly period, when the need to wipe out “surplus capital” went from the earlier forced shutdowns of “healthy” but brutal market competition (with much dirty dealing mixed in) to outright deliberate devastation through allout war to destroy capital and rival capitalists and their rival national sovereignties.

That grew from the disastrous failures of the embryonic inter-imperialist conflict of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870 to the horrors of the (mainly European) First World War killing over 20 million, to the far bigger, far more destructive and extensive planet-spanning Second World War.

And each was followed by concomitant revolutionary upheaval as the contradictions reached unbearable levels, first in the (also embryonic) Paris Commune of 1871, then the titanic Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and its further revolutionary consolidation and magnification in 1945 into the expanded Soviet camp in East Europe, along with a great wave of anti-colonial turmoil and revolt, some going all the way to stunning and determined proletarian revolution in China, Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cuba, their workers states still extant despite revisionist leadership setbacks and retreats.

The already unfolding Third World war is a magnitude greater again in extent and potential (needed) devastation and destruction and will come with an even greater wave of revolutionary turmoil, almost certainly ending this horrifying and species-suicidal privilege and domination system, long out of time.

It is already stirring everywhere in staggeringly self-sacrificing and heroic forms, all declared “terrorist” by the ruling class (and mostly condemned by the craven fake-“left”) albeit hampered by all kinds of backward unscientific or even reactionary ideologies, and certainly as yet lacking the vital conscious Leninist perspective and leadership needed to successfully carry through the full transformation to socialism, although inflicting significant blows and defeats on imperialist domination which will open the road.

Trumpism meanwhile is also completely new, the manifestation at a new level of the complete mind-numbing impasse that has been reached in the huge underlying contradictions of the 800 year old capitalist system, (and thousands of years of previous slavery etc) which has now reached the total end point in the relentless development of its antagonistic competitiveness, and the ever more concentrated monopolisation of capital in fewer and fewer hands.

It is no coincidence that many of the speed-ups and deregulations are being pushed by the single richest man in the world, the dementedly shallow Elon Musk, – now essentially an unelected (not that that means anything) shadow president to the equally philistine and narcissistic dumbed-down Trump, – and a tiny coterie of mega billionaires who now own and control almost the entire world (save to some extent in the Chinese workers state (which reins in its billionaires - to some extent) and other pockets of past socialist and anti-imperialist struggle).

Their crude arrogance is the end result of centuries of relentless concentration of monopoly ownership and power, unstoppably and inevitably continuing in a system based on the struggle for profit and the accumulation of capital in private hands.

But their gargantuan capital holdings can no longer continue making profit because of the intractable and unsolvable contradictions of a system based on each and every giant holding trying to out compete and outsell every other giant holding – necessarily or be wiped out in the shark-eat-shark world markets – with all of them aiming essentially at dominating the entire world.

And there is not room for everybody – in cars for Tesla, Volkswagen, the Chinese producers, Japan’s new mega-merged car-production company, Hyundai, Ford, etc etc etc – in planes for Airbus, the new Chinese planemakers, and once-dominant now floundering Boeing – in electronics, in AI, in energy, in metals, in computers, in pharmaceuticals, – and above all in finance.

Someone has to go under and over decades and decades post-war it has been the older ossified essentially Anglo-Saxon powers which have steadily lost ground particularly in the teeth of rising competition from newer and more nimble powers (particularly German dominated Europe and Japan last century, later joined by workers state China’s strategically controlled capitalist sector).

America is now the most bankrupt nation in the world, in hock for multi-trillions of dollars which can never be paid back to the rest of the planet which has sweated and suffered horribly to produce the value so profligately, wastefully, and shallowly squandered by the careless philistine consumerism and vacuous drug-fuelled pursuit of fashion, hollow celebrity and conspicuous one-upmanship that passes for culture and achievement in the Empire, at least for the “winners” in the deadly non-stop bitter and alienating ratrace (which even in this richest of all countries leaves most of population in permanent insecurity and fearfulness even if they are not among the great majority of outright “losers”, cast aside more or less from birth, condemned by poverty, lack of education, deprivation and class divisive racism to have virtually no chance at all of coming close to a decent fulfilling life).

But America is still the most powerful nation, militarily, culturally and even financially (using everyone else’s money, deposited in its controlling dollar reserves) and ready to swing its weight around in order stay on top despite the onrushing collapse of the entire world trading system.

And if it can’t be done by “fair” means than it shall be done by foul, (or more so than usual) simply trampling across everyone else with sheer bullying might, exactly as Trumpism is now doing with its demented blustering demands against the rest of the world that it should give way to the needs of the Empire, to the extent of Canada capitulating entirely to American sovereignty or Denmark selling cheap its Greenland, Panama giving up its only significant asset, the canal etc etc. or Venezuela, Mexico and Colombia being forced to swallow and accommodate demonised and persecuted migrant expulsions from the US (those not herded into the sinister and brutal incarceration of the re-expanded Guantánamo nazi-concentration and torture camp).

But this comes at a gigantic cost for the bourgeois system, and its long century of pretended leadership to a “better more prosperous world” held back only by the ‘threat of communism’ or lately the mystical “evil” of jihadism and “terrorism” when communism turned out not to be any threat at all, (which it never was even before the stupid Gorbachevite liquidation of the still viable USSR’s workers state by his ultimately puddled bureaucratic expression of long ripening Stalinist revolutionary retreat).

Every stinking cynical hypocrisy and lie about a “better life” to be achieved by “upholding decency and democracy” while suppressing “those who would threaten our values” is thrown on the scrapheap.

Desperate capitalism needs to squeeze more from worker exploitation as Slump and trade war deepens, (as Marx explains) and therefore abandon every reformist “gain” for the working class made over a century of “progress” in working conditions and “welfare safety net” limits, sold as permanent advances to workers by class-collaborating trade unionism and reformism, and given further credence by the crapulous “peace struggle” theories of post-war revisionism, retreating from revolutionary perspectives.

But now even the fundamental labour rights and standards, many embedded in capitalist state (federal) structures, are being dismantled as a poleaxed bourgeois press is reporting:

In Elon Musk’s first two weeks in government, his lieutenants gained access to closely held financial and data systems, casting aside career officials who warned that they were defying protocols. They moved swiftly to shutter specific programs — and even an entire agency that had come into Mr. Musk’s cross hairs. They bombarded federal employees with messages suggesting they were lazy and encouraging them to leave their jobs.

Empowered by President Trump, Mr. Musk is waging a largely unchecked war against the federal bureaucracy — one that has already had far-reaching consequences.

Mr. Musk’s aggressive incursions into at least half a dozen government agencies have challenged congressional authority and potentially breached civil service protections.

Top officials at the Treasury Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development who objected to the actions of his representatives were swiftly pushed aside. And Mr. Musk’s efforts to shut down U.S.A.I.D., a key source of foreign assistance, have reverberated around the globe.

Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, is sweeping through the federal government as a singular force, creating major upheaval as he looks to put an ideological stamp on the bureaucracy and rid the system of those who he and the president deride as “the deep state.”

The rapid moves by Mr. Musk, who has a multitude of financial interests before the government, have represented an extraordinary flexing of power by a private individual.

The speed and scale have shocked civil servants, who have been frantically exchanging information on encrypted chats, trying to discern what is unfolding.

Senior White House staff members have at times also found themselves in the dark, according to two officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions. One Trump official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said Mr. Musk was widely seen as operating with a level of autonomy that almost no one can control.

Mr. Musk, the leader of SpaceX, Tesla and X, is working with a frantic, around-the-clock energy familiar to the employees at his various companies, flanked by a cadre of young engineers, drawn in part from Silicon Valley. He has moved beds into the headquarters of the federal personnel office a few blocks from the White House, according to a person familiar with the situation, so he and his staff, working late into the night, could sleep there, reprising a tactic he has deployed at Twitter and Tesla.

This time, however, he carries the authority of the president, who has bristled at some of Mr. Musk’s ready-fire-aim impulses but has praised him publicly.

“He’s a big cost-cutter,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Sunday. “Sometimes we won’t agree with it and we’ll not go where he wants to go. But I think he’s doing a great job. He’s a smart guy.”

Mr. Musk, who leads a cost-cutting initiative the administration calls the Department of Government Efficiency, boasted on Saturday that his willingness to work weekends was a “superpower” that gave him an advantage over his adversary. The adversary he was referring to was the federal work force.

“Very few in the bureaucracy actually work the weekend, so it’s like the opposing team just leaves the field for 2 days!” Mr. Musk posted on X.

There is no precedent for a government official to have Mr. Musk’s scale of conflicts of interest, which include domestic holdings and foreign connections such as business relationships in China. And there is no precedent for someone who is not a full-time employee to have such ability to reshape the federal work force.

The historian Douglas Brinkley described Mr. Musk as a “lone ranger” with limitless running room. He noted that the billionaire was operating “beyond scrutiny,” saying: “There is not one single entity holding Musk accountable. It’s a harbinger of the destruction of our basic institutions.”

However, the president has given Mr. Musk vast power over the bureaucracy that regulates his companies and awards them contracts. He is shaping not just policy but personnel decisions, including successfully pushing for Mr. Trump to pick Troy Meink as the Air Force secretary, according to three people with direct knowledge of his role.

Mr. Meink previously ran the Pentagon’s National Reconnaissance Office, which helped Mr. Musk secure a multibillion-dollar contract for SpaceX to help build and deploy a spy satellite network for the federal government.

Since Mr. Trump’s inauguration, Mr. Musk and his allies have taken over the United States Digital Service, now renamed United States DOGE Service, which was established in 2014 to fix the federal government’s online services.

They have commandeered the federal government’s human resources department, the Office of Personnel Management.

They have gained access to the Treasury’s payment system — a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending.

Mr. Musk has also taken a keen interest in the federal government’s real estate portfolio, managed by the General Services Administration, moving to terminate leases. Internally, G.S.A. leaders have started to discuss eliminating as much as 50 percent of the agency’s budget, according to people familiar with the conversations.

Mr. Musk’s allies now aim to inject artificial intelligence tools into government systems, using them to assess contracts and recommend cuts. On Monday, Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who has been tapped to lead a technology team at G.S.A., told some staff members that he hoped to put all federal contracts into a centralized system so they could be analyzed by artificial intelligence, three people familiar with the meeting said.

Mr. Musk’s actions have astounded and alarmed Democrats and government watchdog groups. They question if Mr. Musk is breaching federal laws that give Congress the final power to create or eliminate federal agencies and set their budgets, require public disclosure of government actions and prohibit individuals from taking actions that might benefit themselves personally.

At least four lawsuits have been filed in federal court to challenge his authority and the moves by the new administration, but it remains to be seen if judicial review can keep up with Mr. Musk.

The New York Times spoke to more than three dozen current and former administration officials, federal employees and people close to Mr. Musk who described his expanding influence over the federal government. Few were willing to speak on the record, for fear of retribution.

“Before Congress and the courts can respond, Elon Musk will have rolled up the whole government,” said one official who works inside an agency where representatives from Mr. Musk’s cost-cutting initiative have asserted control.

Mr. Musk says he is making long overdue reforms. So far, his team has claimed to help save the federal government more than $1 billion a day through efforts like the cancellation of federal building leases and contracts related to diversity, equity and inclusion, although they have provided few specifics.

Perhaps most significant, Mr. Musk has sought to dismantle U.S.A.I.D., the government’s lead agency for humanitarian aid and development assistance. Mr. Trump has already frozen foreign aid spending, but Mr. Musk has gone further.

“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Mr. Musk gloated on X at 1:54 a.m. Monday. “Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”

The scale and savagery of this dismantling of working class protections is in itself confirmation of the depth of the Catastrophe facing the whole capitalist system, and of the terrifying suddenness of its implosion, magnified, intensified and speeded-up by decades of valueless dollar credit creation.

That credit creation has already fatally poisoned the world finance system even before the non-stop dollar “printing” used to prop up the rotted-right-through world banking system in the wake of the great credit collapse in 2008-9 to save it from the “financial nuclear winter” it was heading into (a collapse far worse than the early 1931 Credit Anstalt bank failure which triggered a domino run of international bank failures, the 1930s Great Depression and its WW2 “solution”).

But the use of such insane credit expansion has only made crisis one hundred times worse, as well as accelerating the downwards spiral.

Contempt for Marxist theory of crisis, means that this implosion is now leaving every kind of liberal, reformist, fake-“left” and every pseudo-revolutionary in a daze at the pace of the Trumpite-Musk coup moves.

Even those purporting to have a Marxist perspective – from shallow Trots like the RCP to the Stalinist Lalkar/Proletarian-ites – have only ever seen “crisis” as something making the usual class struggle a bit more intense, like stormy conditions sweeping off the Atlantic rather than the fundamental existential condition of the capitalist system which is now dragging everything into the abyss of chaotic breakdown and warmongering fascist disaster.

And that goes hand in hand with failure to understand the revolutionary nature of this gigantic chaotic breakdown, (for all the posturing about being Marxists) still hoping to find ways to “defend the gains of the past” or “stopping war” with “ceasefires”.

So bourgeois commentaries like this pour out in dizzied dismay, even in this case from a former CIA analyst:

As we search for ways to resist efforts by President Trump and his surrogates to undermine our democracy and cripple our government, we focus on pillars of our system— Congress, Courts, and Press. Congress, controlled by Republicans, is demonstrating it is not up to the task. The media are as confused and uncertain as the rest of us, and the overwhelming power of social media serves to sow confusion. As a result, many of us are focusing on a major pillar of our system—the rule of law. We are counting on our federal and state Courts to roll back and restrain Trump’s more outrageous actions.

There is little reason to believe that Trump and his followers will be constrained by the law, however. The Supreme Court has given Trump himself a get-out-of-jail free card for all official actions he takes as President. As all orders coming from him to government officials will be considered official, he can not be held liable for any of them—no matter how illegal. While his subordinates have not been given these free passes and thus are theoretically culpable for their illegal actions, Trump has the ability to pardon them. So they need not be constrained by the law either.

The reality of our crisis is demonstrated by what is actually taking place within government agencies. Trump is taking illegal actions and they are been carried out. He fired 17 or 18 inspectors general, effective immediately. This is illegal; Congress requires that it must be notified 30 days in advance for the firing of an inspector general, and a cause for this firing must be given. Neither of these things was done. By law, all of these individuals should have remained on the job, pending the proper procedures. One Inspector General challenged the order. Phyllis Fong, a 22-year veteran of the US Department of Agriculture, said she intended to stay because proper protocols had not been followed. She was escorted out of the building by security agents.

Trump’s take over of the Justice Department and the FBI makes it even more clear that he will be able to fire anyone and undertake any investigations or actions no matter their legality. He is firing apolitical federal prosecutors and agents for doing their jobs and participating in legitimate investigations—a violation of civil service protections. His followers will stock these institutions with their fellow believers and proceed. Whether or not charges brought by them are ultimately upheld in court is almost irrelevant. Years of litigation and prosecution will be sufficient to ruin people.

Other frightening actions are unfolding rapidly. Elon Musk’s surrogates have gotten access to the Treasury Department’s payments system. This system is responsible for sending out trillions of dollars in payments to individuals and groups, including Social Security payments. Anyone with control of the system could presumably target their “enemies” and withhold payments to them. Illegal? Yes! So what? Similar actions have shut down US AID operations around the world, causing large-scale suffering.

The order issued by Trump’s budget office to halt government funding and grants last week was illegal because the president does not have the right to stop payments that have been authorized by Congress. This order was pulled back after a day of chaos as well as court injunction. It is not clear what prompted Trump to pull back the order, but probably it was the chaos—not the court order. Red states were being hit harder than Blue states. I think it is likely that, in the future, Trump will pay little attention to court orders. Federal courts have to rely on government institutions to ensure that their orders are carried out. How can such orders be carried out when Trump controls these institutions?

Everything is being dismantled because the reformist gains of the past were only ever achieved as a result of the revolutionary struggles of the working class as Leninism has always made clear.

Reforms are never stand-alone but spin-offs or partial gains of revolutionary battles which have not gone all the way, sometimes directly so and sometimes more generally speaking.

Most clearly that would apply to the great advances made for the working class in the post-WW2 period when the impact of the huge Soviet Red Army victories against Nazi-Germany sent shock waves through the whole of Western imperialism (and in different ways through Japan and Korea, also “revived” to head off communism).

That led to massive improvements in living standards and social provision as imperialism gave ground to avoid further advances for Soviet communism and the support and prestige it had developed in the working class.

Capitalism had to retreat, and did so by holding out the utterly cynical and lying promise that these gains would be as good as or even better than anything the proletariat had won and built up in the USSR by overturning capitalism.

Leninist understanding rarely rejects such reforms (save tactically where they are impeding or diverting from continuing revolutionary movement as with the first Tsarist Duma in 1906), but explains that they should always be seen in a revolutionary light; not dismissed necessarily if that was the highest point of class struggle advance achievable at any particular moment, but with the underlying revolutionary causes fully understood and the crucial important of continuing the revolutionary struggle all the way to ending capitalism grasped as the only possible guarantee that such “improvements” would not be reversed.

The boom of the fifties and sixties was always an illusion, but non-revolutionary trade union militancy and reformist class-collaboration politics, already deeply entrenched in previously privileged imperialist Britain, was bolstered and encouraged, most obviously in the British “Labour landslide” for the Attlee government in 1945 (a genuine mass vote as opposed to the laughable pretence that just put Starmerism in on 17% of the vote) to help head off any communist notions.

But even with the Attlee government a total lie was being slipped past the working class, its class-collaboration “winning” results but simultaneously actively working to run imperialism in every way as the EPSR repeatedly spelled out as here on Labour treacheries which:

* Approved the nuking of Hiroshima to terrify Russia;

* Launched the first Western colonial-military onslaught against the Vietnamese communists who had liberated the whole of their country from the Japanese imperialist occupiers and their French colonial Vichy collaborators;

* Imposed similar imperialist blitzkrieg on the anti-fascist, Red liberators of Malaya and Greece in order to re-establish capitalist-colonial exploitation there too as part of Washington’s worldwide anti-communist crusade;

* Launched SAS-fascist subversion to try to topple the communist liberators of Albania & Yugoslavia;

* Helped Washington and the West exonerate 99% of German imperialism’s Nazi war criminals so as to restore ruthless neo-fascist anti-communism in West Germany once again;

* Launched the Cold War anti-Soviet ‘Iron Curtain’ provocations as a prelude to the counter-revolutionary subversion stunts later in East Germany, Hungary Czechoslovakia, Poland, etc;

* Founded NATO as the ‘anti-communist defence’ fraud cover for arming and training the CIA inspired anti-Soviet subversion which has gone on non-stop since 1945;

* Rammed through the rearming of German imperialist militarism and the resurrection of the Nazi-Gehlen secret police Gestapo (now called BND) as the backbone of the West’s European anti-communist crusade;

* Re-directed MI6 and the Special Branch to exclusively infiltrate and subvert the ‘left’ in Britain rather than bother any more with the fascist right;

* Sanctioned the Western nuclear arms race by launching British capitalism’s ‘independent’ H-bomb;

* Set up the Zionist-imperialist occupation of Palestine and the fascist annexation of the Palestinian homeland;

* Reimposed British colonial terror over as much of the Empire as possible (paving the way later for the Smith fascist dictatorship in Rhodesia, the apartheid fascist tyranny over Namibia, the Orange fascist tyranny over the occupied north of Ireland, etc, etc);

* Helped launch and run the imperialist warmongering blitzkrieg against the Korean socialist revolution;

and much, much, much more counter-revolutionary villainy besides (EPSR No 861).

And this is exactly what Labourism has always done and increasingly obviously in its late Blairite spin and PR spun fatcat grovelling and international warmongering (Serbia, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Iraq).

And now come the even cruder public relations lies and fraudulence of this disgusting venal Starmerite chicanery, backing the foulest Zionist genocide in Gaza and lying through its teeth about “economic growth” and “improvements” – as if merely asserting a “wish” can change the endemic British imperialist decline and failure underway since the 1970s (and in fact long before that), part of the whole imperialist system crisis but worse.

They might as well call on Mary Poppins to help.

The gross spivvery, hypocrisy and lying cheating careerism of this latest manifestation of Labourite treachery, Blairite vacuum without the “charm”, is summed up in the latest exposés of utter contempt and disdain expressed in the Tameside MP and councillor WhatsApp scandal, not just by one or two “bad apples”, or even an entire grouping, but reflecting the overall culture of these scumbag trustees for the ruling class, indistinguishable in their actions from Tory or even Reform reactionary chauvinism.

It is the Labourites who are dismantling many of the reformists gains.

But reformist advances go back much further, throughout imperialism, under the rising revolutionary movement of the late 19th century and particularly from 1917’s Bolshevik revolution (including, first-off, the suspension of World War One – resumed in the late 1930s).

And it is all these that are now being turned over by Musk’s task force, because the revolutionary basis for them, the international Soviet camp, no longer exists.

But the Trump/Musk dismantling also reflects the bankrupt weakness of the imperialist order itself which can no longer afford to sustain even its “own” working class at levels any different to the brutal exploitation levels the Third World has always suffered.

Confronted by the crude and shocking realities of raw exploitation now that the world catastrophe is biting brutally hard, the working class has no choice but to turn to the revolutionary struggle that alone can not only stop this disastrous collapse but start building the world on a new socialist basis that will far outstrip anything history has managed so far.

Signs are already there in America, not least in the massive public support given to the New York assassin who deliberately killed the grotesquely overpaid CEO of one of the profiteering health insurance corporations:

The man charged with murdering UnitedHealthcare’s CEO in December plans to accept more than $300,000 that people who are sympathetic to the accused killer have raised for his legal defense.

More than 10,000 people had contributed an average of about $30 to Luigi Mangione’s defense fund when his legal team indicated it would accept the donations, according to a post on Monday on the GiveSendGo platform, which is hosting a fundraising campaign in his benefit.

Mangione “very much appreciates the outpouring of support”, said a statement on GiveSendGo that was attributed to his attorney, Karen Friedman Agnifilo.

Authorities allege that Mangione, 26, shot Brian Thompson, 50, to death in plain view of a surveillance camera as the UnitedHealthcare chief walked to an investor conference in midtown Manhattan on the morning of 4 December.

A five-day manhunt led to Mangione’s arrest in a Pennsylvania McDonald’s, where he purportedly carried a gun that matched the one used to kill Thompson. Mangione also carried fake identification and a notebook expressing disdain for the US’s rapacious private health insurance industry as well as its wealthy executives, investigators have alleged.

Federal prosecutors later charged Mangione with interstate stalking and using a firearm to commit murder. Meanwhile, in a case to be pursued in parallel in New York, state prosecutors charged him with murder and terrorism.

A poll published in late December by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago concluded that most Americans believe the health insurance’s profits – aided greatly by routine denials of coverage – shared some responsibility for Thompson’s slaying. But the survey found about 80% of Americans believed Thompson’s killer had either “a great deal” or “a moderate amount” of responsibility for the murder.

Despite that poll, some who have contributed to Mangione’s legal defense fund on GiveSendGo made it clear that – in their eyes – he had done nothing wrong.

“Let’s defend the [right] for self defense,” one contributor wrote on the platform. “Mangione’s actions were an act [where] he [defends] his own right to life.”

Individual terror is not the solution to the collapse into fascist mayhem and ever more extreme inequality, which demands conscious mass class-war struggle to overturn the entire system, educated and informed by the deepest of Leninist revolutionary understanding, but these mass popular responses indicate what a problem the US ruling class has on its hands already, even before any such movement gets underway.

And the Musk mayhem will massively inflame such hatreds, even among millions of workers and petty bourgeoisie who have been taken in by the Trump bluster, expecting somehow that it will be different to the corporate and billionaire Washington establishment which backed the Democrat Tweedledum wing of the US ruling class.

Expectations of “better prospects” are already being undermined by bad economic news:

Stocks on Wall Street slumped at the start of trading on Wednesday, dragged lower by data that showed consumer prices rose more than expected in January, leaving the Federal Reserve little cause to lower interest rates again soon.

The S&P 500 fell roughly 1 percent as trading got underway. The Nasdaq Composite index, which is chock-full of tech stocks that have come under pressure recently from rising global competition to develop the chips that will power the development of artificial intelligence, also fell around 1 percent.

Fresh inflation data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Wednesday showed that prices rose 3 percent for the year through January, up from 2.9 percent in December. The “core” Consumer Price Index, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, rose 3.3 percent year-over-year.

Signs of continuing price pressure is likely to encourage the Fed to refrain from further interest rate cuts in the coming months. For stock investors, higher interest rates means slower business activity, which can weigh on companies’ earnings and stock prices.

Whatever ups and down the US bourgeoisie might yet be able to engineer domestically by its world bullying, the overall direction is down and likely to be very severely so, as the dollar reaches the point of complete collapse. And any boost for the US can only be done at the expense of the rest of the world – both in the exploited neocolonial world and among the major and minor imperialist rivals, as Trump’s threats and intimidation are making startlingly clear, stirring massive conflict everywhere, and hugely inflaming inter-imperialist relations.

But an even bigger problem comes from a central aspect of the Musk/Trump demolition, the demented and ranting destruction of the USAID system and its worldwide network of charity and disaster relief, being ripped apart.

The suspension and probable termination of this body’s operations will have profound effects far deeper than simply the immediate devastation of lives and survival for many in the Third world.

It tears up the entire “soft power” anti-communist operation of US imperialism in multiple ways; firstly removing the charity bandage which has softened the edges of Third World exploitation for the entire post-WW2 period, to hold back the total deprivation and desperation that can only lead minds to revolution.

And it removes at a stroke a colossal part of Western ideological subversion against the anti-imperialist ideas that will increasingly take hold again.

Arch class-collaborating Labourite, Gordon Brown sets out in the bourgeois press just how important is the whole programme for the anti-communist agenda in which he has always played significant part himself both as former prime minister, strongly tied into the international “liberal” establishment and in his new role as “Special Envoy” for the stooge United Nations, itself one of the targets for Trumpite demolition.

Notice how he avoids explaining what is the purpose of the 10% funding that “goes to NGOs” or what those bodies might be.

In fact that seemingly minor function of USAID is its crucial “other” role, even more significant than heading off revolutionary sentiment with charity aid. It provides crucial funds for a whole range of anti-communist “pro-democracy” propaganda, local influence and psyops, in conjunction with the National Endowment for Democracy, the “overt” operations version of the covert CIA:

Coming alongside President Trump’s plan for a US takeover of Gaza, the US administration’s resolve to shut down its international aid agency sends a clear message that the era when American leaders valued their soft power is coming to an end.

But while the Gaza plan is as yet only on the drawing board, USAid cuts – which will see funding slashed and just 290 of the more than 10,000 employees worldwide retained, according to the New York Times - have already begun to bite this week. We have seen the halting of landmine-clearing work in Asia, support for war veterans and independent media in Ukraine, and assistance for Rohingya refugees on the border of Bangladesh. This week, drug deliveries to fight the current mpox and Ebola outbreaks in Africa have been stopped, life-saving food lies rotting at African ports, and even initiatives targeting trafficking of drugs like fentanyl have been cut back. One of the world’s most respected charities, Brac, says that the 90-day blanket ban on helping vulnerable people is depriving 3.5 million people of vital services.

One critical programme has been granted a limited waiver. Pepfar, created by Republican president George W Bush, offers antiretroviral prescriptions to 20 million people around the world to combat HIV and Aids. Its activities escaped the ban only after warnings that a 90-day stoppage could lead to 136,000 babies acquiring HIV. But it has still been blocked from organising cervical cancer screening, treating malaria, tuberculosis and polio, assisting maternal and child health, and efforts to curtail outbreaks of Ebola, Marburg and mpox.

Not only does the stop-work edict mean that, in a matter of days, the US has destroyed the work of decades building up goodwill around the world, but Trump’s claim that America has been over-generous is exposed as yet another exaggeration. Norway tops the list as biggest donor of official development assistance (ODA) as a percentage of gross national income (GNI) at 1.09%; Britain is at just over 0.5%, albeit down from the UN target of 0.7%; but the US is near the bottom of the advanced economies at 0.24% – alongside Slovenia and the Czech Republic. It is simply the size of the US economy – 26% of world output – that means that the 0.24% adds up to more aid than any other country. The US provided $66bn in 2023, making USAid a leader in global humanitarian aid, education and health, not least in addressing HIV/Aids, malaria and tuberculosis.

On Sunday night, Trump told reporters that USAid had been “run by a bunch of radical lunatics, and we’re getting them out”. “I don’t want my dollars going towards this crap,” his press spokesperson added, with one of the president’s chief advisers Elon Musk calling the agency a “viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America”. “You’ve got to basically get rid of the whole thing. It’s beyond repair,” he said. “We’re shutting it down.”

Indeed, in a post on X last weekend, Musk shared a screenshot quoting the false claim that “less than 10 percent of our foreign assistance dollars flowing through USAID is actually reaching those communities”. The implication is that the remaining 90% was diverted, stolen, or just wasted. In fact, the 10% figure is the proportion of the budget going directly to NGOs and organisations in the developing world. The remaining 90% is not wasted – instead, it comprises all the goods and services that USAid, American companies and NGOs, and multilateral organisations deliver in kind, from HIV drugs to emergency food aid, malaria bed nets, and treatment for malnutrition. It is simply untrue that 90% of aid falls into the wrong hands and never reaches the most vulnerable.

In fact, the initial blanket executive order proved to be such a blunt instrument – the only initial exemptions were for emergency food aid and for military funding for Israel and Egypt – that it had to be modified to include exceptions for what the government called “life-saving humanitarian assistance”, although it stopped short of defining them. “We are rooting out waste. We are blocking woke programs. And we are exposing activities that run contrary to our national interests. None of this would be possible if these programs remained on autopilot,” said a statement released by the state department. The new secretary of state, Marco Rubio, now wants his department to control the whole budget and close down USAid entirely. “Does it make America safer? Does it make America stronger? Does it make America more prosperous?” Rubio asked in a statement that suggested that the America which generally worked multilaterally in a unipolar era is now determined to act unilaterally in a multipolar one.

This new stance is not just “America first” but “America first and only” – and a gift to Hamas, IS, the Houthi rebels, and all who wish to show that coexistence with the US is impossible. The shutdown is also good news for China, whose own global development initiative will be strengthened as it positions itself to replace America. Desperate people will turn to extremists who will say that the US can never again be trusted. And by causing misery and by alienating actual and possible allies, far from making America great again, the cancellation of aid will only make America weaker.

US generosity is often seen as mere charity, but it is in the country’s self-interest to be generous because the creation of a more stable world benefits us all. We all gain if USAid can mitigate the spread of infectious diseases, prevent malnutrition in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan, halt the upsurge of IS in Syria and support a fair, humanitarian reconstruction of Gaza and Ukraine. Only the narrowest and most blinkered view of what constitutes “America first” can justify the disaster America has unloaded on the world.

Gordon Brown is the UN’s special envoy for global education and was UK prime minister from 2007 to 2010

What gobsmacking hypocrisy and playacting!!

Brown only regrets that the “era of soft power has come to end” because it makes far more obvious the vicious, barbaric and murderous nature of all bourgeois rule, and makes sharply more clear the need for class war struggle to overthrow imperialist capitalism, which he and his anti-communist ilk are dedicated to heading off.

His dismay is that the truth – the monstrous barbarity of raw capitalist force which alone is now propping up the “America First” empire – will reinforce the great wave of anti-imperialist struggle, those designated by imperialist reaction as “terrorists” like the Yemeni Houthi resistance to Western-backed and run Saudi killer-thug-feudal repression, or the Palestinians they back who have been standing up to the vicious genocidal brutality of the Zionist occupation, the assorted IS factions, and bundled in with them, (telling its own story about the anti-imperialism of all of them) the Chinese workers state, whose economy (part capitalist sector, part state-owned but all under communist party strategic direction) is now the second largest in the world and a major, if not the major competitor to Western imperialism.

The now widespread dogged and self-sacrificing struggles are the more clearly than ever the first stirrings of the world revolution that has been pushing back against the imperialist crisis, particularly after the Iraq invasion (eg see EPSR No1208 11-11-03) .

Despite still having sometimes inadequate, confused or ever reactionary ideologies, far from Marxism, they nevertheless pursue an anti-imperialist agenda.

And if their backwardness or confusion will eventually not suffice for the complete ending of capitalism, establishing workers states, which Marxism makes clear is the only way to stop the great collapse into horrifying and deadly world war, they nevertheless have forced imperialism to show its true vicious reality, tearing up the “freedom and democracy” framework to do it, and nowhere more savagely than in the great Gaza holocaust of the last 15 months.

As Brown frets, that is a disaster for imperialist world rule.

The great network of international social, legal, political and finance institutions, like the UN and all its offshoots, the IMF, the World Bank has fooled the world for 75 years with the pretence of “international justice” and reason being at least achievable under imperialism and even an aim of capitalism.

It has been a huge extension of the capitalist parliamentary democracy hoax, evolved and refined over centuries into the ruling class’s greatest weapon fooling the masses into compliance.

And it has done huge service for imperialism since the 1945 victory of the USA over all the major imperialist powers and its ascendancy as topdog power in the pack, taking lead nation role and the lion’s share of the plunder from the exploited neo-colonial world, not least because of the dull-brained acceptance of this “democratic order and stability” by Moscow revisionism, saturated in “permanent peaceful coexistence” delusions.

But there is no “stability” in the ever changing uneven monopolising development of capitalism; forced to rebuild the German and Japanese powers to hold back Soviet influence (inspiring workers postwar despite its revisionist limitations) America set going the worm of competition which would undermine everything as the EPSR has analysed:

Fabulously affluently successful US imperialism, by far the greatest and wealthiest power in the history of the world, was just as internationally dominant before Gorbachev as after. And it was because Reagan’s administration offered Moscow some important money-saving disarmament deals, and more friendly cooperation to replace the ‘evil empire’ demonisation, that Gorbachev & Co rolled onto their backs like tickled puppy dogs, instantly spouting such infamous nonsense as deals with the West to “build our common European home”, signing anti-terrorist declarations, and introducing the counter-revolutionary glasnost and perestroika to deliberately dismantle the dictatorship of the proletariat to facilitate such international class-collaborating liquidationism.

But why did the Reaganauts make these dramatic offers (at Reykjavik, for example, which put Western reaction into total uproar) and which gained such an unexpected bonus of Soviet proletarian dictatorship’s self-liquidation?

Not out of strength. On the contrary. The Washington proposals were made out of desperate weakness. The critical problem was the growing German and Japanese financial, economic, industrial, commercial, and political rivalry which was proving impossible for US imperialism to effectively fight against with sharpening trade war, all the time that the enormous unilateral cost of leading the ‘Cold War ‘containment’ of communism was carried on with, full blast.

The ‘world leadership’ Cold War posturing had brought US imperialism colossal advantages in trade and political influence, getting half the world to finance the costly advanced armaments research and production which subsidised the lucrative leading position of US technology and science.

But still Germany and Japan had caught up and were by now beginning to forge well ahead in certain crucial economic strengths and industrial developments. Only by cost savings on some of the more spectacular but expensively over-elaborate ‘Western defence’ measures, – and by creating a climate for sharper trade-war offensives against Germany and Japan (and others), – could US imperialism start trying to feel confident again about hanging onto its valuable world-leadership position. Hence the specific heavy rocketry disarmament deals. Hence the degree of limited reconciliation with the ‘evil empire’. Continued international anti-communism remained the banner. But inter-imperialist trade war was fast becoming the real focus. This is where the real challenge to US imperialist world domination lay.

In missing this crucial development, ultra-left middle-class defeatism has disoriented itself completely. They get the Soviet liquidation wrong. They get US imperialism wrong. They get the character of the epoch wrong. They get all the consequent detailed situations wrong as well. (EPSR No868 09-07-96)

And Trump’s tariff war bullying is not new either; Japan and then Germany were hammered with such restrictions from the 1990s onwards (which has kept Tokyo stagnating for decades).

These trade war pressures did not let up with the stupid Soviet relinquishing of its workers state and planned economy in 1991 – just the opposite they underlie the turn to international warmongering ever since as the relentlessly growing capitalist Catastrophe was bursting out in regional collapses and economic meltdowns from Mexico and Moscow to the South-East Asian currency disaster, and finally the dotcom crash and the culminating Credit Meltdown in 2008.

It is the base cause of non-stop war from Serbia onwards, as the butter-wouldn’t-melt dissembling Brown well knows, having been at the heart of Britain’s faltering economy and the deliberate Blairite creation of lying lurid fantasies about “Saddam’s plans to invade the world in 45 minutes” which “justified” the fascist invasion of already bomb-and-sanction-blighted Iraq, to really get world warmongering going as long planned by increasingly desperate US imperialism.

But that has gone badly wrong, initially preempted by the Third World’s rising struggle in the form of the 9/11 World Trade Centre and Pentagon terrorist blow (forcing an unplanned blitzing of Afghanistan) and then seeing setback after setback from the uproar caused throughout the Middle East and across the Third World, as hostility and hatred for Western blitzing has sent 10,000s into the ranks of the anti-occupation resistance and “terrorist” groups.

Every dirty warcrime attempt to suppress them with civilian village missile-ings, Guantánamo and Bagram torture, and special forces deathsquads has inflamed things further.

Once the full crisis collapse broke, that is compounded by the jump to a new level in rebelliousness in its wake, the explosive millions-strong mass revolts of the Arab Spring (also misanalysed by the fake-“left” and its “condemn jihadism” denunciations), which has completely terrified the bourgeoisie, grasping the huge unravelling significance of the giant 111 million population Egypt throwing out imperialism and the potential for this firstly to turn further towards communism and for that to spread like a Los Angeles firestorm across the world.

Its attempts to keep things under control have only emphasised the weakness of imperialism, reluctant to put its own boots on the ground ever since, after so much agony from the body bags returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

A frantic ruling class has vacillated ever since Serbia in how crudely brutal to be, from George Bush’s initial use of “shock and awe” on Afghanistan and Iraq, and “for us or against us” warnings to the whole world not to even think about challenging the US, to the more “traditional” wing relying on continuing bribery, bullied “alliances” with the other major powers and all the panoply of the ineffectual UN etc that Brown mourns (its democracy and “freedom” delusions still capable of causing widespread popular confusion in a world bereft of any Marxist class understanding where revisionist cretinism and Trotskyist shallowness prevails yet).

But its attempts to use proxies, local reactionary forces and CIA skulduggery and manipulated “colour revolutions” for “freedom” to bring the world under its control has been failing badly; the bogus “more Arab Spring” against the “dictator” Gaddafi in Libya was a damp squib needing a NATO invasion to rescue it, and the similar stirred up turmoil in Syria, has been a decade long and continuing mess of backfiring attempts to recruit stooge terrorists, even after finally toppling the erratic anti-Zionist Assadites.

The complexities of that still need further untangling by Leninist science as does the Ukraine war and similar imperial skulduggery from Myanmar to the Sahel.

But the Kiev chaos is just as disastrous, again deliberately set up with long term covert plotting, anti-Russian pysops demonising and fraudulent “democracy” subversion, peaking in 2014 with the covert sniper-provoked Maidan coup to put in power the foulest nazi reaction dating back to the mid-20th century, (its torchlight parade thuggery toppling Lenin statures and renaming dozens of streets after Hitler-collaborating fascist-nationalist Ukraine “hero” Stepan Bandera, ever since).

That is proving a total disaster too, its targeted Russia proving far bigger a mouthful to chew than eventually-toppled Saddamism in Iraq and a useful blow for the world working class to Empire rampaging, despite the minor imperialist nature of Putin’s backward Bonapartism (also requiring further teasing apart of its contradictions which are not remotely captured by the craven fake-“left” from outright imperialist collaborating Trots to the wooden “support” for the Kremlin by museum Stalinism of assorted flavours).

Ukraine has partly served its underlying purpose, that of weakening and undermining not Russia primarily but the competition from the European Union and its dominant Germany, (which none of the fake-“left” grasped - see above quote).

That has included massive chaos and refugee turmoil, huge forced wasteful military expense and not least the illegal terrorist attack on the NordStream gas pipelines, (which everyone knows was a US plot – with possibly British and Norwegian naval expertise involved too) causing massive economic damage.

But its three years of turmoil and death is still ending in humiliating defeat for imperialism, drained of military resource to support it and adding huge additional costs to its already massive debt problems.

It looks like Trump’s belligerent isolationist bluster is now being mobilised to cover up the pullout but the impact of its defeat will have yet further shattering significance historically for the Empire itself and for the relations with the remaining “betrayed” imperialist powers, especially in Europe.

Add in the eventual retreat and pullback from Afghanistan, whose population has been hyped up with promises of a “new democratic capitalist future” and then abandoned for a second or even third time by imperialism to backward primitivism (albeit one that drove out the Empire) and the US humiliation is overwhelming.

But no ruling class will leave history willingly and if anything its glimpse into the abyss can only intensify its ruthless savagery and willingness to impose even more brutal intimidation.

Nothing will stop its plunge to war as Leninism has always made clear against the “left” ranks still posturing with “No to War” sloganising.

And the Gaza genocide horrors demonstrate the fact with a level of inhuman depravity paralleling anything seen in the last imperialist war, the numbers only less because the victimised population in Gaza is smaller than the Jews, Gypsies, communists and others in Europe, and its fighting response has been staggering.

The surviving population and its current Hamas leadership is still standing after 15 months of one of the most unequal fights ever despite unprecedented horrors as even the bourgeois press has not been able to hide completely despite the gross censorship, barefaced lying and intimidation of the Zionist-imperialist lobby:

Israel, meanwhile, has made a graveyard of Gaza, and Donald Trump is calling it a real estate opportunity. The president, as you will know, has decided the US should just take over the Gaza Strip. As for the Palestinians who are inconveniently there at the moment? According to Trump, they can just be moved somewhere else. They can be dumped in Jordan or Egypt or Saudi Arabia. They won’t mind. Those Arabs are all the same anyway.

It’s not clear, by the way, exactly how many Palestinians are actually left to be moved. Fifteen months ago there were an estimated 2.1 million people in Gaza. The official death toll is now almost 62,000 people but this is very likely a gross underestimate that doesn’t account for all the “indirect deaths” from disease and starvation. Writing in the Guardian in September, Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, noted that according to an extrapolation of one estimate published in the Lancet medical journal, the death toll would be estimated at about 335,500 in total.

It seems Trump might agree with that estimate. While waxing lyrical about his planned crimes against humanity, Trump said “we’re talking about probably 1.7 million, maybe 1.8 million” people in Gaza who would need to be moved. If only reporters at Trump’s press conferences would ask him if he knows exactly how many people are dead, eh? However, it would seem that much of the US press simply aren’t that interested.

There is a lot of interest in Trump’s plans to redevelop Gaza, however. The word “shocking” has been bandied around a lot to describe these very Trumpian real estate fantasies. And, yes, the fact that the president is being so blunt, so open, about what he wants to do is shocking. But the idea that the US and Israel might want to get rid of all the Palestinians in the strip should hardly come as a shock to anyone. This, after all, is in effect what Israel’s politicians and pundits, along with Israel’s supporters, have been saying all along: they want to make Gaza unliveable and get all the Palestinians out.

In October 2023, for example, Ma Gen Giora Eiland, who is highly influential, wrote in an Israeli paper: “The State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in.” In another article, Eiland wrote: “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.”

Other people have been very open that they want certain types of human beings to exist in Gaza – just not Palestinians. Last March, for example, Jared Kushner salivated about the prospect of building waterfront property in Gaza and said Israel should move Palestinians into the Negev desert while it “cleans up” the strip. Settler activists have also been scouting locations for Jewish settlements in North Gaza.

So, again, if you’re shocked by Trump’s comments about Gaza then you simply haven’t been paying attention. There are hundreds of documented statements from high-profile Israeli figures calling for the complete destruction of Gaza. And a growing list of genocide experts and human rights groups have termed what Israel has been doing in Gaza a “genocide”.

Speaking to me last November, for example, the genocide expert Omer Bartov said that, from the very beginning, you could see “there was a concerted effort, not only to move the population over and over again, but also to destroy everything that makes the life of a group possible.”

Not many foreigners have been allowed into Gaza to see that destruction for themselves, but those that have gone in come out saying much the same thing. Last November, for example, Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, returned from a trip to Gaza and told BBC Radio the situation in the north was a “besiegement within a besiegement”. Egleland stressed: “This is not self-defence. This is the systematic destruction of Gaza.”

Now that the destruction of Gaza is complete, it seems like forced displacement is about to begin. On Wednesday, after some backlash from the international community, Trump’s team did a little bit of backtracking and suggested the displacement might not be permanent. “The president has made it clear that they need to be temporarily relocated out of Gaza,” Karoline Leavitt, his press secretary, said during a White House briefing.

But history would suggest there would be nothing temporary about the displacement. My grandparents, who had to flee in 1948 from Haifa, were buried in the West Bank; my father was born there. He left in 1967, however, and does not have the right to return. It seems inevitable that any Palestinians leaving Gaza won’t have the right to return either.

Perhaps what is most disgusting about all this is the gaslighting; Trump’s attempts to dress up his plans for forced relocation as some sort of act of humanitarianism. On the contrary, it is violation of international law.

[.]Tlaib is quite right, but she should also have mentioned the media. Another reason Trump can spew this “fanatical bullshit” is because much of the western media have been complicit in dehumanizing Palestinians and normalizing what many experts have termed a genocide.

They’ve been complicit in ignoring the fact that Gaza has become a graveyard for journalists. They’ve been complicit in ignoring the fact that Israel has refused foreign journalists to freely report from the strip. And they’ve been complicit in dressing up horror after horror in sanitizing, passive and obfuscatory language.

Even now much of the media coverage of Trump’s comments omits the fact that just by meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu – who sat by Trump grinning like a Cheshire cat as he made his comments about Gaza – Trump is undermining international law. The international criminal court has an arrest warrant for the Israeli prime minister for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

 

Thank you, Nesrine Malik, for saying so movingly what many of us have felt throughout the Israeli assault on Gaza (Goodbye to the lost children of Gaza. You were loved, you are remembered, you did not deserve it, 27 January). Most western media have been reluctant to call out the horror for what it is. One sentence in her excellent article stands out for me: the killing of children on such a scale was “unnecessary and only permitted because Palestinian life as a whole has been made cheap by the logic of Israel’s absolute right to defend itself by whatever criminal means it likes”.

Western governments and media have been shamefully complicit in overlooking these atrocities, taking no significant action to restrain or condemn Israel, maintaining neutrality between those dropping the bombs and the babies underneath them. Even now, Palestinian suffering is underemphasised. The attention given to the fewer than 100 Israeli hostages still held in Gaza is grossly disproportionate to that given to the suffering of the Palestinians, including the more than 9,000 Palestinian detainees, many of them held without trial or charges.

Michael Foster Chelmsford

Several years ago, I attended the funeral of a three-year-old. It was a harrowing experience, and one which I never wish to have to repeat.

I have often thought of this little boy and his funeral during the course of the relentless onslaught on the people of Gaza. I have tried to imagine the profound grief and sorrow I witnessed then, multiplied again and again, every day, every night, and affecting so many families, so many mothers, so many fathers. We must never forget that behind all these numbers there are individual children, the loss of whom will have an incalculable impact on the lives of their loved ones, and I am grateful to Nesrine Malik for reminding us of this.

Isabella Stone Sheffield

Is there a more moving account of the despair of death, destruction and attempts at making things “good” in a war zone, than Seema Jilani’s (To the unknown child: I tried to save your young life in a Gaza hospital. Now your face haunts me, 24 January)? I believe not. And that she would carry the feelings of blame, guilt and incompetence, saying: “When your soul floated up beside me, was the devil there too, recounting my sins?”

I think the sins lie with Hamas, Israel, the vested interests of other nations and all who have violence as an option in mind. To all the decision-makers and excusers of war who say: “It is terrible, but…” I say leave out the “but” and let this article touch you. It will be pasted on my wall, as it should be in any president’s and any general’s room, particularly those who target civilians to achieve military “goals”.

County Durham

This last “even-handed” comment, reflecting the Zionist arguments, is itself part of the problem, blaming the Gazan people themselves for the horrors brought down on their heads – presumably they should never fight back and simply accept their near-slave racistly second-class existence without rights for the rest of eternity?

A dozen issues are embedded in this complacency, not least the incredible equation between of the scale of the resistance breakout and the subsequent genocide, and the intent and purpose, the one a perfectly valid attempt by a downtrodden and persecuted people to strike back against non-stop inhuman oppression using whatever means they can, (luridly and lyingly exaggerated the Jewish occupation which was responsible for about half the October 7th death toll under its Hannibal directive) and the other an outright and long-planned extension to the programme of colonial occupation underway for a century and relentlessly persecuting the indigenous people ever since.

It also contains the assumption swallowed and promulgated without question by the pro-Zionist media that the whole “war” (!!!) suddenly erupted in late 2023 when its reality is a next phase of attempted resistance to non-stop persecution, intimidation, torture, arbitrary imprisonment and butchery, with routine terrorising and settler rampaging destroying farms, homes and communities, all continuing for 75 years on a daily basis, interspersed with invasions, blitzings, massacres and assassinations, including such notable atrocities as the Sabra and Shatila camp massacres, and repeated raids and bombings of the refugee camps in Jenin and Hebron etc

The Jewish occupation is driven to this most extreme violence by its own historic “logic” founded in the takeover and occupation of another people’s land, steadily and furtively initially (with British imperialist approval) and then with “international approval” through the stooge United Nations in 1948, and its outrageous landtheft partition, handing over territory in Palestine to the Jewish settlers.

Its colonial imperative was immediately apparent as the occupiers promptly embarked on a programme of massacring terror and ethnic cleansing intimidation to expand their holding which has continued ever and cannot ever stop until either the whole Palestinian people is slaughtered or expelled, or the whole notion of an “Israeli state” on this already inhabited territory is rescinded.

It is the fanaticism of these Zionist-imperialist perpetrators driven by the historic “logic” of the occupation to appalling levels of willing racist butchery that Western imperialism needs for its own survival.

Smarting from defeat itself it has tapped this barbarity more relentlessly than ever before in the last 15 months, unleashing and arming its smiting without restraint to try and intimidate the increasingly uncontrollable rebellion in the Middle East.

But abandoning any pretence of reining in the illegality and barbarity comes at a huge cost – namely demonstrating to the world the lie of “international law” and “democracy".

What reason then to maintain the rest of its elaborate lying framework like the whole USAID framework??

From now on raw bourgeois dictatorship is the path – fascism effectively (without getting tangled in definitions).

And imperialism will not stop this degenerate plunge until it is defeated and world consciousness begins to grasp the revolutionary conclusions that can end it.

Don Hoskins

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