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No 1654 8th March 2025

Guns-not-butter Slump response to Oval Office eruption exposes true hatred and hostility between major imperialist powers as cutthroat tradewar driven to white heat by capitalism’s Catastrophic crisis. The nazi-NATO run war first and foremost a US-EU conflict and not against provoked Russia at all – despite its usefulness as a scapegoating distraction to blame Moscow for inevitable economic and social breakdown of all imperialist world society. Anyone taken in by “defence” for “plucky Ukraine” should ask why the same “concerned” Western leaders all support the horrors inflicted on Gaza and half a dozen countries alongside it. Shattering splits in imperialist camp expose hoodwinking bullshit of the post-WW2 “freedom & justice” United Nations (already hammered by carte blanche for imperialist/Zionist crimes against humanity) but “democracy” delusions, and hostility to necessary workers state authority, continue, fed by a century of anti-communist brainwashing, brain-dead revisionism & Trot fake-“leftism”. Leninism revival crucial

The astonishing international vitriol and hatred suddenly spewing out between the pro-Ukraine bourgeois leaders in Europe and Donald Trump’s American isolationism is possibly the most grotesque display yet of sickening humbug and lying fraud in the centuries long history of hypocrisy and cynical manipulation by capitalist “democratic” exploitation rule.

It signals another lurch towards World War Three as the capitalist system runs into the greatest crisis collapse of all time.

Every one of these lying mountebanks (on both sides) with shirts ripped open to show their bleeding hearts, demanding peace by “stopping the war”, or “peace, justice and freedom” for NATO’s stinking Banderite-nazi nationalists by keeping it going (!!), has been four square behind the non-stop genocidal holocaust imposed on the Middle East for the last year and a half by the Zionist occupiers of Palestine.

Not only have they said nothing about this gruesome extension of the imperialist “war on terror”, already destroying country after country in the Middle East, and now cynically and deliberately wiping out, maiming or traumatising an entire 2.3 million strong population in Gaza, (and in fact millions more in the West Bank) but they have suppressed, criminalised and censored every squeak of opposition and support for the terrorised and butchered Palestinian people suffering this “crime against humanity”, outrageously declaring even mild pacifist sympathy to be “anti-semitism” and even imprisonable “thought-crime” (witness the outrageous Jewish lobby pressured pulling of an hour-long documentary from iPlayer on the agonies faced by Palestinian families in Gaza during the 15 months, a once-in-a-blue-moon account by the almost completely one-sided state-funded and state-controlled BBC actually from the persecuted people's side, totally censored under the ridiculous and meaningless excuse that it had some “link to Hamas” despite it showing only a relatively sanitised limited account of the worst atrocities and butchery).

And they have all supported and aided the non-stop blitzing of the entire region too, from the 1990 and 2003 Iraq invasions and the non-stop siege sanctions and bombing in between, killing millions, and the Afghanistan blitzing and occupation, to the NATO toppling of Gaddafi in Libya, the years-long pulverising of Yemen into famine devastation by Saudi Arabia and the Western stirred and provoked civil war in Syria, as well as propping up brutal dictatorships such as the torture and massacre General Sisi “presidency” in Egypt, and the backward gangster-thug tribal monarchies in the Arab Gulf and Saudi Arabia.

In fact these bourgeois leaders all represent a system which has tyrannised and exploited the entire world for the last eight centuries, and especially during the epoch of monopoly imperialist colonialism and neo-colonialism (still continuing).

So, anyone who believes that these reactionary rightwing politicians (or the disgusting TUC/Labourite opportunist careerists who substitute for the ruling class Tories when those are so mired in sleaze and failure that they are losing their grip), – who are all imposing ever more draconian Slump “austerity”, cuts and poverty on their own populations, whipping up anti-migrant racist sentiment and non-stop war and blitzing on the ruthlessly exploited Third World, – could possibly be driven by “concern” for “a plucky invaded people” behind the fantastical made-up nonsense that they too are “suffering a genocide” at the “hands of a tyrant” as the lurid lying CIA/MI6 and psyops propaganda asserts, is either wilfully blinkered or has been seriously hoodwinked.

The bourgeois-beloved anti-communist George Orwell’s 1984 world of “doublethink” (lyingly attributed to Soviet communism) is positively tame in comparison to this gross capitalist twisting of reality.

And public opinion has been totally misled, seriously so, in a world which has forgotten or suppressed the Leninist “catastrophist” revolutionary theory and understanding, based on objective dialectical materialism, that can begin to disentangle the insane and contradictory developments plunging the world towards chaos and destruction.

So much has this science been abandoned or distorted that the latest belligerent eruptions from Trump’s billionaire crew, are causing confusion and splits in all directions, not least among the 50 shades of the useless and treacherous fake-“left”, from hidebound Stalinist revisionism to the most bilious of Trot anti-communism.

They are all as much at sea over the Oval Office outbursts and subsequent suspension of military aid to Kiev, as are the stunned bourgeois governments throughout the European Union and those alongside the US itself in Canada, Mexico and Panama, facing tariffs and threats.

None offer anything like a coherent explanation of these staggering and historic developments which are a next step in the broad breakdown of the entire post-war “international consensus” around the always bogus “freedom, democracy and warcrime justice” lies, (swallowed wholesale by dull-brained revisionism from “peaceful coexistence” Stalinism to the present day), and which run alongside Musk-led tearing-up of the domestic “workers welfare” (so much for 150 years of class-collaborative reformism), and the escalation of warmongering bluster by the “peaceseeking” Trump, echoing Hitler’s similar 1930s dissembling “peace” speeches, in his “State of the Union” threats to “get" Canada and Greenland “one way or the other” replete with Nazi-rally-style applause.

And why do they not say anything useful, let alone spell out the revolutionary necessities this makes ever more urgent? Because the “lefts” long ago lost sight of the foundational principles of the Marxism they pretend to uphold (if they ever really believed them at all), and most of all the grasp of the great crisis Catastrophe, inevitable in the contradiction ridden capitalist exploitation system and, just as much, its unstoppable endpoint in all out world war (see economics box 6, Marx’s Capital, the Communist Manifesto and most of Lenin’s Collected Works).

Only with the deepest Marxist-Leninist perspective of total economic collapse, and the rising rebellious challenge to the world wide imperialist order it is generating in “terrorism” and major street revolts and insurgencies, can any sense can be made of these seemingly astonishing events now unfolding.

What the “lefts” are not setting out, nor even beginning to grasp is the staggering (counter) revolutionary shift in the world crisis to a new level of antagonism and hostility between all the imperialist powers and especially the overwhelmingly dominant topdog US imperialism and its one-time crew of “allied” powers, now being jettisoned.

As some of the more fearful bourgeois leaders in Europe have been commenting, the old postwar order set up in the mid-1940s, (laughably referred to as the Pax Americana>, despite its nonstop wars, coups, sabotage, massacres and interventions in the Third World, over 400 since 1945), is being torn to shreds.

The great hoodwinking fraud of a “United Nations”, a world credit system to “rescue” bankrupted nations and an “international community” with “democratic principles” and “red lines against warcrimes and disruption” etc etc. is being junked.

Now the gloves are off, and the entire seventy years of pretence and hypocrisy about “standards”, “boundaries” and universal justice is being abandoned, most obviously in the horrors of the Zionists’ monstrous Gaza genocide, but equally by the big US bully itself (not least exposed by its all out support for the Jewish occupation of Palestine).

The mask of supposed democracy is ripped away and the open dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the always underlying tyrannical reality of its class rule and exploitation, is being sharply and brutally revealed.

Crude class war is now the order of the day, – fascism in fact though such mechanical designations are only partly helpful, implying as they do that everything else is somehow preferable, and that the abandoned “democracy” was any different.

Under bourgeois rule it is still class oppression and tyranny for the world’s great majority, merely hidden behind the mask of supposed “choice” and “rights” to fool people.

But mostly its gross manipulations, big-money influence peddling and ballot rigging no longer does fool the working class.

Secondly its crumbs-from-the-table concessions in welfare and marginally enhanced wages for bribing better-off working class and petty bourgeois layers, led by reformist opportunism (necessary to maintain some verisimilitude for the whole cynical game) can no longer be afforded even in the richer nations which alone have ever seen the “benefits”.

Why such a jump?

Because imperialism is now completely bankrupt, paralysed by the “overproduction” inherent and unavoidable in a system driven by the relentless accumulation of capital by class exploitation at the expense of all rationality and humanity.

As the EPSR has been warning since its foundation four decades ago, that can only lead to a plunge into war destruction.

It is capitalism’s only “solution” to deal with the Himalayas of excess credit and capital it has produced, destroying the “surplus” choking the world markets, using slump bankruptcy and then all-out war to force the slump burden onto rivals.

That Marxist understanding has been given particular emphasis since the whole imperialist system returned back to overt general warmongering, with first the bullying blitzing of tiny socialist-nostalgic Serbian nationalism in 1999 and then Afghanistan, Iraq and much more of the Middle East, (in various ways) as well as the deliberately stirred up and provoked Ukraine war itself, set in train by two decades of heavily funded anti-communist “democracy” subversion and “colour revolution” skulduggery, putting outright Nazi nationalism back in the saddle in the carefully plotted 2014 Maidan coup.

And it had already been underlined, in heavy black ink, in the wake of the great global credit collapse of 2008-9 which confirmed once and for all the scientific understanding of Marxist “catastrophism”, so endlessly derided, ignored or only half-grasped by the fake-“left” circus during the long credit-extended post-war boom and the petty bourgeois complacency and philistinism it bred.

Despite notionally now accepting “the crisis” not one whit of its devastating world existential significance yet creeps into their perspectives.

Every one of them remains bound by reformism, “left pressure” and “protest” formulas, and either outright collaboration and collusion with the ruling class war drive (social imperialism); useless and disarming “Stop War” social-pacifism and its revisionist extension into impossible “multipolar world” fantasies (including tragically from the leadership of the extant workers states like heroic Cuba, giant China, spiky North Korea and bustling Vietnam) or pitching in with unnecessary and confusing wholesale “support” behind supposed anti-imperialist nationalism like Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussein, Libya’s Gaddafi, Syria’s Assad or the Islamic state of Iran, none of which have anything to do with necessary Marxist revolution and are hostile to it.

As Leninism has always made clear, any defeats for imperialism (of any kind, political, economic, military, or from rebellion or “terrorism”) are welcome, from whatever source, and potentially open a path for better revolutionary scientific understanding to be built.

But that does not mean directly supporting or merging with such forces – just the opposite, Marxist revolution needs to keep its understanding intact, even when taking a stand alongside other anti-imperialism against the common imperialist enemy.

As quoted in recent issues, all these “smaller” wars deliberately instigated by Washington from 1999 (see the Plan for a New American Century etc), were intended to give “shock and awe” warnings to everyone (not just the hapless victims like Iraq or Libya etc) to not challenge US Empire’s dominance as the crisis deepens.

But they can only be the prelude ultimately to an all-out war of inter-imperialist conflict, a third world war.

The scale of destruction in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan etc is far too little to wipe out enough capital to solve the problems (and nor even are the billions spent in destroyed arms in Ukraine).

And the bullying intimidation has not worked anyway with all of them ending in repeated failure, defeat and disaster, while stirring massive rebellion in Afghanistan, the Middle East and Africa, and reinforcing anti-Yankee turmoil in Latin America.

Despite brutal torturing and deathsquad intimidations, Iraq had to be pulled out of, and eventually Afghanistan too.

By 2011 the whole Middle East had erupted in the Arab Spring suppressed only at the cost of imposing civil war destruction, NATO invasion and even more repressive military coups that can only leave anti-imperialist sentiment fermenting under pressure cooker conditions, in the Arab world.

Africa meanwhile sees ever spreading anti-Western hostility held back by further fomented civil war confusion and agony, in Sudan for example, or the degenerate invasions into the Congo by the nasty Western stooge Kagame out of Rwanda (whose “99% election successes” go unremarked by the “democracy loving” Western media, normally so ready to denounce alleged “vote-rigging” when any kind of “left” or anti-imperialist movement gets into power – note the recent elaborately organised scam against Nicolás Maduro’s re-election in Venezuela).

Greece is currently paralysed by general strikes.

Even little Haïti is proving uncontrollable, as alleged “gang” turmoil runs amok (some criminal, but part revolutionary) and Washington remains fearful of the direct interventions it once almost routinely made there when “democracy” was going wrong for US interests (as when it toppled the “left” reformist Jean-Bertrand Aristide (EPSR No1223 09-03-04).

Instead it relies on flaky substitutes like stooge Kenyan police, who can barely leave their Port-au-Prince base in the teeth of seething hostility, and who anyway have major problems of their own back home where revolt and rebellion has been bursting out for the last year against the obviously stitched-up election of pro-Western stooge President William Ruto and his slump-imposing tax increases.

As the EPSR has long warned – the Empire:

will not even find a war “solution” when it reaches its REAL targets which are Japan, Germany, France and Britain plus all the smaller European monopolies, (blamed) for having made it impossible for the American Empire to carry on ruling the world easily and smoothly as before when it was the world’s immediate postwar top economic dog by an enormous distance, and unquestionable political supremo too (EPSR No1252 12-10-04).

The shape of these “real targets” now springs into sharp focus with White House belligerence and berating of the Europeans.

Relations are breaking down at the highest levels because capitalism itself is breaking down.

In that light the infamous meltdown between Donald Trump and Ukraine’s squat green croaking toad nazi president Volodymyr Zelensky, and the subsequent US suspension of arms aid to Kiev, makes perfect sense (inasmuch as chaotic and degenerating imperialism can be said to “make sense” at all).

Trump is after all only making overt what has been the covert reality of this East European warmongering for American imperialism from the beginning, namely the targeting of the European Union.

Exactly as the EPSR has been emphasising, it is trade war against Germany (and the European axis) not Russia which is the central motivator for the interference and skulduggery.

Other factors possibly complicate the picture, including shared Western hostility to the legacy of the Soviet Union and its still lingering socialist ethos in sections of the Russian federation populace, which Putin’s bonapartism has to accommodate as one side of its balancing act with now restored oligarch capitalism.

Certainly one wing of Western imperialism remains nervous about this deep folk memory of the communist period, unsure whether it might revive into a revolutionary movement at some point.

That fear is reinforced by the stirrings of just such sentiment in the more proletarian Russian speaking areas of Ukraine, under the pressure of Kiev’s decade long civil war persecution, set in train by Ukrainian nationalism and its long history of reaction back to Polish feudalism in the Western areas and Second World War fascist collusion with Nazi Germany, (now openly venerated with hero worship of Hitler-collaborator Stepan Bandera, who has had multiple streets renamed after him, statues erected and holidays commemorated by the Kiev government).

But it is ever intensifying trade war between the imperialist powers which is the crucial issue to understand i.e. the great Crisis.

For American imperialism at least it is the competition from the European Union, dominated by the powerhouse economy of Germany at its heart, which matters most, and disrupting and sabotaging that is the true purpose, or at least the overridingly significant aspect, of the war.

Ever growing industrial and financial competition from the EU has been slaughtering American commerce and industry for decades, (along with competition from Japan and of course now the rapidly rising China, whose workers state planning framework for its capitalist sector has allowed it to achieve far better directed growth than the anarchic “free market” ever managed when left to its own devices).

Understood in that light multiple aspects of the war fall into place; namely its deliberate restraint by Washington (if not by its willing British sidekick), feeding weapons and support to the Kiev stooges just sufficient to keep the war underway but never enough to give a decisive edge, so that the war became a constant disruption and destabilising influence on Europe; the cajoling and bullying of the European countries to pitch in with weapons and finance too, draining their economies and splitting their ruling class; and above all the early-on sabotage of the NordStream gas pipelines, downplayed in its significance but with an enormous impact on German industrial growth.

America had already been “diplomatically” and politically bullying the Germans to shut down this pipeline arrangement for years before the Ukraine war was escalated in 2022, (when deliberate buildup of Western-trained Ukrainian forces on the Donbass border, forced Moscow to intervene to protect the local Russian speaking populations who had suffered non-stop bombardment of the civilian areas for eight years and a death toll of over 14,000 and who now faced potential fascist butchery on a much greater scale).

Washington’s aim was to head off a massive increase in cheap energy supplies to German industry from the Siberian gas fields, a trading deal with Russian that had already provided huge benefit, and gave the industrially orientated German economy a substantial edge for its exports.

Many of those go to the United States.

So it did not take advanced mathematics training to put two and two together when three out of four of the new undersea lines had giant holes blown in them, obviously by American sabotage (and perhaps its British sidekick’s naval skills), an impossible task in 200m deep water without highly skilled training and advanced equipment, as independent US journalist Seymour Hersh finally confirmed had been set in train even before the Russians’ “Special Military Operation” (EPSR No1624 24-02-23).

And if that is still doubted, despite assorted subsequent evidence, then Donald Trump’s scathing remarks against Europe should now be the clincher, as he declares that the European Union has been a deliberate weapon to “screw-over” the American economy from the very beginning.

That is exactly what the EPSR explained during the great Brexit debate and referendum, and had been analysing as far back as the downfall of Margaret Thatcher, whose demise was precipitated precisely by splits in the ailing British ruling class over which bloc of the international bourgeoisie to side with (and shelter behind) in the great conflicts which the ruling class understood were coming (through sheer historic experience and cunning rather than Marxist science obviously).

As explained then the EU certainly was a counter to ever more concentrated American monopoly power, and the financial, industrial, technological and scientific weight that such agglomeration produced.

The formation of the European Economic Community was not a move “encouraged by” American imperialism to keep Europe under its thumb, as some off-the-wall fake-“left” analyses suggest.

Certainly Germany’s capitalism had been revived by the US after its 1945 defeat, as part of the Cold War strategy to fend off further spread of popular communist influence but such a powerful bourgeoisie quickly took on its own momentum.

The EEC was a defensive strategy to at least give the European countries a sufficiently large market space, – the “Common Market” as it started out – in which they could be protected against the ever more rapacious power and domination of big US monopoly corporations, allowing development of their own world level companies with the size and resource to survive (Volkswagen, Galileo, Airbus, Demag etc).

The EPSR then was explaining that while Britain’s “pulling out of Europe” might get workers out from under European (Brussels) monopoly rules, it would leave them more directly exposed to even more rapacious world monopolies (like those US firms which the Trump-grovelling Labourites are ready to give America open access to, letting them sell overpriced drugs to the NHS or plunder it by privatisation or access to its incredibly valuable patient database; letting them swamp the food and agriculture markets with surplus produce; letting them sell arms; and allowing them to buy up the best technology developments and brains etc etc – all in the ever weakening British ruling class’ desperation to get a “trade deal” and avoid the tariff war).

The point was not to advocate “sticking with Europe” but against the delusions of British “independence” being some kind of an answer to the great hurricane of crisis slump, as advocated by various shades of fake-“left”-ism saturated in “British workers” chauvinism, such as the deadly class-collaborating nonsense promulgated by the likes of George Galloway and his Workers Party of Britain replete with “patriotic” Spitfire roundels (hastily modified to look like cogwheels after the jingoism was denounced by the EPSR, though still with the red-white-and-blue colours), or Arthur Scargill’s equally backward Socialist Labour Party and its demands for “import controls” (now echoed by Trump!!).

Not coincidentally both of those have been backed on this question by the petty bourgeois Stalinists of the CPGB-ML (Lalkar-Proletarian) at various times, until recently still insisting on the “importance of Brexit” for the “British” working class.

Even to suppose there could be a “choice” in siding with the US or with Europe, when the issue to focus on is capitalism’s international breakdown and the international struggle to overturn all of it, was to thoroughly confuse the working class.

The point now is to show how the crisis-driven fight for markets is the essence of the great new antagonisms between Europe and America expressed by Trumpism.

As already explained, that was true too under the Biden billionaire government (different to the Trumpite wing) but it was playing in the old Cold War framework which persisted after the Soviet revisionist-imposed liquidation.

Until recently common imperialist world exploitation has just about held together as a gang of capitalist power “allies” more or less agreeing to row in behind the giant US “big boss” keeping the neocolonial world policed, financed and under control with tyrannical brutality in return for the lion’s share of the exploitation booty while the remainder is shared out according to the unspoken post-WW2 pecking order.

But the Pax Americana was increasingly under strain as the economic competition increases from the massive growth of the EU, Japan and obviously China.

It already wobbled badly at the time of the 2003 Iraq invasion when Germany and France both expressed doubts about the way the US was conducting its war – not out of concern for the Iraqi people but for their own imperialist trade interests in the region.

That settled down as the global credit collapse bit, and the Arab Spring shook Western confidence but differences persisted, including in the attempts to subvert Ukraine, memorably expressed by America’s then envoy Victoria Nuland’s phone-tapped contemptuous comment to “fuck the EU” over hesitation in backing “democratic” protests with sanctions just before the Maidan coup.

It has now broken completely.

As mentioned, an anti-Moscow component is not ruled out in initial American thinking, alongside European fantasies, about NATO and its nasty Kiev stooges pressing on to topple Putinism and break up Russia, and even then to further encircle China, as eg the Weekly Worker academicism has speculated.

But such perspectives are more likely the product of the petty bourgeois defeatism which characterises this petty bourgeois sect, (and all Trotskyism) permanently awed by the bourgeoisie and its alleged capacity to “negatively resolve” all the “hot spots” on the planet (see eg EPSR No 953, 1043 etc), a wrong prognosis it has made constantly for struggle after struggle, from supposedly doomed Irish nationalism (whose armed liberation struggle has long brought the Irish population out from under permanent second class and persecuted status in the once colonialist tyranny of the artificial “Northern Ireland” and which in the bitterly won post-GFA “democratic space” is steadily gaining on the formal re-unification of Ireland that was its goal from the very beginning) to the Palestinian struggle, which far from being “settled” unfavourably has gone from primitive stone throwing to the highly organised militarised Gaza outbreak 16 months ago, and which remains undefeated after forcing imperialism to reveal its true utterly barbaric fascist nature,

Even if there was such an agenda, attempting to keep the US “bourgeois democracy” credentials intact by demonising Putin as an “autocratic” bogeyman, and covering up the real agenda, it has gone badly wrong.

If the Iraq and Afghanistan wars ended in humiliation why would this much bigger target prove any easier? And in fact the sneered at Russian military and industry has proved the opposite with military defeat for the West’s stooges, and NATO behind them, now certain.

All Trumpism calculates is that there is now no point pursuing an elusive, expensive and risky defeat for Russia, at least via Ukraine, since that was never the real target anyway, and Russia is not anything like the same economic threat to US imperialism as Europe.

It should therefore stop throwing good money after bad, especially as it does not have any.

The cost comes in losing the democracy façade which has always been the most valuable weapon for bourgeois rule.

But that has been getting increasingly threadbare anyway and almost abandoned completely with the outright backing for the inhuman holocaust imposed on the Gazans and now the West Bank by Washington’s Zionist instrument in occupied Palestine.

The atrocities there have long gone past anything to do with just “fighting Hamas” as the bourgeois press is occasionally obliged to report if it is to maintain any pretence at all of “objectivity”. As the following piece shows they are outright genocidal fascism (as the colonialist logic of the Jewish landtheft takeover has always made inevitable, the only alternative being for all the colonialists to leave and return to their original countries, handing back all the stolen land, property, farms, villages and pastures to the Palestinians, with an option of asking permission to stay on if that is done, and a new Palestine will accept them):

Dr Issam Abu Ajwa was in the middle of performing emergency surgery on a patient with a severe abdominal injury at al-Ahli Arab hospital in central Gaza when the soldiers came for him.

“I asked them what they were doing coming into the operating theatre,” he says. “One of the soldiers pointed at me and said: ‘Are you Dr Issam Abu Ajwa?’ I said: ‘Yes, that’s me.’ And then the beating began.”

Still in his surgeons’ scrubs, the 63-year-old Abu Ajwa says he was dragged from the operating room before being handcuffed, blindfolded and stripped.

He was then put in a military truck with other doctors, nurses and medical staff and driven away from the hospital. Less than 24 hours later he was in a detention facility in Israel, beginning what he describes as months of brutal and constant violence and abuse.

“There were no rules,” he says.

During interrogations, he says he was tortured and beaten. “They would throw me on the ground. One would hit me on the head while the other opened my ear and poured water inside,” he says.

“There was a bathroom [in the interrogation room] … [they] would take a toilet brush and tell me ‘today we are going to brush your teeth.’ I was tied up, blindfolded and three or four of them held my face, pinned it down and kept scrubbing.”

Abu Ajwa says they broke his teeth: “They have no humanity.”

Under international law, healthcare workers like Abu Ajwa should be protected from attacks by warring parties and be allowed to continue providing medical care to all who need it.

Yet by the time the January ceasefire came into effect, more than 1,000 medical staff across Gaza had been killed and many hospitals bombed to rubble – attacks which a UN Human Rights Council commission concluded amounted to war crimes.

Hundreds more medical staff who survived the airstrikes and ground assaults were arrested, illegally transferred across the border and disappeared into Israeli prisons, including dozens of doctors.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 297 doctors, nurses, paramedics and other healthcare workers from Gaza were detained by Israel during the war.

Palestinian medical NGO Healthcare Workers Watch says [...]it has verified that 339 healthcare workers from Gaza detained by the Israeli military, with at least 160 still inside Israeli prisons.

In interviews with the Guardian and the Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), eight of Gaza’s most senior doctors have given harrowing testimonies of the torture, beatings, starvation and humiliation they say they suffered during months of detention.

All of those interviewed say they were targeted because they were doctors. Most were arrested inside hospitals as they worked; others were taken from ambulances or detained at checkpoints after being identified as healthcare workers. All those doctors interviewed were detained under Israel’s Unlawful Combatants Law, which grants the Israeli military sweeping powers to detain anyone from Gaza they say might pose a security threat.

Some, including Abu Ajwa, believe they were singled out for extreme violence by because they were doctors.

“One of the senior interrogators had given instructions that because I was a senior consultant surgeon they should make sure that I lost [use of my hands] and unable to perform surgery,” he says.

He says he was handcuffed for 24 hours a day and interrogators used planks with chains to restrain his hands for hours at a time. “They said they wanted to make sure I could never return to work.”

None of the senior doctors interviewed say they were given an explanation for detention. All were released without charge after months of imprisonment.

The UN Human Rights Office said the mass detention of healthcare workers has had a catastrophic impact on civilians, denying injured and sick patients – as well as junior medical staff – access to the decades of medical skills of senior medics and has been a clear contributing factor in the almost total collapse of Gaza’s healthcare system.

“Israel must immediately release all those held arbitrarily, including medical staff, and end all practices that amount to enforced disappearances, torture and other ill-treatment,” the UN said in a statement given to the Guardian. “Those responsible for crimes under international law must be held to account.”

Dr Mohammed Abu Selmia, director of al-Shifa hospital in northern Gaza, was arrested at a checkpoint while travelling with a convoy of patients in ambulances after the Israeli army told him to evacuate the hospital in November 2023.

“When I told them my name, they pointed their weapons at me and their laser [sights] at my head and chest and I was immediately detained … as if they were waiting for me, as if they had seized a big prize,” he says.

“They beat me with rifle butts and chairs,” he says. “After that, they poured sand over my head and shoved dirt into my mouth.

“I was on the floor on my knees with a blindfold and they were beating me … after this I was put in a vehicle, myself and many others piled on top of each other in a humiliating and degrading way,” he says. “The beating was constant.”

All of the doctors interviewed reported the same pattern of identification, detention, transfer to Israel and incarceration, and then being moved multiple times between prisons during their captivity.

In these facilities they say they were subjected to terrifying and inhumane treatment including being constantly beaten and kept in stress positions for hours and having loud music played constantly to prevent them from sleeping.

“Frankly, no matter how much I talk about what I experienced in detention, it is only a fraction of what truly happened,” says Abu Selmia.

“I am talking about being clubbed, being beaten with rifle butts and being attacked by dogs. There was little to no food, no personal hygiene, no soap inside the cells, no water, no toilet, no toilet paper … I saw people who were dying there.

“Every day is a humiliation, every day is degradation. There you are just a number, you are not a hospital director or a human being. I was beaten so badly I couldn’t use my legs or walk. No day passes without torture.”

In their testimonies, the doctors say they were also denied food and water, with some forced to eat toothpaste for lack of anything else. They said they were not allowed to wash or change their clothes, sometimes for months at a time.

Dr Mahmoud Abu Shehada, head of orthopaedic surgery at Nasser hospital, was arrested at work on 16 February 2024. “All the medical staff were told to leave. We [were] lined up between the administration building and the old Nasser building,” he says.

“We were subjected to severe beatings from Friday afternoon to the early hours of Saturday morning. It was a brutal night of assault and abuse. We were stripped naked; it was cold, and they deliberately sprayed us with cold water.”

Abu Shehada spent around three months in different detention centres, where he says he suffered “daily humiliations and torture” before being transferred to Israel’s desert Negev prison.

“In Negev prison, the detainees were suffering from skin diseases, scabies and severe infections with pus and discharge on the skin,” he says.

“After a while the infection spread to us. Weakness and fatigue took over to the point where many of us could barely stand.”

Dr Bassam Miqdad, head of orthopaedic surgery at the European hospital in Gaza, was detained after being stopped at a military checkpoint and spent seven months in Israeli prisons.

“There were Israeli nurses and doctors there but they wouldn’t even look at you,” he says. “I saw people with broken limbs and the guards would pull them around. They would ask, ‘where does it hurt?’ and then beat you on that injury.”

Miqdad said he found it very difficult to recount the violence and humiliation he says he was subjected to.

“It was not just the beatings [but] the way they treated us like we were not human,” he says. “In Nafha prison, they kept telling us to howl like dogs.”

Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a British-Palestinian associate professor of surgery, who volunteered as a doctor in Gaza during the early stages of the war, says the psychological impact of the “performative” nature of the humiliation and torture is “beyond devastating”.

“These are some of the most revered, most respected and senior members of their communities,” he says. “It is [..] a deliberate attempt to subjugate and violate the whole of Gazan society.”

To date, two of Gaza’s most senior doctors have died in Israeli detention. Dr Iyad al-Rantisi, a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist at Kamal Adwan hospital, died at Shikma prison.

[]Reports of torture, violence and psychological abuse of healthcare workers have been verified by the UN and published in reports by organisations such as HWW, Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights Israel.

In a HWW report from October 2024, healthcare workers gave testimonies of being electrocuted, hung by their arms from ceilings, being sexually assaulted and having their genitals mutilated.[...]

Any notion that Trump’s idiotic and inhuman “beach plaza” ethnic cleansing plans for Gaza will be a “resolution” for this struggle by the Palestinians and the 500 million strong Arab nation they are part of, and the Third World beyond, is not serious.

Trump’s blood curdling threat to “unleash hell” – threatening the current ceasefire – follows similar warnings from the Zionists, but the Gazans have refused to bow even to such barbarity and Hamas militancy is still standing after 16 months while the Zionists are split wide apart.

Their onslaught has stirred the hatred and rebelliousness of the entire Middle East and far beyond, adding hugely to the seething mass of world anti-imperialism that will eventually topple not just Zionism but the entire imperialist order.

The sick “guns not butter” responses of the European bourgeoisies to Trump’s Ukraine “peace drive” meanwhile demonstrate the warmongering nature of imperialism more than ever.

The demented hypocrisy and lies of the Europeans have nothing to do with Ukraine at all, but reflect the same readying for World War that Trumpism does, as a cover and “explanation” for the disaster their capitalism has brought upon the world.

The insane costs will push the Slump burdens deeper and harder onto ordinary people than ever – who will finally be forced into revolt to survive.

But they will have to overcome 100 years of brainwashed hostility to communism and “democracy” illusions. Building Leninism ever more crucial. DH

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Bangladesh’s Washington-installed neoliberal banker Mohammed Yunus’s desperate “hunt the devils” pogrom against the Awami League and brutal police suppression of protesting unemployed teachers exposes fake-“lefts” of all shades, who either treacherously backed the Western-provoked “student” unrest that toppled Sheikh Hasina’s nationalist anti-imperialism (e.g. RCP), or, like Lalkar, gullibly fell for Western aid-agency “progressive-financier” fabrications. Unrest grows as capitalist crisis deepens, now compounded further by bankrupt US imperialism’s retreat from “soft power” aid bribery

The Bangladeshi Awami League has finally begun to regroup and resist Mohammed Yunus’s imperialist-imposed fascism after overcoming the demoralising sudden flight into exile of its leader, deposed prime minister, Sheikh Hasina. She fled to India on 5th August 2024 as instructed by the military, and without resigning.

The League also needed to overcome months of violent mob intimidation, job purges, arson attacks on homes, arbitrary arrests and disappearances, torture and extra-judicial killings, as well as the imposition of state censorship and attacks on journalists.

On 29th January, the bourgeois-nationalist AL announced an escalating series of protests, planned to culminate in a mass blockade and general strike, to demand an end to legal charges against Hasina and the party leadership and an end to the ongoing persecution of religious minorities.

In response to a speech Hasina had planned to deliver to her supporters from exile on 5th February in support of this, a violent mob, backed by the fascist state’s security forces, burnt down and bulldozed the nationally significant former family residence of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (Hasina’s father), – from where Mujib led the new Bangladesh after independence in 1971, and where he and members of his family were assassinated, including a 10-year-old child. Violent thugs also attacked current residences linked to Hasina’s family and other AL leaders now in exile, and destroyed murals commemorating Sheikh Mujib.

One such outrage was thwarted by locals who attacked “student” provocateurs attempting to vandalise a former minister’s home. Using this as a pretext, the Yunus clique launched the sinisterly named ‘Operation Devil Hunt’ on 8th February, involving army personnel, police, and specialised units directed by a new command centre in an operation to hunt down Awami League members and supporters; – so named to dehumanise the AL and whip up medieval religious-obscurantist hostility and vigilante violence against them. The campaign has echoes of the sinister British psyops campaigns against the Indonesian Communist Party leading up to the 1965 massacres of up to 2 million party members and sympathisers. “As long as the devils exist, the ‘Operation Devil Hunt’ will continue,” said the Home Adviser, Lt Gen (Retd) Md Jahangir Alam Chowdhury).

Largely hidden through press censorship, 8,664 people associated with the AL have been arbitrarily rounded up and detained in the operation at the time of writing (15 days into the launch of the operation), and many more have been arrested under general police charges, beaten up, disappeared or butchered, – including a local party organiser whose mutilated and decapitated corpse was found at the side of a railway line.

Far from being a sign of strength, this panicked response exposes the coup regime’s weakness; – now threatened with widespread social unrest as the capitalist system disintegrates, and as Trump’s “America First” isolationist response to US monopoly-imperialist bankruptcy withdraws financial support. Despite the key role it played in bringing Hasina down last August, the military-created, right-wing Bangladesh National Party is also fearful – and has warned Yunus that his escalating mob violence and delayed elections could lead to widespread unrest and a resurgence in support for the AL. Significantly, Yunus has not yet felt able to impose an outright ban on the Awami League despite the repression.

Further attempts to demonise the Awami League (literally, to “root out all devils”) came with Yunus’s visit to some empty rooms in some abandoned building somewhere in Dhaka which he asserted, without providing any evidence, to be a “secret detention centre” linked to alleged disappearances and torture of Hasina’s opponents.

He attempted to describe a possible existence of a nationwide network of “torture cells” in the most awkward, ambiguous and confused language imaginable, by shiftily asserting that he was “under the impression that”… “perhaps”… “different versions [of such cells] exist”… “Some say there are 700 such cells, others say 800…” The number is “yet to be determined” because “there are some known”, “while others yet to be discovered”.

A clock with no hands is more precise than this!

This pathetic stunt coincided with a conveniently timed report from the stooge United Nations declaring that 1,400 people “may have been” killed during the anti-Hasina protests that preceded her fall, – a completely arbitrary figure that contradicts a figure of 841 previously claimed by Yunus’s administration, which as such is also not to be believed in principle; – and particularly as it is not clear how many of those alleged killings were actually of supporters of the Awami League.

Far more credence should be given to the AL’s claims that police at the time had no other means to restore order but to use force after the killings of numerous police officers and arson attacks against police stations by stirred up reactionary mobs as part of a premeditated (international) conspiracy to overthrow Hasina’s government (the military had refused to comply with orders to step in and quell the violence). The AL made this statement on the UN report:

The report issued by the United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) on Bangladesh at the invitation of the oppressive Yunus government is completely one-sided. On behalf of the All-European Awami League, we strongly condemn this report.

The UN investigation report on human rights violations in Bangladesh states that human rights violations took place in July-August with the knowledge, coordination, and direction of political leadership and senior security officials. The report claims that the former government, along with its security and intelligence agencies, collaborated with the Awami League to commit serious human rights violations through violent means. It alleges that hundreds of extrajudicial killings occurred and thousands of protesters were subjected to excessive force. Additionally, there were cases of arbitrary detention, torture, and other forms of abuse.

The question is, when a democratically elected government faces a premeditated conspiracy to overthrow it, should it try to thwart that conspiracy in the interest of the people, or should it remain passive?

The UNHRC report mentions that between July 1 and August 15, a total of 44 police officers were killed in various incidents across Bangladesh. This is where the fundamental truth emerges. We all remember that Hasib Al Islam, the so-called coordinator of the so-called anti-discrimination student movement, said in a television talk show: “If the metro rail had not been set on fire or if the police had not been killed, the revolution would not have been so easily achieved.”

We can also recall the speech of the chief advisor of the current oppressive government, Dr. Muhammad Yunus, at the ‘Clinton Global Initiative Leaders Stage’ event in New York last September. During his speech, he called his then-special assistant Mahfuz Alam on stage and said, “This was a meticulously designed movement. There was no leader, the students and the public knew nothing. And the mastermind was Mahfuz Alam.” He did not stop there. Regarding the so-called July-August movement, he stated, “This was not something that happened suddenly. It was a very well-organized movement. Furthermore, such a large movement took place, but no one knew who its leader was. As a result, no one could be arrested, nor could it be said that arresting one person would end the movement.”

This statement makes it clear that the head of the current oppressive government was directly involved in a conspiracy to overthrow a democratically elected government.

The UNHRC report has failed to mention several critical aspects of the July-August killings. After forming his interim government, Dr. Muhammad Yunus appointed M. Sakhawat Hossain as the Home Minister [sic – Adviser]. On August 12, while visiting injured Ansar members at CMH Hospital, Sakhawat Hossain told journalists: “Hearing the statements of the injured Ansar members, I am astonished. There are very few police gunshot wounds among them. Instead, they were hit by 7.62mm rifle bullets fired by people in civilian clothing. A massive investigation is needed. Who are these people? How did they get hold of 7.62mm rifles?” He further stated, “It is understandable that police have 7.62mm rifles, but who were the people in civilian clothing firing inside the Ansar gate? This is extremely serious.”

The entire world knows that between July and August, particularly after August 5, widespread violence took place across the country. Awami League supporters, religious minorities, government officials, and security personnel were targeted in attacks. On August 5 alone, 25 police officers were killed. The student movement began on July 7, and no oppression was carried out against them. However, from July 15, killings and arson attacks began, which were part of that meticulously designed conspiracy. A highly orchestrated massacre took place. When six people were killed, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina immediately formed a judicial investigation committee. She even sought UN assistance for the investigation, and the process had begun. However, after Yunus seized power by ousting a democratically elected government, he shut down the judicial investigation committee’s activities, which is highly suspicious. This proves that they supplied weapons to civilians and orchestrated killings to seize power.

Why did the UN investigation committee fail to examine these matters? That is our question. We urge the UN to conduct a forensic examination of the bodies with appropriate experts to uncover the truth.

After July 1, numerous police stations across the country were attacked. Protesters set fire to several stations, and more than 450 police stations were vandalized. How did the UNHRC overlook these facts in its report?

We firmly believe that the UN report is biased and was prepared under the dictates of the Yunus government. We reject this report. It is astonishing that an institution like the United Nations could engage in such actions.

We believe that the UN should take responsibility and withdraw this one-sided report.

M. Nazrul Islam, President, All-European Awami League

Brig Gen (Retd) M Sakhawat Hossein was removed from his position as Home Adviser after his call for an investigation into the shooting of members of the Ansar security militia by “people in civilian clothing” following protests by the deceptively named “Students Against Discrimination” (SAD). He had also made a declaration stating his respect for the Awami League. He was replaced by Lt Gen (Retd) Jahangir Chowdhury of the above mentioned “eliminate the devils” quote.

It is not ruled out that there was some crudeness in the heat of the moment in the response of the police, and that innocent people were needlessly killed; and there is no suggestion that Leninism in any way supports Hasina and the Awami League’s nationalist anti-imperialism and the methods they use (regardless of what socialist-reformist sentiments there is likely to be within the AL’s membership). But any defeat inflicted on imperialism and its local stooges is to be welcome, as it clears the way for the struggle for socialism. Bringing down the Yunus clique would be an excellent first step.

Fake-“lefts” of all shades stand exposed by these recent developments.

This includes both the “new” RCP branding of Trotskyist subjective-idealism (Socialist Appeal) which egged on the middle class SAD students during the unrest, ignoring their alignment with reactionary right-wing parties such as the BNP as well as assorted sectarian, pro-Pakistan Islamist groups like Jamaat-e-Islami, – and the muddled and vacillating “defence” of Hasina by the museum-Stalinist CPGB-ML.

Both trends of anti-Leninist revisionism, either willingly or through gross philistinism, fell hook-line-and-sinker for the bogus line that the anti-Hasina students were simply protesting to the demand a “fair recruitment process” to replace the quota system for government jobs.

This “positive reverse discrimination” quota system was introduced in 1972 by Sheikh Mujib following the defeat of the genocidal Pakistani war of occupation of the then “East Pakistan” in 1971. It aimed to redress economic imbalances in the newly liberated Bangladesh by reserving a percentage of government jobs to war veterans, women affected by the war and people from various marginalised districts. It also helped ensure that the new civil service was not under the influence of pro-Pakistan elements.

This was extended by Hasina in 1997 to include descendants of liberation fighters because entitled veterans had been unable to benefit from the scheme as a result of persecution from the murderous Western-backed military dictatorships of Ziaur Rahman and then General Ershad that followed the brutal assassination of Mujib and most of his (and Hasina’s) family.

The scheme was abolished for higher grade jobs by Hasina in 2018 (but remained for the lower grades) as a compromise to avert Western-provoked student protests then. A High Court ruling declared this abolition to be illegal and the system was restored on 5th June 2024, thereby providing the pretext for renewed protests. Similar attempts at compromise were made on 21st July, when the Supreme Court increased merit-based recruitment to government jobs to 93%. Despite this, the unrest continued and became increasingly violent. Many police officers were killed – which provoked the forceful police response discussed above. A new single demand then emerged for the downfall of Hasina.

The fact that unrest continued to escalate after the SAD students had more-or-less achieved their demands indicates that the initial objection to the quota system was merely a pretext for counter-revolutionary “colour revolution” regime change.

The CPGB-ML’s head-scratching account of the quota system in a Lalkar article was so garbled and so full of lazily researched false assertions, such as a totally incorrect statement that Hasina did not support it, that it was of no use to anyone except pro-Western bourgeois confusion-mongers (see EPSR No1650]; whilst the duplicitous RCP gleefully amplified imperialist propaganda by portraying the quotas as “a corrupt system, used by Hasina’s regime to reward its loyalest lackeys” (EPSR No1647).

As quoted in the EPSR, whilst accepting the need for reforms, the president of the now outlawed Awami League’s student movement (the Bangladesh Chhatra League), Saddam Hussain, warned of the hardships a sudden abolition of the quota system would cause.

Recent brutal scenes of police violence against dogged daily sit-in protests of mainly female unemployed candidate primary school teachers validates Hussain’s warning. After the July Supreme Court judgment, 6,531 applicants saw their promised appointments suspended. These were then cancelled on 6th February by the High Court, leaving the applicants jobless and their dreams of a stable career shattered.

Their desperate attempts to fight back (ongoing at the time of writing) have been met with brutal police baton charges, sound grenades, water cannons and teargas.

Are these some of the “lackeys” the RCP were referring to???:

Police again used tear gas, water cannons, and batons to disperse protesters from the road leading to the Secretariat on Sunday. This incident occurred during a march by government primary school teachers demanding that the decision to cancel recruitment for assistant teachers in government primary schools be withdrawn.

The protesting candidates had been selected for the position of assistant teacher at government primary schools — a recruitment whose appointments were canceled following a High Court ruling. During the operation, police beat the male candidates with batons. 

While the male candidates left, the female candidates continued their protest by sitting on the street.

The incident took place in front of the Education Building, on the road leading to the Secretariat, at around 4pm. Women protesters remained at the scene until 5pm, chanting slogans such as “We Want Justice.”

“We have come to demand our rights. We will not leave the streets until our demands are met,” said a protester named Nowrin.

Another protester said: “After receiving a job recommendation, I now feel like a criminal. I have been thrown out onto the streets along with my mother, sister, and children.”

She claimed that the march had been peaceful until the police halted it by using batons and, later, water cannons. 

“I don’t understand why the police are using force against a peaceful protest,” she added.

Earlier that afternoon, protesters held a mass rally in front of the National Museum in Shahbagh, demanding the reinstatement of the canceled appointments for assistant teachers in government primary schools. From there, more than a thousand people marched to the High Court Shrine, where they encountered police obstruction on the road to the Secretariat. 

The protesters then took up positions on that road, but police attempted to disperse them using water cannons. Later, tear gas was deployed and batons were used, causing the protesters to flee the area.

Earlier in the day, protesters had gathered at the National Museum intersection in Shahbagh at 11am. Their pre-announced rally commenced around 11:30am with the national anthem, and they began their march from Shahbagh at around 3pm. 

Initially, they were heading toward the High Court via Dhaka University’s TSC and Mazar Road, but they later diverted toward the Secretariat. At that point, police barricaded the road in front of the Education Building and sprayed water on the protesters with a water cannon at around 4pm.

The protesters said that they have been demonstrating on the streets for 11 consecutive days and vowed to continue their sit-in until their demands are met.

Three individuals suspected of having political ties to the banned Chhatra League [the Awami League student movement referred to above – ed] were arrested during the police action at the protest. Protesters also claimed that several people were injured. [...]

Previously, police had used force against protesting teachers on multiple occasions. On February 9, police used water cannons, sound grenades, tear gas, and batons against them, and on Saturday, water cannons were again used to disperse the protesters.

As the EPSR explained, such positive discrimination measures are always open to accusations of favouritism (justified or otherwise), and will inevitably lead to suspicion, resentment and jealously amongst those who are unsuccessful, and the more so now as the capitalist crisis has deepened into open trade-war hostilities between imperialist powers and heads closer towards total Slump catastrophe and world war.

Bangladesh’s capitalist economy is in dire straits (a symptom of the disaster facing the entire world capitalist-imperialist system), with large-scale garment factory closures and resultant worker unrest, rising inflation, slowing GDP growth, currency devaluations, a spiralling debt-default crisis and a looming liquidity crunch, – its external debt amounts to $78.06 billion. This crisis has now been exacerbated by Donald Trump’s sudden suspension of almost all overseas aid operations worldwide:

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) on Saturday suspended its funding to the Muhammed Yunus-led interim Bangladesh government after President Donald Trump suspended all foreign aid for 90 days.[...]

USAID’s decision to suspend financial assistance to Bangladesh could have dire consequences for the Yunus-led government.

According to USAID, its program in Bangladesh is the largest in Asia, encompassing key global food security and health initiatives, along with critical democracy, governance, education, and environmental projects.

It is also the largest donor to Bangladesh’s humanitarian assistance portfolio, which addresses the Rohingya refugee crisis.

International funding has been crucial to aid programs, helping the country navigate economic turmoil and manage the Rohingya crisis, as well as restore stability to its key textile industry.

Last year, the Yunus administration requested $5 billion in financial aid from international lenders to stabilise its shrinking foreign exchange reserves. It had also sought a $4.7 billion bailout from the IMF.

Notably, in September 2024, the US had committed $202 million in aid to Bangladesh. This followed a 2021 agreement in which USAID had pledged $954 million in assistance between 2021 and 2026, of which $425 million had already been disbursed.

Compounding the potentially disastrous economic consequences of stopping the aid needed to prop up the stooge Yunus regime, is the political impact of Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE follow-on slash-and-burn destruction of almost the entire USAID “charity” system, and the blocking of the disbursement of funds from the CIA’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) front.

Yunus has long been a key figure in the international charity-giving racket, and his USAID-partnered Grameen Foundation’s microfinance system has been mythologised since the 1980s as “an innovative poverty-alleviating system of credit and female empowerment”, whereas its real purpose has been to undermine collective, socialist responses to poverty, and to break up long established communal-peasant systems of mutual aid. The debt burdens it has induced has caused immense suffering in rural communities for impoverished female recipients and their families (see Lamia Karim, Microfinance and its discontents (2011); and EPSR No1651).

Yunus himself has described the campaign to overthrow Hasina and install him into position as a “meticulously designed plan”; and a September 2024 report from the investigative-journalist website The Grayzone (quoted in EPSR No1652) exposed the crucial role the NED-subsidiary and US Republican Party-aligned International Republican Institute (IRI) played in destabilising Bangladesh by encouraging anti-Hasina (“anti-authoritarian”) dissent through the targeting of students, youth, ethnic minorities and LGBT activists with social and workers’ rights messaging from as far back as 2018 (CPGB-ML’s article refers to Wikileaks cables which show that Yunus had been in contact with the US embassy in Dhaka from at least 2007).

Further Grayzone revelations published in February focus on the IRI’s cynical co-option of gay and transgender activism as part of its plot to destabilise Bangladesh, with LGBT people reportedly seen as “uniquely disruptive actors” arising from the “discrimination and prejudice they face”. On top of this is Musk’s scrapping of $29 million of aid aimed at “strengthening the political landscape in Bangladesh”; and a further $21 million dollars initially aimed at “boosting voter turnout in India”, but disbursed in Bangladesh, $13.4 million of which had already been disbursed for “political and civic engagement” among students before the January 2024 elections in Bangladesh (as revealed by The Indian Express).

Oddly, The Grayzone made the same mistake as Lalkar in describing Yunus as a recipient of “a Swedish economic prize” when, in fact, he received the Nobel Peace Prize. This is despite the fact that a link embedded in its February piece leads to an article questioning why he received the Peace Prize and not the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences.

The bestowal of the Nobel Peace Prize on Yunus and his Grameen Bank in 2006, after much lobbying by his friend Bill Clinton, helped to reinforce his fabricated public persona as an “avuncular philanthropist”, and prepared the ground for his seizure of power last year by giving him a “progressive liberal” veneer.

The reformist-minded dupes of the CPGB-ML naïvely fell for this and the micro-finance “poverty-alleviation” fraud when they declared in their Lalkar article that Yunus “probably well deserved” the Prize (which would only be true in the sense of rewarding him for the reactionary role he has played in promoting imperialist interests around the world via his microfinance initiatives – the Prize’s real purpose).

Worse than this was the sinister ultra-leftism of the RCP, who willingly swallowed and regurgitated every stinking drop of anti-Awami League poison in support of the SAD student protesters, and even went as far as to declare ludicrously the Washington-backed military coup, which eventually toppled Hasina, to be not only a “revolution” but that “something akin to a (February 1917) dual power situation” had emerged (once it was clear that the military was calling the shots, not the students).

In a recent article written about the general dismantling of USAID, the RCP slide over the dirty role they play in giving a “left” veneer to such counter-revolutionary subterfuge. In it, they fail to mention their own supposed more “principled” opposition to the leaderships of anti-imperialist governments and workers’ states (e.g. Venezuela and Cuba) in pursuit of their “workers’ democracy” perfect revolution fantasies.

They describe the Western-imperialist sponsored shadowy “pro-democracy” NGOs and “human rights” organisations’ cynical manipulation of identify politics to undermine anti-imperialism, but their real criticism is, in essence, that their “links to US imperialism” are too obvious.

It is far more effective to slip in some identity politics to imply poor “human rights” (as they do in a 2021 piece on Cuba for example) in chants such as “Down with bureaucratism, down with corruption, down with inequality, down with capitalism, down with machismo, down with homophobia”, whilst declaring, “Long live the revolution, long live Fidel and long live socialism!”; - but all the while, undermining all confidence in Cuba’s proletarian dictatorship and the forceful measures it necessarily uses to suppress counter-revolution and truly defend the revolution (which they say “harks back to the worst times of the Stalinist repression”).

This is how they describe USAID’s tactical wokeness:

Many USAID-sponsored NGOs cloak their real purpose behind identity politics, professing to support women’s rights, minority rights, LGBT rights, and so on. This has now been exploited to justify the agency being gutted, with Trump pledging to eradicate “woke” spending, and Musk deriding USAID as a “viper’s nest of radical-left marxists [sic].”

In fact, the veneer of liberation is nothing but a Trojan horse concealing USAID’s pro-imperialist lobbying; not to mention blunting opposition to pro-US regimes by funnelling the anger of workers and radical youth towards ‘apolitical’, single-issue operations dependent on western cash, cash which invariably corrupts young activists.

But wait a minute! Who are these easily corruptible young activists?

According to one of the RCP’s leading “theorists”, Alan Woods, there are “probably millions” of unorganised young people who, as “proper, convinced, Marxists”, “feel communism in their guts, heart and soul”, and are “already drawing the correct conclusions” even before they have read Marx. If so, how come they are all so “invariably corrupted”?

And why all that rigmarole in his Lenin biography over Lenin’s alleged “polemical exaggeration” in What Is To Be Done? of the need for conscious revolutionary party-building over rank-and-file spontaneity? If the youths’ spontaneous radical instincts are so easily bought off, surely that demonstrates the need for the conscious leadership and guidance of a Bolshevik-style party of revolutionary theory of the kind that Lenin called for and built? (see EPSR No1652).

And finally, why would any anti-Hasina student groups who benefited from USAID political engagement “cash” just a few months before the coup be uniquely immune from this?

What light-minded dissembling frauds!!! And what utter contempt for the youth, who on the one hand they flatter as instinctive revolutionaries, while on the other, they declare that “each and every one of them” will “always” accept the king’s shilling when offered (which is what “invariably” means).

Now that the pure reactionary viciousness of the Yunus regime is plain for all but the most blinkered anti-communists to see, these slimy Trotsky revivalists slide away without saying a word. The CPGB-ML have yet to provided any clarity either.

Build Leninism, expose the charlatan fake-“lefts”.

Phil Waincliffe

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