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No 1651 20th December2024

Lurid Western distraction lies against toppled and balkanised Syria cannot hide the real perpetrators of genocidal horror and war devastation, bankrupt imperialism itself and its fascist tools in Kiev and Tel Aviv. Nor will more blitzing and smiting solve its Slump crisis problems or stop the rising tide of Third World hatred and hostility for brutal Western tyranny, now 25 years into its World War Three “solution” to Catastrophic crisis breakdown and failing across the board. Just the opposite – endless encouraged and funded savagery is teaching the whole world the falsity and lies of supposed “international justice”, “freedom” and “free market prosperity”. Trampling across elections in country after country with coups, false “colour revolutions” manipulations and assassination, while stepping up domestic repression, censorship and “anti-terror” police-state crackdowns – the path into outright fascism – further exposes the hoodwinking bourgeois “democracy” racket, the greatest fraud in human history. Overturning this stinking out of time monopoly capitalist order with revolution is the only truth. Build Leninism

The Western propaganda lie-machine has been in overdrive to milk (or invent) as much “heartrending” propaganda as possible from the downfall of Bashir Assad’s government in Syria.

But anyone with two neurones to rub together will dismiss yet another choreographed and manipulated hyping of “cheering crowds”, promised a “new future of openness and democracy after decades of authoritarianism” for the utter ruling class garbage and grovelling media hype it is.

Its degenerate hoodwinking promises are already well exposed in Libya, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia etc, all reduced to a devastated, fragmented or primitive mess following Western invasion or blitzing “rescues” to “install democracy” and “remove dictatorships”, creating ever more hostility for the West.

The newly balkanised Syria, much of it occupied by Western countries, and disarmed by extensive US-armed Zionist blitzing of its entire defences will not be long behind.

Only a few more synapses are needed to understand that the sudden exclusive focus on the alleged atrocities of the flaky Assad regime is an utterly desperate exercise in cynical propaganda stampeding of public opinion to cover up and distract from the grotesque guilty holocaust of the Gaza onslaught and the West Bank in Palestine.

As intended, that is now receiving zero mainstream media coverage (even less than before from a compliant bourgeois media) despite continuing daily gratuitous slaughter of men, women and especially children, by blitzing, sniping, starvation, water deprivation and disease.

More than that, this propaganda deluge aims to divert attention from the totality of imperialism’s demented world crisis warmongering, (of which Gaza is just a part, albeit a large one), now so monstrously widespread and continuous that it is destroying (or rather exposing the sham of) the whole post-war framework of supposed “international justice”, the stooge “United Nations” and “democratic freedom” and “prosperity”.

The “democracy” racket is the ideological mainstay of the imperialist order, always its best weapon for maintaining control through brainwashed anti-communist compliance and deadly reformist delusions about steady improvement through peaceful parliamentary means.

Losing its effectiveness means the ruling class must show its true face, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie openly turning to brute force and repression – exactly the pattern throughout the world and especially in this “year of elections” which has seen non-stop subversion, corruption, sabotage, “lawfare” manipulation, endless false “ballot-fixing” accusations and outright civil war in country after country, throughout Latin America (Peru, Ecuador, Brazil and Venezuela), Africa (Kenya, Mozambique) and east Europe, all trying to topple the wave of deepening anti-imperialist anti-ruling class sentiment being reflected in votes everywhere.

South Korea’s reactionary rulers nervously toy with a martial law coup, France’s Macron defies the popular vote with now two ridiculous minority governments, Germany’s government is imploding and the imperialist stooge British Labour Party, with an unenthusiastic vote of less than 17% and falling (ridiculously declared a “landslide”!!!!) keeps “relaunching” itself, using the hollowest of spin and lies to pretend it is doing something when its only purpose is to impose the same slump conditions the Tories did before them (using age-old reformist excuse of being “blown off course by unexpected economic conditions” only this time they were expected even before they took office).

And in Eastern Europe? One election in Romania, is simply annulled because it does not suit the West; another in Georgia is subjected to artificially fomented demonstrations; a similar result in Slovakia, electing an anti-EU president, subject to a (failed) assassination attempt.

All these are facets of the sick and degenerate Slump reality of barbaric capitalist rule which is most sharply of all sharply exposed with every passing day of this Zionist imposed holocaust.

It does not take much further brain power to see that this risible “freedom” cheering by the sectarian Sunni middle-class in the country – egged on by the West and by the oil rich tribal/monarchist-thug Arab Gulf state stooges for imperialism, still sitting on their hands over the wholesale extermination of the Gazan people after 15 months – is either the product of bamboozled brains or wholly self-interested class contempt for the still continuing inhuman barbarities in Zionland just across the border, the fight against which the Assadites had supported (if inadequately).

It is beyond obvious that the Damascus regime has been toppled by imperialist skulduggery precisely because of that support, and the overall anti-imperialist stance taken by Syria, however erratically, over decades, not because of any absurd flannel about “restoring democracy” or “ending tyranny”.

The imperialist world unleashed and sustains this demented Zionist genocidal fanaticism because its whole system is now teetering on the edge of the greatest breakdown in all history and its needs a bludgeon to suppress rising revolt.

Warmongering, domestic censorship and police state repression is the bourgeoisie’s only answer to its economic and political crisis unstoppably plunging into total Catastrophe for two and a half decades already and heading for even worse as Marxist science has always said (see economics box) against all other philosophy from class collaborating TUC-Labourite treachery to the whole slew of shallow fake-“leftist” empty posturing about “revolution”.

But that World War solution, plotted and set in train three decades ago and triggered partly by the shock of the 9/11 attacks on the New York World Trade Centre, (after a “warm-up” NATO blitzing of the Serbian nationalist remnants of socialist Yugoslavia in 1999) has been a disastrous failure.

The opening blitzings on Afghanistan and Iraq were soon mired in defeat and growing insurgency (labelled “terrorism”), with the “shock and awe” destruction doing nothing to solve the Empire’s crisis problems; instead of cowing the world back into submission, to be docilely exploited in a prosperous New American Century (for the rich only), both were soon facing ever increasing resistance and revolt.

As every rational analyst predicted, the invasions generated enormous escalation of the hostility and hatred of the West throughout the Third World but especially in Iraq itself and the whole Middle East region, with massive recruitment into “terrorist” and “jihadist” movements (meaning in fact the resistance to Western domination, finding its expression in its own Islamic cultural traditions, for all their inadequate religious backwardness, in the absence of Marxist-Leninist leadership, temporarily absent because of revisionism’s failings).

Far from stabilising the deepening crisis collapse which has been shaking the monopoly capitalist order for decades (in Latin America, in the Asian currency meltdown, and the implosion of the credit-inflated dotcom boom) the warmongering only helped precipitate the great Global Credit collapse in 2008-9 (relentlessly building up for decades).

That triggered the gigantic upheaval of the Arab Spring, going far beyond the growing jihadism/terrorism into a mass street revolutionary upsurge which shook the imperialist system to the core and which it has been trying to put back in the bottle ever since.

On top, from before the 2003 Iraq invasion, the country has been pegged by the Pentagon as one of the world’s “rogue states”, to be dealt with as part of plans for restoring “lost” US world domination, along with Afghanistan, North Korea, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Vietnam, Venezuela, and any other communist states or left-leaning bourgeois nationalists, showing even the smallest signs of anti-imperialist defiance, – and most of all China.

It is with that perspective in mind, that the current overturn needs to be understood.

And while Syria’s alleged “war crimes” must be examined, the overriding context needs to be the great crisis of the whole capitalist system and its scapegoating belligerence to cover up its own system’s total breakdown into Catastrophe and particularly those 2011 upheavals.

Some of the accusations might well be true, but much is the product of a decade and a half of CIA/MI6/Zionist pysops fabrication, lurid exaggeration and lies, (as non-stop also against Russia, China, North Korea and other “demons”), and much of it the desperate and devastating response to, and consequence of, 14 years of savage siege sanctions and imperialist instigated civil war fostered and maintained by deliberately induced butchery.

It has been calculatedly sustained by outside agencies from the CIA/Zionists, to the venal imperialist ambitions of the Turks (playing a dirty game “supporting” Palestinian rights mixed with bourgeois expansionist ambition, “wearing two shoes on one foot” as the Italians say).

The long “civil” war against Damascus, despite various complications, was first of all a deliberately whipped-up conflict by imperialism, as it tried to deal with the 2011 Egypt and Tunisia revolutionary eruptions.

They were part of a bogus “extension to the Arab Spring”, set in train by Western intelligence counter-revolutionary provocations in Libya and Syria (long in preparation), stirring as much divisiveness as possible, with maximum barbarity from the start, aimed at neutralising any support these maverick “left” nationalists might have given to Cairo or Tunis (just next door and part of the Arab nation but with previously imperialist stooge dictators).

The aim was to contain the genuine mass spontaneous anti-imperialist uprisings of Tunisia, and then the giant population of Egypt, pouring by the millions onto the streets in a ferment, plus the subsequent turmoil rippling into Yemen, Bahrain, and even stirrings in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and elsewhere, all responding to the great imperialist breakdown revealed by the world Bank Credit breakdown.

Total lies were told then and ever since about the alleged “peaceful” protests “violently put down” by Assad and Gaddafi when the reality was of violence and chaos stirred up by Western provocateurs, (and inflamed by Western media reports as usual) including multiple incidents of attacks on state forces (as various independent bourgeois journalists have documented like Active Measures).

Such provocations have a long exposed history all the way back to the MI6 paid street demonstrators in Iran used to whip up sentiment against the left nationalist Mohammad Mossadeq, toppled in 1953.

Hidden snipers were used to shoot into the 2011 demonstrations, such as were successfully set going, to create mayhem and violence and provoke further crackdowns by the state forces, just as they were used on the Maidan to inflame the pro-Western demonstrators in Ukraine in 2014, and against the Venezuelans during the failed anti-Chávez coup in 2003.

So hollow was this fake revolt in Libya, threatening to peter out, that a NATO invasion had to be used to rescue its counter-revolution but in Syria enough sectarian conflict prevailed from Ottoman empire days that a successful civil war could be instigated, raging off and on with maximum viciousness more or less ever since.

It has caused huge confusion because Western efforts to use local sectarianism to spread terror and destruction – as done by recruiting backward mujaheddin against the communist government in Afghanistan in the 1980s (which the fake-“left” eagerly points out to justify their own anti-terrorism, by wrongly declaring it all “run by the CIA”, so lining up with imperialism) – have repeatedly backfired; different groups have turned against imperialism, a phenomenon with its own CIA designation of “blowback” – most notably the notorious ISIS pursuing its own religiously guided path hostile to everyone but with the essential aim of getting imperialism off its back.

So other groups have been “turned” or even specifically set up by the West, probably including al-Nusra, which got lots of favourable Western coverage during the siege of Aleppo by Damascus and Russia, and certainly the now hailed HTS misleadingly declared to be an offshoot of al Qaeda, when in fact it was a complete breakaway into western stoogery as far as can be determined from press reports.

The purpose has been a diversion from the Zionist genocide as well as toppling the Empire-hated Assads, for which confected Western Syria “outrage” has been turned up to eleven.

Much of the “revealed” atrocity is pure hokum judged from both from the ludicrous nature of the “revelations” po-facedly put forwards by unquestioning bourgeois-serving media (“Look a ‘people presser’” said one TV report, pointing at some steel shelves in a prison, declared to be a “device to compress bodies”, for what possible purpose left unexplained but more immediately to stir gruesome “Dr Evil” mind-images, like the non-existent “people shredder” allegedly used in Saddam Hussein’s prisons but which was actually a complete invention by Western intelligence during the 2003 Iraq invasion.)

Other media hype is just as ludicrous with reporters turning up at some scrappy patches of land declared to be “mass graves” with allegedly “more than 150,000 bodies in them” and “possibly many more”.

Or possibly not since no actual remains at all were shown and particularly not if these “mass graves” are anything like those alleged against the Saddam Hussein regime, when Washington and London asserted there were 300,000 bodies in mass graves, only for it to be revealed later that no forensic excavations had been done to prove anything about any bodies at all (EPSR 1243 27-07-04).

As pointed out then, it did not make Saddam’s regime any more savoury but it does make clear what kind of psyops hysteria is being whipped up as some Internet commentary has picked such as “Syrian Girl”:

1. In 2017 Amnesty international did an “estimate” that there were 13,000 prisoners executed at Sednaya. The estimate was based off smoke from a chimney stack. Back then everyone thought the number was outrageously high and stupid. Now we end up with 150,000 where did that come from?

2. When the Sednaya prison was raided only 4300 prisoners were found. People claimed there must be hidden cells with thousands of people and all that turned out to be false.

3. Only 40 bodies were found in a morgue. So the media claimed that the bodies of the other prisoners were melted away with acid or put in “ovens”

4. When people didn’t believe it, they invented this mass grave story and showed us all a some drone footage of some sand. We saw no bodies in this mass graves unlike the mass graves in Gaza that Israel left behind in al Shifa hospital.

All of this is an attempt to deflect from Israel’s crimes.

Why didn’t they just claim there was 6 million dead? Or 40 beheaded babies in Sednaya? The bigger the lie the more likely people will believe it, right? Proof? doesn’t matter. Did it matter when we disproved all of Israel’s lies about Oct 7th to the thousands of Palestinians who have died since?

The assertions were based on some unverified witness accounts, vaguely around having seen “some trucks unload bodies” and by locals, more than possibly with their own axes to grind.

One sophisticated, perfect English speaking witness, was obviously fully coached – underlined by his knowing political comment calculatedly declaring that “after 14 years the Syrian people have liberated themselves” (a key phrase repeated in multiple bourgeois reports).

Really? All on their own? The rebellion was not hugely boosted by massive years-long US occupation in the North-East, with heavy weaponry and massive airpower, arming and funding the colluding petty bourgeois Kurds, (and depriving Damascus of its oil and other revenues)? Not aided and pushed by the Turkish military and logistics presence in two Syrian territory enclaves along its northern border? Not given vast help and training in Western stooge monarchy Jordan by the $1000 million Timber Sycamore CIA programme etc (or the even more disastrous $500M Pentagon training programme) for some of the jihadists (those the imperialist were able to keep onside – unlike the ISIS blowback for example)? Or not financed and politically supported by aid from the USAID and other “NGOs” and some Gulf states (particularly anti-Assad Qatar but also Saudi Arabia)? Not helped by bombing runs over a decade from US or Zionist planes etc etc and deliberate weapons “leaks” to selected “jihadists” (those playing the imperialist game like al-Nusra and this HTS which broke with the anti-American al-Qaeda years ago – and therefore is not on the same side as the anti-Western jihadists, a critical point the bourgeois press (and the fake-“left”) deliberately confuse)????

None of which means anyone should believe that the Assad family, and its feeble restraint of the most backward, corrupt and crudely thuggish elements in its Baathist Alawite sectarian state, constituted any kind of future for the country or the Arab world in general, or that its opportunist bourgeois nationalist control was ever going to deliver any stability, (as Leninist understanding has always made clear, calling only for defeat for imperialist attacks, not any support for Assad Baathism itself (along Kornilov lines)).

Even the most principled of capitalist nationalist regimes would not succeed in a world heading into the greatest crisis collapse in all history, which will exempt noone from its savagery (save possibly the ever more significant Chinese workers state if its revisionist Beijing leadership can stay sufficiently alert against inevitable imperialist world war) and is solvable only by socialist revolution.

Capitalism’s crisis contradictions have been driving all into devastating Slump and intensifying trade war since the turn of the century and will explode into all-out conflict soon between even the biggest powers (as Donald Trump makes bloodcurdlingly clear and the Ukraine war is foreshadowing, with sanctions and Washington’s Nordstream sabotage leaving Germany and France’s economies reeling – as the US always intended).

But the West is not doing this to expose crimes anyway – and in fact has a record of collaborating with Syria at various points when it suited as one of the few relatively principled bourgeois journalists, Seymour Hersh recently recalled:

[...in 2003] I had been told earlier by persons in the US intelligence community that Syria, then led by Bashar Assad—the son of Hafez Assad, who had collaborated with Henry Kissinger during the Nixon administration—had become one of America’s best intelligence sources in the fight against Al Qaeda. Ironically, Syria had been on the State Department terrorism list since 1979 and was considered by the Bush administration to be a sponsor of state terrorism. At one point, the nation was publicly named by the White House to be a junior member of its infamous “Axis of Evil” while it was providing much valued intelligence to the CIA.[]

I had a contact in Beirut who initially arranged a meeting with me with Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, who was assassinated by Israel in his Beirut hideaway on September 27. From Nasrallah’s offices it was a short car ride across the Syrian border to Damascus.

[..]And so I met with Assad, in his unpretentious office in downtown Damascus. I was full of CIA leaks about the reliable information Assad had provided the agency, including hundreds of files on the membership and operations of Al Qaeda. It was invaluable information. I also knew the Syrian intelligence service had hundreds of files on the men who participated in the 9/11 attacks and, so I had been told in Washington, many files on those who wanted to participate.

Assad’s intelligence service also had tipped off the US to an impending Al Qaeda bombing attack on the headquarters of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet, headquartered in Bahrain. Assad did not want to talk about that because, so I thought, it was newly acquired intelligence.

It was hard not to be impressed, especially when I was told that Assad, under pressure from the CIA, had given the US the name of his government’s most vital agent inside Al Qaeda. There was a condition that came with the name—that the CIA would make no direct approach to recruit the agent. Of course, the agency did, presumably with wads of cash. The Syrian source rebuffed the US recruiting attempt and angrily broke off contact with the Syrian intelligence services. Net gain: minus one fantastic source.

The Syrian president insisted that I not publish a word of this—about his and America’s, indiscretions—and I did not. But I was surprised by his willingness to help America beat Al Qaeda. I would learn that Israel, once informed of the information provided by Assad, remained skeptical.

Which only emphasises that all this demonising is psyops distortion, whatever components might have a basis in the more unpleasant realities or confusions of this Damascus bourgeois nationalism.

It is on a par with the endless lies told about Russia, and the war waged against it by NATO through its Kiev stoogery, not least starting with the notion that Moscow is the “aggressor” when its Special Military Operation was responding to eight years of war waged on the Russia speaking east of Ukraine by fanatical reactionary Ukrainian nationalism, saturated in a history of European monarchist reaction, anti-communist hatred and then Nazi-collaboration throughout the Second World War (including much participation in slaughtering communists and Jews behind the Stepan Bandera/Hitler collaboration).

The anti-Syrian coverage echoes the parroted repetition by the Western media of the “atrocity” accusations, fabrications and distortions made by these Banderite Nazis, and their risible war propaganda about “Russian losses”, all never verified, checked or queried despite their obvious falsity, and on many occasions forensic discrediting by analysts like former UN weapons inspection Scott Ritter (Bucha lies, the Kramatorsk station missile (fired by Ukraine itself), etc etc).

All the Ukrainians’ accusations of “genocide” intentions as hysterically pumped out by the squat green fascist toad Zelensky and his Bandera-worshipping compatriots in the Swastika-toting Azov brigade are swallowed and reprinted wholesale, even though there has been no such civilian wiping-out after nearly three years of war, and clearly nothing like the systematic holocaust by the Zionists in Gaza and the West Bank (in just over one year).

There is valid criticism to be made of Vladimir Putin’s bonapartist juggling act between his oligarch restoration bourgeoisie and the mass of the population, still much of it nostalgic for former Soviet times – and no question of support as such for his anti-communist Orthodox Church philistinism, which offers no answers to the world crisis collapse of the capitalism he maintains – but it does not come from swallowing the Kievite thugs’ fascist fabrications and lies, on behalf of degenerating Western imperialism.

That is the main threat to the world and for the moment, the sole enemy to concentrate on, welcoming any defeat it suffers, including exposing its deadly lies and Goebbels falsities aiming to stampede public opinion into a jingoistic hate frenzy to keep its wars going.

The same with Syria where the latest media hysteria matches past imperialist form, from outright lies about babies tipped out of incubators (the first Gulf War), the notorious Gulf of Tonkin non-attack which set off the US onslaught on North Vietnam; the British and CIA false newspapers and broadcasts helping inflame the Indonesian anti-communist pogrom of 1965 (killing at least 1 million and perhaps up to three; the harbouring of (non-existent) WMD in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (in the dodgy dossier made-up by the Blairites on Washington’s behalf); the risible “Viagra fuelled rape-squads” in Gaddafi’s Libya to help justify NATO invasion; the equally non-existent “rape camps” propaganda during ten years of anti-Serbian civil war in former socialist Yugoslavia (while ignoring the real atrocities, past and present, of the pro-Nazi Croatian Ustashe breakaways and the Bosnian reactionaries); outright fabrications about “chemical weapons” attacks during the long and barbaric sectarian civil war in Syria itself and other lies from the anti-Assad “White Helmets” (all being repeated again now despite whistleblowing discrediting of media reports and revelations about how the whole fraudulent “rescue” movement was set up by British ex-military and saturated with MI6 personnel); and all the pro-Zionist lies told and endlessly repeated by the compliant Western media during the Palestinian uprising of the last 15 months, from the monstrous fascist assertions about “rape”, or “burning alive” atrocities, never-happened baby beheadings and mass killings of festival-goers during the Hamas breakout from the Gaza concentration camp (when some half of the deaths were Zionist inflicted, victims of the Jewish military’s infamous “let no prisoners be taken” Hannibal Directive).

And that compounded by the 15 months of non-stop barefaced official lie denials by Tel Aviv about its wanton civilian blitzing, hospital and school bombing, starvation aid blockades, maiming, journalist assassinations by the dozen, deliberate sniper-drone child targeting, inhuman prison torture, rape and killing, and the daily murder and maiming terrorising of the West Bank by outright fascist settler violence (begun long before Hamas even existed and now hugely escalated with effective army approval) – all attempting complete extermination as again Seymour Hersh spells out (but without grasping the utter disaster this is for imperialism and its ideological grip on the world):

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has defeated Hamas, bombed Hezbollah into a corner, and largely destroyed Iran’s capability to defend itself against future Israeli air attacks. He has assassinated enemies and ignored the rage of much of the world about Israel’s continued attacks against defenseless Gaza, all the while enjoying sustained political and military support from the Biden White House. Now he is looking forward to even greater backing from the incoming Trump administration. American bombs and dollars are still flowing into Israel, as the economy there continues its slump, with many successful high-tech firms having fled months ago from Israel’s unsettled market and constant inflation.

[...]Throughout, Netanyahu and his subordinates in the government have turned language inside out and continued bombing innocents in Gaza, the West Bank, Beirut, and Baalbek.

Israel’s recent ceasefire agreement with Lebanon is a perfect example of such double-talk. An expert on international negotiations recently gave me a blistering assessment of the ceasefire that some leading American newspapers have hailed as a significant step toward peace. The Western media has fostered hope that a similar agreement can be reached with the diminished Hamas leadership to bring the surviving October 7 hostages, if there are any, home from Gaza.

“It is bizarre,” the expert told me. “There are no signatory parties on behalf of Country A, Country B. It is not even an agreement. It’s an announcement by the US and France that they understand X, Y and Z. It’s all about what the US and France understand but not the obligations of the parties.”

[It] is in no way “legally binding and has no duration . . . but US officials have said it is designed to be permanent.” The peace, if it comes, will be monitored by soldiers of the reinvigorated Lebanese Armed Forces, whose formerly demoralized troops were recently described by the Economist as one of the few respected institutions left in a chronically fragmented country. Adding to the complications, the expert said, is the fact that most LAF soldiers “view Israel as the enemy, especially since Israel is burning one-third of the country to the ground. The army will never let itself be used against Hezbollah. LAF was always a force for internal security . . . just as [are] all Middle Eastern armies the US controls and arms and trains. . . . And if the US cares so much about the LAF then why is it letting the Israelis kill LAF soldiers and officers?”

The expert was referring to the fact that the Israeli military and air force have continued their attacks in southern Lebanon under the auspices of a side ceasefire agreement between the US and Israel that permits such attacks to take place up to fifteen miles north of the border with Israel, and sometimes miles beyond that limit if intelligence warrants them. The agreement also enabled those who had fled their homes in northern Israel and southern Lebanon to return. Roads on both sides of the border have been filled by those desperate to return home. Many of the returning Lebanese are Shia supporters of Hezbollah.

Reports in the Western media largely depict the near daily Israeli bombing in Lebanon as primarily aimed at Hezbollah targets. Not so, said the expert, who has been monitoring the Middle East for decades. “Israeli jets were not bombing Hezbollah positions throughout Lebanon,” he told me. “They were destroying every Shia village and neighborhood in the country. They were destroying hospitals, schools and mosques and social and financial institutions, and they were targeting ambulances drivers and emergency healthcare workers.”

The United States, he told me, despite its public support for the ceasefire, is at the same time supporting the Israeli war in Lebanon. Washington, he said, “is not a neutral and well-intentioned observer here. If the US wanted to hold Lebanon together” it would pressure Israel—that is, Netanyahu—to back off.

The Biden administration, he said, “has not been engaged in diplomacy. It has just been delivering Israeli ultimatums demanding that Hezbollah and Lebanon surrender.”

I took the expert’s opinion—I’ve not seen anything close to his view in an American newspaper—to a well-informed American official known for his honesty and integrity.

He was blunt. “Israel is not waiting for the next go-around. They are mopping up and consolidating their current hold” in their part of the Middle East. “It is a fact,” he said, that “when a ceasefire is broken in the Middle East, the Israelis are the ones to do it first. Hezbollah is trying to pretend that they are still a force to be dealt with, but it’s all over.

“The game is also over [for Hamas] in Gaza,” he said. “The brave ones who tried to fight are all dead, and all those who are left are too chickenshit to fight.” He said another blow to any hope for Hamas came during the recent state visit to England by Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the emir of Qatar, which, along with Turkey and Hamas, has supported the radical Muslim Brotherhood. Energy-rich Qatar has been the most important financial backer of Hamas, for many years with the tacit approval of Netanyahu. I was told by the knowledgeable American that the emir has made it known at a state dinner for him at Buckingham Palace hosted by King Charles that Qatar no longer supports Hamas. Al Thani also met with Prime Minister Keir Starmer at 10 Downing St. and visited Parliament.

What is to happen, I asked, to the two million or so Palestinians still being bombed and starved and deprived of clean drinking water or any semblance of decent housing and sanitation, with no sign of support from the Arab and Western world and no way to flee Gaza?

The answer, in essence, was a question: What happened to the American Indians in the plains of the Dakotas?

Useful though this is, the defeatist emphasis is a major flaw – not least since there remain millions of Palestinians and millions more Arabs around them, such as the potentially explosive 115 million and counting in Egypt and as many again and more seething throughout the region – and hundreds of millions more in the Middle East and billions in the Third World all taught gigantic further lessons about imperialism’s real Nazi nature and all hugely inspired by the titanic resistance.

This is not the epoch of early capitalist colonial expansionism able to pacify “the natives” but of the plunging historic decline of a rotten ripe system – and while the barbarity and overwhelming force of the Zionists and their American arms have extracted a huge price from the Palestinians for the moment, the war to suppress this revolutionary upheaval has nevertheless taken 15 months, facing the most astounding determination and still with the Hamas (and other) resistance intact enough to negotiate.

The Jewish occupation has itself also paid a huge price (economically as Hersh hints but also in its own military casualties) which is not over yet; the colonists’ society has been ripped to shreds and no reactionary fantasies about an Eretz (Greater) Israel are going to restore it for long, if at all.

As even bourgeois commentary has said, there can be no elimination of the Palestinians and the Third World around them and ferocious resistance will eventually rebound, whatever form it finds to express itself, in further Islamism or possibly and certainly eventually, climbing beyond the limits of religious puritanism to the necessary Marxist science that can lead the world struggle to completely end capitalism.

The huge Gazan revolt is already symptomatic of a world which is changed forever, and is a revolutionary part of creating that change, despite the enormous odds against it and the almost certain reality of its eventual forced submission for the moment imposed by the overwhelming might of Zionism’s best armed and certainly most ruthless army in the world, with the full might of American arms and aid standing behind it.

The savagery it has forced imperialism to show is a disaster in the long run as minds begin to see its true tyrannical nature and open up to the only possible rational conclusion – that its world degenerate system has to be ended, only possible by revolutionary class war.

Most obviously that conclusion is driven by the hypocrisy and fascist callousness of the imperialist world order over the Palestine genocide, not only allowed to run unhindered for 15 months as a whole nation of people is destroyed in the most depraved and gleeful racist way possible by its Jewish perpetrators, but with the active encouragement and help of the entire imperialist bourgeoisie.

Meanwhile even if all the Syrian atrocity assertions were true (which would require gargantuan impartial forensic investigation effort over many months, to even begin to prove) there is an even greater lie being told – that imperialism could care less about the “people of Syria” and their alleged democratic rights to be “fought for in a newly transparent society”.

Even as the Western leaders were emoting on all outlets about the “suffering of the Syrian people” and the “fight for freedom”, the British - Labour(!) - Prime Minister Keir Starmer was on a diplomatic begging-bowl tour of the Arab Gulf states, looking for “investments” from the likes of the UAE and Saudi Arabia (meaning unctuously hawking around a bit of tattered “royal prestige” with visits and banquets at Buckingham Palace (as the Qatar Emir just had) and further fire-sales of British assets, services, and land, the income from which has been the main prop for this has-been near-bankrupt ruling class since Margaret Thatcher began selling the “family silver” in the 1980s – though even she did not consider pawning the Royal Mail) as well as cementing further massive arms deals, a core and mainstay of imperialist economics (and usually sealed with massive secret bribes and kickbacks).

All these corrupt feudal sheikhdoms are notorious for their very undemocratic tribal-monarchical authoritarianism, gross inequality, slave level exploitation of Asian workers, and savage repression (including beheading death penalties, multiple amputations and lengthy imprisonments for political crimes) repression of women and outright criminality, like (among much else) the killing and dismemberment of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul by Crown Prince Salman’s deathsquads and the piratical high seas kidnapping and imprisonment of runaway Princess Latifa from the Dubai Maktoum dynasty by her father.

And all of them are up to their necks in the murky aggressive chaos and humanitarian disasters in the region, not least the UAE and Saudi Arabia in Yemen where murderous war against the Houthi-led national liberation movement killed and maimed tens of thousands in the last decade and brought millions to the edge of not just starvation but outright famine (with military aid and “targeting advice” from seconded British and US military personnel) and, currently, in the deadly and brutal war tearing Sudan apart with famine, horrific slaughter and rape.

A slew of other grotesque hypocrisies and lies can be pinpointed too, such as the sudden favourable Western gush over the Islamist HTS group and its Jalani leader despite decades of the meaningless “war on terror” excuse for imperialist blitzing throughout the Middle East, in which this group among many has been designated a “terrorist force” of such monstrosity that it poses an “existential threat to our way of life” etc etc.

Suddenly there are slick “media friendly” press conferences by the Islamist insurgents (!!!) of the new “inclusive” HTS government now supposedly changed and become the “good guys”.

The oh-so-reasonable approach is stamped allover with the signs of CIA/MI6 coaching to hide the glaring counter-revolutionary nature of the whole “uprising” and the grotesque hypocrisy of imperialism’s open backing for a jihadist movement that would be laughable if its real aim, to stampede public opinion behind imperialist warmongering and world bullying were not so vicious and deadly.

So, a violent breakout from a small enclave by armed and ruthless Muslim militants, designated an illegal terrorist group, is going to be cheered and celebrated??

And this just 14 months after another such “terrorist” breakout – that in Gaza – was not only universally condemned by the international bourgeoisie and its servile liberal and celeb, Labourite and TUC, class-collaborating acolytes, but was met with a genocidal civilian blitzing “punishment” of such unrelenting horror it equals the very worst of the 1930s and World War Two (and centuries of imperialist slave colonialist butchery before it)??

The sudden rebranding of the “opposition” as “rebels”, a media friendly, positive (even “romantic”) term unlike “terrorist” (echoing Ronald Reagan’s obscene “freedom fighters” re-naming of the vicious contra torture-and-killing squads against socialist Nicaragua in the 1980s), is dutifully and grovellingly taken up in the BBC, Guardian and all the other mainstream media outlets, ever more openly showing their true role as anything-but-independent nazi propaganda tools for imperialism as they dutifully wheel out a host of plummy generals and slippery ex-heads of the MI6 Gestapo secret police, to declare that “oh, yes, we should consider de-designating them as soon as possible”.

Yes, because they are still “terrorists”, who broke out of Idlib with maximum violence, including shooting of unarmed Syrian Army prisoners and other atrocities during their advance, (all unmentioned by the media) after years of calculation and preparation backed by vast sums of covert aid, technical assistance, arms and military training from the US Empire (see Active Measures etc) and assorted stoogery like the Turks and the craven reactionary wing of Arab nationalism, poisoned and bent with oil trillions.

Supporting them would be a major crime in imperialism’s alleged “rules based” international law if it was not yet another hoodwinking racket, being entirely a Western controlled and bribed “jihadist group” (unlike for example, the ISIS which long ago “blewback” from whatever initial CIA/Zionist manipulation might have been attempted on it, its ruthless terrorising turned against imperialism).

That of course is why in these latest events there has been no CNN interview whitewashing for this group, despite its own hostility to Damascus. Just the opposite:

The US military said it carried out dozens of precision strikes against ISIS targets in central Syria on Sunday.

The widespread airstrikes came after a dayslong blitz by rebel forces that ultimately led to the downfall of Syria’s longtime leader, Bashar Assad. Russian state news media reported Sunday that Assad had arrived in Moscow, where he was given asylum.

US Central Command, which oversees Middle East operations, said it struck ISIS leaders, operatives, and camps to prevent the terrorist group from rebuilding in central Syria amid the chaos.

Centcom said it used US Air Force B-52 bombers, F-15 fighter jets, and A-10 attack aircraft to strike over 75 targets, adding that battle damage assessments are underway. A senior administration official, speaking to reporters, described the operation as “significant” and said about 140 munitions were used. It is unclear what missiles or bombs may have been used.

“There should be no doubt — we will not allow ISIS to reconstitute and take advantage of the current situation in Syria,” Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla, the Centcom commander, said in a statement. “All organizations in Syria should know that we will hold them accountable if they partner with or support ISIS in any way.”

Syrian anti-government forces announced early on Sunday morning that they had taken control of Damascus. It was the culmination of 13 years of civil war, which began in 2011 after Assad’s forces violently cracked down on peaceful demonstrators.

But the alleged Islamist HTS boss Jalani is hailed as a “national liberation” leader after his careful CIA-coached public relations interviews with the Western media, now abandoning his “jihadist” uniform and persona with it, renamed al Sharaa in a nice new tailored suit and nice new tailored pro-Western pro-Zionist policies.

More interviews aimed to further disguise the Western backing, talking up the supposed “self-sufficiency” of the group and its development and manufacture of highly sophisticated GPS guided drones and other weapons in the Idlib enclave (all made from scrap iron he almost said) by its own resources. Yeah, right. And the guided flying pigs too presumably.

But was not self-sufficient national liberation exactly what Hamas has been trying to do in Palestine against the 75 years long landtheft occupation of this Arab people’s stolen country, inhabited non-stop for at least 1500 years and possibly 2000, greater that virtually any modern nation state, least of all the British or Americans (wrongly labelled Anglo-Saxons) whose mongrel national identity dates back only as far as Chaucer (say 600 years approximately speaking)??

But no calm CNN interviews (!!!) were granted to the dogged but wounded Yahya Sinwar leader, shot down in the Gaza wreckage by an Israeli drone, nor obviously would any have been possible in the existential fight for the Palestinians against the ruthless butchery of the Zionists.

Starmer says this Gulf grovelling is “Good for Britain” playing on the reactionary chauvinism which is increasingly pumped up by the crisis-wracked trade-war capitalist ruling class.

He means moribund British capitalism is so desperate to survive in the increasingly cutthroat conditions of the world crisis collapse that it needs to, and is willing to, abase itself to any and every backward reactionary going.

Such cynical jingoism is far more significant than merely “double-standards” or gross hypocrisy.

Imperialism is now tearing up all its hoodwinking frauds about “freedom and democracy”, “international justice” and “law based standards” in favour of “might is right” brute force exactly as exemplified by the Zionist led onslaught on the Middle East and the Ukrainian Nazi-worshipers, stooging for Nato war aggression.

And it is doing so because a) it is bankrupt and can no longer afford to maintain the façade of “democracy”, which requires at least some concessions to the public to maintain verisimilitude and b) because it was only the existence and pressure of the world revolution, and most of all its expression in the colossal socialist achievements of the Soviet Union, (still hugely positive on balance despite revisionist complacency and retreat from revolution, all the way through to the last few years of the idiotic Gorbachev’s dismantling of the proletarian dictatorship state) which forced it to offer any reforms at all as Marxist science was able to warn even three decades back:

Western democracy has appeared to work so well for so long because it has been forced to make progress by the really revolutionary challenges to capitalism taking place elsewhere.

But it is the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 and ruthless establishment of a proletarian-dictatorship-state of planned economic development and working class emancipation which remains the sole real historical driving force, – the revolutionary resolution of the insoluble contradictions of the free-market forces system (slump, poverty, war, civil war, etc).

Without this constant spur from the example of the socialist camp and the Soviet workers state, now sadly in abeyance, – the ‘reforming’ ideals of the bourgeoisie (all parliamentary sections) will rapidly give way to the notion of ‘the need for national sacrifice’ as the incurable slump moves into its chauvinistic trade-war stages.

And without this phony post-1945 atmosphere in the West of constant reforming reasonableness, no longer forced on the naturally greedy and reluctant monopoly-bourgeoisie by the weight of rival communist example, – the class-war problems for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (the sole reality of western democracy) will so escalate as to totally transform the feel of life in the ‘free’ world.

Because of the collapse of the anti-communist cement which kept the imperialist powers from all-out cut-throat trade-war competition at a political level for so long (while all the time it continued relentlessly brewing up at the economic level), an entirely unprecedented instability is now breaking out throughout the whole capitalist world.

This anti-communist cement was much more important and much more real than the bogus ‘threat of communism’ which the imperialist camp liked to pretend gave the West justified cause to continue its colonial policeman role over the rest of the planet..[EPSR No0724 02-11-93]

That is being confirmed right now in the US as the Donald Trump presidency prepares its early moves, where the billionaire “team” he is assembling is making ready to dismantle labour reform and welfare gains dating all the way back to the early twentieth century when revolutionary pressure and Soviet influence was first felt, as the bourgeois press reports:

Elon Musk is the living embodiment of economic power in the modern US: a multibillionaire, with spicy political views, who has bought his way into a role as Donald Trump’s costcutter-in-chief.

Part of his motivation seems to be not just slashing spending for the sake of it but the dismantling of regulators that his companies have found irksome.

He had previously joined legal action, alongside Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, aimed at having the National Labor Relations Board declared unconstitutional, for example.

This is the body, created in 1935, that enforces workers’ rights. It ensured staff at Amazon’s Staten Island warehouse had the opportunity to ballot – successfully – for union recognition (an outcome the giant retailer has continued to challenge).

Musk has also said he wants to “delete” the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, suggesting it is “duplicative”.

Musk et al’s affront at the very idea that federal agencies have oversight of business is reminiscent of the fury faced by President Theodore Roosevelt and his allies during the so-called Progressive Era, at the turn of the 20th century, when they fought to bust vast monopolies and tame the worst excesses of capitalism.

The mega-rich capitalists back then were the likes of JD Rockefeller and JP Morgan but then, as now, there was a clash of principles about the government’s right to oversee corporations. And then, as now, money was used to buy influence over the debate.

If Musk and his co-director, Vivek Ramaswamy, succeed in scrapping a whole suite of regulators, it could fundamentally shift the relationship between capital and the individual (which, of course, is exactly his hope).

Of course capitalism continues to insist that it upholds “democratic principles” against the supposed “nightmare of totalitarianism” (by which it means communism’s proletarian dictatorships not the great collection of pro-Western fascist stooge dictatorship set in place and maintained by imperialist subversion agencies and bribery since World War Two, from Haïti to the Philippines and multiple points between) because these delusions have been far too valuable a tool for bourgeois rule over centuries just to abandon.

There are still vast numbers of the world’s masses – particularly the petty bourgeois elements – who continue to be gulled by this greatest of all frauds, not least because the fake-“left” of all shades refuses to abandon its revisionist advocacy of “left” pressure “leading to change” within democracy (“bourgeois democracy”) – the antithesis of revolutionary Leninist understanding that only ending capitalism by class war overthrow to establish firm workers states, suppressing bourgeois counter-revolution, can stop its spiralling decline into poverty, desperate Slump and world war, let alone improve the lot of the overwhelming majority as the reformists still gibber on.

Both domestically and internationally in delusions about a new multi-polar world “balancing” against the belligerence of imperialism, this ultimate class-collaborating delusion is a disaster for the working class.

It is founded in Stalin’s post-war errors, extending the revisionist mistakes of the pre-war Popular Front in France and the Spanish civil war, and even as far back as China in the mid-1920s (see EPSR Book Vol 21 Unanswered Polemics against Stalinism) that capitalism was no longer able to expand and all that was required to change the world was to sit tight, making sure only not to provoke its inherent warmongering character by waging vigorous “peace struggle” and eventually economically outcompeting capitalism).

Such delusions still inform much revisionist politics (and sadly seemingly even the huge Chinese leadership and others such as Cuba) instead of making clear the Leninist understanding that the bourgeoisie will never be stopped from its plunge into Slump/war except by defeat and the revolutionary overthrow that can then follow (once Leninist understanding can be fought for).

That crisis context, only graspable through seeing the broadest spanning and deepest possible historical perspective of class-based economic and social development, namely Marxist-Leninist science, is the crucial tool for understanding the rapidly moving complexities now unfolding and their only possible resolution, the revolutionary overthrow of the entire capitalist system.

Without it, and the leadership party to fight for its constant development through polemical struggle, the working class and world proletariat will in fact be taken in, hoodwinked over and over by the non-stop capitalist brainwashing which is pumped out morning noon and night into every tiny aspect of life under capitalism and by the still prevailing retreats and class collaborating treachery and befuddlement of the fake-“left”, still tying workers to deluded notions of “voting for change and improvement” albeit combined with “left pressure”.

But not only the grotesque events of the Middle East are teaching profound lessons in the reality of “democracy”.

So too across the world the masses are seeing all “democracy” being trampled across whenever it does not suit imperialism and its increasingly desperate crisis needs to drive the working class down to the most savagely rapacious levels of exploitation, comparable to the Victorian age or the conditions throughout the great colonial slave holdings of the past (and still found in many parts of the Third World like the Bangladesh sweatshops, Indonesian palm oil plantations, Indian brick kilns, Sri Lankan tea farms, African mineral mines, Latin American coffee and banana growers, and much much more).

In fact world wide it is trampling all across the entire post-war “elections and free-speech” framework from military butchery in Pakistan of Imran Khan supporters, and South Korea’s almost-coup, to the CIA colour revolution trying to topple Georgia’s newly elected government, the cynical annulment of Romania’s presidential vote, the near-assassination of the Slovakian choice earlier in the year, the toppling of Hasina Khan in Bangladesh (see p 10) and the complicated US plot to try and paint Nicolas Maduro’s presidential election as “invalid” in Venezuela.

And the fraud of “democratic choice” is just as sharply shown even in advanced Europe be it in bankrupt France where the majority votes in the recent elections have simply been ignored but also in the trampling across “democratic” votes and election outcomes in country after country, with coups, assassinations and counter-revolution attempted or succeeding in Romania, Slovakia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Georgia, Moldova, Venezuela, South Korea and even France in Europe and effectively Britain among others.

South Korea is one of the most egregious where the delicate pretence of real democracy has always been paper thin, its presidency an open dictatorship for decades under the post-war American occupation (still with tens of thousands of nuclear armed troops present to this day to intimidate communist Pyongyang and China beyond, with regular belligerent “exercises”) and the “freely voted” presidents from the 1990s onwards mostly pro-American anti-communists installed by stitched up vote rackets, raddled with corruption and stirring regular massive demonstrations and hostility.

The few “liberal” presidents let in to head off popular discontent and widespread pro-North Korea unification sentiment were toppled by obviously stitched-up scandals.

But even the crudest manipulations are failing as world crisis bites and the latest reactionary replacement has virtually given up even the pretence, reverting to the dictatorship moves of the past with an attempted military coup.

Its failure in early December has seen bourgeois propaganda turn reality upside down by declaring it a “vindication of democracy” (without explaining why such a ridiculous “proof” should be necessary in the first place).

And it is not looking so vindicated anyway according to the latest bourgeois accounts:

South Korea’s impeached president, Yoon Suk Yeol, failed to appear before the country’s corruption watchdog on Wednesday, it said, after he was summoned for questioning over his attempt to impose martial law.

Yoon was stripped of his duties by parliament over the weekend after his short-lived 3 December martial law declaration, which plunged the country into its worst political turmoil in decades.

Investigators from the corruption investigation office (CIO) had summoned him to their facility in suburban Seoul at 10am (0100 GMT) for questioning over charges of insurrection and abuse of power.

“President Yoon did not appear for his summons today,” a CIO official told AFP.

Yoon’s legal team said on Tuesday he had not committed insurrection and has vowed to fight the charge in court, according to Yonhap news agency.

“While we do not consider the insurrection charges to be legally valid, we will comply with the investigation,” Seok Dong-hyeon, of Yoon’s team, was quoted as saying.

The CIO said this week that a summons was sent to Yoon but returned “undelivered” after an unidentified person at the presidential office refused to accept it.

Yoon’s no-show on Wednesday “will be considered as a failure to comply with the first summons”, a CIO statement said.

Investigators said they were considering dispatching a second summons, but the CIO chief, Oh Dong-woon, told parliament on Tuesday that they were also reviewing whether to issue an arrest warrant.

Yoon is being investigated by South Korean prosecutors as well as a joint team of police, defence ministry and anti-corruption investigators.

The president and some of his inner circle face possible life imprisonment, or even the death penalty, if found guilty. He remains under an international travel ban.

South Korea’s constitutional court, which began proceedings against Yoon on Monday, is separately deliberating whether to uphold his impeachment.

The court on Wednesday ordered Yoon to submit the martial law decree he issued two weeks ago, as well as the records of cabinet meetings held directly before and after the announcement.

The judges have about six months to decide Yoon’s case and a preliminary hearing has been set for 27 December, although Yoon is not required to attend.

It is the potential revolutionary pressure, always just below the surface in the South and obviously indirectly felt from the North Korean workers state, which has forced this much “constitutional” game playing – visible in the huge crowds which assembled for the first impeachment hearings, even if they are a long way from articulating, or even finding, any Leninist understanding.

The same applies in Pakistan which has a similar record of post-war ferment and discontent, held down and repressed by a stream of military coups and intervening “democratic leaders” like the opportunist Bhutto dynasty – even then proving not opportunist enough as the assassination of Benazir proved in 2008 as the world credit collapse was unfolding.

An even cruder repression has been used now with the forcible disbandment of the PTI party under threat of arrest just before elections early this year following arrest of its former prime minister Imran Khan in 2023 under once more obviously stitched up “corruption” charges.

The popular Khan is no Marxist but his anti-American orientation on questions like Afghanistan, is enough for imperialism to pressure the Pakistan military, who pull all the strings in the country, to have carried through what is effectively yet another coup by blocking Khan’s election.

But the growing ferment against this outrageous theft of the result has not died down in this huge population and so even cruder and brutal measures have been used against it as the bourgeois press reported:

At least seven people have been killed and dozens injured in Pakistan as thousands of supporters of the jailed former prime minister Imran Khan forced their way through security barriers and entered the capital Islamabad on Tuesday morning.

Authorities have enforced a security lockdown in the capital for the last three days after Khan called for supporters of his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party to march on parliament for a sit-in demonstration to demand his release.

By Tuesday morning, up to 100,000 of Khan’s supporters had broken through the barriers and entered Islamabad, where they were marching toward the “red zone”, an area in the centre of the capital where the parliament and other diplomatic buildings are located. The area resembled a fortress of barriers, shipping containers and police personnel in riot gear.

The protesters were led by Khan’s wife, Bushra Bibi, who was recently released from prison, and Khan’s key aide, Ali Amin Gandapur, who is the chief minister of the PTI stronghold of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Tens of thousands more were expected to join from neighbouring Punjab and Rawalpindi.

As the protesters approached Islamabad’s D-Chowk area in the heart of the city, police and paramilitary officers rained down rubber bullets and tear gas on the crowds, but they continued to surge forward undeterred.

PTI’s main demand for the protest is for Khan to be released, alleging that the former prime minister is being held as a political prisoner and that the hundreds of charges against him are trumped up by his political opponents.

Voted out of power by parliament in 2022 after he fell out with Pakistan’s powerful military, Khan faces charges ranging from corruption to instigation of violence, all of which he and his party deny.

Among those who reached D-Chowk was Ibrar Khan, who had travelled from Khan’s province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in a convoy of protesters to reach the capital. “Imran Khan is like a father figure for us and father of the nation. We are here for him. We won’t go without releasing Khan,” he said.

He said that they had gone up against tear gas and live bullets to reach the capital. “The government tried their best to stop us but despite all obstacles, we made it here,” he said. “We are ready to sacrifice our lives for Khan but won’t leave without Khan.”

The interior minister, Mohsin Naqvi, had said earlier that Khan’s supporters would not be allowed to reach D-Chowk or get close to the red zone or parliament buildings. He said the government would not hesitate to use “extreme” steps to stop them, which could include imposing a curfew or deploying army troops. “We will not let them cross our red lines,” he said.

Naqvi said the government had offered PTI a field outside Islamabad to hold their protest and that the offer had been taken to Khan in his jail cell, but they were still waiting for a response.

The government, led by the prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, was heavy-handed in its attempt to prevent Khan’s supporters reaching the capital. Highways into Islamabad were blocked with shipping containers and thousands of police and paramilitary lined the streets, firing rubber bullets and teargas at the protesters. Public transport into the city was also shut down to keep Khan’s supporters away.

One police officer was shot and killed in the clashes while at least 119 others were injured, and 22 police vehicles were torched in clashes just outside Islamabad and elsewhere in the Punjab province, the provincial police chief, Usman Anwar, said. Two officers were in critical condition, he said.

Another four Rangers paramilitary officers were killed on the outskirts of Islamabad, reportedly when they were run over by a car driven by PTI protesters.

According to PTI, two supporters were killed by excessive police violence and scored more had been injured. “They are even firing live bullets,” said one of Khan’s aides, Shaukat Yousafzai.

The provincial information minister, Uzma Bukhari, said about 80 of Khan’s supporters had been arrested but PTI said that about 5,000 had been picked up by police as they marched to Islamabad from across the country.

But this and other mainstream reports are only telling half the story as independent Dropsite News reveals:

Revelations of the multi-stage plan, which included a communications blackout, snipers, tear-gas armed soldiers, strategic blockades in the heart of Islamabad, and the use of live ammunition, shows the level of alarm Pakistan’s military government feels about supporters of Khan’s Pakistan Tehrik e Insaf (PTI) party. [...] A second source with knowledge of the planning independently confirmed the outlines of the Army source’s information.

On November 26, Khan had called for demonstrations in Islamabad, the capital city. Heeding his call, thousands of PTI supporters from around the country descended on Islamabad, crossing all hurdles and removing cargo containers placed in their way, while confronting internet shutdowns and tear gas shelling. One contingent of the protestors was led by Khan’s wife, Bushra Bibi, and another by Ali Amin Gandapur, the chief minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwah province, the only one of Pakistan’s four provinces where Khan’s party still forms a government.

In the run-up to the protests, the Pakistani government shut down social media apps like WhatsApp and called the military into the capital, giving it blanket shoot-on-sight powers. The government had claimed that the protestors would not be able to reach Islamabad. But by the evening of November 26, they had reached the heart of Islamabad, only feet from the central D-Chowk roundabout, the symbolic heart of the Pakistani government. The government mission at this point, according to the source within the Pakistani military, was to repel the protestors from D-Chowk – the final hill for Pakistan’s military-backed government to defend.

According to the source, who provided substantial evidence, the operation was planned [..]under the direction of General Asim Munir, Pakistan’s powerful chief of army staff. Jinnah Avenue, the main road in front of D-Chowk, would be encircled, with stacks of shipping containers serving as a barricade. Snipers from Pakistan Army Special Services Group (SSG) were deployed across rooftops while paramilitary rangers carrying assault rifles patrolled the roadside alongside police armed with teargas shells.

As night fell on Islamabad, thousands of PTI supporters massed on Jinnah Avenue, just a stone’s throw from D-Chowk.

[..]The first phase was to sow chaos and fear. Lights along Jinnah Avenue were extinguished, plunging the area into darkness.

At the same time, signals intelligence teams from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency jammed communications networks, effectively cutting off the protesters’ ability to communicate with each other and the outside world [..] to disorient and demoralize.

As confusion gripped the crowds, the Army gave the order to fire tear gas from multiple directions, and the choking fumes sent panicked protesters fleeing.

This was only the prelude to the main assault.

What followed [was] a barrage of live ammunition, including heavy assault rifle fire, directed indiscriminately at the fleeing crowds. Snipers, positioned strategically on rooftops, took aim at those deemed hostile or threatening. “Many ran away when initial bursts were sprayed,” the source said. “It is uncertain who ordered aimed heavy machine-gun fire onto masses.”

Aleema Khan, the sister of Imran Khan, was present for the massacre, and described the tear gas as well as the shooting in an interview with Drop Site. She said that when the protesters were plunged into darkness, nearby cars quickly turned off their lights to avoid becoming targets, and also turned off cell phones. The younger protesters worked to pick up and throw back the tear gas canisters, she said, while the elderly demonstrators sought cover. The rally, she added, had been festive throughout the day. Many protesters were joined by their children, displaying no intention of turning violent.

During the operation, a MALE UAV (medium-altitude long-endurance) and smaller drones with thermal imaging capability provided live surveillance, relaying real-time footage of the unfolding carnage to the operation’s command center. This level of technological sophistication indicated the crackdown was pre-meditated, the source said.

The final phase of the operation involved a swift and thorough cleanup. As soon as the firing ceased, ISI units were dispatched to Jinnah Avenue to remove all traces of the violence, the source said. This included removing bodies, shell casings, and any other evidence that could contradict the government’s narrative of a peaceful dispersal.

[...]Eyewitness accounts from protesters, some published in international media outlets like NRK, detail a terrifying scene of snipers shooting into crowds and the use of live ammunition. Medical professionals, speaking anonymously to the BBC and The Guardian, described treating numerous gunshot wounds and witnessing fatalities. The efforts to conceal evidence are corroborated by reports of authorities confiscating medical records and pressuring medical staff to remain silent.

The deployment of Pakistan Army SSG snipers on the rooftops is also consistent with eyewitness testimonies, a video of Pakistan army troops with large sniper rifle cases arriving at the site, and a sniper rifle captured from one of the soldiers that resembles equipment issued by the Pakistan Army SSG.

Efforts to suppress information about the true extent of the crackdown went beyond the immediate aftermath of the operation.

After he began investigating the protest casualties, Matiullah Jan, a journalist and longtime critic of the military’s influence on Pakistani politics, was abducted, arrested, and charged with terrorism and possession of narcotics. Hours before his abduction, Jan had hosted a television program in which he disputed the government’s claims that no live fire had been used and that no protesters had been killed in the crackdown. On his broadcast, Jan presented what he claimed were hospital records that contradicted the official narrative.

At the time, Jan was investigating the number of casualties at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) with his colleague, Saqib Bashir, when men wearing black uniforms showed up, abducted and blindfolded them, and took them away in a car. While Bashir was released three hours later, Jan remained in custody and was later charged with terrorism, drug peddling, and attacking the police. The charges allege that Jan was under the influence of drugs at the time of his arrest.

Jan, who was released after being granted bail, denies the charges, calling them “fake, funny, and fabricated,” and maintains that he was investigating the deaths of protesters. Amnesty International has condemned his arrest as “an affront to the right to freedom of expression and media freedom,” calling the charges “trumped-up” and “politically motivated.”

Various devious measures are being used in Europe too, especially in the east where dismay has been growing over the failing Ukraine war and anti-Western sentiment is climbing.

In the 1990s in the old workers states of the Soviet camp and the former USSR, popular discontent with the new “free market” and the unpleasant plundering reality of the Western “freedom” lie, grew rapidly as philistine illusions in the supposed “easy consumerism” of the West were shattered.

A number of elections saw members of the old communist parties receive large votes and even outright election, (notably in Belarus, still in place) and while these were only the same tired and hopeless revisionist bureaucrats that let through the Gorbachevite liquidationism in the first place, that did reflect a popular wish for a return to socialism and rebuilding a workers state.

Two decades on, the same desire clearly remains though mingled with the poisonous chauvinism that imperialism generates everywhere as its crisis deepens, and with the clerical fascism which was extant throughout the “less advanced” European countries prior to World War Two (leading many to actively collaborate with Hitler’s Germany).

It remains confused and confusing but even without any signs of any Leninist revolutionary understanding is proving too much for imperialism, trying hard to suppress its manifestations using the whole armoury of CIA trickery and manipulation and again revealing the gross lying reality of “parliamentary democracy”.

In Georgia for example, on the Russian border, the subversion and “democracy” ideology-swamping by Western intelligence (hidden behind the dozens of NGOs which bourgeois ideology funds and operates, like the very obvious National Endowment for Democracy (!!!) or USAID but multiple others) has not managed to pull off the same “popular revolt” trick it did in Ukraine, despite previously having installed nearly three decades of successful pro-Western stoogery to date.

In fact so badly has it backfired that the anti-EU movement represented by the Georgian Dream party, has passed laws to make all the NGOs register as what they are, “overseas agents”, causing massive spluttering hypocritical indignation by the West and its stooges (even as it is busy itself hysterically prosecuting, deporting and banning all kinds of alleged “spies” from Chinese and Russian companies, even into the British Royal Family).

Attempts to whip up petty bourgeois opportunism into another “colour revolution” like the violent Maidan coup in Ukraine, have gone apeshit with nearly two weeks of counter-revolutionary disruption talked up by the Western media with all the usual crap about “disputed” elections (not one election which goes against Western interests ever remains “undisputed” – it is a standard shot in the CIA subversion armoury):

Thousands of people took to the streets across Georgia for the 12th consecutive day of protests against the government’s decision to shelve European Union accession talks after disputed elections.

Demanding a new vote and a return to European integration, protesters gathered outside parliament in the capital, Tbilisi, on Monday as the political crisis that roiled the Caucasian nation showed no signs of abating.

Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze’s shock decision on November 28 that EU candidate Tbilisi would suspend accession talks triggered a wave of protests, which were met with a tough police response.

Police have used tear gas and water cannon to disperse previous demonstrations, and arrested more than 400 people since the second wave of unrest began.

The crackdown has triggered outrage at home amid mounting international condemnation.

Some demonstrators on Monday loudly blew horns and whistles, while others held a banner reading “Less Russia is more freedom”.

 

The UK has sanctioned five senior Georgian officials, including the interior minister, for their roles in suppressing pro-European protests in the Black Sea country.

The individuals will face travel bans and asset freezes for “violating human rights”, the Foreign Office said, adding that the sanctions were imposed in coordination with the US.

Foreign Secretary David Lammy said: “The shocking violence inflicted upon protestors, opposition leaders and journalists is an egregious attack on democracy.”

The country has seen months of violent clashes between protesters and police since parliamentary elections held in October, most recently over the government’s decision to pause EU accession talks.

The spluttering Lammy seems to have less concern about the egregious domination of the second-class Palestinian people by “shocking violence”.

Even cruder measures have been used in Romania where a similar pro-Russian candidates was making the running in the presidential election.

So successful was he that an entirely invented “constitutional infringement” was declared and the whole election annulled (!!) based on mysterious and suddenly discovered “intelligence files” (or as any normal person would say, total bullshit):

The invalidation of Romania’s presidential election results by the country’s top court is a formalized coup d’etat, according to the winner of last month’s first round of voting.

Independent candidate Călin Georgescu topped the first round vote with 22.94%, beating out liberal leftist candidate Elena Lasconi, who received 19.18%, and the country’s Social Democrat prime minister, Marcel Ciolacu, who finished third with 19.15%.

Ahead of a second round vote, Romania’s Constitutional Court annulled Georgescu’s victory on Friday, citing a clause in the nation’s laws that emphasizes the need to ensure the correctness and legality of the election. The judicial body announced that the entire election would be re-run at a later date.

“Essentially, this is a formalized coup d’etat. The rule of law is in an induced coma, and justice subordinated to political orders has practically lost its essence. It is no longer justice, it obeys the orders,” Georgescu, a strong critic of Romania’s pro-NATO and pro-Ukraine policies, said on Friday, as cited by Realitatea TV.

“The corrupt system in Romania showed its true face by making a pact with the devil,” he claimed.

Georgescu insisted that the power of the people is the basis for a democratic state, and that the authorities are obliged to respect the results of the national vote. The current Romanian government is afraid of losing power and facing revelations, he claimed.

Earlier this week, Western media outlets reported that declassified information from Romania’s intelligence agencies had alleged that the sudden rise of Georgescu in the first round of the election was “not a natural outcome.”

According to the claims, the victory emerged thanks to a coordinated social media effort, most likely orchestrated by a “state actor” meddling in the candidate’s TikTok-based campaign. No evidence has been provided to back up any of the assertions.

The annulment came amid accusations that Moscow had assisted Georgescu’s campaign, dismissed as “absolutely groundless” by Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova. The Romanian elections have been carried out amid “an unprecedented surge of anti-Russian hysteria” that is set “to influence the consciousness and will of the country’s citizens.”

“Constitutional” coups like this are not confined to the east and the “inexperienced” democracies of former socialist states.

The European West’s most “advanced” (republican) democracy has just been playing the same very authoritarian game with the refusal of French president Emmanuel Macron to respect just voted mass opinion, ignoring even an almost unprecedented no confidence vote, and all reported with a straight face by the bourgeois press:

François Bayrou, a veteran centrist and ally of president Emmanuel Macron, has been appointed French prime minister, after last week’s historic vote of no-confidence ended the beleaguered and short-lived minority coalition of the rightwing Michel Barnier.

Taking office, Bayrou said he recognised the serious problem of public debt in France and the need for parliament to agree a budget. He said the task was so mountainous it was like politically climbing the Himalayas. He said he wanted to break down the “glass wall” between politicians and voters who had lost trust. There was a need to reconcile France and fight discrimination, he said during a handover ceremony with his predecessor.

Bayrou, 73, is the leader of the centrist MoDem party and a political heavyweight from south-western France who calls himself a “man of the countryside”. A former education minister, and mayor of the south-western town of Pau, he has been an ally and close confidente to Emmanuel Macron since he swept to power in 2017.

Bayrou is the fourth French prime minister this year as France has struggled with a growing political crisis in a divided parliament. Barnier’s government was ousted last week after only three months in office, and Macron wants to avoid a new government facing the same fate.

Since Macron called an inconclusive snap election in June, the French parliament has been divided between three groups with no absolute majority. A left alliance took the largest number of votes but fell short of an absolute majority; Macron’s centrist grouping suffered losses but is still standing; and the far-right National Rally gained seats but was held back from power by tactical voting from the left and centre.

These crude dictatorship moves reflect bourgeois desperation as the crisis deepens. They can be expected too in Germany where, like France, the economy is heading downwards and there is growing hostility to the European Union and its support for NATO’s war in Ukraine, as well as discontent with the vicious repression of all support for the Palestinian struggle. Watch out for trickery now as the government implodes:

Olaf Scholz has lost a historic vote of confidence in the German parliament, paving the way for early national elections following the collapse of his government.

The German chancellor had called the vote in order to deliberately lose it, urging the Bundestag, or lower house of parliament, to declare its lack of confidence in him so that the first formal step could be made towards triggering new elections.

Scholz will now ask the president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, to dissolve parliament, and to formally call new elections which have to take place within 60 days and have been pencilled in for 23 February.

Scholz said his aim was to shore up confidence in the future of the country, insisting: “Germany’s best days lie ahead of us.”

Scholz’s three-way “traffic light” coalition collapsed in November after the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) quit in protest over the chancellor’s sacking of the finance minister, Christian Lindner, over deep disagreements around debt management.

The move left Germany with a minority government of Scholz’s Social Democrats (SDP) and Greens at a time of deep economic crisis and geopolitical uncertainty.

Friedrich Merz, the head of the opposition conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) who is poised to succeed Scholz as chancellor, spoke fervently about the election being a chance to vote against the government and “a day of relief”.

Germany, he said, faced a tough period if it wanted to overcome its extensive economic challenges. Germans would need to work harder, he said, as he promised fiscal rewards for those who decided to put off retirement to participate in [..] a necessary “massive national exertion drive”.

Guns not butter then and “sacrifices in the national interest” the classic bourgeois demands as the EPSR has frequently pointed out:

Under capitalism, and especially facing a long period of deepening world economic crisis [..] xenophobic warmongering-chauvinism become(s) the main policy platform for every Western power to divert the unemployed masses at home from revolution (blaming ‘abroad’ for the slump economic difficulties and trade-war disasters); the lives of most of the population will never be far from turmoil, dire insecurity, or real suffering and a vengeful sense of grievance of one kind or another. (2002 Perspectives)

And nowhere is all this clearer than in the overwhelmingly dominant power itself, the USA whose last election is an even more grotesquely manipulated farce than ever, completely bought by the dancing billionaire Elon Musk as the bourgeois press reveals:

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, spent over a quarter of a billion dollars in the final months of this year’s election to help Donald J. Trump win the presidency, federal filings revealed.

The sum is a fraction of Mr. Musk’s wealth. But it is nonetheless a staggering amount from a single donor, who poured the cash into allied groups and is now playing a role in helping shape the next administration.

One of Mr. Musk’s most brazen moves was spending $20 million to prop up a super PAC that was named after Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late liberal Supreme Court justice, but that sought to help Mr. Trump by softening his anti-abortion positions.

Mr. Musk put the lion’s share of the money toward his main super PAC, America PAC, a staggering $239 million in cash and in-kind contributions.

Mr. Musk also spent $40.5 million on legally controversial checks to voters in swing states who signed a petition in support of the Constitution.

Mr. Musk’s total spending on the election is not yet known — and may never be. He cut other political checks to conservative down-ballot groups this cycle, including $12 million to two groups trying to elect Republican senators, the Senate Leadership Fund and the Sentinel Action Fund. Mr. Musk, who originally wanted to keep his support for Mr. Trump quiet, may have also funded dark-money entities.

And Musk is not the only one:

In a recruitment process that appears to mock his campaign’s appeal to working-class voters, the president-elect has brazenly tapped a gallery of mega-rich backers for key positions that, in some instances, will give them power to cut spending on public services that are used by the most poor and vulnerable.

At least 11 picks for strategic positions after Trump returns to the White House in January have either achieved billionaire status themselves, have billionaire spouses or are within touching distance of that threshold.

The net result will be the wealthiest administration in US history – worth a total of $340bn at the start of this week, before Trump further boosted its monetary value by trying to appoint at least three more billionaires.

What a sick joke!

Time to fight for real democracy, built by the dictatorship of the proletariat and the Leninist science to lead it. Don Hoskins

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The CPGB-ML/Lalkar’s denunciation of the Washington-backed right-wing military coup in Bangladesh that brought down Sheikh Hasina’s bourgeois-nationalism may have fallen on the right side, but its account of the events is a confused mess that gives no clue as to what the working class should do next. Worse, it gives ground to the US-manufactured lie that new military-appointed leader, Mohammad Yunus, and his capitalist “pro-poor” banking system is in some way “progressive” and worthy of awards. The opposite is true. Socialist revolution is the only way out, but this is left unmentioned.

Part Three - conclusion

Without building such (proletarian dictatorship) socialist societies, all Third World nation-states are at the mercy of rapacious monopoly corporation bullying and intimidation, backed by imperialist threats of internal destabilisation and trade-war/ shooting-war devastation.

Lalkar provide further head-scratching “analysis” in its almost gushing characterisation of (new prime minister – see earlier parts) Yunus, which exposes a non-revolutionary petty-bourgeois concession to the idea of “philanthropic” support for small businesses as a way forwards for the rural working class and poor peasantry!!!:

What of Muhammad Yunus? His appearance is friendly and avuncular, exuding apparent good will. He is credited with setting up a special bank, the Granmeen [sic] [village] Bank tasked with making mini loans to peasant women to help them set up small businesses, as a means by which they could escape destitution. This scheme, within its own limitations, has been successful and has no doubt helped quite a few people avoid starvation. Sheikh Hasina very much encouraged his efforts at the beginning. His microcredit ideas have been adopted in many other countries, and he was awarded a Nobel prize for Economics that he probably well deserved.

“Probably well deserved”!!!!!

This just gives credence to the notion that there is some value in such bourgeois prize-giving. This could have at least been caveated with a statement explaining that Nobel prizes exists to project bourgeois values around the world, even with the more “neutral” prizes for hard sciences such as physics; and the Economics prize serves to instil pro-capitalist-market ideologies, with most recipients being American capitalists, and including such anti-communist guru figures as F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman.

Yunus is of the same reactionary ilk:

As noted earlier, microlending is closely linked to neoliberal development. In his Nobel acceptance speech, Professor Yunus redefined the model of poverty eradication as one based primarily on private ownership. In this worldview, nothing is free, and everything from water to education to healthcare is regulated by the rules governing the free market. In his writings, Yunus has made it his goal to send poverty to the museum.

“Almost all social and economic ills of the world will be addressed through social businesses. The challenge is to innovate business models and apply them to produce desired social results cost-effectively and efficiently. Healthcare for the poor, financial services for the poor, information technology for the poor, education and training for the poor, renewable energy – these are all exciting areas for social businesses.”

Through the careful execution of this neoliberal ideology, nothing is free, and everyone is a potential entrepreneur; it is not “poverty” but the “entitlements” of civilians that is being sent to museums. Socially responsible business combines “maximising profit” and “doing good to people in the world” as mutually reinforcing instrumentalities. These new businesses signify moralism in development – a benign relationship between capital and altruism as multinational companies target citizens to generate profit, and concurrently, help the poor with income and social opportunities. In order to implement this diktat, Yunus’s bank has been at the fore of promoting socially responsible businesses.

……………………………..

In his Nobel speech, Professor Yunus called on global corporations to look at the poor as an unrealised market for their goods, just as he had done years ago to call attention to the poor as “bankable.” Once the poor were identified as “bankable” by the Grameen Bank, millions of pounds poured into various microfinance schemes. Social businesses are innovative configurations between capital and altruism – the current pathways through which multinational corporations enter local economies and create new markets in developing countries.

[Lamia Karim, Microfinance and its discontents: Women in debt in Bangladesh, 2011, pp.66-67; 195-196]

What has this got to do with Marxism-Leninism???

In fact, Yunus and his Grameen Bank were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, not the Economics prize as Lalkar suggested.

This is an award usually bestowed on such bourgeois reactionary monsters as Henry Kissenger for fascist services rendered, or to prepare the ground for new ““progressive” stunts, such as Barak Obama, and Yunus himself (or even to paper over past imperialist crimes, such as with the recent award given to the Japanese holocaust survivors’ anti-nuclear peace organisation Nihon Hidankyo, whilst clearing the decks for the next nuclear holocaust).

Lalkar fails to make this clear.

Hasina did not “encourage” Yunus’s Grameen Bank “from the start” either. As mentioned above, it was introduced in the 1980s by Ershad (when the military he led were persecuting the AL) alongside the disastrous interventions of the Washington-controlled IMF.

Hasina did naïvely declare that microcredit was “a critical next step in the effort to reduce and eradicate overall poverty from the face of the Earth,” in 1997, but this just exposes the limits of her bourgeois nationalism. By 2011, she was declaring that Yunus was someone who “sucks the blood out of the poor” (something which Lalkar neglects to mention in its article even though it has been widely reported).

Far from “helping women escape destitution”, the cutting quoted in the EPSR’s No1647 section on Bangladesh demonstrates that Yunus’s vampiric microcredit initiatives have caused immense suffering, and even suicides, amongst impoverished women in Bangladesh and their families, as Lamia Karim (the author of the above quoted study) argues.

Microfinance banks target women from the poorest communities who cannot receive credit elsewhere due to their lack of collateral. The way the Grameen Bank works is that forty women form a centre. This then forms smaller groups of five women each, who then meet weekly. They elect leaders for the groups to enforce fiscal responsibility, discipline and attendance, and make loan proposals on behalf of their group to the bank. The leader is held accountable for the group.

The group becomes jointly responsible for the loans, and the women are encouraged by the bank to police each other to ensure that they all keep up with their payments. This results in daily surveillance of each member. Karim found that women who fail to keep up with their payments are ostracised by their community; isolated from their families by their husbands for the “shame” of the public humiliation they experienced; and suffer increased indebtedness as they turn to other sources of funds to repay their debts. Eventually the household belongings are taken away and their houses broken up to sell as individual parts in the market place to recoup their debts.

Despite microfinance propaganda claims, unquestioningly repeated by Lalkar, the nature of rural Bangladeshi society means that the loans are not used by peasant women to “set up small businesses”. The funds are typically loaned by women on behalf of the men in the household who control where they are invested or spent.

This system of peer-on-peer surveillance and the fear of shame acts as collateral. It is a tyrannical subversion of centuries-old collective peasant culture, for capitalist gain. House-breaking, for example, was a traditional means of ensuring discipline within the community in parts of rural Bangladesh. And so Yunus’s banking system serves bloodsucking capitalist interests by breaking up traditional systems of community solidarity, and replacing them with divisive individualism:

In Bangladesh, the extended family is the core of social identity, care, support and kin-based solidarity. By introducing loans into private life, NGOs have begun to weaken the kin-based bond of identification and family solidarity. While loans can offer a family economic opportunities to collectively work on a project, they can also pit individual members against each other when things do not work according to prescribed norms… At the core is the use of social collateral as a disciplinary technique against poor people. By using the group as the enforcer of loan payments, these NGOs pit poor families against other poor families… It often has devastating consequences at the level of the family and the community. By appropriating existing forms of rural behaviour such as shaming and housebreaking as part of their disciplinary toolbox, the NGOs have institutionalised these forms of behaviour. In recent years, NGOs have resorted to the police and rural elites to recover their money that have destructive results in the lives of women as I have demonstrated in this book. [Lamia Karim, ibid. p.200]

Karim also describe how local Islamists have attempted to resist the encroachment of such sick capitalist relations into the areas where the madrassahs traditionally provide social support. Their advocacy of sharia law as a panacea for all social problems is both futile and barmy, and their attitudes towards the role of women in society may also be backward, but this opposition is an example of how their sense of “Muslim brotherhood” comes into conflict with monopoly-capitalist interests.

The CPGB-ML now appears to be deeply embarrassed by the praise it had heaped on Yunus in its Lalkar publication. Since the EPSR published its own discussion article, the same Lalkar piece has been reposted on its party website The Communists with the “probably well-deserved” comment sneakily edited out without explanation!

Concealing mistakes in this way is typical of the anti-theory disaster Stalinism ended up being, and follows on from the CPGB-ML’s other past cover-ups, such as joining George Galloway’s “patriotic” Churchill-loving Workers’ Party of Britain and then leaving without an explanation; backing the Zionist stooge Mahmoud Abbas and the class-collaborating “two-state solution” to the Palestinian question; and saying nothing about Stalin’s catastrophic support for the foundation of the Zionist entity on Palestinian lands in 1947 despite its obvious relevance today’s events in the region.

Just in case the Brarites are still confused, this following edited cutting shows the disaster imperialist-backed microcredit lending turned out to be after it was first introduced by “non-profit” organisations in Cambodia:

Since the 1990s, Cambodia’s microfinance industry has received hundreds of millions of dollars directly and indirectly from the IFC and US and European governments to provide microloans intended to lift Cambodians out of poverty by increasing their access to credit. Industry proponents argue that microloans have reduced the country’s poverty rate and fuelled the growth of small businesses.

While many microlenders, such as LOLC Cambodia, were initially part of nonprofits, they have transformed into private sector, profit-driven companies. LOLC Cambodia, originally run by a Catholic charity, is now owned by a Sri Lankan holding group, and reported a $58.7m profit last year.

Allegations of debt-driven distress are now being reviewed by the IFC’s compliance advisor ombudsman. In August, the ombudsman launched an investigation of the IFC’s investment into six of Cambodia’s leading microfinance firms, stating that there were “preliminary indications of harm” to borrowers, including coerced land sales, forced migration and children dropping out of school.

The IFC ombudsman’s investigation was prompted by a complaint filed last year by Licadho and another human rights NGO, Equitable Cambodia, on behalf of borrowers who alleged they had been victims of “predatory”, “deceptive” and “irresponsible” loans and collection tactics by the six microlenders, all of which receive direct or indirect IFC funding and comprise about 75% of Cambodia’s microfinance market.

Four of the institutions under IFC investigation – Amret Microfinance Institution, LOLC Cambodia, Hattha Bank and Sathapana Bank – had active loans with at least one borrower who killed themselves and one who attempted suicide, according to their families and the borrowers’ loan documents, seen by the Guardian. One borrower also had an active loan with Phillip Bank and Nga says she and her husband were responsible for her parents’ loan from AMK Microfinance Institution.

The borrowers were all members of Indigenous ethnic minority communities in Ratanakiri, one of Cambodia’s poorest regions, where people often do not fluently speak or read Khmer, the country’s dominant language. The IFC’s investigation is also assessing whether microlenders may have violated the IFC’s strict policies protecting Indigenous peoples.

As well as Laen, the others who died include a husband who had an affair and was required to pay financial compensation to divorce, in accordance with local custom, which he could not afford along with his debt, his wife and parent-in-laws say. There was also a struggling cashew farmer burdened with repayments for a number of microloans.[...]

Five microlending institutions denied in statements that the suicides and attempted suicide had any connection to microloans. They claimed that internal company audits found the deaths and suicide attempt were caused by family and personal disputes or other factors.

Sathapana did not respond to requests for comment.[]

Cambodian borrowers’ average microloan sizes of about $9,000 are more than twice the median income of the country’s rural families, while the value of active microloans held by borrowers has doubled from $8bn in 2019 to $16bn, according to a recent study by Licadho and Equitable Cambodia.

The Cambodian industry’s soaring growth has been driven by direct and indirect government funding from the development banks and agencies of the US, Sweden, France, Norway, Finland, Austria, Belgium, the UK, the Netherlands and Germany.

This list of Western imperialist “donors” should be enough to make it clear that, objectively, microfinance banking exists to further capitalist expansion into the hardest-to-reach recesses of the Third World – regardless of what some well-meaning but naïve NGO workers may think they are doing at the start.

The fact that much of this was initiated by charities and nonprofit organisations and then transformed into private capitalist companies demonstrate sinister role such Western-funded NGOs play, and the futility of such developmental interventions in societies dominated by capitalist relations.

This would be different if Bangladesh was a workers’ state, where such use of capitalist market mechanisms would be under the control and direction of its proletarian dictatorship.

Then, as Lenin explained, the aim would be to grant peasant traders a number of economic, financial and banking privileges, including in the granting of state loans, with the aim of encouraging their participation in co-operative trading.

This would have an educative role in preparing them for a transition to socialism:

But there is another aspect of the matter for which we may need state capitalism, or at least a comparison with it. It is a question of cooperatives.

In the capitalist state, cooperatives are no doubt collective capitalist institutions. Nor is there any doubt that under our present economic conditions, when we combine private capitalist enterprises—but in no other way than on nationalized land and in no other way than under the control of the working-class state—with enterprises of the consistently socialist type (the means of production, the land on which the enterprises are situated, and the enterprises as a whole belonging to the state), the question arises about a third type of enterprise, the cooperatives, which were not formally regarded as an independent type differing fundamentally from the others. Under private capitalism, cooperative enterprises differ from capitalist enterprises as collective enterprises differ from private enterprises. Under state capitalism, cooperative enterprises differ from state capitalist enterprises, firstly, because they are private enterprises, and, secondly, because they are collective enterprises. Under our present system, cooperative enterprises differ from private capitalist enterprises because they are collective enterprises, but do not differ from socialist enterprises if the land on which they are situated and means of production belong to the state, i.e., the working-class.

This circumstance is not considered sufficiently when cooperatives are discussed. It is forgotten that owing to the special features of our political system, our cooperatives acquire an altogether exceptional significance. If we exclude concessions, which, incidentally, have not developed on any considerable scale, cooperation under our conditions nearly always coincides fully with socialism.

Let me explain what I mean. Why were the plans of the old cooperators, from Robert Owen onwards, fantastic? Because they dreamed of peacefully remodelling contemporary society into socialism without taking account of such fundamental questions as the class struggle, the capture of political power by the working-class, the overthrow of the rule of the exploiting class. That is why we are right in regarding as entirely fantastic this “cooperative” socialism, and as romantic, and even banal, the dream of transforming class enemies into class collaborators and class war into class peace (so-called class truce) by merely organising the population in cooperative societies.

Undoubtedly we were right from the point of view of the fundamental task of the present day, for socialism cannot be established without a class struggle for political power in the state.

But see how things have changed now that the political power is in the hands of the working-class, now that the political power of the exploiters is overthrown and all the means of production (except those which the workers’ state voluntarily abandons on specified terms and for a certain time to the exploiters in the form of concessions) are owned by the working-class.

Now we are entitled to say that for us the mere growth of cooperation (with the “slight” exception mentioned above) is identical with the growth of socialism, and at the same time we have to admit that there has been a radical modification in our whole outlook on socialism. The radical modification is this; formerly we placed, and had to place, the main emphasis on the political struggle, on revolution, on winning political power, etc. Now the emphasis is changing and shifting to peaceful, organizational, “cultural” work. I should say that emphasis is shifting to educational work, were it not for our international relations, were it not for the fact that we have to fight for our position on a worldscale. If we leave that aside, however, and confine ourselves to internal economic relations, the emphasis in our work is certainly shifting to education.

Two main tasks confront us, which constitute the epoch—to reorganize our machinery of state, which is utterly useless, in which we took over in its entirety from the preceding epoch; during the past five years of struggle we did not, and could not, drastically reorganise it. Our second task is educational work among the peasants. And the economic object of this educational work among the peasants is to organise the latter in cooperative societies. If the whole of the peasantry had been organised in cooperatives, we would by now have been standing with both feet on the soil of socialism. But the organisation of the entire peasantry in cooperative societies presupposes a standard of culture, among the peasants (precisely among the peasants as the overwhelming mass) that cannot, in fact, be achieved without a cultural revolution.

Our opponents told us repeatedly that we were rash in undertaking to implant socialism in an insufficiently cultured country. But they were misled by our having started from the opposite end to that prescribed by theory (the theory of pedants of all kinds), because in our country the political and social revolution preceded the cultural revolution, that very cultural revolution which nevertheless now confronts us.

This cultural revolution would now suffice to make our country a completely socialist country; but it presents immense difficulties of a purely cultural (for we are illiterate) and material character (for to be cultured we must achieve a certain development of the material means of production, we must have a certain material base). [see Lenin, On Co-operation, Collected Works vol. 33]:

In the context of building a socialist state, there would much merit in the granting of awards to recognise successful innovation, and educate and inspire others. But Bangladesh is a degenerate capitalist state; and Yunus is an advocate of neoliberal capitalist-state polices whose implementation has resulted in much hardship and suffering for women (mainly) in already impoverished rural communities. To suggest that there is some merit an awarding such “innovative” capitalist means of exploiting the poor masses for profit is a sick joke.

Lalkar does, further down, correctly point out that Yunus had attempted to persuade the 2007-08 military dictatorship to accept a new party he wanted to form whilst Hasina and Khaleda were in prison, and rightly links this to Yunus’s “prostration before US imperialism”.

However, there is even confusion here. Lalkar omits Khaleda’s name, but mentions Hasina’s “Islamist electoral rival”. This could not be anyone else. However a party that has a woman as a leader (the BNP – a party she has led for over 40 years) does not seem very “Islamist” given Islam’s strict gender codes.

As mentioned above, the BNP attempts to counter the AL’s secular nationalism with a more Muslim-centred nationalism, and it has also allied itself with the JeI and other Islamic religious parties, but it is not “Islamist” as such. Despite allowing radical Islamist groups to operate in Bangladesh for divide-and-rule scapegoating purposes when Khaleda was last in power, it also set up the murderous RAB death-squad force to suppress their anti-Western militancy on behalf of imperialism.

Yunus’s proposed new party was exposed in Wikileaks cables from 2007, which also showed his close relationship with the American embassy, with whom he discussed his plans whilst expressing his support for the military’s then state of emergency for averting “possible civil war.”

Further cables from 2009 show that Yunus continued to brief the embassy against Hasina and the Awami League after the December 2008 election that the AL won, whilst lobbying for US support in a dispute he had with the Hasina government over his chairmanship of the Grameen Bank.

Apparently, Yunus had also supported the idea of a “benevolent dictatorship” to replace Hasina in 2015 (which he would possibly lead), according to an article quoted by Lalkar. This, if true (the quoted article does not give any details), and the above Wikileaks cables, would indicate that Yunus’s recent appointment as chief adviser by the military had been kept on the table as an option for a number of years.

Overall, Lalkar’s article on Bangladesh is replete with errors, half-thoughts, contradictions and unexplained assertions. Being generous, it may have been rushed out to meet a deadline. However, there is also suspicion that Lalkar is concealing some mistaken past position on Bangladesh, which would be grossly misleading.

The Leninist approach is to turn any mistakes made into an invaluable opportunities for learning.

Mistakes in detail can be quickly rectified when spotted. Mistaken analyses can lead the revolutionary party to take incorrect positions, and can require a lot of study and polemical discussion to rectify.

This can only come if the party frankly admits the mistake made, analyses why it arose and opens up the discussions needed on how to correct it.

Study, and build Leninism.

Phil Waincliffe

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