Recent issue
No 1221 February 24th 2004
As Blair plays race card over EU and asylum benefits abuse, Western imperialism's blind eye to Zionism's colonial-apartheid wall, completing the genocidal imprisonment-to-death of the Palestinian nation, marks the serious fascist frontline aggressiveness of the monopoly capitalist system in crisis. Sowing more race-division in Britain echoes the monstrous "freeworld" propaganda which presents blitzkrieg tyranny over Third World weakness as "justified".
Far worse than the problem of lumpen anti-Semitism from small racist parties
is the scandal of the international Zionist lobby trying to brainwash
the world into preventing the origins of the Palestine catastrophe from
ever being discussed.
The supposedly "very intelligent" moralmaze queen Melanie Phillips, star of radio and television and the daily and Sunday papers, is a prize example of this very twisted propaganda blitzkrieg.
The aim is simple: Be as critical, controversial, or challenging as anyone could wish about any past or present deeds in the Arab-Jew conflict; but NEVER allow the 1947 implantation of the so-called state of "Israel" onto the land of the Palestinian nation EVER to be re-examined or even discussed.
This powerful and hugely well-connected Zionist lobby within the ranks of Western monopoly capitalist ruling circles has even managed to con the duffer archbishops of Canterbury and Westminster into declaring that it is "prohibited anti-Semitism and immoral" to even start talking about how "Israel" got there in the first place in a post-1945 act of deliberate Western colonial tyranny to genocidally usurp the country of the Palestinian people to make a "homeland for the Jews".
The sickest and most destructive trick of all by the Zionist lobby is to keep on disingenuously asking: "Well, should not the Jews have their own country?"; — knowingly falsely implying that this is what the argument over the origins of "Israel" is all about, plus the further conversation-stopping sneering implication that it could only be anti-Semitism to doubt that the answer must be "yes".
But that is NOT the question, — as the entire Zionist lobby is well aware.
The real question is about WHY and especially HOW did this armed colonial seizure take place post1945 of the land of Palestine by Jews of the Western imperialist countries????
The totally abstract question of "Should the Jews not have a homeland at all?" is a consciously cynical TOTAL DIVERSION, — — provocatively thrown in purely in order to excite "anti-Semitism" hysteria.
Of course they should; but then so should the Basques, and the Kurds, and the Irish, and the Kashmiris, and the Chechens, and the Australian Aborigines, and the North American Indians, etc., etc., etc., many of them more ancient, or more numerous, or with as rich a historical legacy, or with an even more precise or more just claim to a particular territory than the Jews have to Palestine, not least of all the Palestinians of course.
Many have literature or culture far MORE notable than the Bible for their claim, but the Bible and its tacked-on Christian mythology was the religion adopted by Western feudalism, capitalism, and then imperialism in its long march to world domination, and therefore Jewish folklore has always received extra attention in the West's ruling circles.
Thus the rhetorical "abstract right" question is not only an obviously diversionary attempt to provoke an "anti-Semitism?" eyebrow raising, but thereby also manages to actually avoid any evaluation of which of the very many peoples on Earth, who are denied a state, really are the most deserving of nationhood , — bearing in mind all of the colossal upheaval, conflict, and warmongering any such re-running of history to achieve a more "just" outcome inevitably always entails.
Leaving aside that massive minefield of whether for example the Vikings, Celts, or AngloSaxons deserve England back (all losing their homeland to war or upheaval MORE RECENTLY than the Jews lost their place among all the Semitic tribes around Palestine); or whether the Iroquois and Sioux nations should get North America back, or the Aborigines Australia, etc, etc, etc; or whether even more ANCIENT claims than the one the Jews promote, such as the Basque or Cyprus questions, should be the issues demanding world sympathy more, — — there is even then little but obnoxious special pleading and rotten string-pulling behind the Zionist neo-colonial propaganda.
Even the Biblical history claim amounts at best to just a tiny part of Palestine compared to the Philistines (Palestinians) who were there first until overrun by the Israelites and many other Semitic tribes.
And unlike the Jews who were subsequently scattered, absorbed, and lost their language (Hebrew) like most of these ancient Semitic nations, — the modern Palestinians have been in Palestine for the last 1,500 years, and speaking Arabic, the dominant Semitic language.
Palestine has overwhelmingly been the country of the Arabic-speaking Palestinian nation for twice as long as England has been the country of the English-speaking nation, finally established only 700 years ago.
Hebrews stopped using Hebrew, (which effectively died as a language ), and they became by-and-by Spanish Jews, Greek Jews, Italian Jews, French Jews, German Jews, English Jews, etc, etc, all mostly growing up speaking the local language as their first native language.
Hebrew has now been only artificially revived again as a deliberate political act to try to lend some legitimacy to this post1945 colonial conquest by these Western imperialist Jews.
But despite all this, the Jewish colonisers (especially the American ones, the largest and most aggressive contingent of the landgrabbing "settlers"), relentlessly pound out "their Godgiven right to all this land", etc, etc, — bristling murderously with a NAZI "master-race" fanaticism.
It is all a complete joke and a complete con.
Even more obnoxious special pleading hype is then added in on account of the Holocaust.
The Holocaust, all round, was the "achievement" of Western imperialist "democracy", both in the elected Hitler government which introduced it, and in the rest of the monopoly capitalist West which deliberately encouraged the rebuilding of German militarism under the National Socialist party as a bulwark against the Soviet workers state, and which took its time in Second World War counter offensives in order to let the USSR be destroyed as much as possible first, through fighting 90% of Germany's mighty forces on its own virtually, for most of the war.
The Holocaust had nothing whatever to do with Palestine or the Palestinian people who live there.
But it is the Palestinian people who now have to bear the brunt of this hate-filled vengeance which self-righteously spews out of the most aggressive Zionist colonisers and NAZI-style assassination deathsquads Jews support.
And they are subsidised to the hilt to do this by the selfsame Western imperialist "world order" racket which financed Hitler Germany's remilitarisation to start with.
Phillips concentrates on more subtle word games than these cruder diversions and red herrings about "the promised land" and the Holocaust, etc.
She specialises in knocking down obscure Aunt Sallies in order to bedazzle with words, often very critical of Sharon and "the extremists", so that the main aim is achieved: Appear to discuss everything, but in fact make sure that the post1945 implantation of "Israel" and the "reasons" for it is never in fact discussed at all.
Typical is this week's latest Sunday Observer. With a bold breath of fresh air, she starts by appearing to warn Jews that the more that they moan about "anti-Semitism", the more anti-Semitism they are likely to promote.
But she is not really telling them to shut up, of course, (and why should they if it really is anti-Semitism which is now "the problem" for world society). The entire Phillips piece is itself one long tirade against "anti-Semitism" as really "the reason" why so many intelligent people in the West are failing to understand and support the cause of "Israel" in the way Phillips thinks is logical, moral, and justified.
This is just the start of a clever weave using a chorus of ironic self-deprecation of Jews as the 'New McCarthyites' for their supposed sanctimoniousness (not accepted by Phillips, of course) in over zealously hurling the "anti-Semitism" stigma around. By this stunt, Phillips slyly gets through an entire list of current participants in the Palestine polemics, cynically effectively labelling them as "anti-Semites" as a means of disposing of their arguments.
Thus advice at a London 'Economist' debate for Jews not to overplay the "anti-Semitism" insult card is juxtaposed to a stranger's shocking "I hate Jews" outburst to effectively brand all (who think that the "anti-Semitism" propaganda blitz by Zionism might be self-defeating) as "anti-Semites" themselves.
This then gets repeated in a subtle variant by the Zionist Phillips ladling on the self-pitying irony in declaring:: " I should have said I brought this on myself by writing anything at all" as an "answer" to some public perception that the sizable international media power of Jewish monopoly imperialist finance capital might deserve querying as a "sinister" control over public debate about Zionism's genocidal colonisation of the land of the Palestinian people.
Instantly, this perfectly proper question about who owns the media, and therefore who controls much of the debate about world affairs, is then juxtaposed to some presumed anti-Jewish "big lie" about some Egyptian water wells, poisoned in 1947, an obvious "stock libel repetition from medieval Jew hatred" in Phillips' eyes but which she really ought not to dare to point out for fear of being labelled a "Holocaust shroud waver".
This self put-down sarcasm goes seething on to tar Tory MPs with the same "anti-Semite" brush, and give a withering glance towards the entire European Commission for "this week only finally admitting there was a problem with rising Jew hatred", kicking Prodi for acknowledging "some prejudice" when a blitz of synagogue and cemetery desecration is the real new horror story, according to Phillips.
Finally, she gets to the point, masterfully led into by Phillips at last agreeing that indeed, "Some Jews grossly overreact to perceived anti-Semitic bias".
Having lulled the senses with this phony self-criticism, then the master-stroke: Appear to acknowledge everything bad about "Israel", Zionism, and the Jews that anyone could wish to hear frankly and fearlessly discussed, — but in reality ensure a glossing over completely of any questioning of HOW and WHY this "Israel" was militarily implanted in the way that it was onto the Palestinian people's homeland after 1945. Thus:
Nevertheless, as Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks told the EU conference, an unholy alliance between the Left, the far Right and the Islamic street means millions are being told that alone among nations, Israel has no right to exist and that all the troubles of the world are the work of the Jews.
At the heart of this bitter disagreement is the conflation of the issue of Israel with the issue of Jew hatred. The latter claim maddens people who feel they can't criticise Israel without risking being accused of anti-Jewish prejudice. 'The two, they say, are not connected. In theory, that's true. In practice, one issue often morphs into the other, both implicitly in the way Israel is described and explicitly in overt Jew-hatred.
CRITICISM OF Israel is certainly legitimate, as is criticism of any country. I am myself critical of its policies. But a line has been crossed into something else, the demonisation and dehumanisation of Israel based on systematic lies, libels and distortions. As a result a lot of decent people have been unwittingly caught up in a narrative of hatred.
Then, having got away with this monster sleight-of-hand, Phillips turns her real venom in reality on EVERY type of criticism of the Jewish freemasonry, of Zionism, and of the "Israeli" colonial/military dictatorship tyranny that has EVER been uttered, and proceeds to pour the vilest "anti-Semitic" false accusation abuse on it that she can muster.
British academics get it; Jenny Tonge gets it; the 'European left' gets it; all anti-Blairism gets it; Tam Dalyell gets it; the British aristocracy gets it; Islam gets it; Hamas gets it; Karl Marx gets it; Archbishop Tutu gets it; — — wall to wall "anti-Semitism" in all directions.
But WHY and HOW and in particular WITH WHAT ENVISAGED CONSEQUENCES was the decision made to FORCIBLY implant "Israel" on the homeland of the Palestinian nation post1945 (and more and more brutally strengthened ever since, despite the ever-increasing warmongering catastrophe that inevitably this has all unleashed)???????????
That really BIG issue, the only objective approach to this human tragedy worth making, that question Phillips constructs her whole propaganda to make sure never gets asked.
An entire, worldwide, powerful Zionist brainwashing campaign is being conducted to achieve exactly the same censorship suppression, — a truly outrageous achievement by the cleverest international religious freemasonry that has ever existed.
But it will fail, of course.
When working in the same direction as the flow of historical class and national forces, propaganda can be all-powerful.
But when the historical tide has turned, then all of the brainwashing propaganda smartness in the world, allied to no matter how many powerful freemasonry connections here, there, and everywhere, — cannot halt the rot.
The backstabbing selfish greed of the Western imperialist system's "overproduction" credit-creation dollar-pollution binge since 1945 to defeat the appeal of communist revolution by spreading world trade and dollar aid largesse everywhere, — is relentlessly sinking ever-deeper into insoluble economic crisis every day.
The entire Third World is heading towards revolt against this tyrannical Western monopoly domination which ceaselessly creates an ever widening gap between the richest and the poorest on Earth, but which in unresolvable crisis times actually increases mass impoverishment not only relatively but absolutely as well. The poorest billions of the world actually get poorer.
No wonder Western domination is facing ever escalating "terrorism"revolt problems in all directions.
Of course the West is mounting a massive warmongering counter-attack on Third World revolt, — called the "war on terrorism".
And the propaganda brainwashing to convince the world of the "justice" and the "inevitable deserved triumph" of this blitzkrieg onslaught against "rogue states" and all "evil axis" influences everywhere, has become an absolutely unprecedented phenomenon of history.
The world is closer to 1984 Newspeak dictating that black is white than it has ever been before.
But despite the frightening shock to intelligence and to "human rights" delusions that Hutton, and Blairism, and Guantanamo, and Bushism, etc, have produced, — the game is still up.
History has moved on and the Third World can no longer be knocked around as of old. In fact, it cannot be knocked into any sort of shape at all to suit the West's unceasing domination interests.
In fact, the West looks more and more like it is LOSING this "war on terrorism".
In Iraq and Afghanistan, the first two "rogue state" targets for forcible "democratic reconstruction" to suit Western needs, doubts proliferate that US imperialism will end up with any sort of usable stooge regime satellite country at all.
The warmongering brutalisation may only eventually lead to new anti-imperialist regimes which become far more effective obstacles to Western military and economic domination of the Middle East region, and of the Third World interests in general, than ever the eccentric, cruel and degenerate regime of Saddam Hussein was.
And far from cowing the Third World in general by this deliberate "shock and awe" example setting by Western military terror, the political fiasco of failing to win any popular support subsequently in Iraq or Afghanistan has only resulted in a massive INCREASE in "terrorism" resistance to imperialist domination.
Having just heard from even Westernised Afghani women that life is actually worse there now than under the Taleban, now the voice of Iraqi women is being raised in the Western capitalist press admitting that things are not even any better in Iraq, in spite of all the massive Western publicity about the "democratic transformation" that was "going to take place there", and despite the fact that the barbaric Saddam regime could hardly have set lower standards for the life of women or anyone else:
Iraqi family law is the most progressive in the Middle East. Divorce cases are heard only in the civil courts (effectively outlawing the "repudiation" religious divorce); polygamy is outlawed unless the first wife welcomes it (and very few do); and women divorcees have an equal right to custody of their children.
The "liberators" of Iraq can take no credit for this. The secular family code was introduced in 1959. Saddam Hussein weakened its inheritance provisions but left it mostly unchanged. Now it is under threat from the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council. IGC resolution 137 will, if implemented, eliminate the idea of civil marriage and place several aspects of family law — including divorce and inheritance rights — directly under the control of religious authorities.
Only 100 women demonstrated in the city's Firdose Square to condemn it. Where was the outcry?
I asked every woman I met why she seemed not to give a damn about a resolution that is surely going to change women's lives for the worse. I was met with kind smiles and the same weary reply: it's not going to change a thing.
Ten months after their "liberation", Iraqi women have only just started to leave their houses to carry out ordinary tasks such as taking their kids to school, shopping or visiting neighbours. They do so despite the risk of kidnapping or worse. It is women and children who bear the brunt of the absence of law and order, the lack of security and the availability of weapons.
Ten months on, most women graduates are still unemployed. Seventy-two per cent of working Iraqi women were public employees, and the public sector is in tatters. Other workers are suffering too. My niece, Luma, is a biologist. She was unemployed during Saddam's era because she wasn't a member of the Ba'ath party. She is unemployed now because she refused to get a tazkia (a recommendation form) from one of the main political parties represented in the IGC.
As a housewife and a mother, her daily life, like that of most Iraqi women, follows the same tedious routine: get gas for the cooker (make sure the cylinder doesn't leak — gas explosions are not unusual); buy oil (make sure it's not mixed with water); buy petrol for the car (she will queue for three hours, but the men's queues are even longer so the task falls to her).
At the sound of special hooting many of Baghdad's women rush outdoors to pay the refuse collectors to collect the rubbish (in the heart of old Baghdad, rubbish piles as high as the buildings. Women and children search there for anything they can sell or eat).
The electricity supply hasn't improved in the past 10 months either, despite Paul Bremer's claims. In my family's house in Palestine Street, a middle class area, the women have to deal with three different supply sources to get just 12 hours of power a day. The first source is the national grid, from which we receive electricity for two hours then are cut off for three (we're lucky in al-Adhamia the on/off ratio is 2:4; residents there believe that they are being punished because they support the resistance).
The second source is the local mosque, which acquired a generator during the looting and now supplies 100 houses with three hours of electricity per day. The third source is the house generator, which must be handled with special care. To add to the general misery, there is still no postal service in the country and no telephone services in most areas.
There has been no shortage of initiatives to "enlighten" Iraqi woman and encourage them to play an active role in the country's reconstruction. In one, the Department for International Development and the Foreign Office declared "the need, urgently, for a women's tent meeting in Baghdad with a declaration in compliance with 1325".
Patricia Hewitt tried to establish a high council for Iraqi women. Condoleezza Rice opened a centre for women's human rights in Diwanya. In her opening speech delivered via satellite she assured Iraqi women that "we are with you in spirit". It was attended by commanders and soldiers of the occupying forces, but by very few Iraqi women. Meanwhile in Diwanya itself, local farmers (many of them women) were unable to start the winter season because of unexploded cluster bombs on their land.
Iraqi political parties are also desperate to employ women to boost their own credibility. So why are Iraqi, women not welcoming the chance to be a model for others in the Middle East?
Over countless coffees, the women explain. They are educated, resilient and survivors of atrocities of Saddam's regime. They replaced male workers during the eight years of the Iran-Iraq war, and set up cottage industries to support their families during 13 years of brutal sanctions. They are not about to forgive the US or British governments for strengthening Saddam's regime, imposing sanctions, and destroying their cities in two wars. Iraqi women know that the occupation forces are in the country to guard their own interests, not those of the Iraqis.
In refusing to take part in any initiative by the US-led occupation, or its Iraqi allies, women are practising passive resistance. They adopted the same technique against Saddam's despised General Union of Iraqi women.
Haifa Zangana is an Iraqi-born, novelist and painter. She is a former political prisoner of the Ba'ath regime
But most graphically of all, the massive significance of this Third World
revolt shines brightest of all in colonised Palestine itself where the
depths of humiliated and beaten degradation can be accurately plotted
on a time-scale of relentlessly rising revolt.
In 1948's catastrophe of the "legal proclamation" by Western imperialist world rule of the state of "Israel", effective Palestinian resistance was very small and weak. Jordan's imperialist stooges and other corrupt Arab nationalist regimes did all the talking, such as there was any, on behalf of Palestinian interests.
Zionist imperialism's 1967 annexation of the West Bank and Gaza as well, thus effectively swallowing up the whole of Palestine and completing the genocidal liquidation of an entire nationhood, saw not much more effective resistance. The tide started to turn following the further unresisted humiliation of the Palestinians in Beirut and in their refugee camps in Lebanon in the early 1980s.
Some Lebanese and PLO units started guerrilla war fightbacks against this new Zionist imperial landgrab, and so successful and competent did Hizbollah and other groups eventually become that Jewish colonisation retreated from its occupation of Lebanon, the Zionists first retreat ever.
Since then, history has increasingly put the writing on the wall for the whole project of continued everlasting Western imperialist domination of the Middle East by one means or another.
The Saudi feudal monarchy, perpetually Washington's most reliable stooge regime in the area but also the biggest and the most controlling paymaster of most "anti-imperialist" nationalism too, including Arafat's PLO, has long been facing terminal decline and overthrow, desperately striking more and more anti-Western poses lately in a bid to survive the irresistibly growing anti-imperialist wrath of Third World revolt.
The al-Qaeda part of the anti-imperialist struggle is largely Saudi grown.
Washington's other chief stooge regime for augmenting local regime tyranny in the area when needed, Saddam Hussein, went so far off the pro-imperialist rails that the West had to destroy his Iraqi dynasty.
And the loss of the Shah in huge Iran has still never been replaced to suit Western stooge interests, and the Islamic Revolution there, albeit reactionary itself, is still showing signs of as much anti-Western awkwardness as ever.
But most dramatically of all, the Palestinian resistance itself, and inside Zionist-colonised Palestine itself, has gone from strength to strength relentlessly since the early 1980s.
Now the unthinkable might even be close, the overthrow of Arafat compromise nationalism itself, to be replaced by much more militant anti-imperialist fundamentalism which in spite of its Islamic delusions, is far closer to the spirit of worldwide anti-imperialist revolt than the old 'non-aligned', Stalinist-corrupted, Arafatism could ever possibly have aspired.
From here, full-scale communist revolution will be easier, not more difficult.
And feeding Zionism's "anti-Semitism" insult-dealing frenzy, this steady change in the balance of international class and national forces has even reached the consciousness of a cross-party Parliamentary forum, as capitalism itself reports:
The report, by a Commons select committee which conducted a six month inquiry last year, blames Israel's incursions, curfews, checkpoints and other restrictions including its security wall along the West Bank, for choking the Palestinian economy.
The MPs say that what "makes the poverty so unpalatable is the level of deprivation vis a vis Israel, and the awareness that it is not the result of natural calamity but of deliberate actions on the part of the government of Israel".
Criticising Israeli restrictions that disrupt movement within the West Bank and Gaza, the MPs say: "It is hard to avoid the conclusion that there is a deliberate Israeli strategy of putting the lives of ordinary Palestinians under stress as part of a strategy of bringing the population to heel."
The committee, which is made up of Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs, says it is unfair for Israel to benefit from a trade agreement with the EU while Palestinians, who are also part of the agreement, are prevented by the Israeli restrictions from doing so.
"We therefore urge the UK government to propose to the EU council of trade ministers that Israel's preferential terms of trade with the EU be suspended until it lifts the movement restrictions which it has placed on Palestinian trade," the MPs say.
Although the Belgian government threatened trade action against Israel two years ago, it is unlikely that either the British government or the EU will endorse the recommendation, both preferring to engage Israel in dialogue rather than economic pressure.
Publication of such a critical report is unhelpful to Israel at a time when it is on the defensive diplomatically, including a hearing at the International Court in the Hague later this month over its security wall.
Tony Baldry, Conservative chairman of the committee, said: "Key measures, such as the construction of a security barrier higher than the Berlin Wall, may bring the mirage of immediate security to Israelis, but the level of despair felt by ordinary Palestinians at being denied an ordinary life can only increase the supply of suicide bombers."
In the report, the MPs say that while there is no starvation or absolute poverty in the Palestinian areas, there has been a serious decline in living standards that has translated into malnutrition on the West Bank and Gaza as bad as in sub-Saharan Africa.
The Palestinian economy and education system have suffered a sharp deterioration as a result of the closure of its borders by the Israeli military and restriction on movement within its borders.
"The management of checkpoints is all too often handled by young, inexperienced IDF [Israeli Defence Force] conscripts who may lack the training and experience to deal with large numbers of people passing through on their way to work or to study," the MPs say.
They criticise the extent to which Israel has control over Palestinian water supplies, describing the "wilful destruction" of water infrastructure by the IDF and settlers as "simply unacceptable".
The EU would suffer financially from a suspension of its trade agreement with Israel. Between 2000 and 2002, the EU exported €44bn (£30.1bn) to Israel, while Israel exported €28bn the other way.
It is already obvious how the Phillips "anti-Semitism" witchhunting technique is going to have its work cut out to stem this rapidly turning tide.
Phillips' tricks, such as accusing LibDem MP Jenny Tonge of "incitement to mass murder" for saying she could understand how Palestinian suicide bombers felt after a lifetime of imprisonment, humiliation, and brutalisation, are obviously on desperate last legs when even British Parliamentarians can report that more suicide bombers is the only possible answer to the vicious collective penning-in of the entire Palestinian people on their enclaves and refugee camp reservations behind one giant prison wall to end all prison walls.
Meanwhile, Phillips' great hopes in the Bush/Blair revival of NAZI-imperialist blitzkrieg tactics in support of "master-race" interests, grow gloomier by the day on both political and economic fronts.
Although the credit-based boom-creation strategy still staggers on not quite yet in total disarray, despite obviously being completely doomed in the long run, there is now no hiding the utter destabilisation menacing the whole world economy from the dollar's unending pollution degradation.
The world is being conned. The whole of history has been conned. The planet's first truly global currency is an utter fraud, just printed by the billions and trillions at not even the limited regulations that capitalism itself normally imposes in spite of its fundamentally anarchic piratical essence, all in order laughably to "save the world from communism", thereby completing the very process Marx said must happen of capitalism bringing about its own self-destruction (see EPSR box).
While maybe still early days in the crisis yet, the skids now irreversibly placed under the dollar's value have at last started shaking up international market complacency.
These initial capitalist press reports of the worries around do at least capture the flavour of potentially catastrophic difficulties ahead, even if lacking in imagination about just how disastrous a total corruption of the dollar's value by ongoing Washington imperialist madness could become for the world.
ASIAN CENTRAL banks are quietly moving away from holding the US dollar in their foreign exchange reserves, suggesting further weakness in the value of the greenback this year.
A new analysis by Lehman Brothers estimates that in the last half of last year as much as $133 billion of foreign exchange reserves in non-Japan Asia left the dollar for stronger, higher yielding currencies such as the euro, pound and Australian dollar.
The research compared US Treasury statistics on foreign holders of its debt with Asian central banks' statistics on reserve holdings.
'The dollar's now sharing its reserve currency status a little perhaps not a bad thing,' says John Llewellyn, chief economist at Lehmans.
Last week it was revealed that foreign exchange reserves held by Asian countries had reached $2 trillion, as governments over insured against a currency crisis.
The bulk of this had been in dollars and dollar debt such as US treasuries. Asian central banks financed half of the US current account and fiscal deficits last year.
But diversifying reserves away from US dollar assets, which are low yielding and becoming more risky, has become compelling over the past year. Lehmans says its research is 'tentative' but consistent with the strength in the euro, and hints that the US dollar has further to fall.
Other leading economists agree. 'It was very clear in 2003 that these central banks did not buy anywhere as much treasuries as they have accumulated forex reserves. It was particularly marked in the second half of last year,' skid Jim O'Neill, head of economic research at Goldman Sachs.
Earlier this month, at the latest G7 meeting in Boca Raton, Florida, the fuming guardians of the euro sought to reallocate the burden of currency adjustment on the inert Asian currencies. But the markets took little notice.
Where economic diplomacy is failing, however, the crushing side effects of too many foreign exchange reserves may do the job. This is the $2 trillion question for the world economy. In their search for stability, Asian governments, through their central banks, have become voracious purchasers of dollars and dollar debt, particularly US treasury bonds.
'The latest split for 2003 shows that 62 per cent of global FX reserves now rest in the hands of developing nations, dominated by Asia. This did not happen overnight,' says Claudio Piron of Standard Chartered.
The Bank of Japan, on behalf of the Ministry of Finance, bought more than $67bn in intervention in January alone, a record for any central bank. The ministry is seeking Y61 trillion (£300bn) in funds from parliament for currency intervention operations this year.
'It's like having a captive customer who doesn't care what the price is. The Bank of Japan is the single biggest buyer of treasuries in the world and shows no sign of stopping,' one trader told Reuters last week.
For Japan this is partly a consequence of having interest rates of zero. But China, Taiwan, Korea, India and Russia are all racking up record currency reserves. These flows have helped the dollar avoid a free fall and kept long term interest rates in the US very low.
It is effectively a very cheap loan from the Asian countries to help finance the consumption boom in the US, which in turn increases demand for Asia's exports. Half of the US budget deficit is being funded by Asian central banks. It's the biggest vendor-financing scheme in history.
But it can't go on. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan know this. 'Given the already substantial accumulation of dollar denominated debt, foreign investors, both private and official, may become less willing to absorb ever growing claims on US residents,' Greenspan told US Congressmen last week. The core reason for this astonishing build-up of mainly dollar reserves insurance against another currency crisis is also wearing thin.
'In theory the optimal level of forex reserves would cover three to six months' imports. Taiwan has four years,' points out Jim O'Neill, Goldman Sachs' currency guru. O'Neill also points to the inflationary consequences. which are seeping through in China.
But the real shift is in the composition of reserves. The dollar has long been the globe's reserve currency. Its decline in value and low-yielding debt seems to have sparked the first steps of a diversification of reserves, at least outside Japan. Russia has started to build up its gold reserves. The Reserve Bank of India is pondering buying euro-denominated gilts rather than treasuries. Even the Australian dollar has benefited from a slow move out of the dollar.
O'Neill says it is clear that the central banks did not buy nearly as many US treasuries as they have accumulated reserves, particularly in the second half of last year. So this is a further reason for broad-based dollar weakness. And the likelihood of these banks moving more money into the euro and the pound could also keep these European currencies riding high.
The "shock and awe" blitzkrieg of Iraq has already put a $200 billion hole in Washington's accounts just like that (and with very little to show for it, so far).
The international worth of the dollar has been collapsing accordingly.
But Bush's delivery earlier this month of the budget forecasts for 2005 has promised more warmongering to such an extent that a deficit of $2,400 billion could appear to be on the cards over the next 10 years if a crazily hoped-for massive "economic recovery" boom does not materialise.
And on top of all this, the shift in historical power towards worldwide anti-imperialist revolt is finally bound to cast doubt on the worthwhileness of the entire post-1945 American imperialist 'New World Order'.
If imperialist warmongering domination is no longer valid for imposing economic "solutions" (greater exploitation, unfair trading, debt tyranny, military blackmail, etc, etc) on the vast Third World, then INSOLUBLE crisis is firmly back on the agenda.
And in that case, renewed inter-imperialist warmongering is also inevitably back on the historical agenda.
And at the same time, the "defeat of communism" is suddenly looking a ludicrously premature notion from at least four powerful new points of view (Third World revolution; anti-war revolution; anti-slump revolution; and re-established workers state revolution).
In the face of such possible perspectives, all sorts of long-established obligations and relationships, which have built the secure "freemarket" world since 1945, no longer look remotely near as reliable as before.
Specifically, the political, military, financial, and commercial stability which has allowed US imperialism's "free world" to flourish so effectively since 1945, could now start seeming to be anything but stable, and could begin spreading more doubt than reassurance all round the capitalist imperialist system.
Not only is the dollar no longer as good as gold. It might soon start
looking as if the American imperialist epoch was never much more than a
cheap, tawdry, and insubstantial flash in the pan, with possible untold
far-reaching implications. Build Leninism. EPSR
World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).
British imperialist collusion in death squad assassinations in Ireland meets Canadian inquiry judge's wrath for delaying disclosure.
The retired Canadian judge had been tasked by the British and Dublin
Governments to investigate allegations of state collusion in relation
to six specific cases. These included the killing of defence lawyers
Pat Finucane and Rosemary Nelson, the death of Catholic Robert Hamill
and the LVF prisoner Billy Wright. The Dublin Government adhered to its
original promise to publish two of the six reports before Christmas but
the British have delayed publication and sought to redraft Cory's findings.
At the completion of his findings Judge Cory warned that he would not tolerate interference or suppression of his reports and would be prepared to kick up a fuss if there was any attempt at political manipulation. This week, the judge made good his promise by going over the British Government's head and informing the families of the victims that he had recommended inquiries into the deaths of their relatives.
The judge had become so annoyed at the British Government's refusal to publish his reports that he personally contacted the families to inform them of his recommendations. The British Government has cited a series of legal considerations as the reason behind their failure to adhere to their commitments.
The Finucane family welcomed the Judge's intervention. Michael Finucane, son of the murdered solicitor, said he had received a telephone call from Judge Cory on Monday afternoon and described the Canadian as a man of "unquestionable integrity". The judge informed the families of his recommendations but did not detail the findings that led him to make his decisions.
"I think the fact that Judge Cory felt compelled to contact us shows up the British Government as being at the very least, guilty of bad faith and, at worst, duplicity and lies," said Michael.
"I don't think the concepts of independence and impartiality are compatible with how the British Government does its business," he said.
The Finucane family is now seeking a judicial review in an attempt to force the British Government into complying with its commitments by publishing the findings and establishing the recommended inquiries.
Speaking at Stormont, Sinn Féin's Gerry Adams said the British Government's reluctance to fulfil the commitments it has made is rooted in the fact that collusion was and is part of administrative practice in the North of Ireland and British agencies did collude with unionist paramilitaries.
Adams said the British Government is seeking to find excuses to prevent publication of the reports and said the British Prime Minister must personally address the issue.
"There was a policy and administrative practice of collusion between British agencies and agents within unionist paramilitaries," said Adams. "That obviously is a huge thing for the British Government to deal with, but Mr Blair has to deal with this issue."
Meanwhile, Fírinne, the victims' group campaigning for the truth about collusion, is to hold a mass picket at the headquarters of British Intelligence in London.
On Wednesday 4 February, 100 relatives of those killed as a result of collusion will travel to London to picket, for the first time, those responsible for the policy of collusion the government department and agencies that directed the loyalist killer gangs.
"The policy of employing the loyalist death squads was not the
actions of rogue agents or individuals who overstepped their responsibilities," said
spokesperson Mark Sykes (who was seriously injured in the attack on Graham's
Bookies on the Ormeau Road). "It was a policy endorsed at the highest
political level. The British response to the Barron Inquiry and their
refusal to act on the Cory report prove this. The British Government
has never accepted its responsibility for the deaths which resulted from
this policy."
Return to top
World Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).
How British/Unionist reaction let a Special Branch Gestapo fit-up wreck the GFA
THE DUP's devolution proposals mark an important shift in as much as they are "a shift by that party from the never-never-land politics they have inhabited for decades," Sinn Féin's Chief Negotiator Martin McGuinness told the party's Six-County Cuige AGM in Belfast
McGuinness said the DUP had recognised "that power-sharing is the way forward" and that this brought the party "into the ballpark of the Good Friday Agreement politics".
He challenged the DUP to talk directly to his party rather than use the conduit of the British Government, a government that they have for years been denouncing as treacherous and dishonest.
Less prominent in the media was the dramatic development last Thursday when the substantiate allegations of the so-called 'Stormont spy ring' were dropped. In October 2002, the British Government, imposing legislation outside the terms of the Agreement, suspended the political institutions on the pretext of IRA spying at the heart of government.
The fact that the suspension followed a meeting of the UUP ruling council at which the party adopted the anti-Agreement agenda of the DUP was far from incidental, as republicans pointed out at the time.
The spy ring allegation began with a high profile raid on the offices of Sinn Féin at Stormont and led to a number of house raids and arrests. Four people were later charged, Ciaran Kearney, Denis Donaldson, William Mackessy and Fiona Farrelly.
All charges against. Fiona Farrelly were dropped without explanation by the DPP last year. In Belfast Magistrates Court this week, the other three defendants were informed that key charges against them had been dropped. Crucially, the central charges used to substantiate allegations of a 'Stormont spy ring' have been dropped without explanation.
Speaking in court, Ciaran Kearney blamed Special Branch for the collapse of the Assembly, which he described as an "act of political subversion".
"Many of the charges read out to me one and a half years ago by Special Branch have now been withdrawn. Most of all, the allegation that I possessed documents of a secret, confidential and restricted nature originating from the NIO has been withdrawn without explanation," said Kearney.
'The Special Branch fantasy of a Stormont spy ring is finally disproved. The clock cannot be turned back. My family has been victimised and the political process has been damaged. Special Branch carry the blame for that. They have not yet been made accountable for that act of political subversion."
Meanwhile, Sinn Féin sources were putting a less favourable spin on the DUP's position. "I don't think anybody believes they are going to engage — not even the two governments," a party member told the Sunday Business Post.
Sadly, recognition of the pitch doesn't mean the DUP are willing to play ball. "Their proposals are a cynical, deceptive way to recreate some form of unionist majority rule. The DUP is engaged in a tactical game — it isn't substance, just smoke and mirrors," said the source.
At the core of the current crisis is not unionist regrouping around reactionary rejectionism, although this plays its part, but the British Government's strategy of only moving forward as slowly as unionism allows.
Meanwhile, another game of smoke and mirrors was being played out in the media, with the Sunday tabloids devoting frontpage banner headlines and in-depth analysis of the continuing Stakeknife saga.
It is surely no coincidence that, just three days earlier, the relatives of a hundred victims of British collusion with loyalist death squads had travelled to London to picket the MoD, MI5 and the British Tory party. The cornerstone of their collusion story is the way in which the British state reorganised and rearmed unionist paramilitaries as a mechanism to commission the murder of citizens within its own jurisdiction.
It would be impossible to overemphasise the damaging nature of this revelation. But the media ignored it. Throughout the campaign to expose collusion, the British state has sought to thwart, distort and obscure the truth. At first, the British depicted collusion as an informal relationship between individuals, a few bad apples. Later it became just a question of information 'leaks'. Then it was about "taking the war to the IRA".
Of course there are British agents within the IRA; it would be foolish for any republican to imagine otherwise, but the Stakeknife story carries an agenda far beyond the details, which may or may not be true or false, fact or fiction. Stakeknife is about containing the notion of collusion. In this collusion scenario, republicans are depicted as turning against other republicans, IRA Volunteers are cast as killers of other IRA Volunteers. In other words, Stakeknife keeps the notion of violence in-house, it is simply a matter of violence turning in on itself, the classic squabble amongst thieves.
This scenario obscures the British state's primary relationship with unionist paramilitaries. It obscures the fact that the targets of Britain's collusion strategy were not simply IRA Volunteers but all those who posed a threat to British rule, politically, (members of Sinn Féin), judicially (Pat Finucane and Rosemary Nelson) and those who simply got in the way.
Meanwhile, in the Irish News, columnist James Kelly was bewailing "the fickle hand of fate" and "our unfortunate history" which, according to Kelly, has dealt northern nationalists the double blow of losing the guiding hand of John Hume at a time when Ian Paisley, "the guldering rowdy who disgraced us at Oxford, Westminster and Strasbourg" has "emerged on top of the rubble of unionism".
And recently, within the nationalist discourse there has been an increasing expression of fatalism. Brian Feeney, another prominent nationalist commentator, has become so pessimistic about the potential for political progress in the face of unionist fundamentalism that No Hope has become the corollary of No Surrender.
And the SDLP weren't any more enthusiastic, describing the DUP's proposals as "insubstantial". The proposals did not show a commitment to working the agreement, said SDLP leader Mark Durkan. "We have no interest in majority rule by the back door," he said.
But if the DUP's proposals still amounted to a 'wreckers' charter for northern nationalists, the Ulster Unionist Party was claiming they represented a step too far. UUP leader David Trimble said the DUP was proposing to "let republicans off the hooks in terms of paramilitary activity".
And here lies the failure at the heart of the UUP. If David Trimble would only stop behaving like a mesmerised rabbit caught in the DUP's headlights, he might be able to secure the tens of thousands of unionist voters who supported the GFA but who have failed to subsequently vote for the UUP.
Instead of presenting an alternative voice, a voice a significant section of unionism is clearly eager and willing to hear, he allowed a fundamentalist agenda to dominate the unionist discourse and in doing so systematically corroded his own power base. And now his only complaint against the DUP's fundamentalist vision is that it isn't fundamentalist enough.
But as Sinn Féin has been consistently making clear, unionism can only stall and thwart the Good Friday Agreement as much as the British, and to a lesser extent the Dublin Government, allows them to.
"If the two governments continue as they have since October by not following through on their commitments, that feeds into the DUP's sense that, while they are in the ascendancy, nothing will change," said a Sinn Féin source.
"Where is the incentive for unionists to engage? If the DUP knew that the British Government in particular was going ahead with changes on human rights and equality over their heads, then they'd engage.
Return to top
World Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).
Genocidal colonisation continues Jewish landgrab in Palestine.
"Fortress Jerusalem" is symbolised not only by burgeoning communities of Israeli settlements, but most starkly by the construction of physical barriers of walls, fences, barbed wire, and trenches that threaten to encircle the city in the north, east, and south.
This new policy marks a cross roads in the extraordinary conceptual
transformation that underlies Israel's contemporary approach to East
Jerusalem. Israel once viewed its presence in East Jerusalem with confidence
and enthusiasm.
Fortress Jerusalem, in contrast, envisages a permanent confrontation with and subordination of Palestinian East Jerusalemites that promises a battlefield vision of the future. Despite its vaunted security function, the barriers now being constructed will fail as a security measure and will cause endemic Palestinian poverty, bloodshed, and resistance.
The original architects of Israel's occupation of East Jerusalem shared Sharon's objective — unchallenged Israeli rule over the city and its inhabitants.
Palestinians in East Jerusalem have always been viewed by Israel as a problem to be managed and a threat to be defused, if not eliminated. For more than two decades after 1967, a succession of Israeli leaders was confident that this objective could be achieved by promotion of Palestinian economic growth and integration. Israel advertised this benign approach to counter criticism of its permanent occupation.
The failure of Israel's massive settlement policy to increase its demographic domination in the city prompted a dramatic change in this conventional wisdom. Despite decades of intensive settlement that brought almost 200,000 Israelis to settle in East Jerusalem, the percentage of Palestinians in the city rose from 25.8% in 1967 to 32.6% in 2000.
Security considerations reinforced the trend favouring division and separation. The policy decision to restrict movement from the West Bank to East Jerusalem, inaugurated in 1991 at the time of the first Gulf War, was not strictly implemented until the bus bombings in Israel that followed the killing of Palestinians at Hebron's lbrahimi mosque in early 1994.
Ironically, the dynamic of division land separation, and as a consequence East Jerusalem's economic decline, was heightened by the Oslo process, notwithstanding wide support among Palestinians and Israelis that Jerusalem's future was best served by its preservation as an open city. Diplomacy raised the option of the political separation of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, and the Jerusalem municipality withdrew services to Palestinian neighbourhoods even as continuing settlement increased East Jerusalem's isolation from its West Bank hinterland.
The readiness of Prime Minister Ehud Barak to "divide" Jerusalem, physically and in terms of sovereign control, reversed a policy proclaiming exclusive Israeli rule over "united Jerusalem." Barak repudiated this central tenet of Israel's occupation policy because he wanted to lock in territorial gains in East Jerusalem settlements acknowledged by the Clinton parameters — "what is Palestinian is Palestinian and what is Jewish is Israeli" — and because he recognised that continuing settlement in East Jerusalem would not reverse Israel's losing demographic battle, an increasingly salient issue in domestic Israeli political opinion.
Today Prime Minister Sharon is attempting to establish a new paradigm to succeed Dayan's integrationist policies and to foreclose Barak's concept of divided sovereignty. Sharon is determined to destroy the Oslo framework and its potential for Israeli withdrawal and Palestinian sovereignty as a basis for negotiation and the resolution of the Jerusalem issue. On a political level, the permanent closure of, the Orient House and the absence of a successor to the leadership provided by the late Faisal Husseini leaves the city's Palestinians without a recognised political leadership or institutional base at anything beyond the local level. Fortress Jerusalem, in concert with settlement expansion in Ras al-Amud and Abu Dis, will close the option of a Palestinian corridor to the mosques on the Haram al-Sharif from the presumptive Palestinian capital in Abu Dis-part of the expanded East Jerusalem capital for Palestine mooted during the Oslo process. On the practical level, the policies now being implemented strike at the heart of the city's ability to function for Palestinians in its historical role as an economic and commercial crossroad and as a political, religious, and cultural centre.
In territorial terms, Fortress Jerusalem is meant to complete the geostrategic isolation of Palestinian areas within the city from those on its West Bank periphery. East Jerusalem settlement communities, such as Gilo and Har Homa in the south, and Neve Ya'akov and Pisgat Ze'ev in the north and east, also serve this purpose. Settlements, however, are porous. Their existence does not preclude the transport, civic and employment linkages with the Palestinian periphery that a continuous security barrier promises.
Fortress Jerusalem marks Israel's rejection of the notion that Palestinian economic prosperity is a vital element of coexistence. It also ignores the extraordinary cost of the new policy to both Israelis and Palestinians. The Palestinian city emerging from this vision will be a series of disjointed communities disrupted by expanding Israeli settlement and linked, if at all, by an ageing road network interrupted by checkpoint bottlenecks. Palestinian East Jerusalem is largely sandwiched between Israeli West Jerusalem, to which access can be unreliable and complicated, and its Arab hinterland in the West Bank, which is blocked by a physical barrier.
It is impossible to construct a model for prosperity for a city divided
from itself and under siege. Impoverishment and eventual depopulation
of the Palestinian sector and a continuing flight of capital and talent
from West Jerusalem are far more likely consequences.
The unstated assumption driving Sharon's plan for Fortress Jerusalem
is the shrinking of the Arab city in size and aspirations to enable
its domination by Israel. East Jerusalem has languished as a consequence
of closures during the last decade. Its West Bank market has been denied
to it, a feature of the Oslo years that is now made permanent. Israelis
long ago stopped patronising or visiting the Arab sector, and tourists,
once the entire city's lifeblood, have all but abandoned it. Despite
its evident attractions, they will be slow to return to a city under
permanent siege. Fortress Jerusalem will contain less than 250,000
Palestinians, a tiny market for a city Palestinians expect to embody
their political as well as economic aspirations.
If there is a strategic rationale for Fortress Jerusalem, it would appear to be the expectation that Arab Jerusalem, no matter how grand its past or expectations for its future, will wither in the face of the terrible reality in concrete and barbed wire that is being constructed. The Sharon government intends to leave this legacy to the Arabs of Jerusalem. It may well discover to its dismay that it is bequeathing a similar testament to Israelis as well.
Return to top