Recent paper
No 1335 1st July 2008
Demented lying anti-Zimbabwe tirades are monstrous scapegoating to feed the world imperialist desperate need to build up an atmosphere of hate and self-righteousness. The aim is to stampede the masses into war – the only solution that the capitalist system has ever had to regular and ever more catastrophic crisis breakdowns into Slump and Depression. Economic failure is rapidly unravelling into total disaster (lyingly and consciously presented by New Labour as “two or so tough years”) confirming richly Marxism’s dogged refusal to stop warning the working class that it needs a revolutionary solution, not more lies about “democracy”. Urgent need for the masses everywhere is to rebuild such Leninist perspectives and understanding to lead the huge class struggles ahead.
The non-stop demented campaign of now almost insane fabrications and arrogant racist abuse against Robert Mugabe and the Zanu-PF could be giving the working class in the world hugely valuable lessons in the contradictions and manipulations of imperialism – and how they are increasingly failing as their crisis grows, and slides faster and faster into Slump catastrophe – if it were not for the treachery, capitulations and philosophical cowardice of the entire fake-“left” spectrum.
World opinion can still be stampeded around and fooled to some extent by bourgeois hypocrisy about “democracy” because of decades of soft-headed capitulation to the misleading and false notions of “reforms through parliament” and “peace campaigning” to “stop war” – the result of Stalin’s disastrous revisions over decades of Leninist revolutionary perspectives and the even worse petty bourgeois Trotskyist “corrections” of, and “opposition” to those failings, which were nothing but rank anti-communism, hostile to everything in the workers states including their mighty material achievements which far outstripped any leadership failings.
Revisionist opportunism and refusal to examine glaring historical mistakes from the 1930s onwards, and bitter Trot hatred of working class discipline and capitulation to imperialist pressure, has kept the working class well away from revolutionary perspectives which are now needed more urgently than ever as capitalism reveals yet again that it will always return to slump and Depression disaster.
War follows Depression, all history shows.
Knowing what is coming, US imperialism has already been pushing that agenda forwards for nearly a decade from the initial NATO bombing of the conveniently small victim Serbia, to the non-stop blitzkrieging of the civilians and insurgency of Afghanistan and Iraq under the nonsensical justification of a “war on terror”.
But the unexpected resistance of the masses in the Middle East which has bogged down the occupations and exposed the warmongering lies of the Bush neocons and its Blairite henchmen, has equally bogged down the drive to war.
Partial defeat and failure, has made it more difficult than ever to whip up the kind of mass populist chauvinist ferment needed.
But the desperate crisis collapse of capitalism’s economic order is now wide in the open.
More scapegoats are needed above all to keep the atmosphere of chaos and hatred on the boil.
Hence the frantic desperation of the tirade of preposterous hearsay reports about a supposed campaign of deliberate “beatings and killings”, constant daily predictions of supposed “mass rebellions”, “general strikes” and “popular opposition” due to “erupt any second” as the “Zimbabwe economy collapses tomorrow” with non-stop lying reports about alleged “international condemnation” and “possible armed intervention by the UN” etc etc, all in an effort to stampede world “opinion”.
The extended Goebbels Big Lie techniques of modern capitalism have gone far beyond the Nazis’ crude efforts.
Under the guise of a “fair” electoral challenge the aim is to provoke as much mayhem and chaos as possible, to allow the counter-revolutionary toppling of a Western hate figure, just as other “democratic” movements organised by the Western intelligence agencies worldwide aim to precipitate chaos with a constant background of violence, like that threatened in Ukraine by the Western coordinated Orange movement, or as is being coordinated now against the popular movements on the rise in South America.
The mad campaign abounds with self-contradictory nonsense – endless forecasts of political and economic failure, of ostracism for Zanu-PF, of “popular” hostility, of “genocidal massacres any day now like Rwanda” (an imperialist created atrocity via the chaos and stoogery its colonialism has left, and the constant manipulation it carries out in various parts of colonial Africa and which Zimbabwe fought against incidentally), of armed intervention by other African states against Harare etc etc etc.
All these fantastical nonsenses are usually disproved the next day, but drowned in yet more inventions.
There has been screaming crude racist hatred against “African dictators” (arrogantly implying that this is “all they’ll ever come to these natives”) and even bundling Mugabe in with such monsters as Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, for example, to try and smear him by implication – when it is the West which installed the Mubaraks, Mobutus and Idi Amins, trained them, funded them and maintained them.
There are stooge gangster dictators like these – and there are those who refuse to steamrollered away by capitalist manipulation and “democracy” lies.
Mugabe is something else – by no means a Marxist nor necessarily the solution to many problems but definitely a part of worldwide hostility to imperialism which is growing daily.
That nascent rebellion, and its counterparts in the Middle East, Nepal and the Philippines, and South America is intensifying the disastrous internal failures of the capitalist order which are built-in to its foul, ruthless, unfair and increasingly inhuman profit plundering system.
Capitalism is drowning in the ever more maniacal accumulation of vast and pointless surplus capital, siphoned up from the relentless slave-like exploitation of the Third World – and unable to find room any more to expand its insane hunt for yet more profit and power for the tiny bloated ruling class, already the most corrupt, degenerate, indolent and distorted in the whole of history.
Emperor Nero had nothing on the corporate kings of US imperial power and their pale echoes elsewhere in the capitalist world.
The panicky desperation revealed by the insane frenzy of hatred and baiting of Zimbabwe’s anti-colonialism is a telling confirmation of a system teetering on the edge of utter disaster.
Capitalism is in the biggest hole in history worldwide with banks, household name companies and even governments facing total meltdown and disintegration.
Warnings of Slump and Depression, – which the EPSR alone has been making to the working class for two decades against the ridicule and smug contempt of the entire fake- “left” – are no longer written off as nonsense but are the daily currency of the mainstream press.
Warnings of total war disaster should equally be heeded.
The EPSR will keep on repeating them, as it develops, and argues for, its understanding of the unfolding crisis against all the complacency, smugness and sheer opportunist pointlessness of the fake-“lefts”, the 57 varieties of self-declared but totally anti-communist or opportunist “revolutionaries”.
As before the last great collapses of the system, in World War One and Two, imperialism needs war and destruction; the only answer it has ever had to its disastrous in-built contradictions which will always bring it back to slump collapse and failure.
It will be one hundred times, five hundred times, a thousand times worse than the appalling horrors of trench warfare and European WW1 agony (still causing pain, tears and personal grief to some nearly a century later); or of the much more widespread destruction of tens of millions of lives, hundreds of cities and entire countries in 1939-45’s blitzing mayhem.
All was done to wipe out surplus capital and impose the burdens of capitalist caused “over-production” crisis on somebody else; the working class firstly and rival capitalists as much as possible, wiping out as much as possible of both.
But even WW2 was a lot harder to get underway by the big capitalists than the 1914-18 Great War, already labelled the “war to end wars” and subject to promises that it would “never happen again”.
Stampeding the world into a second total war took the imperialists nearly fifteen years of aggressive build-up and the invention of the extraordinary posturing, posing and aggressive theatricality of the Fascisti and German Nazism for a “New World Order”, combined with the beginnings of non-stop anti-communist propaganda onslaughts and scapegoating of minorities.
It was done on behalf of all imperialism’s need to “sort things out” and Mussolini and Hitler (both riding the “democracy” waggon at various points) were not just blind-eye tolerated by the rest of capitalism but actively supported in the frenzied anti-communism which was central to their rise (Spanish Civil War collusion, Munich agreement against Sudetenland and the USSR, non-action on the Anschluss, British establishment Nazi sympathising, Labour-spawned Mosleyite Blackshirts, US pro-German movement, US home-grown fascists, Ford ruthless anti-unionism and universal anti-communism etc).
The whole system wanted and needed conflict and the whole of capitalism was becoming dictatorial, aggressive and warmongering.
Fascism was universal in other words, whoever was taking the overtly jackbooting roles.
The build-up of the chauvinism, hatred and mass self-righteous populist fury needed for another blitzing is even more difficult after two such experiences by the world’s masses and especially after 65 years of supposed “boomtime and prosperity” (extremely erratic and crisis ridden as it is) and hypocritical but desperate apologetics of the European bourgeoisies over the atrocities and monstrosities of the war.
Promises that capitalism will deliver change, welfare reform and peace just as good as the real benefits which communism could show, and with endless consumerist delights to go with it (in the rich countries anyway, and ignoring widespread Third World suffering and poverty) have been used to keep back revolutionary upheaval for decades, working through the opportunist layers of official “trade unionism”, Labour reformism and the onion layers of “lefts” who protect its “labour lieutenant for capitalism” style of opportunism and collaboration.
But it has all been built on hollow ground, the most enormous, world-penetrating inflationary boom in history, printing dollars like there is no tomorrow (which there is not for capitalism) from the 1950s on, accelerated by Nixon (ending the Gold standard to pay for the costly Vietnam war) and even more in the 1990s and under Bush.
The dollars flown into the Iraq debacle on aircraft pallets and dispersed without record, the huge tax giveaways in America, the fantastical building programmes, and the massively multiplication of credit through hedge funds and similar creations have made even Nixon look responsible.
Credit on a new scale has stretched to delay the inevitable slump collapse of the profit system at least for a few decades (aided by the unexpected, historically bizarre and utterly unnecessary capitulation of Stalinist revisionist “communism” in the still solid Soviet workers state in 1989).
But there is “no tomorrow” ultimately in capitalism’s limited, one-sided profit-bound historical logic.
As Marx demonstrated with his mighty Capital and many other works, and as many scientific developments have further developed since (most of all his colleague Engels and subsequently the Bolsheviks under Lenin) the implosion of the capitalist system is a routine, recurring and unstoppable elaboration of its inner contradictions.
All history shows that it is worse every time around, and along with the spread of capitalism everywhere, more widespread.
The dollar bloated world imperialist system has put off the evil day which means that collapse will be even worse and it now faces catastrophic paralysing failure on an unprecedented scale.
In the very long historical perspective it is even possible to speculate that it faces the terminal collapse of the imperialist order and its 800 year long rapacious rise from the early capitalist city states of northern Italy, Dutch anti-feudal merchant capitalist dominance and the full development of bourgeois capitalism via British industrial development, French political overthrow and the era of worldwide imperialism.
Even longer perspectives can be invoked, of the ending altogether of all class-based human progress and the revolutionary transformations and rise over thousands of years from early slave societies through feudalism to modern US monopoly capitalist dominance.
Mankind has outlived the need for privilege and class leadership and exploitation.
But the ruling class is not about to quietly leave the stage and give up its sweet life.
The preparations for more war are being warmed up as fast as possible with suitable scapegoats, Zimbabwe among them, along with Iran, Sudan, Cuba and North Korea.
The supposed democratic opposition of the Morgan Tsvangirai “Movement for Democratic Change” wants neither democracy nor changes but is a Western coordinated and funded counter-revolution aiming to provoke as much chaos and disruption as possible.
Provoking violence was the intention from the beginning with the MDC as the Zanu-PF proved nearly a decade ago when Tsvangirai was caught on camera plotting to assassinate Mugabe, not normally a “democratic” practice.
The MDC was even recently pushed into calling for “armed intervention”, to cap its constant disruptive and sabotaging play acting and violent attacks within Zimbabwe; a move the arch-stooge Tsvangirai was rapidly forced to back-pedal on with a letter to the Guardian disowning the article printed only 24 hours previously in his own name, because it is both highly treasonable and because the imperialist hate-campaign had begun to believe so much of its own distortions that it was giving away its true aims.
But Tsvangirai’s panicked disowning immediately gave even more of the game away about the direction and control of the entire MDC, when the bourgeois press Guardian was forced to flounder around trying to explain how come the article was written by someone else, a mysterious Australian “freelance” but who took no money for his pieces and also worked for various other reactionary Western inspired provocations against other demonised targets:
...The comment desk turned to James Rose, an Australian with a background in journalism and a trusted source for pieces from Tsvangirai as he’d supplied a comment piece from the MDC leader in April. Rose wasn’t paid either time...
Rose told me he also does pro-bono work for the National Coalition Government for the Union of Burma. “I believe good causes need good copy,” he said. He has worked with the MDC on four or five pieces, published under Tsvangirai’s name, which have appeared in the Guardian, the Washington Post and the Melbourne Age among other newspapers - one that appeared in the Age, last month, also called for a UN peacekeeping operation in Zimbabwe.
In this case, when Rose got the go-ahead for Tsvangirai’s Guardian piece from his contact - an MDC spokesperson who works closely with Tsvangirai – he drafted the article without input from anyone else based on what he already knew. This was unusual but he assumed that because the MDC was in crisis it couldn’t do more. He read the finished piece over the phone to his contact, who approved it for publication.
Readers may be surprised that some comment pieces are put together in this way...”
This was not just any “comment piece” or another routine political speech “ghostwritten” as the Guardian pretended, but a call for war!!!
So who sets the aims of the MDC??? Not its “leader” Tsvangirai for sure.
Bourgeois press readers might well be more than just “surprised” that total southern African conflagration, and worse, could be potentially unleashed by an article casually checked by “reading it over the phone”!!!
Or perhaps not, if they have any grasp of the endless coup plotting and war provocations of the capitalist order throughout the twentieth century.
That such a grasp is not universal is down to revisionism’s decades of insistence on the working class trusting in parliamentary politics and “peace campaigning”, the result of a long opportunist failure to insist on Lenin’s revolutionary understanding that only overturning the capitalist ruling class can offer the world any real peace or progress, – or any say that counts by ordinary people in the way the world is run.
As if “democracy” has ever meant anything at all in the modern capitalist epoch except as a cynical tool to control the masses.
Just how cynically the game is played is demonstrated by the simultaneous events on the other side of Africa.
Somewhere beneath the mountain of racist Goebbels lies and arrogant filth propaganda over Zimbabwe is the devastating testimony in court on the other side of Africa of Simon Mann, leader of the recent coup attempt against tiny oil-rich Equatorial Guinea, only two weeks ago.
These explosive and stunning revelations of imperialist intrigue and dirty dealing, have vanished without trace despite the implication of senior members of the ruling class and the total knowledge, complicity and support of both European and US intelligence agencies and Governments behind them.
And small wonder; it tells you all you need to know about imperialism’s real concerns about democracy, the “will of the people” and the “development and welfare of the African nations”, which it has poured out non-stop with the most disgusting sanctimony and hypocrisy to attack Zanu-PF.
The mighty posturings about “honour”, “duty” and the values of “family” by the mafia gunmen thugs in the Godfather films could not be more hollow or preposterous.
The entire West was totally ready to recognise and support the “new government” in Equatorial Guinea it was planned to install in a short, sharp and bloody invasion, as the initial reports made clear:
In evidence to a court in Equatorial Guinea yesterday, the British mercenary Simon Mann said Mark Thatcher, the son of the former prime minister, was a committed member of the group that organised the attempted coup in the oil-rich west African state in 2004.
Giving his first detailed account, he said Thatcher “was not just an investor, he came completely on board and became a part of the management team”. Thatcher had provided $350,000 (£178,000).
Mann also claimed that Spain and South Africa, including President Thabo Mbeki, had supported the plot. By January 2004, two months before the action, he said “it was like an official operation. The governments of Spain and South Africa were giving the green light: ‘You’ve got to do it’.”
Spain, he said, was prepared to recognise the new government the day after the coup and send in lots of military police. Outside the court the Spanish ambassador, Javier Sangro, said he had no comment.
Senior members of the Equatorial Guinea army, police and cabinet were also implicated, said Mann.
Tacit approval for regime change came from the Pentagon, the CIA and the big US oil companies. Their message, conveyed by a colleague who discreetly tested the waters in Washington, was that “the political situation in Equatorial Guinea was very unsatisfactory and very dangerous and that a well-conducted change of government would be welcomed”, he said.
At the end of a four-hour examination, Mann made a plea for clemency after the prosecution recommended on Tuesday that he serve a prison sentence of 32 years.
“I am very sorry for what I did in 2003 and 2004. I am also very happy that we failed, that it didn’t work, especially now that I am here and I’ve met you all.”
Referring to his incarceration in Zimbabwe after being arrested with a plane load of mercenaries en route to Malabo, the capital of Equatorial Guinea, he said: “I’ve been in prison for four years and I’m not the same man that I was.”
The name of Lady Thatcher’s son cropped up when Mann was asked about planning meetings in South Africa, where Mann and Thatcher lived at the time. Thatcher, who now lives in southern Spain, accepted a plea bargain from the South African authorities in 2005 after he admitted helping to finance a helicopter which he suspected “might be used for mercenary activities”. He was fined $450,000 and given a four-year suspended sentence. He has refused to elaborate on his role. The Equatorial Guinea government has tried to get an international warrant for his arrest.
In the months before the coup, Mann said Thatcher attended many meetings “because at this stage he came on board”. He took Thatcher to the Chelsea home of Ely Calil, the Lebanese businessman who is alleged to have been the main financier. He named the management board as Calil, himself, a London property developer, Thatcher and a Lebanese colleague of Calil, who lives in Beirut. Calil has always denied involvement.
Thatcher’s money was eventually used to buy a small plane to transport the provisional president, Severo Moto, from his exile in Spain to Malabo.
Mann said Calil had initially asked him in May 2003 to assassinate President Obiang and launch a guerrilla war or a coup.
No constant front pages here or pompous condemnations from Gordon Brown – no non-stop mobilisations of “world opinion” to condemn the guilty men, and further expose the “henchmen”. Just the opposite; the implicit justification for this illicit act of world terrorism.
Stunningly the local Tory MP for Mann, interviewed for the BBC’s Today programme, could only complain that Mann was not being “tried at home” and in a touch of supreme old fashioned imperialist arrogance complained that the court case was being held in Spanish.
As if the British courts would switch to Arabic, let’s say, for one of the many trumped up “terrorism” cases that constantly command lurid headlines, only to end up in dismissal of the charges.
But in a ten minute interview not one word of Mann’s allegations, and the already confirmed admissions of British knowledge of the events, and the establishment funding of them (then Home Secretary Jack Straw conceded he had been informed beforehand but made no effort to warn Equatorial Guinea eg). Nor, just as tellingly, was there one question about them from the gushing Today presenter.
Had she been interviewing a Zanu-PF member she would have been bull-terrier “don’t-you-avoid-my-questions” sanctimonious aggressiveness personified, the constant interruptions bludgeoning down even the most reasonable answers in show-trial arrogance and “righteousness”.
Mann’s claims about Thabo Mbeki do not quite make sense since it was South Africa together with Zimbabwe which exposed the plot; more would have to be investigated to make that credible.
But whether that is true or not there is plenty that should be further uncovered.
Mark Thatcher has already admitted involvement under the disingenuous excuse of “not being aware of what was involved”.
He is at the heart of the establishment, a ruling class which is constantly in a conspiracy to oppress, suppress and exploit the working class and proletariat of the planet, not in the deluded, limited and historically unnecessary sense of “secret plots to carry out the 9/11 events” (mostly disproven anyway) but in the much broader sense of continuously and always being aware of their own class interests and carrying through endless scams and coups, bribery and corruption to keep their rule in place while spinning the soft web of deceit about “freedom and democracy” for working class consumption.
It will be argued that Equatorial Guinea somehow “doesn’t count because it is only a little tinpot dictatorship” – a revealingly arrogant racist declaration anyway and a million miles from the truth. Or that Mann has “done a deal”, which he may well have done but it still does not change that some ruling class were caught red-handed.
And neither does it change the picture of the real nature of capitalism which has been one of non-stop bribery, intelligence-agency-run regime overthrows, coup plotting, blitzing wars, bought governments, imposed dictators, gangsterism, stoogery and manipulations, especially in the age of American neo-colonial dominance when direct colonialism imposed by the likes of the UK and France, with rampant corruption and barbaric levels of brutality, torture, coercion, invasion and genocide (destruction of Delhi in India (wiping out of the Aborigines in Australia, the Maoris in New Zealand, the many nations of “Red Indian” Native Americans, the Incas, the Aztecs, and so on) was extended into the more than 400 coups, invasions, bombing runs, bloody massacres and total wars of the post-war period.
In Africa, even in the post-colonial era (forced on imperialism by the wave of anti-colonialism that its last great WW2 upheaval generated) there have been numerous monsters installed; Mobutu the monstrous megalomaniac dictator of Congo amassing vast personal fortunes as the imperialists plundered Congo’s wealth, the entire apartheid regime of South Africa, endless coup governments in Nigeria helping imperialism continue the plundering of its huge oil resources; the corrupt and stooge regimes of Kenya, holding its people in perpetual servitude and exploitation by the big western agribusinesses; the planted dictators in Uganda, from the Sandhurst trained and British sustained psychopath Idi Amin used to overturn the anti-colonialist nationalist Milton Obote who had taken power in 1962, to the current stooge Yoweri Museveni who led a western-coordinated rebellion against Obote again after Amin had been deposed.
Egypt is another prime example of western controlled brutal dictatorship, funded and subsidised by the US with billions of dollars annually to keep the gangster regime of Hosni Mubarak in place and hold back the long fermenting nationalist and anti-imperialist sentiments of the huge Arab population there; which will one day explode creating huge problems for nearby fascist Jewish Zionism, which ensures the West’s entire domination of the Middle East.
The torture, political imprisonments and capitalist dictatorship of Cairo rarely make the buried foreign pages let alone the endless banner headlines constantly pumped up against Mugabe. But here is one recent story giving away some of imperialism’s interests:
Travelling across Egypt, our investigation, published in today’s Observer Magazine, found the fields that cling to the Nile full of children working the cotton for up to 10 hours a day, removing the bollworm, the cotton farmer’s nemesis, and handling plants drenched in pesticides. Health studies are thin on the ground, but many of the children complain of breathing difficulties. A recent Unicef survey found nearly all the children questioned reported violent beatings by foremen.
Juliette Williams, a spokeswoman for the Environmental Justice Foundation, which has investigated the cotton industry across the world, particularly in Central Asia, claimed last night that retailers in Britain have very little idea of where the cotton they sell is coming from.
She said: ‘Egyptian cotton is synonymous with luxury, yet the reality behind its production is endemic child labour - up to a million children are working in the cotton fields each year. This is a scandal that companies need to redress. Yet when we have pressed companies on their supply chains, many tend to fudge the issue and simply say that they require their suppliers to meet certain standards within the factories that produce clothing. This misses the point. Companies need to get out of the factories and look at the fields.
In Egypt it is estimated that approximately 30 per cent of cotton-pickers are children of 12 or 13 years old.
Even more grotesque is the devastating and confused war launched against the Congo ten years ago with Uganda and Rwanda involvement, both Western stooges, to guarantee the West plundering rights for the huge mineral wealth there; it follows decades of intrigue and assassination in the area from the 1961 CIA and Western backed assassination of Marxist Patrice Lumumba, the installation of the monstrous egomaniac Mobutu who tyrannised the country for decades and the subsequent rebellion by pro-Marxist Laurent Kabila, also assassinated.
Zimbabwe’s military aid to Kabila’s Congolese nationalism and subsequently to the government of his son Joseph, helping thwart the Western manipulation in the region is one of the major reasons for western hatred of Mugabe along with the anti-colonial land reform programme in Zimbabwe itself.
The exposure of the Equatorial Guinea plot by Zimbabwe as well, capturing the plane load of mercenaries and arms on the runway in Harare, has added to the frenzy.
These are all reasons for the tide of filth and lies poured out against it.
One other lie revolves around the more ridiculous aspects of Western cynicism; the UK’s childish tantrum withdrawal of a knighthood given to Mugabe in the 1990s, combined now with revived stories about a ““massacre” in Matabeleland in the 1980s, adduced as evidence of supposed Zanu-PF atrocities and its “North Korean trained” police (another giveaway of the bourgeois anti-communist hatreds and foulness tied up in this stunt).
But this event was part of a continuing resistance war (which had only just overturned the Smith government by armed struggle) against a local uprising, fostered by deliberate Western provocation of tribal differences – classic divide and rule manipulation.
And if Mugabe was already such a monster, why did imperialism give him a knighthood????
Because they hoped to “turn” the rebellion as so many other anti-colonial movements, especially in Africa, have been twisted into stooge imperialist regimes by a mixture of bribery and coercion (withdrawal of “aid” money, economic siege etc), like the continuing corrupt Kenyans, and a variety of smaller Western dependent countries such as Tanzania.
But they failed then and it is looking more and more as if the West has totally failed in its latest world coordinated subversion to topple the Zimbabwe anti-colonialism despite years of vicious economic strangulation of the country (the devastating and shattering effects of which it then blames on Mugabe) and despite mobilising every stooge Uncle Tom and collaborator on the planet, from the dependably sly betrayals of the disgusting anti-communist Archbishop Tutu to the obedient yappings of the current and past UN general-secretaries.
Tragically the enormous achievements of the ANC/SACP struggle against imperialism and its massive victory against the apartheid regime – a major stride forwards for the masses everywhere – has apparently been coopted into aiding imperialism’s case, though exactly what it has said is extremely unclear from capitalist press reports lyingly suggesting that “all the surrounding nations are against Zimbabwe”.
But the disastrous revisionist confusion and difficulties hampering the development of further revolutionary understanding in South Africa, were enough to let British capitalism add Jacob Zuma, the newly elected ANC leader to its list of “local regimes speaking out against Mugabe” – a foul opportunist betrayal, and a clear signal of the poisoning effects ultimately of revisionist confusion; Zuma is ostensibly an SACP trained “left” leader.
Nelson Mandela’s vague criticism of “the quality of leadership” from Zanu-PF tricked out of him during his recent London visit underlined the damage done by the long retreat from Leninist understanding in the world.
But none of it helped the brash Western predictions of Mugabe’s “isolation” at the current African Union conference in Egypt – another in a flood of bullying Western fabrications and nonsensical “predictions” which are patently ridiculous but aimed to demoralise the movement.
“What business is it of yours” Mugabe correctly asked the sanctimonious and smugly self-righteously aggressive ITN correspondent trying to bait him at the African Union meeting. “Are we still a British colony?”
And Zanu-PF gave an even more robust answer shortly afterwards as the bourgeois press had to report:
Zimbabwe angrily told critics of the re-election of Robert Mugabe to “go hang” and dismissed calls for a power sharing deal with the opposition.
George Charamba, the Zimbabwean government spokesman, emerged from a closed-door African summit in Egypt to hit back against Mugabe’s accusers.
It was a defiant performance that dampened hopes of a deal along the lines of the agreement brokered earlier this year that ended post-election violence in Kenya.
Charamba, said the United States, Britain and other European countries could “go hang”. He said they had no basis to condemn the widely discredited election.
He also said the Kenyan prime minister, Raila Odinga, had hands “dripping with blood”, after Odinga called for Zimbabwe’s suspension from the African Union yesterday.
Odinga, the former opposition leader who became prime minister as part of the Kenyan deal, said on Sunday that AU peacekeepers should be sent into Zimbabwe.
Charamba said: “I take it you saw the blood that flowed in that election. I hope you realise that Raila Odinga’s hands drip with blood, raw African blood, and they are not going to be cleansed by any amount of criticism of Zimbabwe.”
On plans for a government of national unity, he said: “Kenya is Kenya. Zimbabwe is Zimbabwe. We have our own history of evolving dialogue and resolving political impasses the Zimbabwean way, not the Kenyan way. Not at all.
“The way out is a way defined by the Zimbabwe people, free from outside interference, and that is exactly what will resolve the matter.”
Charamba also denounced Mark Malloch-Brown, the British foreign office minister for Africa, Asia and the UN, pointing out he was raised in the former colony of Rhodesia, present-day Zimbabwe. “When he pronounces himself on Zimbabwe, he is recalling the historical period when the white man reigned supreme. That period is gone. Gone for ever,” he said.
Zimbabwe’s spirited anti-imperialism would be a thousand times stronger if was thoroughly grounded in a Marxist understanding and perspective however.
It is not just white rule of Africa that is on the way out but the entire profit making imperialist order – and the ruling class of capitalism across the planet whatever colour, creed, shape or size they may profess themselves to be.
There is no sense in confusing the working class with uncritical support of Mugabe as such therefore; simply grasping the Marxist understanding that the imperialist onslaught is what needs exposing and defeating.
But Zanu-PF is not getting any help in its development from the fake-“lefts” of the world.
To the contrary: the despicable Trots line themselves up with imperialism’s campaign – until recently even forming part of the MDC, until the obvious reactionariness of its supporters and Western backing became too much, and still posturing around as a “left opposition” just as they have tried to undermine every workers state and anti-imperialist movement with their conceited notions of “pure revolution” (which they would lead of course) but which have never taken the struggle against capitalism anywhere ever.
But even those few groups on the Revisionist “left” which – to their credit – manage to be on the right side in exposing the imperialist campaigning, like the Lalkar/Proletarian, still are not helping but hindering the struggle.
Its ineffectual “call for an end to imperialist meddling in the internal affairs of Zimbabwe” is just reformist posturing of about as much use as repeated “Stop war” pacifism demands.
Such tepid analysis – limiting itself to the notion that imperialism’s motivation is to get its hands on the agricultural and mineral wealth of Zimbabwe, just as Lalkar declared Iraq to be a “war for oil” - is a disastrous halfway house of analysis. Oil is part of the Iraqi picture – as the provocative reforming of the old Iraq Oil monopoly and its allocation by imperialism of lucrative oilfield contacts has just confirmed – but is not the reason for the Iraq war nor the non-stop continuations of strutting aggression.
It misses out the biggest context, of overwhelming crisis driven urgency by the ruling class to step up confusion and hatred via its self-righteous posturing, just as the Hitlerites whipped up “hurt” German nationalism against the evil Poles, the greedy Czechs and so forth.
But the revisionists refuse to make the total analysis of the entire capitalist crisis the centre of their understanding – even now barely mentioning the overwhelming evidence of complete economic collapse and the crisis warmongering it is generating, when looking at all these events.
Such partial episodic analysis is inevitable when the whole basis of politics is to avoid looking back at the mistakes and errors of the past and to understand better how Moscow (Stalin’s) leadership retreated so disastrously from revolutionary understanding.
Though the MDC stunt is of course a renewal of arrogant Western colonial war against Zimbabwe’s liberation campaign, which Zanu-PF fought so bitterly and with such costs against the vicious Selous Scouts fascist atrocities of the white supremacist Smith regime (a reactionary settler rebellion notionally against Britain but tacitly supported by the imperialist minded wing of the ruling class with constant sanctions busting) - it has far greater significance.
The overriding purpose of the campaign is for frying far bigger fish, helping re-establish a fanatical war atmosphere which the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were supposed to create and which instead continue to be such disasters; foul festering messes that have dismayed and appalled the entire world.
Meanwhile the really foul and lying “democracy” campaign on earth is within the dominant USA itself where hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent to keep the lying racket going.
It has only one outcome whichever of the two total opportunist mountebanks finally makes it; the renewed path into warmongering with almost certainly the blitzing of Iran a first step, either directly by the US or by its proxy sword in the Middle East, fascist Jewish Zionism which has recently been issuing bloodcurdling threats against Iran of blitzing and bombing.
John McCain has issued plenty of aggressive talk already in the campaign but so too has Barack “O’bomber”, rushing around to convince the ruling class (who really control things) that he would be a safe pair of hands for their warmongering needs.
There is no choice for a system relentlessly driven by the needs of capital into trade war and conflict which must sooner or later break into total war to the bitter end with the major capitalist rivals on the planet; the Japanese, and the European bloc now being dragooned into some kind of unity under German domination.
The petty bourgeois commentators are still trapped in the reformist delusion that it somehow “makes a difference” to have a “black face” elected; exactly the purpose of long years of Political Correctness single issue politics to divert the world from the only understanding that offers the working class and proletarian masses a solution; Leninism.
Tragically the dulling and dumbing of revisionism has infected even the greatest of fighters with Cuba’s Fidel Castro recently writing excellently against Obama’s outrageous abuse of the Cuban revolution (see next issue) but disastrously throwing in the phrase that he is “doubtless, from the social and human points of view, the most progressive candidate to the U.S. presidency.”
No, no, no, and no - there is no “progressive candidate” and the implication that somehow he would be an improvement over the Republican is as much a mistake and misleadership of the working class in the world as the still continuing fraud that Labourism or even the “left” variants of it are somehow “better than the Tories”.
It makes no difference! Cuba had to make revolution, as he correctly says, and did. But so does the rest of the world.
Why feed illusions in “democracy”???
Capitalism rules always and is now heading for renewed open dictatorship. It will not be improved except by its complete ending – the only way to stop total chaos and destruction, and go on to build planned socialism in the world and establish a cooperative society truly reflecting the needs of everyone.
Develop Leninism and build revolutionary leadership.
Don Hoskins
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World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).
Humanitarian cover for US hunt for bases
IT is difficult to believe at this stage of history what the U.S. Southern Command could resort under cover of training for situations of natural disaster.
Even more so if that implies opening the door to the presence of U.S. soldiers in one of the areas most desired by Washington, precisely the one that serves as a base for the Guaraní aquiferous region in Latin America, considered to be the largest subterranean fresh water reserve in the world.
And the fact that this is taking place at a time when the Republican administration of George W. Bush is suspiciously embarking on a series of military movements in the region with a view to reactivating its presence to the maximum, makes it a situation that is about to provoke as much alarm as in the case in the Argentine province of Chaco.
A few days ago, labor, academic and social organizations in the province informed the press of at least two meetings between representatives of the Southern Command and provincial ministers and officials of a number of local institutions with the aim of Yankee soldiers undertaking “humanitarian” action in jungle areas hard hit by flooding, in a rapid response to the call made by Jorge Capitanich, governor of Ghaco, who has decreed “a water,health,educational and housing emergency in the province.”
...Sergio Soto, general secretary of the Chaco Education Workers Union utech), stated to the pulsar news agency. “Can anyone believe that the presence of a Yankee military unit coming to these places is just to offer training and advice in the face of possible disasters?”
...the Argentine Chaco is part of the so-called triple border, an area on which world capitalism has set its sights as a place for the potential relocation of industries requiring abundant water and a cheap workforce and, being an Amazonian habitat, correctly described as “one of the planetary icons of ecology and biodiversity,” the green belt of the hemisphere and replete with unexplored natural riches.
One has to be mistrustful of the Southern Command’s intentions in the Argentine Chaco given that, just a few steps from there, the U.S. army has a military base in the Paraguayan locality of General Estigarribia. It is worth recalling that the outgoing Paraguayan government passed immunity laws for U.S. troops operating in its territory, a territory which, for that and other conditions, the Pentagon has denominated a “hinge” due to its location between Argentina and Brazil.
Certain naive individuals... believe that because of the wars of aggression that the Pentagon is waging in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. government has turned its attention away from Latin America and the Caribbean. Nothing is further from the truth. It has been precisely in the last few years that the empire has increased joint exercises with military forces in the region with nato participation. It is seeking a replacement for its former Vieques base, which it was forced to abandon due to the lengthy struggle of Puerto Ricans against the disastrous effects of that ‘facility’ on the island’s population; It knows that its time oh the Manta base is running out, given that the government of President Rafael Correa has reiterated that it is not going to renew the U.S. contract to remain.
For now, the United States is left with its bases in Honduras; the Compalapa in El Salvador, that of Iquique in Chile; the Queen Beatriz in Aruba; and that of Hato Rey in Curacao, not to mention the illegally maintained Guantánamo Base on Cuban territory, which it has turned into a concentration and torture camp.
As if that were not enough, still in the news despite the time that has passed, is the decision of the U.S. Navy to reestablish its 4th Fleet, dissolved in 1950, to “supervise” vessels, aircraft and submarines operating in the Caribbean and Latin America. The 4th Fleet is to commence its operations on July 1 and is reported to include a nuclear aircraft carrier. The intention could not be clearer.
The empire is readying its weapons. That is not by chance when, on this side of the world, a group of nations have decided to establish a Latin American Defense Council in order to stand up to the external dangers facing the liberation processes developing in the region and threatening the sovereignty and independence attained.
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World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).
‘Autonomists’ try to destabilise Morales government
Bolivia’s wealthy elite resist progress
BY EMMA CLANCY
THE process of progressive change underway in Bolivia is facing serious challenges from the rich, mainly European or mixed-race elite, based in the eastern lowlands of the country, who are pushing for ‘autonomy’ from the central government.
The government is led by the country’s first-ever indigenous president, Evo Morales, who, since his election in December 2005, has begun a process aimed at renationalising the country’s natural resources in order to lift the mainly indigenous poor majority out of crushing poverty.
Morales, an Aymara Indian and an ally of Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez, was elected with his Movement Towards Socialism party (mas) on the back of years of struggle by the social movements against the corrupt rule of the US-backed white oligarchy.
Since forming government in early 2006, Morales has started the process of returning Bolivia’s large natural gas reserves - the second-largest in Latin America - into state hands. When Morales came to power, 70 per cent of Bolivia’s land was owned by 400 individuals, and the government has now begun implementing wide-ranging land reform.
With the assistance of Cuba and Venezuela, the mas government has used the revenue from the nation’s hydrocarbons to establish health and education programmes for the poor, and has introduced the Dignity Bond, a pension for those over 60 years old.
Bolivia has joined the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (alba), the alternative trading bloc established by Chavez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro. alba is based on mutual co-operation and solidarity, and was set up to counter the US-pushed Free Trade Area of the Americas.
The government has also held elections for a constituent assembly, which handed down a draft new constitution in December 2007, to be voted on by the Bolivian people in a future referendum.
This new constitution, if approved, would considerably empower the indigenous majority in a “pluri-national” Bolivia by recognising indigenous rights to land and other resources, and by ensuring their increased political participation. It would also provide the firm constitutional basis for increasing public control over the nation’s natural resources.
Unsurprisingly, the prospect of the new constitution, in addition to the reforms already being implemented by the Morales government, has the right-wing elite up in arms.
The latest attempt by this powerful minority to destabilise the indigenous-led reform process has been the organisation of a series of referenda on ‘autonomy’ in the wealthy, industrialised and resource-rich eastern lowland departments (or states) of Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando and Tarija. Needless to say, this autonomy movement is being heavily financed by the US Government through usaid and the National Endowment for Democracy.
Massive pro-government demonstrations were held throughout Bolivia in support of national unity.
The statutes contained in the autonomy referendum hand significant powers in control over land, natural resources and policing and justice, and the right to sign international treaties, over to the opposition-controlled prefectures.
Beni and Pando followed Santa Cruz in voting for autonomy on 1 June, and the fourth eastern province, Tarija, held a similar referendum on 21 June. Combined, these four eastern departments account for most of Bolivia’s industry, agribusiness and gas production.
The editor of the Bolivia Rising news website (www.boliviarising.blogspot.com), Federico Fuentes, spoke about the intentions of those orchestrating this campaign:
“While it cannot be ruled out that the oligarchy could use this social base to move to divide Bolivia through secession, its main plan at the moment is to put a halt on the process unfolding since Morales’s election - aiming to wear down popular support for the government by forcing concessions from Morales at the negotiating table and paving the way towards ultimately getting rid of him, via a coup or elections.”
The backdrop to the autonomy drive is a persistent and virulent racism against the Indian majority, which the opposition is trying to harness in order to undermine Morales. Two-thirds of Bolivia’s population is indigenous, mainly Quechua and Aymara Indians, and they have faced centuries of exclusion and extreme poverty. It wasn’t until 1952 that indigenous people won the right to vote and pongage (a system of indigenous forced labour in rural areas) was halted.
On 25 May, the south-central city of Sucre witnessed sickening scenes of a racist assault against Quechua Indian political and community leaders and campesinos (small farmers) in response to a proposed visit by Morales to the city.
Anti-government forces, armed with dynamite, sticks, and stones occupied the stadium where Morales was due to visit. So as to avoid a confrontation, the president cancelled his scheduled appearance and withdrew the security forces from the area.
Pro-autonomy protesters, many of them wealthy university students, then surrounded a group of about 50 indigenous Morales supporters and proceeded to beat them, rob them of their belongings, and force them to walk seven kilometres to the city plaza. Here they were stripped, forced to kneel and “apologise for coming to Sucre”. They were also forced to burn their ponchos, the mas party flag and the Indian wiphala flag. Twenty-eight people were injured in the incident.
This public humiliation of the indigenous councillors, mayors and campesinos was supported by the mayor of Sucre and the rector of Sucre University, who deliberately incited racist violence in order to strengthen the pro-autonomy movement.
While racism is certainly part of the ideological basis of those orchestrating the autonomy movement, their key motivation is the threat to their material privileges and wealth posed by reforms aimed at empowering and enriching the poor. Washington views Bolivia as a weak link in the chain of Latin American rebellion, as the process of change is not as advanced as it is in Venezuela or Cuba.
The social movements are calling on the government to push ahead with the economic programme of nationalisations and the referendum on the pro-posed new constitution in order to prevent the national project being derailed by the US-backed autonomists who want to prevent majority rule.
But first Morales faces another referendum: a recall referendum to be held on 10 August on the presidency and the prefects of the nine departments. This law was initially proposed by mas in December last year to resolve the deadlock between the government and opposition, but the opposition-controlled senate refused to pass the law until early May.
The move is viewed by many as a manoeuvre by Podemos, the main opposition party in the senate, to regain the leadership of the opposition movement from the Santa Cruz-based autonomists. However, it is highly likely that the move will backfire badly. Morales’s popularity is at a high point and he will probably resoundingly defeat any attempt to recall his presidency. Some of the opposition-held prefectures are not so certain in their support and may be replaced by mas.
A victory for Morales in the recall referendum and the successful ratification of the new constitution will be crucial to demonstrating and mobilising the popular majority support for the process of change and for national unity.
An Phoblacht 26 June 2008
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World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).
‘Escalation of aggression and lies against Venezuela
BY NIDIA DIAZ
-Special for Granma International—
THE violation of Venezuela’s airspace by a U.S. war-plane on a reconnaissance mission has highlighted plans for possible military aggression against that country...
The incident, which is not an isolated one, occurred on May 17, when the aforementioned aircraft from the U.S. Fleet violated Venezuelan airspace by flying over the island of Orchila, where a national military base is located. In the wake of a formal complaint by the Bolivarian government, the government of the United States admitted the incursion, but justified the action by alleging that the plane was on an anti-drug operation and lost its navigation references.
Not even the most dimwitted observer could believe that tale. Nobody is in any doubt that the violation of Venezuelan airspace is part of the escalation of provocations orchestrated by Washington with the aim of forcing a crisis with Venezuela of regional proportions and thus, in line with its aspirations, killing a number of birds with one stone. In short, defeating the Bolivarian Revolution and thus doing away with the process of regional integration based on solidarity, cooperation without political conditions and respect for the national characteristics of each country.
It is the hope of the White House and the Colombian government, which has lent itself to the inflammatory game, that once this objective has been achieved, the so-called domino effect will follow. If Venezuela falls, they suppose, so will Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua. Brazil would be left without allies within the region and no foothold to move ahead with the South American Defense Council which it is promoting. It should be recalled that at the end of 1980’s the U.S. administration had similar dreams of a domino effect in relation to Cuba.
At that time they were rubbing their hands in glee on the basis of the argument that once the Soviet Union was dismembered and the Socialist camp had fallen, the Cuban Revolution would be unable to survive.
However, in the midst of such meditations they are not giving up the blueprint of subverting internal order in Venezuela. For that project, they have the divided forces of the Venezuelan opposition, to which they are channeling resources worth millions with a view to their entry onto the national stage prior to the upcoming elections in November. In those elections, 600 posts at the level of state governors, mayoralties and legislative councils are to be contested and potentially “taken” from the Bolivarian forces by this opposition.
The separatist threat in the wealthy state of Zulia is part of the plot, as well as so-called subversives within the military to secure garrisons’ backing for a coup d’état, which has not been given up, despite the failed attempt of April 2002. Not to mention assassination, a card always up their sleeve.
It is worth detailing the issue of separatism, which is being given priority. President Hugo Chávez has publicly exposed the steps being taken in that Venezuelan state to dismember national unity.
Manuel Rosales, the current governor of Zulia - swept away at the polls in the last presidential elections in which he stood against Chávez - has been given the mission by the United States to play a similar role to that of Prefect Ruben Costas in Santa Cruz. It does not seem to have occurred to Washington that if Rosales was incapable of uniting the Venezuelan opposition, he is far less likely to have the support and social base for undertaking the Balkanization of Bolivarian Venezuela.
The exposes in this context by the Venezuelan leader are not unfounded. On the contrary, suffice it to recall that in 1928, U.S. agents were trying to create a so-called Republic of Zulia including that wealthy Venezuelan territory and the Colombian departments of Santander and la Guajira, this last a settlement of the indigenous Wayuu.
The fact that that William Brownfield, the U.S. ambassador in Colombia, has now publicly stated that if Ecuador does not renew the rental contract for his country’s Manta military base - as President Rafael Correa has reiterated - “there is always the possibility of it being transferred to La Guajira” (a Colombian town on the northern border with Venezuela), certainly revives those days in the early 20th century.
The escalation of aggression and defamatory campaigns against Venezuela are taking place in the midst of a regional scenario in which the Bolivarian Revolution and, in particular, its maximum leader Hugo Chávez, has gained enormous prestige, not only for forging a new type of integration (the alba), but as a mediator in attaining peace in neighboring Colombia, where the humanitarian exchange of hostages has become an indispensable condition on that road. It should not be overlooked that the unilateral exchange of some of the hostages by the farc guerrillas was a gesture to the Venezuelan president, in recognition of his trustworthy role as a mediator.
All these battlefronts are covered by the Venezuelan and foreign private media, which constitute key pieces in the system of domination that the United States and the opposition want to perpetuate. It was no coincidence that Andres Izarra, the Venezuelan minister of information, recently accused the Spanish El País of being “partial and manipulative”, and revealed that just in the first three months of this year, the daily published 142 articles on Venezuela with negative content and in opposition to the Bolivarian government. The media campaign is simultaneously attacking from the U.S. corporate media and the Colombian, passing through those of the few remaining banana republics still existing on the continent.
Parallel to these separatist threats, President Chávez himself has warned that the U.S. intelligence services are planning “an attack like the one perpetrated by Colombian soldiers in Ecuador in March,” which would constitute an extremely dangerous action. It is not the first time that Colombian military forces have violated Venezuelan territory with provocative incursions.
Both separatist actions and the possibility of establishing a U.S. military base right on the Venezuelan border are clearly threats of unpredictable consequences, but ones that imperialism is apparently prepared to carry out, because in Venezuela it is seeking the head of Hugo Chávez in order to crush a process that has taken control of natural resources to place them at the service of national and social development, in that country and throughout the region.
Or are we perhaps forgetting that the nations that make up the alba are adopting measures to confront the world food crisis that is approaching? How else to confront this and other realities if not on the basis of the consolidation of a new political model, diametrically opposed to that imposed by the powerful neighbor to the North?
Nor should it be forgotten in this analysis that, on May 14, oil reserves in Venezuela were internationally certified to a figure of 129,312,890,000 barrels.
In 2009, after new certifications, the Orinoco Oil Belt will make Venezuela the country with the largest crude reserves on the planet. •
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