Back issue
No 1373 29th July 2010
Afghanistan fascist mayhem secrets from Wikileaks are further blows to imperialism and a symptom of the rolling defeats it is suffering trying to maintain its tyrannical “authority”. But moral outrage and protest will not stop the plunge towards Third World War which is driven by continuing capitalist catastrophic crisis failure. Only revolution can end carnage. Leninist leadership vital
The shallow pretence by Western political leaders that the Wikileaks’ warlog revelations of Nazi mayhem, indiscriminate civilian killing, death-squads, robotic, remote death-drone hits, corruption and drug-addled incompetence in Afghanistan are “nothing new” is an even more disgusting condemnation of their fascist dissembling and Goebbels lies, than the torrent of bare facts revealed.
That is not what they and the compliant intelligence-agency-fed media have been telling us.
So where is the non-stop campaign for war crimes arraignments, massacre trials etc at the Hague?
Where are the endless giant headlines about “human rights” abuses, etc, etc, which at least should obviously follow such crimes and atrocities detailed for year after year after year by the Western forces themselves (!!), if not the complete “regime change” as constantly demanded in screaming headlines against Iran, Burma, Serbia, Zimbabwe, China, and Cuba etc and other assorted demonised Western scapegoated victims being lined up for war and hatred on the flimsiest of unsubstantiated pretexts (and just plain Lies, like those and which are constantly recycled about the alleged tyrannies and “oppression” of communism and its history (all of which fantastical hate garbage, if all accepted at face value, would mean the entire human race had been slaughtered, more or less, several times over in the last 80 years)?)
Is the war going to end?,
Just the opposite. The great liberal hope Barack Obama, who convinced all the deluded politically-correct “anti-racists” and single issue fake-“lefts” – (including plenty who claimed to understand that he was “nothing different” to any US president before) – that he was a “step forwards” for ordinary people from the cowboy shoot-’em-up Bush presidency, – this same Obama has just sacked the hard-nut Pentagon general Stanley McChrystal in charge in Afghanistan because his strategy was “too soft” including trying to cut out gung-ho shoot-outs (for what it is worth), appointing General David Petraeus who promises to give the ground troops free rein once more to open fire more or less at will, and thereby escalate the mayhem even further.
On top of which he will supervise another escalation of the troop numbers on the ground on top of the massive increase already ordered and sent by “anti-war” Obama.
Leading US imperialist circles are fuming at the implications and consequences of the leaks, not just because as (also) Obama declares, the information revealed by the astonishing freelance amateurs (in the best sense of the word) is “a danger” to the imperialist bullying forces (“our boys” as reactionary chauvinism likes to call them in the “patriotic” gush that pours out from British and American TV, press and Hollywood) but because of the implications it has in showing worldwide dissatisfaction and disintegration of the certainties of capitalist society everywhere.
Well might the Wikileaks team keep away from America and choose to sleep somewhere different every night.
And well might no one be surprised they do, so inured has even the mainstream petty bourgeois become in accepting the death-squad assassination dangers that anyone dissident faces inside and out of the “world’s greatest democracy”.
The existence of Wikileaks and its astonishing success in finding leakers in the heart of the US military and intelligence machines is an extraordinary phenomenon raising directly or further focusing a slew of enormous philosophical questions in minds everywhere, challenging every comfortable and smug middle class “democratic” assumption in the past about “they would never do that” and “calling them fascist – that’s a bit strong/clichéd” etc.
Fascist blitzkrieg warmongering is exactly the path US monopoly capitalist imperialism was already set on ten years ago as the onset of its greatest ever disastrous crisis failure was beginning to become uncomfortably urgent and the necessity to re-impose its “authority” on the planet glaringly clear to the inner ruling circles (who knew very well just how badly things were going, if not in Marxist scientific terms, then with the deep pragmatic class knowledge and cunning of the most powerful Empire rulers in all history).
The strategy since has been the attempt to “shock and awe” the planet, to intimidate and override all objections and challenges to the now completely parasitical continuation of US demands for world resources and the wealth generated by the exploited billions (without even the pretence of fair trade on the hugely unequal terms imposed by capitalism normally), and face down in advance both nationalist or socialist rebellion and the rivalries of other major capitalist powers who are constantly forced to play second fiddle and accept a minor share of the loot plundered from around the planet by their capitalist corporations.
American dominance (itself established by the last great inter-imperialist shoot-out in 1945, to both distract the world’s attention from miserable systemic failure of the profit-making order and eventually re-divide the loot post-war), is accepted in boom periods when its agreed “policing role”, to keep the exploited masses suppressed for the benefit of all capitalist interests, pays off but is increasingly an intolerable burden in crisis times when there is no longer enough plunder to go round, and the very survival of the other major powers is threatened, as the credit-crunch unrolling collapse is highlighting sharply.
But the 21st century is not the high point of imperialist colonialism, able to cow and awe the “natives”. Just the opposite, the wars have massively increased the world revolutionary turmoil. Even the heart of the reactionary British establishment is admitting this:
The former head of MI5 delivered a devastating critique of the invasion of Iraq today, saying it substantially increased the threat of terrorist attacks in Britain and was a significant factor behind the radicalisation of young Muslims in the UK.
Lady Eliza Manningham-Buller told the Chilcot inquiry into the UK’s role in Iraq: “Our involvement in Iraq radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people – not a whole generation, a few among a generation – who saw our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as being an attack upon Islam.”
Asked by Sir Roderic Lyne, a member of the inquiry, to what extent the conflict exacerbated the threat from international terrorism facing Britain, she replied: “Substantially.”
She was not surprised, she said, that UK citizens were behind the 7/7 attacks in London nor that increasing number of Britons were “attracted to the ideology of Osama bin Laden and saw the attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan as threatening their co-religionists and the Muslim world”.
Invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein allowed al-Qaida to establish a foothold in Iraq which it had never previously managed. “Arguably, we gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad so that he was able to move into Iraq in a way that he was not before,” Manningham-Buller told the inquiry.
She referred to assessments by the Joint Intelligence Committee, of which she was a member, warning ministers that an invasion of Iraq would increase the terrorist threat to Britain. If they read the reports, she said, ministers would have been in no doubt over the threat.
The former MI5 chief said she did not have individual discussions at the time with Tony Blair about the effect invading Iraq would have on the terrorist threat to Britain. She referred to Sir Richard Dearlove, head of SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service or MI6, which provided intelligence for the infamous Iraqi weapons dossier. “I believe the head of the SIS saw him [Blair] much more frequently than I did, for understandable reasons”.
MI5 had advised the Home Office that Iraqi intelligence agents in the UK would pose little threat in the event of war. “We regarded the direct threat from Iraq as low,” she said.
“We did think that Saddam Hussein might resort to terrorism in the theatre if he thought his regime was being toppled, but we didn’t believe he had the capability to do anything in the UK. That turned out to be the right judgment,” she continued. MI5 was concerned about the threat from al-Qaida before the 9/11 attacks on the US in 2001, she said. She dismissed claims made by elements in the Bush administration that Iraq had been involved. “There is no credible intelligence to suggest that connection. That was the judgment of the CIA. It was not a judgment that found favour in some parts of the American machine,” she said. “It is why [former US defence secretary] Donald Rumsfeld started an alternative intelligence unit in the Pentagon to seek an alternative judgment.”
By focusing on Iraq, the government was diverted from the continuing threat posed by al-Qaida in Afghanistan, Manningham-Buller said today.
Her remark was picked up by Admiral Lord West, then head of the navy and subsequently appointed security minister in the Labour government. “My own personal view is that it is actually a very bad idea to invade people,” he told BBC Radio 4’s The World at One. “I was never a supporter, I have to say, of going into Iraq. I think it was a foolhardy thing to do when we were already engaged in Afghanistan.”
“There is no credible intelligence to suggest that connection [between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa.ida]. That was the judgement of the CIA. It was not a judgement that found favour in some parts of the American machine”.
All sorts of disinformation subtexts are buried in this, not least the sly recriminations blaming other sections of the ruling class (MI6,CIA etc) for disaster and trying to pretend the issue is “Islam”, which is not a cause of rebellion but a transient ideology which carries anti-imperialist feeling at present but which must and will be superseded by Leninist science as the contradictions, needs and difficulties of developing revolutionary struggle demand greater maturity from the world’s masses (helped by the vital battles for Marxist consciousness, especially to expose the delusions of revisionist “no to war” and “don’t rock the boat” retreat from revolution which have held the masses back from what they were told was ‘communism’ for decades.)
The establishment is also trying to distance itself from the damaging fallout of defeat in order to concentrate on the warmongering it does think can “succeed”.
Setbacks and defeats in Iraq and elsewhere have already torn political careers and governments to shreds including the Blairites, Brown following, and the neocon Bush braggarts, who became the most unpopular presidency in history.
“Due process” of parliament and elections was manipulated on both sides of the Atlantic to shuffle these failures away with some token sacrifices (like Blair – lucratively paid-off) before the hostilities and hatred they had aroused started heading in more serious directions for the ruling class (stirring revolutionary or at least rebellious conclusions domestically in Britain or the US).
But damaging as they are, mere exposures of the reality of this ongoing warmongering will not stop anything despite the increased exhortations of the “Stop the war” fake-“lefts.
War is being driven by the imperatives of collapsing capitalism.
The “progressive Democrat” White House was slid in to pretend things were different, precisely so that the warmongering and intimidation could be continued with notional compliance from the petty bourgeoisie, as is clear from the death-squad coup in Honduras, the deliberate “military exercise” provocation currently under way against North Korea using the specious “Pyongyang torpedoing” claim as an excuse (on a par with the Gulf of Tonkin lies against Vietnam or the Recak “massacre” Lie used to “justify” the bombing of Serbia which began the current wave of now non-stop warmongering) and setting up Iran for victimhood, imposing brutal sanctions and colluding with the maturing fascist Zionist blitzkrieg warplane plans, deep in preparation.
The reality is that American imperialism cannot but try to finally stamp out this fire of rebellion and insurgency because withdrawal, and open admission of defeat, would be a disaster for the prestige and intimidatory authority of US imperialism everywhere, and even more for its world war plans.
But it has to end it because it is draining the finances, morale, willpower and manpower of even the giant overwhelming might of the greatest monopoly capitalist power in history and its decades of post-war dominance of the planet, especially now the greatest economic cataclysm in all history has broken open. All the more thoughtful petty bourgeois commentaries are now declaring it unwinnable if not totally lost.
Capitalism is trapped between a rock and a hard place.
Only revolutionary overturn can resolve the giant historic contradiction for mankind and take it to a socialist future of peace and rational development.
Build Leninism. Don Hoskins
Discussion
“Robin Hood” hero-worship for messed-up Moat underlines enormous vacuum in leadership left in the working class by the betrayals of reformism and Labourism, the complacent ineffectuality of the official Trade Unions, the petty bourgeois sourness of anti-communist Trots, and the long retreat from revolution by Stalinism
The outrageous official whitewashing of the police killing of innocent bystander Ian Tomlinson at the G20 demonstrations last year, giving carte blanche to state forces to use any amount of murderous violence against mass protest, is one of the best clues why a wave of popular support has followed the hunting of the tragic killer Raoul Moat.
That is not only because of the glaring disparity between the treatment meted out to a screwed-up worker, both causing his instability and angry damaging outburst and then relentlessly and vengefully hunting him down for it, compared to the violence of the state which goes scott-free, though the hypocrisy-laden difference is clear.
This is not about sympathy as such for a capitalism-damaged individual either.
Instead, however inchoate and inarticulate the thousands flocking to the Facebook site may be, they seem to be expressing much more, a mass class discontent and hostility for the brutality, repression and unfairness of capitalist society, and the looming cataclysm of its crisis unfolding daily.
It is far more about defiance for the class battles which are coming and which the working class senses are coming, wanting leadership boldness and firmness.
In the absence of anything better, some tens of thousands have settled on the seeming bravado of a maverick (temporarily).
That they have resorted to elevating such a flawed and damaged individual into a “Robin Hood”, when he himself was crying out for leadership and direction, is a complete condemnation of the entire reformist and pretend revolutionary fake-“left”, all flavours, its sanctimonious political correctness and academicism covering up an utter lack of perspective and understanding of the world and its revolutionary nature.
All the “lefts” have completely failed the working class.
The world is philosophically parched and dry after decades of bankrupt reformism, opportunist New Labour lies and corruption, official Trade Union bureaucracy and capitulation, small-minded Trotskyist anti-workers state posturing (pretend “revolutionism”) and the pathetic and deluded “peaceful road” parliamentarianism of Revisionist “communism” (no such thing).
Their pie-in-the-sky politics, always dragging the working class back behind reformist parliamentarianism and useless stop-the-war pacifist type protest – even those that profess to be r-r-revolutionary and militant – has left the working class bereft and facing the complete collapse of the all the “achievements and gains” so trumpeted during the artificial post-war boom and its shallow philistine consumerism (which the celebrity-awed “lefts” fail to challenge essentially).
None of the fake-“lefts” has anything better to say now as the greatest crisis in history is breaking except to call for “more left pressure” to “refuse to accept” the cuts and unemployment.
But the devastation and destructive collapse of markets and finance systems throughout the world, with massive bankruptcies happening or threatened, will not be stopped by dogged refusal, important though working class resistance is and will be.
It demands the ending of the insanity of a profit system that will always return to slump and war disaster.
That means, though it does not know it consciously yet, that the working class is desperate for real revolutionary communist understanding (Leninism), developing a revolutionary perspective capable of explaining and guiding the struggle for the total ending of capitalism which is now all that is going to solve any issue at all in society, and which alone can stop the headline plunge towards world slump disaster.
It needs to overturn the class rule of capitalism, and build rational planned socialism under the firm control of the working class.
It needs to take power.
That class civil war is on the way is exactly what the Tomlinson decision is all about.
It is an overt statement of the class war viciousness of the ruling class which is being wound up to new levels of readiness as its incompetent and uncontrollable political and economic failures tip the world towards an abyss of Depression misery and eventual world war devastation.
The in-your-face contempt of the government prosecution service, underlined by deliberately making the announcement of “no further action” on Tomlinson exactly on the fifth anniversary of the Charles Menezes shooting at Stockwell, another “accidental killing” of an innocent where the police and capitalist state are going scott-free, confirms the class war reality of the police role in capitalist society.
That has always been the case as Marxism long understood (e.g in Lenin’s State & Revolution) and always clear in practice to workers during strikes, demonstrations, rebellious rioting, and other outbursts and fights for better conditions, or against repression and depression in capitalism.
But it has to come to the fore even more now as the ruling class attempts to impose its worst ever catastrophic crisis Depression and slump onto the backs of the working class.
It stands alongside the savagery of the Budget cuts as a deliberate declaration of war.
It is a warning of stepped-up intimidation and violence being held in readiness for the inevitable outbreaks of resistance, strike action, occupations and street disorder that are guaranteed as the mass of ordinary people begin to feel the pain and devastation of rapidly rising unemployment, a completely dismantled health service, decimation of social services, wiped-out pensions and much more, shattering lives and shattering illusions in steadily improving “lifestyles” promised by a century of misleading and opportunist reformist politics.
The civil war levels of confrontation by militarised police that were used on the miners by the Thatcher government give just a hint of the fighting and repression that the ruling class knows it must prepare for domestically in order to push through the savagery of its cuts and speed-ups, which it must make or go under in the cutthroat trade, credit and currency wars between the major monopoly capitalist powers sweeping the planet after the “credit-crunch” (all part of capitalist economic meltdown).
For all the cynical pretence of “upturn” and “putting the economy back on track” from both the Tories and the New Labourites (with the only dispute ostensibly about the “best way to do it” and “who was to blame”) the reality is that the entire capitalist system has hit the buffers and is on the edge of complete failure after two decades of slow motion collapse across the world.
This is not “the worst slump since the 1930s” as the fake-“lefts” have finally begun saying in the teeth of the indisputable facts (after decades of ridicule, hostility or plain incomprehension for Marxism-Leninism’s constant warnings of the catastrophic economic disintegration to come). It is much worse, the greatest meltdown catastrophe in all history which is unravelling into a far bigger trade war, slump conflict than anything ever seen before, and a Third World War destructiveness of unparalleled extent.
The historic epoch of private ownership of the means of production is finished, and its greed driven exploitation is no longer pushing world development forwards (however brutally) but restricting and hampering human ingenuity and development, keeping billions in unnecessary enforced ignorance and want, and pushing what production and invention there is into destructiveness (arms production etc) and consumerist waste, and ultimately blitzkrieging war.
Only the incredible hyper-inflationary pumping-up of the essentially bankrupted world economy with trillions of worthless paper dollars (over and above the hundreds of millions of unbacked dollars pumped out constantly year by year for decades by dominant American imperialism, to keep its economy afloat and bribe, bully and manipulate dozens of stooge and fascist regimes into compliance for US exploitation around the planet) has kept the monopoly capitalist system from utterly disastrous and immediate chaotic implosion, as was briefly tasted in the bank failures and Stock Exchange collapses of October 2008.
But the ruling class (and its New Labourite stooges) – are well aware that the latest “growth” figures and “increased output” are a fragile interlude in the devastating plunge into “over-production” crisis.
Such crisis must always return on an ever greater scale in a system which organises production for private profit rather than rational and planned output designed to match real human needs and wants, not insane, advertising-driven over-consumption and waste.
Massive jostling and shoving is underway in world markets to try and survive the collapsing demand which is an inevitable endpoint of capitalist production, as Karl Marx long ago demonstrated in his astounding disentangling of the contradictions of the profit system in the book Capital (all volumes), and which, for all the complexities of modern electronic finance etc, remains unchallenged and unchallengeable in its conclusions.
The bitter cutthroat battles between rival capitalists expressed in the currency and credit movements, which circle like sharks around any weak-looking victim, demand the slashing of costs and ruthless speed up to extract more surplus value from the working class.
The savagery of the Tory Budget, and the aggressiveness of the G20 policing (and much else) are overt moves stepping up the preparations for bitter inter-imperialist struggle to come and eventually all out war.
Behind the police, lies the ever-escalating police-state surveillance and control which every government and especially New Labour has been steadily increasing in preparation for the crash which they all knew was on the way and would wipe out the fraudulent “improvements” their “reforms” were making (if or when they improved anything at all) and which they all consciously covered up.
And behind that is the more sinister use of torture and eventually military army violence if necessary which the ruling class has been getting the world prepared for under the guise of its “war on terror” (see lead story).
In other words all the mechanisms to impose open dictatorship (completely fascist whatever formal shape it takes, run by existing ruling class or some theatrical reactionary party).
But the turn to fascism and dictatorship is a major weakness historically, abandoning the much stronger class rule by apparent consensus and socially accepted “rule of law” under the illusions of bourgeois democracy, and making much clearer the reality of the dictatorship of big capital and its constant exploitation which in fact rules capitalist society always, even in the most liberal “boom time” prosperous republic.
There is no boom time anymore and the ruling class’s small concessions to “social progress” are being stripped away.
But these were made to hold back post-war revolutionary pressure across the world by pretending that the benefits demonstrated even from the beginning by communist society, like free education, health, cheap housing and universal reasonable employment, cultural advance and scientific progress (and much more) could be equalled or done “even better” in capitalism.
It was always partial, always a lie and built only on ruthless super-exploitation of the Third World sweat shops and plantations anyway which saw none of it.
But it kept back the communist momentum which terrified the entire capitalist world, as a working class, disgusted by the 1930s Slump and World War Two slaughter, was inspired by the strength, resilience and power of the Soviet working class facing the most brutal savagery ever imposed (Nazi blitzkrieg killing tens of millions).
And despite up and downs, and attempted reversals of working class gains, the ruling class has never dared take away the few pathetic crumbs it granted as “reforms”.
Attempts at reaction like Thatcher/Reagan have been only partially successful, and despite the conspiracy to break the miners in 1984, coming to grief over growing hostility and rebellion like the Poll Tax upheaval.
Now aggressive cuts and draconian “economies” are crucial if the ruling class is to survive and keep its life of sweet luxury and power.
It is pretending to do it with a “mandate” but the parliamentary racket is almost dead, and the government “legitimacy” is nonexistent, held together only by the duplicity of the LibDems, and the opportunism of the Labourites (quite happy to be in “opposition” and able to let off posturing gas without consequence).
The entire traditional “left” leaderships, from the class-collaborating official Trade Unionism, weakly and ineffectually “protesting within the law” the savage waves of redundancies (happening and threatened), wage and pension cuts, to the pocket-lining opportunist corruption, degeneracy and big business stoogery of New Labourism are a complete disgrace and historic betrayal.
The whole is sustained only by the fake-“lefts”. Even in the last election they were all busy once more giving credence to the giant pretence of bourgeois “democracy”, calling on the working class to once more back the lie of “voting for socialism” and “left representatives”, backing up the same old historically discredited Parliamentary racket even though the working class has long had nothing but contempt for it, and its pocket-lining “politicians”.
Lenin long ago made it clear that the only purpose of participation was to expose it.
But the aggressiveness of the ruling class is a brittle veneer.
This is by no means a confident and powerful ruling class calmly preparing to impose the necessary “discipline” and “belt-tightening” (for the masses) to get it through another “downturn”.
Its failure is summed up by the disaster of the British Petroleum debacle in the US. The premium flagship representative of “private enterprise” and British imperialist wealth is a disgrace of arrogance, environmental destructiveness, bankruptcy, incompetence and greed.
Its jitteriness and fears are reflected in the public outburst Tory leader David Cameron felt obliged to make against the Facebook tributes to Raoul Moat and his “he’s a murderer-end of story” attempt to suppress the issue.
Why would the leader of the former British Empire ruling class feel the need to intervene in such an essentially trivial matter unless its nerves are on edge?
And unless it signalled something deeper going on?
What it does signal is the urgent need for the vacuum in leadership in the working class to be filled.
It will not happen from the fake-“left” who see nothing of the revolutionary stirring in the world because essentially they neither grasp revolution nor want its upheavals to disturb their petty bourgeois niche, where they can posture and strut.
The join in with imperialism in denouncing the great Third World rebelliousness which is unstoppably on the rise everywhere, “condemning terrorism”.instead of seeing rising spontaneous revolution, which even if it is incoherent and sometimes self-defeatingly confused and backward, (though often highly developed, as in Palestine) can only mature into a greater and greater revolt against imperialism.
Their grasp of these phenomena is shallow or laced with sanctimonious hostility as it is for Moat.
The condolences and even hero worship, neither particularly express simple class “sympathy” as some of the more cautious fake-”left” groups have said (see SWP commentary below), or backward “misogyny” from “thick and potentially reactionary chavs” as the more extreme feminist and middle class liberal fake-“left” nonsense has arrogantly painted it.
Class feeling for a damaged and hurt individual, screwed up by the contradictions of capitalist life and possibly persecuted and harassed by the police and others, is part of it. There may even be threads of inappropriate or backward attitudes towards women (though that is a whole issue to be debated in itself).
But it is the discomfort of the ruling class which was enjoyed and celebrated, with its ridiculous showy Hollywood police and media excess and expense given the run-around.
Clearly Moat’s murderous, self-destructive behaviour and ultimately defeatist “martyrdom” in a miserable suicidal (if it was) conclusion, makes him anything but a hero and useful role model. His destructive violence has shattered lives immediately around him to no great purpose.
His own desperate struggle to make sense of the positive side of masculinity and aggressiveness, which could have valuably turned it into class leadership against capitalism, reflects the same tragic leadership vacuum, and the disastrous suppression of male vigour, assertiveness, intelligence (as he is reported to have been) and purpose (deliberately encouraged by capitalism) under petty bourgeois PC anti-male feminism, blaming men rather then class society for the conflicts and confusion.
If he is the best that can be found for tens of thousands of people it underlines what a disastrous failure of fighting leadership there has been.
They, and all the working class, deserve and need much better.
They need Leninist revolutionary clarity and the leadership to end capitalist reactionary backwardness.
It needs to start now. Build Leninist grasp and a party.
Alan Moss
Fake-‘left’ aims to commit “mad killing” of all Marxism
The fake ‘left’’s approach to the rampage by Raoul Moat and his death in a stand-off with the police is the very opposite of Marxism, and shows once again that all fake-‘leftism’ amounts to anti-communism and counter-revolutionary politics.
The SWP, for example, presents some “daring” comments that Moat’s anti-police actions and tirades have become “popular” and that the British police have killed more people than serial killers; the SWP also mentions that Moat was “sick in a sick society” and clearly suffering from alienation. It also highlights that Tory David Cameron’s sneer that Moat was a “callous murderer” is pure hypocrisy coming from a British imperialist leader. The essence of its article, which is really nothing more than liberalism, runs:
Cameron said, “I cannot understand how there can be any public sympathy for him. Raoul Moat was a callous murderer. Full stop.”
This is a bit rich coming from the man responsible for the continuing Afghan and British deaths thanks to the war in Afghanistan....
Yet while condemning Moat, Cameron defended the police to the hilt – even though they have murdered more people than Moat or any serial killer in history.
The truth is that Moat was neither a monster nor a martyr. He was a man suffering from deep alienation and mental illness.
Killers are made, not born. Moat asked for help over and over again – to his social workers, prison guards, anyone who would listen. But society left him to suffer.
One message attached to a bouquet of flowers read, “You were not helped and failed by the system massively.” It was right.
It is the easiest thing in the world to condemn an individual with a “full stop”.
But it is far more useful to understand how such individuals are created by the world we live in – and how we can change it.
Much of this is simply stating the obvious to the working class: but Marxism-Leninism and true revolutionary politics require a great deal more than that – what is needed is to extend Marxist understanding to cover such events, to develop understanding and use such incidents to demonstrate the role of Marxist theory.
Typically for all SWP articles, it dribbles out to end in the “we must change the world” gnomic conclusion, so that exactly what must be done to change the world is left unspoken; this is simply to avoid saying whether reform or revolution is its agenda.
But this nudge, nudge, wink, wink pathetic uselessness is far worse. In fact, it is hopelessly defeatist vileness from these disgusting Trot charlatans.
Moat’s rampage is one of a vast number of desperate acts of alienation from all capitalist society; and to bring hope out of this despair Marxism-Leninism precisely has to define what it is about decaying capitalist society’s social and historic crisis that causes such tragic outcomes, and how ending capitalist exploitation, the “us and them” rat race, alienation and the sense of powerlessness that pervades the great mass of people – which can only be done by the socialist revolution - will transform the world and all relationships for the better.
That doesn’t condemn just this article on Moat by the SWP – but its entire anti-theory political output. Since its politics are relentlessly anti-communist, anti-Soviet and anti-theory, its shallow ‘leftism’ (actually liberalism) over Moat can only ever be treated as the worst possible menace to the working-class revolutionary perspective.
Where does the SWP ever bring LENGTHY extracts (rather than just snatched phrases capable of misinterpretation) from the Marxist classics by Marx, Engels and Lenin about commodity-production alienation; about inter-imperialist trade war and warmongering; about the all-important need to defend Soviet power; about the use by the working class of state forces to defeat counter-revolution; about the vicious role of the bourgeois labour parties; about the sick role played by the anti-Leninist Trotsky at so many critical moments of the Russian revolution (except when under Lenin’s firmest control)????
Instead, at every turn where the EPSR has intervened at meetings, the SWP and the fake ‘left’ have always attempted to BLOCK all Marxist-Leninist understanding. The SWP refuses to urge on revolutionary politics from the Moat tragedy, but offers liberal hand-wringing, in the same way that it postures about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to present the “stop the war” pleading nonsense of bourgeois-pacifism. But working-class disquiet over the Moat incident should be directed towards the OVERTHROW by revolution of the whole decaying and alienating capitalist order; public revulsion over the Western imperialist death, destruction and defeat in Afghanistan and Iraq should be directed towards the further DEFEAT of Western imperialism and its warmongering crisis, and the need for the world socialist revolution.
And the SWP’s talk about “sick society” with everything that has to be done to change it left unspoken – the need for communist revolution; the need to defend proletarian dictatorship as the transition phase from capitalist mayhem; the reality of capitalism’s crisis taking the world to mass unemployment, fascist degeneracy and world war again – leaves these Trots as the nastiest possible OBSTACLE to the working class making revolution to end capitalism and the nastiest possible OBSTACLE to the working class ever understanding the Moat tragedy in a fighting way that can “change the world”.
Build Leninism. Build the EPSR.
Chris Barratt
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World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).
Afghanistan – civilian blitzing and torture
Two news items and just one North
by Elsa Claro
THE CIA is fearful of the possible distribution of photographs of its agents during interrogations with presumed terrorists detained in the U.S. prison on the illegal base in Guantánamo. This news item is self-explanatory. People who have no reason to fear, don’t. We hope that, in this case, the result win not be the same as in several places on our continent; where murderers and tortures are still at liberty without the U.S. or European governments developing allergic reactions or having their “diplomats” circulate in any “dissident” circuit, even though plenty of people in the United States or the European Union are against the system. The second news item comes from Germany, where a parliamentary commission is investigating the details surrounding an air strike against two fuel tankers in Kundus, Afghanistan. It has been reported that the vehicles were under Taliban control but were surrounded by civilians at the moment the bombs were released, and thus 142 people died of were wounded in the attack, among them women and children.
Those events took place on September 4, 2009 and provoked inevitably strong reactions, hence the process during which differences between the official version given by Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg emerged, Guttenberg has been accused of lying in order to save his political career and of having forced the resignation of the officers involved.
On top of that, on March 18, 2010, the Spiegel-Online website revealed the existence in Afghanistan of the so-called “Group 85,” in charge of reacting to potential International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) investigations by projecting “a positive image of success,” thus preventing “by any means” any criticism of the German army.
Even though there is still time to obtain some loophole justifying his decision between now and April 22, the date set for the minister to give his depositions, it can be deduced that he will have no other option but to resign from his post due to a loss of credibility.
These factors are part of a large chain of events that, in recent years, has dispatched certain features that previously somewhat differentiated Europe from the notorious and lascivious U.S. flexibility in regards to assessing what is correct, legal, or despicable. Or, if one prefers, that unchecked manner of U.S. leaders lacking any notion of limits where their interests are concerned.
The lack of moral boundaries carries the same meaning when decimating the original inhabitants of North America, practicing torture, creating institutions with the purpose of fabricating lies against others, or justifying the unacceptable or the despicable.
It is sad to see Europe is joining the United States in this context. The way in which some governments opposed to the invasion of Iraq ending up allowing the secret flights and prisons for alleged terrorists or refrained from criticizing their transatlantic ally when it was impossible to continue concealing the excesses committed is pathetic. Today they are following a similar path. Is that or is that not servile complicity and submission?
“An allied country kidnaps one of your nationals (Khaled El Masri) during his vacations, makes him disappear, deprives him of all his legal rights, tortures him during a whole year in a secret prison and finally releases him in a parking lot in Albania saying: ‘We are sorry, we made a mistake, go back home and shut your mouth if you don’t want any trouble.’ And all that happens with Mr. Masri’s government - the one that is supposed to protect its nationals and the rights that their own constitution is supposed to guarantee - doing nothing. And, when the allied country acknowledges (after having lied) that it is true, won’t you make any questions? Will you be satisfied with a vague excuse and the promise that it will not happen again? And when the allied country denies Mr. Masri entrance in its territory, thus preventing him from having access to the court’s justice; or when the media reveals that it was your own secret services that put Mr. Masri in the hands of the arbitrariness of torture; what should you do? Well, we just close our eyes not to get upset with the Big Brother. And this is happening in Europe - from where we are always willing and ready to give lessons of civilization and human rights.”
Those opinions were expressed by German political scientist Jacob Singer, former advisor to Chancellor Schmidt, when the then Secretary of State Condolezza Rice spoke at the nato headquarters to assure that her country respected international law and that the interrogation methods used by the United States were “relatively benevolent.”
Despite that speech, Washington has maintained its repressive philosophy inside the United States and in foreign lands. The members of the Bush administration most responsible affirmed and insisted that torturing defenseless people was necessary, although almost all of those who were subjected to the worst kind of ordeals and offenses were innocent, as was the case with Masri, In 2006, they admitted - whether they did so because of momentary weakness or simple arrogance is still unknown - that they were using torture, while Europe, while continuing to question others, allowed it to occur and even adopted some bad habits of its own, such as fabricating lies against those who will not subordinate themselves.
Organizations of various stamps and parties of differing tendencies affirm that when always-reprehensible formulas match the deed that they are intended to eliminate, those who formulated them commit the same excesses as the perpetrators. The end does not justify the means when those ends are equally condemnable.
If those shameless prisons could be defendable, then there would be no reason for them to be secret. Europe passed the buck on letting the detainees be taken to other areas of the planet, but even so, it remains inexpiably to blame, given that after the investigations, it did not bring anyone to trial, or even stand up to the White House, as it has done in the past over more trifling trade issues. And now what ii is doing is to encourage sedition in the name of a democracy that it would be good to see practiced and not simply echoed, a pitiful echo of subjugation and ideological revanchism. •
WHAT THE PRESS SAID
• THE German Der Spiegel assured that the German government knew about the 437 CIA flights through its airspace, but Berlin, at that time headed by Gerhard Schroeder, a social democrat who promoted neoliberalism in his country, claims to have not been informed.
The Guardian revealed 210 flights to the United Kingdom. Given that country’s history, it’s no surprise that the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree.
- On November 2, 2005, the Washington Post revealed that the CIA was utilizing secret prisons in Eastern European countries, places in which no detainee rights whatsoever are recognized and where these prisoners were confined in isolated cells. The columnists stated that the interrogations used were in violation of the UN conventions and U.S. military law, as was confirmed in Guantánamo. It is also known that this was common practice in the extensive network of prisons where religious humiliations took place, likewise contrary to the Geneva Conventions, and many other international agreements.
The UN revealed connections among the 66 countries implicated in the network of arbitrary detentions and disappearances. Why didn’t we hear European condemnations, complaints, and tantrums about all of that and so much more?
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World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).
Cuba is not alone
by Miguel Bonasso, – Special for Granma
THE reaction had to come and it came. From late 2008, Cuba has been harvesting a series of political and diplomatic successes that are helping to break the isolation imposed on it by Washington since the very beginning of the Revolution. For the ideologists of the blockade, these advances had to be counteracted by a grand-scale media move which, while inscribed within the general parameters of the mediaeval siege imposed on the island 50 years ago, has special characteristics given a situation lamented by the Cuban authorities: the death of the common prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo, converted into a “dissident” and a political martyr by the corporate media.
THE FACTS
1. On November 14, 2008, during the 27th Meeting of the Rio Group in Zacatecas, Mexico, Cuba was incorporated into the group as a full member.
2. On June 3, 2009, the 39th oas General Assembly in Honduras rescinded, by acclamation, the resolution which expelled Cuba from the organization in that famous meeting in Punta del Este and became effective in 1962. The oas also called for Cuba’s re-entry into its body.
3. From early 2009 to date, 12 Latin American presidents have made state visits to Havana: Martin Torrijos (Panama), Rafael Correa (Ecuador), Cristina Fernandez (Argentina), Michelle Bachelet (Chile), Alvaro Colom (Guatemala), Raúl Leonel Fernández (Dominican Republic), Fernando Lugo (Paraguay), Daniel Ortega (Nicaragua), Evo Morales Ayma (Bolivia), Hugo Chávez (Venezuela), Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Brazil), and José Manuel Zelaya, the subsequently overthrown president of Honduras.
4. On October 28, 2009, the UN General Assembly once again voted, by a record majority, for a resolution against the embargo (blockade) imposed on Cuba by the United States. The result was conclusive: 187 countries in favor of the resolution; three against: the United States, Israel and Palau; two abstentions: the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia; and no absences.
Too many significant achievements to let pass without attempting to counteract them with a dirty media campaign presenting Cuba as a sinister country that tortures and kills its political prisoners, or allows them to die. The occasion presented itself with the death of the prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo, sentenced for common crimes. Zapata Tamayo had gone on hunger strike in demand of a personal cooker and telephone in his cell but, despite the medical care he received in Cuba’s finest hospitals, he contracted pneumonia and died.
I have no doubt that the doctors and nurses did everything possible to save his life. I know personally and directly the dedication of Cuban doctors to their humanitarian task and have found them matchless in the world. It is not coincidental that when the death of Zapata Tamayo occurred, lamented by Raul Castro himself, hundreds of Cuban doctors were saving lives in Haiti. That is something that they have been doing for decades in the most dramatic scenarios of Asia, Africa and Latin America, without expecting any recompense other than the recognition of the condemned of the Earth.
That was what they did in the wake of the devastating earthquake in Pakistan, where I was the direct witness of a moving fact: Fidel Castro himself-organizing and directing the humanitarian mission, which stayed on in those icy mountains when all the Western aid organizations had left, reaching a unprecedented record for a country without resources: treating 300,000 Pakistanis in barely four months.
None of these honorable precedents were taken into account by the European Parliament when, on March 11, it condemned Cuba for “the inevitable and cruel death of the dissident political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo.” European democracy must be going very badly when Euro deputies violate the principle of non-intervention and self-determination by urging European institutions “to give unconditional support to and unreservedly encourage the beginning of a peaceful process of political transition toward multiparty democracy in Cuba.” A direct call on European embassies in Havana to fund and cover up all kinds of subversive activities against the Cuban government.
Once again the European allies of the United States have done the dirty deed.
Just as they proclaimed the “Common Position” against Havana when Washington passed the Helms-Burton Act, this time they have taken a leading role in the anti-Cuba propaganda, so that “the hand that rocks the cradle” remains in the shadows.
As is known via some old U.S. documents, partially declassified in the 90s, without revealing its face, Washington proposed 50 years ago to covertly fabricate and finance an opposition. Instructions to that effect were issued by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1960: “It is essential to keep the hand of the United States concealed.”
The Strasbourg document serves those ends and ratifies the long-existing complicity between Europe and the United States. Those old powers, maintaining colonial enclaves like the Malvinas, do not hesitate to preach morality with their flies open. Not only have they refused to condemn the crimes against humanity perpetrated against Iraq and Afghanistan, which have already resulted in a million deaths, or the confirmed torture and abuse in the prisons of Abu Ghraib and the Guantánamo Base, but they have also lent their own territories - as in the case of Sweden - for secret CIA flights carrying kidnapped people. Neither did the Euro-Chamber condemn the bloody coup d’etat in Honduras, which has already cost more than 300 lives, or the inadmissible fact that five Cubans, who were fighting against terrorism, remain incarcerated in the United States while the U.S. government continues giving impunity to the shady Luis Posada Carriles, mastermind of the terrorist bombing of a Cubana de Aviación passenger plane.
The European political class and corporate media has maintained and increased its anti-Cuban line to date; it would be a good idea for them to take note of a shared determination on the part of the great majorities of Latin America: that Cuba will not be on it’s own because, in the main, all of us Latin Americans are Cuban. •
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World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).
Posada Carriles
Five years covering up decades of terror
by Jean-Guy Allard – Granma
ON June 15, it will be five years since Venezuela formally applied to the U.S. government for the extradition of international terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, after his arrest on May 17, 2005 in Miami, Florida.
Bernardo Alvarez, Venezuela’s ambassador to Washington, recalled then how he had submitted successive applications on May 13 and June 10 through diplomatic channels, both for the arrest and eventual handover of this fugitive from Venezuelan justice, responsible for the in-flight destruction of a Cuban passenger plane which caused the death of the 73 persons on board.
Present at the same press conference, Deputy Foreign Minister Delsy Rodríguez stated: “The clock is ticking for the extradition of Posada Carriles” and pointed out that the file presented to the U.S. authorities contained 500 pages documenting every aspect of Posada’s activities in Venezuela. The attorney in the case, José Pertierra, added that an application like this from the Bolivarian government had to be addressed “immediately.”
Apparently responding to Posada’s possible expulsion from the country because he had illegally entered U.S. territory from Mexico aboard the Santrina shrimper, Immigration magistrate William Lee Abbott initially refused to set bail for Posada Carriles, at that time held in a detention center for undocumented workers in El Paso (Texas).
However, a few weeks later, after hearing testimony from Joaquim Chaffardet, an accomplice of Posada in counter-insurgency campaigns that left hundreds dead and tortured in Venezuela during the 1970s, the same magistrate decided that Posada could not be extradited to that country because he might be tortured.
On April 17, 2007, after a long string of legal acrobatics before seven successive magistrates, Posada’s release by Judge Kathleen Cardone in El Paso, confirmed the Bush clan’s determination to thumb its nose at public opinion.
That also-made it very clear that, for the anti-Cuba circuit of U.S. intelligence, the man who had fulfilled unmentionable CIA instructions in the last four decades would be saved at all costs.
For five years the U.S. government, its Justice Department and its unique system of justice have refused to recognize and have even attempted to ignore the terrorist past of Luis Posada Carriles, in spite of the fact that he has described himself as a terrorist on a number of occasions. Both FB I and CIA files are full of declassified or non-declassified documents that reveal the criminal nature of his activities.
Dating back to the early 1960s these files explain in detail how Posada Carriles was agent amcleve/15 and his CIA handler Grover Lythcott.
Released files tell all regarding how he trained terrorists in the Everglades and how he joined the Representation Cubana en el Exilio (RECE), the terrorist group sponsored by [a Western corporation].
How can they not know of Posada’s terrorist past when the very head of RECE, Jorge Mas Canosa, was a CIA agent?
A founder of the Cuban-American National Foundation (mas) ended up directing and financing Posada’s activities.
In the face of so much evidence, the CIA cannot logically be ignorant of the reason why the former Venezuelan president, Carlos Andres Pérez, now in exile in Miami under its protection, also gave protection to Orlando Bosch, chief of the Coordination de Organizaciones Revolucionarias Unidas (coru) and Posada’s accomplice in the Cubana de Aviación crime, who now lives in Hialeah, enjoying total impunity.
On June 11, 1976, on formally hosting the meeting that founded the coru, in Bonao, Dominican Republic, the CIA authorized a long list of bloody crimes subsequently perpetrated by that terrorist organization. Chairing this meeting of gangsters including Posada, was another agent more CIA than its own Langley headquarters was Alexander Vlonsky, a Romanian immigrant and naturalized U.S. citizen then known as Sacha Volman.
In spite of all later efforts to eliminate the evidence of its criminal responsibility, the Agency’s hand then appeared everywhere after this top secret meeting of all of the elements that characterize it.
Just like it appeared in Posada’s escape from his Venezuelan jail, when that was demanded by CIA agent Felix Rodríguez Mendigutia, Che’s murderer and the collaborator of Oliver North, who made him operations leader at the Salvadoran base of llopango. There, in the service of the CIA, Posada was converted into an arms and drugs trafficker.
In the interview that Posada gave to The New York Times in 1998, in which he confessed to being the mastermind of the terror campaign unleashed on Havana the previous year, Posada admitted with an amazing ingenuousness, “The CIA taught us everything...how to use explosives, how to kill, to make bombs...”
The Posada file is much more than that of one sole man. That is demonstrated daily in the Venezuelan right-wing press when it attacks the presence of Cuban civilian cooperative workers in that country while ignoring or even justifying Posada’s presence in the disip (Venezuelan secret police), when its squad of hit men massacred young revolutionaries on the orders of Posada and his associates.
In the past, upholding the violence of Posada and his ilk; now behind the smokescreen of the defamation campaigns, on attempting to defend human rights, those who own the camp of shame in Guantánamo will always reap what they have sown.
For the United States, as much for the Bush clan as for its successor, Posada is more than just another agent, an obedient hit man, who has to be protected in order to reassure the rest of them.
Posada is the key name in the decades-old dirty war of assassination operations, shameless interference, shameful complicities for the purpose of eradicating and annihilating every example of rebelliousness in this hemisphere. 20 June 2010
EL PASO FARCE CONTINUES
CIA keeps its agent Posada out of reach
by Jean-Guy Allard – Granma (2nd May 2010)
THE B-rate soap opera that the CIA invented to keep its agent Luis Posada Carriles out of jail despite his terrorist crimes and to confuse the American people happily continues: Judge Kathleen Cardone of El Paso, Texas, in charge of the case, has given the U.S. government a new extension up until June 2, 2010.
The court order was signed by the Texas judge on April 12, 2010, but was not revealed until Sunday, April 25, when Ricardo Alarcón, president of the Cuban National Assembly, interviewed by the press after voting in the municipal elections, noted that the five Cubans incarcerated in U.S. prisons for having infiltrated terrorist groups in Miami are unable to exercise their right to vote.
According to Prensa Latina, Ricardo Alarcón went on to comment, “Meanwhile, the trial of terrorist Luis Posada Carriles is still being postponed via agreements between the government and the district attorney.”
The proceedings accompanying the Posada’s trial were scheduled for May 20, but the federal district attorney once again asked for an extension, on the ridiculous pretext of having another engagement that same day.
“The status conference was postponed on April 12; however nothing has been said. I have not seen any cable dispatches, no media network has reported it,” Alarcón said, noting the complete information block by the press agencies and the Miami mafia press.
The so-called “status conference” is no more than an exchange between the district attorney’s office and the defense to agree on the direction of the trial and its date.
This form of “justice,” where cases are dragged out with delay proceedings when the district attorney and the defense have a common interest in doing so, is commonplace in the United States. In this case, the district attorney needs to save Posada from extradition, which is agreeable to the defense, which, in the meantime, continues billing Posada’s benefactors.
Ironically, Posada’s file is the responsibility of the federal district attorney’s office in the Department of Justice’s anti-terrorist section.
The current U.S. administration, like that of George W. Bush, is attempting to pretend that it has no evidence that Posada was one of the masterminds behind the 1976 mid-flight explosion of a Cubana airplane off the coast of Barbados.
Nor does it recognize that his principal accomplice, Orlando Bosch Avila, a refugee in Miami since July 2,1960, is a terrorist.
Posada and Bosch are the co-founders of the Coordinating Committee of United Revolutionary Organizations, whose operations are among bloodiest in the entire history of terrorism on the continent.
For decades, Posada was a regular collaborator and confessed agent of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, under whose direction he committed numerous acts of terrorism, torture, and the disappearances of people during counter-insurgency operations in Venezuela and Central America. He also trafficked weapons and drugs and participated in various attempts to assassinate the Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
While Posada and his defenders wish to justify his crimes by claiming that he was simply obeying cia orders, the Justice Department is stating that the possible link between Posada Carriles and the CIA is not pertinent to the 11 charges brought against him.
Judge Cardone prohibited the murderer’s lawyers from using the cia in the defense of their client.
After his illegal entry into the United States five years ago, Posada was formally accused of lesser charges in January 2007. His trial was first set for May 11 of that year, three years ago!
And exactly four years have passed since Robert E. Jolicoeur, director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in El Paso, Texas, sent a letter to Posada Carilles - detained at the time -in which he stated that Posada constituted “a risk to U.S. national security.” •
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