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Economic and Philosophic Science Review

Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. V. I. Lenin


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No 1416 26th November 2012

 

Panicked Washington halt to the Zionist fascist onslaught on Gaza's desperate masses is nothing to do with humanitarian concern and "international restraint" but fear of the revolutionary wave rising throughout the Middle East. The Zionist land-stealers' horrifying onslaught threatened to unite conflict ridden Middle East masses from Turkey to Syria to Libya as the "Arab street" and other peoples seethe with justified rage at the monstrous Nazism of the artificial "Israel". The West's carefully manipulated bogus "uprisings" in Libya and Syria to fragment and violently destroy the genuine revolution begun in Tunisia and Egypt, using NATO Turkey and the feudal Gulf states to foster reactionary "rebellions" are all jeopardised. But world capitalist crisis is unstoppable and the revolutionary spirit out of the bottle. Leninist science now the vital missing ingredient

Halting of Zionism's latest round of genocidal blitzkrieg and indiscriminate killing of the endlessly persecuted and dispossessed Palestinians in Gaza, is yet further confirmation of the deepening fears of US imperialist ruling class over the world rebellion which its now disastrous and catastrophic crisis has pushed to completely new levels of mass revolt, most of all in the long troubled and resource rich Middle East.

The rapidity and urgency with which Washington flew its highest level state department officials into Cairo to shut down yet more Zionist blitzkrieg and butchery on besieged and beset Palestinian Gaza is the real story behind the "ceasefire" ostensibly mediated by Morsi, the halfway compliant Egyptian stooge figurehead levered into place by the West, but certainly also involving heavy covert pressure on the West's rotweiller Zionists in Tel Aviv (who are ultimately dependent on Washington economic subvention and arms supplies).

It underlines how deeply shaken US imperialism has been by the Middle Eastern rebellion in Egypt and Tunisia, on top of the disastrous slow running failures of Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Syria, and how terrified that the Zionist populist Nazi killing stunt would stir the already seething region into boiling over completely.

Holding back the fanatical Zionists and their state terrorising and murderous military onslaught on the hapless masses trapped inside the mined and walled border around their cramped concrete hellhole has got nothing to do with "humanitarian principles" and "concern to separate the warring parties" (itself a foul Goebbels misrepresentation of suggested equality between the world's fourth most powerful military and the desperate, deprived, besieged and repressed Palestinians).

The Western capitalist ruling class not only could not care less about human suffering and oppression but actively want to ensure that the world's masses are relentless intimidated and in "shock and awe" at the ruthlessness with which any hint of rebellion and resistance will be treated.

But its cynical calculations have to include the fearful prospect that Turkey, Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Palestine and above all Egypt would be drawn together in common purpose, the assorted stooge regimes or inadequate bourgeois nationalist leaderships forced to respond to the boiling over of anger and hatred on the "Arab Street", and among the Persian masses etc at the monstrous Zionist crimes and killings against the whole Palestinian people, raising a thousand questions in minds about who is the real enemy.

It would threaten to break down the host of manipulated and petty conflicts stirred up by imperialism, between NATO member Turkey, Syrian Ba'athism, in Libya, and in Egypt itself, both consciously done by imperialist intelligence agencies and arising anyway from the poisonous day-to-day alienation and cutthroat competitive antagonisms of the struggle to win out in the greed-driven private profit making world.

The philosophical and consciousness changing implications are enormous.

Such giant contradictions cannot help but lead to even deeper thinking and puzzlement about the world and its balance of forces and the dominance of world imperialism over lives and livelihoods.

While that is possibly a long way yet from coherent revolutionary understanding, let along Leninist communist grasp, it opens up a hornets nest of potential rebellion and anti-imperialism on top of the huge impact that ten years of "war on terror" has already had in driving recruitment into all kinds of "insurgency", national resistance, "terror organisations" and militancy.

Washington has no "moral" nor "democratic rule-of-law" qualms about Tel Aviv's nazi-style collective punishment tactics and, as even some of the bourgeois press views reproduced below can see, the Americans are anyway these days overtly leading the world in indiscriminate blasting to pieces of alleged "terrorists" with sinister "Terminator" style drone warfare and Navy Seal death-squad interventions.

The war-crime illegal "kill-list" assassination decrees issued weekly from the White House, like untrammelled Roman Imperator diktats, by the Obama presidency (so much for the EPSR south-west disrupters' argument that Obama was a "step-forwards for the working class" - see EPSR last issue) along with the deliberate fostering of the racist petty bourgeois counter-revolutionary upheaval in Libya (barbarically killing Gaddafi by war-crime iron-bar buggery), with NATO blitzing on top and now too in Syria, has taken the world lead in escalating "shock and awe" "might is right" bullying and intimidation.

The Zionists can easily point for "justification" or for a lead role and example, to the US's own policy of warmongering and violent "punishments" against any hint of challenge anywhere in the world to the non-stop exploitation of imperialism.

Its terrorising and civilian "collateral damage" (blasting apart Afghan, Somali, Yemeni and Pakistani weddings, village squares, community gatherings etc), inventively vicious torture, "disappearings" (rendition) and war blitzing, has now become a de facto and accepted norm, as the goalposts of "international acceptability and civilised standards" are constantly and deliberately shifted towards the once unthinkable but now more and more overt expression of the inherent fascist nature of all capitalist imperialism.

There is only one path capitalism has ever found out of its disastrous crisis collapse and failure and that is the distraction of war, used as an excuse for domestic "austerity" and clampdown on dissent and debate, while scapegoating "others" and "enemies" in all directions to blame for its own failure and contradictions, the built-in collapse and crisis which inevitably and inexorably brings it back to Slump and disintegration.

Each time is worse, more sudden and deeper than the last reflecting the ever more overdue reality that the capitalist private profit system has reached the end of the road historically, not only unable on balance to take the human race forwards, despite continuing technological and industrial advances, but threatening it more and more with devastation and disaster.

The promise of steady upwards progress through "entrepreneurial flair" – (always a fraudulent proposition in detail anyway since most corporate inventiveness (intellectual property) is hijacked from bought-in or legally bound talent and brain workers, absorbing the best genius of the entire world) – gives way to Depression, imposed penury, and above all the massive intensification of the always festering antagonisms and cutthroat tensions that run right through capitalist society from the very highest point of international relations to the daily interactions of worker struggling against worker for limited opportunities, jobs and prospects, massively intensified as the crisis deepens.

The only flair on show increasingly is in making weapons and destruction.

The crisis now fast unravelling is deeper, more rapid and more intractable than any in history, because of the greater than ever penetration of the entire world by capitalism, (intensively and extensively) the extraordinary stretching out of the artificial post-war dollar "boom time" through the creation of new credit mechanisms on an unprecedented scale, and the greatest monopoly dominance by a single power ever seen.

All these mechanisms have served to put off the inevitable day-of-reckoning when the inbuilt contradictions must implode, as Marx long ago analysed in Capital (see economics box) which means now things have come to a head, the disaster is greater, faster and more thoroughgoing than ever before.

As soon as ludicrous "solution" of printing yet more insane trillions of utterly valueless dollars works its way through the system, the collapse can only unwind even faster.

Even before the credit crunch reached surface in 2007-8 the unfolding catastrophe had already pushed the US into taking the world warmongering lead, to try and ride out the crisis which its ruling class has long known was brewing, with "shock and awe" intimidation of the planet with ruthless brutality to hold down rebellion and put a shot across the bows of the major imperialist rivals who are increasingly challenging US economic might and implicitly eventually its political and even military power.

Not that the Zionist occupiers needed even to justify themselves in fact, when the Obama feminist/black nationalist/"gay rights" presidency immediately declared its full support for Tel Aviv on day one, using the topsy-turvy Nazi logic that the Zionist enclave "had the right to 'defend' (!!!) itself" by stamping on the benighted and besieged Gazans with the very latest hi-tech high explosive weaponry.

The shooting-fish-in-a-barrel metaphor needs updating to using hand-grenades.

But within hours of the Zionist atrocities and barbarism getting underway the appalled world and especially local response was making it clear just how this bullying was teaching the whole world yet deeper lessons about the foul stinking degeneracy of the "Israeli" occupation and the imperialism which stands behind it.

The mainstream media like the BBC and much of the press continues to reflect the pro-Zionist support of the most reactionary wings of the bourgeoisie and the powerful influence of the Jewish lobby but widespread petty bourgeois disquiet is also reflected in some bourgeois press web commentaries and articles:

The way western politicians and media have pontificated about Israel's onslaught on Gaza, you'd think it was facing an unprovoked attack from a well-armed foreign power... Meanwhile, most western media have echoed Israel's claim that its assault is in retaliation for Hamas rocket attacks; the BBC speaks wearisomely of a conflict of "ancient hatreds".

In fact, an examination of the sequence of events over the last month shows that Israel played the decisive role in the military escalation: from its attack on a Khartoum arms factory reportedly supplying arms to Hamas and the killing of 15 Palestinian fighters in late October, to the shooting of a mentally disabled Palestinian in early November, the killing of a 13 year-old in an Israeli incursion and, crucially, the assassination of the Hamas commander Ahmed Jabari last Wednesday during negotiations over a temporary truce.

Israel's prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, had plenty of motivation to unleash a new round of bloodletting. There was the imminence of Israeli elections (military attacks on the Palestinians are par for the course before Israeli polls); the need to test Egypt's new Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi, and pressure Hamas to bring other Palestinian guerrilla groups to heel; and the chance to destroy missile caches before any confrontation with Iran, and test Israel's new Iron Dome anti-missile system.

So after six days of sustained assault by the world's fourth largest military power on one of its most wretched and overcrowded territories, at least 130 Palestinians had been killed, an estimated half of them civilians, along with five Israelis. The goal, Israel's interior minister, Eli Yeshai, insisted, had been to "send Gaza back to the middle ages".

True, the bloodshed hasn't so far been on the scale of Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9, which left 1,400 Palestinians dead in three weeks. But the issue isn't just who started and escalated it, or even the grinding "disproportionality" of yet another Israeli military battering (even before last month's flareups, 314 Palestinians had been killed since 2009, as against 20 Israelis).

It's that to portray Israel as some kind of victim with every right to "defend itself" from attack from "outside its borders" is a grotesque inversion of reality. Israel has after all been in illegal occupation of both the West Bank and Gaza, where most of the population are the families of refugees who were driven out of what is now Israel in 1948, for the past 45 years.

Despite Israel's withdrawal of settlements and bases in 2005, the Gaza Strip remains occupied, both effectively and legally – and is recognised as such by the UN. Israel is in control of Gaza's land and sea borders, territorial waters and natural resources, airspace, power supply and telecommunications. It has blockaded the strip since Hamas took over in 2006-7, preventing the movement of people, materials, and food supplies in and out of the territory – even calculating the 2,279 calories per person that would keep Gazans on an exemplary "diet". And it continues to invade the strip at will.

So Gazans are an occupied people and have the right to resist, including by armed force (though not to target civilians), while Israel is an occupying power that has an obligation to withdraw – not a right to defend territories it controls or is colonising by dint of military power.

Even if Israel had genuinely ended its occupation in 2005, Gaza's people are Palestinians, and their territory part of the 22% of historic Palestine earmarked for a Palestinian state that depends on Israeli withdrawal from the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem. Across their land, Palestinians have the right to defend and arm themselves, whether they choose to exercise it or not.

But instead the US, Britain and other European powers finance, arm and back to the hilt Israel's occupation, including the siege of Gaza – precisely to prevent Palestinians obtaining the arms that would allow them to protect themselves against Israeli military might.

It's hardly surprising of course that powers which have themselves invaded, occupied and intervened across the Arab and Muslim world over the last decade should throw their weight behind Israel doing the same thing on its own doorstep. But it isn't Palestinian rockets that stop Israel lifting the blockade, dismantling its illegal settlements or withdrawing from the West Bank and Gaza – it's unconditional US and western support that gives Israel impunity.

Whatever the Israeli government's mix of motivations for winding up the past week's conflict, it seems to have backfired. For the first time since the start of the Arab uprisings, the cause of Palestine is again centre stage.

Emboldened by the wave of change and growing support across the region, Hamas has also regained credibility as a resistance force, which had faded since 2009, and strengthened its hand against an increasingly discredited Palestinian Authority leadership in Ramallah. The deployment of longer-range rockets that have now been shown to reach Tel Aviv and Jerusalem is also beginning to shift what has been an overwhelmingly one-sided balance of deterrence.

The truce being negotiated on Tuesday would reportedly enforce Hamas responsibility for policing the strip and crucially break the blockade, opening the Rafah crossing with Egypt for goods as well as people. It doesn't, however, look like the long-term security deal with Hamas Israel was looking for, which would risk deepening the disastrous Palestinian split between Gaza and the West Bank.

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Israel's escalating air attacks on Gaza follow the depressingly familiar pattern that shapes this conflict. Overwhelming Israeli force slaughters innocent Palestinians, including children, which is preceded (and followed) by far more limited rocket attacks into Israel which kill a much smaller number, rocket attacks which are triggered by various forms of Israeli provocations -- all of which, most crucially, takes place in the context of Israel's 45-year-old brutal occupation of the Palestinians (and, despite a "withdrawal" of troops, that includes Gaza, over which Israel continues to exercise extensive dominion). The debates over these episodes then follow an equally familiar pattern, strictly adhering to a decades-old script that, by design at this point, goes nowhere.

Meanwhile, most US media outlets are petrified of straying too far from pro-Israel orthodoxies. Time's Middle East correspondent Rania Abouzeid noted this morning on Twitter the typical template: "Just read report in major US paper about Gaza/Israel that put Israeli dead in 1st sentence. Palestinian in 6th paragraph." Or just consider the BBC's headline. Worse, this morning's New York Times editorial self-consciously drapes itself with pro-Israel caveats and completely ignores the extensive civilian deaths in Gaza before identifying this as one of the only flaws it could find with the lethal Israeli assault: "The action also threatens to divert attention from what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly described as Israel's biggest security threat: Iran's nuclear program."

... US policy always lies at the heart of these episodes, because Israeli aggression is possible only due to the unstinting financial, military and diplomatic support of the US. Needless to say, the Obama administration wasted no time expressing its "full-throttled support" for the Israeli attacks. And one can't help but notice the timing of this attack: launched just days after Obama's re-election victory, demanding an answer to the question of whether Obama was told in advance of these attacks and gave his approval.

Ultimately, though, Obama had no choice but to support these attacks, which were designed, in part, to extra-judicially assassinate Hamas military leader Ahmed al-Jabari as he was driving in his car (the IDF then proudly posted the video of its hit on YouTube). How could Obama possibly have done anything else?

Extra-judicial assassination - accompanied by the wanton killing of whatever civilians happen to be near the target, often including children - is a staple of the Obama presidency. That lawless tactic is one of the US president's favorite instruments for projecting force and killing whomever he decides should have their lives ended: all in total secrecy and with no due process or oversight. There is now a virtually complete convergence between US and Israeli aggression, making US criticism of Israel impossible not only for all the usual domestic political reasons, but also out of pure self-interest: for Obama to condemn Israel's rogue behavior would be to condemn himself.

It is vital to recognize that this is a new development. The position of the US government on extra-judicial assassinations long had been consistent with the consensus view of the international community: that it is a savage and lawless weapon to be condemned regardless of claims that it is directed at "terrorists".

...Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has repeatedly said that "extrajudicial killings are violations of international law." EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana has said: "The European Union has consistently condemned extrajudicial killings. Israel has a right to protect its citizens from terrorist attacks, but actions of this type are not only unlawful, they are not conducive to lowering tension." Former UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has similarly pointed out: "the British government has made it repeatedly clear that so-called 'target assassinations' of this kind are unlawful, unjustified and counter-productive."

Thus, to condemn Israeli aggression here, President Obama would need do no more than simply affirm universally recognized precepts of international law, ones that the US government has long claimed to support (even as it often violated them). That, however, is no longer possible for Obama - at least not without triggering a global laughing fit.

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Gaza is a tiny territory where 1.7 million Palestinians, most of whom are refugees, are denied the right to return to their homes simply because they are not Jewish. It is from this besieged territory that militants have fired mostly rudimentary projectiles at Israel. While Israeli officials are quick to rattle off the numbers of projectiles fired from Gaza, rarely do they tell you what they fire into Gaza, what the effects of this fire is and what the fallout from it is.

For example, in 2011, the projectiles fired by the Israeli military into Gaza have been responsible for the death of 108 Palestinians, of which 15 where women or children, and the injury of 468 Palestinians, of which 143 where women or children. The methods by which these causalities were inflicted by Israeli projectiles breaks down as follows: 57 percent, or 310, were caused by Israeli aircraft missile fire; 28 percent, or 150, where from Israeli live ammunition; 11 percent, or 59, were from Israeli tank shells; while another 3 percent, or 18, were from Israeli mortar fire.

Through September 2012, Israeli weaponry caused 55 Palestinian deaths and 257 injuries. Among these 312 casualties, 61, or roughly 20 percent, were children and 28 were female. 209 of these casualties came as a result of Israeli Air Force missiles, 69 from live ammunition fire, and 18 from tank shells. It is important to note that these figures do not represent a totality of Israeli projectiles fired into Gaza but rather only Israeli projectiles fired into Gaza which cause casualties. The total number of Israeli projectiles fired into Gaza is bound to be significantly larger.

For context, consider this: more Palestinians were killed in Gaza yesterday than Israelis have been killed by projectile fire from Gaza in the past three years.

But the Israelis are also keeping another issue quiet. If you follow the dynamics of fire you will learn two things. First, the vast majority of projectiles from Gaza result in no injuries or deaths. Second, most of them are fired during "flare ups" which are initiated, more often than not, by Israeli strikes which cause significant casualties. Hamas has in the past worked to clamp down on factions firing projectiles, like Islamic Jihad and others. But when Israeli strikes target these organizations and kill and injure Palestinians in Gaza, it ignites responses that lead to flare ups.

In short, what this means is that if it chose to modify its strategy, Israel could have likely dropped the number of projectiles it saw coming from Gaza significantly. Israel could coordinate with Hamas through third parties like the Egyptians; positive things like truces and prisoner exchanges have happened in the past. But the strategy Israel chose was not one of restraint or diplomacy.

The problem Gaza presents for Israel is that it won't go away—though Israel would love it if it would. It is a constant reminder of the depopulation of Palestine in 1948, the folly of the 1967 occupation, and the many massacres which have happened since them. It also places the Israelis in an uncomfortable position because it presents a problem (in the form of projectiles) which cannot be solved by force.

Israel does not like to admit it doesn't have the military might to accomplish something. But when it comes to relations with Palestinians, and with Gaza in particular, there is no military solution.

Israel has tried assassinating Palestinian leaders for decades but the resistance persists. Israel launched a devastating and brutal war on Gaza from 2008 to 2009 killing 1,400 people, mostly civilians, but the resistance persists.

Despite the useful points in these accounts, they still recognise the existence of "Israel" as a genuine state despite the completely artificial nature of its existence from the very beginning.

The "occupation" is deemed to be war occupation of the invaded lands of 1967 while the ethnically cleansed and massacre terrorised Zionist seizures of land in post-war Palestine are accepted. Only the last piece, quoted from the "Daily Beast", ventures close to raising the 1945-48 land dispossessions which are the very heart of the Palestinian question. The EPSR has explained before:

Far worse than the problem of lumpen anti-Semitism from small racist parties is the scandal of the international Zionist lobby trying to brainwash the world into preventing the origins of the Palestine catastrophe from ever being discussed.

...The aim is simple: Be as critical, controversial, or challenging as anyone could wish about any past or present deeds in the Arab-Jew conflict; but NEVER allow the 1947 implantation of the so-called state of "Israel" onto the land of the Palestinian nation EVER to be re-examined or even discussed.

This powerful and hugely well-connected Zionist lobby within the ranks of Western monopoly capitalist ruling circles has even managed to con the duffer archbishops of Canterbury and Westminster into declaring that it is "prohibited anti-Semitism and immoral" to even start talking about how "Israel" got there in the first place in a post-1945 act of deliberate Western colonial tyranny to genocidally usurp the country of the Palestinian people to make a "homeland for the Jews".

The sickest and most destructive trick of all by the Zionist lobby is to keep on disingenuously asking: "Well, should not the Jews have their own country?"; — knowingly falsely implying that this is what the argument over the origins of "Israel" is all about, plus the further conversation-stopping sneering implication that it could only be anti-Semitism to doubt that the answer must be "yes".

But that is NOT the question, — as the entire Zionist lobby is well aware.

The real question is about WHY and especially HOW did this armed colonial seizure take place post-1945 of the land of Palestine by Jews of the Western imperialist countries????

The totally abstract question of "Should the Jews not have a homeland at all?" is a consciously cynical TOTAL DIVERSION, — — provocatively thrown in purely in order to excite "anti-Semitism" hysteria.

Of course they should; but then so should the Basques, and the Kurds, and the Irish, and the Kashmiris, and the Chechens, and the Australian Aborigines, and the North American Indians, etc., etc., etc., many of them more ancient, or more numerous, or with as rich a historical legacy, or with an even more precise or more just claim to a particular territory than the Jews have to Palestine, not least of all the Palestinians of course.

Many have literature or culture far MORE notable than the Bible for their claim, but the Bible and its tacked-on Christian mythology was the religion adopted by Western feudalism, capitalism, and then imperialism in its long march to world domination, and therefore Jewish folklore has always received extra attention in the West's ruling circles.

Thus the rhetorical "abstract right" question is not only an obviously diversionary attempt to provoke an "anti-Semitism?" eyebrow raising, but thereby also manages to actually avoid any evaluation of which of the very many peoples on Earth, who are denied a state, really are the most deserving of nationhood , — bearing in mind all of the colossal upheaval, conflict, and warmongering any such re-running of history to achieve a more "just" outcome inevitably always entails.

Leaving aside that massive minefield of whether for example the Vikings, Celts, or AngloSaxons deserve England back (all losing their homeland to war or upheaval MORE RECENTLY than the Jews lost their place among all the Semitic tribes around Palestine); or whether the Iroquois and Sioux nations should get North America back, or the Aborigines Australia, etc, etc, etc; or whether even more ANCIENT claims than the one the Jews promote, such as the Basque or Cyprus questions, should be the issues demanding world sympathy more, — — there is even then little but obnoxious special pleading and rotten string-pulling behind the Zionist neo-colonial propaganda.

Even the Biblical history claim amounts at best to just a tiny part of Palestine compared to the Philistines (Palestinians) who were there first until overrun by the Israelites and many other Semitic tribes.

And unlike the Jews who were subsequently scattered, absorbed, and lost their language (Hebrew) like most of these ancient Semitic nations, — the modern Palestinians have been in Palestine for the last 1,500 years, and speaking Arabic, the dominant Semitic language.

Palestine has overwhelmingly been the country of the Arabic-speaking Palestinian nation for twice as long as England has been the country of the English-speaking nation, finally established only 700 years ago.

Hebrews stopped using Hebrew, (which effectively died as a language), and they became by-and-by Spanish Jews, Greek Jews, Italian Jews, French Jews, German Jews, English Jews, etc, etc, all mostly growing up speaking the local language as their first native language.

Hebrew has now been only artificially revived again as a deliberate political act to try to lend some legitimacy to this post-1945 colonial conquest by these Western imperialist Jews.

But despite all this, the Jewish colonisers (especially the American ones, the largest and most aggressive contingent of the landgrabbing "settlers"), relentlessly pound out "their God-given right to all this land", etc, etc, — bristling murderously with a NAZI "master-race" fanaticism.

It is all a complete joke and a complete con. (EPSR 1221 24-02-04)

As well as bourgeois liberal commentaries the fake-"left" of all shades continues to go along with accepting the alleged "authority" of the United Nations "gift" of Palestine to the Jewish bourgeois occupation, thereby failing to understand the eternally unsolvable nature of this permanent spear into the Middle Eastern body, which can only fester and provoke total hatred and resistance.

And declaring Palestinian resistance OK but "attacks on civilians 'not allowed'" is a capitulation to Western pretences of "fairness and legality" on a par with the universal "condemning of terror" which followed the 9/11 attacks, including all the fake-"lefts (and tragically enough the revisionist leadership of heroically revolutionary Cuba).

Attacks including the most horrifying and tragic suicide bombings, will continue for as long as the monstrous oppression continues to generate the hatred and hostility of the savaged masses, and no amount of setting "rules" and "boundaries" for the resistance will do anything to stop them fighting back in anyway they can.

To moralise in this way simply plays into the hands of imperialist hypocrisy and bogus "righteousness" and the lying propaganda with which it wraps its brutality.

The third quoted piece declares that there is no military solution for the Zionists and in expressing the defiance of the Arab world it is correct.

But that is precisely the logic of the Zionists' always surrounded position driving them constantly to the most depraved conclusion of all, in a dreadful ironic reversal of history, the genocidal eradication of the Palestinians, a "final solution" to equal the depravity of the German camps.

Too exaggerated?? But this is what leading Zionist Gilad Sharon (son of the war-criminal Ariel Sharon who masterminded the 1982 Shabra and Shatila Palestinian camp massacres in Lebanon) was writing three days into the latest onslaught:

We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn't stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren't surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too.

There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing. Then they'd really call for a ceasefire.

A bizarre maverick? But 70% of the Israeli Jewish occupiers of Palestine are in favour of the massed tanks invasion (just as the petty bourgeoisie supported Hitler in Germany) and all the war-crime destruction going with it, which in the previous "Cast Lead" barbarism 4 years ago included use of deadly and internationally illegal bone-burning white phosphorus, multi-"flêche" metal arrow anti-personnel bombs and other grotesque maiming and killing weaponry, against small children, women and civilians as well as the dogged but inadequately armed resistance fighters.

What price now the complacent middle-class academic "leftism" which smugly and woodenly declares "you must not use the term 'fascist' to describe the Zionists (or imperialism) because fascism is a special case, and we have not got there yet – that is something different."

This posturing pretend "revolutionism" and its "anti-Nazi" and "anti-racist" activism, leaves the working class completely disarmed, fed with the notion that somehow as long as they "keep the Nazis off the streets" then the rest of capitalism is less threatening, and everything will be more or less OK, requiring just a touch of "left pressure" for better conditions – reformist business as usual in other words.

It is a million miles from Marxist revolutionary understanding, that capitalism is the cause and source of all the vicious degeneracy in the world and that only the total ending of capitalism by the revolutionary destruction of its entire class-rule social structure, and the re-building of the world as a cooperative planned socialist economy and rational and philosophically coherent people, can ever change things.

That reality daily confronts the Gazans and actually, the other tens of millions in the Third World cut down in over 400 non-stop wars, interventions and massacres throughout it since 1945, including the Mau-Mau Kenyans roasted alive by post-WW2 "anti-Nazi" upright British officialdom, and not least the Vietnamese, who alone suffered more destruction and high explosive bombing that the entire Second World War put together on all sides.

Whether or not the bourgeoisie turns to particular forms of racist and aggressive reaction in its crisis – always kept in the background and mobilised in crisis as the Golden Dawn has been fostered in Greece or Le Pen in France – is missing the point.

It is capitalism which can, and does carry out the most grotesque violence and brutality of all, often without any such theatricalities as shiny jackboots and deaths head symbolism (see "civilised" British colonialism's record from wiping out the Native Americans, Aborigines, Maoris and Zulu's, running India's Andaman island prison camps with medical "experiments" on prisoners long before Hitler had left the First World War trenches, to the modern day prisoner beatings and killings in Iraq etc).

And it is capitalism which creates and sustains any formalised "Nazism" anyway, financing Hitlerism for example.

This revisionist pap which divides imperialism into "fascist and non-fascist" – aggressive and non-aggressive – Nazi and non-Nazi 'phases' – helped sustain the implantation of the Zionist excrescence in the first place with the revisionist USSR led by a still-in-control Joseph Stalin himself, not only recognising the new Israel but even offering arms to the Zionists.

To this day, like much else, this disastrous error is brushed under the carpet, or denied by the museum-Stalinists throughout the world, part of the overwhelming cover-up of all the multiple mistakes and philosophical rot of Stalinism which had already penetrated deeply into Moscow's leadership by the post-war period, and which would finally eat its way through all grasp and understanding completely, leading to the idiot capitulation to the West and its "market forces" by Gorbachevism in 1989, liquidating the workers state itself.

The tragic end result has been the temporary collapse of all faith in "communism" generally which can only be recovered by the determined rebuilding of the struggle for Leninist scientific understanding via the greatest and most open polemics, which is always evaded and slid around by all the fake lefts as well as the long philistine anti-communist anti-theory traditions of the "great Labour movement of ours" official trade union and Labourite reformists.

The immediate expression of this sly and evasive opportunism surfaces immediately from the Lalkarite/Proletarian Stalinist remnants for example, its pathetic "protest" mentality ineffectually calling for "mass non-cooperation with the genocide in Palestine".

Right. That will sort it out then.

No need to pay any heed to Lenin and his scathing contempt for all such moralising and pacifism, which never achieved anything and cannot do so for as long as capitalism remains in control of all society, the information (or rather disinformation) and propaganda it feeds out at all levels steering the path inexorable towards war, mobilising and stampeding the masses with hoodwinking lies, chauvinism (anti-EU campaigns), scapegoating (anti-Muslim hate propaganda now non-stop), and filthy slanders, enlisting the great masses in the inevitable war drives that the crisis is bringing.

No need to help clarify the gigantic contradictions besetting the entire world and bringing the world to an epochal change because of the brick-wall the production for private profit system has hit, (which can only drive the world into desperate economic disaster month by month).

Most particularly no need to trace back, analyse and understand the difficulties and errors of the first titanic experiments in socialist construction which whilst demonstrating the historic step forwards of running a completely new kind of society, without owners and bosses, capable of unheard of new achievements in arts, sciences, culture, education and society, (despite non-stop sabotage, disruption and subversion), still got into a tangle of retreats and errors.

No need to sort out the difficulties now caused for the masses everywhere because of the gloating pretence of capitalism that "communism doesn't work", become the last resort of its ideologues as it daily grows clearer that it is capitalism that not only doesn't work but is only just starting its slide into utter world war disaster; that Marx's much derided "catastrophist" understanding was totally correct (as even the BBC has conceded); and that socialism, even in such isolated and besieged, or revisionist compromised places as China, Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam certainly does work (in fact it was still working well enough too in the Soviet Union which continued its steady if not very inspiring progress and did not "collapse" but self-liquidated because all faith and grasp in Leninist understanding and revolutionary theory had long disappeared).

But for the revisionists no need to get any of this clear. Just ignore or deny the 1989 liquidation, and pretend it has nothing to do with Stalin's huge errors, because revisionism is not really interested in rebuilding revolutionary understanding, just more pacifism and "left" reformism, continuing all the illusions in "democracy" that have disarmed generations of struggle post-WW2.

This exhortation on workers to "Stop the War" is the shallowest of posturing garbage which does not begin to warn the working class of the scale of the crisis onslaughts facing them, nor of the gigantic struggles that unavoidable face them.

It implies that war can be stopped – "containing" imperialist aggression.

"If we all stopped making and moving the weapons then capitalism would not have the means to make war" this pie-in-the-sky lightmindedness says explicitly, which is doubly misleading, suggesting something that cannot be done - stopping the warmongering which is intrinsically and inseparably bound into capitalist society and its crisis – and implying that such an ambition would be sufficient in itself anyway.

So if war is "stopped" – and Lenin's conclusion should be repeated, it is unstoppable, – what then?

The revisionist implication is "a step forwards" is made, a change to the better in the world presumably, allowing...what?

Peaceful pressure to continue the path to socialism must be the implication, with capitalism's worst aspect bound hand and foot (and was the conclusion directly emerging from Stalin's 1952 revised analysis that imperialism was no longer able to expand and would be gradually overtaken and hemmed in by the growth of the socialist states).

But that was reformism, not revolution, and history has given its verdict – that philosophy not only abandoned revolutionary struggle but eventually gave up all the unprecedented and gigantic achievements of the 70 years of Soviet socialist progress – which had already shown the world that socialist society and production can go far, far beyond anything capitalism could fantasise about in its most excessive Hollywood dreams.

It is time all the fake-"left" groups abandoned the lying nonsense that they have anything to do with revolution and admit is all a play-acting pretence driven by petty bourgeois vanity and ambition (and usually degenerating into anti-communism soon enough, as the Trotskyists did long ago).

In the real world it takes painful and dogged battling to win through to the revolutionary understanding, which comes as imperialism is pushed back and defeated, and no-one demonstrates that better than the Palestinians who have slowly fought their way to greater and greater militancy as the decades have passed, growing even deeper now as even some bourgeois press pieces were pointing out:

It might not look like victory. Dozens of dead children among nearly 100 civilians killed. Hundreds more injured, some condemned to a life of struggle by terrible wounds. Houses flattened. Bridges, offices and stadiums blown to bits.

But as life returns to what passes for normality on the streets of Gaza – once again clogged with people and traffic even as the Israeli drones continue to buzz overhead – many Palestinians regard the ceasefire that put an end to more than a week of incessant bombing and shelling as an Israeli surrender.

The victor, they say, is Hamas, which faced down Israeli aggression and has emerged from years of diplomatic isolation to be embraced, if tentatively, by the leaders of a new Arab world. The lesson learned is that standing up to Israel delivers results that years of concessions under US peace plans and drawn-out negotiations have not.

Western leaders from Barack Obama to David Cameron rushed to blame the bloody upsurge of violence in Gaza on Hamas and other armed groups firing hundreds of rockets into Israel, but Palestinians have a different take. The common view in Gaza is that the conflict was a war of choice by the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu.

Mkhaimer Abusader, a political scientist at Gaza's Azhar University, said there was a widespread belief that Netanyahu ordered the killing last week of the Hamas military chief, Ahmed al-Jaabari, to provoke a confrontation and launch a military operation in order to make himself look strong in the runup to elections in January.

Opinion polls showed many Israelis favoured an invasion of Gaza to follow the air and sea bombardment. That Netanyahu did not order one is regarded in Gaza as evidence he was deterred by the scale of resistance by Hamas and other armed groups, even in the face of much larger Israeli retaliation, which surprised Palestinians.

"Palestinians were very happy to see rockets landing on Tel Aviv and Jerusalem for the first time. It may be crazy but there's admiration that Hamas was able to manufacture long-range missiles and deter Israel," said Abusader. "Palestinians believe the Israelis were begging for a ceasefire. The conclusion Palestinians reach is that the way to get results is resistance, is to make the occupation costly to Israel."

The ceasefire deal may not have got Hamas all that it wanted, but there is a commitment by Israel to ease the blockade that was imposed to break the Islamist group, and to end the kind of "targeted assassinations" that killed Jaabari. There is plenty of scepticism that Israel will deliver or that the truce will last, but the crisis has shifted the diplomatic ground by breaking the international isolation of Hamas imposed by the US and Europeans.

Change was in the offing, driven by the Arab spring, not least in Egypt, where there is a new government more openly critical of Israel than its US-allied predecessor. Israel has alienated its only real friend in the region, Turkey, over the Israeli military's attack on the Mavi Marmara flotilla to Gaza in which eight Turks were killed.

It was no coincidence that the first stream of regional political heavyweights to visit Gaza in more than a decade was led by the Egyptian prime minister and the Tunisian and Turkish foreign ministers. Scenes of the Turkish foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, shedding tears in a Gaza City hospital over dead children, and saying he stood in "solidarity with the Palestinian nation's suffering", were read in Gaza as proof they were no longer alone.

Talal Okal was for many years among the leaders in Gaza of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestinian, a secular leftwing organisation decidedly different from Hamas. "I am anti-Hamas. I am democratic. I am secular. But I admire what Hamas has done because they showed they were working underground secretly to challenge the Israelis," he said. "Now we are facing Israel from a better position. We don't have a balance of power with Israel. But now, because of Hamas, we have influence in the region and that makes a better situation."

But Okal said Hamas was still divided over how to take advantage. Its external leadership, led by Khaled Meshaal, has embraced the Arab spring as an opportunity for Gaza to declare autonomy. Hamas leaders in Gaza, led by the prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, remain allied with Iran and Syria, with an eye on extending power to the West Bank.

Okal said that from his conversations with Haniyeh he thought there was growing confidence in Hamas that it could widen its support among Palestinians. "I used to think Hamas is going to have a state in the Gaza Strip. But now I think Hamas is headed toward reuniting the Palestinian establishment pushed by the hope it will be in control [of Gaza and the West Bank]," he said.

That may be wishful thinking given the growing disillusionment among many people in Gaza with Hamas before the latest fighting. "Before the war erupted, Hamas was under a lot of criticism," said Abusader. "Hamas was accused of corruption, smuggling, mismanaging revenues, issues of land management. That's why Hamas had a government reshuffle a month ago."

But that criticism has been silenced for now, and there was open support in the West Bank – where the Palestinian leadership there is often seen as weak for its emphasis on negotiation – for Hamas for fighting back against Israel.

Hamas's political gains are at the expense of Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority and leader of Hamas's rival, Fatah. He was all but irrelevant in the recent crisis, with Hamas centre stage in the Arab world. On Thursday, Abbas was forced into a humiliating call to Haniyeh to congratulate him on his "victory".

The past week has been a severe blow to Abbas's strategy to bring about a Palestinian state. He has renounced violence and committed to a negotiated peace with Israel. He has followed the obstacle course laid out by the US and Europeans, and supervised by Tony Blair, of "institution-building" and security co-operation with Israel, with the promise of a Palestinian state dangling at some undefined point in the future.

The result, as many Palestinians see it, is that Netanyahu has ignored and humiliated Abbas and continued Israel's expansionism with yet more Jewish settlement construction and measures to reaffirm Israeli control over all of Jerusalem and great chunks of the West Bank.

The lesson many in the occupied territories have taken away from the past week is that standing up to Israel brings results.

*************************

Abu Nizar has never met an Israeli who wasn't carrying a gun. Unlike his father, who travelled across the Jewish state to work different jobs, the 24-year-old has not spent a day outside the Gaza Strip, other than a brief sortie into Egypt. He is not interested in knowing Israelis. He just wants them to go away. And he is willing to fight them to make that happen.

"Myself, I don't want to meet them. They are all occupiers, an enemy," said Abu Nizar sitting among other fighters from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade in Beach Camp, a Gaza refugee camp. He said his unit had fired dozens of rockets from Gaza in the recent battles.

One of the results of years of conflict is a generation of young adults on both sides who rarely meet each other except at the point of a weapon. The humanising experiences of middle-aged Palestinians and Israelis who had contact in everyday situations – such as Palestinians working in Israel who often learned Hebrew, or Israelis taking cars for repair by Palestinian mechanics or shopping in Arab markets – faded away with two intifadas and an ever more brutal occupation.

Abu Nizar and others of his generation have not only never met an Israeli except in confrontation but grew up with the trauma of living in neighbourhoods that felt like perpetual combat zones. They in turn are raising a generation of sons and daughters enduring life under periodic barrages of rockets and shells, and perpetual siege, and developing their own perceptions of Israelis as a dehumanised enemy. "We didn't have a normal childhood at all. The Israelis created a whole generation that hates them. They are idiots. This last war has doubled, trebled the hatred from kids today," said Abu Nizar, a small, slight man with a neatly trimmed beard. "My three-year-old is always asking me: why is this? What's going on? Why are there rocket blasts? I tried to tell him what's happening and now he hates Israel."

Another fighter, Abu Jindal, speaks up. "The Israelis have always killed children in Gaza. They came here to kill children during this [latest] war. Our children see it," he said.

Israelis often tell themselves that Palestinian children are brought up on their mother's knees to despise Jews, and as they grow up the hatred is piled on in schools and mosques. Some of that is true some of the time, but it is also a convenience for Israelis to absolve themselves of responsibility for why each generation of Palestinians seems more militant and more violent.

The generation of young adults in Gaza that, like Abu Nizar, has taken up arms was also shaped by a childhood marked by fear of Israeli guns, rockets and tanks enforcing occupation and taking territory for Jewish settlements. They saw people their own age killed and maimed by indiscriminate shooting. And they watched their parents helpless in the face of the humiliations of occupation.

As happens in so many conflicts, Palestinian children were raised to honour the warriors and the dead. They worshipped "martyrs", whether they were suicide bombers who killed Israelis on buses in Jerusalem, armed men fighting Israeli soldiers, or the children shot at their school desks in Gaza by Israeli gunfire.

In 2004, Usama Freona, a psychologist at the UN clinic in Rafah, described to me the impact of perpetual conflict on children. At the time, Rafah and neighbouring Khan Yunis were among the most dangerous places in the Gaza Strip because of the adjacent Jewish settlements.

The Israeli army declared the whole area a war zone which, it said, justified firing weapons into residential areas. Barely a night passed without the machine gun fire that shredded homes and forced families to sleep in an inner room behind bricked-up windows or a second wall.

"The levels of violence children are exposed to is horrific," Freona said. "We work in a lot of schools to treat the children. In the one next to Kfar Darom [a Jewish settlement in Gaza at the time], all the children are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Most of them were crying and shaking when they were speaking about their experiences."

Three years ago Gaza's leading child psychiatrist, Dr Abdel Aziz Mousa Thabet, said in an interview with the Guardian that the traumatising effect of violence on children was shaping a generation itself ready to use violence. He said a 20-year study showed that about 65% of young people in the Gaza Strip suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, with a profound effect on enclave's future.

"They become fighters. I warned about this 15 years ago, that in 15 years these traumatised children will be more aggressive, they will want to fight, there will be more violence in the community," he said. "So now we will have another generation of more aggressive behaviour. They will go to more extremes because they have no future. This is a problem. I've been warning people of this but nobody was listening. It's a cycle of aggression."

Abu Nizar's experience fits the pattern. In the 2000s, Israeli attacks on Beach Camp and Jabaliya were routine. A cousin was killed. So were other people he knew. But even before that, he had encounters with Israeli troops.

"I used to see the soldiers when I was small," he said. "I used to throw stones at them. I remember the occupation. We were the kids of the stones. I was beaten. There was a curfew. I was caught and beaten up. I was seven years old," he said.

Abu Nizar watched how Israeli troops treated the men in his family: "They arrested my father. They arrested my uncles. The Israelis would come at night. They called all the men into the street and put them in an open area and beat them. They humiliated them. This created the hatred of the occupation."

The humiliation of Palestinian men in raids and at checkpoints, sometimes by young female Israeli soldiers, could have a powerful effect on boys and routinely continues to this day in the West Bank. Freona described how boys lost respect for their fathers because they were helpless to stand up to the soldiers. Instead children would look to the armed men with admiration because they represented resistance.

Abu Nizar picked up a gun for the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, in 2005, aged 17.

At the time, Gaza was still partially occupied and under regular Israeli bombardment and ground attack. That first year he lost schoolfriends to an Israeli attack. "There was an incursion in Jabaliya. My friends were killed by an Apache helicopter," he said.

Now Abu Nizar is quite frank that he regards himself, and his role as fighter, as a product of a childhood in a combat zone. It is how he comes to be at ease with the fact that the rockets he fires into Israel may be causing civilian casualties there, such as the three who died, along with a soldier, from rockets fired from Gaza in recent round of fighting. For him there is no such thing as a civilian on the other side.

"The [Israeli] civilian is a soldier. The men who employed my father serves in the army. They come here to kill and then go back home, no problem," he said. "Anyway, we know how Israelis regard us. They want to kill us all."

...Abu Nizar has two boys, aged three and 11 months. How would he feel if, in a few years, his eldest son put his life on the line to confront Israel?

The stock answer from many Palestinians to that question is that they would gladly have their children die for the cause...But Abu Nizar hesitates.

"When I was young, it was just stones back then. Now it's rockets," he said. "When he grows up he will take his own decision. I don't know if it will be the same. The end of Israel is getting closer."

Not just of "IsraeL" but all of capitalism's oppressive, aggressive world domineering as the entire Third World learns to struggle deeper and harder.

The defeats which it is inflicting on capitalism are crucial blows in helping develop the revolutionary understanding that will ultimately emerge for the complete overturn of the capitalist system everywhere.

The world was supposed to have been pacified and constrained by the last decade of warmongering aggression, restoring eroded US imperialist world authority, and setting an agenda for a "New American Century" of continued world exploitation, with compliant stooge regimes reestablished everywhere to keep the peace (meaning suppressing rebellion and revolt by whatever bloody and barbarous means deemed necessary) while maintaining a façade of "democratisation" and the rule of law.

Any challenges to the US top-dog status arising from the oncoming crisis would be intimidated and held back by displays of ruthless military power.

But the whole strategy is a disastrous mess.

Supposedly pacified Iraq is a burnt-out disaster of obliterated infrastructure and blighted lives, with constant renewals of bombings and chaos.

And the savagery and blitzing on Afghanistan has gone on non-stop now for ten years, the longest "war" ever fought by US imperialism and draining tens of billions of dollars every year, and all for nothing as even bourgeois circles are voicing both inside and outside America such as the internationally well-connected senior British establishment figure Paddy Ashdown. The recriminations and accusations are flying in all directions:

British forces must withdraw from Afghanistan as quickly as possible before any more troops are killed, former Liberal Democrat leader Lord Ashdown has said.

In a damning assessment of the campaign in Afghanistan, he said allied forces had failed to build a sustainable state and establish a government which was untainted by corruption.

Prime minister David Cameron has said British forces will have been withdrawn from Afghanistan by the end of 2014 but writing in the Times, Ashdown said it should be sooner.

He said: "We cannot pretend there is any more to do in Afghanistan. The urgent priority is to get out. It is not worth wasting one more life in Afghanistan. All that we can achieve has now been achieved. All that we might have achieved if we had done things differently, has been lost.

"The only rational policy now is to leave quickly, in good order and in the company of our allies. This is the only cause for which further lives should be risked."

Ashdown said the failure to establish a functioning state was not the fault of British troops but of the international community to work with the country's leaders and neighbours.

"The international community in Afghanistan needed to speak with a single voice in pursuit of a single plan with clear priorities," he said. "Instead we have been divided, cacophonous, chaotic. We should have concentrated on winning in Afghanistan where it mattered, instead of distracting ourselves with adventures in Iraq.>

"We should have engaged Afghanistan's neighbours, instead of going out of our way to make them enemies. Our early military strategy should have been about protecting the people instead of wasting our time chasing the enemy.

"We should have made fighting corruption our first priority instead of becoming the tainted partners of a corrupt government whose writ, along with ours, has progressively collapsed as that of the Taleban in the south has progressively widened."

His comments come amid an increasing number of green-on-blue attacks where members of the Afghan National Army have turned on allied troops.

Pakistan has increasingly been split apart too, its imperialist-cooperating military elements almost in civil war with the anti-Western Taleban sympathy which has been stirred up by daily drone terror and assassination illegally run in to Pakistan from across the border by the now not so secret CIA operations.

These accumulating defeats for imperialism are the crucial element, combined with the debilitating, demoralising and completely unsolvable economic crisis which are undermining the grip of the capitalist ruling class across the whole planet and opening up greater and greater opportunity for the revolutionary movements worldwide to develop and complete the struggle to finally overturn the monopoly capitalist order.

But the crucial ingredient in those struggles is the development of a conscious understanding of the balance of class forces and the scientific understanding of the crisis its causes and its solution by means of the dictatorship of the working class to firmly guide the transition of society into the self-disciplined communist rationality that must prevail.

A first question is to disentangle the deliberate confusion of the bogus revolts stirred up in Libya and Syria, and the confusion of "fight for democracy" liberalism in Egypt when what is needed is the struggle for socialism and the overturn of all capitalism.

Leninism is the vital need. The struggle to understand and build the Leninist party needs to proceed urgently.

Don Hoskins

 

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"Gay rights", feminist, and black nationalist single-issue reformism last line of defence for bourgeois "democracy", Obama's Nazi kill lists and the degenerate British ruling class

Lack of space means that detailed analysis of the way that single issue reformism has been used by both collapsing American and British imperialist "democracy" frauds in the recent period must be held over.

But the overwhelming importance of the women's vote, black votes and most of all the newly mobilised "gay marriage" votes, in holding up the otherwise collapsing Obama mandate in the presidential election in the US (and the presidential "democracy" fraud itself), makes the issue a crucial one, demonstrating yet again how fake-"left" "politically-correct" single-issue reformism is providing a last ditch defence for capitalism, even as its society falls apart into total Nazi warmongering chaos (led by Obama) driven by the brick-wall economic catastrophe as in the latest Zionist fascist depravities against Gaza.

Equally the use of the "gay is normal" card by David Cameron to bat away questions and head off further investigation and questioning in the North Wales boys home abuse and homosexual paedophile abuse cases (involving, specifically, abuse of boys and male teenagers - as in many other cases including the Catholic church children's homes scandal in Ireland, the Boy Scouts of America, the American football coach case, the Glasgow paedophile ring and many more) has effectively shut down a series of major bourgeois journalistic investigations, underlining how the PC "gay rights" agenda is not only not remotely threatening to the ruling class but even is used to directly defend it from valid and legitimate questions about cover-ups and depravity reaching all the way to the top of the Tory party and the capitalist establishment as already shown by admissions about various named but now deceased individuals.

Perfectly valid queries and journalist probes into the three decades old, past shut down investigations have disappeared from the TV and press in a welter of absurdly self-lacerating mea culpas which simply underline further the complete craven obsequiousness of the allegedly "impartial" management of the BBC (capitalism's reactionary state broadcaster in reality) to the ruling class and its behind the scenes string-pulling (and the ruling class agenda that ultimately controls all the press) and the myth of a "free speech and free press" within capitalism.

The moves expose the fake-"left" circus for the opportunist fakes that they have always been, and the foul anticommunism of their jibes of "homophobia" against Leninist science, which has long raised a challenge to the notion that "gay is no different to heterosexual", in order to deflect attention from their total capitulation to bourgeois ideology. More detailed investigation will follow.

 

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World Revolutionary Socialist Review

(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).

Statement by Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Cuba, during the general debate of the 67th session of the United Nations General Assembly. New York, October 1, 2012.

Mr. President: Never before had Latin America and the Caribbean expressed themselves with such strength and unity as they did at the so-called Summit of the Americas, which took place last April in Cartagena de Indias, and which once again excluded Cuba as a result of a U.S. imposition.

Argentine sovereignty over the Malvinas Islands, which our country fervently supports, and the lifting of the blockade of Cuba, were the focus of a declaration that showed that the American homeland envisaged by Bolivar - Our America, as envisaged by Martí - had entered a new epoch, the century of its final independence.

A few months previously, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (celac) had been founded, precisely in Caracas. "No other institutional event in our hemisphere in the course of the last century has been as transcendental," wrote the leader of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro Ruz.

We know that celac is still to express itself in facts, so that our peoples can "march in close ranks, like silver in the roots of the Andes." But Latin America and the Caribbean have definitely changed, and they are bent on making a greater contribution to the "equilibrium of the world."

However, the threats, dangers and obstacles should not be underestimated.

The United States policy toward our region, whether under Democrat or Republican governments, is essentially the same. The promises made by the current President back in 2009 were not fulfilled. The voracity for our wealth; the imposition of models, cultures, ideas and interference in our internal affairs have never ceased.

Even though there is talk about "smart power," and new and fabulous technologies are being used, a focus on security and military deployment prevail, rather than democratic and mutually beneficial relations among equal and sovereign states.

In the circumstances of a global economic crisis, the depletion of resources and a new distribution of the world, NATO continues to perceive our region as a Euro-Atlantic periphery, in which it is possible to intervene to secure interests, even if they are illegitimate.

The imminent elections in the sister nation of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela will be decisive for the common destiny of our region. We would like to express to the Venezuelan people and its leader, President Chávez, our full solidarity in the face of destabilizing attempts looming on the horizon.

The governing powers in the United States would be committing a very serious error of unpredictable consequences if they should attempt to reverse by force the social achievements attained by our peoples.

In a discreet and modest way, Cuba has always contributed to the achievement of peace in Colombia; it gave its total support to the confidential exploratory talks that were held during the year in Havana, and it will continue to do so as a guarantor and venue of the upcoming process of dialogue between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

"Our America" will remain mutilated as long as Puerto Rico, a Latin American and Caribbean nation, is not independent, a cause that we fully support.

Mr. President: Today's world is in no way similar to the one envisaged by those who drafted the United Nations Charter, over the ashes left by the Second World War, when they determined to save our generations from the scourge of war, protect the fundamental rights of human beings and equality among all nations, large and small; and to promote justice, dignity and social progress.

Right now, the overthrow of governments through the use of force and violence is being blatantly encouraged; "regime change" is being imposed from Washington and other nato member countries' capitals, and wars of conquest are being waged for the control of natural resources and strategically important areas.

The United States and certain European governments have decided to overthrow the Syrian government, for which they have armed, financed and trained opposition groups. They have even resorted to the use of mercenaries.

Due mainly to firm opposition on the part of Russia and China, it has been impossible to manipulate the Security Council in order to impose the interventionist formula applied in recent warmongering adventures.

Cuba reaffirms the right of the Syrian people to the full exercise of their self-determination and sovereignty without any interference or foreign intervention of any kind. For that, violence, massacres and the acts of terrorism which have taken a high toll in innocent lives must cease. The trafficking of arms and money to help the insurgent groups as well as the shameful manipulation of reality by the media must also come to an end.

It is the duty of the General Assembly to make use of its faculties to promote a peaceful solution to the current situation which is tearing apart that Arab country and prevent a foreign military aggression which will have serious consequences for the entire Middle East region.

The General Assembly should act with resolve and recognize the State of Palestine as a full member of the United Nations Organization, with the boundaries established prior to 1967 and with East Jerusalem as its capital; and it should do so now, with or without the consent of the Security Council; with or without the United States veto; with or without new peace negotiations.

Mr. President:

The global economic crisis, currently reflected with particular harshness in Europe, reflects the inability of governments and institutions to solve a problem which calls for a reconsideration of the basics of the current international economic relations system, which is only useful for plundering underdeveloped countries.

The severe consequences of the crisis in the developed world and the failed policies adopted so far in the attempt to stop it continue to be borne by workers, increasing numbers of the unemployed, immigrants and the poor, whose protest movements are being brutally repressed.

Predictions of a new spiral in the price of foodstuffs as a result of the drought affecting much of Northern America threaten to make the situation of global food insecurity even more critical.

Environmental destruction has also increased; loss of biodiversity and the natural balance of ecosystems is accelerating, while the intensification of irrational production and consumer patterns, the marginalization of more than a half of the world's population and the absence of global measures to halt the advance of climate change presuppose an ever-growing risk to the physical integrity of entire nations, particularly the small island states.

In the face of these colossal challenges, we could ask ourselves if anything could ever justify the fact that, 20 years after the end of the so-called Cold War, the military budget has almost doubled to reach the astronomical figure of $1.74trillion. President Raúl Castro Ruz posed the following questions: "Against which enemies will these weapons be used? Will they be used to eliminate the masses of poor people who can no longer cope with their poverty, or to halt the unstoppable migration of survivors?

Under these circumstances, it is urgent to save the United Nations Organization while subjecting it to profound reforms in order to place it at the service of all equally sovereign states, and remove it from the arbitrariness and double standards of a handful of industrialized and powerful countries.

International law and the purposes and principles of the UN Charter should be resolutely enforced; the key role of the General Assembly should be restored and a democratic, transparent and truly representative Security Council should be re-launched.

The Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement was successfully held in Tehran and reaffirmed the Movement's positions in defense of peace, independence and sovereign equality of states; justice; the right to development; sovereignty over natural resources; general and complete disarmament, particularly nuclear disarmament; and the right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy was reaffirmed. We have committed our full support to the presidency of the Movement.

Mr. President: On July 31 last, the U.S. Department of State once again included Cuba on a unilateral and arbitrary list of states sponsoring international terrorism.

The real purpose pursued by including Cuba on that spurious list is to fabricate pretexts to increase the persecution of Cuba's financial transactions and justify the policy of blockade, which has caused invaluable human and economic damages to the value of one trillion dollars, estimated according to the current value of gold.

The United States does not have the slightest moral or political authority to judge Cuba.

It is known that, as a weapon in its anti-Cuba policy, the U.S. government has resorted to state terrorism, which has caused the death of 3,478 persons and maimed 2,099 of our compatriots. At the same time it is harboring dozens of terrorists, some of whom are living in freedom in that country, while maintaining the long-lasting and inhumane incarceration and cruel and arbitrary retention of five Cuban anti-terrorists in its territory.

Cuba strongly rejects the use of such a sensitive issue as terrorism to pursue political goals and calls upon the United States to cease its lies and end this shameful exercise, which is an outrage against the Cuban people and the international community and discredits the cause of the battle against terrorism.

We reiterate to the United States, approaching its presidential elections, our irrevocable vocation for peace and our interest in moving toward the normalization of relations through dialogue, on an equal footing and with absolute respect for our independence.

With absolute certainty, our people, come what may, "with all and for the well-being of all", will continue advancing down the path they have already chosen until we "conquer all justice."

Thank you very much.

Translation: Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs. •

 

 

 

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