Engraving of Lenin busy studying

Economic & 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 1448 16th July 2014

Yet another degenerate and barbaric slaughter of the disabled and children by Zionism will not save the Jewish occupation of Palestine but recruit tens of thousands more into the armed struggle in the Middle East which will eventually destroy the false “state” of “Israel” and all imperialism beyond it. The painful battle to overcome confusion and sectarianism in the religious sectarian insurgencies in the Middle East – stimulated and generated by growing anti-imperialist discontent as the catastrophic capitalist crisis unravels, will be accelerated by this Nazism. Not an impossible “two state” humiliation but total overthrow of Zionism and all capitalist imperialism is the only possible outcome, the turmoil a leading part of world revolution. Egypt will return to this fight. Leninist clarity is the missing element.

The staggering defiance and willingness to fight back by the endlessly persecuted Gazan population against the latest Zionist blitzkrieg onslaught (against all the odds) is the real reason for the Western nation’s “call for restraint” as the latest Jewish-Nazi terror is imposed on this most oppressed and persecuted of all nations.

They fear the lessons being taught by this indomitable resistance will further inspire the millions already stirred into anti-imperialist resistance throughout the Middle East and further throughout the entire Third World as the world capitalist collapse continues towards total catastrophe.

They are increasingly demonstrating their hatred and discontent with the non-stop tyrannical exploitation imposed upon them.

World outrage is growing everywhere at the disgusting butchery of the latest onslaught, killing women, children and even bombing a disabled people’s homes – the lowest and most degenerate atrocities yet in 70 years of fascist violence, war crimes, high-tech state terror and non-stop persecution against the benighted people, kept in concentration camp conditions in a tiny enclave, besieged, starved and suffering slave level exploitation a the best of times and routinely “punished” in a manner that would have pleased Hitler himself.

The Zionist barbarities will further recruit even further tens of thousands into surging revolt in the Middle East, which for all its confusions and sectarian conflicts has one point of common focus, the Zionist enemy and its oppression of Palestine and, behind that, the imperialism which sustains it.

The degenerate “Israeli” Zionist attack will further consolidate this unity or expose the backwardness and limitations of the assorted leaderships and stimulate even deeper development of fighting consciousness; already Hamas has been joined in its resistance by attacks across the border from Lebanon, and Syria, where the forces like the Shia Hezbollah are placed, even though only recently the two have been on opposite sides in sectarian fighting over the Assad anti-imperialist regime.

Sorting out these differences stemming from long past historical causes is vital; giant lessons have yet to be painfully learned by the various resistance movements which must eventually cohere around an understanding that there is one real enemy, imperialism (and its attack dog Zionism).

Only a scientific revolutionary understanding – which is to say Marxism – will suffice ultimately for a full solution to the problems facing the world’s masses, the building of a conscious fight to end capitalism totally and establish the dictatorship of the working class everywhere, but already the ever growing fighting skills and capacities of the Middle Eastern revolt are imposing defeat after defeat on capitalism.

But the Palestinian doggedness is a huge inspiration and will continue to be so even with such leaderships as Hamas as long as their militancy is sustained.

The Zionist and imperialist LIES that the conflict is caused by “a terrorist threat” as if it has emerged from an “aggressor” is even more laughable than ever and the growing world sympathy for the Palestinians will further rebound on this degenerate excuse for whipping up world warmongering, driven in fact by the total bankrupt failure of capitalism itself, turning to world war provocations everywhere to evade and escape its unsolvable (within capitalism) Slump disaster - as twice in the 20th century.

The resistance of the Palestinians to the occupations of their lands is totally justified.

It can be nothing but an armed struggle using whatever methods and techniques they are able to muster against the non-stop repression, shelling, terrorising, killing and mass “punishment” imposed constantly by one of the most heavily armed regimes of the world (courtesy of both arms and annual subventions on a huge scale from American imperialism and the private contributions of rich international Jewry).

This is their country, stolen by terror and ethnic cleansing by Jewish Zionist reaction from a people who had occupied the area for 1500 years (longer than the British in Britain).

It is a completely out-of-time colonialist implant that has no right to exist at all (not within any borders, be it 1967, or 1947) and can only ever maintain its presence through constantly and continually smiting and blitzing suppression (which goes on at all times, with endless terrorising, killing and siege imprisonment nearly always ignored by the Western media which always report the far less frequent incidents of fighting back as if they are the cause of the struggle.)

It is the most outrageous lie of all the lying distortions of the bourgeois press.

Most of all it ignores the historical reality of a people who will always be forced to fight back for their own lands and rights.

Only their complete genocidal suppression can “solve” this problem, as imperialist occupations and colonialism “solved” the difficulties of occupying lands held by over 200 Native American nations, or the Aborigines, the Maoris, the Zulus, the Incas, the Aztecs, the Ethiopians, or many others driven to total or near extinction, with any remnants left to fester in alcoholic unemployed misery and despair on “reservations”.

But this aim, which the logic of occupation must always drive the Zionist aggressors to try and impose, (and which is the reality of their lives in the scrappy lands left to them anyway, with the most bigoted and Nazi elements consciously calling for their total elimination – even in the recent days) is out of time, belonging to an epoch of capitalist empire building and not the era of anti-colonialism and revolution now unfolding.

The 8 million Palestinians are not going away and every blitzkrieg teaches yet more of them and the whole Arab nation the hatred for imperialism and Zionism that will rightly eventually see it destroyed as a state (the fate of the individual Jewish occupiers is a different matter - depending on how willing they are to join in the eventual building of a Palestinian state on Palestinian terms).

The fight will grow using every weapon that the desperately oppressed and threatened people are able to find from suicide bombing to missile attacks.

Condemning them for their methods is a capitulation to imperialism.

They fight as they can.

What is worrying the imperialists is that “fighting as they can” has reached a new level of technical sophistication, with more and longer range missiles deployed in a more coordinated and organised way than ever before, despite the almost total blockading of the Gaza strip and the recent military coup in Egypt shutting down most of the smuggling tunnels into Gaza.

The fake-“lefts” who supported the 2013 choreographed counter-revolution by the military against the Muslim Brotherhood government have a lot to answer for, since the fascist Sisi regime they all supported as a supposed “step forwards for the revolution” has removed temporarily one of the material supports for the Palestinians.

The rebellion that exploded three years ago in Cairo, which shook imperialist confidence to its core as the biggest nation in the Middle East erupted, was fed by sympathy for, and hugely inspired by the Palestinian fightback on top of the oppression and penury directly imposed on the masses in Egypt.

And though it has been temporarily suppressed by a bloody and massacring military coup, shooting down thousands in cold blood and imposing a draconian torture and judicial repression, imperialism knows that the ferment revealed in that explosive development can return at any moment.

It is spreading worldwide.

Leninist clarity needs to be built.

Don Hoskins

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Government child abuse inquiry will try to whitewash degenerate ruling class cover-ups and freemasonries protecting its own but the crisis-driven emergence of scandals will roll on because of ruling class recriminations. Fake-“left” PC “gay rights”insistence that “gay is normal” is part of the problem. Declaring background checks “homophobic” helped protect abuse rings

The sudden announcement of a government inquiry in to “high level connections” with the foulest of child abuse reveals a ruling class which is increasingly on the ropes as its historic crisis unravels.

The panicky decision by the Tories (changing their minds over a weekend) is obviously a desperate measure to stop the haemorrhaging of public opinion, as revelation piles on revelation, by “kicking the issue into the long grass” as the cynical bourgeois politicians would say.

As a form of cover-up too, that is a story in itself, particularly as much of the political scandal is precisely about cover-ups and the endless kicking of the issues into the long grass over decades, by stitched-up or inadequate inquiries, lack of action on results and suppressed investigations.

But possibly the most significant political factor is that the tide of hostile public opinion which has forced the Tories’ hand is coming not just from the traditional working class but to a large extent from the “middle England” which has always been assumed to be natural support for the Tories.

The historic Labour leadership and its fake-“left” buttresses (all the little Trotskyist and Revisionist groups pretending “revolution” but actually propping up the bourgeois democracy fraud with “left pressure and protest”) have not only lagged on the issue, but if anything even helped cover it up with “political correctness” single-issue campaigning, especially around “gay rights” insistence that homosexuality is “normal” and, desperately denied and rapidly glossed over after recent revelations about PIE and the NCCL, former connections even with “paedophile rights” (as the slippery and monstrous opportunist denials and grudging admissions of senior Labour figures like Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt demonstrate). It is the world of the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail which has made the running in pushing these scandals to the fore.

And while they may tap some backward and reactionary sentiments in places, lacking in any understanding of how to treat the sickness and psycho-sexual disorders of the perpetrators, they mainly express real general public concern about the degeneration of society, its inability to raise and protect the most vulnerable of children, and the cynicism of a ruling class which has either covered up these scandals to protect its own, or even used them for blackmail and to keep control.

Interestingly too, one of the main figures of the old Thatcherite Tory wing, Norman Tebbit has put his own oar in, to declare that there “could have been cover-ups”, a highly significant move by the more contemptuously semi-fascist wing (which includes figures like Murdoch) against the chinless wonder patrician semi-aristocratic section of the ruling class, further hinting at how the crisis is causing splits and disquiet, and fears of a breakaway already seen with the Little Englander anti-Europeanism of UKIP.

Tebbit, and these rightwing papers are not going to emphasise that the society which is degenerating is capitalist society of course, representing a much narrower petty bourgeois reactionary fearfulness, but the implications are hugely significant for all that.

Taken along with public discontent over a whole clutch of scandals from MPs expenses scams to revelations about state surveillance and press telephone tapping, they reveal the beginning of a breakdown in the established structure of society, if yet a way from any great shift towards a total rejection of it.

Layers of class collaboration and “bourgeoisification” of the working class, which have helped keep the ruling class in the saddle for over a century are starting to slip.

Like the Arctic ice flows cracking up in the Spring, enormous fragmentation is taking place as the entire class rule system hits an historic brick wall of catastrophic economic collapse (only held off temporarily by Quantitative Easing fantasy credit injections and due to come back in some form at any time) and concomitant and now non-stop fascist warmongering threatening everyone.

Old assumed certainties built up during long years of imperialist dominance of the world and the corrupting effect (via petty bourgeois reformist politics primarily) of the super-profits that flowed in from billions of colonially exploited workers living in virtual slavery, are falling apart, most obviously in the now universal scathing contempt for Parliament and “politicians”, and the ever decreasing turnout in elections.

The “we are all middle class now” illusions held by some quite widespread and once complacent sections of the working population (particularly in municipalities and the public sector, and by what Marxism has long called the “labour aristocracy” of skilled and office workers, supervisors, even scientists and IT staff etc) that capitalist democracy is basically sound, offers a steadily improving life if you are a “hard working family” and that it is communism or “totalitarianism” which threatens orderly or safe existence, are falling apart.

There has been more than 150 years of this hoodwinking fraud which has tied deep layers of the working class to the interests of the ruling class, corrupting much of it with chauvinistic arrogance and colonialist minded racist attitudes, all fed to workers by the relentlessly anti-communist petty bourgeois reformism of the Labourism and “official” bureaucratic trade union class collaboration and deal-making.

But the austerity savagery of the crisis, is shaking this philistinism and smugness to the core.

The working class has been hammered by Victorian workhouse austerity impositions.

So too have the subjective assumptions of “middle-classness” held by millions of people brainwashed and miseducated by imperialism and left more or less willing to turn a blind eye to the rest of the world’s desperate condition (of tyrannically exploited near slave labour which feeds the rich nations) as long as they get a share of the loot (in various reforms and improvements effectively speaking).

They are being undermined more and more by the realisation that even better off workers are facing wage cuts, intensified and stressful work levels and dismantled welfare services, and increasingly job loss and Victorian levels of dole privation, misery and despair.

Far worse is coming once the catastrophe can no longer be held off with Mickey Mouse money printing.

And as detailed analysis of capitalist crisis by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (see economics box) made clear long ago, increasing exploitation, inequality and unfairness also drives a greater and greater numbers of the actual middle class (better-off professionals, small businessmen etc) down into the ranks of the proletariat too, as is finally being proven after decades of the inflationary-credit fuelled post-War “boom” which seemed to show the opposite. Welfare state gains and rising wage incomes were always a temporary historical abnormality.

Widespread conscious understanding of the crisis creating these issues is still distant yet and the revolutionary politics, which alone can change it, infinitesimally small.

Building the party and understanding needed is not helped by the anti-theory “empirical” roots of British capitalist culture particularly and its reflection in the philistine hostility of the old-style opportunist “Labour movement” to revolution, and the equally backward anti-communism, “stop the War” social-pacifism, and “democracy” imbecilities of the fake-“left” who despite their self-aggrandising as “revolutionaries” never put the building of revolutionary science on the agenda (through open polemic).

But the rapidly intensifying contradictions must find their way to the surface somehow.

Few issues are more visceral than the care and protection of children.

The growing evidence of repeated cover-ups has reached a tipping point, and the latest Tory government moves reveal a desperation that it might go out of control.

Until now, despite more and more evidence accumulating for decades not only of the scandalous and vile degradation and exploitation of orphan children, ruining thousands of ordinary peoples’ lives – and of the highest level connections and networks exploiting it – no attempt to expose establishment corruption and degeneracy has even been indicated let alone be proactively initiated by the “great and good” leadership of society and its claims to set the standards of behaviour (under Labour or the Tories).

Just the opposite – they have been covered up.

These grotesque and inhuman uses of hapless children, youths and teenagers, consumed like commodities to satisfy malformed sexual appetites, or other emotional failings and distortions, and then left to fester in their ruined lives, psychologically crippled, frequently driven to suicide or, suspicions are in some cases, even killed, have been reported, alleged, witnessed, uncovered, and even investigated repeatedly by various concerned and determined individuals (including one or two MPs).

Just as repeatedly they have been dismissed, covered up, smothered, stifled and shut down by every trick in the book, the abused whistle-blowers, and principled journalistic or detective investigators (rare breeds anyway in capitalist society) left isolated, disparaged and rubbished, or ignored.

Files have been “lost”, and the fact of their loss itself smothered and downplayed.

Even last year former Home Secretary Leon Brittan was saying he had “no recollection” of one of the major dossiers being handed over, suddenly recovering his memory this year as more evidence piled up across board about the overall scope and scale of the scandals.

The abused witnesses themselves and whistle-blowers have been persecuted, subjected to ruthless character assassination and whipped up public contempt, warned-off, or suppressed by assorted threats and intimidation, with the heavy bludgeon of libel actions and injunctions, or by blocked promotions, stifled careers, sackings, and the whispered “word-in-the-ear” to lay off or face the consequences.

Most of all, allegations and witness accounts of senior establishment figure involvements have been vigorously suppressed by the old boy networks, and assorted freemasonries (including gay and paedophile networks themselves) that make up bourgeois society’s class rule, with its thousand and one hidden links and connections.

In some cases the transgressors themselves were protected in exchange for favours, blackmailed in other words, as with the notorious secret Whips books in Parliament, used to keep rebellious MPs in line or face exposure of their peculiarities.

Jimmy Savile at the notiorious Jersey children's home Haut de  la GarenneBut none of that is working any more.

So the next line of defence is the inquiry.

It would not be called at all unless the political situation was going out of control.

But it may not be enough.

Multiple other cases of inquiries being dropped, prosecutions abandoned, and witnesses subject to character assassinations have mounted up, as with the North Wales abuse scandal around boys’ homes there, over the Kincora boys home in Northern Ireland where the issues have rumbled on for years without getting a clear picture of things.

The Jersey Haut de la Garenne home is another scandal, with journalists still being blocked by mysterious visa refusals for example as this “early day motion” from MP John Hemmings describes:

That this House welcomes the arrival in the UK of US journalist Leah McGrath Goodman, the only journalist known to have been banned from the UK at any time during the last 10 years; notes that she was banned by the UK Border Agency (UKBA) in 2011 when she indicated an intention to research matters relating to Haut de la Garenne in Jersey; further notes that this was prior to the revelation of James Savile’s visits to Haut de la Garenne; further notes that there are allegations children have disappeared from Jersey; further notes that the details of the original process resulting in her ban in 2011 and a full explanation of the delays in her being provided with a visa in 2013 have still not been revealed; calls on UKBA to provide the missing CCTV records of the events in 2011 and full details of the communications relating to her being banned and the inquiries which delayed the provision of her visa in 2013; further calls on the Jersey government to co-operate with Ms Goodman in her investigations into the disappearance of these children; and further calls for the Government to stop being complacent about the disappearance of children from care in recent years and for the Government to recognise that an independent audit is required not only for financial arrangements but also for the outcomes for children.

All this has accumulated in the public mind, increasingly disquieted as in these bourgeois press letters for example:

I am intrigued by the continuing saga surrounding Savile, and the way the media constantly associates his vile acts with two British institutions: the NHS and the BBC (Savile’s reign of abuse across NHS exposed, 27 June). While it seems obvious that both might have done more to prevent these crimes it seems equally surprising that questions are not being asked about two other institutions Savile had relationships with: the royal family and the Conservative party. His close relations with Prince Charles are well documented and if I’m not mistaken he spent 11 New Year’s Eves with Margaret Thatcher, not forgetting Ken Clarke’s generous gift of the keys to Broadmoor. With the levels of surveillance the state is capable of, are we to believe that somebody with the access Savile enjoyed had not been investigated by the intelligence services. Should I be more frightened of the ineptitude or the complicity of these organisations? Matt Scott Falmouth, Cornwall

• The latest Savile revelations make distressing reading – children and adults assaulted in hospital, disbelieved and derided, a sexual predator supported and encouraged by those in the highest positions of power. It is not credible for the DoH to blame this on “inadequate processes” – another version of “things were different then”. Sexual abuse and a refusal to listen to victims have never been acceptable in the NHS. However, equally alarming is that the political features that sustained Savile are even more entrenched today. Edwina Currie admits she used Savile as part of her attack on Broadmoor trade unions, calling his approach “a pretty classy operation”. In their obsession with creating an internal market of the NHS, forcing hospitals to compete with each other, successive governments have attacked health unions, driving down public investment and increasing privatisation. Consequently, trusts are forced to resort to fundraising to provide essential services, encouraging senior managers to prioritise this above patient care and safety. Alison Higgs London

• For 50 years Jimmy Savile abused people in health and prison facilities with impunity. Now a report lists these abuses but fails to hold anyone to account. The culture of failing to hold people to account is the same in 2014 as it has been over the past 50 years. “The culture was different then” is an empty retort. Maybe we should have an independent inquiry into the effectiveness of inquiries? Neil Sinclair Edinburgh

As the last letter suggests an immediate certainty is that the ruling class’s declared intention of “complete transparency” and “getting to the bottom of things” is a total lie.

Like every other ruling class official “investigation” the aim is entirely to contain and control the damage to its interests from the growing scandal.

Far from throwing clear light on past cover-ups and suppressions, the purpose is to further delay and obfuscate getting any clarity and truth out in front of the ordinary masses at all, just as the entire “parliamentary” process is aimed to fool and hoodwink the working class from understanding the actual dictatorship of capital which rules things in reality.

The hope is that by the time a report is made, public attention will have “cooled off” or been distracted by other matters, with an immediate aim of putting it in the “long grass” until after the next election but if possible far beyond that.

The broader the remit, the more the process can be dragged out, it is hoped.

It is an unwritten rule of the bourgeoisie, understood by silent class instinct, that the purpose of an inquiry is to finely judge just the minimum necessary in the way of admissions and “guilty parties” to keep things quiet while protecting and salvaging as much of the situation as possible.

As often with such situations for the big bourgeoise, (the central establishment that comprises the heart of the ruling class and really rules the roost in the capitalist world, and which has as much contempt for the smaller middle class “hard working families” they pretend to venerate, as they do for the working class itself) there might be a number of sacrificial victims required to be thrown to the wolves in order to keep the “mob at bay”.

But disquiet is so deep that even that has immediately come under fire as the bourgeois press reports:

Opposition to the appointment of Lady Butler-Sloss as chair of the panel of inquiry into child abuse is growing at Westminster with lawyers and key MPs, including the new chair of the health select committee, urging her to stand aside.

She has been criticised on the basis that her brother, the late Lord Havers, was attorney general at the time some of the controversy over the failure to prosecute child abuse cases may have occurred.

The Home Office insisted on Tuesday it would not ask her to step aside, but the possibility remains she will make her own decision to quit even before starting.

The former high court judge insisted she had been unaware of reports that her brother tried to prevent ex-MP Geoffrey Dickens airing claims about a diplomat in parliament in the 1980s.

“I know absolutely nothing about it,” she told the BBC. “If people think I am not suitable, then that’s up to them.”

There is huge resentment among her friends that her suitability is being challenged.

But Sarah Wollaston, the chair of the health select committee, tweeted: “Not doubting her integrity but hard to see why Baroness Butler-Sloss would want to accept a role so many regard as conflicted at the outset.”

Alison Millar, the lawyer who has represented many victims of child abuse, also voiced her concerns to the BBC, saying Butler-Sloss had enormous integrity but there needed to be not a shred of doubt that the inquiry was an establishment cover-up.

She said: “Survivors of abuse have a deep and well-founded distrust of authority figures given the breach of trust they have experienced as children. To enable them to be able to believe in the findings of this inquiry and for it to be seen, in their eyes, as a safe environment in which to talk about their experiences, there can be no shadows of doubt cast by links to allegations of an establishment cover-up.

“Whilst Baroness Butler-Sloss is a person of enormous integrity, the concern is that she is just too close to the establishment and in particular, concern over her family connection to Sir Michael Havers.

Labour MP Simon Danczuk who has played a leading role in calling for an investigation into child abuse allegations, also aired his doubts on Wednesday, saying it beggared belief that the government did not forsee the potential conflict of interest when it first invited her to take the post on Monday.

The decision to set up the inquiry was made over the weekend, and at the time Theresa May announced the inquiry on Monday afternoon no appointment of a chair had been made.

Butler-Sloss’s experience in the family court made her appear at first the logical choice although her age raised questions about her stamina.

Danczuk acknowledged her expertise, saying she “does have a lot going for her in that she’s very knowledgeable, very experienced, but there are these outstanding issues that raise concerns and we want somebody in the chair that exudes confidence and that’s not the case”.

He added: “She’s part of the establishment and that raises concerns and the relationship in terms of her brother is too close for comfort. I think that’s the conclusion most people will reach …

“The government should really look at this very closely. We want to get off to a flying start, we’re not going to do that; we want to have confidence in the inquiry and this is not going to help matters. So I think the government should think again in terms of who they’ve appointed to this position.”

The Labour MP said Lady Butler-Sloss should herself reconsider whether she was an appropriate appointment.

It is typical of the “opposition” and the Labourite class collaborating tradition – even from those who are demonstrating some principles about this issue at least, - that it sees its task as warning the establishment that its mask of credibility is slipping and that it needs to brush things up, rather than pointing to the whole racket as evidence of the giant confidence trick it all is, part of an entire two centuries long game played by the ruling class with the working class to tie it to the pretence that “things can be changed by slow steady pressure abiding by the rules”.

There are no rules and if the “parliamentary democracy” process ever slips out of the complex framework of lies, public relations “spin”, fixed election boundaries, anti-communist brainwashing, media hype, manipulation, bribery, and constrained choices (between two or three equally opportunist parties of mountebanks, liars, self-seekers and pocket-liners, offering only the most trivial differences of “policy” while all running capitalism) to give the working class any real advances, it will be toppled over anyway, as just demonstrated in Honduras, Egypt, or Kiev or Thailand, (and dozens of times before that) installing coup governments with as much bloody violence, torture and intimidation as is deemed necessary.

Of course to keep the illusion going, the military or fascist stooges will always promise to “re-establish democracy” once it can be got back on approved rails (with any effective real opposition suppressed) that suit the interests of monopoly capitalist imperialism, hopefully with a suitable corrupt stooge like Nouri al-Malki in Iraq in place, or “President” Sisi in Egypt,the fascist oligarch billionaire Petro Poroshenko in Ukraine, or the latest “elected president” in Aghanistan (whichever of two it is). The same with Indonesia’s latest election.

And if that cannot be achieved there is always the option of tearing the “rogue nation” to shreds with provoked civil war or outright blitzkrieg, like in Serbia, Libya Iraq or Syria.

The great domestic delusion that it “couldn’t happen here because we are different and this is the mother of democracies” is the greatest illusion of all, sustained by the Labour tradition, and equally propped-up by layers and layers of “left” pretenders, many claiming themselves to be “revolutionaries” but never actually raising the question – that only turning over capitalism to establish socialism can “stop war” or “stop austerity” and “clean up society”.

But extreme ruling class coup solutions are a desperate last ditch, open fascism a sign of weakness of capitalist rule (and historically highly unstable as with Hitler’s “1000 year Reich” which actually managed just 12 years (destroyed by the titanic Red Army and the huge sacrifices of the Soviet communist masses)).

If it can, the bourgeoisie will always prefer to use the most powerful weapon of all, the hoodwinking pretence of “rule of law” and “democracy” and the out and out lie voiced by David Cameron that “no one is above the law” as the phone hacking inquiry exonerated all but a couple of scapegoats (when everyone knows the rich and powerful have a thousand ways to avoid being held to account, from expensive lawyers to string pulling and funny handshakes).

But the “democracy pretence” needs to be good enough and sometimes can trip up the bourgeoisie; the danger of inquiries is that things might emerge that were not intended.

Plenty has emerged already on the networks of influence with allowed the Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris paedophile cases to go unchallennged (how did Savile get appointed to Broadmoor as its boss!!!!!!??), the monster Cyril Smith MP’s homosexual paedophilia running a boys home, and much else. It is worth recording some of the bourgeois press revelations which have lead to this deep scepticism:

A senior Tory politician said to be part of a child sex ring was allegedly stopped by a customs officer with child pornography videos but got off scot-free, police have been told.

The former MP was driving back to the UK via Dover when a customs officer pulled him over because he was “acting suspiciously”. The border guard, who is now retired, has told detectives that when he searched the MP’s car he found videotapes of children “clearly under the age of 12” taking part in sex acts.

He passed the material on to his superiors, but the MP was never arrested or charged.

And, like a dossier of evidence compiled by the late Geoffrey Dickens MP, the videotapes and paperwork relating to the seizure have since gone missing.

The latest disclosure will increase accusations of a cover-up, as no action was taken against the MP at the time the videos were seized. The same MP is understood to have been named in the Dickens dossier, which was handed to the then Home Secretary Lord Brittan but has since been lost or destroyed.

The customs officer who stopped the MP in the 1980s has spoken to detectives from Operation Fernbridge, the Metropolitan Police investigation into allegations of child abuse by Cyril Smith and others at Elm Guest House in Barnes, south London, which has since closed down.

A senior Tory politician has been accused of abusing a young boy at the guest house, but police are understood to have insufficient evidence to take any action.

A source close to the investigation said that the customs officer was originally approached over claims that a known paedophile had been stopped with a videotape showing the MP at a sex party with underage boys. The customs officer said the report was false, but told police he had stopped the MP in question and seized child pornography videos from him.

The source said: “He viewed the tapes on a video recorder at the border control, and found them to contain pornography involving both underage girls and boys together. He said the children were clearly under the age of 12.

“Unfortunately he can’t remember the exact date when it happened, but he had no doubt about the identity of the MP because he checked his passport. He said he had passed the details of the seizure up the chain of command and had no knowledge of what happened after that.

“The officers on the case have not been able to find the videotapes or any paperwork to corroborate his account.”

Lord Brittan, now 74, has faced questions over his handling of a bundle of papers handed to him by the late Mr Dickens, which contained allegations against the same MP, and against a number of other prominent figures, some of whom were part of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) which campaigned for the lowering of the age of consent. The Labour MP Simon Danczuk has suggested the dossier was “destroyed to protect the people whose names were in it”.

Meanwhile The Daily Telegraph has learnt that four more cases of historic sex abuse have been referred to the police by Home Office officials in recent months.

An internal review of hundreds of thousands of Home Office files found 13 previously undisclosed “items of alleged child abuse” last year.

The Home Office said nine of the 13 cases had previously been reported to the police – including four which involved the department’s officials.

 

Sir Peter Hayman’s life was one decorated with worthy acronyms and exclusive memberships. By the time of his retirement from ‘the Diplomatic’, the Stowe and Oxford-educated former Rifle Brigade officer had been a Home and Foreign Office mandarin, working closely with the intelligence services at the height of the Cold War: it has even been suggested he was a senior figure in MI6.

His final posting was as High Commissioner to Canada...he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George (KCMG), Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (CVO) and an MBE.

Off duty he also belonged to the MCC and the Army and Navy private members’ club (The Rag). Like Sir Peter, both were pillars of London’s old-school-tie Establishment.

Yet unlike the MCC, there was no distinguishing neckwear at Sir Peter’s rather more discreet third ‘club’,...His membership number was ‘330’ and this organisation of similarly minded if not gilded individuals was called the Paedophile Information Exchange. PIE supported and encouraged illegal sexual relationships between adults and children. In other words, child abuse.

Sir Peter lived with his wife of 40 years in a lovely home in South Oxfordshire where, in a parallel existence, he was deputy chairman of the Conservative Association. He acted as a churchwarden’s assistant, and opened the local fete.

Everyone there thought he was marvellous. Who was to know otherwise?

That was because his official PIE literature and graphic correspondence with fellow paedophiles was ...sent to a flat at 95 Linden Gardens, Notting Hill Gate, London, some 50 miles away.

The ex-diplomat had rented it for that purpose — as well as extra-marital sexual liaisons — under the name of Peter Henderson. The fact that the flat was almost across the road from the Soviet embassy was simply an irony. How the KGB would have loved to have made blackmail use of his peccadillo.

Then Sir Peter made a mistake. He left a packet of paedophile material in an envelope on a London bus. The package came into the possession of the police. Soon afterwards, in November 1978, they raided the Linden Gardens flat.

What they found was a huge trove of revolting paedophilia and other extreme pornography. Among it was a library of 45 substantial diaries in which Sir Peter had recorded in detail his sexual experiences and fantasies, the latter including sex with minors.

There was also substantial correspondence with other PIE members — 111 pages in one instance — in which they shared their otherwise secret desires and other graphic paedophile material.

Police later found that two of the dozen or so paedophiles in Sir Peter’s epistolary circle had been writing to each other about their interest in the extreme sexual torture and murder of children.

When interviewed, Sir Peter — a man who had been deputy commandant of the British zone in Berlin and was later tasked to tear a strip off the Soviet ambassador to London after Moscow crushed the Prague Spring of 1968 — broke down and wept.

He would surely be exposed and his reputation ruined. And yet he wasn’t.

Much to the anger and disbelief of the Obscene Publications Squad he was let off with a caution. The grounds for this decision certainly seem extraordinary to contemporary eyes. The Director of Public Prosecutions deemed that as the paedophile material sent through the post by Sir Peter and his friends had not been ‘unsolicited’ nor traded for profit, no offence had taken place worthy of prosecution.

The result? Save among a few officers at Scotland Yard, Sir Peter’s reputation remained intact and might have remained so until his death in 1992 had he not been later exposed in parliament.

The Hayman affair came back into the spotlight this week, with David Cameron ordering an investigation into an alleged cover-up of a VIP paedophile ring which included leading figures in Westminster and Whitehall.

The matter was raised by campaigning MP Simon Danczuk, and centres on a dossier of child sex allegations involving senior Establishment figures, which was handed to the then Home Secretary Leon Brittan by fellow Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens in November 1983.

Lord Brittan says that he passed the documents on to Whitehall officials. But no action was taken and the Home Office has admitted that the Dickens dossier was subsequently destroyed.

The peer faces increasing pressure to fully explain both his handling of the dossier and what it contained.

For his part, Dickens was always convinced there had been a high-level cover-up of VIP paedophilia. The rough treatment he received when in March 1981 he used the legal protection of parliamentary privilege to name Sir Peter Hayman in the Commons, and ask about the security risk his paedophile activities might have posed, is certainly instructive of the Establishment attitude of the time.

In the immediate aftermath of Dickens’ outing of Hayman, the letters page of the Times newspaper gave some flavour of the ranks closing against the campaigner.

‘Until a week ago, only a few unfortunates in Huddersfield had heard of Mr Geoffrey Dickens and no one who has watched him performing his stunt can have supposed that he has one scintilla of Sir Peter Hayman’s unselfish ability,’ wrote R P T Davenport-Hines. ‘Mischievous avidity for headlines is no substitute for talent or hard work.’

Mr Davenport-Hines is now an eminent historian.

In a similar vein one Julian Fellowes, himself the son of a senior British diplomat, wrote: ‘Thoroughly revolted as I am by the Paedophiliac Society with all its professed aims, I feel I cannot be alone this week in being almost as disgusted by the spectacle of a Tory MP dangling his victim over the slavering jaws of the media.

‘The feeblest student of human nature must surely be aware of how slight the connexion between pornography and practices need be.

‘To flirt with fetishes is hardly rare in the best circles ... now he has to have his life, public and private, more thoroughly smashed than if he had murdered his kinsman in broad daylight.

..Today the Oscar winner and Downton Abbey creator is a Tory peer — Lord Fellowes of West Stafford. He is married to a lady-in-waiting.

Prior to Dickens naming Hayman, there had also been strenuous attempts by leading figures in Westminster and Whitehall to prevent him from doing so.

The then Attorney General Sir Michael Havers argued with him outside the Commons chamber for 20 minutes before the disclosure of Hayman’s name in written questions.

Dickens later argued: ‘I have had to consider a gentleman with a very distinguished career for which he was many times honoured, and his family.

‘But I have also to consider the parents whose children are procured, sometimes for a bag of sweets, to perform sexual acts and pose for sexual photographs.’

The parliamentary record Hansard shows that Liberal leader David Steel also spoke out in the House against Dickens’ use of parliamentary privilege to name the paedophile diplomat in written questions.

‘As a member of the Select Committee on Privileges I am naturally concerned that parliamentary privilege should at all times be defended,’ said Steel. ‘I submit it is difficult to defend if there is a sign on occasion it is being abused.

‘I want to draw your attention to two questions which have appeared on the Order Paper today naming a retired public servant and asking for further inquiries into his activities.’

He added: ‘I would like to suggest to you this is creating a dubious precedent of which we should be careful.’

...We know now, of course, that Mr Steel and his Liberal Party failed to recognise the paedophile activities of their own MP Cyril Smith, who is believed to have been named in the dossier Dickens later handed to Brittan. Police recently confirmed that Smith was also a visitor to the notorious Elm Guest House in South-West London, where paedophile parties were allegedly held.

At the time, Steel and the Liberals did nothing, and Smith took his secrets and good reputation to the grave.

To shouts of ‘old school tie’ from Labour MP Christopher Price, Sir Michael Havers had to explain to the House why Hayman had not been prosecuted along with other members of PIE in a trial which had ended at the Old Bailey the previous week with the former PIE chairman Tom O’Carroll being jailed for two years for conspiracy to corrupt public morals.

Hayman’s alias of ‘Mr Henderson’ and his collection of paedophile material and diaries had been alluded to in O’Carroll’s committal hearings, but his true identity was suppressed.

It is not just the ruling class that is being exposed by this accumulation of depravity and cover-ups but the whole of the reformist Labourite and fake-“left” too, with a record of “gay rights” aggressiveness which has been directly implicated in a range of appalling child abuse cases, notably around local authorities like Hackney and the years long abuse by the “gay” Mark Trotter, hired to run the children’s home with only cursory background checks (which were deemed intrusively “homophobic”) and who infected hundreds of children with AIDs.

It is notable too that the “liberal” section of the bourgeois press like the “gay rights” supporting Guardian have been relatively quiet on this topic (until obliged to catch up) despite normally being so “in the lead” campaigning around issues like GCHQ spying, Iraq torture and “human rights” (though never losing sight of their overall class role in maintaining an anti-communist “human rights” climate, as with joining in the frenzy of “anti-dictator” demonisation deluges that go with Western warmongering (against Serbia, Iraq, Syria and Libya for example and exonerating the Kiev fascism), or the current “even handedness” of coverage over the latest Zionist blitzing massacres in Gaza, foully pretending there is a two-sided “conflict” or even “aggression” and “terrorism” from the barbarically treated Palestinians, instead of a monstrous genocidal occupation lasting 70 years and a desperate and fully justified fight against it by the besieged Gazans, using whatever – limited – means they can find).

This reticence lies in the single-issue reformist politics that saturate the fake-“left” of all shades, from “anti-racism”, environmentalism, “animal rights” and feminism to most of all the adoption of the “gay rights” issue and its insistence not simply on fighting against backward and primitive homophobia and bullying (which is perfectly valid) but on declaring that “homosexuality is normal”.

It particularly lies in the denial that there is any connection to or overlap at all between homosexual and paedophile forms of emotional and sexual instability which has led to an institutional climate in which even to raise the issue of perhaps checking the background of those working as teachers or carers, or controlling such jobs, has evoked an aggressive response accusing all such caution of “homophobic persecution” – and often strong enough to provoke outright hostility and even physical violence at times.

The rational Leninist argument which tries to understand the psychology of homosexual frustrated emotional development, and the paedophile psychology, based on a wide range of developmental studies and research by experts such as Robin Skynnner and Oliver James (often cited by the Guardian itself) and general evolutionary and Marxist sociological science, is not only denounced as “reactionary”, but used a tool by many “left” revisionist and Trotskyist groups to attack and blockade all political argument and polemic and attempts to explore issues scientifically, revealing their deep anti-communism.

The EPSR’s Wikipedia entry is permanently hijacked by this censorious hatred, all its politics swamped by the monomaniac denunciations by the “gay” lobby, and even the Palestinians have found their fight against the Zionist fascist savagery attacked and undermined because their culture, and leaderships like Hamas, do not have a fake-“left” approved view of “gay normality” (and likely never will). They can suffer brutal slaughter to the point of extinction for all the “gay” lobby cares as gay campaigner Peter Tatchell has made clear (see EPSR 1242).

Most of all any attempt to explore the clear overlap between homosexuality and the paedophilia is vigorously denied.

Of course the two things are different, and a crude view equating them needs to be fought against as part of society’s gradually developing climb out of barbaric persecution of homosexuals and other minority psychological developments.

It also needs to be emphasised that the majority of paedophile activity is heterosexual and most likely in distorted family environments, (with causes particularly in the distorted, antagonistic and damaging alienations of capitalist society and the failure of community).

The same is clear from cases like Jimmy Savile, Rolf Harris and Max Clifford (though possibly to be more accurate in at least Savile’s case, his affliction was less heterosexual than asexual, indiscriminately imposed on boys and girls, being driven by complex desires to hurt others rather than misplaced emotional and sexual attachment – see Oliver James’ recent tentative article on Savile for example explaining “projection”).

Conversely too most homosexuality is separate to, and not involved at all, with child abuse.

But that an overlap occurs is undeniable, from case after case: the Cyril Smith abuse is completely on little boys and much of the associated Rochdale care home abuse; most of the Catholic homes abuse in Ireland was homosexually orientated and other Catholic church scandals are equally so; the many cases in the Boy Scouts of America and the Australian orphan transfer cases are also on boys; the Kincora abuse in Northern Ireland and that in north Wales at homes like Bryn Estyn the same; and the Glasgow paedophile ring too, convicted in 2009 as the bourgeois press reported:

The groundbreaking court case uncovered Scotland’s biggest paedophile network and revealed the shocking crimes of a spider’s web of apparently respectable men”.

A jury at the High Court in Edinburgh took ten hours to return verdicts on 54 separate charges.

It emerged during the case that the ringleaders Neil Strachan and James Rennie befriended the families of the children they abused.

Rennie, 38, was the chief executive of LGBT Youth Scotland, a group dedicated to helping young lesbian and homosexual deal with their sexuality.

Strachan, 41, a paint firm engineer who was previously jailed for molesting a young boy, was the former secretary of a Celtic boys club and a campaigner on homosexual issues.

The court was told that he was “polluted by deviant compulsion”. Dorothy Bain QC, prosecuting, said: “In reality he is someone who allowed his profound interest in the sexual abuse of children to engulf his entire life.”

As a basic principle of even bourgeois scientific statistical method, correlation does not necessarily imply causation but it does indicate powerfully that there is such a possibility and the need for a much greater understanding of the issues, which cannot be achieved by shutting down all discussion and difference of opinion except that which capitulates to a view that “homosexual is normal”, which huge numbers of ordinary people would not necessarily accept.

It certainly indicates a need for a deep caution in society, as has been argued by the EPSR in the past (EPSR No0948 28-04-98):

No amount of promiscuity or emotional instability remotely justifies homophobia, properly condemned by EPSR as “a barbaric instinct”.

But neither should a hatred of the historic persecution of homosexuals justify the unwisdom of politically-correct censorship of any inquiry at all about who to put in charge of children’s homes.

Such PC ‘correctness’ was and remains a far more appalling threat to human rights (those of sexually-abused youth as under council care in Hackney, Islington, Leicestershire, Cheshire, Liverpool, Clwyd, etc,etc) than any amount of legitimate precaution about the all-round responsible maturity, and sexual and emotional stability, of all who are given supervision of children.

But the current controversy over permanent public identification of paedophiles only renews the still-unresolved contradiction between social responsibility and the so-called ‘civil liberties rights of the individual’.

Such people, prey to such unfortunate emotional/sexual drives, need help. The regime of ‘political correctness’ was the exact opposite, – self-righteous opportunists pompously posturing their “we ask no questions” imbecility, informed only by such philistine acts-of-faith as “what makes you assume that male homosexuals might be interested in boys any more than any other group”.

Blanket assumptions on such questions would be monstrous. Sensible questions on such matters might be helpful.

Individualism will always put the stress on personal liberty. Marxism has always insisted that a real concept of freedom is only valid if it recognises the social necessities which have governed the whole evolution of civilised mankind.

The understanding that in communist society, the free development of every individual is the condition for the free development of all, can obviously only mean that the full right to flourish for those with malfunctioning sexual and emotional orientation, (if such phenomena persist once clear of screwed-up capitalist society), cannot be at the expense of even the remotest danger or interference at all to the unhindered flourishing of everyone else from the cradle to the grave. In other words, if malfunctioning sexual orientation persists, then it could only not be a problem if it continued in complete openness, i.e. with the known proclivities to paeodophilia of some homosexuals, for example (as well as of sick heterosexuals, obviously) universally openly acknowledged, and the individuals at risk identified.

If a causal link is not proven by these widespread correlations, even less is the opposite view, aggressively insisted on by the “gay” lobby and its fake-“left” supporters, that there is “no connection”. Just the opposite, the starting point would be that there probably is.

It is notable that such prominent “gay rights” campaigners as Peter Tatchell constantly press for a lowering of the age of consent, and some “left” groups too, like the CPGB Weekly Worker (debating the advocacy of this issues only a few weeks ago).

Furthermore the “left”’s un-evidenced assertion of “no connection” is relatively recent; as has come to light again recently around the arch-opportunist and careerist Labourites Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt, in the early days of adopting the gay rights cause the link was accepted via the notorious Paedophile Information Exchange PIE and its affiliations with the National Council for Civil Liberties, a major training ground for Labourite careerism (and even by some outright “libertarian” Trotskyist “left” groups such as the Revolutionary Communist Party, actively campaigned for).

The main criticism of these leading Labourites, and the greatest lies that they tell, are in their totally cynical continuing pretence that capitalism is a viable and continuing system (and that the crisis is “solvable”), guilty of not only not warning workers of the unrolling and unstoppable disaster that its historic failure is bringing but deliberately covering it up; of instigating the lying fascist warmongering that capitalism is using to try and get out of it (particularly through the WMD lies and Iraq war they all went along with); that democracy is anything other than a giant lie; and that Labourism is anything but the most vile class collusion which not only will never so anything to take on the real oppression and exploitation of the working class, but in fact runs capitalist imperialism and is nothing but another face of ruling class domination.

But their wriggling and squirming over the PIE-NCCL revelations has been a further lesson for the working class in the utter venality and philosophical and political corruption of Labour.

At another level so too has been the excuse making and downplaying of the issue by the fake-“lefts” who for all their supposed revolutionary differences with Labourism have all rushed to defend Harman, and Hewitt, by declaring that the accusations are “politically motivated by the Daily Mail”. Some revolutionaries these!!!

An anti-”left” agenda by the Mail is highly likely but is not the point, (made only to deflect attention) which was confirmation of the allegations, grudgingly wrung out both (only after much dishonest prevarication) along with an “apology” by Patricia Hewitt (a former MP and now a “corporate lobbyist” - ie on the capitalist gravy train.) And the entire fake-“left” has let the matter be quickly be brushed under the carpet (by more behind the scenes string pulling) instead of exposing the opportunism of these arch-Labourite careerists.

Why so? Because it is completely damning of the “gay rights” PCism to which all the “lefts” have pinned their flag.

It makes clear that when this “single issue” campaign was first adopted the supposed “no link” to paedophiles assertion was not considered important (despite one or two figures sounding warning bells - as Jack Dromey claims he did.) It became so only as various scandals emerged at which point the entire fake-”left” were trapped – hence the now insistent denials and “factual” assertions that “gayness and paedophilia are different things”.

There is no basis for such declarations.

But the fake-“left” needs its single-issues which have been a major prop for anti-revolutionary politics for decades.

Such PC sanctimoniousness is a perch for the pretence of “principled struggle” while avoiding, evading or opposing genuine revolutionary politics.

They are built on the false notion that there are struggles which can be fought to improve the world separately to and in advance of the fight to overturn capitalism, – it is “in-the-meantime” “leftism” allowing petty bourgeois posturing as “revolutionary” while never actually bringing the revolutionary questions to the fore (which is always the case around any real question from austerity battles in Britain to the Ukraine, or Middle East).

Some “lefts” declare these are battles which have to be fought first, in order to “improve people” enough for them to advance to revolutionary understanding (the “racists cannot fight capitalism” argument).

It is utter horseshyte.

This step by step notion of the route to socialism, saving the rainforests, the animals, stopping nuclear arms, stopping fracking, battling discrimination against women or assorted racisms (usually around skin colour but also against the Irish say, or East European workers, or Caribbean contempt for Nigerians, or Asians etc) is nothing but a specialist variant of general reformist philosophy and a total diversion from revolutionary grasp.

Often it goes with a demand “not to mention communism until later” in case you “put people off”.

Not only that, PC single issues campaigns, built around bourgeois individualism, grow increasingly reactionary, and particularly the “gay” campaign, which has whipped up hostility against the Palestinians; sustained the fascist US presidency under Obama by trading voting support for “gay marriage” concessions (oblivious to Obama-ism’s gross continuing warmongering and torture), and most glaringly whipping up demented Goebbels hate campaigns against Russia around the Sochi Olympics, just when the fascist Kiev coup provocation was reaching a crescendo, with reactionary luvvies like Stephen Fry accusing Russia of being a ”Nazi state”.

Only the total ending of capitalism can begin to see these questions properly examined, free of the distortions of capitalist alienation, and properly to be solved.

Refusing to make this point is helping maintain the anti-communist illusions that hold workers back, which is the function of all single-issue politics.

The point of revolutionary politics is to challenge this hostility head on and win the understanding that only communist revolution can take mankind forwards. Build Leninism

Steven Tudy

 

 

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