Back issues
No 1476 13th September 2015
Drone slaughter of UK “jihadists” in Syria is further shift in capitalist warmongering towards outright fascism. Such death squad assassination exposes the cynical fraud of the “rule of law”. Hoodwinking nonsense of “democracy“ further revealed by cynical Tory contempt for specific parliamentary vote AGAINST Middle East warmaking and by secret UK participation in US Pakistan drone “kill team”. Both incidents warn of bourgeois dictatorship reality of class rule which will go all the way to military coup if threatened. Re-building faith in this deadly “democracy” is the greatest fault of new “left” Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, disarming the working class from understanding that only revolution and workers dictatorship authority can change anything. Landslide Labour vote shows crisis shift in mass consciousness but misled by reformist opportunism, like useless “open doors” sloganising on asylum and refugee crisis, a posturing cover for fake-“left” anti-communism. Leninism needed and party to build it
The killing of two young British citizens in Syria, remotely blasted apart by robot drones is outright bloody murder by the British ruling class and its capitalist state.
It is a state lynching by Hellfire missile which has absolutely nothing to do with the “rule of law”.
It is pure “might is right” bullying of the planet to escape and evade the disaster which capitalist catastrophic Sump collapse is bringing to the whole world. It is fascism.
The feeble hesitancy of the fake-“left” hesitantly wondering if “circumstances really justified it” (!!) or worse still, “if it was legal” or “was there any evidence” is outright class colluding cowardice and betrayal, further exposing the anti-revolutionary reality of all their posturing and pretences, reformist “Labour movement lefts” (Corbynites) and pretend “Marxists” alike.
It also goes hand in hand with their “condemnation” of the rising Third World mass anti-imperialist sentiment.
Since when has there ever been any “justification” or “legal basis” for imperialist warmongering and assassination???
Their floundering, covered over simultaneously by their idiotic and impossible “welcome all immigrants” diversionary “liberal” posing, backing up their sanctimonious “condemnations” of “terrorism” and Politically Correct denunciations of radical Islamism, are treacherous evasions and a total betrayal of the working class.
It all plays into the hands of the demented Goebbels ruling class demonisation of ISIS and other Islamic anti-imperialist revolt, (while Washington and its stooges are simultaneously supporting other such barbaric elements against Assad’s Syrian regime), all being used by capitalism as a scapegoat (blame victim) for the world’s ills, and as the justification for its continuing and non-stop crisis warmongering, torturing and terrorising.
The callous “might is right” barbarity of the latest incident escalates the already depraved warmongering and atrocities of the ruling class with a new level of arbitrary “kill them all” punishment which makes the Wild West look positively restrained and civilised.
Such “state vigilantism” from the Tory ruling class (grovellingly accepted by the Labourites, openly by the Blairites and mumblingly by the “left”) is nothing to do with justice or chauvinistic “protection of British citizens” and everything to do with intimidation and terrorising of all Third World resistance to the onrushing capitalist catastrophic crisis and the warmongering Washington and its stooges have imposed on country after country to try and escape it, tearing entire populations to shreds, fomenting devastating conflicts and civil war, and creating the gigantic refugee agony now experienced over the Mediterranean and into central Europe (deliberately encouraged by the capitalist powers).
It shows up even further the degenerate vileness of the out-of-time 800 year of capitalist order, collapsing into ignominy and shameful depravity, sliding towards all out World War Three to evade responsibility for the economic breakdown, non-stop massacres and destructive chaos its contradiction ridden profit system has created – all to maintain its stinking privilege and indolent luxury and power, whatever turmoil and agonising mayhem it imposes on the world (far far beyond anything the ISIS, Boko Haram or such like could dream of).
This incident is an expression of outright fascism and a trampling over all so-called legality and what passes for “justice” “democracy” and the “rule of law”, which the stinking, corpse-rotten hypocrisy of the West pretends it is imposing on “rogue regimes” by its bloody war destruction.
Even if tried and convicted of a crime on the most watertight of evidence and due process there is nothing in British bourgeois law – (twisted as it is by its completely partial class orientation, dedicated to the preservation of the ruling class and its property, and to suppression of the working class and any challenges for fairness it might make) – that says there should or can be a “death sentence” imposed on a convicted person, let alone one carried out by the grotesque inhumane violence of a high-explosive Hellfire missile “taking them out” in shredded fragments of burnt flesh, along with anyone else who might happen to be standing within a relatively large radius nearby (or travelling in the same car in this case).
But there was no trial and there was no evidence other than flimsy and highly suspect “intelligence suspicions” that they “might” have been “influencing others” to attack people in England.
That would be the same kind of intelligence “suspicions about WMD” that started the second Iraq war we can assume, the Goebbels LIE, war destruction cause and motivation of much of the mass “jihadism” and anti-Western insurgency, epitomised by ISIS, which grows bigger, more organised, more ruthlessly hostile, and more attractive to the Third World masses for its anti-Westernism, every day.
Or it would be the same intelligence which pours out non-stop, unverified, lurid propaganda stories about “another terrorist incident prevented”, only to be shown up later (in the down page stories) as total nonsense like the infamous “ricin plot” or numerous raids where the accused are simply released days later, uncharged; all to keep the general public in a state of high tension and confused fear, and justify the every increasing universal spying surveillance and political censorship on the entire population which long ago made a mockery of notions of “free speech” and “democratic rights”.
Even at the most extreme, these two victims were not proven to be “guilty” of any crime at all, other than thinking and speaking opinions, hostile to British and American imperialism of course, full of aggressive bravado and laced with puritanical religious severity about Western life, but not capital offences (which, apart from bizarre unused feudal remnants like “treasonably setting fire to her majesty’s dockyards”, do not exist under British law for any crime at all, even proven physical murder).
Even the arch anti-communist George Orwell’s counter-revolutionary 1984 fictional dissing of communism and the Soviet Union, with its made-up “thought crime” concepts (actually reflecting the capitalist society he was in, not communism), did not go so far as instant incineration as punishment.
The Tories’ blatantly dissembling justification of an “imminent threat” is a Goebbels big lie of astonishing proportions – in what way are two twenty year olds, several thousand kilometres, away an “imminent threat” to the integrity of British society?
If they were “plotting” some incident it was obviously known about and the organisers were trackable, or how would the intelligence services have enough “evidence” in the first place to pass their illegal “death sentence”, and just as importantly, carry it out?
It they were “influencing others” then clearly the “others” could be and were being tracked too, enough to know there was some intent for action, (or what are the vast tens of millions spent on the secret spying apparatus of GCHQ for?) and they would anyway be the “guilty perpetrators” of any active incident, not those 3000km away.
Pre-emptive state assassination on a suspicion of “intent” it should be repeated, is monstrous Nazi humbug.
It is equivalent to the deliberate 1988 SAS death-squad killings of unarmed IRA members in Gibraltar in 1988, and numerous illegal covert assassinations since, (including against the innocent solicitors Rosemary Nelson and Pat Finucane for presuming to defend republicans), carried out mainly by thug Orange “loyalism” against the heroic Irish national-independence struggle but repeatedly with British intelligence “kill-list” information, or even directly by the secret British state units.
It is on a par with the extra-judicial killings that were routine in wars like Vietnam, against North Korea and on a mass scale in Indonesia (where CIA and British intelligence 
lists, deliberately fed to fascist forces under General Suharto, helped kill over one million actual communists or, mostly, simply suspected “sympathisers” – see the excellent Act of Killing film), in El Salvador’s slaughter (tens of thousands), Guatemala (100,000s), Argentina (hundreds of “disappeareds”), and many more barbaric Western sustained and financed stooge fascist regimes from Papa Doc’s Haiti to Ferdinand Marcos’s Philippines.
Or it is on a par with Iraq’s death squads in the deliberately inflamed Sunni-Shia civil war of 2005-7 and then again in Libya and Syria, all with covert US training and support, via the sinister School of the Americas (now renamed) and other mechanisms (see the for-once useful March 2013 Guardian report on El Salvador death-squad specialist Colonel Jim Steele, covertly operating in Baghdad), and via reactionary stooge local regimes like the primitive living-fossil feudalism of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Sheikhdoms (whose lack of democracy, and use of mass beheading and dismemberment for punishment – and now aggressive blitzkreig civilian-killing illegal invasion of Yemen, – does not bother Western humbug one iota, let alone evoke calls for “concern by the international community” etc etc).
It also is on a par with the routine Oval Office signing-off every Tuesday morning by the warmongering Barack Obama of approved “death lists” for American joystick “heros” – (and, just revealed, dozens of UK personnel too secretly working with the US on a mass scale, completely illegally) – all safe in their computerised Nevada and Arizona bunkers while they command drone and robot killings all over the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan on the merest hint of suspicion or half-baked scrap of informer fingering, routinely “taking out” suspected anti-imperialist fighters (proven or not) along with dozens of bystanding innocents and civilians (wedding parties a speciality), in order to “heroically (!!) get their man”.
These death warrants have less basis and justification than the Great Seal parchments of feudal absolute monarchs Henry VIIIth or Elizabeth I, which consigned tens of thousands to the axeman’s block for “plotting” and “treason” during the revolutionary advent of the protestant bourgeois class 500 years ago.
They are a complete mockery, showing up the lying fraud of the “rule of law” and “democracy”, even in the bourgeoisie’s own preposterous class-interested terms.
And just to rub home the point, these Tory killings were even more illegal by their own rules (if that is possible) than all of the above, having been deliberately and specifically proscribed by recent parliamentary vote, which ruled out any interventions at all in Syria where these barbaric murders were perpetrated (a vote which was itself a rejection of another BIG LIE provocation around supposed Damascus “use of chemical weapons”, an unverified media-inflated intelligence agency slander which is now repeated by the reactionary press – with the “liberal” Guardian well in the lead – as if fact, on the propaganda principle that if you tell a big lie and repeat it often enough it “becomes fact”, like the non-existent Tian an Men “massacre” or 1995 Srebrenica fabricated “genocide” or the Rwanda “Hutu genocide of the Tutses” (in fact the other way round, mostly a mass killing by the monstrous US-trained Blair-approved Western stooge Paul Kagame and his carefully set up invasion army from next door Western stooge Uganda) or “Russian aggressive annexation of Crimea”, or a thousand other topsy-turvy examples of “black-is-white”, “up-is-down”, “war-is-peace” Western disinformation and brainwashing).
Staggeringly the government, which claims a “democratic mandate” (based on a tiny minority vote of the population - and a highly manipulated one at that) has already for months secretly simply ignored this crucial vote on Syria and gone ahead with British airforce participation in Washington-led bombing raids and attacks anyway – completely and flagrantly contemptuous of the “parliamentary principles” of “anti-totalitarianism” it pretends to uphold as the “principled” basis for the now non-stop war interventions, blitzing and destroying and tearing to shreds entire countries for over two decades.
Further disclosures undermine even more the flimsy “legality” pretences based on the laughable notion that their was an “imminent threat”.
The victims had been followed for months it is revealed and were only “dealt with” after the supposed “targeted events” had passed by, weeks before.
Some “imminence”.
And it is further revealed in bourgeois press reports that there are “kill-lists” not just of these youths but unknown “others” - drawn up months ago by Tory and “security” committees.
So not imminent at all then:
A list of names of several British jihadis was drawn up at the meeting of senior national security council members that approved the first UK drone strike on Syria, it has emerged.
Several names were identified for targeting at the NSC meeting. Downing Street said the meeting, held several months ago and chaired by David Cameron, was convened to discuss how to protect the British people in the face of threats from “a number of individuals”.
Families of jihadis fighting with Islamic State have voiced concerns that the British government has drawn up a “hitlist” of targets to be struck. In a series of broadcast interviews on Tuesday morning, the defence secretary, Michael Fallon, denied ministers had drawn up a “kill list”.
Fallon indicated that the government was preparing the ground for further attacks, and said Isis militants had their own targets.
He told Good Morning Britain on ITV1: “They have a kill list. They have plans to mount a series of attacks on Britain and our job is to identify those attacks, identify the terrorists and where we can forestall them. But if you’re asking me would we hesitate to take similar action again today, tomorrow, next week – absolutely not, we would not hesitate.”
The prime minister’s spokeswoman indicated that ministers considered a list of jihadi targets that went beyond Reyaad Khan, who was killed in an RAF drone strike on 21 August. Ruhul Amin, another British Isis fighter who was not a formal target, was also killed in the strike.
A third Briton, Junaid Hussain, was killed in a US airstrike in Raqqa on 24 August as part of the same operation. Hussain and Khan were targeted after intelligence indicated they were plotting to attack the VE Day commemoration event presided over by the Queen on 10 May, and events to mark the murder of Lee Rigby on Armed Forces Day on 27 June in Woolwich.
The spokeswoman said of the meeting that approved the strikes: “That meeting was about what action we should take to protect the UK from a terrorist threat.”
Asked whether others jihadis had been identified for targeting in addition to those killed last month, the spokeswoman said: “It was about what action we should be taking to protect British people here in Britain. As the defence secretary was saying, we have been clear that there are a number of individuals who are part of the terrorist organisation that is Isil that are seeking to plot and attack the UK and indeed other countries.”
The Guardian understands that a list drawn up by ministers on the NSC went beyond those killed last month.
The sick stampeding of public opinion behind this depravity has been helped by the entire spectrum of the fake-“left” and its cowardly and craven crawling behind the demonisation and scapegoating of “jihadists” – either condemning them as “reactionary” or “using unacceptable methods” or alleging them to be ‘all run by the CIA’.
Even such apparent principled positions like left-“Labourite” Jeremy Corbyn’s reported denunciation of the assassination of Osama bin Laden as another “death squad” illegality, – which it was, illegally carried out in another country at that – collapse under ruling class or media pressure into half-hearted mumbling about “having to see the evidence”.
What spinelessness!
What petty bourgeois class-collaborating betrayal.
What a lesson yet again in the true position of all fake-“leftism” which not only will always grovel before the ruling class but acts as its agent and instrument when in government.
The “lefts” de facto capitulation to imperialism’s insanely meaningless nonsense of a “war on terror”, which is nothing but a shallow excuse for capitalist world terrorising, equally shows up the cowardice, collusion and petty bourgeois counter-revolutionary nature of all their posturing and strutting about single-issue rights and “politically correct” self-righteous individualism.
Even some establishment minded bourgeois press commentators can do better at pinpointing the humbug:
Tony Blair on the Iraq war, [declaring] that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction” that posed “an imminent threat” to British national security....killed stone dead the thesis that such assertions by ministers should be taken on trust.
The suspicion has to be that British intelligence had a tag on the suspect Britons for some time and got lucky. British planes had been operating over Syria all summer, with orders to disregard parliament’s veto on military action if targets were of sufficient “value”.
As it stands, the visible evidence against them related to events that had already taken place peacefully. The threats appear mere bravado. If not, the more reason for explaining what exactly was the threat, other than “recruitment”.
Cameron’s lawyers were content that action was essential to prevent what international law recognises as an “occurring or imminent” Article-51 threat, notified to the United Nations. That law envisaged an army moving to cross a frontier, not a 21-year-old Cardiff terrorist. Even so, I doubt if anyone would quarrel with Cameron’s decision were a threat to be specific and ongoing – with ministers knowing about it in advance. But the menace would have to be so great as to justify the near certainty, as indeed happened, that bystanders would also die, as they have in dozens of American drone attacks (in retaliation for no conceivable “threat” to the American people).
It is the likelihood of an attack, not a threat of one, that must be substantiated. Asymmetric wars may demand new rules of engagement. But new rules must be reasoned openly.
Cameron’s covering news of the executions with an announcement on refugee relief looks suspiciously like a guilty conscience. Even at some risk to intelligence, he has absolutely no interest in Blair-like obfuscation.
The root of this trouble is an ongoing failure to define a “war on terror”. Calling an embryo caliphate “an existential threat to Britain’s national security”, as has Cameron, is not just an absurdity. It implies a government with no confidence in the resilience of the British state against a genuine military threat. It suggests ministers have lost all sense of proportion in matters of security.
Crazy youths who go abroad to fight in other people’s wars and make bloodcurdling threats against British people certainly merit drastic countermeasures. But they are criminals who would kill and maim. They do not threaten the state or its security. Nor do they justify the suspension of the rule of law or the traditions of open accountability. To claim otherwise is simply to concede victory to the enemy.
The proper question to ask of these actions is, who has benefited? The answer has to be the forces of violence in the Middle East. They need no further encouragement from Britain. As for the claim that drone strikes in Syria are the best way to tackle the refugee crisis at source, no one can believe that.
These “reasoned doubts” from former Times editor Simon Jenkins, correctly mocking the absurd exaggeration and nonsense of a “war on terror” still go along with the completely topsy-turvy idealism that ISIS and the rest of the growing jihadist revolt in the world are somehow “the forces of violence”, an “enemy” arising out of nowhere by some black miasma of evil intent, causing the problems.
But it is imperialism which has been tearing the world apart with a scale of destruction, savagery, bullying intimidation and torturing depravity which is orders of magnitude beyond the terrorising bravado of even the most “ruthless” of the “jihadists”.
Since the monstrous 1998 nazi-NATO attack on former Yugoslavia over Kosovo (justified by another media-inflamed glaring lie about an alleged “massacre” at Racek) virtually continuous war, waged solely by the hi-tech West, has seen hundreds of thousands killed, or tortured or casually incarcerated, and millions or tens of millions have had their lives destroyed as families have been devastated and whole countries have been reduced to rubble, in a warmongering frenzy that began long before such fundamentalism appeared.
It is angry opposition to this capitalist war destruction and barbarism which has been the main recruiting sergeant for the assorted insurgencies which have grown ever since.
“But they started it with the 9/11 attacks” say blinkered petty bourgeois selective memories, pretending that the imperialist world is somehow just doing its own thing, quietly minding its own business in some peaceful (and tediously patronising) Hobbit-Arcadia, only to find itself disrupted by “crazy maniacs” or “criminals” or “evil demons”.
Such pompous, bigoted and racist self-righteousness appears all across the board, including among the fake-“lefts” who even if they point to the barbarity and warmongering of the capitalist world, and shout and posture mightily about “No to War” etc, still all in various ways go along with the idea that “terrorism” and “jihadism”, is a “problem” quibbling solely that monstrous fascist blitzkrieging is the “wrong way to go about dealing with it”.
Thus “left” commentator Seamus Milne, who more or less expresses the conventional revisionist/reformist “left” CPB-type view of the world, and occasionally makes sound enough specific and well-researched criticism of the capitalist West, can berate the Cameron-Tory gung-ho nazi-bombing aggression as being yet more of the warmongering which has been a major aggravating factor in stirring up the jihadist-Middle East terrorist rebellion over the last decade, correctly declaring that it is the brutal bombing and barbarity which feeds the anti-Western hatred (on top of decades of slow-burning and growing rightful resentment and hostility at the slave-level exploitation, degradation, and humiliation foisted onto the masses of the Third World by imperialist exploitation) but still ends up discussing how its “poison can be drawn”.
But the moment ISIS or the rest of the jihadist revolt is declared “poison”, all argument is cut away, and these “lefts” line up with Western imperialism about the need to “deal with it” – the only dispute being fine points of methodology, - negotiation or all-out blitzkrieg.
They all end up in effect on the same side as imperialist barbarity.
Completely lost sight of is any material understanding of the real cause of problems in the world and the grasp that it is capitalism and its overwhelming domination of the planet that is responsible for creating the pain and destruction.
And this applies to all the “left” groups and their assorted theories about the jihadists “all being run by the CIA” or “headbangingly insane” etc.
Barmy religious notions can be mocked or criticised and should be, in once sense, as inadequate to achieve the necessary defeat and overturn of capitalism.
The point needs to be made that only a revolutionary party deliberately engaging in open debate for a wide-ranging scientific revolutionary perspective, constantly developed, can lead the struggle to establish planned socialism under the necessary firm control of the working class.
But the “left”s, sneering at “jihadism”, are as highly selective as imperialism is, over which parts are written-off and which supported, as with the museum Stalinist Lalkar/Proletarian for example denouncing ISIS and al-Qaeda, but uncritically and unMarxistly elevating the equally barmy “headbanging” (if it is to be called so) of Iran’s state Islamism to some kind of “steadfast ally” status.
The driving material conditions pushing tens of thousands into such staggering self-sacrificing suicide-bombing desperation are lost sight of completely, left aside and avoided by these armchair “revolutionaries” who long ago abandoned such Marxist materialist understanding of the world when it comes to real world turmoil (whatever their academic articles might say about crisis).
The understanding is missed completely that this giant wave of revolt – from Pakistan and Afghanistan to al-Shabaab in Somalia and Kenya, Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Tauregs and al-Qaeda in Mali or Yemen, and deep into Africa - for all its weird confusions and often self-defeating methods, is a staggering and real material development expressing the unbearable conditions of hundreds of millions of people under imperialist exploitation and tyranny, and fighting back, inflicting defeats and setbacks on imperialism.
So is it a “reactionary ideology” as various of the Trotskyists want to call it?
It is not Marxism and its subjective aims and sometimes methods are laced with religious backwardness which Marxism does not support, but neither is it materially a part of capitalism, the only objective source of reaction and war in the world.
Or is it all organised by the CIA as others declare, finding a different way to condemn it all without appearing to side with imperialism?
Such notions are laughable, saying nothing about what on earth would such CIA plotting all be for?
What is the point of Western intelligence setting the world on fire and having to deal with extra chaos and the need to suppress it, on top of the turmoil and revolts erupting everywhere else (Ukraine, the whole of Latin America and potentially dozens of other countries including most of the imperialist countries, once the QE Mickey Mouse money printing runs its course and the world economy implodes again?)?
What is the point of stirring up masses of people into a ferment in which all kinds of political ideas could take hold, most of all those of communist revolution, which will certainly occur, because it is the only correct understanding of the world and the only way out of its disaster, and which is the only way the ever more agonising contradictions of capitalist class rule can be resolved?
Spontaneous understanding is impossible but these understandings have been reached before and are latent in world history, requiring giant discussion and sorting out of past mistakes and retreats of course, but that is exactly what the great upheavals are leading to.
The CIA would want to provoke that??
The notion that all this was begun by and is driven by Washington makes no sense.
Of course there have been and are, all kinds of attempted manipulations, covert actions, provocations and corralling of some jihadist forces by Western intelligence, often taking advantage of sectarian divisions, feeding them with money or arms, and pushing situations with covert special forces interventions, sniper provocations to create a violent atmosphere etc – as notably done in the anti-Soviet disruption of socialist Afghanistan in the 1980s, in some Latin American coups, and in the bogus “people’s revolt” set going in Syria four years ago and in Libya initially.
But this is desperation.
Imperialism is not in control but more and more urgently trying to divert and head off rising revolt, intervening where it can to cause splits and confusion and secondly to take advantage of mayhem for its own war making purposes.
The “left” theories that all this revolt is just “reaction” or deliberately provoked, is a desperate evasion to avoid the question of the revolutionary breakdown of world imperialist monopoly capitalism. It gets all of them into terrible tangles, condemning the Muslim Brotherhood for example but then flounderingly trying to explain why they support the Palestinian struggle - (which “lefts” would dare say they did not - other than the PC “gay rights” lobby around Peter Tatchell etc?) - and support its leadership run in part by a branch of the same Muslim Brotherhood, namely Hamas.
Leninism keeps this issues clear by not supporting any movement other than Marxist revolutionism, but recognising who the real enemy is and calling for the total defeat of reaction, imperialism and its Zionist fascist forces, by whatever resistance emerges, Hamas or the Islamic Jihad included.
Even a decade ago this pattern of world development was clear (EPSR No 1227 06-04-2004):
All anti-imperialism needs to get its head around the philosophical reality of the present world crisis.
The “fundamentalist extremism” of the Third World is in fact typical of new-found self-assertiveness of emerging class forces and national forces in every period of major world upheaval.
But this adopted puritanism is never destined to prevail longterm. It is always a temporary vehicle of identification.
Puritanism in Britain was a powerful signal of the eventual Cromwellian Revolution that brought down the corrupt decadence of feudalism and destroyed the absolutist power of the monarchy, — but the serious historical movement which emerged into power was capitalism. Puritanism dwindled to a harmless cult.
The Third World masses can only be on their way to one workable worthwhile goal ozone, - which is worldwide economic cooperation, or planned socialism.
In this scientific age, fundamentalist extremism will dwindle to nothing even more rapidly than puritanism did.
The reactionary primitiveness of some aspects of fundamentalism and extremism in the Third World are obviously good for an imperialist propaganda laugh about how we will all end up being forced to pray to Mecca five times a day, and how “neo-NAZI military hordes” wall be conquering the planet unless Iran is blitzkrieged, following Iraq, etc, etc, and unless HAMAS leaders are put to the sword like Sheikh Yassin, etc, etc, etc.
It is all TOTAL codswallop.
The most advanced “threat” to the West from Iraq was largely secular. The most successful national liberation movements throughout the Arab nations post-1945 were largely secular (Nasser in Egypt, Kassem in Iraq, Mossadeq in Iran, the FIN in Algeria, the PLO in Palestine, etc, etc. etc.).
It was the temporary Revisionist collapse of the communist movement’s serious revolutionary anti-imperialism which has momentarily given Islamic fundamentalism the brief chance to play a rabble-rousing “leadership” role (while the total fraud of Stalin’s “peaceful coexistence” continues to sink-in worldwide, now having totally undermined the Soviet workers state and having left the Third World virtually defenceless against any imperialist military tyranny that American monopoly-capitalist domineering chooses to inflict).
Hamas and Islamic Jihad have played important armed resistance roles in challenging Zionism’s genocidal colonising tyranny to steal the country of Palestine away from its rightful owners in the monstrous post-1945 Western imperialist diktats — ONLY because Arafat’s “coexistence” capitulatory nonsense has taken as long as Stalin’s Revisionism to die.
But it is secular Palestinian revolution which will finally drive the Jewish imperialists back to the west from where they came.
And in Iran now, the bogus “anti-imperialism” of the Ayatollahocracy will slowly but surely give way to the communist anti-imperialist revolutionism which has also only been temporarily disoriented by, once again, the disastrous aftermath of Stalin’s “peaceful road” Revisionist nonsense, (plus the crafty initial insertion by the West of the Ayatollah Islamic Fundamentalism in 1979 when proletarian mass revolt in South Tehran is what had really brought down the West’s favourite imperialist stooge, the Shah.)
For the REAL fundamentalist NAZI lunacy, look to the societies of imperialist culture which really are trying to recreate the colonial-supremacist past, or just grab a belated share of the modern imperialist spoils (as Germany tried to do under Hitler), or simply just postpone an uncertain future by any means possible.
[“Temporarily” is of course relative to the tens of thousands of years of human history, or at least the eight centuries of capitalist rule, and can mean months or even decades, but the point remains.] And meanwhile things go from bad to worse for imperialism which has not succeeded in pacifying anywhere with neo-colonialist rule, or establishing the once much vaunted “New World Order” supposedly possible with the bragged about “end of history” (hardly mentioned anymore) of continuing untroubled “democratic” imperialist world exploitation.
The disastrous chaos and mess, stirred up by the war defeats suffered by the new colonialism in Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq etc, and the huge boost it gave to insurgency recruitment, has rocked the dominant US empire back on its heels, creating internal splits and uncertainties so deep they almost toppled not just the George W Bush presidency, but Presidency in general, salvaged only by the “black man in the White House” fraud of Obama-ism.
This “liberal” hoodwinking racket (helped into power by fake-“left” diversionary “Politically Correct” single-issue anti-revolutionary politics, like feminism, black nationalism and the “gay vote”) had to be allied with a pretence of withdrawal from direct warmongering (because of the endless dollar, and bodybag-emotional, costs it was imposing), switching to remote warmongering and proxy civil war instead, to disrupt and prevent the revolutionary ferment from coalescing anywhere.
But the Third World rebellion has developed anyway, despite, or rather because of, the non-stop depravities of the “war on terror” (which has seen the “withdrawing” Obama carry out more torture, Guantánamo-imprisonment, bombing and routine drone assassination etc, than ever before).
But far from educating and alerting the working class to this imperialist failure and the weakness of its system, the fake-“left” capitulation to imperialist scapegoating has become ever deeper.
It now goes along completely with the notions of “jihadism” as the “main threat to the world”, losing all sight of the catastrophic nature of capitalism’s crisis (relegated to just anther reformist battle to “Stop Austerity” instead of the epochal and unstoppable collapse of the entire 800 year class exploitation system into utter mayhem).
Their confusion comes from a petty bourgeois shallowness that fails to see, and out of class instinct does not want to see, the revolutionary crisis steadily deepening in the world, a paralysis and breakdown of all existing society solvable only by a massive overturning of everything now taken for granted and the rebuilding of the world on a completely new basis of communal ownership of the means of production.
It is expressed most sharply in their complete failure to explain and understand the 2011 Arab Spring, and the shaming support they all gave - give - to the counter-revolution against it, and the tangle of confused support or denunciations of various sides of the Middle East seeming chaos.
All the “left” groups ended up denouncing this revolt - “condemning terrorism” or declaring it to be reactionary – while supporting such barbarity as the new General Sisi “elected” dictatorship in Egypt, which took power in 2013 with cold-blooded street slaughter of thousands of unarmed civilians in Cairo, and now imposes mass death sentences in joke show- trials against any dissenters, puts critical journalists in prison for years on end, and released the former gangster dictator Hosni Mubarak, the Washington/Zionism stooge that the original Cairo revolts set out to, and did, topple.
Their support of the 2013 anti-Muslim Brotherhood stunt is either treacherous betrayal or muddle-brained confusion, born of petty bourgeois opportunism.
It is worth restating events: the growing insurgency against Washington’s warmongering and counter-revolutionary interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and erupting spontaneously elsewhere like Nigeria, west Africa, was accelerated by the global financial meltdown of 2007-8 when the long-maturing underlying crisis of imperialism (already driving the warmongering of the past decade against Serbia, Iraq, etc) broke surface; it found full expression in a qualitative shift from sporadic terrorist and suicide-bombing struggles (heroic and determined as many were in particularly the desperate Palestinian revolt for example) into the huge sudden mass demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt.
These shattering eruptions, bring down imperialist stooge dictators, created ruling class panic worldwide particularly over giant Egypt, with a long history of anti-imperialism, and by far the biggest population of the Arab world, or most of the Middle East.
Washington prematurely set in train half-completed plans to stir up populist petty bourgeois counter-revolutions in nearby "rogue states" (a CIA technique well-honed in assorted “colour revolutions”).
Dressed up as “extensions of the Arab Spring” in nearby Libya and Syria, these were obviously bogus revolts, in “rogue state” countries hated by the West for their left-nationalist erratic anti-imperialist intransigence (unlike “our man” Mubarak) and long near the top of Pentagon and New American Century “to deal with” lists.
Some of the fake-“left” swallowed this nonsense, as the shallow “street movement” tail-ending Trotskyists did, exactly as they have previously swallowed numerous imperialist counter-revolutionary stunts, like the Solidarnosc bogus “trade union” in Poland which pushed over the revisionist workers state (aided by revisionism’s own philosophical implosion) to re-establish extreme Catholic reaction, now allied with the fascist right in Kiev etc and sending soldiers to join imperialist world interventions.
Others like the Stalinists, (and one or two maverick Trot groups) woodenly declared for these regimes, on the right side against imperialism perhaps but feeding illusions that Assad or Gaddafi’s bourgeois nationalism and idiosyncratic “socialist” reformism were a way forwards, supporting their confused bourgeois nationalism and losing sight of all wider perspectives of the crisis.
And this weakness, failing to keep imperialism in focus all the time, and thinking a “left-ish” bourgeois regime was a “step on the road” to full socialism (a totally reformist world view, derived from Moscow revisionist mistakes) led the museum Stalinists into a wooden categorising view of the world; declaring all the civil war disruption against Assad to be absolutely reactionary.
But the sectarian chaos stirred up against Assad by Western provocations and demented media lie onslaughts about government “atrocities” – (more successfully than in Libya where the pathetic opportunist petty bourgeois “revolt” stirred up was so thin it had to be supplemented with a nazi-NATO invasion, with the Obama presidency keeping a low profile and letting the French and British take the leadership “credit”) – while obviously initially provoked and manipulated by Western intervention, is neither part of imperialism nor in its control.
Rigidly categorising all such jihadism as “headbanging reaction” - a sweeping generalisation then extended to uprisings and revolts from Mali to Nigeria, as well as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, is crude mechanical thinking, putting everything in boxes, that has seen the Stalinists line up with Sisi in Egypt, or with the imperialist bombing of ISIS in Iraq and Syria, which has nothing to do with “protecting freedom” and everything to do with extending capitalist war mayhem.
Of course these movement have become increasingly ruthless, borrowing and adopting the terrorising methods for their own rebellion that they have learned from, or been deliberately schooled in by imperialism, not least in the vicious and brutal ethnic cleansing imposed on numerous city districts in Syria early on, with imperialist money, training and arms, fed directly or through the reactionary Gulf states, and clearly prompted and provoked by covert agents fed across the border (including certainly Zionist provocateurs), along with a deluge of media lies about the Damascus government’s alleged and utterly unverified “repression”.
It is impossible at any one moment in the welter of disinformation and contradictory reports about the turmoil in Syria and Libya, to be definitive about the nature of any of the dozens of sects and groups, nor to pin down what their subjective understanding might be; but then all the more reason to take a long perspective focussed around what is clear, which is the Marxist understanding of the material causes of the historic crisis, the breakdown of the monopoly capitalist world, which is the sole driving force of crisis on the planet; everything else being a response to it, and struggle against it.
Equally the nature of these upheavals is constantly changing, as the struggles themselves cope with various contradictions and failings of their own subjective understanding.
The ISIS in Syria is exactly an example, spawned as part of jihadist anti-imperialist revolt against the American Iraq invasion and developing and expanding since; drawn into sectarian conflict there and subsequently in Syria, and turned against the Assad regime as part of the deliberate civil war set in motion after the Cairo Spring, playing a reactionary role aiding imperialism: but then breaking with the collection of backward sectarian anti-Assad forces and heading out on its own path, including invading Iraq, to the consternation of imperialism.
This is not part of the plan and more like a “blowback” against it.
It seems from the hesitant and partial imperialist bombing campaign against ISIS – strangely ineffectual given the alleged intent to “wipe out this evil” etc etc and considering the enormous firepower available from US and now French aircraft carriers etc, and landside use of Turkish airbases – that there is still an astonishingly cynical intent to try and use ISIS and its confused and backward sectarian hatred of the Assad regime, by “punishing” it for transgressing Washington plans in Iraq while “corralling it” away from Baghdad, where an American placed stooge Shia government is “in control” and back into Syria, fully intent on using its ruthlessness against Assad.
Imperialist dirty dealing is quite capable of this, while simultaneously denouncing the most gruesome of the ISIS fighting methods to whip up public opinion into a frenzy of “kill them all” hatred, stampeding the world into universal war hysteria.
And overall war is the aim, the only way out of crisis capitalism has got, distracting everyone from the real causes of disaster and getting ready for the giant inter-imperialist conflicts to come as the QE artificial respiration for the collapsed world economy finally peters out and the 2008 disaster returns, magnified ten times further by the delay and QE itself (which has already been feeding the international currency and trade wars, intensifying as the markets collapse).
The need for revolution to end this horror is tragically underlined by the desperation of the now millions fleeing war zones and chaos.
But the fake-“left” deliberately says nothing covering up its evasion by pumping out idiotic and self-righteous demands to “welcome all migrants and asylum seekers”, which is not only ludicrously impossible - are 500 million desperate people from Africa and the Middle East to be “welcomed” just like that into an economy which is already savaging living standards, services and wages??? - but a recipe for confusion, stirring up defensive nationalism and driving hard-pressed workers into the hands of UKIP and worse.
The posturing of a few mansion owning popstars like Bob Geldorf with the wealth to put up a few families for a short period is not only not any kind of answer to the refugee crisis - not even a sticking plaster on an amputation – but it covers up and avoids the only possible answer to the war destruction.
Such charity is worse than useless – its is a palliative that helps keep capitalism in place.
Without tackling that question there is no solution but only more war destruction as the EPSR has long explained about the “open doors” posturing [EPSR 1091 29-05-01]:
The impractical and empty-gesture politics of “end all immigration controls” and “welcome all asylum-seekers from everywhere” teach the working class absolutely nothing about the disruptive stunts, rackets, and breakdowns indicative of the whole imperialist system in terminal crisis, but only tend to add to local communities’ immediate worries or confusion, playing right into the hands of the fascists.
Immigrant refugee floods and opportunist economic migration are both safety-valve features of imperialist economic-crisis-management which can only continue to help defuse Third-World revolution while yet adding to the already grotesquely belittling and intimidating imbalances in wealth between the First and Third worlds. People big enough and determined enough to abandon their own homelands and cultures in order to suffer the constant humiliation of being unwanted immigrants in backward imperialist countries need every encouragement to become anti-imperialist revolutionaries either here or back home, but hardly need it for stimulating individualist betterment or immigrationist reformism.
Opportunist reactionaries do not cease to be such just because they become immigrants somewhere, and while opposing anti-immigrant prejudices could close off one avenue of racist backwardness, adopting the purely reformist challenge to the imperialist state to drop all immigration controls could just as easily help the establishment to play into fascism’s hands, creating fresh ‘racist’ grievances ripe for exploitation.
[EPSR No 1040 18-04-00]:
It is a complete recipe for continued imperialist disaster on earth. There is not even a hint that there is anything wrong with domination of the planet by free-market capital. There is not even the slightest suggestion that what the world’s masses really need is to get monopoly-capitalist exploitation off their backs so that their own homelands can be transformed into flourishing countries, all roughly equal the whole world over.
In reality, it reveals cynical contempt towards the struggle for international socialist revolution, faith in which gets an occasional routine airing as the redeeming grace of these ‘left purists’.
In practice, it amounts to the most demented ‘reformist’ nonsense imaginable. It implies that as world capitalist crisis relentlessly deepens, bringing with it inevitable increases in divide-and-rule racist tensions deliberately being stoked up by collapsing imperialist establishments everywhere as a last hope of political survival, --- then simple altruistic urging on the doorstep by self-righteous ‘lefts’ such as the LSA will achieve instant racial harmony, and the fascist danger rampant in every imperialist slump in history, will simply disappear without trace.
The working class will allegedly respond to growing mass unemployment and poverty by swarming forward to demand an end to all immigration controls as their most pressing anti-crisis demand.
This LSA ‘left’ swamp is not just fake-’socialist’ but is close to being mentally deranged. This is Jehovah Witness territory, and as remote from practical blood-and-guts Bolshevik revolutionary reality as it is possible to be.
Right round the world, racial conflict is escalating rapidly as crisis-induced class-war frictions explode uncontrollably. Indonesia, in flames from racial-conflict diversions almost from end to end, is the obvious way the whole world is going to go. [Or the Middle East now - ed]
Mere reformist preaching at this problem to make it go away is just playing into the hands of the imperialist ruling-class, gaining time for them.
Only by taking the international economic and political system completely out of the hands of the free-market bourgeoisie will a real start even begin to be made to ending the racist nonsense in human culture once and for all. No class-exploitation mode of production (the free market) can possibly avoid systematic breeding of racist prejudices and backwardness of all kinds, no matter what reformist laws or altruistic examples are introduced.
Of course racist attitudes should not be tolerated anywhere, and racist prejudice should be constantly re-educated, and of course Bill Morris is right to accuse even this oh-so-politically-correct New Labour regime of creating “a climate of fear” by its “degrading, divisive, and stigmatising” asylum voucher system.
And Margaret Jay’s reply, Blair’s minister, that Morris was just covering up for his lorry drivers whose professed ignorance that they had illegal immigrants stowed aboard “beggars belief”, was a monstrous disgrace.
But the reality that mafia crime is already deeply established in the sordid exploitation of immigrant transportation (using the pattern of frequent container-transport changeovers, etc, and a thousand and one other ways of making money out of smuggling illegal immigrants past Customs) should help bring all sides to their senses. Like drugs and prostitution, if the free-market world wants it, the free-market world will get it. Despite all barriers, if people want to migrate, the free-market system will, for money, find a way to make it happen, legally or illegally.
But like all bourgeois law, agitating for ‘no immigration controls’, – with the implication that this will help defeat racism, – is almost as big an illusion as the Blairite deception that ‘firm but fair’ asylum controls will ‘calm fears’ and ‘help enhance social harmony’.
...All immigration controls are obviously racist by their very definition; but educating the world out of those prejudices by trying to treat the immigration-control symptom, is as futile as trying to cure bubonic plague by offering someone a box of tissues to help with their sneezing. Far from achieving anti-racist re-education, the reformist pipe-dream of ‘no immigration controls at all’, while the capitalist free-market and national economic rivalry remains the way of the world, will simply add fuel to the fire of this deliberate imperialist diversion.
Getting rid of capitalism is the only serious and practicable anti-racist policy. It is the same paradox as with revolution. It might seem simpler to just try to reform capitalism. In practice, that will prove impossible, and it will be easier, in fact, to overthrow it.
[EPSR No1093 12-06-01]--
Just parading their utterly abstract and academic ultra-’political correctness’ line of “no immigration controls” and “welcome all asylum-seekers”, etc, is worse than useless. If the literally hundreds of millions who would willingly exchange grinding Third World poverty and/or political disillusionment, despair, or repression for First World affluence could actually make it to Britain, then the practical stupidity and pointlessness of this ultra-’politically correct’ posturing would become all too apparent.
But even as things stand, the ‘nobility’ of the gesture is the vainest and emptiest show imaginable since in reality all it is doing is giving a fake-’left’ cover to existing bourgeois reformist practice, legitimising the very manipulativeness of the capitalist state which it claims to be setting out to expose as ‘racism’........Changing Britain’s immigration laws is pure reformism and not ‘revolutionary’ at all, no matter how apparently extreme the “no immigration controls at all” academic posture might seem. And not once throughout this whole immigration controversy has the fake-’left’ exposed the deliberate imperialist political encouraging of worldwide emigration for more than a century as a safety valve to take the more enterprising away from crisis-ridden countries where revolution would be the only other option. A socialist revolution in Britain would have the immediate clear internationalist duty, - as posturingly accepted by both the SA and the SLP, - to instantly start helping every other nation on earth to achieve their own socialist revolution. Tens of thousands don’t like life in Kosovo, or Iraq, or Sudan, or Nigeria, or Bangladesh, etc, etc????? Fine, great. So instantly equip them with training, revolutionary education, and material support for an organised return to their homelands to fight for a revolutionary improvement in conditions there. It would be all-round entirely reactionary, to just encourage the individuals who had the drive and ambition to leave their homelands for something better, to just swell the catering and cleaning casual labour force in Britain, or help British backwardness to continue to ignore its gap in training sufficient doctors and nurses of its own, or teachers, etc, etc.
So what is the ‘revolutionary’ point of encouraging reforms for “complete freedom of immigration” now, under capitalism??
There isn’t any. It grants the capitalist state the right to play God over human lives when the only thing worth thinking about any capitalist state or any of its activities is that they are all out-of-date and irrelevant and that the only worthwhile future is to abolish all capitalist states immediately. It pretends even more stupidly that sound ‘reforms’ to a capitalist state’s immigration laws can make a capitalist state quite a worthwhile and tolerable thing after all, pure reformist nonsense. And it says to the native working class that the only real problem is their racist intolerance of all the immigrant newcomers. “Welcome all asylum-seekers” working-class communities everywhere are instructed. “Any problem you think you might have with this rests entirely in your own backward racist prejudices”.
......It is quite pointless telling culturally disadvantaged and economically-deprived proletarian communities that more immigrant admissions to the already-lengthening dole queues and housing queues and hospital queues and social services queues could not possibly adversely affect their own lives and that they must overcome their own natural prejudice with a leap in philosophical magnanimity to simply “welcome all asylum seekers”.
It is not going to happen, and the BNP’s intervention spreading ludicrously bogus ‘comfort’ about serving ‘British nationals’ first is a warning to the fake ‘socialist’ swamp to start shedding their own anti-communist and counter-revolutionary prejudices themselves, and quickly, so that a serious Marxist-Leninist revolutionary movement can start to be built in the working class, making the only possible sensible anti-capitalist observations and proposals on the immigration question, making world revolution the only sane answer for all, and the only long-term possibility for consigning backward racist prejudices to the dustbin of history.
In the last 15 years, this understanding has been emphasised a hundred times over by a huge increase in migrant labour in the UK (and the other major Western European economies) from the poorer former workers states firstly, then from the crisis hit economies like Greece, Spain, and Portugal, and finally from the Middle East and Africa.
There is no longer a question of “if vast numbers could come here etc” but a huge real increase in the foreign working numbers, taking the UK population from 59 million to 63 million in a few years.
Clearly it has hit the local working class, which in the absence of any revolutionary or Marxist perspective (a damning black mark against the fake-“left”), has in part turned to defensive petty nationalism like UKIP (not yet necessarily on a wide scale and in many cases with sound instincts against its reactionariness, but without any alternative either).
Imported labour serves at least a double purpose for capitalism; firstly in vastly increasing the labour pool in the UK, with foreign workers prepared to take wages and salaries which greatly undercut indigenous levels, and extend the “reserve army of the unemployed” as Marx characterised it, reducing the ability of workers to organise and maintain living standards; and secondly stripping the best, fittest and youngest workers from countries like Poland, (where post-communist near-fascist conditions were disastrous for the working class, with massive unemployment and low wages), releasing political pressure that would otherwise build up.
Additionally this movement fosters backward individualistic attitudes in particularly many of east European workers, sneering at “lazy English workers” etc and helping sustain the most reactionary of regimes “at home” (where post-Soviet anti-communist governments express some of the most extreme nationalistic hostility against refugees).
Nor is it a surprise that a whole wing of the Tory ruling class, particularly the small and medium business sector, is strongly in favour of European “free movement of labour” with the Confederation of British Industry one of the strongest pro-European lobbying bodies, and David Cameron walking a tightrope between that and Little Englander anti-Europeanism.
Such is the moribund state of British industry in particular, and “old” European capital in general, that without this cheap labour most of it would go under in the cutthroat competitive conditions of the world crisis.
Dramatic surges of desperate “economic migrants” from Africa, and increasingly war and terror refugees are compounding these problems.
Particularly with Syria it is notable that it is the better off, English-speaking middle class which is on the move, those with enough money to pay the gangster smugglers, and to organise their escape, and those with a reactionary hostility to the Assad regime; interviewees recently have included lawyers and surgeons, who while reduced to total desperation - and facing mortal risks – are also driven by reactionary hostility.
Denuding a country like Syria of its trained and skilled professionals simply compounds the agony being imposed by the Western provoked civil war while propping up countries in Western Europe,openly boasting of how they can supplement “ageing workforces”.
The UK ruling class is particularly cynical in its pretence of “doing something” - refusing refugees altogether at first and then setting up a system of “selective asylum” directly granted within Syria –thereby allowing British immigration to weed out all but the most reactionary.
Of course there is huge sympathy and wish to “do something” among ordinary people, but as explained above it will firstly solve nothing to demand “open doors”, and secondly could rapidly see such sentiment turn to its opposite as the huge strains on already stretched services and jobs reach breaking point.
That is not an argument to “do nothing”; it is an argument for doing what alone can change things, - building a revolutionary movement.
Neither Corbynite “left” Labourism nor the fake-“left” pseudo-Marxists say any such thing. Build Leninism.
Don Hoskins
Back to the top