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No 1481 14th November 2015

Delayed admission of terrorist bomb responsible for Sinai crash shows callous cynicism of Western skulduggery desperate to maintain re-installed Sisi gangster dictatorship in Egypt at all costs against Arab Spring mass upheaval. But the blow exposes Bonapartist Putin for Western-apeing Syrian intervention against “terrorism” which simply plays into the hands of imperialism’s “jihadist” demonising and Nazi Islamist-scapegoating war stampede. The whole “condemn the monstrous terrorism” propaganda is a lying cover and excuse for the real source and cause of all the war destruction, the non-stop blitzing and torture imposed by capitalism itself as a way out of epochal economic and political catastrophe which unravels unstoppably despite temporary Quantitative Easing boost. Fake-“left” once again joins imperialist moralising “condemnation” instead of explaining the crisis basis of world “jihadism” as the initial confused revolutionary turmoil of a world in terminal disintegration. Clear Leninist revolutionary perspectives are the urgent need everywhere

The desperate airlift for thousands of winter sun seeking British tourists (and now Russians too) stranded in the Sharm el-Sheikh Sinai resort, is an humiliating blow for Western imperialism’s nonsensical “war on terror” and its Bonapartist apeing in corrupt gangster oligarch-dominated Moscow.

The Third World revolt against the catastrophic capitalist crisis just keeps on rising.

But far from explaining the defeat represented by this devastating further failure of Western domineering and war plans, the plane crash disaster and its chaotic aftermath will be traitorously “condemned” by all the fake “left” once more, just as they have all capitulated across the board to the imperialist demand to “condemn terrorism” ever since 9/11.

Obviously the death of nearly 300 random people is a human tragedy but the continued denunciations of the Middle Eastern and Third world rebellion as “headbanging jihadism” using “unacceptable” methods, will do nothing to stop such attacks.

Just the opposite, until the real and only cause and generator of such mayhem and chaos is firmly identified as the epochal breakdown of all world relationships arising from the catastrophic monopoly capitalist crisis, and the revolutionary answer to it made conscious and fought for, it can only continue and deepen, as it has been for more than two decades.

Petty bourgeois moralising against “terrorists and jihadists” – either declared to be “reactionary” or “really part of imperialism run by the CIA” – becomes part of the problem and not the answer, helping imperialism’s warmongering “kill them all” hate frenzy to be whipped up.

Instead of clearly identifying the material cause of the ever spreading anti-Western hatred and ferment, or even seeing the anti-imperialist content of this rising struggle at all, this lets the monopoly capitalist ruling class literally demonise it, declaring the great upheavals to be the “work of the devil” or of “evil madmen”.

It is not an “explanation” but a descent into irrationality and mysticism deliberately being fostered as part of imperialism’s drive to war and destruction, its only way out of the intractable collapse of the entire private profit system (just as in 1914 and 1939 - but worse).

Such primitivism is the very opposite of the rational and clear objective science - revolutionary Leninism - needed to lead the world out of the barbarism it is being dragged into.

It is consciously and deliberately fostered by imperialism to whip up mindless hatred, racism, and fear as a diversion from and excuse for its own collapse and bankruptcy.

The fake-“left” groups across the broad which “condemn” the ISIS and much other Islamist rebellion have been capitulating to this irrationality since at least the 9/11 events as pointed out immediately afterwards (EPSR 1109 23-10-01):

If particular disasters likely to befall a hated world-domination imperialist system are to be ‘condemned’ in line with general bourgeois ‘shock horror’ propaganda, then the pretence of nevertheless still being in favour of ‘all-out class war’ is just hypocritical posturing, because of refusing to take advantage of all the difficulties the system is facing in order to overthrow it, - as Lenin explains.

It is precisely because this class-collaborating stance of “all agreed in condemnation of Sept 11 massacre of innocents” has uncovered the philosophical humbug at the heart of fake-‘left’ anti-imperialist ‘revolutionism’ that the 57 varieties of Trot and Revisionist petty-bourgeois posturing have so desperately tried to pretend that “imperialism has been strengthened” by the so-called “disastrous terrorist crime”.

The true rottenness of all subjective-idealist philosophy of course oozes out at such a point like foul pus, - prepared to say anything about reality purely in order to “prove” the justice or correctness of a class attitude already instinctively adopted. These middle-class don’t want to be associated with Sept 11 despite wanting to posture as “sincere, all-the-way, anti-imperialist revolutionaries”. So any crap distortion of reality will do to “prove” them right to “condemn terrorism”.

The biggest joke of all, of course, is that the serious scientific Marxist-Leninist disagreement with terrorism as necessarily the best first-choice tactics for fighting imperialism, and its obvious potential disadvantage if trying to build a mass proletarian party of revolutionary political theory as the only possible way to finally defeat imperialism (see EPSR 1106, etc) not only does not imply or require any condemnation of terrorist tactics to substantiate Marxism’s own credibility, but does not lead to any philosophical contradictions if the OBJECTIVE damage to imperialism from other sources or causes (including al-Qaeda terrorism) is acknowledged.

This is exactly the point that Lenin was explaining to the 57 varieties of fake-’lefts’ which plagued the workers movement then. To joyfully take advantage of Tsarism’s humiliation and defeat by truly loathsome Kaiser colonial-imperialism in no way implied anything but utter contempt for German monopoly-capitalist domination.

The situation of Sept 11 should have been a thousand times easier for today’s fake-’lefts’ to get their heads round because only in complete subjective-idealist irrationality could the tragic handful of suicide-bomber fundamentalists be confused as “another German colonial-imperialist military aggression”, either under its Kaiser mantle or its Nazi version (and so what, anyway, Lenin would add).

Once again, all that the pathetic fake-’left’ attempts (to portray al-Qaeda as the “new Nazism”) achieve is to draw attention to their own philosophical squirming as they somehow sense the ground slipping away from under their “condemn terror” idiotic posturing.

A first lesson to draw out of the latest tragedy is the cynical willingness of the British (and Russia) to leave their own people exposed to danger – at least initially.

As even many bourgeois observers and commentators have said ever since the Afghan and Iraq wars were unleashed, the brutal “shock and awe” revenge bullying of the world has been the best recruiting sergeant ever for Third Wold revolt, which temporarily, but not exclusively emerges as Islamic fundamentalism.

And this lesson is now so glaring that the entire world could immediately see cause and effect between the “kill them all” bombing runs imposed on Syria’s ISIS by Moscow’s latest “anti-terror” interventions and the deadly explosion bringing down a passenger plane over the Egyptian desert.

But both the Western media and the Western-apeing Bonapartist “anti-terrorism” strutting in Moscow initially were playing down the incident.

The usual belligerent crowing against Russia by the West, telling Putin that he had got his “comeuppance” for intervening in Syria - which only two weeks ago was a major part of Western propaganda because Moscow was bombing the CIA-stooge Free Syrian Army in Syria - vanished too, at least temporarily.

Instead immediately following the downing of the Russian airliner back to St Petersburg the intelligence agency dominated news wires insistently fed out the story that the shock crash had “nothing to do” with the anti-Cairo regime, anti-Zionist insurgency in the Sinai, and revenge for Russian warmongering bombs in Syria.

Such reticence was in marked contrast to the downing of the MH17 passenger jet over eastern Ukraine, when the Western media immediately whipped up a hate campaign on no evidence at all against “Russian backed separatists” alleged to have hit the plane.

The Sinai fighters were alleged, equally on no evidence at all, to be “incapable” of hitting such a plane because it was “flying too high” (the same altitude as the Ukrainian plane in fact).

Why renounce the chance to pin the blame on “terrorists” as usual, to keep on whipping up the “kill them all” anti-”terrorism” war fever capitalism needs as its crisis catastrophe heads for disaster?

Because while it suited Western subversion, backing the Kiev fascist populist coup in Ukraine, to demonise the supposedly “monstrous actions” of the anti-western anti-Nazi working class Donbass rebels (when the guilt almost certainly lay with the Kiev death-squad and freelance fascists thugs) to stampede public opinion into supporting the aggression against them and against Russia behind them, the Sinai incident has shaken the West to the core.

It was desperate to talk down the dangers (and to hell with the “safety of our own people”) in order to keep in place the teetering Egyptian economy, already hammered by the world capitalist meltdown and the after-effects of the Arab Spring revolt.

Cairo is the largest and most significant element in the Middle East jigsaw, with by far the greatest population (85 million) and a history of anti-imperialist revolt stretching back to Nasser and embracing at one point an entire pan-Arabic anti-Zionist anti-imperialism.

Losing it is potentially a devastating blow to imperialist control of the Middle East, both in itself but also far and wide as it spreads renewed anti-imperialist inspiration, firstly throughout the Arab speaking world, and potentially, despite sectarian differences, into Iran, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa and even further.

Eventually this could trigger all kinds of developments including potentially a re-emergence of anti-capitalist and ultimately communist understanding.

When it suddenly and spontaneously erupted in popular revolt in February 2011, bringing millions onto the street, ready to die against the Western funded and supported gangster tyrant Hosni Mubarak, the entire bourgeois world was poleaxed with panic and fear.

This Arab Spring was a popular rebellion on a scale far beyond the growing anti-imperialist insurgencies and Islamic fundamentalism which have unstoppably spread since the barbaric revenge wars on Iraq and Afghanistan following 9/11; it was an upwelling qualitatively different in its mass participation.

Keeping a murderous lid on this revolt, or turning it back, has been vital for Western interests ever since, not in the shallow “war for oil” sense (long since discredited as the central explanation anyway by the collapse in prices as the crisis has bitten home) but strategically and politically.

It will be much more difficult next time it erupts (as it must at some point) to head off a renewed mass movement with a halfway house compromise reformist like Mohamed Morsi and the “soft” “democracy” end of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Morsi was tolerated by Washington as the “best of a bad choice” which helped jostle him into place to fill the vacuum in 2012, until the “bourgeois parliamentary voting” illusions were overturned by renewed military coup counter-revolution in 2013, under General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Bloody violence and street massacres of unarmed, peacefully-demonstrating thousands were used to consolidate this military-rule and it has become a byword for repression and judicial stitch-up since, with even the legally elected president Morsi now, grotesquely, sentenced to death and the old US and Zionist stooge dictator Mubarak released again.

As soon as “decently” possible the US token “human rights” protest against its repression was dropped by the Zionism-friendly Obama presidency, with John Kerry flying in to reinstate US aid and arms supplies to the military.

So important is the grip on Egypt considered that just as this Sinai attack unfolded, David Cameron’s Tory government was in the middle of further sanitising the Cairo dictatorship with a much protested diplomatic visit to London.

This repellent alliance, cemented with four days of unctuous uncritical hospitality for “President” Sisi at No 10, is considered so urgent that the glaring hypocrisy of denouncing assorted demonised “rogue states” for allegedly “shooting down their own people” (eg Assad in Syria, Gaddafi etc) and being ready to bomb them into the floor because of it, while saying nothing about Sisi’s cold-blooded street killings of unarmed civilians, or the equally absurd cheering on of the “establishment of democracy finally” against the “rule of the generals” in Myanmar, (via the British Oxbridge-trained Buddhist supporting reactionary and anti-Muslim racist Aung San Suu Kyi), is all completely brushed under the carpet (as too is the Saudi primitivism’s disgusting and continuing massacring war on Yemen).

These contradictions are not just hypocrisy in fact but well beyond it.

“Hypocrisy” could only imply double-dealing on “moral standards”, or that political principles were being ignored, which could be re-established by “better people”.

But these staggering inconsistencies are simply the Goebbels reality of the capitalist order and a totally cynical ruling class and its lying “doublethink” pretences about democracy.

The entire racket of bourgeois parliamentary democracy has always been a total hoodwinking fraud masking the actual dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (ask the ludicrously gold-braided General Houghton) behind a lying illusion that ordinary people “have a say” (only if it suits General Houghton and his class).

But the desperation of the ruling class is making the pretence harder and harder to hide despite the relentless “black is white” brainwashing on the “democracy” question which every individual in capitalist society is deluged with from cradle to grave.

The British holidaymakers were just disposable pawns in this cynical crisis manipulation.

The declarations of “no terrorism here” were not “reasonable caution” but show the ruling class willing to jeopardise and gamble with thousands of ordinary lives to keep things going and salvage its al-Sisi Cairo stooge.

The West knows it is vital to sustain the tourist revenue which almost alone is saving Cairo from bankruptcy (and which will obviously now come to a shuddering halt).

Without it Egypt could face renewed explosive mass popular upheaval if the economy disintegrates, just as the gangster Hosni Mubarak did in early 2011, because the huge anti-imperialist undercurrent has not gone away.

This time it would erupt with a mass population which has been taught its own deep lessons about the fraud and violent coup lies of the “democracy” it was “offered” when Mubarak’s 30 year gangster tyranny was toppled.

But the British ruling class finally panicked at the impact that another tragic plane disaster would have on its own already growing domestic discontent (surging around in the November 5th Million Mask March anarchy for example).

There could be no pretending a second downing was “due to a damaged tailplane”.

So it has had to come clean (in a mealy-mouthed way) about “intelligence indications of a bomb” etc and so too did the Putin fronted oligarch mess in Moscow.

There was almost certainly major international pressure to do so too, behind the scenes, from the European bourgeoisie (German and French in particular) over the valued Airbus corporation facing a devastating hit to its safety reputation if the “fault in the A319 plane” story continues, (the alternative “explanation” for the disaster) just when the giant Volkswagen car corporation is reeling from the multi-billion dollar impact of safety scandals deliberately set running by US competitive pressures.

That could be a another devastating blow in the escalating European bloc trade war with America, at the point when the world monopoly capitalist economic crisis is on the edge of even greater disaster than the 2008 “credit crunch” bank collapses, as the temporary “upturn” effect of insane QE valueless money printing peters out and the cutthroat reality of inter-imperialist aggressive competition returns with a vengeance.

This London panic surely indicates a ruling class at sixes and sevens as the crisis deepens, and as the worldwide rebellion against the West continues to gather pace.

As well as specific skulduggery around Egypt the ruling class wants to play down the Sinai revolt because it is far harder to demonise outright, and undermines all the hate campaigning against these worldwide revolts.

The absurd “war on terror” justification for now non-stop capitalist aggression and wholesale destruction of country after country, is built on painting the Islamist movements as irrational barbarians, pretending that the ruthlessness and violence in the world is all on one side, having suddenly arisen from “religious nutcases” more or less “out of the blue”.

The notion of an otherwise “calm and peaceful” “democratic” world is laughable of course when the industrial scale slaughter, torture, terror and war destruction imposed by the Washington-led West is magnitudes beyond anything world resistance could do, slaughtering and butchering tens of millions, but some headway with capitalist public opinion is made with this Nazi-scapegoating.

That in part is because the sectarian and religious confusion and weirdness of the insurgents is not the answer to the epochal breakdown everywhere and no better answer, revolutionary Marxism, has yet been rebuilt after decades of revisionist confusion and retreat.

As in the quote above, that does not preclude a Leninist analysis from seeing the objective impact such movements are having pushing back on imperialist world tyranny, even while making clear that Marxist science stands apart ideologically.

This gigantic Third World movement is striking telling blows against the warmongering barbarism of the West, and is the early, inchoate, often confused form of an unstoppable rise of world revolution against centuries of Western exploitation and colonialist tyranny spreading everywhere from Boko Haram in Nigeria and revolt in Mali to Al-Shabaab in Somalia, movements in the Central African Republic, anti-Westernism in Bangla Desh and the bitter fighting in Yemen against barbaric Saudi Arabia Nazi blitzing.

Movements which have been manipulated by the West for its own purposes have also turned against it.

If its form is crude and cruel, then blame that firstly on the lessons learned throughout the world from the horrors inflicted by the rampaging Western powers since at least the rise of the Spanish Empire, and the endless degradation, massacres, total and attempted genocides (Aborigines, indigenous New World nations, Incas Zulus, Arabs, Berbers, Aztecs, Maoris, Indians, Chinese etc), on slavery and on the humiliation imposed on multiple generations of ordinary people (mostly the “little brown natives”) in the colonies’ sweatshops and plantations, worked into the ground forever more to sustain the “Western lifestyle” and above all the grotesque, indolent wealth and power of the tiny minority ruling class.

Blame it too more immediately on the now non-stop BIG LIE backed warmongering imposed by Washington and its tailending stooges like Britain since at least 1998 (in Serbia) as imperialism has tried to blitz and intimidate its way out of the epochal crisis collapse of the profit system, which has been in a slow motion crisis disaster for decades of “Black Mondays”, currency collapse and credit failures, culminating in the 2008 global meltdown.

If its religious Caliphate notions are even at times backward or even reactionary - and certainly hostile to revolutionary Marxism, the only real way out of the crisis -, then blame that on decades of failure of the entire “fake-“left” circus of both Stalinist revisionism and Trotskyism and their total failure to offer a revolutionary perspective to the world, confusing and misleading the working class with reformism, lies about “democracy” and hatred of all working class discipline (written off as “totalitarianism”).

But the rebel forces in the Sinai are far harder to demonise along with the Gazans just across the border.

It is much more difficult to maintain the shallow nonsense that the resistance, self-sacrificing suicide bombings, desperate attacks and individual acts of violence by the renewed Third Palestinian Intifada have no cause, rhyme or reason other than some alleged psychotic “hatred of our way of life”, as the Western hate-propaganda declares, when the entire world can see the daily terrorising tyranny and fascist persecution poured onto the heads of the seven million Palestinian people who have had their land stripped from them for seventy years by the most monstrous ethnic cleansing intimidation and murderous colonialist exploitation and prison confinement.

Of course they try to fight back using whatever means and weaponry they are able to pull together in the absence of the hi-tech weapons systems, mass destruction military hardware and sophisticated and expensive military organisation used constantly against them.

They have no choice and will never have any choice for as long as the vile occupation of their land continues, just as the Zionist thieves and occupiers have no choice historically, if they are to continue their land-grab colonisation, but to ever intensify the brutal oppression against them.

The logic of the Zionist position is that they must constantly hold down by, the utmost violence and barbarity, the resistance which will never go away.

They thereby create an endless cycle of ever greater and more horrifying racist oppression which can either totally wipe out the indigenous Arab and Bedouin people (there for a minimum 1500 years, and more in some parts, far longer that the “British” have held their islands for example), just as several centuries of colonialism has wiped out multiple native peoples, – or be driven out finally.

Then the defeated Jewish occupiers can either return to the assorted countries from which they came or perhaps stay on or integrate into a future Palestine, if the Palestinian rulers will agree to it (which would make the best political sense).

So world wide sympathy and solidarity is now almost universal for the benighted and endlessly slaughtered, dispossessed Palestinian masses and never more so than following the grotesque Jewish occupation’s massacring brutality in summer 2014 (latest and most depraved yet of a series of such blitzkriegings) destroying half the already hellish near-prison camp Gaza strip, begun with a savage fanatical Jewish-settler vigilante killing of a Palestinian teenager, (having burning petrol poured down his throat), and continued with every deadly high-tech weapon possible blasting apart civilian men, women, and children in schools, community centres, homes and even footballing teenagers on the beach.

It would take a particularly reactionary mindset to even begin to question the right of every persecuted Palestinian to fight back against this Jewish Nazi land-theft occupation with whatever means they can and when even many bourgeois commentators have long declared that it is “not difficult to understand what drives such upheaval” any supposed “lefts” who “condemn” these fighters will find themselves stranded high and dry by working class sentiment.

But the Sinai fighters clearly stand alongside the Gazans and their fight has long attacked the Zionist enemy, and now the re-instated Cairo military dictatorship which has poured its violence upon them:

Mada Masr 22 September 2015: At the end of the ninth day of Operation Martyr’s Rights in North Sinai, the Egyptian military announced on its official Facebook page that it had killed 55 terrorists, arrested 35 suspects and destroyed 35 houses – in one day alone.

The operation, billed to the Egyptian public as the decisive battle in the state’s ongoing campaign to tackle the country’s terrorist groups, has been met with much media fanfare, and to ensure the public is kept up-to-date, the military’s spokesman has taken to social media to announce the number of deaths and arrests each day.

Attacks on Egyptian checkpoints signal escalation in Isis capabilities.

In the press, the operation has been declared a sweeping success, and commentators have predicted that domestic terrorism will be “completely eradicated” by the 6 October, to coincide with the anniversary of what is perceived to be Egypt’s great 1973 military triumph against Israel.

The operation is just one campaign of many launched by the government in response to the wave of terrorist attacks sparked by the overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi, in July 2013. The terrorist attacks have included widespread nationwide bombings targeting government buildings and civilians, in addition to the assassination of the prosecutor general in June with a car bomb.

Many of the offensives launched by the national army to tackle terrorist activity have centred on North Sinai, where the terrorist group Sinai Province – which last year announced allegiance to Islamic State, and has claimed responsibility for most major terrorist attacks in Egypt – is located.

But for the cities of Rafah and Sheikh Zuwayed,at the heart of the ongoing battle, Operation Martyr’s Rights is merely an intensification of the violence they’ve been caught up in for two years.

For the majority of Egyptians, spurred on by triumphalist news reports, the latest clashes are hoped to put an end to the fear that has been disrupting their lives, but for the people of Sinai, it’s a very different story.

Sheikh Zuwayed, a town of 70,000 people just over six miles away from the border area of Sinai, is thought to be one of the key militant strongholds in the peninsula.

For Essam, a community leader there, the last two weeks have been some of the harshest he’s ever had to endure. Fear of random shelling is constant – the last time he had access to electricity was six days ago and running water was cut the day the operation began on 7 September.

Special forces have been conducting exhaustive searches of homes during the day, he explains, while the nights are punctuated by continuous shelling and missile attacks that, according to four residents, strike more civilian homes than terrorist hideouts.

Residents say the violence started to intensify in July, when the government responded to Sinai Province’s simultaneous assaults on military strongholds in the town with shelling and ground attacks. More than 100 men died, prompting locals to refer to 1 July as “Black Wednesday”.

A few locals, like Ahmed, a resident in his 20s, say that after the clashes they couldn’t return to their homes until the next day. Even then, the military refused to show them a safe path back at the confrontation continued, he explains.

Ahmed says that the militants’ initial success was mainly because of what the residents refer to as “ghost fighters”, or what militants call “submergers”; suicide attackers, Ahmed explains, who are highly trained in street war tactics and attack alone using heavy weapons to distract the military.

On 1 July, Ahmed recounts that Sinai Province militants enforced a siege of the town for hours before the army’s F16 started to attack. It was the first time the fighting had penetrated the city so deeply.

In the days that followed, the military announced several operations targeting militant posts in the city, of which Operation Martyr’s Rights is a highlight, at least according to its media coverage.

The Egyptian army last week announced that in 11 days the campaign had left 438 militants dead, and a further 462 arrested.

Reports and military experts have asserted the success of the operation daily, saying that it has left militant groups destabilised and struggling, and that the operation is paving the way for the development of the peninsula.

Essam, however, is skeptical. “They are bombing us here in the city because they can’t come near where we all know terrorists are, deep in the desert.”

Essam says that entire villages that were associated with militants have been effectively taken off the map due to heavy shelling, leaving them completely destroyed and deserted. These include Althouma, Mahdiya, Moqataa, Lofayta and Goura, among others.

“The military considers everyone in the city to be terrorists,” Essam says. “People tell [the army] ‘We don’t want you to protect us, we know how to protect ourselves, just don’t shoot at our houses’.”

Aside from their experience of warfare, residents say diminishing services have also rendered their lives more difficult.

The main electricity line was hit in the July attacks and blacked out the city completely for 13 days. Water was completely cut too, and has returned only partially more than two weeks later.

Essam adds that some residents pooled funds to buy a generator, due to high demand. However, they could not operate it given the lack of fuel, which has been banned from entering the city since last September, purportedly because terrorists use it for armaments.

“But what about the other inhabitants of the city?” asks Essam.

In order to operate the generators, some of the residents drive to Arish, 24 miles away, and smuggle gas back in the city in litre bottles. Others take gas out of their cars.

Analysis Why Egypt’s mass evictions in Sinai are a risky strategy

For now, fleeing has become one of the only options. Essam sees pick-up trucks loaded with people and belongings leaving every day. Some residents estimate that over half of the town’s inhabitants have already left, despite military reassurances that they would guarantee the safety of the people sometimes voiced through microphones touring the town.

Ahmed, along with many other residents, finds himself between a rock and a hard place. “When the military entered Sheikh Zuwayed, we were happy, and we thought they would protect us from the terrorists. But now we’re stuck between the two: the terrorists accuse us of dealing with the military and the military says we’re all terrorists.”

*****

The bodies of eight Mexican tourists killed in a mistaken attack by Egyptian security forces in September have been returned to Mexico.

Mexico’s Foreign Relations Department said the bodies arrived on a commercial flight on Tuesday and have been taken to a Mexico City morgue. The bodies will be subject to a forensic examination before being handed over to their families.

Six Mexican tourists who were wounded in the incident on September 13 returned to Mexico on Friday. All are expected to recover.

Egyptian forces hunting militants mistakenly attacked the tourists’ convoy in Egypt’s western desert. Survivors have said the attack was carried out by helicopters and an airplane and involved bombs dropped on the tourists’ vehicles.

The dire 9/11 retreat of all the fake-“left” groups essentially cheered on or accepted the CIA (or other agencies) provoked installation of this brutal Cairo counter-revolution in July 2013, either celebrating along with the “happy crowds” (the Stalinist Lalkar/Proletarian) or tacitly accepting it by their greater hostility to the Morsi regime, declared to be unacceptable because it is “reactionary Islam” (crypto-Trots like the CPGB Weekly Worker), even if there were “some doubts” about the military.

Shallow philistinism and anarchic hostility to leadership prevailed across the board, calling for “democracy” even as the newly elected democratic president Morsi was being toppled; the anti-authority notions of “flat leadership” and “no hierarchies”, imported from the “Occupy” movements worldwide, rejecting any attempted deeper understanding or organised scientific leadership.

What was needed for the great mass rebellion there – and throughout the world – is the battle for scientific leadership and theory and a coherent disciplined struggle for understanding of the crisis, with the need to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat at the core.

The petty bourgeois 2013 shallowness has parallels with the 1921 Kronstadt rebellion against the Bolsheviks’ new Soviet state – demanding “Soviets without the Bolsheviks”, a “left liberal” pretend socialist cover for essentially, counter-revolution, tapping into illusions about “democracy “ and anti-Lenin “authoritarianism”, to undermine the vital dictatorship of the proletariat which is crucial for resisting imperialist subversion and capitalist restoration.

The working class in Egypt has been taught quicker lessons about the hopelessness of this anti-Leninist “secularism” (than three years of civil war in Soviet Russia) as the coup has swept up anarchists and liberals along with the Muslim Brotherhood into the torture prisons and death-row condemned cells.

Of course the Muslim Brotherhood was not an adequate way forwards for solving the crisis in the Middle East or anywhere else, and particularly in its Morsi wing, with its compromising with the IMF and opportunist acceptance of “democracy” reformism, and ultimate aims for an Islamic state.

But it was a desperate compromise which Washington had been forced to accept as a stopgap to head off further potentially revolutionary turmoil, and one which opened up new developments, most of all in aiding the Palestinians, keeping open the cross-border smuggling tunnels into Sinai from the Gaza strip and sympathetic to their struggle, and particularly the militant Hamas leadership, which is originally an offshoot of the MB.

Some sections of the US ruling class even thought this MB reformism tolerable for the sake of holding back further revolutionary development. Reactionary republican senator John McCain opposed the 2013 anti-Morsi revolt for example making explicit the usefulness of the “democracy” illusion once it had been established.

But more fearful sections of the ruling class feared even the most limited movement and support for the Gazans.

As the EPSR has previously analysed their hand was probably forced by regional reaction, particularly the Zionists, and as new bourgeois press revelations suggest, by the backward tribal/feudal Gulf sheikhdoms:

The United Arab Emirates threatened to block billion-pound arms deals with the UK, stop inward investment and cut intelligence cooperation if David Cameron did not act against the Muslim Brotherhood, the Guardian has learned.

Internal UAE government documents seen by the Guardian show that the crown prince of Abu Dhabi was briefed to complain to the prime minister about the Muslim Brotherhood in June 2012, when one of its leading members, Mohamed Morsi, became Egyptian president.

In the briefing notes it was suggested that the crown prince demand Cameron rein in BBC coverage.

In return, Cameron was to be offered lucrative arms and oil deals for British business which would have generated billions of pounds for the jet divisions of BAE Systems and allowed BP to bid to drill for hydrocarbons in the Gulf.

A second set of papers from 2014 reveal that the UK’s ambassador to the UAE was warned by Khaldoon al-Mubarak – best known in Britain as chairman of Manchester City football club but also the right-hand man of the crown prince – that the UAE was still unhappy and that a “red flag” had been raised about the British government’s indifference to the Brotherhood’s operation.

The warning delivered to Dominic Jermey said the trust between the two nations “has been challenged due to the UK position towards the Muslim Brotherhood” because “our ally is not seeing it as we do: an existential threat not just to the UAE but to the region”.

A trio of the UK’s closest allies in the Arab world – Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE – have complained that London is a base for the Muslim Brotherhood, which began and developed in Egypt and has since spread around the world. These Arab nations have all outlawed the Brotherhood and accused it of links to terrorism. The Muslim Brotherhood denies this, saying it is a peaceful political movement.

The UAE’s internal foreign office papers claim the Muslim Brotherhood is “ingrained” in British society, and characterise the group as a potential fifth column which has “been masterful in working undercover and presenting themselves in a veneer of moderation”.

The issue is likely to have been raised this week by the visiting Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, who launched a brutal crackdown on the Islamists after ousting President Morsi. Sisi had vowed to wipe out the group, which he branded a terrorist organisation.

On the day Sisi arrived in Britain, the Foreign Office confirmed the key findings of an independent review of the Islamist group would be published. The review, by Sir John Jenkins, Britain’s former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, was commissioned almost two years ago but publication had been repeatedly put off because of concerns that it would trigger a court challenge.

The UAE, one of Sisi’s biggest financial backers, began raising the stakes with Cameron a day after Morsi was declared Egypt’s first democratically elected president in June 2012.

Abu Dhabi’s crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, met the prime minister in Downing Street and the Guardian has seen papers which reveal the scale of concern over the implications of Morsi’s victory.

The first set of papers reveals the strategy for Sheikh Mohammed – the de facto ruler of the UAE – to deal with Britain in the light of the Egyptian election.

The briefing notes were written in June 2012 for the crown prince by Simon Pearce, a Manchester City board director who also handles UAE’s global image. In the notes, the plan appears to be to offer a series of carrots for British business and the country’s military in return for action against the Brotherhood.

...The UAE wanted a “measured” public approach from Britain in dealing with the Brotherhood. The emirate, the papers show, had identified 380 Islamists against whom the sheikh warned it would take “appropriate measures … as they will rise again”. Two weeks later Human Rights Watch decried a crackdown which saw police detain lawyers and peaceful political activists in the UAE.

According to the same 2012 briefing notes, the UAE was preparing the ground for such draconian measures, saying it had a “very real domestic challenge”. Cameron should be asked: “What does the Brotherhood mean for regional stability and progress? What does it mean for Lebanon and Jordan? What does it mean for Israel?”

Britain was to be reminded “in your enthusiasm to spread democracy don’t give oxygen to something that has yet to reveal itself for what it truly is”.

In return for “challenging” the Brotherhood in Britain, the UAE “offered” Cameron a series of diplomatic victories. The 2012 briefing notes say the UK could expect “BP back in the game” around the oil-rich sands off Abu Dhabi’s coast; progress on a proposed £6bn Typhoon fighter jet deal and “further deepening of the intelligence and military relationship”, as well as Gulf cash to be invested in Britain.

The documents say the UAE had £1.5bn of investment in the UK at the time, supporting 32,000 jobs. It noted there were “huge opportunities for UK companies such as BP, BAE, Rolls-Royce in the UAE” and that there were “120,000-plus British expats in the UAE with a fantastic quality of life”.

When British action did not materialise, Abu Dhabi signalled its displeasure with the UK through commercial and political pressure. In 2012, BP was temporarily excluded from bidding for an extension to onshore oil concessions in the Gulf. At the end of 2013, the UAE declined to buy the Typhoon fighter jets, a massive blow to BAE.

A few months after the arms deal rebuff the prime minster announced a review of the Brotherhood’s activities in the UK. The first country that Jenkins went to see about the Brotherhood was the UAE – a fact British diplomats raised with Abu Dhabi. Jenkins met Khaldoon al-Mubarak there in April 2014.

It is no error that a subsequent Guardian story puts “Middle East envoy” Tony Blair, at the heart of the UAE secret investment dealing, and that Blair was a leading proselytiser for the July Sisi events along with a heavily biased pro-military western media deluge with ludicrous exaggerations of the middle class populist movement, laughably and impossibly declared, without any evidence at all, to have nearly 30 million supporters at one point (much in the way the counter-revolutionary bogus “trade union” Solidarnosc in Poland was lyingly alleged to have “millions” of supporters – when the only “millions” it had were the hundreds of millions of dollars poured in from the Vatican bank and CIA).

The entire fake-“left” failed to warn the world working class of the significance of the Egyptian counter-revolution and the inevitable reactionary outcome, rejecting Leninist politics and grasp in favour of petty bourgeois liberalism and anarchic hostility to working class organisation and discipline.

A glaring silence has prevailed ever since, particularly from the Stalinists, whose chosen way to avoid mistakes, over and over again is to sweep errors under the carpet, refusing the open polemical debate that is vitally needed to sort out these issues.

Instead of following Leninist practice to go over mistakes and see their class and philosophical roots, they simply cover-up, hoping that no-one will notice the disasters.

Incredibly, they continue to denounce the Morsi-ites and to write-off the entire Sunni Islamist insurgency as “reactionary headbangers” and just “CIA tools”, oblivious to the contradictions this gets them into.

For example they declare it the “duty of revolutionaries” to support the Hamas Palestinian leadership in Gaza while simultaneously denouncing the MB (and the Sinai movement) and equally supporting the Hezbollah Islamist movement in Lebanon, the Shia group which fights for the Assad regime against ISIS even though Hamas opposes Assad and its supporters, and the Hamas Sinai allies recently become part of ISIS.

This tangle comes about through the wooden undialectical inability of all these groups to rise above bourgeois “logic” which says if you are against one side therefore you must support the other; Leninism says only that it is for the defeat of the real enemy, arms race warmongering capitalism and its crisis (as in the opening EPSR quote on the Bolshevik defeatist position for Tsarism which implied no support for German imperialism).

The Brarites have been trapped in the rigid idea that because Syria’s bourgeois nationalism had made some reforms and responded to some extent to Arab street hostility to Zionism, therefore it was the path to total socialism; a reformist notion of step-by-step progress which ignores completely the capitalist world crisis and its catastrophic disintegration – where “all fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air” as the Communist Manifesto says.

Syria is being swept away and trying to defend it as it is, leads to disastrous mistakes, declaring all those fighting against it to be “reactionary”.

Wanting to see the Washington skulduggery against various rogue state victims fail, and be defeated, is not the same as supporting Assad.

Assorted liberals, “left” Labourites and some Trot groups have tried to cover-up in another way, ostentatiously joining in the London protests against the Sisi visit. But they still mange to slip in sly a “condemnation of terror”, shamefacedly reworded as “repudiation” to let imperialism know that they are part of the system, however vigorously they “protest”:

We are concerned to hear that the government has invited the Egyptian dictator, Field Marshal Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, to visit the UK. We believe it violates the British values which the government claims to champion to welcome a ruler who has overthrown an elected government and instituted a regime of terror which has thrown back the cause of democracy in Egypt and the wider Middle East many years.

While not necessarily supporting deposed President Morsi or the policies of his Freedom and Justice party, we note that he was democratically elected, and that his removal from office was effected by means of a military coup led by Sisi.

Since then Sisi’s military-directed regime has massacred thousands of civilians. Hundreds of supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, including President Morsi, have been sentenced to death in mass trials that were a travesty of justice. Almost all independent political activity has been suppressed, including that of liberal and leftwing organisations. Women’s rights have been violated across the country.

Sisi was “elected” president in 2014 in a vote that did not meet the most minimal democratic standards. The parliamentary elections currently taking place in the absence of any real opposition have been shunned by the vast majority of Egyptian voters with record low turnout, in the expectation that the new Egyptian parliament will be no more than a fig leaf for Sisi’s authoritarian regime.

Meanwhile, security and police forces have illegally arrested, detained and tortured Egyptian citizens, media freedoms have been suppressed and many journalists arrested and abused.

Such renunciation of democracy and human rights has surely contributed to the upsurge of terrorism in Egypt, which we repudiate but regard as a consequence of, rather than a justification for, Sisi’s barbarism.

Under these circumstances, we regard any visit to the UK by this despot as an affront to democratic values. No considerations of commerce or realpolitik can justify such an invitation. We urge the government to withdraw it.

Diane Abbott MP; Caroline Lucas MP; John McDonnellMP; Lindsey German Stop the War Coalition;John Pilger Journalist;Dr Anas Altikriti The Cordoba Foundation;Andrew Murray Chief of staff, Unite; Dr Daud Abdullah British Muslim Initiative; Ken Loach Film-maker; Dr Abdullah Faliq Islamic Forum of Europe; John Rees Counterfire; Dr Maha Azzam Egyptian Revolutionary Council; Harjinder Singh;Prof John L Esposito; Victoria Brittain Writer; Salma Yaqoob Former councillor; Peter Oborne Journalist; Bruce Kent CND peace campaigner; Aaron Kieley Student Broad Left; Kate Hudson CND; Chris Nineham Stop the War Coalition; Michael Rosen Author and political activist; Carl Arrindell Broadcaster; Dr Omar el-Hamdoon Muslim Association of Britain; Dr Farooq Bajwa Solicitor; Reverend Stephen Coles St Thomas the Apostle Church; Steve Bell Treasurer, Stop the War Coalition plus more

And the real purpose of this? As the EPSR has said before (EPSR 1247 07-0-9-04):

...worldwide reformist chorus of “condemn the terrorist resistance” lets the monopoly-imperialist system off the hook of EXPLAINING WHY TERRORISM IS NOW SUCH A RAPIDLY INCREASING PHENOMENON.

And it lets the monopoly-imperialist system off the hook of explaining WHY THE EVER-GROWING REPRESSION ONLY SEEMS TO CREATE MORE AND MORE TERRORISM.

And it lets them off explaining where yet more “tough stance” repression is going to lead in due course, given that it doesn’t work in stopping terrorism but has the exact opposite effect.

All of these questions immediately go right out of the window the moment that the middle-class “critics” of imperialism all start clucking in unison: “We must start by condemning this latest terrorist outrage”, or “of course firm preventive measures must be taken”, etc, etc, etc.

The argument never gets any further.

And what is worse, there is not a single “reformist” do-gooder who does not KNOW that all of the ‘condemnation” in the world is not going to reach or have the slightest impact on the wretched victims of imperialist injustice who have been driven to terrorism, and in particular to suicide terrorism, to start with.

They KNOW that terrorism is not only going to continue but is going to grow, — as does everyone else on Earth with half a brain.

... And how delighted will the imperialist status quo feel at hearing all its “critics” capitulate to “Western democratic values” the moment that the question of serious RESISTANCE to imperialist domination should come up.

One element of the “left” condemnations is that the “terrorist struggle” is to blame for “helping imperialism” - so much so that many of them declare it all to be “organised by the CIA” as a deliberate ploy to excuse capitalist warmongering.

This does not explain why the Western conspirators would deliberately set out to create total breakdown and chaos, when they are trying to re-establish Western colonial authority and exploitation, nor why in Egypt for example, where they are heavily funding and diplomatically supporting a regime like Sisi, they would simultaneously create the de-stabilisation and rebellion that might bring it down.

But it does let many of the “left” off the hook of seeming to line up with the imperialists; this way they are not opposing rebels at all but “just the CIA”.

One background assumption to this is that all such “terrorism” necessarily reinforces Western public support for imperialism “because it is so horrifying”.

But the effect of blows against imperialism are as likely to do the opposite; it is defeats and revealed weaknesses that begin to shift mass opinion.

It was the 1968 Tet offensive of the Viet Cong which produced a giant shift in Western consciousness leading to the anti-war movement and a wave of student rebellion throughout Europe and the US that summer - it was the dogged struggle of the ANC’s Umkhonto we Sizwe armed revolutionary wing which stimulated the huge anti-apartheid movement.

After the Sinai events exactly such a shift is recorded by Blairite management and economics guru Will Hutton, who says it is “beginning to change our mental map of the world” despite hedging his comments with all the usual sanctimonious “moral” posturing about supposed “barbaric indifference to the deaths of innocents”.

Try telling that to the tens of thousands of physically or psychologically maimed and bereaved Palestinians, the millions strong blasted and desperate refugee populations of Afghanistan and Iraq, Pakistan and Libya, the residents of the wreckage left of Somalia or the freshly created bombed-out hellhole of Yemen being destroyed by Saudi missiles and planes, or the endless tally of families,wedding parties, bystanders and children daily ‘taken out’ by “computer game” remote drone-fired Hellfire missiles.

Or tell it to the families of the millions of children who die each year from starvation and disease in the sanitation-free slave hovels of the Sri Lankan tea plantations, Indian shipyards, Latin American banana farms, Thai sweatshops, and collapsing Bangla Deshi textile factories; in the Haitian slums and the drug war ravaged towns of Mexico, or even the “illegal” but blind-eyed gang-boss worked near slaves from Eastern Europe in our very own British farm and food processing etc etc etc.

Tell it to Shaker Amar and many others held and tortured in Guantánamo for a decade and a half while totally innocent.

The only “barbaric indifference” on show is that of smug overpaid intellectuals and greed ridden finance parasite reactionaries in the West, living on the extracted wealth from the great mass of the Third World, and maintaining the great armsrace tyrannies of capitalism.

Despite this arrogant contempt founded on the most disgusting blinkered smugness and complacency, Hutton manages to say that there are material causes driving this, and not simply some berserk madness without rhyme or reason – albeit only from the narrow self-interested world view of the petty bourgeois:

Yet the facts speak. There is a lengthening list of destinations to which western governments advise us not to travel. Flights to Libya, Somalia, Iraq, Crimea and eastern Ukraine, among other countries, are prohibited by the Americans, while there are restrictions to Mali, southern Sudan, Kenya, Congo, Iran and Afghanistan. Now add Egypt’s Sharm el-Sheikh to the list.

The causes of the terrorism seem so intractable that to engage with the issue is to invite defeat and so inflict political damage on those who try. Instead there is a hunkering down – increasing the temptation to close borders – and a growing readiness to set aside the principles of liberty and permit mass surveillance. Witness last week’s investigatory powers bill.

But engage we must. Apart from the amorality of standing aside while hundreds of millions of people plunge ever deeper into violence and isolation, there is our own self-interest to consider. Already we have a refugee crisis, but there is worse ahead. Without change, the risk grows that a dirty nuclear device will be exploded in a western capital in the next 10 to 15 years.

The starting point for a response must be twofold...First, it is crucial to recognise there is nothing inherent in Islam that disposes it to mindless barbaric violence. Indeed, ...one of the characteristics of many jihadi terrorists is that they have not been brought up as “proper” Muslims; they are people from the margins of society who have no real understanding of the religion in whose name they act.

Second, terrorism is fuelled by poverty and injustice. Economist Paul Collier has identified 50 countries in which a billion people live with either stagnating or falling incomes: it is no accident that so many are recruiting sergeants for Islamist terrorism. In The Bottom Billion, Collier calls for a multi-pronged assault to generate economic development – creating functioning, rule-of-law, accountable states, giving preferential export access to western markets, focusing development aid on the poorest and using western force, if necessary, to impose peace.

Too much conflict and terrorism, he wrote before Syria and Libya unravelled to prove his point, is the result of a vicious circle of violence begetting violence. In response, western governments have to build states, create peace and simulate the kind of smart interdependence between the private and public sectors that has underpinned every development miracle – from postwar Europe to Asia today. Yet such compassionate hard-headedness – that is neither wildly free market nor statist – seems beyond us.

It is beyond “us”, Will, because such nostrums are just deluded pie-in-the-sky reformism that ignores the gigantic elephant of the capitalist catastrophe and are no more achievable than making water run uphill.

It is scarcely credible that such shallow Christian piety is even thinkable let alone voiced in the middle of now endless warmongering chaos.

It wilfully ignores that the “billion” in poverty, (and in fact many, many more, facing more than just grotesque injustice and deprivation) are held in such inhuman conditions because their ruthless exploitation is the very basis of the huge wealth and privilege of the rich nations and above all the tiny but bloatedly rich and powerful ruling class elites, which would not and cannot exist without driving most of the world along in near or actual slavery.

Western governments are not about to “build states and create peace” and have no intention of doing so, but the very opposite, driving the world into war just as they have been doing for two decades of world chaos and destruction, deliberately imposed as their only path out of the unsolvable contradictions of the private profit system.

It will not be stopped or changed by any amount of piety, or even left pressure.

Only revolution can change things.

It is coming and the huge turmoil of international “terrorism” is the great foreshock - confused, contradictory and even self-defeating as it is.

The ruling class knows it, which is why it is stepping up its censorship and thought-control, pretending it is aimed at “jihadism” but with the catch-all intent of “anti-extremism” which means any and all left movement, and above all the communist perspective that is vitally needed.

And that is why it is readying measures for barbaric coups right in the heart of “parliament” as the increasingly outspoken threatening comments of deep establishment figures like General Houghton make clear, and the sneering ruling class contempt for the tamest “left” moves like Jeremy Corbyn’s election.

Such “left” Labourism will achieve nothing but it disarms the working class with its “protests” and “letters to the Ministry of Defence" about “transgressing the limits of democracy.”

Do they really think the ruling class will stick to the “rules” as the crisis deepens??

No more than it has anywhere in the world like Chile in 1973 and the murderous coup of General Pinochet against another “trusting” lefty, Salvador Allende, who equally believed “it couldn’t happen here”. Or in a hundred other places, from the ousting of Aristide in Haiti to the toppling of Sukarno in Indonesia, Thomas Sankaro in Burkina Faso, Mossadeq in Iran, Lumumba in the Congo, Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine, President Manuel Zelaya in Honduras and of course Morsi in Egypt.

The recent anarchist “Million Mask March” willingness to confront fascist police state surveillance and repression is a sign of growing discontent as the crisis deepens but can achieve nothing until it takes the need for revolutionary leadership more seriously.

Protesting at ever deepening grotesque privilege, fracking, environmental destruction, grinding down of the poor, collapse of basic service and the sinister cover up of Establishment paedophile and sex scandals, shows up the ineffectuality of much of the “left” but “anti-capitalism” needs to get a much deeper understanding, a learning built on the lessons of the huge revolutionary achievement of the past including the staggering 70 year history of the Soviet Union.

It ultimately retreated from revolutionary philosophy, the real problem with Stalinism, and liquidated the workers state.

That that needs to be analysed and understood, as part of building a new revolutionary perspective, not by swallowing the anti-communist brainwashing of capitalism, (and echoed by the Trotskyists) but by a huge debate to grasp the great achievements of the USSR and the failure of Stalinist revisionism.

Anarchist suspicion of “leftism” is understandable given the complete failure of all shades of the “workers movement” leaderships from “left Labourism” (however “revitalised” it might be around Corbyn) to endless varieties of supposed “Marxism” in the two main groupings of Stalinist revisionism and biliously anti-workers state Trotskyists, none of them taking up these critical questions and leading the huge debate needed to sort them out.

But it is not enough to “reject authority” and the battle for leadership.

The coup in Egypt showed precisely the weakness and confusion of anarchism and hostility to theory.

The world desperately needs a coherent and scientific grasp of the great unrolling capitalist catastrophe which is dragging everything into bankruptcy, chaos, war and destruction, and of the revolutionary overturn of capitalism which is the only path out.

And it needs an understanding of the bitter organised class war battles needed firstly to achieve such an overthrow and the disciplined dictatorship of the proletariat (the rule of the 99% in popular terms) which alone can hold on to power once the capitalists are brought down, to build planned socialism.

It needs a party of deliberate conscious open struggle for such understanding.

Build Leninism.

Alan Moss

 

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