Back issues
No 1510 21st April 2017
Syria blitzing, MOAB “super” bomb slaughter and North Korea blustering threats underline the demented slide towards world war the capitalist system needs to “escape” its Great Catastrophe of economic collapse. These blustering fascist provocations can only increase as the crisis re-emerges and deeper Slump is imposed. Working class leadership needs to wake up to the urgency of this deadly crisis and the need to build a revolutionary movement. But the vital debate and polemics to establish a world perspective remain suppressed by posturing PCism and fake-”left” self-righteousness. Jewish Zionist world conspiracy plays on this petty bourgeois single issue moralising, using accusations of “racism” to suppress all revolutionary opposition by declaring it “anti-Semitic”. Leninism must be built
Goebbels-lies, hypocrisy and sick propaganda “justifications” get ever more grotesque as US-led imperialism steps up its war blitzing, “collective punishment” butchery and blustering fascist threats in all directions from Syria to Afghanistan and North Korea.
But however much this barbaric bullying can be imposed, (and it will be, even though with the “naval flotilla” threats against North Korea actually steaming away from the target it is yet largely bluster) it will do nothing to solve the unstoppable crisis collapse of the capitalist system or re-impose its authority and credibility as leading a “free world”.
Almost the only ones still swallowing the “democracy and the ‘rule of law’” bullshit are the class collaborators of the Labour movement from the TUC “official trade unionism” and the Labourites (Blairites and opportunist Corbynites), the fake-“lefts” tailending them, and the “No to War” social pacifists and revisionists.
But things are now so desperate the ruling class itself barely bothers at all with the always fraudulent pretences of “justice”, rationality and “democracy” and the humbug of “policing war-crimes”.
Hence the crudest nazi terrorising yet, unleashing gun-happy Pentagon generals to test out their most gruesome weapons on living victims in Afghanistan and Syria, just as they once “tested” the nuclear bomb on already defeated Japan in 1945.
The purpose then was not to “stop the aggressive Japanese empire” as lyingly declared but show off the new “superweapon”, primarily to intimidate and threaten the victorious Nazi-destroying Soviet Union and to “hold back communism”.
Dropping a 10t MOAB “superbomb” on a scrubby patch of Afghan mountain valley with a few tunnel-hidden and ill-equipped jihadists (and butchering a literally unknown number of civilians at the same time) might be on a smaller scale but was just as unnecessary and strategically irrelevant, and would be so even if the notion of a “war on terror” were in anyway rational and not an insane and completely meaningless “justification” for imperialism’s own warmaking.
The same with the carefully pre-warned “beserk” attack on Syria with a 60 cruise-missile volley killing half a dozen hapless soldiers, again with a ludicrously made up justification worthy of the best from 1930s Hitlerism.
The bourgeois press reported with a straight face, that:
The British foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, had led the push for further sanctions on Syrian and Russian leaders. On Tuesday, he said sanctions could still follow the findings of an investigation by the independent Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
“We hope that it may be possible, if we get evidence, that those responsible for unleashing those chemical weapons should be [subject to] sanctions,” he told the BBC, adding that there was widespread support for sanctions if the investigation confirmed Syrian or Russian responsibility.
“Syria guilty of war crime” had already been trumpeted around the world a week previously by the Washington (and British) intelligence agencies and the eagerly compliant “free press”, as usual with no questions or doubts offered, followed by a demented campaign of solemn debates, stooge UN motions, international meetings and sanctimonious calls for “punishment” etc, all predicated on the unqueried assertion of this “fact”.
In such Alice in Wonderland “justice”, judgement is made first, the execution carried out next and only then the evidence (“if we get it” says Boris) even begins to be gathered. Finally there is the accusation.
Obviously no one could know even what had happened, let alone who was responsible; teams of skilled investigators and forensic experts have to be assembled, get to the site, gather evidence and document it all, carry out recordings and photography, take samples and make laboratory tests and then build up an analytical picture of what might have happened and the most plausible possible scenario(s), and all that taking into account various possible alternative explanations (eg what planes were in the air, who has missile capacity to reach the site (various of the western funded jihadist groups, Zionism which has both planes and missiles and gas attack capacity and past form for attacking Syria in secret, Turkey perhaps)).
It takes months, as for example the investigation of the alleged Yugoslavian Recak “massacre” (declared so on the spot the same morning after a casual glance by the Organisation for Security & Cooperation in Europe representative William Walker) used to “justify” the nazi-NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999 – the Finnish forensic team months later suggesting the evidence to be consistent with a set-up job using re-arranged bodies from a firefight, all long after the 19 major powers of the “righteous” West had already pounded little Serbia’s cities killing hundreds.
On top the type of gas, emotively declared to be “sarin” is suspect and not least because all the “eye witness accounts” and “medics’ reports” were channelled through the “usual suspects” of axe-grinding and entirely partial stooge bodies, quisling “resistance groups” set up by the US, and anything but neutral “agencies” such as the Syrian National Coalition. Even the “information” came from such as the laughable “Syrian Observatory of Human Rights”, one man based in Coventry in a terraced house front room but quoted by the yellow press as if an objective impartial source!!!.
It is anyway the most total humbug that the West could care less about the savagery or the devastation.
Even as the onions were being held under Donald Trump’s nose for his TV and Twitter “concern for little children” the butchery and slaughter of hundreds of civilians (many children) was continuing in the attack on Iraq’s Mosul by American special forces, British and French troops and the military of the US-stooge Baghdad regime, adding to the agony caused by the occupation in 2003 and the misery of lives ever since in this utterly wrecked country, amid the sectarian war and suicide killings deliberately stirred up by undercover US military using the death squad methods imported from CIA Latin America interventions.
More horror was also being imposed by the attack on Raqqa in Syria by similar special forces and with the equally stooging Kurdish “democracy” forces (plus the odd British army “volunteer” mercenary lauded as a “hero” by Channel Four and Guardian liberal anti-communism); in the 18 month long savagery imposed on Yemen (for daring to call for democracy after the Arab Spring), a hightech onslaught by the primitive tribalist monarchy of Saudi Arabia but lavishly supplied with weaponry by the venal US and British arms industries and managed by hundreds of British technical “advisers”.
It has left two million people facing the slow death and agony of outright famine.
Warlordist killing chaos is all that is left in once prosperous and egalitarian, if slightly barmily led, Libya wrecked by nazi-NATO invasion.
And Syria’s civil war which has seen multiple horrors is a war originated and deliberately set alight by Western subversion, CIA training and encouragement, and with US and reactionary sheikhdom Gulf state money and arms poured in to sectarian forces, which from the beginning used the vilest of ethnic cleansing terror techniques, taught and encouraged by Western “advisers” – all “war crimes” for what it is worth and all covered up, ignored or even celebrated by the bourgeois media.
Even greater is the outright lie that the West “draws a red line at gas attacks” etc when it has a long record of chemical warfare throughout the post-war period, not least in the saturation bombing of Vietnam with Agent Orange, the deadly dioxin poison which not only destroyed the ecology of half the country and killed thousands but has left a legacy of tragic and severe birth defects and distortions still affecting thousands of new births to this day.
Similar chemical “pesticide” war was waged on the FARC revolutionary movement in Colombia under lying cover of a “war on drugs”.
White phosphorus bone-burning munitions, depleted uranium shells, (the dust residue causing widespread cancers, birth defects and other illness) were all used in Iraq, again in Libya and on Gaza by the Western-supported Zionist-nazi occupiers of Palestine, along with flechette and cluster bombs.
The contempt for “Geneva conventions” by the West is also clear from recent moves to shut down investigations of, release or let off, perpetrators of war crimes and torture in the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, including outrageous prosecution of respectable solicitors to shut them down, or simply to keep hidden the operations of thuggish mercenary “private security contractors” (many drawn from that same military) who increasingly do much of imperialism’s dirtiest work in the shadows.
Besides which, is being blown apart by “allowable” weaponry, wielded according to the “rules of war”, any better????????
And ever without bombs, is the always continuing slow death from hunger, disease, and overworked impoverishment in the exploited Third World, killing millions of children annually, any better???
Another inversion is currently underway against the demonised North Korean workers state, accused with Through the Looking-Glass “logic” of “threatening the world” (like Iraq before and many others) when it is obviously the victim – not just of endless huge, regular, threatening “military exercises” using live missiles and ammunition just offshore from its coast, an obviously intolerable threat, but of decades of a massive intimidatory US military occupation in the South, the legacy of the 1950s fascist overrunning of the nascent workers state and almost complete high altitude bomb pulverising of its capital Pyongyang (98% flattened and since brilliantly rebuilt, after a titanic struggle, costing millions of lives, including many Chinese, beat the imperialists out of half the country, at least).
Ever continuing siege “sanctions” have been imposed since, sabotaging the economy with more sick upside down propaganda then blaming the North Koreans for the hardship caused.
Despite all kinds of flaws in its revisionist world view, the workers state leadership expressed sound sense in its defiant logic after the Syria attack:
The North called the airstrikes “absolutely unpardonable” and said they prove its nuclear weapons are justified to protect the country against Washington’s “evermore reckless moves for a war.”
The comments were made by a Foreign Ministry official and carried Sunday by North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency.
The airstrikes, announced shortly after Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping wrapped up dinner at a two-day summit in Florida last week, were retaliation against Syrian President Bashar Assad for a chemical weapons attack against civilians caught up in his country’s long civil war.
“Some forces are loud-mouthed that the recent U.S. military attack on Syria is an action of warning us but we are not frightened by it,” the report said, adding that the North’s “tremendous military muscle with a nuclear force as its pivot” will foil any aggression by the U.S.
“We will bolster up in every way our capability for self-defense to cope with the U.S. evermore reckless moves for a war and defend ourselves with our own force,” it said.
North Korea has long claimed that the United States is preparing to conduct similar precision strikes against its territory or even launch an all-out invasion.
Washington denies it has any intention of invading the North.
Tensions have been even higher than usual over the past few weeks because annual war games between the U.S. and South Korean militaries are underway. The exercises this year are the biggest ever and have included stealth fighter training and other maneuvers that are particularly sensitive to North Korea.
For its part, the North test-launched a ballistic missile just ahead of the Trump-Xi meeting and has been rumored to be preparing for a possible nuclear test.
The Korean Peninsula remains technically at war since the 1950-53 Korean conflict ended with an armistice, not a formal peace treaty.
North Korea considers Syria an ally. But unlike Syria, experts warn that North Korea has a means of striking back if provoked.
Pyongyang has also pointed to those countries like Iraq and Libya which did abandon weapons programmes under “international community” (ie imperialist) pressure - both invaded and reduced to devastated chaos by imperialist big lie invasion.
Of course North Korea should be entitled to defend itself with any weapon it wishes to have, just like every other country, as one “liberal” Guardian letter managed to declare through the usual deluge of anti-communism filling its pages:
Asked on BBC news whether her country needed nuclear weapons, a North Korean woman said: “If we do not have nuclear weapons, other countries’ nuclear weapons will fall on our land.” This sounded paranoid – until one reflected that Britain has exactly the same policy. David Butler London
Not quite true in fact because the Western powers hold their weapons for aggressive, not defensive purposes, as the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki can testify: only a propaganda machine that has pumped out endless absurd and ludicrously parodic accusations of “killing people with anti-aircraft guns” etc against Pyongyang (all nonsense tales that would be laugh-out-loud if they were not so sinister, see EPSR 1508) – could present things otherwise.
Such bizarre big lies are generated by South Korean intelligence and its CIA-US occupation (25,000 troops in massive military bases including in Seoul, all with nuclear arms – seemingly not an issue for the South to have on its territory pointed northwards) where the real matter is the dramatic weakness of continuing capitalist rule as the underlying world trade war crisis continues to bite and the threat of major economic collapse grows all the time.
The bullying of the north is largely about trying to contain the gigantic political discontent in the South against the US, which saw five months of demonstrations and a reactionary president so mired in sleaze and corruption entangling much of the big corporation establishment, that she has had to be put in prison to avoid the country becoming ungovernable.
The prospect of revolutionary development is just beneath the surface.
And so it is increasingly across the whole planet, a ferment only held back and frustrated by the complete vacuum in leadership and understanding that is required, namely scientific Leninist revolutionary perspectives.
The world is screaming out for a complete denunciation and exposure of this genocidal degeneration and disintegration into war and chaos, and the need for a revolutionary transformation of the world to put a stop to it.
And the only way to do that is the class war to overturn this deadly festering mess of capitalism, to establish workers states, take all its property, finance and industry into common ownership and build a planned socialist world.
But the supine complicity of the entire “left”, rooted in complacency, anti-communism and stinking opportunist treachery says no such thing in practice (even the r-r-revolutionary posturers).
They all either support the West’s nazi onslaughts outright, or effectively do so by supinely bleating their social-pacifist “No to War” slogans, all very virtuous but completely useless (and intentionally an evasion).
And this is doubly so when they go along with the Goebbels propaganda (against Assad eg, or Russia) as they all do, save one or two barmy Stalinist groups who swing wildly and nonsensically the other way offering outright support for the billionaire oligarch run Russian Orthodox bonapartist Putin etc, instead of calling only for the defeat of Western intrigue and aggression (by Putin or Assad if that is what pans out).
Worse still they all capitulate to the demented “war on terror” and its demonising scapegoating, leaving the big lies unchallenged without a word.
They thereby retreat from seeing and understanding the biggest current wave of anti-imperialist upheaval there is, and instead line up with Trump and the rest of imperialism.
Despite sectarian confusions (and some attempted manipulation by the West), most of this ever growing ferment of terrorism and jihadism is a major expression of Third World hatred and resistance to centuries of exploitation; it may be a long way from the socialist revolution (and its religiosity often hostile to it) that will eventually end capitalism, the only way world development and peace can be achieved, but it is the early sign that the great mass of the planet has had enough of centuries of slave-level exploitation and humiliation.
Going along with imperialism’s onslaughts on this upheaval is to be on the wrong side, and playing into its warmongering games.
There is no “war on terror” but there is a war on the world by bankrupt imperialism, the real terrorist.
What the working class needs to hear is that this plunge into ever greater barbarity is unstoppably heading for total war, the end point of the Great Catastrophe of economic and political collapse which emerged in full in 2008.
It is the ruling class’s only answer to the intractable contradictions at the heart of the monopoly capitalist system.
The hysterical chauvinism, and “kill them all” fascist hatred (“bomb the shit out of them” to quote Trumpism) is being ramped up because the first round of “shock and awe” was a disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan, solving nothing and bogged down in rebellion, growing ever since as “jihadism”.
A pretence of withdrawal was made by the Obama presidency, though vicious drone and death squad warfare continues, Libya was destroyed and Syria’s civil war deliberately provoked.
War interventions continue all over Africa, in the Pakistan mountains, in Iraq again.
But the global bankruptcy of 2008, was just the start of the greatest economic collapse ever.
The brief “recovery” is totally hollow, built on insane money printing credit creation, and ramped up international trade and currency war, and ready to implode again at any time.
Antagonistic contradictions of the “free market” system are already driving the international tensions to fever pitch and the trade war, protectionist and chauvinist atmosphere is deepening constantly.
Real war must ultimately erupt between the great rivals of the capitalist system in some way or another and they have to get the atmosphere ready.
But ever more obvious Nazi bluster and bullying propaganda remains virtually unchallenged by the entire “left” and working class “leadership”, which becomes more craven by the day.
The revolutionary perspective, the only possible way humanity can go forwards, and an inescapable necessity being imposed on the great majority, is unheard.
Worse still the “left” actively assists the growing censorship and suppression of such politics - particularly through the ever widening application of Political Correctness inspired gagging and banning of speakers under so-called “no platforming” and “safe spaces” rules, rife throughout the student politics movement particularly.
These posturing “principles” have built up a witch-hunting and intimidatory atmosphere which is the very opposite of the great open polemic debate and discussion which is desperate to emerge with the crisis and crucially required in the working class to build and develop revolutionary understanding.
It sits alongside and helps the ruling class’ own increasing panicking “anti-extremist” repression through bureaucratic brainwashing programmes like “Prevent” and now almost non-stop universal surveillance (even done through modern television sets, exactly as predicted in the 1984 dystopia (which far from being a view of “Soviet repression” as the nasty police fink anti-communist George Orwell presented it, was always an account of capitalist alienation and oppression)).
As the EPSR has many times pointed out these PC politics, might have begun with real enough injustices and the additional double oppressions of various groups within capitalism (eg female inequality, homosexual persecution, racist abuses, etc) but rapidly became the ultimate in self-centred subjective idealist politics, the very antithesis of the struggle for objective (Marxist) science and a prop for reaction, avoiding and shutting down all discussion.
The end point of decades of diversionary and evasive single-issue politics, these have been adopted and built up by the fake-“left” groups as a posturing pretence of “effecting change” in society, (to cover up their complete failure and retreat on the revolutionary questions which alone can bring real change and justice on these, and all matters).
Their reformist progress has become the outright reactionary opposite, with the emergence of active repression where subjective “feelings” are deemed sufficient reason to shut down debate if anyone should declare themselves “offended” or “insulted”.
Imperialism has made good use of this gagging and near book-burning framework as ready-made bludgeon against revolutionary thought and for pumping up its war atmosphere – for example using the homosexuality issue, abetted by leading “liberals” and fake-“lefts”, to dangerously feed antagonism and hatred against countries such as Russia and various Muslim and Islamic countries or movements declared insufficiently “gay friendly” (for refusing to concede to a stampeded insistence that “gay is normal”, a highly contentious matter still not resolved at all within capitalism where the block on discussing or examining the issue comprises more anti-science censorship in itself).
All kinds of backwardness does exist but it will not be solved by making it the core issue and assisting capitalism’s “war on terror” demonisations.
One of the most sinister campaigns of all is the bullying suppression of all attempts to speak out for the genocidally oppressed and persecuted Palestinian people – with anyone presuming even to criticise the Zionist colonial occupation of Palestine being pilloried and excluded, even when they hold back from denouncing the total falsity and land-theft reality of the monstrous Israeli “state”, imposed on the Middle East by Western stooge UN decree in 1947-8.
The central element of this deliberate counter-revolutionary censorship is the ludicrous accusation of “anti-semitism” against all attempts even to start understanding this struggle let alone sympathise with it or call for the defeat of the Zionist oppression.
Acceptance of this absurdity, produced and aggressively promulgated by a deliberate CIA-Zionist conspiracy (see below), both from “Israel” itself and via the influential Jewish freemasonry networks intertwined through imperialist society, is to swallow and collude with the entire world imperialist “war on terror” counter-revolutionary programme, which uses the Zionist tyranny as a major weapon for itself and has borrowed much of its fascist-aggression “collective punishment” methods for its own non-stop warmongering on Iraq, Yemen, Libya etc.
The latest evocation is the pillorying and “disciplining” of maverick fake-“left” Labourite Ken Livingstone as part of a demonising campaign against all supporters for the Palestinians.
Livingstone is an arch-opportunist himself, hostile to communism, but like some maverick “left” elements occasionally makes the odd telling point, in this case highlighting the reactionary history and nature of the Zionist regime and its oppression of the Palestinian masses.
So the Labour Party show-trial “disciplining” of Livingstone for supposed “anti-semitism” is actually for having (correctly) pointed to the collusion between official Zionism in Germany in the early 1930s and Hitler’s Nazi government, under the so-called Ha’avara deal.
It was an agreement to funnel Jewish money, frozen in Germany, to Palestine to “encourage” emigration there which both sides wanted to see happen; it benefitted mainly better-off Jews at the expense of poorer.
Livingstone made his point in the course of defending some other anti-Zionist voices.
For this not exceptionally radical comment, putting forwards some true historical facts about the Zionist movement and its record of opportunist and cynical collusion with Nazism, Livingstone has been harried from pillar to post by the bourgeois media, and the disgusting Blairite reactionaries still dominating much of Labour.
Their willingness not only to go along with of this censorship but to push it further (as with the vicious reactionary “expulsion” demands by London Mayor Sadiq Khan) underlines their entire repellent record of not only degenerate and traitorous class collaboration with this entire sick imperialist system, but their proactive support and willingness to manage, run and operate capitalism on behalf of the ruling class, exactly as every Labour government has done from the “left” Attlee landslide majority post-WW2 onwards.
Under Blair this went all the way to total fascist warmongering in the war crime aggression launch of the Iraq war.
But just as degenerate is willingness of the “left” Corbynites to go along with it too, with an elaborate pantomime of setting up “tribunals” and “special inquiries” to “root out” alleged “anti-semitic racism” in the “extreme” left, a charade of supine acquiescence to the propaganda deluge, which lent some “validity” to this lying nonsense, all solemnly carried through by the arch-careerist and opportunist “civil rights” campaigner Shami Chakrabarti (taking her thirty pieces of silver in the form of a House of Lords sinecure and (unelected) shadow cabinet position).
The real purpose of course is bureaucratic leverage to suppress and shutdown not just Palestine support but left voices in general.
The Labourites, however “left” posing, all have craven class-collaborating reactionary souls, ready to abandon all posturing and pretences of support for international anti-imperialism at the sniff of a parliamentary position (just as they have reneged on support for Irish nationalism and a dozen other left-circuit causes).
As a “radical” Hollywood film director once said to the studio bosses when forced to make changes: “Gentlemen, I have principles, and if you don’t like them...I have others”:
The Labour leader came under pressure to take more action after an unprecedented outcry from MPs and senior figures in the Jewish community about the decision to let Livingstone stay in the party.
A disciplinary panel of three officials found Livingstone guilty on Tuesday night of bringing the party into disrepute for suggesting that Hitler supported Zionism and defending Labour MP Naz Shah’s antisemitic Facebook post, for which she has apologised. He was suspended for a further year, but senior Labour figures, from deputy leader Tom Watson to former leader Ed Miliband and London mayor Sadiq Khan, said he should have been expelled from the party.
Corbyn issued a statement ...criticising Livingstone, his old ally and supporter, for causing deep offence to the Jewish community, and said the party’s ruling body would examine some of Livingstone’s more recent comments, such as the claim that there was “real collaboration” between Hitler and some German Jews in the 1930s.
“Ken Livingstone’s comments have been grossly insensitive, and he has caused deep offence and hurt to the Jewish community,” Corbyn said. “It is deeply disappointing that, despite his long record of standing up to racism, Ken has failed to acknowledge or apologise for the hurt he has caused. Many people are understandably upset that he has continued to make offensive remarks which could open him to further disciplinary action.”
However, the Labour leader disappointed some of his MPs by saying he respected the disciplinary panel’s decision to suspend Livingstone for another year rather than expel him. He also told reporters from regional newspapers that he wanted Livingstone to stop making controversial comments and “contribute to our party’s work in trying to win elections and oppose racism in any form”.
In an escalation of the controversy, nine senior members of Labour Friends of Israel, including Joan Ryan, Louise Ellman and Rachel Reeves, wrote to Corbyn urging him to call publicly for Livingstone to be expelled and to press the national executive committee to review its decision.
Around 100 Labour MPs, among them shadow cabinet ministers such as Barry Gardiner and Angla Rayner, also signed a statement saying the Labour decision “was not done in our name and we will not allow it to go unchecked”.
“This week the institutions of the Labour party have betrayed our values. We stand united in making it clear that we will not allow our party to be a home for antisemitism and Holocaust revisionism. We stand with the Jewish community and British society against this insidious racism,” they said.
The “left” side of Labour has ever been an utterly treacherous pit-trap for the working class, to hold them bound to the same reformism which has repeatedly sold them down the river, keeping the parliamentary democracy racket alive by pretending that eventually we will have a “real socialist” Labour with “fair and decent” policies once the “left” get in.
It is at it again now with the lying election nonsense that there is an “alternative to cuts and austerity” in the current unrolling capitalist disaster which is a) both untrue because the crisis is an objective reality of the entire capitalist system, unstoppable and irreversible, and destined to crash into much worse breakdown than was seen in 2008-9 and b) is not even on offer in the Labour “plan” which does nothing to tackle the great wave of cuts already made (as much by Labour as the Tories), the dismantling of the NHS (ditto), the savagery of the welfare cutbacks (again ditto), the disintegration of social provision etc, and which panders to the same Little Englander “Brexit” chauvinist diversion as the Tories, softening the working class up for the oncoming trade war hatreds and world war to follow.
Just as shown up are the “left” groups tagging behind Corbynism that also accept this Zionist-inspired persecution garbage and even go along with it.
Even those who have defended Livingstone, mostly capitulate to the ludicrous assertion that there is “anti-semitism on the left” covering this up with an elaborate rigmarole pretending there is a major distinction between “anti-Zionism” and “anti-Jewishness”, the latter (allegedly) subject to “racism” from the left.
Such is the line of the revisionist Weekly Worker CPGB for example, pretending to take a “revolutionary” line of “anti-Zionism” which it declares to be a major trend of opinion within the “Jewish” community too.
But to criticise Jewishness as such is anti-semitic it says, exactly as the world international Jewish conspiracy does.
But as the EPSR has formerly analysed (multiple issues - 1144,1207, 1209, 1212, and 1221 among others), in the modern post-war period of the “Israeli state” occupation this is a largely meaningless distinction; Jewish identity almost completely overlaps with Zionism, and this is even spelt out by the “Jewish community” itself as for example in a bourgeois press article such as this last year, beginning, as many such pieces do, by making the very “accusations” declared to be from somewhere “objective”:
The furore around Malia Bouattia’s election as the new president of the National Union of Students has yet to die down. Accusations of anti-semitism dogged her campaign (!!!) and continue to do so, with Cambridge University’s union threatening to disaffiliate from the NUS altogether. Bouattia’s defence of her comments are, broadly, that it is Zionism she takes issue with and not Jews. And it is for this reason that she felt the need to describe the University of Birmingham in a blogpost as “something of a Zionist outpost”, followed by the comment that “it also has the largest Jewish Society in the country, whose leadership is dominated by Zionist activists”....
Bouattia says she has a problem with “Zionist politics”. Zionism, at its core, is the belief in the right of the state of Israel to exist. Whether Bouattia likes it or not, connection to Israel is a key part of Jewish identity for an overwhelming majority of Jews in 21st-century Britain. In nearly every synagogue around the world, on Shabbat and major festivals, Jews pray for the safety of the state of Israel. The latest research on British Jewish attitudes towards Israel reports that 93% say Israel forms part of their Jewish identity.
If Bouattia was really serious about engaging with Jewish students she would know that, within the same 90%-plus of Jews who feel connected to Israel as part of their identity, a significant number are not supporters of the current policies of the Israeli government when it comes to the peace process or expansion of settlements. And nowhere does this apply more than to students and younger members of the Jewish community, who are increasingly outspoken on these issues.
Bouattia says she is concerned about liberty, equality and inclusion – but very few Jewish students will feel included in a National Union of Students built in the image of its new president.
She has also talked of “mainstream Zionist-led media outlets”. It is hard to believe that someone as politically engaged as Bouattia has not heard of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a seminal antisemitic text, a forgery originating in tsarist Russia that accuses Jews of trying to take over the world by controlling the media. It is an antisemitic trope that circulated throughout Europe in the 20th century, and continues to do so today. And if Bouattia knows about the Protocols, surely it might have crossed her mind that to refer to a Zionist-controlled media might make Jewish students feel extremely uncomfortable?
Perhaps Bouattia does not know that significant numbers of Jews in this country have friends and close family in Israel and therefore she doesn’t realise why saying that “boycott can be misunderstood as the alternative to resistance by the Palestinian people” makes many Jewish students recoil. When she says “non-violent” resistance is not enough, she is endorsing violent resistance against their friends and family. Will Jewish students want to participate in broader student politics knowing the president of their union thinks the potential killing of their friends and family is a legitimate “act of resistance”?
Bouattia is well within her rights to criticise the policies of the Israeli government. Indeed, many British Jews do. She is perfectly entitled to say she is not a Zionist. But it seems she is unable to understand why invoking antisemitic tropes and supporting armed resistance against Israelis causes deep offence.
And when she says, “For me to take issue with Zionist politics, is not me taking issue with being Jewish”, she shows a deep lack of understanding of Jewish identity.
Hannah Weisfeld is the founder and director of Yachad, an organisation that exists to build support in the Anglo-Jewish community for a political resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
In other words virtually all members of the Jewish freemasonry in countries like Britain and America are not only fully in support of the “right” of Israel to exist but are willing to hold an Israeli passport and to take up the Zionist “right of return” – meaning the “right” to go to Palestine and settle on land violently wrenched from the local population which has been indigenous there for at least 1500 years (longer than the modern “British” population comprising mixed Norman, Anglo-Saxon, Danish and Celtic stock, has been in place).
They certainly are not taking up the struggle to end completely this artificially imposed racist apartheid “state” and its non-stop tyrannical oppression, and especially not as part of an overall revolutionary struggle to defeat all imperialist domination in the region, the only “anti-Zionism” that can possibly mean anything.
There are a few liberal Jews who at least spoke out to defend Livingstone albeit still with mealy mouthed caveats:
• Ken Livingstone may be tactless and self-indulgent, but the facts of collaboration between the Zionist leadership and the Nazis are well established, uncomfortable though they may well be. My late friend Rudi Vrba, imprisoned in Auschwitz, was helped by his fellow prisoners to escape in 1944 with the remit to warn the Hungarian Jewish community of their imminent deportation to the camps. Instead, as he documents in his book, I Cannot Forgive, the Zionist leadership, under Rudolf Kastner, cut a deal with Adolf Eichmann that enabled them to leave without alerting the community they led to the threat. When, after the war, Vrba himself went to Israel, he found Kastner and the same Zionist leadership well ensconced.
Professor Steven Rose London
• It may have been politically inept to bring up the question of Nazi support for Zionism in the way Ken Livingstone did, and in the context of the discussion at that time. However, while it is possible to argue about the extent or motivation of Nazi-Zionist support and collaboration, the transfer agreement and other Nazi endorsements of some aspects of Zionism really did happen. It is chilling to insist that a member of a democratic party believing in free speech should resile from what is indisputable historical fact. So as a Jewish member of the Labour party, I feel I must, therefore, support Ken Livingstone, and oppose the punishment imposed on him. If that means I will be expelled from the party, so be it.
Dr Ian Saville London
These only go so far however.
And Weisfeld’s “allowable criticism” of the Israeli government’s “policies” and of the continuing “illegal” settlement movement steadily expanding the extent of this already monstrous territorial theft of someone else’s country, is simply a get out for a liberal wing of Zionism fearful of the revolutionary response that overt “Zionist” expansionist tactics might create.
All it says is “let’s be content with what we have already seized and been ‘granted’ by the ‘international community’ (meaning imperialist UN “votes”) and not rock the boat”.
And let any real resistance by the Palestinians, be deemed “unacceptable” except for disputing a few small token details of their humiliation after they accept their miserable lot for all eternity on the tiny scraps of the worst barren land they might have left for the remnants of the population, once it is totally wiped out as a nation.
Various other points in this article also need examining but first it needs underlining that the key question which is being covered up and which the CPGB and all other such “anti-Zionism” evades is why should there be a so-called Israel at all????
What “right to exist” is there – at the expense of destruction and suppression of another entire people???.
The whole furore comes down to the creation of a deliberate and aggressively proselytised smokescreen to prevent this very question even emerging into the open let alone the occupation and land-theft of Palestine being challenged head on.
It avoids the crucial point that the so-called “state” of “Israel” is nothing but an out-of-time colonial occupation imposed in a period when the whole world had already reached and understood the need for de-colonisation of the old imperialist empires (notwithstanding that financial, economic and stooge political domination by the major powers and their multinationals, has continued with the virtual colonisation of most of the world at least as ruthless and bloodsucking ever since).
Not only does “Israel” involve the grotesque dispossession and non-stop genocidal repression of Palestine’s 7-8 million people, achieved from the start with systematic fascist terrorising of the population from off the land, and permanent and continual barbaric butchering repression ever since, but it is also the centre for non-stop repression of the whole Arab world.
It is an instrument for imperialism to carry out continuous aggressive smiting of the entire Middle East, (Arab and non-Arab) and brutal “punishment” of all attempts to get out from under the capitalist exploitation jackboot.
Bombing and blitzing, subversion, single and mass assassination, indiscriminate massacres, house demolition and dispossession, invasions, sabotage, punishment beatings, arbitrary arrest and intimidation, summary execution, torture, land confiscations, well-poisoning, crop destruction, overflight terrorising and more have all been, and continue to be, imposed on the Palestinian people by the racist arrogance and vile fascist supremacism of the Jewish takeover of their land, and on the countries around, some with sections of their lands also occupied by the warmongering Zionist entity.
And this endless barbarity lasting from before the Second World War, is doomed to continue until either the entire Palestinian people is eradicated or the monstrous lie of the Israeli “state” is brought to an end by its revolutionary overthrow.
It can only ever generate the deepest hatred and hostility from all the masses of the Arab world, of the Middle East and the whole Third World.
It is a part of the growing general anti-imperialist ferment and one (major) focal point for it.
Declaring this to be the result of “anti-semitism” is beyond incredible.
It is the result of explosive worldwide anti-imperialist sentiment and militancy, driven by centuries of brutal oppression and now intensified and magnified by the impact of the greatest ever slump crisis in history.
And that sentiment from billions of proletarians everywhere, cheers on the great and heroic Palestinian fightback against this oppressive overlooming occupation which squats and bears down on all daily life of this entire people imposing a most monstrous fascist apartheid dictatorship on everything they do.
Every single blow against the Zionists, using whatever methods and weapons the population can find in the stifling concentration camp imprisonment their existence amounts to effectively, is a defeat for imperialism as well as for this monstrous imposition and helps drive it back.
And this struggle merges into and is part of the huge wave of anti-imperialist jihadism, all of which makes the ending of Zionism a part of its aims.
It is unavoidable that the great sympathy and solidarity of the rest of anti-imperialism sometimes takes the form of indiscriminate anti-Jewish feeling in the cruder and more nascent eruptions of such revolt and rebellion in the world and even emerges in random attacks such as the Paris supermarket killings, at the time of the Charlie Hebdo incident.
But that is no different to the anti-Yankee feeling that equally expresses the unformed and early hostility of awakening masses in many parts of the world as the EPSR said before (Issue No 1209 18-11-03):
There is obviously not a scrap of humanity, justice, or justification on any “rational” basis, in any one of these acts of terrorist vengeance perpetrated against innocent individuals just because of their nationality or their religion.
But there never has been. There was no such rational “justification” for the Twin Towers attack on Sept 11, or for any of the IRA bombing casualties in many London and Ireland “atrocities” in the past.
Nor for any of the attacks on Red Cross or UN personnel going on in Iraq now, etc, etc, etc.
But what hypocritical line is being drawn here?????
The Jewish homeland can butcher the Palestine nation all it wants in total NAZI blitzkrieg and concentration-camp style for 55 years and NOTHING has been done about it BY ANYONE, or will be done.
In other words this crude hatred is caused by the oppression against it.
It will be ended when that oppression is ended, which will only come about when it, and the imperialism it is part of, is defeated and overturned.
As with the question of terrorism in general, Marxist understanding does not normally advocate or support such methods but neither will it condemn or denounce the eruptions of world struggle which take that form; even if the tiny voice of Marxist understanding in these early days of world turmoil could be heard at all, it is neither the place of Marxists nor their right to tell other anti-imperialism how to pursue its struggle.
Only the growing political education and refinement of the world struggle with a scientific understanding and discipline will allow the focus to be on the imperialist reality of world oppression and the need to topple it by mass communist struggle.
One factor currently muddying the water is the re-emergence of some crude fascist anti-semitism in Europe, deliberately stirred by “alt-right” confusion mongering and by attempts to revive backward racism and white nazi-supremacism in America.
This is rooted in past feudal pogromism and persecution of the Jews throughout the Middle Ages, and on under 19th century Tsarism, (for which there were all kinds of complex material class based causes) and which was eventually twisted into the infamous persecution and scapegoating of the existing poorer and working class Jewish masses (and also communists and many other minorities like Gypsies, homosexuals, mentally ill and others,) by the German Nazi face of world imperialism, a victimisation which ended in the horrors of the Holocaust.
But this has nothing to do with the general Third World and proletarian hostility to “Israel”, and Zionism.
To the contrary: the alt-right, for all that its bigotry includes elements of anti-semitism (being stirred to create division and conflict in the working class), is in favour of the aggressive actions of the Zionist government and even has expressed its approval for the expansionist settlement programme.
Conflating this reaction with the anti-imperialist anti”Israeli” struggle is just part of deliberate confusion mongering.
And it is very deliberate. The article above makes heavy weather sneering that the idea of any kind of “Jewish conspiracy” as promulgated by early 20th century Nazism and the forged “Protocols of Zion” is also an “anti-semitic trope” but this is a sleight of hand, covering the reality that the “Jewish community” is very much a self-serving freemasonry with widespread connections and influence throughout the imperialist ruling class.
It is neither necessary nor predetermined that anyone has to “belong” to it; there is no genetic basis to Jewishness and like every religion or political movement it can be rejected by any individual. A minority of those with a Jewish background do reject it, and even become communists, not least of course Karl Marx.
Like all such self-serving groups and networks within capitalism of course Jewishness is constantly looking out for its own interests, and this is conspiracy in the loosest sense of the word (just as the reality of all capitalist rule is one constant conspiracy of class interest, often unspoken or unplanned).
But much more deliberate and sinister manipulation is also constant by the Zionist “state”, notoriously through its military and security wings like Mossad and in combination with the CIA and other imperialist agencies, who are not fed $billions because they do nothing.
Just occasionally some of this comes to surface, including the labour movement “anti-semitism” demonisation racket, which is not a hoax at all:
Shai Masot, an official at the Israeli embassy in London, was caught on film boasting about setting up several political organisations in the UK, whose links to Israel he had apparently tried to obscure.
An undercover reporter with al-Jazeera’s investigations unit also filmed Masot as he and Maria Strizzolo, a UK civil servant, talked about plans to “take down” MPs he regarded as hostile to Israel, including the Foreign Office minister, Sir Alan Duncan. The Israeli ambassador to the UK, Mark Regev, subsequently apologised to Duncan and said the embassy considered the remarks “completely unacceptable”.
Masot’s business card describes him as a senior political officer, although the embassy says he is not a diplomat. He is being sent back to Israel, while Strizzolo, a manager at the Skills Funding Agency who has also worked as a Conservative party aide, resigned at the weekend.
Israeli diplomats in London issued a warning that attempts to “operate” British Jewish organisations from Jerusalem could be unlawful several months before (he) was caught on film talking about “taking down” MPs and setting up political groups in the UK.
In a cable to the Israeli foreign ministry, the diplomats also cautioned that operations being run by the country’s strategic affairs ministry could be dangerous and counterproductive.
“The strategic affairs ministry must understand that ‘operating’ organisations directly from Jerusalem by email and telephone isn’t good for their health,” warned the cable from London. “It’s not clear that the strategic affairs ministry understand the local law with regards to the activities of charities.”
As well as establishing what he has described as “several political support groups in the UK”, Masot has claimed credit for persuading the British government to adopt procurement guidelines that prevent local authorities and the NHS from boycotting Israeli goods.
The disclosures have angered MPs from all parties – a number of whom are demanding an inquiry – and provoked a number of former diplomats to warn that Masot would not have been operating without authority.
A British diplomat who has worked on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict said: “British parliamentarians need to feel able to criticise Israeli government policies which are illegal, such as settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, without fear for their promotion prospects or being smeared as anti-Israel or even anti-semitic. This is not an isolated episode. Masot is being sent home because he was caught out, not because he was a maverick.”
Israel’s strategic affairs ministry has been handed the task of countering the worldwide campaign to use boycotts, divestment and sanctions to target Israel – the so-called BDS movement. In September, the strategic affairs minister, Gilad Erdan, described the UK as the centre of the worldwide BDS campaign. Shortly afterwards, when Erdan visited London, Masot was among the Israeli officials he met.
The cable, which was first reported upon by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, was sent from London to Jerusalem two weeks later. “Attempts to act behind our back have happened before and will happen again, but ‘operating’ Jewish organisations directly from Jerusalem, with no coordination and no consultation, is liable to be dangerous,” it said. “Operating like this could encounter opposition from the organisations themselves, given their legal status: Britain isn’t the US!”
Netanyahu’s government has declared that the BDS campaign poses a strategic threat to the country. But the strategic affairs department has been given the funds to mount initiatives to counter the campaign, at a time when the foreign ministry is facing cuts.
The Zionists of course do not for one minute believe the boycott movement is a “strategic threat” in itself and nor is it going to bring down Zionism, any more than the boycott movement ended South African apartheid.
It helped, but it was the armed struggle of the ANC that toppled it.
At best the BDS and its supporters, many possibly well meaning, can be an small obstacle to a free hand for Zionism.
But the BDS, tied up with the collaborationist treachery of the Palestinian Authority (taking Zionist and CIA money for “security training” to police its own population) is also a major obstacle to any real fight by the Palestinians opposed to the armed struggle currently led by groups such as Hamas, and covering up the fundamental issue of “Israel”.
It politics are based on the UN call for “withdrawal” to the 1967 borders, which is a de facto recognition of the “state of Israel” and continuing illusions in the always completely unworkable fantasy of a “two state solution” which is a) never going to happen and b)is a complete and treacherous sellout of the dispossessed Palestinians, asked to agree to having just one fifth of their own lands,and the scrappiest waterless sections at that.
This is pivotal issue which exposes all the “left” groups, including those backing the BDS.
Not surprisingly BDS has abased itself completely with the whole “anti-semitism” witch-hunt, going along with the entire sick and nonsensical demonisation.
Some left groups appear on first sight to stand firmer.
To its credit for example the “hard nut” Stalinism of Lalkar/Proletarian has declared the whole campaign “spurious and baseless”.
To counter it, the Lalkar wing has just completed a very detailed three part history of the origins of Zionism within capitalist imperialism itself, tracing back 400 years to show how it was deliberately fomented by the non-Jewish ruling class as a tool for furthering imperialism’s colonisation programme.
The articles show the movement was not even Jewish at first but deliberately set about creating a migration and settlement movement among Jews to assist its own aims, particularly in seizing the Ottoman empire territories as it disintegrated.
They also go into detail on collaboration with Hitlerism.
Much of the scholarship is excellent – the EPSR should try to find room for some of it.
But embedded with the piece is the compromising notion that not only is the “Jewish community” separate to Zionism but potentially an opposition to it.
This is mainly drawn from the conditions of the nineteenth century and before the Second World War when there was a large population of poorer small business and proletarian Jews in Europe.
At that time there was a reasonably strong thread of socialist and even occasionally communist support, though there were complications early on over demands for Jewish separatism which Lenin’s Bolsheviks declared incompatible with revolutionary communist principles, famously breaking with the Jewish Bund in 1903.
But as already shown, post-war the Jewish community is essentially inseparable from support for the Jewish state apart from a tiny minority of individuals, and most of those do not campaign for its ending.
Which leads the Brarites to declare, alongside the Weekly Worker, that hostility to the “Jewish community” is anti-semitism, undermining its whole position.
And this is reinforced with a smuggled in recognition of the right of Israel to exist!!! - despite declamations elsewhere against the land seizing nature of the Zionist occupation.
How so? By declaring that the issue pivots around return to the “1967” borders - the fraudulent UN declared state (with only expansion beyond that being deemed “illegal” in dozens of anyway always ignored resolutions):
As things stand, the Zionist state of Israel, through its occupation of territories it captured in the 1967 war, its continued colonisation and settlement building, has to all intents and purposes scuppered the 2-state solution. That being the case, it will either have to impose its rule over the Palestinians through a system of brutal apartheid or grant them rights as equal citizens in a bi-national state. Either way, it puts paid to the Zionist dream of an exclusively Jewish - not to say theocratic and racist - state. Of these two options, the Zionists are likely to choose the former. History provides sufficient proof that such a state of affairs cannot be maintained indefinitely. It must break down in the face of Palestinian resistance and the fatigue of never-ending war between the oppressors and the oppressed.
What “state of Israel” Zionist or otherwise????
This recognition is smuggled in via a single paragraph tacked onto five pages of just the first article and gives away the entire non-revolutionary philosophy of these arch-revisionists and its endless cover-ups of the Stalinist errors of the past and the revisionist mistakes which gradually deepened into the total mind rot of Gorbachevism and the liquidation of the still viable Soviet Union.
Diplomatic recognition of “Israel” by the (still Stalin-led) USSR in 1948 and even aid for the new Zionist “state” is one of the more glaring and obvious errors that emerged – and it opens up the entire philosophical can of worms of revisionist retreat and abandonment of revolutionary politics (See EPSR book Vol 21 Unanswered Polemics) .
So as always with such Stalinism, the facts are going to be ignored, the mistakes brushed under the carpet.
But that means the Brarites cannot get to the nub of the issue, the existence of this colonial excrescence in the first place, however well they rail against its fascist atrocities.
In fact the more the detail on that, the more they cover up (with multiple pages of other stuff) the core matter.
Secretly they still hanker after the useless revisionist “Two State solution” the miserable acceptance of the land-theft described by the EPSR in past (1144 16-07-02):
The[] big fraud is in so adamantly implying that there could not possibly be ANY OTHER SOLUTION than for the Arabs and Zionists to “share” the land of Palestine (as was) (Some “sharing”, - 78% to 22%!!).
Utter total nonsense. It is the one ‘solution’ which could obviously never work in practice; (where would the ousted Palestinian millions with no more home to go back to end up, - on the already overcrowded West Bank and Gaza? and with already not enough water, or land, or manoeuvrability there for any tolerable life even for the Palestinian natives of Gaza and the West Bank????; it is a nonsense ‘solution’, meaning certain continuing anti-occupation conflict for the rest of time).
It is only abandoned now because after six decades, even this dull-brained Stalinism has had to recognise its historic unworkability (and even then hinting that “if only” the Zionists would “change their intransigence” it could still be “made to work”. Just hopeless.
And does that dim comprehension lead to a revolutionary conclusion, calling for the overturn and ending of Israel? Not at all; there should be a different compromise, in a “bi-national” state which the Zionist will be forced to accept if there is sufficient “left pressure” (Palestinian resistance).
But this is nonsense too; the only call there can be is for the total defeat of Zionism after which it might be possible for those Jews who want to remain to come to an agreement with the rightful population to stay on.
It would be the rational course for a victorious revolutionary Arab nation, to work with those from the Jewish population who agreed to build a new Palestine, particularly given the deliberately created “reality on the ground” of new infrastructure etc.
But it can come only after the complete restitution of all Palestinian property and land.
A further issue buried away in all this is the continuing and growing militancy of the Palestinian leadership, in the form of Hamas or whatever might overtake it if (or when) its religious nonsense proves inadequate to continue the struggle.
For the moment Hamas continues to hold the leadership and not least because of its central, firm and correct insistence that there is no right for Israel to exist at all and willingness to lead a dogged and determined struggle against it, despite the genocidal blitzings and horrors rained down on it, particularly in the Gaza strip.
And the world can only declare its support for the rights of the national liberation struggle to fight in any way it can against the Zionist monster, and to call for its defeat.
That does not mean supporting the Hamas or other ideologies as such; Marxism must continue to battle everywhere for a scientific materialist world view, “marching separately while striking together”.
But this raises multiple other questions, particularly around the revisionists’ craven “condemnation of terrorism” and (particularly Sunni) jihadism. For what are Hamas and the Palestinians?
Or if it comes to it, what are the jihadists of the Sinai region, slap-bang next door, allies of the Gazans and also enemies of the Zionists???
But Lalkar/Proletarian condemns them as part of ISIS - and it even supports the gross General Sisi regime in Cairo because it fights these “terrorists.”
That is, the US funded, Israeli-collaborating repressive Cairo dictatorship which took power on the back of the cold-blooded street massacre of thousands of men, women and children, which imprisons and tortures many more of the opposition, carries out mass judicial executions and which assassinated a young Italian researcher into trade union activity.
And this “condemn terrorism” tangle ends up siding with the oligarchs in Russia, and barmy Iranian mullahs (also “Islamic headbangers” surely???)
Such are the tangles that revisionist cover-up gets into.
The crisis is creating ever more complications as it disintegrates towards world war and finding a path of rational understanding through it grow more and more complex.
But it will not be done by cover up and censorship. The huge open debate and a party of scientific understanding is needed to establish a clear world view - build revolutionary Leninism.
Don Hoskins
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The Tories’ election coup a lying confidence trick to impose more open dictatorship covered by the cruder than ever sneaky lying trickery of “bourgeois democracy”
The sudden election call, a crude racket to stitch-up a “mandate”, reflects fearfulness and panic in a ruling class that knows the Great Catastrophe of world economic collapse is breaking open and that it will have to impose far more severe Slump conditions creating massive upheaval and rebellious turmoil.
Defeating this Tory face of ruling class would be a useful move but without a scrap of faith in the “alternatives” however “left” they posture.
They all fool the working class with reformism and deadly “democracy” illusions; either nothing will change or there will be real military coups if the ruling class is threatened.
Only revolution can change things.
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