Back issues
No 1559 26th June 2019
Trump’s boasted economic “success” is that of Nazism, an unstable spurt built on the bullying, intimidation and trade war cheating of the rest of the world, armsrace escalation and suppression of the working class and Third World masses. But it can only backfire as America First tramples across the great pretences of “democracy” “ freedom” and the “rule of law” everywhere, and above all the Middle East. The century long pretence an “international order” is being torn up because the crisis collapse has not been overcome but will implode even more catastrophically shortly as QE money printing effects give out. Saudi mafia thuggery and Zionist ultra-reaction is not only blind-eyed but encouraged and inflamed by Washington. Torture and gruesome horrors are accepted in order to foster the warmongering atmosphere needed to stampede the world towards world war, once more the only solution to Depression and economic breakdown. British media swamping with Tory “leader debate” another aspect of tearing up “democracy”. Build Leninism
The ignorantly oafish Donald Trump can boast all he likes about a “strong US economy” for his re-election pitch but it changes nothing about the gigantic contradictions built into monopoly capitalism, relentlessly dragging the whole world towards catastrophe and horrifying war.
Just the opposite. The great “success” he brags about is not only totally hollow, built on valueless QE credit (which has nothing to do with him anyway), but is bought at huge cost to the rest of the world as the savage crisis crash is forced onto everyone outside the States by financial arm twisting and fascist brute force bullying and threat.
And it will eventually carry even huger cost for the US itself as resistance and hostility rebounds against its belligerent chauvinist threats of sanctions and bloody destruction, the only means it has to stay on top, using intimidation to overcome economic and political bankruptcy.
That will ultimately bring it down once the world rediscovers, and further develops, revolutionary Marxist Leninist understanding, leading class war to end capitalism for good.
Simmering Third World anti-imperialist ferment has already been deepening rapidly as detestation for the colonialist and neo-colonialist exploiters and plunderers who steal and expropriate everything from the great mass of humanity, is increased.
Revolt and resistance multiplied following the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, when tens of thousands were recruited by the anti-occupation insurgencies and “jihadist” movements – and millions then poured on the streets in Egypt and Tunisia in 2011. Even greater bitterness and hatred now seethes just beneath the surface everywhere (especially Cairo - see below) and will grow daily.
Half a dozen countries have already been pulverised by US and NATO invasion, or have been torn apart by manipulated civil war and secret (i.e not democratic at all) “special forces intervention”, to quell them and “encourage the rest”.
More are lined up for intimidation and “blame” through a torrent of Goebbels lies, staged “incidents” and provoked “popular risings for democracy”.
Beyond that not just the poorest masses but increasingly the whole world is being brought to detest the US and its arrogant, callous and brutal topdog domination, personified by Trump’s fascistic bluster and his henchmen’s ever more Goebbels war provocations and lies – Syria, Iraq and Libya before, Yemen, Iran, and Venezuela now, and much bigger targets to come.
Current number one target is Iran, being set up with sanctions throttling and obviously bogus pretexts for attack more hollow than the WMD claims which set the Iraq war in train.
A world built on gangsterism and Nazi threats to “obliterate” whole countries cannot be stable.
Yet this anarchic “free market” system cannot stop itself or change direction.
It will become ever more degenerate until stopped for good, in the only way possible, by suffering defeats and the revolutionary class war that must emerge to overturn the ruling class and build socialism under working class rule.
It will come and to some extent is already here.
Meanwhile anger and resentment is spreading even among rival capitalist powers, and down into much of its own population, as Washington forces the impact of incurable “overproduction” onto everyone else (the only basis for US “growth”).
It will be uncontainable when the QE finally gives way, as this bourgeois prognosis fears (reading between the academic jargon lines and establishment euphemisms):
Data released over the next few months will show that the current US economic expansion is the longest on record. But while the US continues to outperform other advanced economies, this success has yet to dispel many Americans’ persistent sense of economic insecurity and frustration; nor does it alleviate concerns about the lack of policy space to respond to the next economic downturn or financial shock.
The current expansion began in mid-2009, following the 2008 financial crisis and the “Great Recession”. Powered initially by exceptional fiscal interventions and previously unthinkable monetary policies, the economy built enough of a foundation for private sector confidence to return, and for corporate balance sheets to recover. Coupled with accelerating advances in new technologies, the expansion came to be led in large part by technology and platform companies presiding over the new “gig economy”. It was given further impetus by pro-growth measures, including deregulation and tax cuts.
With the US unemployment rate at 3.6%, real (inflation-adjusted) wages are growing at 1.6%. And with the most recent quarterly data indicating an annualised GDP growth rate of 3.1%, US economic activity continues to outpace that of Europe and Japan by a significant margin. Owing to this strength, America has become increasingly assertive [!!!] in pursuing national objectives abroad, including by circumventing longstanding cooperative and conflict-resolution mechanisms and threatening import tariffs and other protectionist measures.
To get to this point, the US had to overcome headwinds from abroad, including an existential debt crisis in Europe and slowing economic growth in China. Domestically, deep political polarisation, especially since 2011, has impeded congressional legislative activity and produced multiple actual or threatened government shutdowns (including the longest on record). In the absence of new pro-growth measures from Congress, monetary policy became the “only game in town”. After being forced to expand its role in the economy substantially during the crisis years, the US Federal Reserve flirted with some major policy mistakes, and became more vulnerable to political interference.
Because annual growth over the past decade has often been tepid and insufficiently inclusive – what has become known as the “new normal”, or secular stagnation – the US economy has been left with a residual sense of underperformance and potential vulnerability. According to an oft-cited Fed survey, almost half of US households report having insufficient savings to cover a $400 emergency expense.
No wonder trust in institutions and expert opinion remains so low. Coupled with excessive inequality (of income, wealth, and opportunity), frustration and political anger remain high. Making matters worse, fearmongering about the implications of technology and globalisation continues to fuel concerns of job dislocations and disruptions. And outside the US, many have come to worry that the superpower responsible for issuing the global reserve currency, and that plays a decisive role in many multilateral interactions, is no longer a reliable and predictable anchor for global trade and finance.
Moreover, unlike in prior expansions, the US is yet to build sufficient buffers to deal with future economic and financial challenges. Or, to quote former US president John F Kennedy by way of IMF managing director, Christine Lagarde, more recently, we have not fixed the roof while the sun was shining.
Beyond the lack of self-insurance at the household level, the Fed’s ability to counter economic recessions and financial disruptions is rather limited. Whereas the current policy rate is 2.25%-2.5%, past downturns have usually required cuts of five percentage points or more. Also, the Fed has a bloated balance sheet and a rather weak mechanism for transmitting monetary-policy measures to the real economy. And even if fiscal policymakers were to become more responsive, they would be starting from a point of relatively high deficits and debt.
Prolonging the current expansion will require great care. Policymakers, particularly Congress, need to avoid big mistakes and minimise the risk of market accidents while doing more to promote growth. The US needs a well-targeted approach to modernising and upgrading its infrastructure.
Policymakers and leading economists also must be more sensitive to how the fruits of economic growth are shared; among other things, there should be better protections for the most vulnerable segments of society and stronger automatic stabilisers. Businesses, for their part, need to do more to embrace their social responsibilities, if only to avoid ending up in the same position as the banks after the 2008 crash. There is already a growing chorus calling for more regulatory constraints on “big tech”.
Moreover, having shaken up global trade, the US needs to ensure that it will remain the anchor of the rules-based international system. Otherwise, its ability to inform and influence economic and financial outcomes around the world will weaken.
The US will – and should – soon be celebrating its longest-ever expansion. But it must not lose sight of its remaining challenges. The last thing the world needs right now is for today’s expansion to give way to a sustained period of lower growth, higher financial instability, and greater cross-border tensions.
• Mohamed A. El-Erian is chief economic adviser at Allianz. He served as chair of President Barack Obama’s Global Development Council and was one-time deputy director at the IMF.
This smug bourgeois account’s wishful thinking and bankrupt Keynesianism states that the answer to problems is to say that they “should not happen”.
All these “has yet to build”, “must be more sensitive” (!!!) and “must not lose sight of” phrases are completely empty, not answers to capitalism’s problems, but just another way of restating them.
Declaring that “the last thing we need is a Slump” is beyond fatuous.
And declaring that others are the problem (existential debt in Europe and slowdown in China eg) is just feeding Trump’s chauvinism – these symptoms did not cause but followed the crash in the American banking core of world monopoly capitalism (and it was Beijing, taking revisionist “don’t rock the boat” class collaboration nonsense to extremes in helping out capitalism, which used its planned economy to pump in much of the credit stimulus which temporarily “rescued” the global collapse).
The piece is worth quoting however because it spells out just how disastrous things remain.
The greatest crisis ever of the capitalist system has not been solved at all and its contradictions are driving all the world’s turmoil, including all the “terrorism” and “jihadism” against the West.
Even the “growth” supposedly achieved is only that of climbing back to the starting point from the near “financial nuclear winter” of the bank meltdowns in 2008, done only by relentless printing of valueless money (inflationary dollar credit creation), begun during Obamaism and simply carried on through into Trumpism.
It is highly unstable and transient, burning the ship’s deck and timbers to keep the furnaces stoked.
Some “recovery” momentum has been established temporarily through savagely squeezing the masses all around and ruthlessly suppressing revolt through a meaningless “war on terror”.
But far from the US pulling the world economy along as a “locomotive” as the bourgeois shallowness sees it, the isolationism and aggression is adding to the gross unevenness, corruption and inequality which has always run through capitalism and which create its gigantic disparities and alienation, feeding international hostility and the deliberately fostered growth of chauvinist nastiness (including “Brexit”).
Beyond even this instability the entire monopoly capitalist framework is ever closer to implosion again, which will be far, far worse than 2008 because of the ludicrous QE inflation further saturating the credit system (already creaking like an overfilled balloon from the decades of previous inflationary dollar printing all the way back to Richard Nixon, forced to abandon the post-war Bretton Woods “good as gold” pledges in 1971).
The mess is completely incurable (the paralysed bourgeoisie has “yet to build sufficient buffers to deal with future economic and financial challenges” as the man mumbles nervously) as endless siren warnings from other bourgeois agencies, analysts and journalists declare almost daily (see multiple past EPSRs).
The most hopeless piety in this piece lies in its “liberal” desperation that the US needs “to ensure that it will remain the anchor of the rules-based international system”.
That is precisely what Trump’s America belligerence is deliberately tearing to shreds, and necessarily so from the point of view of the ruling class.
Capitalism, all of it, needs war.
It has no other way out from the intractable difficulties caused by production for private profit.
The great trade rivals have to be hammered and “overproduction surplus” wiped out (rather than be used rationally to satisfy desperate want across the planet).
Not just the tyrannically exploited masses have to be driven (back) down but increasingly even the bourgeoisies in the other major imperialist countries.
Conflicts with Europe for example were already clear when the Bush/Blair Iraq 2003 invasion was unleashed.
Now “America First” means they are all having their noses rubbed in trade war “penalties” and are being forced to “make concessions”, be it Europe over Iran, monopoly deals (and much else); China’s fast-growing and ever more successful capitalist sector economy; Mexico; or even the “ally” Japan, still suffering the stagnation begun in the early 1990s, largely as a result of US sanctions and trade bullying.
Even that will not suffice.
As the EPSR has long analysed and explained, repeating the lessons spelled out by Lenin’s Bolsheviks as World War One was brewing, it is the conflict between the major monopoly capitalist powers which becomes overriding as incurable capitalist crisis deepens.
It becomes more pressing and antagonistic even than the raw and constant class war of capitalist society and its suppression of the working class within its own countries, and against the workers states, (– in fact as Lenin explained, the primacy of inter-imperialist splits and infighting was the saving of the initial Soviet Union, weakening the wars of intervention after 1917’s Revolution; the same was true in the Second World War when Germany unleashed attacks on rivals Britain, France and Belgium first of all, not the USSR (pushed that way by skilful Soviet diplomacy establishing the 1939 “Stalin-Hitler” Pact, to buy time to build up its forces against an eventual Nazi onslaught), and even seeing temporary alliances with one side of imperialism in WW2.
The “competition” in the system (never exactly “fair” at the best of times and saturated with mafia-style dirty dealing, bribery, corruption and spying) now becomes not just cutthroat battling for markets among ever larger monopoly combines all trying (impossibly) to capture the entire world market, but literal to-the-death conflict to wipe each other out and with them the great capital “surpluses” clogging up the system.
The consequences were seen in the horrors of the Great War (“to end all wars” - hah!) and the far greater World War Two as whole countries were utterly destroyed, their cities and industries pounded and burnt into rubble and tens of millions of lives wiped out.
Even worse is brewing now as the unsolvable difficulties ripen ever further.
Petty bourgeois “democracy” and “left pressure” delusions, founded on complete failure to understand Marxism and its scientific perspective of unstoppably intensifying contradictions causing breakdown and collapse, still leave the working class in complete ignorance about the scale and extent of the horrors to come.
But the ruling class has no such doubts as Pentagon preparations are already making clear:
The Pentagon believes using nuclear weapons could “create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability”, according to a new nuclear doctrine adopted by the US joint chiefs of staff last week.
The document, entitled Nuclear Operations, was published on 11 June, and was the first such doctrine paper for 14 years. Arms control experts say it marks a shift in US military thinking towards the idea of fighting and winning a nuclear war – which they believe is a highly dangerous mindset.
“Using nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability,” the joint chiefs’ document says. “Specifically, the use of a nuclear weapon will fundamentally change the scope of a battle and create conditions that affect how commanders will prevail in conflict.”
At the start of a chapter on nuclear planning and targeting, the document quotes a cold war theorist, Herman Kahn, as saying: “My guess is that nuclear weapons will be used sometime in the next hundred years, but that their use is much more likely to be small and limited than widespread and unconstrained.”
Kahn was a controversial figure. He argued that a nuclear war could be “winnable” and is reported to have provided part of the inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove.
The Nuclear Operations document was taken down from the Pentagon online site after a week, and is now only available through a restricted access electronic library. But before it was withdrawn it was downloaded by Steven Aftergood, who directs the project on government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists.
A spokesman for the joint chiefs of staff said the document was removed from the publicly accessible defence department website “because it was determined that this publication, as is with other joint staff publications, should be for official use only”.
In an emailed statement the spokesman did not say why the document was on the public website for the first week after publication.
Aftergood said the new document “is very much conceived as a war-fighting doctrine – not simply a deterrence doctrine, and that’s unsettling”.
He pointed out that, as an operational document by the joint chiefs rather than a policy documents, its role is to plan for worst-case scenarios. But Aftergood added: “That kind of thinking itself can be hazardous. It can make that sort of eventuality more likely instead of deterring it.”
Alexandra Bell, a former state department arms control official said: “This seems to be another instance of this administration being both tone-deaf and disorganised.”
Bell, now senior policy director at the Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, added: “Posting a document about nuclear operations and then promptly deleting it shows a lack of messaging discipline and a lack of strategy. Further, at a time of rising nuclear tensions, casually postulating about the potential upsides of a nuclear attack is obtuse in the extreme.”
The doctrine has been published in the wake of the Trump administration’s withdrawal from two nuclear agreements: the 2015 joint comprehensive programme of action with Iran, and the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty with Russia. The administration is also sceptical about a third: the New Start accord that limits US and Russian forces strategic nuclear weapons and delivery systems, which is due to expire in 2021.
Meanwhile, the US and Russia are engaged in multibillion-dollar nuclear weapon modernisation programmes. As part of the US programme, the Trump administration is developing a low-yield ballistic missile, which arms control advocates have said risks lowering the nuclear threshold, making conceivable that a nuclear war could be “limited”, rather than inevitably lead to a global cataclysm.
The last nuclear operations doctrine, published during the George W Bush administration in 2005, also caused alarm. It envisaged pre-emptive nuclear strikes and the use of the US nuclear arsenal against all weapons of mass destruction, not just nuclear.
The Obama administration did not publish a nuclear operations doctrine but... sought to downgrade the role of nuclear in US military planning....but it did not go far towards disarmament as...expected.
Obamaism only played “disarmament” games because the US was forced into temporary retreat after the Middle East defeats and setbacks faced by imperialism during the New American Century belligerence of the Bush/Cheney presidency. Lost morale and war weariness were deepening hostility to the whole discredited “democracy” racket, which long term could turn to revolutionary politics.
But imperialist warmongering had to continue in Libya and by skulduggery, proxies and provocations, in Syria, Ukraine, Somalia and ultimately Yemen (initiated on Obama’s watch). The Zionist landtheft occupation of Palestine mounted one genocidal blitzing after another particularly on the Gaza hellhole, essentially a besieged concentration camp for two million dispossessed people and is increasingly egged on by Washington.
So there is nothing “tone deaf” in this (accidentally?) leaked US top brass warning; it is exactly on the path the ruling class has been following and which brings the world closer day by day to “things going wrong” and precipitating war, as is hair-raisingly clear in the monstrous bullying and intimidation of Iran and the outrageous fabrications against it, echoing the Gulf of Tonkin and “WMD” excuses for Vietnam and Iraq blitzkriegs.
WW3 will not come about by accident, any more than the shooting of a second tier archduke in Serbia 1914 caused the First World War by “accident”; it was decades of growing rivalry, local and colonialist “skirmishes” (Africa, Balkans etc), interlocking “war alliances” and arms buildup which broke into the great slugging match between the imperialist powers, described by Lenin as a war of thieves all battling to re-divide the colonial world and the super-profits plunder it provided from exported capital.
Those profits were the escape route for the rich countries from ever greater slump collapses domestically, and the threat of revolution, as analysed by Karl Marx as the inescapable consequence of production for private profit (see EPSR box and Capital Vol 1,2 and 3)).
The second part of the world war in 1939-45 saw the US come out on top, establishing itself as the controller and policeman of post-war exploitation, and Cold War leader to “contain” communism – (deludedly seen upside down by Moscow revisionism, as Soviet power “containing imperialism by peace struggle” following Stalin’s disastrous 1952 mis-analysis - see Unanswered Polemics EPSR book) – in exchange for the lion's share of the booty.
It was sustained by the most extraordinary boomtime in history, filling the space left by WW2 destruction with new investment, until that too began to reach saturation (signalled by the 1970s “oil shocks” – not a cause of inflationary crisis but its result).
The whole was held together with the gigantic pretence of a “new world order” of international cooperation, markets regulation, “human rights” and civilised treaty pledges against torture and atrocity; all a huge extension of the cynical “democracy” racket that had been evolved by the bourgeoisie over centuries to cover-up its actual class dictatorship with the hoodwinking fraud of everyone “having a say” and gradual improvement in conditions.
The staggering lie of Western “freedom” pretended that capitalism had been transformed from the antagonistic warmongering horrors of the past slump and war into a “New Order” of prosperity and enlightenment (even as the US instigated and fought over 400 wars, coups, invasions, mass killings and bloody interventions to suppress anti-imperialism and communist uprising post-war).
Massive dollar bribery and violence to install local tinpot fascist rulers, kept it all in place along with small “reforms” allowed in the richer countries to pay off the petty bourgeoisie and corrupt upper layers of the working class.
The “rules based international order” the man wants, was always total garbage in other words, as four-fifths of the world could have explained any time from their plantation hovels and sweatshop slums.
And it was all lubricated by the philosophical capitulations of the reformists and the middle class fake-“left” selling the working class the notion of “steady improvements” and “peaceful progress” whether it be from the Stalinist idiocies of “containing capitalist aggression”, or the Trotskyists’ idealist fantasies of “perfect revolution” to be carried out by a morally “perfected” working class hammered into shape by sanctimonious middle-class notions of “political correctness” before they were allowed to participate.
Revolutionary class war never gets a look in, especially where its initial outburst takes the crude and often ideologically backward form of “terrorism”, treacherously “condemned” and denounced by the fake-“left”.
Capitalist “freedom” lies were the complement to non-stop anti-communist brainwashing against the workers states, the greatest and most sustained mendacity in all history, painting them as “horrible murderous grey tyrannies” etc with all their enormous economic and egalitarian achievements, rational advances, societal, scientific and human progress written off and belittled (even when they outpaced the West – destroying Hitlerism, putting the first man in space, making incredible cultural advances, aiding and training millions from the Third World, backing anti-colonialism etc).
The bourgeois mindbending was helped by the poisonous middle-class Trotskyists, who always hated the workers states and their disciplined and reasoned proletarian dictatorship (vital to achieve communism), and more subtly by the inadequate and wooden understanding of Stalinist hero-worship, ostensibly defending the socialist camp but failing to see, analyse, criticise, and thereby hopefully help correct, the multiple (and inevitable) mistakes of these first great attempt to build socialism, leaving the working class and themselves confused.
The inevitably disappointed Stalinists even slip from uncritical tailending of Moscow into almost as much badmouthing in the end, with their “it all went rotten” defeatism virtually echoing the Trots in petty bourgeois sourness directed at successors to Stalin, usually picking on Nikita Kruschev as the alleged “counter-revolutionary” villain despite his long training and careful selection by Stalin himself (see the Polemics book op cit) and despite a not completely bad record as far as defending the dictatorship of the proletariat was concerned, against the Hungarian counter-revolution in 1956 for example or in the Cuba “crisis”.
Some like CPGB Weekly Worker, have become virtually indistinguishable from the Trots in their poisonous “anti-Stalinism”.
They none of them can explain why the actual liquidation of the Soviet workers state waited until 1989 and its philosophical basis (again see Polemics book op cit) in the retreat from revolutionary understanding.
The whole artificial edifice of Cold War “stability” propped up a post-war boom with a more or less stable division of the spoils among the imperialist powers, the US “big boss” taking the cream (and half the milk too).
But as Marxist science makes clear (confirmed once more in 2008) the crisis-termites never stop eating away at the system.
It has been breaking down repeatedly since in regional collapses, national bankruptcies, currency meltdowns and Stock Exchange lurches, each foreshock a hint of the giant seismic collapse to come, but repeatedly salvaged by the luck of Soviet revisionist liquidation in 1989; by yet more inflationary credit injection and forced austerity (Mexico 92, Japan and South-East Asia, Argentina, restored Russian capitalism 98, dot com bubble burst etc etc etc); and by continuing vacuum is world Leninist understanding.
But the collapse goes on and with it chauvinism is inevitably increasing, breaking up the network of alliances and agreements pinning all this together as a supposed “international community” (“United Nations”, World Bank, IMF, European Union) – insofar as they were ever achieved in the face of US contempt and exemption (never accepting various “war crime” jurisdictions for example, and just as well since the US would have been permanently in the dock).
The national basis of bourgeois society can never produce the genuine world cooperation that human society and rational production increasingly needs (as Brexit has underlined); that is possible in stable rational way, in harmony with nature, only through world communism built by an internationalist working class.
America’s bloodcurdling threats against Iran (and the outrageous intimidation of sending a vast war fleet just off its coast) embody the whole extent of this breakdown.
Tehran might be the direct target for US vengeful aggression as a long-term thorn in the side for Washington (and humiliation for its “right” to dominate the whole world) – and hated regional rival for imperialism’s allies in Zionism and thug-mafia feudalism of Saudi Arabia – but sanctions and war threats are also aimed at its capitalist rivals.
Repudiating the nuclear treaty with Tehran and imposing sanctions was as much about curtailing its trade with Europe and China to stymie their economic prospects.
And shutting down its oil output serves geostrategic purposes; it blocks vital supplies to other powers and at the same time cuts back international production at a point when there is a world glut. It is no coincidence the plunging oil price has risen again.
Far from US aggression being “all about oil” in the sense of stealing and plundering even more, as the fake-“left” has shallowly claimed in their one-sided philistine theories, it is about cutting it back, also serving the interests of allies like Saudi Arabia (which is increasingly facing economic disaster in a world with too much oil).
That is all the more so since the US has struck lucky with oil shale fracking, now being self-sufficient if necessary, as Trump explicitly pointed out last week.
War blockage of the Straits of Hormuz (where all the Gulf oil supplies come through) would now do less damage to the US than others.
But the last-minute White House reversal of its military “punishment” raid on Iran, shows the nervousness and uncertainty which underlies the ruling class’s fascist bluster.
Trump is not remotely concerned about the “150 lives that would have been lost” in Iran but about the potential damage done by any kind of a defeat for the US itself if it lets itself be stampeded into an onslaught (as the warmongers around the White House table want, and the beserker Zionists, Saudis and Gulf Sheiks too - any of which could have carried out the mysterious tanker attacks themselves and are more likely than Iran to have done so - which has no reason to draw an onslaught onto itself.)
Iraq and Afghanistan were already tough nuts that went badly wrong despite overwhelming US firepower; Iran’s huge population and larger economy would be virtually impossible to pacify and control with a “regime change”.
The hundreds of $billions economic costs and morale-destroying stream of bodybags home shattered the Bush presidency. Obamaism was subsequently obliged to pretend being in the back seat for the Libyan NATO invasion, desperately needed to suppress the huge Arab Spring revolt in Cairo (by supporting bogus “democracy revolt” provoked against Gaddafi and then Syria).
Trump’s populist isolationism had to be based on “ending pointless overseas adventures” and their costs.
That will not stop the even more desperate wars to come but despite the “hawks” and Pentagon gung-ho nuclear line (real enough) the ruling class seems not ready for such an Armageddon (yet).
An Iran war would also damage the backward Gulf Sheikhdom statelets, mafia thug Saudi Arabia itself and the so-far crucial rottweiler presence of Zionism’s landtheft occupation of Palestine which serves as a spear into the side of the Arab world for imperialism.
Even more it would further damage the pretences of “freedom and democracy” a still powerful weapon for the ruling class to fool and delude much of the world’s population, particularly within the petty bourgeoisie (and throughout the fake-“left” of all types advocating pacifist “No to War” protest, “step-by-step” advances and “left” pressure for the working class, having long abandoned revolutionary understanding except as empty posturing put off into the far future – if they ever had it all).
So while treaties, trade deals and the “international order” are being torn to shreds, the “democracy” stunts continue, like the latest ludicrously hyped and wildly exaggerated demonstrations in Hong Kong against perfectly justified Chinese workers state authority, or the supposed “mass protests” by the middle-class in Sudan and their reactionary calls on the “international community for aid and help” (meaning for US or European intervention, with all that means in the light of Libya, Syria and Yemen).
No Marxist support is needed for Sudan’s regime to see these pro-Western protests are not the way forwards for the working class.
The anti-China flurry with its laughably and wildly exaggerated numbers, dutifully reported as “fact” by the lying Western media, and deliberately provocative violence by some of the masked demonstrators tooled up with bottles and weapons, hoping evoke police “crackdowns” that could then be one-sidedly reported as “brutal state control” etc, comes, not by coincidence, just exactly on the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen counter-revolutionary “revolt” amid a deluge of Western media lies trying to revive the Goebbels pretence of “10,000 massacred in Beijing”, despite the long ago discrediting of the whole big lie nonsense (EPSR last week).
The students on the Hong Kong street are even more just pampered petty bourgeois youth filled with anti-communist ideas and opportunist hopes of “making it” in the West than their Beijing forerunners were (whose leaders have long found niches in the rich West serving the pro-capitalist propaganda machine and denouncing the Chinese workers state); as the previous 2014 “umbrella” demonstration stunt quickly showed, the great majority of the city-state’s working population were hostile to the disruption.
The only criticism to make of the Hong Kong chief executive, and Beijing standing behind it, is that she backed off at all from this obvious Western-sponsored challenge for the moment, suspending the extradition bill instead of standing firm to assert the workers state authority of Beijing and its right to extract criminals and murderers from a territory which is effectively part of China, whatever temporary “two systems” compromise was forced on it by the West.
Delaying the extradition law may be “clever tactics”, especially knowing the hollowness and petty bourgeois lack of staying power of any such pro-democracy stunt but making concessions and even “apologising” for perfectly sound police action against street violence only inflamed this counter-revolutionary flurry, (ludicrously described as “Hong Kong’s biggest political crisis in decades”) giving the Western media more ammunition to paint its usual “peoples’ protest for freedom” lies.
These are particularly sick and hypocritical from Britain which stole Hong Kong in the first place and then ran it for 150 years as a sometimes brutal colonial dictatorship, with never a peep about “bringing democracy” from the governors high on the Hong Kong Island hills until the Chinese Peoples Republic took over.
Things do seem to be petering out all the same with petty bourgeois defeatism now to the fore:
Elisa Wong thought she would move from Hong Kong when her seven-year-old daughter reached university age. But the recent political crisis has prompted her to emigrate to Australia.
“I must put in an application as quickly as possible,” the 45-year-old former manager at a bank said. “It’s hard to uproot your family and start again in a new country, but the upheavals in the past weeks have made up my mind.”
...Many Hong Kong people were considering leaving before the recent political turmoil because of exorbitant property prices, high cost of living and notoriously intensive education regime. But the crisis which emanated from the controversial bill has stiffened the resolve of those like Wong.
According to a survey conducted in December 2018 and published in January by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, 34% of Hong Kong adults would emigrate if they had the chance. Among this group, 16.2% have already made plans to move. Those who wanted to leave were disproportionately young and well educated: 51% were between the ages of 18 and 30 and 47.9% had college degrees.
Among those inclined to emigrate, three of the top five reasons for leaving were political: 25.7% said there were “too many political disputes and discord”, 17.4% blamed the lack of democracy and their dissatisfaction with the political system and 14.9% were dissatisfied with the Chinese government. Other factors were “crowded living conditions” (25.7%) and high property prices (17.4%).
The three most popular destinations were Canada (18.8%), Australia (18.0%) and Taiwan (11.3%).
The government does not keep official statistics on the number of Hong Kongers moving abroad but emigration consultants say that the desire to leave jumped after the 2014 Umbrella Movement failed to force Beijing to grant Hong Kong people an unfettered vote to choose their leader and spiked again this year amid the recent protests.
Willis Fu of the Goldmax Immigration Consulting Co, says enquiries received by his company this year have doubled.
...The One Country-Two Systems policy, put in place after the handover of sovereignty in 1997 to maintain Hong Kong’s status quo for 50 years, runs out in 2047. It is still unclear what Hong Kong’s status would become once that deadline passes, but the political crises in recent years add to the uncertainty of its political future.
Willy Lam, an adjunct professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said even though the extradition bill has been suspended, “it won’t remove the anxiety because Beijing is determined to promote political integration between Hong Kong and China”.
This includes infrastructure projects such as a bridge linking Hong Kong, Macau and Southern China’s the Greater Bay Area, a daily quota of 150 mainland Chinese migrants to Hong Kong, and the indoctrination of ideology at schools and the silencing of critical media.
Lam said both waves of emigration, in 1989 and 2019, demonstrated “a serious degree of distrust of the Chinese Communist Party” and are linked with the fear that the Chinese system may encroach upon Hong Kong’s core values like the rule of law, civil rights and freedoms.
All these “core values” are precisely what is being exposed by the crisis as the total sham of “fairness” and “legality” and “human rights” is shot full of holes; as credibility and “principles” become more obviously bogus with every passing day and falling bomb; inhumanity and criminality and savagery are more openly pursued; and with the obvious Goebbels fabrications for stirring war fever ever more blatant.
How much longer will the petty bourgeoisie swallow this garbage as the West’s reality of mafia thuggery and Nazi war blitzing becomes ever more grotesque, particularly in the Middle East?:
For more than four years, a brutal Saudi air campaign has bombarded Yemen, killing tens of thousands, injuring hundreds of thousands and displacing millions – creating the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. And British weapons are doing much of the killing. Every day Yemen is hit by British bombs – dropped by British planes that are flown by British-trained pilots and maintained and prepared inside Saudi Arabia by thousands of British contractors.
The Saudi-led military coalition, which includes the UAE, Bahrain and Kuwait, has “targeted civilians … in a widespread and systematic manner”, according to the UN – dropping bombs on hospitals, schools, weddings, funerals and even camps for displaced people fleeing the bombing.
Saudi Arabia has in effect contracted out vital parts of its war against Yemen’s Houthi movement to the US and the UK. Britain does not merely supply weapons for this war: it provides the personnel and expertise required to keep the war going. The British government has deployed RAF personnel to work as engineers, and to train Saudi pilots and targeteers – while an even larger role is played by BAE Systems, Britain’s biggest arms company, which the government has subcontracted to provide weapons, maintenance and engineers inside Saudi Arabia.
“The Saudi bosses absolutely depend on BAE Systems,” John Deverell, a former MoD mandarin and defence attache to Saudi Arabia and Yemen, told me. “They couldn’t do it without us.” A BAE employee recently put it more plainly to Channel 4’s Dispatches: “If we weren’t there, in seven to 14 days there wouldn’t be a jet in the sky.”
The British bombs that rain down on Yemen are produced in three towns: Glenrothes in Scotland, and Harlow and Stevenage in south-east England. Bombs roll off production lines owned by Raytheon UK and BAE Systems, firms contracted by the government to manufacture Paveway bombs (£22,000 apiece), Brimstone bombs (£105,000 apiece), and Storm Shadow cruise missiles (£790,000 apiece) for the Saudi Royal Air Force. BAE, under government contract, also assembles the jets that drop these bombs in hangars just outside the village of Warton, Lancashire.
Once these weapons arrive in Saudi Arabia, Britain’s involvement is far from over. The Saudi military lacks the expertise to use these weapons to fight a sustained air war – so BAE, under another contract to the UK government, provides what are known as “in-country” services. In practice, this means that around 6,300 British contractors are stationed at forward operating bases in Saudi Arabia. There, they train Saudi pilots and conduct essential maintenance night and day on planes worn out from flying thousands of miles across the Saudi desert to their targets in Yemen. They also supervise Saudi soldiers to load bombs on to planes and set their fuses for their intended targets.
Around 80 serving RAF personnel work inside Saudi Arabia. Sometimes they work for BAE to assist in maintaining and preparing aircraft. At other times they work as auditors to ensure that BAE is fulfilling its Ministry of Defence contracts. Additional RAF “liaison officers” work inside the command-and-control centre, from where targets in Yemen are selected.
Aircraft alone have never defeated a guerrilla insurgency. Despite atrocities committed by the Houthis on the ground, the rebel group’s domestic support has only been bolstered by outrage over years of Saudi bombing. Facing up to this reality, last year Saudi Arabia decided to deploy significant ground forces across the border – and here too, the British have joined the mission. In May 2018, an unknown number of British troops were sent to Yemen to assist Saudi ground forces. Since then, multiple newspapers have published reports of British special forces wounded in gun battles inside Houthi-controlled territory.
Under British law, it is illegal to licence arms exports if they might be used deliberately or recklessly against civilians – or in legal terms, to violate international humanitarian law. There is overwhelming evidence that the Saudis are flagrantly in violation, and yet when questions are raised in Parliament about Britain’s role in the atrocities occurring in Yemen, Conservative ministers typically limit themselves to three well-worn responses.
First, they claim that Britain operates “one of the most robust arms export regimes in the world”. Second, they say that while Britain may arm Saudi Arabia, it does not pick the targets in Yemen. Third, they say that the Saudi-led coalition already investigates its own alleged violations of international humanitarian law.
These responses have long since been overtaken by the bloody reality of the Yemen war. In fact, as the conflict has continued, the killing of civilians has actually accelerated. According to Larry Lewis, a former US State Department official who was sent to Saudi Arabia in 2015 in an attempt to reduce civilian harm, the proportion of strikes against civilians by Saudi-led forces almost doubled between 2017 and 2018.
As the court of appeal prepares to rule on the legitimacy of the British government’s continued supply of weapons to the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen, new figures show the conflict’s death toll is fast approaching the 100,000 mark.
With no clear resolution in sight, the extent of civilian casualties caused by direct targeting as the war with Houthi rebels enters its fifth year has been outlined in a report by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (Acled).
The project claims to provide the most comprehensive evaluation of the war to date, extending its previous research into fatalities to cover the start of the Yemen conflict in March 2015 through to the present day,
Clionadh Raleigh, Acled’s executive director, said the data provided “an estimate of the war’s true toll for the first time”.
“The data is both a tool and a warning,” said Raleigh. “The international community must use it to help understand, monitor, and ultimately resolve the conflict before the situation spirals even further out of control.”
The figures for earlier years paint a similarly distressing picture. In 2015, 7,700 events caused 17,100 deaths, while the following year 8,700 events caused 15,100 death. In 2017, 7,900 events caused 16,800 deaths, bringing the total number of events to 39,700 and cumulative fatalities to 91,600.
The deliberate targeting of civilians, which both sides continue to deny, is outlawed by the Geneva conventions.
Since 2015, Acled has recorded 4,500 direct civilian targeting events that led to approximately 11,700 reported deaths. Acled found that the Saudi-led coalition and its allies were responsible for 67% (over 8,000) of such fatalities, with the Houthis and their allies responsible for over 16% (1,900).
The statistics suggests that, despite international efforts to bring about a ceasefire in the region, there is little prospect of peace for those directly or indirectly caught up in the conflict.
The report, which counted 10,200 events that were responsible for the deaths of 30,800 people, identified 2018 as “the war’s deadliest and most violent year on record”. So far in 2019 there have been 4,900 recorded events that have caused 11,900 deaths.
Taiz was identified as the most violent governorate in Yemen, largely due to a four-year siege laid by Houthi forces. The statistics revealed more than 18,400 reported fatalities and nearly 2,300 reported fatalities from direct civilian targeting since 2015. Hodeidah – where the report warned civilians are at especially high risk “due to intense urban combat and indiscriminate attacks” – and al-Jawf followed, with almost 10,000 total combat fatalities reported in each region since 2015.
Analysis of the December 2018 ceasefire in Hodeida – the UN-backed Stockholm Agreement - revealed a partial drop of 20% in fatalities since its implementation, despite repeated truce violations. Acled recorded over 1,000 fewer fatalities in January and February 2019 compared with the previous two-month period, and civilian fatalities in Hodeidah province dropped to their lowest numbers in more than a year.
Anna Stavrianakis, senior lecturer at the University of Sussex, said: “These figures from Acled are a sobering reminder that the war in Yemen is getting worse, not better. Acled have counted 11,700 reported civilian fatalities – a conservative estimate of civilian deaths as a result of direct targeting, which should be considered alongside collateral deaths as well as the impact of famine and cholera caused by the blockade and attacks on infrastructure and healthcare facilities.”
Acled, who collated the data in partnership with the Yemen Data Project, said the Saudi-led coalition was responsible for the majority of reported civilian fatalities from direct targeting. The figures raise further questions about UK policy towards Saudi Arabia following the murder of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the recent observation by Mark Lowcock, the UN undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, that “the war is not only brutal, it is unwinnable”.
The court of appeal has declared British arms sales to Saudi Arabia unlawful because they contributed to civilian casualties in indiscriminate bombing in Yemen.
The ruling from three senior judges follows a challenge brought by Campaign Against Arms Trade, which had accused the UK government of licensing the sale of arms when there was a clear risk that their use could breach international humanitarian law.
In its judgment in London on Thursday, the court of appeal ruled that “the process of decision-making by the government was wrong in law in one significant respect”.
Announcing the court’s decision the master of the rolls, Sir Terence Etherton, sitting with Lord Justice Irwin and Lord Justice Singh, said the government “made no concluded assessments of whether the Saudi-led coalition had committed violations of international humanitarian law in the past, during the Yemen conflict, and made no attempt to do so”.
However, he added: “The decision of the court today does not mean that licences to export arms to Saudi Arabia must immediately be suspended.”
Future risks of breaches of humanitarian law by the Saudi-led coalition must be assessed by ministers when deciding whether to allow arms sales, in the context of past behaviour, the court said.
A spokesperson for the Department for International Trade said that ministers would seek leave to appeal. “This judgment is not about whether the decisions themselves were right or wrong, but whether the process in reaching those decisions was correct,” the spokesperson added.
So much for the “rule of law” then – imagine the non-stop bourgeois press din if it were China or even Putin’s Bonapartist Russia. Or if Cuba were accused of something gruesome inside an embassy:
The crown prince of Saudi Arabia should be investigated over the murder of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi because there is “credible evidence” that he and other senior officials are liable for the killing, according to a damning and forensic UN report.
In an excoriating 100-page analysis published on Wednesday of what happened to Khashoggi last October, Agnes Callamard, the UN’s special rapporteur, says the death of the journalist was “an international crime”.
“It is the conclusion of the special rapporteur that Mr Khashoggi has been the victim of a deliberate, premeditated execution, an extrajudicial killing for which the state of Saudi Arabia is responsible under international human rights law,” she says.
Using recordings of conversations from inside the Istanbul consulate where Khashoggi was killed, her report pieces together his last moments, and how he was confronted by Saudi officials, one of whom said: “We are coming to get you.”
When Khashoggi refused to cooperate, a struggle can be heard, including heavy panting. The special rapporteur’s report concludes: “Assessments of the recordings by intelligence officers in Turkey and other countries suggest that Mr Khashoggi could have been injected with a sedative and then suffocated using a plastic bag.”
The report highlights how critics of the kingdom are deliberately targeted, and comes amid a number of claims that Saudi Arabia has been using sophisticated surveillance spyware to hack the phones of journalists and academics.
The Guardian can now reveal it has been warned that its journalists have been targeted by a hacking unit inside Saudi Arabia.
The kingdom initially denied any involvement (in Khashoggi), and then described it as a rogue operation that the heir to the throne knew nothing about.
That is not the view of the special rapporteur’s report. Its main findings include:
• There is credible evidence, warranting further investigation, of high-level Saudi officials’ individual liability, including the crown prince’s.
• Khashoggi’s death was an extrajudicial killing. His attempted kidnapping would constitute a violation under international human rights law … and may constitute an act of torture under the terms of the convention against torture.
• The investigations conducted by Saudi Arabia and Turkey failed to meet international standards regarding investigation into unlawful deaths.
• The Saudi investigation was not conducted in good faith, and might amount to obstructing justice.
The report demands that the trial of the 11 suspects in Saudi Arabia be suspended amid concerns about secrecy over the proceedings and lack of credibility.
It states: “Some eight months after the execution of Mr Khashoggi, the determination and assignment of individual responsibilities remain clouded in secrecy and lack of due process.”
It adds: “To date the Saudi state has failed to offer public recognition of its responsibility for the killing of Mr Khashoggi, and it has failed to offer an apology to Mr Khashoggi’s family, friends and colleagues for his death and for the manner in which he was killed.
“The special rapporteur obtained information regarding a financial package offered to the children of Mr Jamal Khashoggi but it is questionable whether such a package amounts to compensation under international human rights law.”
Khashoggi, 59, was killed when he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on 2 October last year. One of the Middle East’s most important voices, he considered journalism within, about and for the region to be vital, the special rapporteur states.
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In a recording from inside the consulate on 1 October, one man was recorded saying: “A commission is coming from Saudi Arabia tomorrow. They have something to do in the consulate … Their work inside will take two or three days.”
There were discussions that day about a farmhouse in Yalova, a city on the coast of the Sea of Marmara, and its isolated position. When an official is told “there is nobody there … just a caretaker,” he replies, “Very nice.”
The report then outlines conversations that took place shortly before Khashoggi arrived at the Turkish consulate on the day he died.
One Saudi official asked whether it would “be possible to put the trunk in a bag”. Another replied: “No. Too heavy. It is not a problem. The body is heavy. First time I cut on the ground. If we take plastic bags and cut it into pieces, it will be finished. We will wrap each of them.”
Khashoggi entered the consulate at 1.15pm , the report says. He was invited to the office of the consul general located on the second floor of the consulate.
According to recordings, the conversation with him first focused on whether he would come back to Saudi Arabia. An official told him: “We will have to take you back. There is an order from Interpol. Interpol requested you to be sent back. We are coming to get you.”
He was asked about his two phones and told to type a message, which he refused to do, the special rapporteur says.
According to the recordings, Khashoggi said: “What should I say? See you soon? I can’t say kidnapping. I will not write anything.”
An official then said to him: “Type it, Mr Jamal. Hurry up. Help us so that we can help you because at the end we will take you back to Saudi Arabia and if you don’t help us you know what will happen at the end; let this issue find a good end.”
At 1.33pm, Khashoggi could be heard saying: “There is a towel here. Are you going to give me drugs?”
“We will anaesthetise you,” came a reply.
In the recordings, sounds of a struggle can be heard, the UN report says, and then voices saying: “Did he sleep? … Keep pushing … Push here. Don’t remove your hand. Push it.”
The report adds: “The sound of plastic sheets (wrapping) could also be heard. Turkish intelligence concluded that these came after Mr Khashoggi’s death while the Saudi officials were dismembering his body.”
And the “democratic” West, so keen to denounce China, or Venezuela etc for supposed tyranny, where do they stand???
The US secretary of state Mike Pompeo did not discuss the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in a meeting with Saudi king it has been reported, in the latest sign the Trump administration is trying to drop the subject.
Pompeo said in a tweet that he had had a “productive meeting” with King Salman “to discuss heightened tensions in the region and the need to promote maritime security in the Strait of Hormuz”.
“Freedom of navigation is paramount,” he said. Asked about the slaughter and dismemberment of Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident, in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last October, an unnamed senior state department official travelling with Pompeo told Reuters news agency the subject did not come up.
In an interview broadcast on Sunday, Donald Trump said he had talked to Saudi crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman on Friday but the Khashoggi murder “really didn’t come up in that discussion”.
The president sought to deflect further questions about the killing, saying Iran killed more people and pointing to Saudi spending on US weapons and other goods.
“They spend $400 to $450bn over a period of time, all money, all jobs, buying equipment,” Trump told NBC News.
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The ruling from the court of appeal (UK arms exports to Saudi Arabia ruled illegal over risk to Yemenis, 21 June) is to be welcomed. It may interest readers that in February this year the foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, one of the contenders for the Tory party leadership and thus to be prime minister, criticised his German counterpart for halting arms sales to Saudi Arabia. “I am very concerned about the impact of the German government’s decision on the British and European defence industry,” he wrote in a letter seen by Der Spiegel magazine (Jeremy Hunt urges Germany to rethink Saudi arms sales ban, theguardian.com, 20 February).
So not only did Jeremy Hunt want to continue UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia, but even more despicably he wanted to dissuade other countries from halting any sales.
Rae Street Littleborough, Lancashire
And if that is not enough, there is plenty more gangster thuggery in the region.
Zionist genocidal oppression of the Palestinians is non-stop.
And in next door Egypt Saudi Arabian money helps fund the dictatorship of General Sisi which overthrew the newly democratic presidency of Morsi in 2013 (with Western intelligence and Zionist help).
Hundreds were slaughtered on the street and mass imprisonment and mass “executions” have gone on non-stop since. Now Morsi himself has effectively been murdered too:
Egypt’s first democratically elected civilian president, Mohamed Morsi, has collapsed during a court session and died, almost six years after he was forced from power in a bloody coup.
Morsi, a senior figure in the now-banned Muslim Brotherhood, was attending a session in his trial on espionage charges on Monday when he blacked out and died, according to state media.
“After the case was adjourned, he fainted and died. His body was then transferred to the hospital,” reported the Egyptian state newspaper al-Ahram, referring to Morsi’s retrial for allegedly spying for the Palestinian Islamist organisation Hamas.
Egypt’s public prosecutor said Morsi, 67, was pronounced dead on arrival at a Cairo hospital, after he fainted inside the defendants “cage” in the courtroom. Nabil Sadiq’s statement said the cause of death was being investigated but that “there were no visible, recent external injuries on the body of the deceased”.
The Brotherhood accused the government of “assassinating” Morsi through years of poor prison conditions, and called on Egyptians to gather for a mass funeral.
“We heard the banging on the glass cage from the rest of the other inmates and them screaming loudly that Morsi had died,” Morsi’s lawyer, Osama El Helw, told AFP.
Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, reacted angrily to news of Morsi’s death. “History will never forget those tyrants who led to his death by putting him in jail and threatening him with execution,” he said in a televised speech.
Morsi became president in 2012, following Egypt’s first and only free elections after the dictator Hosni Mubarak was forced from power. He won 51.7% of the vote and his rule marked the peak of power for Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which had functioned for decades as an underground political organisation.
But his time in power was cut short a year later as demonstrators once again took to the streets – this time to protest against Morsi’s rule and demand fresh elections. Egypt’s military seized power in a coup on 3 July 2013, bringing the then defence minister, Abdel-Fatah al-Sisi, to power.
As president, Sisi has overseen an extensive crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood and anyone suspected of supporting the group, which Egypt now considers a terrorist organisation.
Many of his supporters met an even worse fate. On 14 August 2013, Egyptian security forces raided two protest encampments that had been set up in Cairo to demand that Morsi be reinstated. At least 1,150 were killed in five separate incidents when Egyptian forces opened fire on protesters, according to Human Rights Watch.
The former president, who had a history of ill health including diabetes and liver and kidney disease, was held in solitary confinement in Tora prison in Cairo.
In 2018, a panel of three British parliamentarians reported that Morsi was being kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, with just one hour allowed for exercise.
The “demonstrators” in 2013 were the military and the middle class, coordinated by the intelligence agencies (CIA, possibly Zionist) in yet another artificial revolt bearing all the hallmarks of previous “colour revolutions”, set going once they finally got their act together as they recovered from the shock of the spontaneous 2011 uprisings.
The coup needed a year of carefully plotted economic sabotage by the military bureaucracy (advised by Washington), using its continuing ownership of major enterprises and utilities, to discredit the new Morsi presidency and create discontent in the petty bourgeoisie.
It was much the same general programme used now against Iran, against Iraq, against Venezuela and many more, and as will always be used against “democratic change” if it does not suit imperialism, which can be countered only by the full takeover of an economy by the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Such is the confusion of the fake-“left”, they end up shamefully declaring the original demonstrations to be all “organised by the West” instead (EPSR 1557 eg) a nonsense completely out of kilter with world events, with the political nature of the eruption (against a heavily supported Western stooge dictator in Mubarak) and with the obvious unrolling worldwide of anti-imperialist resistance deepened by the devastating economic crisis.
Even the CIA with its billions in funding for skulduggery and decades of experience in covert counter-revolution and coups would find it impossible to bring millions onto the street in such a sudden and obviously unexpected upwelling, one that threw the entire West into a panic (knowing if the giant 90 million population of Egypt was in anti-imperialist revolt, the Arab world and even the whole Middle East would follow).
And why on earth would imperialism want to overturn its well-subsidised man Mubarak and the deals done with Zionism, in order to create a turmoil that could go in any direction, unleashing who knows what mass upheaval?
And why would it then be necessary to spend two years getting things back under control using the crudity of the Sisi coup, and a subsequent dictatorship (once more heavily funded by the US, in cahoots with Zionism and suppressing all local revolt)?
The idiotic and shameful revisionist characterisation of the Arab Spring (and subsequent jihadist eruptions) as “just a Western plot” reflects the complete abandonment of all revolutionary grasp and goes hand in hand with the whole fake-“left”s capitulation to the “war on terror” nonsense.
Instead of seeing the world in revolt, they declare such revolt itself to be the problem, nothing but “headbanging jihadism” or “reactionary Islam” to be suppressed.
They thereby effectively go along with imperialism’s pretence to be policing the world instead of explaining to the working class that these are the opening stages in World War Three, caused and created by capitalist crisis and imperialist warmaking.
It is craven cowardice and total counter-revolutionary nonsense, which in a few cases even ends up effectively supporting such monsters as Sisi, Saddam Hussein and the flaky Assad Ba-athists.
As the EPSR has many times said, the confused, sectarian, barmy religious and often even reactionary ideology of the numerous (and ever growing) insurgencies and “terrorist” upheavals, is not one that Marxist would support ideologically or usually in its methods, as an answer for the working class’s problems.
But the revolutionary momentum underneath them, needs to be recognised not condemned and denounced.
The battle is to build the revolutionary understanding that can lead the world.
Without such perspectives there can be no hope of changing the relentless slide into Slump and war anywhere.
Nor will the working class make any progress in Britain without it as the ludicrous current leadership “election” makes clear, with its non-stop deluge of pure Tory propaganda saturating the airwaves and media to install yet another prime minister and government without any reference to the mass of the population.
This is a ruling class too fearful even to allow the pretence of “democracy” at all.
But fake-“leftism” still props up that delusion. Build Leninism. Duncan Trubshaw
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