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No 1580 28th May 2020

Demented anti-China campaign the most elaborate Western disinformation diversion yet for the incompetence, failure and breakdown collapse of the imperialist world order. Not only is hate campaigning poured out over non-existent “genocide” of Uighurs in Xinjiang, “repression” in Hong Kong and “spying” by Huawei a heap of festering garbage but also the most grotesque HYPOCRISY by a capitalist system of world domination and tyrannous exploitation that was built and continues on NOTHING BUT genocide and repression. Sick willingness of Labourite scum not only to back this campaign but outdo its poison underlines the counter-revolutionary role its rampant opportunism and class collaboration plays. The fake-“left” still insisting Labour entryism or “critical support” is a way forwards (and just as bilious against Beijing) also thoroughly exposed. But so is “anti-Labour” Stalinism which encouraged the Brexit jingoism this fits with, and which refuses to declare China a workers state. Leninism needed

Labourite eagerness to pitch in behind the hate-filled lie campaign stirred up by the bourgeoisie against China to cover up the crisis breakdown of the capitalist system, is even more disgusting than their continued “left anti-semitism” McCarthyite witchhunting and censorship, aiding the foulest colonialist Zionist aggression in the Middle East, bombing Iran and violently suppressing the 8 million strong Palestinian nation.

Their willingness to back the simultaneous anti-Russian “bogeyman” distraction stunt by other Tories and ruling class elements (which in fact reveals all kinds of crisis splits in the bourgeoisie with other elements taking big donations from assorted oligarchs) only underlines their grovelling venality.

Both give further confirmation of the utterly counter-revolutionary purpose of Labour while further exposing the posturings and pretences of the fake-“left” still insisting there is a way forwards through “changing Labour” by assorted variations on “entryism” or “conditional support for left elements” or transforming part of it by forming internal groupings, all bolstering the threadbare “democracy” racket by dragging the working class back behind this rotten reaction.

But only ending this vile system can change things, by its revolutionary overturn, and that includes overturn of the whole TUC/Labourite stooge tradition.

It was born of class collaboration and has long been thoroughly part of imperialism itself, ready to do any dirty business to run it and defend it (See EPSR books Vol 10) while looking after the interests of the fatcats and City boys as Blairism made explicit (but which was true covertly from at least as far back as Ramsay McDonald and under the “great left” Attlee government too).

As crisis rapidly deepens the Labourites do not even make a pretence of being an “opposition” nor to seriously challenging the Tory ruling class, quibbling only over minor management details as they half-heartedly go through the motions of opposition, though certainly not in any sense to bring down this incompetent gang of Eton bullies and spivvy wide boys desperately floundering as the British capitalist economy heads for the rocks.

They have no wish to be in charge as the ship goes down, but let it be known they “fully support” the government in “a time of emergency” (just when it should be brought down).

They even made sure when the Labour “left” accidentally took the lead under Corbyn, that it was sabotaged and stymied with the poisonous Zionist “left anti-semitism” campaign, to prevent even this tepid reformist pretence from going anywhere, or letting it give any impetus to the mass popular support which pushed it up (for fear it might get out of control).

So these post-Blair Labourites not only go along with the entire anti-China Goebbels charade, carefully built up by the intelligence agencies over past years as part of the international blame game for capitalism’s own failure, but even try to outdo the Tories in demented vitriol.

Backing this vicious and demented war fever jingoism would be a foul treachery in itself, but they attack the government for not being hard enough, lining themselves up with the minority wing of ultra-right MPs and their off-the-wall red-faced “British Empire” chauvinist rantings on Hong Kong etc (pretending that a year of every kind of provocative violence, anti-socialist hatred, reactionary pro-British flagwaving colonialism, attacks on bystanders, intimidation, arson and disruption constituted “peaceful pro-democracy protest”); their ludicrous fearmongering about Huawei telecoms “spying”; and their even more laughable accusations that China “caused” the Covid virus pandemic, and echoing overall the Trumpite Goebbels inversion that it is China that is “being aggressive”.

The old fascist “joke” that he “attacked my boot with his face your honour” springs to mind.

The whole farrago swamping the airwaves is nothing but a stinking stew of fabrications, CIA and MI6 coached “witness” statements, misrepresented video and still images, unfounded allegations, un-evidenced accusation (and in the case of alleged computer hacking, with no way to obtain evidence anyway other than “assessments by the intelligence agencies”) and unjustified conclusions drawn from specious “analysis” of perfectly inconsequential databanks.

Every part of this deliberate campaign of carefully coordinated disinformation and diplomatic aggression is a complete fraud, a giant “fake news” diversion by Washington and its poodle British stooges, playing on knee-jerk petty bourgeois individualism (which elsewhere continues to insist on its “rights not to get the Covid virus”) built up by decades of anti-communist “human rights” brainwashing.

Its aims are much deeper than straightforward anti-China hostility.

First and most important is to cover up and distract attention from the total breakdown of the capitalist profit system rushing on the world like a runaway locomotive, and to stir up further the jingoism and hate atmosphere needed for the war it must end in.

That may well not be with China at all, now a very large and powerful nut to crack, but with the other “enemies” whose competition and capitalist efficiency relative to the US (and Britain too) has undermined its supremacy for decades, most of all Japan and Germany-dominated Europe.

A fearful ruling class knows (if the language can be excused) that real shit will hit the fan very shortly when all its insane credit swamping to keep things staggering on, will have to end, or explode in massive inflation and currency failures.

Long emerging, the new financial meltdown is not just a “Covid disaster” as it is lyingly presented, – (although triggered and much worsened by the pandemic) – but the greatest economic Catastrophe in history, part two of the Global Bank Collapse which broke surface in 2008, the result of the contradictions of monopoly capitalist “ownership” and its bourgeois profit driven system which always eventually reaches “overproduction” collapse and cutthroat trade war as markets spiral down.

As Marxist science spelled out 12 years ago (and in fact from its very origins) the disaster was always going to return and a hundred times worse, as is inevitable and

in a system based on private ownership and “entrepreneurship” however flashy or long-lasting the “booms” it produces (see economics box, Marx’s Capital, the Communist Manifesto, Lenin’s Imperialism or multiple past issues of the EPSR).

The full impact of the collapse will be dumped on the shoulders of ordinary people.

Just how bad is the disaster they now face still has to sink in to a largely unsuspecting working class (and layers of the middle class too) fooled by decades of credit fed “boom” and a philosophical vacuum in mass political understanding caused by deliberately encouraged backward hostility to theory, compounded by consumerist philistinism and all further confused by reformist opportunism, blockheaded revisionism and bilious anti-Soviet Trotskyism, all still bemused by, and capitulating to, the lying fraud of bourgeois “democracy”.

Already hammered by a decade of austerity, welfare cuts, homelessness, food bank poverty and grotesque profiteering by the ultra-rich (see Grenfell inquiry eg), along with privatisation plundering of what remains of public assets (shamelessly including the Covid-distorted NHS and social care services, even as the pandemic continues), they now face mass unemployment, forced wage cuts and deprivation on a scale never seen before, even in the 1930s Depression.

Bitter lessons will soon be learned from the real world.

The bourgeoisie will try to drive them all the way down into Third World exploitation levels or worse, (not even ruling out Nazi-style forced labour) if there is time before even greater devastation follows in the inevitable world warmongering to come, like World War Two but worse, which is the only “way out” the ruling class knows from its periodic and always worse crisis breakdowns.

But the crisis will also drive massive upheaval, turmoil and social breakdown (and is already) as the ruling class is fully aware and trying to prepare for, with its belligerence and warmongering and most obviously at present in the ever-closer-to-outright-fascism of the Trumpite police and federal street repression of the Black Lives protests in America itself, using many of the techniques seen under tinpot dictatorships like Pinochet’s Chile etc (use of unidentified agents, unmarked cars, brute unprovoked violence on demonstrators, secret street snatch arrests to undisclosed locations etc etc) and in the jingoism, race hatred and other divisiveness (chauvinism, ageism, feminism, PCism of all kinds) spewing out in all directions (including from the PC fake-“left” itself).

In such conditions, though only with clear Leninist leadership ready to fight for such perspectives, workers will be ready to understand that planned socialism is the only way forwards for humanity to deal with the gigantic problems it faces from the historic collapse of the capitalist economic order, more degenerate, incapable and vicious than ever.

Only the most titanic class war to overturn this deranged and psychotic ruling class will allow such a transformation of society.

Hence the bourgeoisie’s long laid efforts to demonise Beijing’s huge success has gone into overdrive, part of its permanent programme to rubbish the achievements and attractions of collective society now highlighted by the capitalist chaos everywhere else.

Serious workers still recall the gigantic achievements made by 73 years of the Soviet Union, and nostalgia in Russia and East Europe for socialist life has not completely vanished even a generation on (in Eastern Ukraine for example).

And the Chinese workers state, (and other examples like Vietnam, Cuba and North Korea and Laos too) remain an inspiration in general for the sweatshopped near-slave driven masses of the Third World, despite sometimes flawed Beijing revisionist leadership.

It will increasingly become so too for the up-to-now imperialist-corrupted masses in the “rich countries” as the crisis rapidly deepens and their complacently assumed “standard of living”, benefiting from a century and a half of ruthless Third World exploitation, is wiped out.

Multiplying that attraction now is the stunning example all workers states have delivered in competently and calmly handling the Covid pandemic and bringing it under control (any initial errors notwithstanding), saving lives through the discipline and organisation of a centrally planned economy serving the collective interest and not profiteering, as the EPSR has been saying since the start (No1571 p2).

The contrast is sharp with the anarchy, incompetence and sheer callous indifference to the huge scale of pandemic deaths, and knock-on unemployment, shown by the US and Brazil in particular and its stooges in the British ruling class, as well as capitalism generally.

The bourgeois concern has been only to protect and bail out the finances of the big monopoly corporations leaving the little petty bourgeois businesses mostly to go under, while simultaneously using the pandemic to slip through all kinds of sly privatisations and profiteering trade deals (Brexit US sellout a case in point).

Profit making interests for pharmaceutical and medical equipment suppliers are typical, directly overriding any humanity or the common pooling of research etc for better progress and instead feeding into the chauvinist trade-war atmosphere too, which has guided Trumpism from the start.

A crucial element is concentrating and increasing the riches of the ruling class through selling them the vastly increased national debts being incurred.

As a recent bourgeois press letter commented:

Many ask how Rishi Sunak’s generous budget will be financed (Tory praise for summer statement comes with concerns over finances, 8 July). The Tories can confidently scatter cash into the economy, knowing that the OECD, Wall Street, Eurodad Capital Flight and other international agencies estimate there are more than $32tn (£25.4tn) of tax-unpaid assets held in some 75 tax havens, which grows at $1tn (£0.8tn) per annum. It is this vast sum of illicit money, endlessly searching for safe, profitable havens, that keeps global interest rates at near zero.

Of this, it is estimated that $3tn (£2.4tn) is from the UK. If Sunak spends $300bn (£237bn) of this UK hoard, it is only 10% of our tax-haven assets. So, long-term borrowing at near 0% rates is not likely to be a problem. We, the people, will pay the loans back to the tax havens in due course. If HMRC is empowered to levy back-tax and penalties as normal, it will approximately amount to the whole capital – $3tn – and spare the UK taxpayers.

Noel Hodson Member of Eurodad Capital Flight

But 0% interest is not an advantage so much as the central problem facing capital because if there are no “safe profitable havens” then where are all those dividends for the languid, and indulgently degenerate ruling class luxury life going to come from?? Or more prosaically, all those middle-class pensions and “nest-egg” incomes, sustaining the great golf-club rentier lifestyle Lenin pointed to?

The tendency of profit rates to fall, which is what interest rates reflect, is the great contradiction paralysing the system and driving it towards collapse (see Capital once more) as surplus capital mountains inexorably grow.

So State debt is the only option, artificially maintaining “earnings” (ha!) paid for by the ruthless taxation and speed-up exploitation to come.

But that has limits too; entire countries can be wiped out by the vicissitudes of the market.

Of course none of this great sloshing surplus is going to be taxed as the letter proposes - avoiding the HMRC or any fairness was precisely why the ruling class set up this network of luxury tax free havens and island paradises in the first place.

To overcome this paralysing crisis, all this wealth has to be seized and used by the working class, along with the real world assets it ostensibly “owns”, set in motion for working class purposes, under the overall control of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the only means by which a socialist and ultimately communist world can be built.

Such lessons being learned are anathema to the ruling class which does its best to suppress such truths despite the risible notion of “freedom of speech” (another “ha!”).

It already hates every scrap of movement in the world towards communism, bending every effort to discredit and destroy even the tamest partial examples of left progress and anti-imperialism with non-stop denigration, sneering and lies about “grey totalitarianism”, backed up by physical measures to stop any progress including siege starvation and blockade (strangling little Cuba for 60 years eg - so far without success), sabotage, assassination, death-squads and massacres, coups and if necessary all-out invasion and war.

It has killed tens of millions in pursuit of the anti-communist crusade starting with drowning the Paris Commune in blood in 1871, and the far greater slaughter after 1917 with the 14 nation war of intervention into Lenin’s new Soviet Russia and the much greater barbarity of the Second World War (killing over 25 million Soviets) and in a stream of wars and interventions since.

Tens of $billions were devoted to subversion, intimidation and undermining of the Soviet camp, surrounding it with a gigantic nuclear arsenal and even then succeeding, eventually, only through the weakness of Moscow’s revisionist philosophical retreat from revolution, not any “collapse” or defeat.

But China and others remain despite their own revisionist leadership flaws; and their latest dramatic proof of the advantages of communist society, just when bankrupt capitalism is facing oncoming Catastrophe anyway, has sent the bourgeoisie into a frenzy.

And the Labourites are right up their fundament.

Every every possible foul Goebbels accusation and slander against the Chinese workers state is not only repeated but embellished by these Labourite scum, including the grotesque and outrageous CIA-fabricated BIG LIE allegation of “genocide” of the Uighur people parroted straight-faced by the weasel-like “shadow foreign secretary” Lisa Nandy, and the preposterous “Sir” Keir Starmer, fresh from banging up whistleblower Julian Assange and now wheeled out onto the BBC Goebbels lie machine, or the bourgeois press to try and give some credence to this hollow hate campaign.

It should barely get off the ground it has so many holes in it.

But before looking at the gobsmacking nonsense of this coordinated torrent of fabrications and innuendos, all dutifully discussed, interviewed and repeated with straight faces across the news programmes and front-pages (have bourgeois journalists absolutely NO principles at all? - rhetorical question) - the grotesque bare-faced hypocrisy of the whole foetid mess needs exposing.

Imperialist world domination comprises, and has always comprised, tyrannical exploitation sustained by a string of nothing but genocidal onslaught and war, among them the elimination of more than 200 indigenous nations in colonised America, (“Indians” in the North, the Aztecs, Incas, Caribs and many others in the centre and South); the Aborigines in Australia; the Maoris in New Zealand; the Zulus in Africa; the enslavement or massacre of tens of millions more Africans and other nations; the Gatling gun shooting of the Sudanese, and many more Egyptians, Algerians, and other Arabs; chemical warfare on the Iraqis in the 1920s; horrific slaughter in India by direct warfare and by exploitation-imposed famine (including 3 million Bengalis by Churchill during World War Two); the degenerate fascism of Franco’s civil war slaughter and terror in Spain (aided by the whole of imperialism); brutal butchery in Indonesia and the Philippines, and obviously the litany of post-WW2 horrors of over 400 interventions, coups, massacres, invasions, and all-out wars including the total destruction of south-east Asia (Vietnam, Kampuchea, Laos etc) by high explosives and deadly chemical and ecological warfare with the Agent Orange, leaving a deadly legacy to this day of hundreds of thousands of unexploded mines and bombs and horrifying birth defects across all three.

The preceding war on North Korea destroyed 98% of the capital Pyongyang and killed at least two million and another up to three million were butchered in Indonesia’s anti-communist coup by General Suharto in 1965.

The little island of Grenada’s bold revolution and its heroic leadership struggling towards Leninism under Bernard Coard was drowned in blood in 1983 (see EPSR Book Vol 12) by the insanely over the top might of Ronald Reagan’s American invasion and the whole of Latin America has been subjected to CIA coordinated non-stop subversion, skulduggery and sabotage, including some of the most depraved mass torture and outright massacre techniques ever, by local military and police trained by the “School of the Americas” and later Fort Benning; in Chile under General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship following his CIA-directed coup in 1973 (wrongly stated in the last issue as 1974), in El Salvador, in Argentina, in Brazil, in Guatemala, in Honduras and Paraguay. Haiti has been kept in the direst of poverty by death-squad repression and Puerto Rico too, suppressed and absorbed by the US.

Currently the Middle East is witnessing at least four grotesque wars killing hundreds of thousands on top of the millions slaughtered and terrorised in non-stop war and brutality since the “shock and awe” invasion of Iraq in 2003, - (after more than a decade of barbaric “sanctions” siege had killed millions including 500,000 children, in the wake of the first Gulf War) - and its gratuitous and monstrous killing and brute suppression of the civilian population, (currently being partially, if limitedly, admitted to in the TV series Once upon a time in Iraq).

As well as the destruction of the entire country this has massively accelerated the “terrorist” and jihadist recruitment to the anti-occupation movements, compounding and inflaming the turmoil, which in turn have been barbarically “eliminated”, along with thousands of civilians and the total razing of several major cities.

Not a peep ever emerges denouncing all these genocides from any politicians including the Labourites let alone action.

But all this chaos is highly visible, evidenced, videoed and testified to with a slew of witnesses far greater and much more solid than the single Uighur woman currently being touted round the studios and newspapers by the intelligence agencies to spout unchallenged her carefully scripted nonsense about “torture” and “forced sterilisation”, alongside a stale bit of video of a standard prisoner transfer in China repeated from last autumn but suddenly presented as “new” (because real “evidence” is so thin) hysterically described as proof of “repression”.

Simultaneously the Yemen has been blitzed on a truly genocidal scale (as far as this now overworked word means anything), for over four years courtesy of British and American arms, maintenance for the same, and military training and support.

Despite a deluge of actual evidence against the monstrous feudal-gangster thugs running Saudi Arabia (the Khashoggi murderers) of the total destruction and horror imposed on the Yemeni people, including repeated and deliberate bombing of civilian men, women and children and the facilities that sustain their lives, not one word of real “outrage” has been heard from the “deep concern for human rights” allegedly driving the Western fainthearts over Xinjiang and its Uighur population.

Tens of thousands have been butchered, killed or horribly maimed, traumatised, bereaved and terrified by the giant high explosive bombs, cluster bombs with their hundreds of bomblets and the long distance missiles from robot drones circling night and day, operated by “hero” pilots sitting in comfort in Riyadh or even UK safety thousands of miles away.

The continuing agony as the country is pulverised into a wasteland of wrecked infrastructure and cities, has brought most of the population to the edge of not just hunger but outright famine, including ten million (!!) children as the endless, hopeless sticking-plaster charity appeals about the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis” agonise routinely on TV.

That is now compounded by the total lack of facilities to handle the Covid virus which is sweeping the country just like everywhere else.

And the Western response?

Not just total silence but the very opposite of the sanctimonious nonsense the Uighur witness was programmed to spout about “what country puts commercial interests before human rights” over China:

Britain is to resume the sales of arms to Saudi Arabia that could be used in the Yemeni conflict just over a year after the court of appeal ruled them unlawful because ministers had not properly assessed the risk of civilian casualties.

In a written statement, the trade secretary, Liz Truss, said sales would restart after an official review concluded there had been only “isolated incidents” of airstrikes in Yemen that breached humanitarian law.

Truss said that the undertaking given by the government after the court defeat last June “falls away”. The government had agreed not to grant any new licences to export arms or military equipment to Saudi Arabia for possible use in Yemen.

As a result, Truss said, “the government will now begin the process of clearing the backlog of licence applications for Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners that has built up since 20 June last year”.

Arms trade campaigners said the decision was “disgraceful and morally bankrupt” and they were considering a legal challenge.

Andrew Smith, of Campaign Against Arms Trade, said: “The Saudi-led bombardment of Yemen has created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, and the government itself admits that UK-made arms have played a central role on the bombing. We will be exploring all options available to challenge it.”

Britain is a major supplier of arms to Saudi Arabia. The leading arms maker, BAE Systems, sold £15bn-worth of arms to the Gulf kingdom over the last five years, principally supplying and maintaining Tornado and Typhoon aircraft used in bombing missions.

Thousands of civilians have been killed since the civil war in Yemen began in March 2015 with indiscriminate bombing by a Saudi-led coalition that is supplied by western arms makers. The kingdom’s air force is accused of being responsible for many of the 12,600 deaths in targeted attacks.

According to the Save the Children and the Civilian Impact Monitoring Project, which tracks the impact of airstrikes in Yemen, 26 children were killed and 18 injured in a single incident on 15 February this year when airstrikes hit a civilian gathering at a fighter jet crash site in Al Hayjah area in Al Maslub district.

The official review sought to examine historical examples of airstrikes from Saudi Arabia using British-licensed equipment that may have breached humanitarian law, and in particular whether there were trends in incidents where there were civilian casualties.

“This analysis has not revealed any such patterns, trends or systemic weaknesses,” Truss told MPs in the statement. “The conclusion is that these are isolated incidents,” which the minister said justified restarting exports.

Labour accused the government of mixed messaging, contrasting the decision with Monday’s announcement by the Foreign Office of sanctions against human rights abusers, including 20 Saudi nationals involved with the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

Emily Thornberry, the shadow trade secretary, said that it undermined “the government’s claim to be human rights defenders”. She added: “Britain should be working flat out to bring this terrible war to an end, not selling the arms that continue to fuel it.”

But Emily, it should be asked, you support and sustain the very monopoly capitalist system which inevitably and ruthlessly is pursuing just such arms race warmaking, including all the “union jobs” in its arms companies (BAE, Rolls Royce, etc) and you support the grovelling “diplomatic relations” with these vile regimes which the Tories and four Blairite governments pursued (using, it can be pointed out, that friend of paedophile abusers, to put it mildly, Prince Andrew, as a leading intermediary and “salesman for Britain” flattering the egos of the equally preposterous, degenerate and repulsive Gulf “royal” sheikhs).

Thornberry’s barely audible token lip service to anyway useless social pacifist “ending war” is a million miles from the hysterical megaphone hate-mongering against China.

Even less is heard about the UAE and its arrogant and depraved “royals”, another big investor in Britain, and itself up to its neck in the Yemen war as well as now backing the warlord civil slaughter raging across Libya which has been in turmoil ever since the Western NATO invasion in 2011 (the same NATO created under the 1940s Attlee “left” government) to topple and gruesomely murder the erratically anti-imperialist Muammar Gaddafi and to try and contain the millions strong spontaneous Egyptian Arab Spring street revolt which deposed the brutal Western-backed dictator Hosni Mubarak (all under the lying pretence that the scrappy stunted-up Libyan street revolt was “more of the Arab Spring” rather than the paid-for CIA “colour revolution” it was in fact).

Saudi Arabia is involved here too, backing the General Haftar side, via finance and funds for the brutal General Sisi regime now running Egypt after its very own CIA/Zionist colour revolution overthrew the new president Mohamed Morsi in 2013, the first popularly elected under the newly established democracy “allowed” the people after their genuine toppling of the Mubarak dictatorship two years previously.

Where are the non-stop demands for sanctions and disengagement with these regimes and their brutal torture and trampling across the popular will (Sisi’s regimes having imprisoned, tortured and either mass-executed or killed by mistreatment, thousands of the opposition, not to mention the former president himself collapsing and dying in court due to his brutal imprisonment)?

Where is the crying out about slave and near slave labour across the Third World (or indeed in Leicester sewing shops) in contrast to the latest absurd denunciation of sweatshops added to the litany of falsehoods against China’s Xinjiang province (with the usual weasel journalist phrasings of “have been accused of”, “some critics say” and “could be connected with” to cover up zero actual evidence).

In fact the province, like the rest of China, has been dragged up out of poverty by its 70 years of socialist planned development, instead of languishing in semi-slave poverty like multinational dominated Bangladesh, India, Africa, Haiti, Latin America, etc, where it would be to this day as an “independent state”.

Without China, incidentally, the overall world index of poverty amelioration would not have seen the improvements it has over the last 30 years which middle-class prats like the modern Dr Pangloss, Professor Stephen Pinker, declare to be a sign that “the world is steadily becoming a better more peaceful place”.

Most disgusting of all is the bourgeois (and Labourite) approval and sanctioning of the Zionist colonial landtheft occupation of Palestine and the ever expanding and expansionist artificial state of “Israel”.

This monstrous imposition on the local Arab peoples of the region, indigenous to it for at least 1500 years, was established by imperialist “United Nations” diktat (ie Washington domination) in 1947, handing their land over to someone else by international force, supplemented by years of Stern gang and other Zionist terror massacre and then bloodsoaked ethnic cleansing war to seize even more of their land and property.

The pattern of brutal suppression and expansionist terrorising violence has continued ever since, pushing an entire eight million strong people ever further downwards into dispossessed exile in permanent refugee camps or humiliated semi-slave imprisonment in near intolerable conditions, particularly in the overcrowded Gaza strip concrete hellhole, largely deprived of basics like electricity, decent sanitation and clean water by Zionist and colluding Egyptian siege.

And their reward for any kind of resistance at all (and often for none) is to be constantly violently harassed, persecuted and abused and subject to regular outright blitzing destruction and nazi-style “collective punishment” killing and maiming thousands, including women and children.

The entire stinking Nazi-Zionist occupation is imposing a slow genocide.

But never a word is heard from the manipulated popular opinion so exercised over the entirely fabricated “destruction of the Uighurs” about this real and glaring destruction of a people and continuing theft of what little of their land remains, all repeatedly declared illegal by the United Nations (for what it is worth since its token anti-Empire denunciations and resolutions are always ignored), let alone calls for “disengagement”, sanctions and other punishments and “pressure”.

Just the opposite, the monstrous CIA/Zionist black is white campaign to label even the mildest of criticism of “Israel” as “anti-semitism”, let alone any doubting of its “right to exist” has been adopted across the board within imperialism as way to suppress any hint of opposition to this imperialist intrusion into the Middle East, not least of course by the Labourites themselves and their twisted campaign to suppress even the mildest of opinion speaking out for Palestinian national liberation.

On top of the complete hypocrisy around this China campaign not one scrap of it stands up anyway, from the long-discredited Tiananmen “massacre” nonsense as bourgeois sources admit (see No0956 30-06-98, No1577 06-06-20 and EPSR Book 16) to the middle-class “self-determination” humbug wanting to break Tibet away from the revolutionary authority of the workers state and return it to the feudal servitude, ignorance and stagnation of rule by Buddhist monks, overturned in 1949 along with the rest of reactionary rule over China.

The preposterous Hong Kong “freedom” racket is likewise a total provocation, stirred up by Western consumerist influences and ideology and shallow delusions in “freedom and democracy” (much as the pampered student youth in Beijing had been in 1989) and consciously attempting to restart the deliberate violence of that time to create an atmosphere of chaos and breakdown, opening the door to counter-revolutionary influences.

Those have flowed in with agents and media deluges from the West, deliberately inflaming the situation (including all kinds of secretive visits to America and the UK by “leading pro-democracy” figures to get their instructions - meeting with senior Trumpites, CIA officials etc to help plot the best way to escalate things).

Grasping this needs no barmy conspiracy theories – it is the reality of endless capitalist world skulduggery and the reason it spends tens of $billions on surveillance and its multiple agencies.

Certainly the growing desperation of the crisis will have played a role initially, particularly affecting many ordinary people in a trade-dependent entity like Hong Kong, with its huge inequalities, creating fear of the future, and thereby initially bringing more of the population out onto the streets until the obvious reactionary character of the core “demonstrators” became clearer.

More clarity about the reality of the crisis from the Hong Kong leadership and Beijing itself would be the best answer possible to much of that confusion, along with a clear explanation of the importance of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the need for firm authoritative moves against the disrupters, saboteurs, and anti-communist anarchists.

But at last firm practical measures are now being taken by Beijing with the new Hong Kong security law, which was a) envisaged as part of the original handover negotiations contrary to the hysteria from the British ruling class about “illegal abrogation of the one country two systems agreement” and b) is no different to the provisions for defence against state overthrow and disruption which every state puts in place (and in bourgeois states a lot more brutally and ruthlessly).

Of course it declares provocations, incitement to violence and seditious calls for “independence” to be unacceptable; why should it allow a maverick breakaway of a city which was simply part of China in the first place, and which the entire treaty agreement with Britain, ending in the 1997 handover, was merely finally recognising after a century and a half of British colonialist arrogance?

It requires the most astonishing turning of history inside out to pretend that it is Britain and the West which have “rights” which are “being infringed” after it stole these islands by brute force as a bridgehead to the monstrous semi-annexation of the mainland (by five major powers) for the next 100 years, using the dirtiest methods, including the deliberate peddling of drugs on a mass scale to debilitate millions (a favoured tactic by the CIA etc to this day and even more devastating throughout the Americas and Europe), and three wars to demand “the right to sell opium and pursue trade”!!

If the petty bourgeoisie in Britain continue to be taken in by the pretence that this is all about “democratic rights” it reflects only the depth of philosophical damage done by class collaboration with the Empire.

Marxism-Leninism has at its core the understanding that all pretences of “democracy” within capitalism are just monstrous humbug, disguising the actual dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (which will show and currently is showing its brute reality as crisis deepens) and that the only way to fight that is with its replacement by another class, the proletariat acting for the great majority of exploited and oppressed, through replacing the bourgeoisie with its own dictatorship (possible only by revolutionary class war) to completely suppress its inevitable attempts to re-establish its class rule.

Vicious counter-revolution will continually reemerge until enough of a change has been made towards building socialism for the bourgeoisie to become a fading class, a process taking generations as the masses are released from the alienation and miseducation of capitalism, every individual able to develop their full talents while being drawn more and more into the development and management of society for all, creating a true democracy.

And even as that becomes universal, and the bourgeois remnants disappear, democracy will no longer be necessary in a self-disciplined society where everyone can fully develop their talents, and where everyone can understand what are the necessities of society in constant development in harmony with nature.

But until then it is crucial to maintain the authority of the workers state and particularly against the influences of imperialist chaos.

That includes the violence of jihadist suicide bombing when directed against workers states.

As the EPSR has previously analysed, the supposed “persecution” of the Uighurs, now the mainstay of the coordinated anti-Chinese campaign, is no more or less than the maintenance of such proletarian authority against violent and disruptive attacks on a large scale by fundamentalists.

Growing worldwide Third World revolt against the crisis caused by capitalism has tended to adapt the militancy of the Muslim religion for its leadership, particularly because Soviet Moscow’s revisionist retreats have left a worldwide vacuum in revolutionary perspectives and temporary disappointment and disillusionment with what is presented as being “communism” in either its social-pacifist derivations from Stalinist revisionism or outright anti-workers state hostility from Trotskyism.

But religious notions do not differentiate clearly between the monopoly capitalist source of world degeneration and its plunge to war, and the workers state discipline of China.

Further confusion emerges because Beijing’s leadership has used capitalist methods on a large scale in the economy to force the pace of development, without clearly explaining the temporary and limited nature of such a tactic historically speaking.

As with Lenin’s New Economic Policy adopted in 1921, a step back out of necessity from immediate overall socialist planning because of the backwardness of the then mostly peasant economy, the profit sector in China remains under the overall political control of the workers state which retains the strategic aim of development in a balanced way of the whole country and its international links, aiming for socialism in the long term.

It requires the utmost clarity of leadership to explain this complex perspective to the masses, while carrying out such a tightrope act with capitalist methods and all the confusions and regenerated petty bourgeois notions that sets running within society, and it is not obviously there in Beijing’s theoretical pronouncements (or lack of them) despite relatively firm continuing practical control.

Western skulduggery and subversion has taken full advantage of revisionist confusion to muddy the water and stir discontent as in Hong Kong and it does so in Xinjiang by trying to manipulate the jihadist revolt which imperialism’s own actions have inflamed worldwide, both by encouraging Islamic backwardness and manipulating it against communism, as early on in Afghanistan, or against Muammar Gaddafi’s erratic anti-imperialism or in Iraq and Syria, or by twisting the stirred up revolt against its own actions, in such events as the 9/11 attacks, the Hamas revolt against Zionism’s occupation, and the Iraq revolt against the American occupation.

These are two sides of the same coin, with initial imperialist manipulation dialectically transforming into hate-filled hostile anti-imperialism, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and now throughout north Africa, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and most obviously with the rise of ISIS in Syria from the initially manipulated Sunni sectarianism turned against the Assad regime, long a target for the Empire and its Zionist henchmen for failing to knuckle down and fully comply with imperialist aims.

As previously stated (No 1567 07-12-19):

The increasing revolt stirred up, for the moment, mostly borrowing militant Islamism as its guiding ideology, has also spilled into China, causing a massive wave of terrorist attacks and bombings there, killing hundreds.

In addition significant numbers of Uighurs have left to join ISIS and other jihadist movements in Syria and Iraq.

The Chinese state has responded with a programme of re-education and social control, not blitzkrieg destruction of the entire Province, or huge “collateral damage” and illegal assassination raids like those on Osama bin Laden by Obama-ism and al-Baghdadi by Trump.

...there are questions to ask on just what the re-education comprises and especially about revisionist notions on “condemning terrorism” in general (rather than solely when directed at a workers state).

But even so, this is a relatively humane and rational response which is in complete contrast to the imperialist barbarity from Afghanistan and Iraq, to the devastation imposed on Libya, Syria, Somalia and Yemen, and the fascist suppression in Egypt.

The Western lie campaign will ultimately backfire just as it is in Hong Kong where the “demonstrations” have become ever more openly reactionary and pro-Washington (and pro-Trump)....

So now comes the latest anti-Chinese Uighurs onslaught to prop up the failing Hong Kong provocations and sustain their prejudice.

The groundwork has been laid for some time by the Western media using all the tawdry tricks of ostensibly “secret” filming, outrageously distorted accusations of repression by axe grinding dissidents (never checked, let alone verified, and certainly not cross-examined), silhouette-filmed “witness” testimony and “satellite image discoveries” to imply sinister secrecy, all presented with “analysis” by CIA and similar types to a background of doomy clanking music.

The aim has been to pretend that the People’s Republic of China is actually little different to outright Nazism, running a “brutal regime of concentration camps” where “millions” of the local population have been “forcibly imprisoned”, with the not-so-hidden implication that these are virtually the same as the nazi-death camps of the Second World War and the Chinese workers state a regime of “totalitarian nightmares and horror”.

It is the most disgusting and filthy LIE.

These “exposés” ignore completely not only the Chinese explanation of camps but the obvious facts, with wildly exaggerated numbers claimed for people undergoing re-education and of the camps themselves (with never more than one or two actually shown).

Instead a disgusting campaign of outright lies and filthy innuendo, carefully coordinated by the Western intelligence agencies has seen a round of theatrically revealed new “evidence” in the form of an allegedly leaked “tranche of secret documents” about “orders to crack down” in the province.

Not by chance this just happens to be a distorted mirror-image of the way that revelations about imperialism’s actual warcrimes and torture, financial corruption and plundering, and spying and surveillance have been leaked to Wikileaks in particular in the last decade.

So this “trope” is used now as a cover by the intelligence agencies to give “verisimilitude” to this outright scam (an even sicker pretence, given that they have Wikileaks founder Julian Assange still not only in gaol on trumped-up charges but possibly being driven towards death by mistreatment and torture, as senior doctors have warned).

But a few minutes reading the bourgeois accounts, and reordering their deliberate hype (with the Chinese responses hidden in a few paragraphs at the end) make a different story clear:...

As examined previously, the twisted innuendo and wild exaggerations – the figure of “one million detainees” is complete speculation for example – suggesting that all this amounts to “concentration camps” with the obvious not-so-hidden innuendo of “death camps”, is a complete outrage; they are clearly a firm but humane crackdown on a disruption which challenges the Chinese workers state and the planned society it is developing.

Of course in dealing with major violence and terrorism the workers state uses forced detention camps – but most of the inmates are held for around 18 months the small print reveals – not the “lock them up and throw away the key” draconian and vengeful punishment the British ruling class wants to stampede popular opinion with, locking “radicalised youth” into cells for much of the day in overcrowded prisons with limited educational or vocational resources (a move to prepare for suppressing leftism in the future).

These camps are clean, the inmates fed, and the accommodation reasonable as even the doom-laden TV documentaries are forced to concede, despite the fraudulent “evidence” of a few carefully coached dissident “witnesses” (often living in the West) alleging “torture”. The “revealed” Beijing instructions include specific orders to avoid mistreatment, brute force, and intimidation, and to allow as much family and outside contact as feasible:

It is strictly forbidden for police to enter the student zone with guns, and they must never allow escapes, never allow trouble, never allow attacks on staff, never allow abnormal deaths, never allow food safety incidents and major epidemics, and they must ensure that the training centre is absolutely safe and free of risk.

For training centres with more than one thousand people, special personnel must be stationed to do food safety testing, sanitation and epidemic prevention work.

But every “revealed” instruction in these reports is twisted around by the bourgeois press. So, for example, the timescale for most of those being re-educated of about a year – is turned, in these report, into a lying suggestion of “indefinite detention”:

These requirements to “complete” courses show how detention is both arbitrary and indefinite. They mandate a minimum stay of a year in the camps, but no upper limits. It does not lay out standardised levels of Mandarin, or other requirements that if reached, would allow inmates – or “students” – to leave.

If inhumane and degrading conditions are to be found, and easily verified, it is in the enormous refugee and impoundment camps in Syria and Iraq holding not only tens of thousands of largely women and children displaced by the imperialist blitzkrieging devastation of the ISIS but many more straightforward civilian refugees, all in overcrowded and desperate tented “shelter” subject to the bitter winter cold and without even the most basic human medical, educational or welfare facilities (seeing small (and therefore obviously innocent) children die for want of fundamentals for example - as in the case of the British “jihadi bride” Shamima Begum illegally stripped of citizenship).

Or find them in the much more long term effectively imprisoned lives forced on Palestinian refugees in camps in Jordan, and Lebanon, expelled for generations by the terrorising by the Jewish occupation and its forced ethnic-cleansing landtheft of their country started over 70 years ago and continuing ever since, with non-stop shelling, persecution, intimidation and routinely-imposed all-out massacre blitzkrieg.

Or the inhuman deprivations imposed on two million more, besieged and corralled in the narrow land strip of Gaza, without power much of the day, limited sanitation, restricted education, and stripped bare hospitals, mostly without drugs and just a few ageing bits of obsolete equipment, to deal with disease and injuries inflicted by endless military oppression, sniping, bombing and shelling.

No endlessly sympathising press reports and political statements are made for these people; instead speak out on the Palestinians’ cause and against the Zionist occupation and the worldwide Jewish freemasonry which either supports, or accepts, the “existence of Israel” (however liberally “anti-Zionist” they claim to be) and there will be an avalanche of demented lies and nonsense poured down, turning reality on its head to pretend you are the “racist” and supposed reactionary purveyor of “anti-semitism”.

This deliberate inversionary untruth, which the grovelling opportunist Labourites and fake-“lefts” are forced to parrot and “sincerely believe”, (staggeringly and cravenly even setting up their own “root it out” inquiries to do the job for the ruling class), is a real life version of the character Winston Smith’s brainwashing in the novel 1984, in which he is finally forced to believe that “two plus two equals five”.

But that was a fiction – invented by the snivelling anti-communist police fink George Orwell (so beloved by the Trots) and deriving not from the Soviet state actions he blames, in his made-up story, but from the actual capitalist society all around him post-WW2.

The demented “left anti-semitic racism running rampant” propaganda stunt is a real version of this Goebbels trick.

And so is this latest bourgeois LIE against China, flinging around its scarey accusations of “dictatorship” to fool the shallow pro-democracy types...

Of course a workers state is a dictatorship, – but of the proletariat, developing society in the interests of the great majority instead of the interests of the tiny minority under the only other form of society there is in a class-divided world, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, exploiting the labour of the masses for its own wealth, power and privilege.

The measures China or other remaining workers states are forced to take by imperialism’s non-stop hostility and subversion, the firmer the better, should always be supported unconditionally by genuine communists.

That does not remotely preclude polemical criticism of Beijing, Havana or other revisionist leaderships to challenge their political or philosophical mistakes.

(To the contrary- it demands it).

And a key question to take up here lies in just what the re-education comprises.

Its aim is obviously to head off discontent and build an understanding which will bring around the population in Xinjiang to willingly support the further building and development of China as a workers state (while their own cultural traditions are respected and recognised).

Basic cultural, economic and language integration – teaching Mandarin, job training etc – is not the problem.

But the foundation must surely be a Marxist political and philosophical grasp, with the oncoming crisis of the entire capitalist system at the centre and the need for the revolutionary overturn of the ruling class everywhere, the perspective.

Only such an overarching Leninist understanding can make sense of the great surge of “terrorism” in the world, what has driven it, and how it can be overcome (by defeating imperialism).

But there has not been any sign from Beijing that its approach to “terrorism” differs from the blanket condemnation of terrorism as a thing-in-itself, along the same moralising lines common to all the fake-“left”, particularly since the 9/11 attacks on New York, which has declared all terrorism to be either “unacceptable” or to be “all run by the West”.

This capitulates completely to the philosophically nonsensical notion of a “war on terror” which then leaves the imperialist system a free hand to pretend it is “policing the world”, when it carries out its endless warmongering and intimidation (which is solely driven by capitalism’s relentless pursuit of world domination and armsrace warmongering magnified by its world war needs as the system hits total Catastrophe).

The latest addition to the bonfire of anti-Chinese disinformation is a dutifully reactionary BBC Panorama attempt to yet again put the blame for the Covid pandemic on “the communist system” and its alleged “lack of freedom”, which is beyond rich in a Western world that now routinely arrests, suppresses and outright murders journalists covering its degenerate warmaking, or arrests, attacks and injures those reporting the US street demonstrations against racist killings.

The usual reactionaries like Tory “Lord Chris Patten” and former military officer MP Tom Tugenhat, the go-to spokesman for anti-communist bile, plus assorted representatives from ultra-right bodies like the Royal United Services Institute were wheeled out simply to make assertions that they “did not believe” the Chinese, all laced with vitriolic insults about the “nasty” communists and how you “could not trust them”.

The supposed significance of “revelations” seven months on by a new “witness” speaking out about “suppressed” samples and delays in passing information on is risible.

Even if such mysterious “new evidence” which comes, surprise, surprise, from an anti-communist professor in Hong Kong were not suspiciously convenient for Western propaganda it cannot undo the reality of China’s overall stunning success in dealing with the virus, safeguarding lives and eventually economic output too, because of its ability to organise and command a collective societal response in the interests of the mass of the ordinary population, in complete contrast to the contempt, incompetence and indifference of the US Empire.

Bureaucratic hesitations in Wuhan are already known about and certainly reflect weaknesses in overall revisionist party development by the Chinese CP - though partly understandably at a point where the threat was unsure and the danger of panic mongering high.

But the real story remains that for all its woodenness China quickly took astonishingly firm action which impressed the entire world, as well as publicly warning of the danger, in January.

It was and is imperialism which then delayed, prevaricated or Trump style even encouraged populations to ignore the threat, and which has been pumping out non-stop lies ever since, including in this slickly edited BBC disinformation diatribe.

All this is desperate stuff from a British ruling class which is increasingly frantic as the crisis deepens, one of the weakest links among the bourgeois powers and most vulnerable to the intensified trade war conditions of the crisis.

Its line is a complete capitulation to the deranged belligerence of the America First Trumpite White House line of nonsensical finger-pointing blame-mongering against all and sundry to cover up the disastrous crisis breakdown and the incompetence and incapability of the bourgeois system.

And it comes at a huge cost, particularly in the grovelling of the British government to Washington demands to impose outright trade war bans on Chinese companies, notably with the Huawei 5G equipment under the ludicrous bogeymen pretence that its constitutes a “security threat”:

The chief executive of BT has said it would be impossible to strip Huawei products out of the UK’s telecommunications network within the next decade.

Philip Jansen also warned of “outages” and possible security risks if the sector was told to curtail all business with the Chinese technology company during the building of the 5G network upgrade.

His comments follow suggestions that a decision on the future of Huawei in the UK is due to be made public by the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, on Tuesday.

Dowden, speaking last week, said US sanctions on Huawei were likely to have a significant impact on its ability to play a role in the UK’s 5G network.

Speaking since, the Cabinet Office minister, Michael Gove, said a decision on Huawei would be made by the national security council and announced to parliament.

Jansen told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Huawei has been in the telecoms infrastructure for about 20 years and a big supplier to BT and many others in the UK telecoms industry.

“It is all about timing and balance. So if you want to have no Huawei in the whole of the telecoms infrastructure across the whole of the UK, I think that’s impossible to do in under 10 years.”

Boris Johnson, as part of his election manifesto, promised to ensure faster broadband and internet speeds across the UK to “level-up” the country’s regions. The government’s target of delivering gigabit speed broadband to every UK home by the middle of the decade could be under threat if operators including BT, which owns broadband infrastructure company Openreach, have to spend too much time and investment on removing Huawei equipment across their networks.

Jansen said there was a danger that “accelerating the rip-out” of Huawei from the 5G network meant that not enough effort was being put into extending the service provision across the country.

BT and Vodafone have said the cost of removing Huawei equipment would run to billions of pounds, and could be passed on to consumers.

He said there would be consequences for the UK as a result of rejecting business with Chinese company. “At BT and in our discussions with GCHQ, we always take the [view] that security is paramount; it is our No 1 priority.”

According to reports, the government is to order that Huawei equipment be removed from the UK’s 5G network by 2025. About two-thirds of BT-owned EE’s 5G network consists of Huawei equipment, with one-third supplied by Nokia. Vodafone relies on Huawei for about one-third of its 5G network equipment, the remainder is supplied by Ericsson.

Huawei UK’s chairman, John Browne, a former chief executive of BP, has said the moves against the Chinese company are political and that it has “become a football between the United States and China”.

In January, the UK government announced that mobile operators in Britain would only be allowed to use Huawei equipment for up to 35% of their 5G networks, and only in non-core parts.

Based on National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) findings, the UK is being taken down an “irreversible path”, as the culture secretary Oliver Dowden put it, leading to all Huawei equipment being stripped out from 5G networks by 2027.

Following this road, however, will lead to consequences for businesses across the country, including potentially lost revenues and delays to vital networking upgrades in rural areas. Telecoms companies, for example, may need to re-examine and re-organise their supply chains, while the wider economy may suffer a long-term productivity dip...

Vodafone told IT Pro it was “disappointed” by the announcement, adding it “will add delay to the rollout of 5G in the UK and will result in additional costs for the industry”.

What telecoms companies may consider a small victory is the government’s lack of action over Huawei equipment already installed in the UK’s 2G, 3G, 4G or broadband networks. This makes sense, given the nature of the NCSC decision - and the reasons why its view differs from that in January.

Having deemed that future Huawei tech may be potentially unsafe, there’s no reason why telecoms companies should be expected to retroactively strip it out. Why then, should they be expected to remove Huawei equipment - previously deemed safe - from their 5G networks, as the government has instructed? Perhaps it’s more of a symbolic move; a gesture to appease Huawei-sceptics, and to retain a sense of anti-Huawei uniformity for 5G networks.

The most obvious alternatives to Huawei may arise from the likes of Nokia and Ericsson, the latter of which, of course, is supporting O2’s 5G rollout. The government, however, has reportedly held meetings with Japanese and South Korean companies, and according to the Financial Times, is seeking to persuade its Five Eyes partners - Australia, New Zealand, the US, and Canada - to collaborate on finding a suitable industrial alternative.

Ultimately, this episode highlights not only the geopolitical tensions between China and the West but also the UK tech industry’s inability to sustain itself. While it’s no great crime to rely on technology sourced elsewhere, in the face of potential security risks, many may question why the UK hasn’t fostered a company with networking prowess to rival the likes of Huawei or Cisco.

When you also consider the abysmal state of the full-fibre rollout and the fact that UK 5G speeds are three times slower than US speeds, the saga threatens to throw a spotlight onto the UK’s technological sluggishness. It’s particularly ironic that we’re reminded of such themes when ridiculous stories emerge such as the government buying the wrong satellites to replace the EU’s Galileo system.

And the damage is not just to telecoms. Billions could be lost by universities and other education which is highly valued by the Chinese for its standards, again in direct revenue and possible closures. The same with investments in nuclear energy. At the same time the ruling class is doing somersaults on its anti-immigration policy also potentially at huge cost :

Simon Jenkins (Britain can’t protect Hong Kong from China – but it can do right by its people, 2 July) powerfully ridicules the imperial pretensions of 21st-century Britain, yet at the same time expresses precisely that viewpoint in his statement that Hong Kong’s freedoms are a “legacy, however brief, from the British crown”.

On the contrary, it was only as a result of China having stood up in the world and thus having become an equal negotiating partner with Britain in the matter that the people of Hong Kong gained the right to a democratic vote on their future, something that would have been unthinkable during the century-and-a-half of British colonial rule.

I am particularly concerned by his statement that many of the over 100,000 Chinese students in Britain feel “dubious loyalty to their own regime” and are “therefore now at risk”, and that they “need encouraging and protecting from the new laws”.

As a university lecturer who teaches many of these students, I object to the implication that I should “encourage” those among them who are of “dubious loyalty” to what he refers to as their “regime”. Indeed, this explicit call to recruit students as tools of foreign interference would result precisely in exposing them to even greater risk of what, in the case of Hong Kong, Jenkins terms the “ruthlessness of Beijing’s repression” or what is, in reality, the implementation of regrettable measures that have been forced upon them by the flagrant whipping-up of anti-Chinese hysteria by such champions of democracy as Trump and his supporters in this, the former colonial power.

Dr Hugh Goodacre Department of Economics, University College London

• Now that Dominic Raab is opening our doors to 3 million Hongkongers, can he and the Johnson government explain the logic and morality used for this? I was told that post-Brexit the UK is to “take back its borders” and to limit immigration. The long-term Home Office policy of harm, cruelty and repeatedly broken promises continues to be practised against Commonwealth friends, particularly the rightful presence of Windrush-generation Jamaicans. How is lack of positive action for them and enthusiastic encouragement for Hongkongers balanced?

Martin Goldman Cambridge

• How wonderful that the Home Office, praised by Dominic Raab, has been able to resolve the situation of those with BNO status in Hong Kong so speedily. How strange that the Home Office has failed for decades to resolve the situation of Windrush victims, most of whom are already in the UK, except for those unjustly deported to their alleged homes in the Caribbean.

Greg Conway Amersham, Buckinghamshire

• Pleased though I am that we are apparently to offer potential citizenship to over 2 million Hong Kong inhabitants, I can’t help comparing this to our inability to cater for a few hundred child refugees seeking to be reunited with their families, or indeed a few thousand Windrush citizens.

Jill Wallis Aston Clinton, Buckinghamshire

The British ruling class has been swinging for decades between an alliance with the European monopoly bloc, formed postwar to allow a big enough protected market for the development of multinational corporations which could compete with giant American imperialism, and with the US itself, the traditional “ally”.

But the demands of either alliance are high - either follow draconian European Union regulations ostensibly for worker protection and environment but which favour the interests of the big European monopoly corporations, increasingly outcompeting the British, or capitulate to American demands to open the market much wider to be plundered by its corporations and hedge funds.

In the past the ruling class has scraped by, trying to balance between the two, and just about retaining enough clout through particularly its finance industry, to survive. It was tolerated by America as a useful Trojan horse inside Europe against the Franco-German axis.

For as long as the imperialist post-war compromise was in place, with America the agreed topdog maintaining “world peace” - ie the Cold War against communism and suppression of the Third World, this unstable balancing act survived though ruling class tensions periodically erupted in the bitter “Europeans versus Eurosceptic” infighting over which side to choose.

But the Catastrophe means this is no longer tenable.

America First signals the degeneration of the trade war into all-out conflict which will eventually erupt in war making the British halfway house impossible.

Hence the bitter conflict of the Brexit issue with the pro-American ruling class wing winning out for the moment, tapping the most backward British Empire jingoism and delusions about sovereignty.

The willingness to pay such a huge price in lost “British” commercial and industrial development, - the great pretence of supposed “new opportunities as we go our own way” etc – in order in reality to tuck in behind demented American aggression underlines what a fraud all that chauvinism is, and what a humiliating position the British bourgeoisie has to adopt in order to survive at all.

It also underlines what a complete gang of opportunists the entire fake “left” are, the whole swamp of 50 shades of “red” still failing to give the working class a scrap of understanding of this crisis (however much they describe its dire effects) or the slightest indication of the way out by building revolutionary understanding.

Just the opposite. They either continue behind the Labour Party, effectively supporting its anti-Chinese hysteria, – or where ostensibly anti-Labour they fall in behind the worst chauvinism, like that of the Stalinist Proletarian backing the chauvinist Workers Party of Britain being run by fake-“left” demagogue George Galloway, so much part of the parliamentary racket that he came out in support of the monstrous imperialist fascist (and anti-Indian racist) Winston Churchill for having “defended democracy”.

The Stalinists pretend to defend China but cannot bring themselves to call it a workers state for fear of needing to explain revisionist failings.

But Leninism battles for just such understanding. It needs to be built. Alan Moss

 

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