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No 1592 3rd April 2021

Fake-“left” capitulation to the international hate campaign against the Myanmar generals for resisting the “democracy” skulduggery and counter-revolutionary turmoil that the West has provoked, is a further sign of complete opportunism, ignorance and treachery. The Empire and its stooges have been whipping up stunt after stunt to undermine and sabotage even the tamest of anti-imperialist remnants in Belarus, Ukraine, Venezuela, Yemen and Africa as well as preparing the world for all-out war as its credit-dollar economy heads ever closer towards the edge of the greatest ever Slump-Catastrophe in history. Ratcheting up demented Goebbels lie campaigns is now continuous to stampede petty bourgeois public opinion behind war plans with lurid BIG LIES about non-existent “Uighur genocide”, and “war on terror” scapegoating. The stinking war mess of the last 20 years, carried out by “democracy” killing millions, is the real tyranny. Whatever the shortcomings in Myanmar it is defeat for Western counter-revolution that matters, opening the road for Leninist revolution.

The imperialist world is in deeper trouble than ever as its system heads for total Catastrophic economic breakdown, rotten ripe for the overthrow that has +to come as the crisis pushes more and more of the masses into the desperate fight for survival, now urgently in need of revolutionary understanding and leadership.

And what do they get but capitulation to the desperate Goebbels stunts and lies around the threadbare racket of “democracy” being used by imperialism to fool and corral the masses behind yet more warmongering, and destruction, on top of 20 years of horrors already imposed to acclimatise the world to the total inter-imperialist conflict to come; World War Three in a word.

It is on a par with their “condemnations” of the 9/11 WTO New York attacks, denunciations of “terrorism” and “jihadism” ever since, and swallowing of the bogus “Arab Spring” counter-revolutionary “uprising” stunts set going in Libya, Syria and eventually Cairo, to suppress and head off the actual anti-imperialist mass street uprising Spring of early 2011 in Tunisia and Egypt (and to simultaneously wipe out anti-imperialist “troublemakers” like Gaddafi and Assad).

The world has never more needed revolutionary theoretical clarity and leadership for the titanic upheavals to come but by taking the wrong side or failing to expose these stunts the “lefts” all help the ruling class get away with the lying diversionary pretence that the West is sustaining the “rule of law” and “upholding democratic rights” against “tyrants”.

That has to be one of the sickest hypocrisies and cynical lies ever, aiming to keep popular opinion onside even as imperialism’s warmongering depravities reach a scale never seen in history (bombing of little Serbia by the giant NATO imperialist coalition in 1999, Saudi Arabia internal repression and massacring war in Yemen, the endless killing of the Palestinians by the nazi-Zionist apartheid occupation in the Middle East, years of shelling and bombing of the workers in east Ukraine, Egyptian torture and killing to suppress any Arab Spring repeat, a decade of war in Libya, and in Syria, whole cities pulverised like Raqqa and Mosul, two decades of blitzing, killing, warcrimes and provoked terrorism in Afghanistan, destruction of Iraq, throttling of Iran, Somalia, besieging and coup making against Venezuela, and Nicaragua, Cuba and North Korea devastatingly besieged with blockades, endless tyrannised poverty in Haiti, the Philippines, Brazil, etc etc).

On top there is the inhuman treatment of refugees, and “terrorists” such as Shamima Begum, stepping up of domestic repression, racist scapegoating, surveillance, censorship (including the de facto slow judicial murder of Julian Assange etc), the casual cynical slaughter of thousands through Covid incompetence and profiteering, austerity, more austerity and arrogance.

The imperialist world has now gone into overdrive with its counter-revolutionary provocations, black propaganda, and attempted coups (Russia, Belarus and Venezuela in there too, Cuba and North Korea non-stop and the Sahel), because the Catastrophic credit failure of its economic order can no longer be put off much further.

Already 12 years of dollar printing and Quantitative Easing to save the banks and prop up the monopolies (at the masses' expense) has stretched the credit system far beyond its limits, which decades of previous inflationary credit had already brought to the edge anyway, shaking the world with endless Stock Exchange “Black Mondays”, currency collapses, hedge fund disasters, national bankruptcies and regional credit implosions.

Bidenism’s further trillions and infrastructure investments (to be examined next issue) might try to extend things a little further but it cannot work for long.

Between the lines, and sometimes outright, the least self-deluding of the bourgeois analysts constantly warn that system is due to implode spectacularly, almost certainly with a failure of the dollar itself, almost certainly with massive inflation, or world banking breakdown (as the EPSR has warned repeatedly – see multiple back issues).

Technically, just how it collapses is less important than the fact that it will, on a scale which will far outdo the Great Depression of the 1930s, or the long stagnation of the late nineteenth century, both preludes to the great world war eruptions of 1914-18 and between 1936-45.

A taste of how disastrous the cataclysm will be came in the period just after the 2008-9 banking meltdown when the narrowly averted total collapse was described by Alistair Darling, then British Chancellor, as creating “a financial nuclear winter” if it had happened.

Far worse is in store when it breaks fully now, since the credit bubble has been inflated even more since then with never-ending QE, zero interest rates and other measures in the bourgeoisie’s desperation to keep the world economy propped up.

There is no stopping the devastation, which results from the iron laws of the capitalist system itself (see economics page), and the contradictions of production for private profit.

The unstoppable logic of the anarchic “free market” always results eventually in “overproduction” and the accumulation of vast amounts of “surplus” capital, all seeking profitable investment opportunity but unable to find it because of the great mountains of other capital seeking the same without any restraint or limit, in a world where the capacity of the masses to buy the output is restricted because of their wage-slavery exploitation and because each enterprise produces as if for the whole market, meaning aggregate production is far beyond rational needs.

The battle to drive rival capital (and rival capitalists and workers) out of business has been part of the cycle of capitalist boom and slump for centuries, eventually bankrupting and destroying enough production each time, at huge cost in workers' lives and livelihoods, to revive the process.

Some capitalists get wiped out too.

Early in the revolutionary rise of capitalism against the old feudal agricultural torpor, the benefits of such competition, driving human endeavour and technology and forcibly reorganising society and its production on a new efficient basis, outweighed the drawbacks in savage exploitation and degradation of the once land-tied masses “freed up” for wage slavery.

But that changed to its opposite in the epoch of monopoly capitalism beginning in the late nineteenth century (as Lenin analysed – see Imperialism).

The spread of capitalism, colonialism and deepening of its exploitation, has intensified the contradictions.

The cycle is hugely extended and the Slump is far worse each time, and in this modern imperialist period has brought the market collapses to the level of international trade war, and vicious hate-filled antagonisms, exploding into world wars, each bigger, more destructive and more deadly than the last.

It should be added at this point that this process was underway long before the lockdowns and holdups of the pandemic. The Corona virus (which should be renamed the Crony-virus in Britain) is not the cause of economic collapse, though it clearly has a severe immediate impact and makes matters much worse for the proletariat and, increasingly, bankrupted or struggling petty bourgeois elements: it may even have a temporarily beneficial effect for the biggest monopoly capitalists by clearing away some small business “undergrowth” clogging the system, and letting state-funded profiteering run rampant.

But even if so, the effect will be short-lived and far from sufficient for the extent of capital destruction required to restore the “free market” to vibrancy, as it did briefly for a couple of decades of “never-had-it-so-good” boomtime after World War Two, when the US Empire came out on top.

World War Three is what is required now, serving to wipe out capital, and deal with ever-growing monopoly competition from the other great blocs, like Japan, German-dominated Europe, some smaller but rising powers such as India and Brazil, and also the rising Chinese workers state.

China’s planned use of controlled capitalist methods to develop the economy has seen it rise astonishingly fast as a major market competitor (and for all the dirty propaganda pumped out around it, without the pain and agony of the working class in the centuries-long slow rise of the bourgeoisie in Europe and America, and even worse agony still in the ruthlessly exploited colonies).

China is also hated, because it is still a workers state, despite sometimes severe revisionist shortcomings.

It is constantly on the US Empire’s agenda that all moves by the world working class towards socialism and a fair and rational society without the grotesque and tyrannical exploitation by capital, or even just nationalist moves by the Third World to get imperialist domination off its back, must be endlessly subverted, sabotaged, and where possible, wiped out, by military invasion and blitzkrieg if necessary, by coups, or by stitched-up elections and induced (counter) “revolution” if it can be achieved, until all traces of such rebellion and revolution have been eradicated.

China has become the largest and most significant obstacle to continuing capitalist world domination and is therefore doubly a prime target.

Planet-wide imperialist war blitzing and intimidation is needed too for the “problem” of hugely rising revolt throughout the rest of the world, which takes all kinds of crude, confused and backward forms at present but is constantly evolving and learning to fight better, and which is going to erupt on a much greater scale when the unfolding collapse destroys trade and commerce to a colossally increased extent.

Many of the Third World countries are already on the edge of unrepayability for their international debt burdens once more, despite the token “debt relief” programmes of the last two decades, which are anyway being cut back or shut down.

Measures such as those the crisis-wracked UK is taking to cut the “overseas aid” palliatives which the rich countries use to take the sharpest edges off world exploitation, to try and prevent revolutionary stirrings, (and for manipulating governments) will add to the ever-growing world wealth disparities pressure.

On top of that every bourgeoisie has the problem of its own masses to handle, already in turmoil even into the heart of the American Empire around issues like the George Floyd killing and the dismay and disgust at the stagnation in wages and jobs for decades, as well as the gross, and getting ever grosser, differences in wealth and income.

Planet-threatening pollution, ecological and agricultural destruction (erosion, staggeringly wasteful and disgusting factory farming), pandemics, global warming, ocean depletion etc etc etc are all now widely visible and minds are more and more seeing that capitalist greed, wastefulness and cynicism is to blame, albeit not yet making the step to revolutionary politics that is the answer, and the only answer, to all these disasters.

All this is potentially uncontrollable once the Slump really bites and the ruling class is terrified of what will come, and soon too.

What keeps it “controllable” is confusion and a century of anti-communism, fed with continuing delusions about winning reforms through “democracy” and, increasingly, with huge lardings of “patriotism”, meaning hate-filled chauvinism and flag-waving reaction, used to divide the masses and divert their attention into scapegoating at home and international finger-pointing hostility to blame “others” for the problems which capitalism alone is creating.

The Union Jack backgrounds for Tory Zoom interviews and the ordering of flags to be flown on town halls are two superficial symptoms of this cynical fostering of jingoism; the whole of Brexit and the vaccine wars, deeper signals.

The whole fake-“left” more or less helps feed this confusion, deadly for the working class, some overtly fostering “Britishness” like the Lalkarites’ Popular Front lashup with George Galloway in the Workers Party of Britain, or others propping it up through support for the Labour Party, now cynically wrapping itself in the flag to ape the Tories.

But if the world is to be dragged back into war, and stampeded into the horrors of all-out destruction it needs believable bogeymen and enough fanaticism to carry through the onslaught.

The Empire has been trying.

Half a dozen countries have already been destroyed in two decades, deemed “rogue” states like Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and the Sahel and Yemen currently, reduced to a humanitarian wreckage by UK-US directed Saudi Arabian blitzkrieg.

“Terrorism” is deemed an “existential threat” to “wage war on”, a philosophical nonsense to cover imperialist rampaging.

But more is needed if the momentum is to be kept going.

The CIA/MI6/Zionist etc disinformation departments have been working on it for decades, but the stories grow increasingly insane.

China’s workers state is the obvious first target, particularly inflaming Western hatred by standing (relatively) firm against bullying and lying attempts to blame it for the pandemic; against false “self-determination” provocations over Tibet trying to “restore” the pre-feudal slave tyranny of past centuries (and break up China’s workers state); against the violent attempts to disrupt Hong Kong under the lying pretence of “peaceful demonstrations for democracy”; and the outrageous pretence being revived that the reactionary imperialist stooge regime in Taiwan is a valid “state” and not the permanent political and military provocation its dictatorial bourgeois regime has allowed the USA to use it for, ever since the anti-communist reactionaries retreated there after losing to Mao’s revolution in 1949.

Meanwhile the pandemic has backfired on the Empire, with practical exposure of the cynicism and callous profiteering contempt of the West for ordinary lives, contrasting to the calm efficiency and organisation of the Chinese workers state in handling Covid with sharp and firm action, backed up by mass coordinated social and economic support for the populations forced to isolate, and for those in quarantine.

The less than 5000 deaths in a population of 1,400 million, and an economy back on track within a few months, have been a stunning lesson for the working class within the imperialist countries in the West, and particularly in the Third World, in how collective society can act quickly and efficiently to deal with such potential disasters and minimise the damage.

It has maddened the bourgeoisie even further.

By extension it is also a lesson in how a disciplined workers state, in overall command of the economy and society, can advance all the interests of the working class, not just over emergencies.

Planned production and societal development are creating ever better educated, provided for, and rational humans who can be steadily drawn in increasing numbers into the running of society, a true extension of real democracy – in contrast to the giant, corrupt and manipulated fraud of Western parliament etc.

The major criticism that could be made against Beijing is that it does not emphasise sufficiently, or much at all outside China, the importance of its dictatorship of the proletariat, and how it was won by a long and bitter revolutionary war against both overseas imperialist powers and as a class-war civil-war over nearly three decades inside China.

Nor does it emphasise those revolutionary lessons for the whole world as imperialism plunges into the deepest crisis in history, and nor does it spell out the need to revive the entire Leninist struggle for revolutionary theory to lead world wide class war.

Beijing’s use of capitalist methods to develop the economy, while a sound enough Leninist tactic if done under the overall authority of the workers state as still seems the case – remains a worry because of the potential political (bourgeois) pressure it creates and the overall swamping of population in philistine consumerist shallowness versus deepening their philosophical and class-struggle consciousness.

Yet even though there can be no illusions in Beijing revisionist leadership, its recent assertiveness over Hong Kong, and increasingly firm and scathing anti-imperialist diplomacy generally is a good sign that it not only continues to resist the “democracy” subversion from the West but is possibly shifting towards a better understanding under pressure from the crisis.

So it reins in the billionaires and the Hong Kong provocateurs, gives the Americans a sharp tongue lashing at the recent Sino-American summit, and even puts a flea in the ear of the reactionary Western media, not least the state run BBC and its preposterous “impartiality” cover for Goebbels incitements, as the bourgeois press details:

Tsai Li-chu recalls being a young mother on Taiwan’s Kinmen Island, when the shelling would start around 7pm most nights, launched from the People’s Republic of China just a few miles over the sea. “I remember having to run to the shelter with the kids, carrying the baby,” says Tsai, now a retired teacher in her 70s.

The bombardments – predominantly shells filled with propaganda leaflets – [!!!!] – stopped only when the US government formally recognised communist China and cut ties with Taiwan in the late 1970s. But the hostilities never really went away.

Today relations are at their worst point in decades, with Chinese threats to take control of Taiwan growing more realistic. Kinmen, or Quemoy, a tiny archipelago nearly 200 miles from Taipei but just three miles from the Chinese city of Xiamen, sits on the frontline.

The Chinese Communist party has never ruled Taiwan but nevertheless considers it to be a part of China. Beijing, driven by President Xi Jinping, wants unification without war, although it is prepared to use force if required.

Amid rising US support for Taiwan under Donald Trump, which the new president, Joe Biden, has said will continue, Beijing has responded with bellicose rhetoric and increased military activity. Last year, China’s People’s Liberation Army increased drills and flights into Taiwan’s air defence zone, crossing the median line for the first time in two decades in August. It has hugely ramped up aggressive and illegal sand dredging operations. On consecutive days in January more than a dozen PLA planes buzzed towards Taiwan, a message to the newly inaugurated Biden. Taiwan’s air force scrambled, and for days the roar of jets punctured Tainan City’s hazy skies.

Beijing warned: “Those who play with fire will burn themselves, and ‘Taiwan independence’ means war.”

 

Jack Ma, chief executive of e-commerce giant Alibaba,...built a bona fide tech champion, China’s answer to Amazon, eBay and PayPal rolled into one.

Little more than a decade on, Ma is experiencing a much less triumphant moment in the spotlight. After nearly three months in which his whereabouts have been unknown, following a public show of dissent towards Beijing, he resurfaced last week, apparently much chastened.

His 48-second appearance – in a broadcast from an unknown location – was “like a hostage video”, according to one member of a large online forum of China analysts.

Alibaba remains a powerhouse of the Chinese business scene, but Ma has had his wings clipped, having taken the bold and perhaps foolish step of crossing the Communist party, of which he is a member.

“I don’t understand what he was thinking,” says Bill Bishop, who writes the China-focused newsletter Sinocism. “That’s not constructive in the Chinese system.”

During a summit in Shanghai last October, Ma criticised regulators’ attitude towards big business, accusing them of a “pawnshop” mentality that stifled innovation. “We shouldn’t use the way to manage a train station to regulate an airport,” Ma declared. “We cannot regulate the future with yesterday’s means.”

He was speaking just moments after Wang Qishan – righthand man to China’s leader, Xi Jinping – had said much the opposite. Wang had stressed the primacy of safe regulation ensuring that business did not become the master of the state.

“[Ma’s speech] was about risk-taking, putting your neck on the line and not minding the instability that comes from that,” says George Magnus, a research associate at Oxford University’s China Centre and the author of Red Flags: Why Xi’s China Is in Jeopardy. “That’s anathema to the philosophy of Xi Jinping’s party.”

Ma’s direct contradiction of Beijing’s rhetoric went viral on social media, adding to the potential embarrassment for the Communist party. He might have been worth more than £35bn, but it swiftly became clear who was boss.

Within a fortnight, the entrepreneur and two of his lieutenants were summoned to meet financial regulators. A day later, the imminent stock market flotation of Ant Group – an online finance company spun out of Alibaba that includes the digital payments system Alipay – was cancelled.

Regulators cited “changes to the financial technology regulatory environment and other major issues”, but the prevailing narrative was that Ma was being punished at the cost of Ant Group’s initial public offering (IPO). Shares in Alibaba, which owns part of Ant, fell more than 8%, whittling down Ma’s net worth by more than £2bn. Authorities in Beijing also ordered an investigation into allegations of “monopolistic practices” at Alibaba – as well as fellow tech firm Tencent – and later ordered Ant Group to scale down its operations.

“It’s China, it’s the Communist party – it’s always political. He basically embarrassed the vice-president and the regulators … four days later his IPO is pulled.

Rumours abound that it was Xi personally who pulled the plug. Magnus, who has charted Xi’s style of government, emphasises his regime’s steady march away from its flirtation with “marketisation”. Instead, Xi’s China has gravitated towards a Leninist ideological approach, imposed via the “United Front” network of businesses and groups whose interests must align with those of the party.

“Jack Ma happens to be one of the most popular and well-known people who has fallen foul of the leadership’s new angst about people growing too big for their boots. “If entrepreneurs are politically compliant, they will thrive. If they’re not compliant they will not thrive.”

...his return has not necessarily cleared things up.

In the video, released last week, Ma devoted himself not to matters of regulation and business but to uplifting China’s rural poor. “My colleagues and I have been learning and thinking, and we have become more determined to devote ourselves to education and public welfare,” he said, addressing teachers at a rural school.

He had, he said, reached the conclusion that Chinese entrepreneurs should be devoting their time to “rural revitalisation and common prosperity” – both key parts of the Xi agenda.

Magnus points out that it is impossible to know whether Ma is under some form of detention. His current whereabouts are not certain either. And the fact that his businesses have become so integral to everyday financial transactions for many Chinese people may not protect him.

“Do they have to be careful with him? Some might think so, because his elevated position is a bit like Bill Gates or someone like that. To be honest with you, if the party was really anxious about him and his influence, I don’t think they’d have any qualms about shutting him away.”

 

Foreign ministers in the G7 group of nations, including the United States, have expressed grave concerns at what they said was China’s decision to fundamentally erode democratic elements of the electoral system in Hong Kong.

The G7 released a statement that was tweeted by British foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, saying the recent decision to change Hong Kong’s electoral system indicated that authorities in China were determined to eliminate dissenting voices and opinions in Hong Kong.

“We also call on China and the Hong Kong authorities to restore confidence in Hong Kong’s political institutions and end the unwarranted oppression of those who promote democratic values and the defence of rights and freedoms,” it said.

China’s parliament approved on Thursday a draft decision to change Hong Kong’s electoral system, further reducing democratic representation in the city’s institutions and introducing a mechanism to vet politicians’ loyalty to Beijing.

The measures are part of Beijing’s efforts to consolidate its increasingly authoritarian grip over the Asian financial hub following the imposition of a national security law in June 2020, which critics have seen as a tool to crush dissent.

The European commission and the high representative noted in an annual report on Friday that there had been an “alarming political deterioration in Hong Kong”, citing the imposition of the national security law, the arrest of dozens of pro-democracy activists in January, and Beijing’s move this week to overhaul the city’s politics.

“China is consciously dismantling the ‘one Country, two Systems’ principle in violation of its international commitments and the Hong Kong Basic Law,” Josep Borrell, the EU’s high representative and vice-president, said.

Separately, Australia and New Zealand said they were deeply concerned, urging Hong Kong and China to allow “genuine avenues” for the city’s people to participate in their governance, and to protect the role of the Legislative Council.

The changes were a “significant step which will further undermine Hong Kong’s autonomy” Marise Payne and Nanaia Mahuta, the foreign affairs ministers of Australia and New Zealand respectively, said.

In Hong Kong, the government said in a statement late on Friday it strongly opposed the EU’s remarks and that the report’s questioning of China’s willingness to uphold the “one country, two systems” principle was a “groundless accusation”.

The Hong Kong government said stability had been restored to society since the implementation of the national security law.

 

Beijing has unleashed another attack on the BBC after one of its correspondents, accused of fake reporting on Xinjiang and Hong Kong by China, purportedly “ran” to Taiwan without informing Chinese authorities of his leaving.

Speaking on Wednesday at a regular press briefing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying blasted the conduct of the BBC and reporter John Sudworth (Sha Lei).

“I want to declare again that we just learned that Sha Lei left without saying goodbye, and I don’t know what happened. He left the country abnormally because he had not fulfilled the formalities that a resident foreign reporter should go through before leaving his post,” she noted, confirming earlier reports from the Global Times claiming Sudworth had taken refuge in Taiwan.

Sudworth, a BBC journalist who has reported on China issues for nine years, has moved to Taiwan, saying it had become impossible for him and his crew to film amid Chinese pressure. The BBC said in a statement: “John’s reporting has exposed truths the Chinese authorities did not want the world to know.”

Hua claimed that people in Xinjiang plan to sue the journalist and the BBC for slandering the region, adding this action had nothing to do with the government in Beijing. “Sha Lei’s interest in fake news has harmed the interest of people in Xinjiang, they plan to sue Sha Lei,” she said.

She also said that Beijing has frequently made its opinions known to the British broadcaster and has demanded it stop spreading fake news on issues related to Xinjiang, Hong Kong and the Covid-19 pandemic.

The BBC has been a prominent reporter of alleged human rights abuses of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang province. China denies all allegations of wrongdoing.

Hua added that the public-owned, license-fee-funded UK broadcaster has a “strong ideological bias” and “when it comes to BBC reporting on China, everyone actually knows that the BBC broadcasts a large amount of fake news.”

The gross nonsense of the Xinjiang “Uighur genocide” invented by the CIA and deliberately hyped by the American bourgeoisie, including the new “democratic” Biden government, has been clear from the beginning, with its now obviously fabricated emotion-tugging accounts of “rape” and “forced sterilisation” from exiled axe-grinding dissidents, all looking for a moment of fame or money from their new Western lives by regurgitating standard off-the-peg “atrocity” propaganda wheeled out against every regime that Washington does not like, or is setting-up for invasion, from the Yugoslavs throughout the 1990s, and against Gaddafi’s Libya – the infamously idiotic notion of viagra-fuelled “rape squads” (!!!!) – to the recent Belarus hysteria).

Perfectly straightforward “satellite images” are given a sinister spin with misdirecting doom-laden voice-overs full of twisted innuendos equating standard prisons, or security contained centres, to “concentration camps” and inviting the viewers to jump even further to conclusions about “death camps” etc – not least by mobilising the worldwide Jewish freemasonry supporters of “Israel”, (the Zionist-Nazi occupation of Palestine), to add it to their “Holocaust Day” commemoration.

That must be the sickest misuse yet of the tragic emotions around this genuine historical Nazi atrocity, among many such propaganda misuses by the Jewish colonisers to “justify” their own ethnic-cleansing slow-genocide of the Palestinian nation to clear the land they have stolen for their own use – which is to say the whole of Palestine including the bit they were initially “legally awarded” by the imperialist dominated UN in 1948).

The cynicism of the bourgeois press pumping out the intelligence agency garbage on China is gobsmacking, like the deliberate misrepresentation recently of alleged “proof” of Uighur genocide, declared by the Guardian (who else? the “liberals” as always more to the fore in bilious lies than even the reactionaries) to be in a “landmark legal report”.

Hyping this further as a supposed "first independent, non-government legal examination” in Xinjiang, the paper heavily implies this to be a world authority, described as “a non-partisan US-based thinktank”, while carefully avoiding saying who it is.

Only after a slew of unsubstantiated allegations is the name finally given of the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy as the author.

To which the comments “who he” and “non-partisan my arse” are most appropriate, the institute being yet another privately funded anti-communist body, this one set up by an American multi-millionaire chicken farmer Dr. Ahmed Alwani who:

serves on the boards of several nonprofit organizations, including the Washington Theological Consortium (a community of theological schools of diverse Christian traditions, with partners in education, spirituality, and interfaith dialogue) and Fairfax Educational Foundation. In 2018, Dr. Alwani became vice president of the International Institute of Islamic Thought...

He has served as a member of the advisory board of the U.S. military’s Africa Command.

Meanwhile, to list those making the running with “concerned” and pompous declarations of “crimes against humanity” etc is enough to expose its falsity; since when have the Trumpites, (or the equally reactionary Bidenites), or the most reactionary of the jingoist Brexit Tories such as Ian Duncan Smith, usually lining up behind such depraved regimes as the gangster-thug Saudi feudals, the Zionists, the Colombian fascists, the Bolsonaros (and Pinochets) of this world, and of course carrying out their own warmongering on Iraq and Afghanistan, Africa and Yemen, had the interest of “ordinary Muslims” (as the Uighurs are) at the top of their concerns?.

Why would anyone line up with reactionary Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, and his posturing UN podium denunciations – save of course the shadow foreign secretary, Labourite Lisa Nandy denouncing him and the Tories on Radio 4 for not being sufficiently aggressive in the Goebbels BIG LIE grandstanding, and adding her voice to the stream of hate-filled falsities.

Labour has grovellingly done service for the ruling class for decades, running imperialism’s repression and warmongering when in power, all the way to facilitating the Iraq war with made up WMD lies, and then joining the invasion.

This Nandy comment was more pure fascist-minded conscious lying.

It is part of the sick tragedy of retreat and capitulation by the entire fake-“left” that they still prop up this disgusting “parliamentary” racket, and in the case of most Trots, still prop up the Labour Party itself with their weasel “entryist” justifications.

As previously explained, (EPSR No1591 eg) China has been caught up in the worldwide rise of Islamic militancy which is driven by the capitaliast crisis in general and growing discontent, despair and hatred of major populations against the tyranny and slave-level oppression and exploitation it imposes on them.

Many Uighurs were influenced and some joined with ISIS and other islamist jihadism around Iraq particularly where it was mingled with the anti-occupation insurgency struggle against reactionary sections of the Shia Iraqi bourgeoisie who chose to stooge for imperialism.

But the limitations of this cultural-religious ideology saw some turn their militancy onto the wrong target, namely the Chinese workers state (since that is where they live).

Bombings and attacks have caused massive damage and killing in Xinjiang.

The state has responded obviously with policing measures and with a re-education programme, a much more humane response than the West’s indiscriminate blitzing, torture and military invasions, manhunts, executions etc and the fomenting of poisonous anti-Muslim racism and scapegoating.

It is part of the worldwide failing of revisionism that Beijing did not develop a better understanding of the world class struggle throughout the masses in China which could have given the militant discontents a better revolutionary perspective in the first place of the real problem in the world, namely capitalist rule and its crisis.

Such an education, dialectically drawing all the masses into the struggle for revolutionary science (from basic school onwards) would be far the best way to cope with still developing parts of the population which are caught up in cultural hostility, rather than simply imposing civic, language and practical training in re-education centres.

For all such shortcomings, further signs of growing anti-imperialist confidence continue to emerge from China.

One is the refusal (so far) of revisionist Beijing to go along with the storm of hysterical demonisation of the Myanmar government’s defence of its state authority in the teeth of the counter-revolution the West has succeeded in provoking against it.

Putin’s Bonarpartist Russian government too, still uneasily balancing between the oligarch capitalist restoration which followed Gorbachev’s idiot liquidation of the Soviet workers state, and some (minor) reformist concessions to try and prevent any nostalgic communist sentiment reviving, also refuses to go along with calls for UN (US puppet) resolutions to isolate it, justify strangling sanctions and setting the atmosphere for possible intervention or invasion, in the same way that Libya’s Gaddafi was set up before the 2011 NATO onslaught (under “Joe” Biden’s vice-presidency).

Less certain is precisely the motive of either in holding back; a sound enough instinct to oppose Western skulduggery perhaps, and in China’s case a recognition that its own regime is in the gunsights too, for reasons of proximity and economic and political ties.

No clarity yet emerges about the importance of defeating the Western posturing, and the upheaval it has managed to provoke.

Nor are there explanations about the reactionary nature of this eruption and the deliberate demonisation of the Tatmadaw military regime as part of the overall drive to war of the entire capitalist system, its only solution to crisis (which is not explained either).

And it is still not clear what Beijing’s position is on world upheaval in general and imperialism’s still continuing nonsensical “war on terror” meaning “war on any violent upheaval which even remotely looks as it could topple or even challenge imperialism.”

Hopefully Beijing has pulled back from the dire mistake of joining in with American and other Western imperialisms' declaration of non-stop brutal suppression of all such ferment, after at one point even providing some “policing” forces, and joining with the West against “piracy” off the Somalian coast too; all of which is essentially the assertion of imperialist interests everywhere, seaways included, with violence and blitzing (as throughout Africa and the Middle East).

Meanwhile, that much of the Western fake-“left” has been dragged behind the current “democracy” stunt only underlines their cravenness, opportunism and the long retreat from revolutionary science, despite all their play-acting about Marxism, wooden programmes, formulas and strategies, and turgid academic debates about the Soviet Union (either ignoring its giant achievements as the Trots do by “proving” (!!) that its 73 years of astonishing progress without any capitalists in control were “impossible” or never happened, or by ignoring the difficulties and philosophical shortcomings that led to Moscow’s eventual liquidation because of a long slow revisionist retreat from the grasp that all development is revolutionary (Marx, Engels, Lenin).

Abandoning that perspective began soon after Lenin’s death, transforming into Stalin’s revisionist post-war “peace struggle” strategy which led on to the disasters of “peaceful roads” and disarming parliamentary struggle (See EPSR Book Vol 21 Unanswered Polemics) and such tragedies as the Pinochet overthrow in Chile and the slaughter of millions of communists and fellow traveller in Indonesia.

The importance of revolutionary theory and a clear perspective of the balance of class forces in the world is critical in understanding all turmoil such as that unfolding in Myanmar – what street revolt is anti-imperialist (the initial Arab spring eg) and what is counter-revolution which imperialism has been provoking for decades behind the lies and confusion of a “fight for democracy” and disguise of “popular revolt”, using paid or planted stoogery and whatever petty bourgeois movement can be set going around it and then hyped up and exaggerated with lurid press campaigns and fake-news, as now in Rangoon and Yangon etc.

With a Marxist perspective the not-at-all “peaceful” demonstrations in Myanmar have been clearly identifiable as a counter-revolutionary stunt from the beginning like the Nazi-sympathising “Orange revolution” in Ukraine, the middle-class anti-communism in Belarus, the hyped-up Hong Kong demonstrations and the 2013 counter-movement which the CIA-Zionist intelligence and Egyptian military was finally able to organise against the Morsi government installed by the democratic reforms “granted” after the 2011 Arab Spring toppling of the dictatorial regime of Hosni Mubarak.

And like, further back, the eventually successful Solidarnosc movement in Poland, the bogus “trade union” funded by $100 millions of US and Vatican money in Poland, which quickly showed its true colours early on for anyone with a smidgeon of understanding, with its adoption of Pilsudski fascist nationalist symbolism, backward Catholic worship and calls to bring down the workers state.

The Trots’ sticking with it for a whole decade helped grease the wheels for the great counter-revolutionary movement which Moscow’s Gorbachevite revisionist stupidity and liquidationism unlocked, bringing the still viable USSR to a halt and opening up the restorationist gangster plundering.

The failure of the revisionist wing of the fake-“left” to challenge and expose the roots of Gorbachevism in the long retreat from Leninism started under Stalin equally played into imperialism’s hands.

The current turmoil is obviously a tragedy for hundreds of lost young lives in Myanmar (though possibly not as many as the unverified counts put out by the Western backed organisations, to feed deliberately inflammatory information into the situation) – taking to the streets because of delusions in Western lifestyles, consumerism and free-market “opportunity” under “democracy”, and driven to a frenzy of disruptive and violent action by outside agitation, (both via Internet, and in personal contact), stirring ethnic hatreds against the Chinese particularly, mixed with anti-communism.

The violent character of the supposed “peaceful demonstrations” has rapidly become clear over the weeks with barricades erected (sometimes burning tyres), increasingly dangerous weaponry, (Molotov cocktails etc), and as disclosed in the latest bourgeois press stories, training with combat troops from some of the militarised ethnic groups which have been trying to disrupt the Myanmar state for decades (egged on both by drug-running interests and by Western subversion, hoping to use ethnic tensions to inflame “self-determination” fragmentation of the country).

These conflicts have been frequent and dangerous; in a recent fight 500 of the military were killed as is given away by the details of this bourgeois press report trying to talk up and romanticise the turmoil, while demonising the regime with lurid phrases like “bloodthirst” and covering up its egging-on with slipped-in lies about “peaceful demonstrations so far” and “defensive action”:

In a jungle in the borderlands of Myanmar, the troops sweated through basic training. They learned how to load a rifle, pull the pin of a hand grenade and assemble a firebomb.

These cadets are not members of Myanmar’s military, which seized power last month and quickly imposed a battlefield brutality on the country’s populace. Instead, they are an eclectic corps of students, activists and ordinary office workers who believe that fighting back is the only way to defeat one of the world’s most ruthless armed forces.

“I see the military as wild animals who can’t think and are brutal with their weapons,” said a woman from Yangon, Myanmar’s biggest city, who was now in the forest for a week of boot camp. Like others who have joined the armed struggle, she did not want her name published for fear that the Tatmadaw, as the Myanmar military is known, would target her.

“We have to attack them back,” she said. “This sounds aggressive, but I believe we have to defend ourselves.”

After weeks of peaceful protests, the frontline of Myanmar’s resistance to the Feb. 1 coup is mobilizing into a kind of guerrilla force. In the cities, protesters have built barricades to protect neighborhoods from military incursions and learned how to make smoke bombs on the internet. In the forests, they are training in basic warfare techniques and plotting to sabotage military-linked facilities.

The boldness and desperation of this new front recalls the radicalization of a previous generation of democracy activists in Myanmar, who traded treatises on political philosophy for guns. As in the past, the hard-line opposition is a defensive response to the military’s mounting reign of terror. The Tatmadaw has cracked down on peaceful protesters and unarmed bystanders alike, killing at least 275 people since the coup, according to a monitoring group.

Other forms of resistance have continued in Myanmar. A mass civil disobedience campaign has idled the economy, with a nationwide strike on Wednesday leaving towns devoid of business activity. In creative acts of defiance, protesters have lined up rows of stuffed animals and origami cranes as stand-ins for demonstrators who could get shot.

But there is a growing recognition that such efforts may not be enough, that the Tatmadaw needs to be countered on its own terms. Last week, remnants of the ousted Parliament, who consider themselves the legitimate government, said that a “revolution” was needed to save the country. They have called for the formation of a federal army that respects various ethnic groups, not just the majority Bamar.

“If diplomacy fails, if the killings continue, the people of Myanmar will be forced to defend themselves,” said Dr. Sasa, a spokesman for the ousted Parliament who is on the run after having been charged with high treason.

Any such movement will have to contend with a military that has ruled Myanmar by force for the better part of 60 years and has fought dozens of insurgencies for even longer. The Tatmadaw’s bloodthirst is notorious. Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the army chief who led the coup, has repeatedly commanded the extermination of entire villages, most chillingly the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims.

The country has trembled as the Tatmadaw has brought its war machine to the cities, imprisoning Myanmar’s civilian leaders last month and erasing a decade of political and economic reform.

Since then, dozens of young protesters have been killed by single gunshots to the head. Security forces have fired into homes at random, leaving families cowering in back rooms. On Tuesday, a 7-year-old girl sitting at home in her father’s lap was shot in the city of Mandalay, in what appeared to be a collateral death. (Hundreds of protesters were released on Wednesday after weeks of detention.)

The Tatmadaw is flouting the international rules of war. Security forces have fired at ambulances and tortured detainees. Given the brutality, members of Myanmar’s frontline of democracy say there is no choice but to take up arms.

Most days in the concrete conflict zones of Yangon, Ko Soe Win Naing, a 26-year-old sailor, prepares for war: a GoPro camera affixed to his helmet, a balaclava over his head, vials of tear gas in his vest pockets, a sheathed sword on his back and a gas mask at the ready. His weapon of choice is a firework fashioned into a sort of grenade.

Mr. Soe Win Naing has not gone home for weeks, part of a roving gang that tries to protect neighborhoods from marauding security forces. He does not, however, support going into the jungle to train to fight the military.

“Although we are working for the right thing, I have become like a fugitive,” he said. “But even if I get killed, I will fight until the very end.”

The frontline fighters have piled up sandbags and built bamboo barricades, which they defend with homemade firebombs. Children have joined, too, dressing in pajamas to look harmless as they travel to their battle posts.

The nation’s ousted civilian leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for her campaign against the generals who locked her up for 15 years. (The award was tarnished by her defense of the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya.)

But most struggles in Myanmar have involved guns and slingshots. In the mountainous periphery of the country, ethnic armed groups have been fighting for autonomy for decades. After soldiers gunned down hundreds of protesters in 1988, thousands of students and activists fled into the forests and formed armed groups that fought alongside ethnic insurgencies.

Of late, their tactics have extended to information warfare. On Wednesday, anti-coup protesters said they had launched hacking attacks on two military-linked banks.

For the new generation, the decision to fight is born of a desire to protect what the country has gained over the past decade. Myanmar was once one of the most isolated countries on Earth, as a xenophobic and economically inept junta cleaved the country from the international community. Then came tentative political reforms, an internet link to the world and chances at private-sector jobs.

The notion that Myanmar might return to a frightened past has galvanized some protesters. One young woman, who is about to start military training in the jungle, said she remembered huddling as a child with her family and listening secretly to BBC radio broadcasts, an act that once could have earned imprisonment.

“I decided to risk my life and fight back any possible way I can,” she said. “If we oppose nationwide in unison, we will make the military have sleepless nights and insecure lives, just as they have done to us.”

“We have our political faith, we have our dreams,” she said. “This is the fight in which we have to use our brains and our bodies.”

If any armed rebellion is to succeed, it will need the backing of the ethnic insurgencies that have long been at war with the Tatmadaw. Last week, the Kachin Independence Army, which represents the Kachin of northern Myanmar, launched a surprise strike against the Tatmadaw.

On Thursday, five Tatmadaw soldiers were killed by the Karen National Liberation Army, which fights for the Karen ethnicity. Last year, hundreds of Tatmadaw troops died while battling another ethnic insurgency in western Rakhine State.

“If ethnic armed groups launch offensives, it could help relieve pressure on the protesters in the cities,” said Padoh Saw Hser Bwe, a general secretary of the Karen National Union.

With the Tatmadaw’s most notorious brigades now stationed in the cities, focused on anti-coup protesters rather than ethnic civil war, the military’s killing continues unabated.

On Monday in Mandalay, Ko Tun Tun Aung, 14, wandered out of his home to grab a pot of water. A bullet pierced his chest, killing him instantly, according to his relatives. At least seven others were also shot dead in the same neighborhood that day. Two were rescue workers.

Ko Thet Aung, a 23-year-old frontline defender, is from the same Mandalay neighborhood where the killings occurred. For three weeks, he has been manning barricades and dodging gunfire.

“The more they crack down, the more we are motivated to fight back,” he said. “We are from Generation Z, but I would call ourselves Gen-P — Generation Protection. I will die protecting my country at the front lines.”

This story, laden with outright lies, such as the “ethnic cleansing” of the Rohingya, still gives away enough to make clear the violence which reveals the true nature of the supposed “peaceful protest”.

It is no small matter in Myanmar where a low level civil war has been kept raging by skulduggery and provocation among the minority groups over many years; the country is permanently on the edge of violent outbreak.

Under such conditions the jumpy response of the military, however crude it might be, is understandable.

Already weeks back, there has been deliberately inflamed anti-Chinese violence, tapping the most backward racist instincts in the petty bourgeois mass, with five factories burned down, and a crowd 2000 strong deliberately blocking fire tenders from getting through; the obviously necessary firm response by the state security forces immediately became out-of-context grist to the Western media mill to stir further hatred, hoping to establish a cycle of confusion and violence that could be whipped-up even more into all-out civil war, or as justification for invasion by the West.

The pretence that a “general strike”, bringing the economy to a halt, is just another facet of “peaceful protest” is also of a piece with the deliberate hysteria, designed to fan the flames.

So too the offhand revelation of cyber-sabotage, deemed a serious enough modern threat in the Tories’ new UK defence review that is classified as a mass destruction weapon so threatening it could justify a nuclear response.

And in what way is a 26-year-old sailor, dressed head to toe in armoured visor and body protection, carrying both rocket launcher and a “sheathed sword” supposed to be a “democracy advocate”. He is not alone among many patrolling for weeks, long before the hyped-up death toll climbed far.

Those numbers, quoted in this story as 270 or so but now higher, along with the lurid allegations of “indiscriminate killing” should be disbelieved on principle by anyone halfway reasonable, let alone by Marxist scientific objectivity; they pour out from such partisan sources as “Justice for Myanmar”, and an exile “political prisoner” organisation based in the West.

Such groups are of a kind with other Western “support” organisations for Myanmar such as the US union body, the reactionary AFL-CIO (with past links to the CIA) which is working with some local unions in conjunction with the reactionary National Endowment for Democracy.

These add up to anti-communism across the board.

It is no coincidence either that sinister “pro-democracy activists” from Hong Kong, saturated in pro-Western anti-communist hatred, have turned up in Myanmar, and that the demonstrators have for some weeks been using the same kind of large-scale 5-person slingshots for firing lethal projectiles and Molotov cocktails that emerged there last year, not to mention the bow and arrow and other weaponry seen in Hong Kong, which for all their “toytown” descriptions, are potentially deadly. Such weapons were not the mainstay of the feudal epoch for no reason.

(Staggeringly one of the anti-mainland leaders in Hong Kong, complaining about the firm hand now being applied by Beijing’s legal changes in the city-”state” against last year’s violent pro-Western disrupters, was still whining on the BBC (where else?) this week that China was “unfairly and brutally” suppressing “peaceful democratic protest” despite a year of violent attacks by the pampered and privileged youth at the forefront, including setting bystanders alight.)

Hong Kong’s “umbrella” upheaval, (another with symbols or colours typical of coordinated CIA provocations) was always a counter-revolution masquerading under the pretence of “democracy”.

So too are the events in Myanmar.

Its class nature is made clear in the bourgeois press piece above citing the ambitions of the youth to find “private sector jobs” and keep hold of “what they have gained in the last ten years” (the period in which some Western companies and consumerism have been allowed in by the Aung San Suu Kyi “democracy” party).

Sympathetic links all the way back the 1988 “demonstrations” make the point even more sharply, since that was a movement intent on toppling the even more overtly socialist-orientated regime at the time, part of the wave of counter-revolutionary stunts which were deliberately provoked as the Gorbachevite revisionist confusion and counter-revolutionary dismantling of the Soviet Union was reaching its peak.

Not by coincidence, that “five-8s” upheaval was provoked and set running just one year before the major attempt to overturn and topple the Chinese workers state itself with the Tiananmen demonstrations by the spoilt brat student youth and their pro-American Statue of Liberty effigy, intent on all-out counter-revolution (see EPSR Book Vol 16 Defeat for Western “democratic” influence in China) and set on provoking the spilling of blood to achieve it.

Invoking the 1988 events underlines that the whole eruption here is the culmination over decades of plotting by the West.

In fact it goes all the way back to the anti-British nationalist struggle during and after the Second World War which forced ailing British imperialism into “granting independence” (ie retreating from colonial domination which had been as vicious as the rest of the British Empire’s colonialism).

It was initially an independent bourgeois parliamentary republic.

Within a short period the nationalist leaders, including the central figure, the father of Aung San Suu Kyi, were assassinated by an obvious British plot.

Ever since, the West has stirred and provoked endless local “self-determination” fights against the left-leaning nationalist regime (self declared as “socialist” after a military coup in 1962 ) among a dozen or so minorities who inhabit the fringes of the central Burmese area, deliberately trying to disrupt an inclusive multi-ethnic policy by the government.

Myanmar, despite limited economic development has maintained a relatively firm grip with a large section of the economy under state nationalised control; its refusal to kowtow to Western imperialism and to allow the great monopolies to exploit the economy has made it a target for subversion and skulduggery, and the imperialist pressure to “democratise” ie allow in imperialist political and economic influence.

The West hates the Burmese nationalist regime for its socialist ambitions, and for its links with communist China, and has been trying to topple it, as a “rogue state” victim in itself, and as an indirect undermining of communist China.

Plans have gone back decades, particularly using the “martyr” figure of Aung San Suu Kyi, educated and formed in Britain’s elite circles, and in America, working at the United Nations.

Though the generals have been careful to maintain a control over core state functions and the central economy their recent compromises with the “democratic” bourgeois wing has been allowing more and more capitalist outside investment and ideological influence.

But despite its anti-imperialist determination, the Myanmar regime is by no means a workers state, and without the firmest and clearest Leninist understanding made conscious for the whole population, such compromise is fraught with danger, especially in saturating the population with philistine illusions in the “prosperous” world of the West and its consumerism.

Cultural, economic and political undermining has been deliberately escalated by Western infiltration to take advantage.

Clearly after the last election the generals felt this was going too far, forcing their hand.

Fake-“left” and liberal delusions that this turmoil is about “democracy” because the generals tore up the latest election result are cretinous.

Their decision that the ballot was rigged by the pro-Western National League for Democracy behind Aung San Suu Kyi, is not remotely implausible; and whatever the specific mechanism, their political assessment is correct, if somewhat late in the day.

The whole of bourgeois democracy is a twisted and bent racket, manipulated and twisted by a thousand means even (or especially) in the heartlands of imperialism where $billions are spent to prevent any result that would really change things (aided and abetted by a class-collaborating stooge Labour movement that does not want revolution anyway – the only way to change anything), to the whole Third World where attempts to subvert and topple anti-imperialist regimes by creating bogus “democracy” movements are legion (like the MDC in Zimbabwe for example) and any “open election” will be swamped by the money and influence of capitalism.

The West spends billions in government funds to subvert and disrupt all such “free voting” and billions more via “thinktanks” and “private foundations”, working alongside the intelligence agencies whose major job is overturn anti-imperialism using every possible means.

That the upheaval has successfully forced the hand of the military into lethal repression is a measure of how successful the skulduggery has been.

And the working class should be in no doubt that if a counter-revolution is fully successful a bloodbath of torture, murder and repression will follow, to the extent imperialism feels it can get away with, exactly as happened in 1973 in Chile after General Augosto Pinochet took power (orchestrated by the CIA and other Western allies’ agencies), killing thousands and as happened in Egypt to suppress the Arab Spring with non-stop executions, torture, prison deaths and intimidation since 2013, and many other examples.

Fascist vengeance and intimidation against future resistance is the intent, as well disrupting and threatening the Chinese workers state.

And this makes it even sicker that the fake-“left” is going along with the Western campaign, like the Lalkar/Proletarian, whose clinging to museum-Stalinist philosophical retreat has so addled their brains with “democracy” delusions that they simply repeat the bourgeois press garbage about “corrupt generals” verbatim.

It is one thing to use bourgeois press material when it is making unavoidable concessions about imperialist weakness, splits and tyranny (because the bourgeoisie needs some objective facts itself, and because a diet of pure lies would be too easily seen through – though it is getting there) and quite another to just repeat the distortions and lies.

Staggeringly the Brarites declare the Tatmadaw illicit because it is a military government and the “civilian government” is “only a figleaf” (presumably most other bourgeois governments are perfectly valid then and not the veil over bourgeois dictatorship that Lenin describes in State and Revolution?) going on to repeat verbatim the bourgeoisie’s lying propaganda allegations of “warcrimes”, and “ethic cleansing” which “many regard as genocide” (EPSR No1315 and 1520) and then the accusations that the business interests of senior general Min Aung Hlaing “scream loudly of corruption” (again presumably so different to the pro-Western bourgeoisie which the Brarites obviously consider to be a paragon of probity).

Certainly the West need hardly bother with its propaganda machine at all with such willing hands, approvingly citing the street calls for “restoration of the civilian government and respect for the election result”.

A convoluted section of the Brarites’ analysis has to follow to explain away why both the Chinese and Russians have vetoed UN action - declared to be out of cynical self-interest by both, which while it might have some truth to it, is no justification for pitching in whole heartedly behind the “civilian government” and simply raises questions about Beijing and Moscow.

Another set of revisionist remnants, the Weekly Worker CPGB has equally pitched in with denunciations – firstly by continuing support for the Labour Party and also via some activist posturing against the Zionist-owned arms company Elbit Systems. Such value as there might be in drawing attention to vile arms trading, is completely swamped by singling out its sales to the Myanmar military as the main reason for opprobrium.

Fakery and anti-communism are vital props for imperialism.

The world desperately needs Leninism.

Don Hoskins

 

 

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