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No 1647 10th September 2024

Arrest intimidation of journalists and peace-protestors over nazi-Nato war on Russia & Zionist/imperialist Gaza genocide, shows desperate weakness of imperialism facing total crisis meltdown of its economic and political system and defeat from rising Third World “terrorist” revolt. Vicious censorship is the next notch ratcheting bourgeois “democracy” dictatorship into outright fascism as warmongering frenzy solves nothing. Any silence so imposed is filled by shouting to the world the lying falsity of bourgeois “democracy and freedom” already threadbare from decades of decline and treachery, 20 years of war destruction, the horrors of Palestine and the hypocrisy of “international justice” and a “United Nations”. Fake-”left” refusal to abandon “left pressure” reformism and explain the revolutionary need for proletarian dictatorship helps monopoly capital prolong its rule and disastrous plunge into world Catastrophe. Venezuela counter-revolution election stunt against Maduro would get nowhere without revisionist brainrot

The wave of brutal police raids, bogus “terrorism” detentions and gagging orders just unleashed on pro-Palestine and anti-Ukraine peace campaigners in Britain and America is a desperate response by the imperialist world order to setbacks and failure on both fronts in its barbarically genocidal crisis warmongering.

These vicious repression, censorship and intimidation moves – with sudden airport detentions, extended terrorising interrogations, FBI or MI6 home raids and ransackings by the West’s Gestapo “thought police”, and with much more threatened and in preparation, – want of course to shut down the deluge of news about the grotesque inhuman atrocities imposed by Zionist/imperialist warmongering in Palestine and the lies against the Russian speaking population of Ukraine, blamed for a war actually instigated by the West’s NATO and its 2014 coup-installed Banderite-Azov outright fascist regime in Kiev.

But most of all the West wants to silence all news and protest stimulated by the defeats being suffered by imperialism as it writhes and squirms to avoid the great unstoppable economic Catastrophe increasingly dragging it into Depression and much worse as the dollar implodes.

The Third World War it is imposing as its means of “escape”, blaming the rest of the world for its contradiction riddled system’s self-generated collapse is not going well.

Far from reasserting the supremacy and authority of the Empire – to sustain a “New American Century” of dominance, wealth and unquestioned power, – the latest wars in at least two decades of blitzing, bombing, droning and brutal torture warmongering (from Serbia onwards) are facing humiliation, military chaos and vast unaffordable expense on the front lines while splits and political uncertainty shake the foundations at home; in Washington, in Jerusalem, in London and Europe too.

And these defeats come on top of the failures to reestablish unchallenged imperialist writ in Iraq, in Libya, in Syria, across the Sahel, in Afghanistan, in Lebanon and in the Yemen despite unbelievably appalling violence and criminal destruction of entire peoples to “eradicate” the “terrorist menace” as the incipient and ever growing world anti-imperialist struggle is lyingly and misleadingly labelled.

Haïti is on fire and the 4000 Kenyan police finally imported to shut down its “gangster” rebellion (because noone else was willing) will soon be needed back home in Nairobi where turmoil and revolt is foaming just beneath surface and occasionally breaking through in riots against a completely corrupt stitched-up regime.

Nearly bankrupt Egypt is just as close to the boil, the brutal General Sisi “democratic” (!!) military dictatorship just about keeping a lid on things after his bloody 2013 street massacre coup to suppress the huge 2011 Arab Spring eruptions.

But with economic meltdown, hunger and daily power blackouts pushing an already seething population, red-hot with anger at the slaughter of their brothers in Palestine, it is potentially coming to an social explosion point even greater than of the Arab Spring.

Latin America refuses to lie down, most particularly the endlessly subverted Venezuelan “left” nationalist anti-imperialist struggle (see below).

Only a total absence of any Marxist revolutionary theory holds back a world of struggles from finally toppling for good this grotesque and out-of-time bourgeois class rule and its ever more obviously fascist degeneration.

It will come as the great revolt, driven by the unstoppable crisis contradictions identified by Marx 150 years ago (see economics box) necessarily forces re-developed conscious Leninist understanding.

But even far from clear spontaneous world anti-imperialism is shaking the bourgeoisie to its foundations, especially in Palestine where degenerate Western-collaborating Arab bourgeois and feudal backwardness and corruption has spent eleven months sitting on its hands watching the non-stop maiming, starvation and massacres against women and children unfold daily as schools, hospitals, homes and desperate tent encampments are deliberately targeted along with the aid convoys and basic infrastructure.

Containing this ferment is crucial for imperialism if it is to maintain its grip and dampen down rising world dismay and disgust at its outright butchery.

So this latest state repression goes hand in hand with shutting down or minimising all mainstream media coverage as much as possible via the craven compliance of most well-paid bourgeois “journalism” with the propaganda control of the state (the latest huge anti-Zionist march in London receiving exactly zero coverage for example, and the horrors in Gaza and the West Bank only limited and partial attention).

And the Internet is being blocked as much as possible to shut down any remaining social media channels or forcing them to open up to non-stop (not so) secret state surveillance, all in the name of “stopping terrorism” but in fact to help maintain the dictatorial control of the billionaire ruling class over the exploited masses of the planet, trying to head off social explosions and rebellion.

Hence the astonishing arrest in France – obviously at American “request” – of maverick Russian oligarch Pavel Durov, inventor and owner of the Telegram Internet communications system which remains one of the few networks which has never given the Western spy services the “backdoor” key to its encryption channels (unlike most of the other social media and software producers) and which until now it has refused on “free speech” grounds.

So in classic fascist-bully-style Pavel has been charged with every kind of demonising crime under the sun from drug and sex running to paedophilia and even abuse against his own six-year old child (!!!), the full gamut of mudslinging character assassination (generously supplied by feminist and other single-issue self-righteousness) now routinely hurled by capitalism’s state forces at every individual and even entire “rogue regimes”, deemed to be an obstacle.

Who knows what was demanded for him to secure bail as he faced the implicit threat of years in gaol as the petty bourgeois left press reports???:

Last week, Telegram founder Pavel Durov was arrested in Paris and faces being indicted on 12 different charges, including refusing to “share information or documents with investigators when required by law” and “complicity in managing an online platform to allow illicit transactions by an organized group.”

Durov’s messaging app has played a significant role in the ongoing information war surrounding the genocide in Gaza. Supporters of the Palestinians have been able to freely share information exposing ongoing Israeli war crimes while highlighting the efforts of Hamas, Hezbollah, Yemen, and Iran to resist Israel.

[Among them is] British human rights activist and social media influencer Sarah Wilkinson was arrested by UK police on 29 August, reportedly over “content she posted online.”

“The police came to her house just before 7.30am. [Twelve] of them in total, some of them in plain clothes from the counter-terrorism police. They said she was under arrest for ‘content that she has posted online.’ Her house is being raided, and they have seized all her electronic devices,” Jack Wilkinson is quoted as saying by the social media account Suppressed News.

“The pro-genocide UK regime has arrested [MENAUncensored’s] roving reporter and Human Rights Activist Sarah Wilkinson for supporting the Palestinian resistance and relaying what is really happening in Gaza and the West Bank to the world,” MENA Uncensored announced via social media, alleging Wilkinson was accused of supporting “terrorism.”

UK police did not issue a statement about Wilkinson’s arrest at the time of publication.

The British activist and reporter has been an outspoken critic of the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Earlier this year, she took part in the “Freedom Flotilla Coalition,” an international initiative that tried to deliver humanitarian aid directly into Gaza.

Wilkinson’s arrest comes two weeks after Syrian-British journalist Richard Medhurst was detained and questioned by UK police upon his arrival at Heathrow Airport under the Terrorism Act, Section 12.

“I believe I’m the first journalist to be arrested under this provision of the Terrorism Act. I feel that this is a political persecution and hampers my ability to work as a journalist,” Medhurst explained.

Other British journalists who have reported critically on Israeli, UK, and US foreign policy have also been detained and harassed upon returning to their home country, including The Cradle contributor Kit Klarenberg and Vanessa Beeley.

Other insane allegations are now following thick and fast with well-known former Iraq weapons inspector, peace campaigner and broadcaster Scott Ritter just raided by the FBI on grounds of “being a foreign agent for Moscow” (because his journalism debunks some of the more egregious psyops lies and fabrications poured out by NATO, the Pentagon, the CIA and MI6, and not coincidentally he also speaks out against the Zionist occupation, supporting the right of the Palestinians to fight back against it, including in the Hamas Flood operations).

And in Florida, one of the US’ most reactionary states, home to ultra-right Cuban terrorist exiles and anti-communists, as well as the “hanging chad” election fix for George W Bush in 2000:

Four Americans face charges that they conspired to have other U.S. citizens act as illegal agents of the Russian government, or that they acted as unregistered Russian agents themselves. The prosecutors say that Russians directed them — and in some cases, paid them — to push Russian propaganda, including after their country invaded Ukraine in 2022.

The defendants, who have pleaded not guilty, say that the U.S. government is criminalizing dissent protected under the First Amendment. All four of them are current or former members of the African People’s Socialist Party, an organization promoting Black power; three are also members of the Uhuru Movement, the party’s activist arm, which is based in St. Petersburg and St. Louis.

One of the defendants also founded a different group, Black Hammer, a radical Black separatist organization in Atlanta. The Uhuru Movement supports self-determination for Black people and has protested issues from racism and colonialism to local police conduct for decades.

“We are innocent of what they claim we’ve done,” Omali Yeshitela, the chairman of the Uhuru Movement and one of the defendants, said in an interview. “We’re just a vehicle that’s being used to assault free speech.”

Regardless of the outcome of the trial, which is expected to last about four weeks, experts say it offers a window into how the Russian government has long tried to influence U.S. elections and promote Russia’s geopolitical agenda.

“Infiltrating social movements has been core to Russian espionage since the 1950s,” said Bret Schafer, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund, a Washington-based research group that promotes democracy. Some of the infiltration attempts involve unwitting Americans, he added.

In the Florida case, which did not result in any pro-Russia candidate elected to public office, the payoff for Russia may seem exceedingly small. But on a broader level, Mr. Schafer said, Russia wants more “authentic” American groups to adopt Russia’s perspective.

Would that Washington “think tank” (one of dozens of brainwash institutions set up by the US billionaire “community” inside the US and throughout the imperialist dominated world) be advocating the same kind of “democracy” as run by mafia-thug-killer Prince Mohamed bin Salman of the absolute monarchy Saudi Arabia and its beheading and amputation “justice”, or by the just-as-brutal slave-labour sheikhdoms of the United Arab Emirates (owners of half of London) or that in the completely degenerate Kuwaiti al-Sabah stooge dynasty so brutally protected by the US in the first Gulf War in 1990????

Or like the long list of gruesomely vicious killer dictatorships installed or propped up by imperialism throughout the long post-war capitalist credit-fed boom from the massacring regimes of Latin America, killing millions in El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, Argentina, Grenada, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia and the ton-ton macoute Haïti of Papa and Baby Doc, and, most notably, in the 1973 Augosto Pinochet military torture and slaughter coup against revisionist “parliamentary socialist” Salvador Allende, to millions more throughout Africa and Asia like Mobutu Séé Seko in Zaire, set in place by the CIA after the assassination of anti-imperialist Patrice Lumumba, Idi Amin in Uganda and his successors Museveni and the sinister Paul Kagame in next-door Rwanda); like the Shah of Iran and his brutal Savak torture police after another US/UK assassination of anti-imperialist Mossadeq ???

Or perhaps they mean the “democracy” “defended” in the colonially dominated stooge-fascist Vietnam and Korea at a cost of over six million lives between them???

Or that of General Suharto in Indonesia, installed by a CIA/MI6 controlled coup in 1965 killing possibly two million in a deliberate massacre of the local communist party and anyone even just suspected of being a “fellow traveller”????????

Overtly barbarous state violence being stepped up to shutdown and silence every voice raised against the non-stop depravity and to head off even the most shallow exposés and lukewarm pacifist objections and protest might work for a while.

But such suppression – including the killing of 105 journalists to date in Gaza – will only add to the disquiet and eventual falling apart of complacency and illusion in the delusional world of Western consumerist “lifestyles” and philistine shallowness (still easily distracted by the price of tickets for the deliberately media-hyped diversionary reunion of the tedious Oasis band, or the equally shallow “Swiftees” phenomenon and turning a blind eye to the unfolding world collapse).

Even the disgusting “liberalism” of the Guardian, a foremost prop for the anti-communist brainwashing that keeps Western privilege cocooned in its smug world built on non-stop exploitation of the rest of the planet, cannot stop fretting about how middle class complacency is being shattered, and particularly by the staggering atrocities being perpetrated by the Zionist monsters in their now demented genocide/expulsion “solution” against the population of the land they have stolen since 1947 (and even before that) in Palestine:

The war in Gaza has become a breaking point for the rules-based international order. That is also true in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israel argues that it has to take action to protect itself from what it claims are attacks using Iranian-supplied arms. Yet bombing civilians from the skies looks like a way of terrorising a people into submission – and it is increasing. Between 2020 and October 2023, six Palestinians in the area were killed in airstrikes. This week, the UN said that 136 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed in Israeli airstrikes since October 2023 – a sharp increase. These numbers are obviously dwarfed by the 40,000 dead Palestinians in Gaza, with the majority of those identified being elderly people, children or women.

One obvious distinction between the two theatres of Israeli military occupation is that in Gaza there has been no re-establishment of Israeli settlements. Nor is there a political consensus in Israel to do so. In the West Bank, things have taken a very different turn. The hope remains that a Palestinian state can be created in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with its capital in East Jerusalem. Yet the day before the historic ICJ opinion, the Israeli parliament voted overwhelmingly to pass a resolution – co-sponsored by parties in Mr Netanyahu’s coalition together with support from his rightwing and centrist opponents – rejecting the establishment of a Palestinian state.

This may be a reflection of where Israeli society finds itself. But it is self-defeating and shortsighted. It is true that Israel had difficulty evicting 8,000 Jewish settlers from Gaza in 2005. There are now nearly 90 times as many in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Even if wiser heads had prevailed years ago, it still would have been a tough ask: there were about 65 times as many settlers in its eastern occupied territories in 2012 as there were uprooted from Gaza in 2005.

But the ICJ’s call for Israel to evacuate all of its settlements and pay reparations to Palestinians for damages caused by the occupation should not be lightly dismissed. Israel can barely recognise the national existence of the Palestinians. But it is an admission that the world should encourage Israel to make.

The world’s powers must ask why they seem incapable of finding an agreement to end the current bloodshed. Without a deal, faith in the global institutions risks withering away.

The 57-year-old story of the Israeli military occupation is not yet over. Only through diplomacy can the longer-term resolution of this conflict be achieved to enable two peoples to live side by side in peace. Yet as long as international legal principles are not respected, no political accommodation will have permanence.

Nothing is “breaking” and “faith” long “withered away” in the “rules based” international order of “freedom, democracy and international justice” except in the smug West.

There has been nothing to break, it all having been a completely lying racket since it, and the United Nations stoogery at the heart of it, were set up 80 years ago to help fight the Cold War, pretending imperialist neo-colonial tyranny was as “fair and just” as the then victorious Soviet socialism which had won the admiration and support of the world’s masses after destroying Hitlerism virtually single-handed at enormous cost and working class sacrifice.

The UN’s panoply of toothless and biased international courts, principles, declarations and resolutions were and will always be “lightly dismissed” whatever the Guardian pretends, except where it is turned on those countries or movements which become too much of a thorn in the side for monopoly capital’s exploitation interests, even where they are a long way from communism, such as Serbia’s revisionist nationalist Slobodan Milosevic, hated for resisting imperialism’s breakup of the Yugoslavian workers state (see EPSR 1095 26-06-02 and 1124 19-02-02) or, almost exclusively and racistly, a stream of African “rebel” movements or regimes interfering with untrammelled Western corporate plundering.

But these petty bourgeois fears that further repression will undermine and discredit ever more threadbare illusions in capitalist “democracy” and “freedom” still lingering in petty bourgeois and some (mainly Western) privileged working class layers, are well placed.

And they are only being reinforced by the blatant trampling across popular opinion in Europe and the US. Most glaringly this is so in France where the wishes of the recent majority election winners, the “left” New Popular Front, have been completely ignored by President Macron, appointing instead the rightwing Michel Barnier from a very small grouping, who will be obliged to cooperate with the Le Pen fascists – which the NPF was specifically aimed at defeating (a lesson in Popular Front illusions which needs further analysis - but see also EPSR No1644 28-06-24).

The Labourite government is virtually as blatant, claiming authority on a less than one-in-five vote (and most of those not for the Starmerites but only against the Tories – as EPSR No 1645 explained) and already reneging on even the utterly hollow “jam tomorrow” promises it made – blaming financial “black holes” on the Tories.

Deficits and economic slump are the consequences of all of imperialism’s crisis unravelling unstoppably for over 50 years, and to Britain’s ever weakening position in the ever more bitter and fraught inter-imperialist trade war rankings (and including throughout the previous Labour (Blairite) period whose rampant privatisation simply accumulated even more debt and productivity problems while delivering ever greater cream to the fatcat capitalists Labour cosies up with).

Starmerite cynicism is total, knowing full well there is no “laying foundations” for an impossible “recovery” because all capitalism is imploding; their job is solely to impose the “discipline” needed against the inevitable class upheaval (as 2011 and August’s riots foreshadow) as far deeper slump develops.

These sick careerist liars and mountebanks all know this and have done for years, which is why they are escalating the domestic thought police crackdowns and fully backing the nazi-Zionist genocide of the Middle East revolt (which spreads much further than the Palestinians themselves), as well as backing to the hilt the reactionary British establishment’s war urging in Ukraine, taking a lead trying to drag US and European imperialism deeper into the hair-raising but losing belligerence against Russia (reflecting the past “imperial glory” hubris of the British establishment and its desperation to divert attention from the total incompetence and uncompetitiveness of this has-been ruling class, more frantic than the lead US power).

The “elected” Labourites are looking more and more like Oswald Mosleyite nazis as the days pass.

Overall, the international bourgeois billionaire class Labourism grovels to has no other mechanism to escape disaster except warmongering and destruction (see Marx and Lenin box and much more in major works from the Communist Manifesto and Capital to Lenin's State and Revolution etc.)

Only total ending of this outmoded and ever more incapable and regressive system of arrogant inequality, wastefulness, tyrannical exploitation and demented deadly plundering of the earth’s resources to the point of existential collapse can now solve this unravelling catastrophe.

But until a Marxist understanding of the dictatorship reality of capitalist class rule is consciously fought for and much more widely grasped, such disillusion will never translate into a fight to end the capitalist system, overturning the bourgeoisie’s arrogant assumption of “authority and right to rule” by establishing workers states – the dictatorship of the proletariat.

That would happen a lot quicker were it not for decades of brain dead fake-“leftism” founded in nearly a century of Revisionist retreat into “peaceful coexistence” mindrot, deadly notions of “Popular Front” cross-class struggles and later “parliamentary roads to socialism” which that generated and which are still being promulgated.

And a lot quicker too without even more debilitating notions fostered by supposed “opposition” to this class collaboration, Trotskyist “anti-Stalinism”, which was never a genuine attempt to correct and improve the Soviet workers state (as lyingly claimed by Trotsky himself and by generations of Trot frauds ever since) but always a deep hostility to the entirety of communism and its first great manifestation in the Soviet Union, a hostility founded in petty bourgeois subjectivism and individualist rejection of working class discipline.

What none do is make clear that only a revolutionary path can now stop the plunge to disaster, – for all their ultra-left posturing they offer only reformist and social-pacifist answers, such as “ceasefire now” or “sanctions on Israel”.

Even those who throw in token phrases about “overthrowing capitalism”, always caveat them with an “ultimately” or an “eventually”.

It is worse than useless, implying things can be improved, or at least ameliorated, step-by-step “in the meantime” and leaving workers theoretically disarmed, without the vital understanding that the bourgeois system has hit a brick wall, is deceased, dead, and stiff as a Norwegian Blue parrot.

No amount of protest, reason, exposure of atrocities and warcrimes, and no amount of “organising against fascism” is going to stop the great plunge into world war – only revolution.

All continuing illusions in “voting” as a solution in itself (as opposed to a platform to argue revolution) or even simply that steady progress can be made through parliament, leave workers wide open to counter-revolution as once more demonstrated in Venezuela where a non-stop demonisation campaign around the last election presidential election in late July has attempted yet another coup against Nicolas Maduro’s continuation of the anti-imperialist semi-socialism of Hugo Chávez which has so far survived for nearly twenty years.

The worker-orientated “left” nationalism so far has been sharp enough to hold firm against the Washington-led world imperialist conspiracy to use forgeries, lies and computer-hacking to try and stitch up the election behind the ultra-reactionary bourgeois opposition, trying to re-establish the dictatorial capitalist regime of the past and its links with big international corporations and finance, particularly the USA’s and particularly in the oil sector, in a country with national reserves of high quality oil which are some of the biggest in the world.

The monstrous attempt to overthrow Maduro has been a disgusting scam from the beginning behind a reactionary bourgeois personnel which has already attempted numerous coups.

Main protagonist, Maria Corina Machado was initially the candidate but was banned from standing for outright treason, because of constant provocations and calls for external intervention by the US and also to Zionism’s genocidal killer leader Benjamin Netanyahu, for aid in toppling the regime.

She has been involved Western imperialism’s non-stop attempts to subvert and overturn Chávismo, all the way back to the infamous failed but bloody military coup of 2003 when she was among the signatories of the declaration to make “businessman” Pedro Carmona the president, which would undoubtedly have seen Chávez executed save for the intervention of a loyalist section of the army which restored him to power (see EPSRs No1133,1136,1137, and 1176 18-03-03 among others).

She was deeply involved in the months of violent “protests”, disruption, sabotage and fascist terror attacks on state forces mounted by the business and middle class in 2013 with CIA coordination after the (mysterious?) death of Hugo Chávez, trying to disrupt the election of his replacement Maduro.

A similar attempted rejection was made of the 2018 election, falsely and lyingly declared invalid by the imperialist “community”.

A worldwide propaganda onslaught was mounted against the results in defiance of actual election observers’ declarations, even though on both occasions the election was verified and attested as clean and above board (for what that is worth).

The second election followed years of strangling US economic sanctions to try and demoralise the regime, which saw massive suffering imposed on the proletarian population.

The Washington-led campaign of misrepresentation culminated in the specious declaration that reactionary “opposition” leader Juan Guaidó would be “recognised” as president, with Western “diplomacy” solemnly pretending he had won for two years until the whole racket imploded in a wave of corruption.

A subsequent farcical attempt was made to invade the country by a “freelance” mercenary grouping which ended in sunken boats and arrests, one key figure just arraigned in the States for gun running:

A former US Green Beret who, in 2020, organized a failed crossborder raid of Venezuelan army deserters to remove President Nicolás Maduro has been arrested in New York on federal arms smuggling charges.

A federal indictment unsealed this week in Tampa, Florida, accuses Jordan Goudreau and a Venezuelan partner, Yacsy Álvarez, of violating US arms control laws when they allegedly assembled and sent to Colombia AR-styled weapons, ammo, night vision goggles and other defense equipment requiring a US export license.

Goudreau, 48, also was charged with conspiracy, smuggling goods from the United States and unlawful possession of a machine gun, among 14 counts. He was being held at the Metropolitan detention center in Brooklyn.

Goudreau, a three-time Bronze Star recipient for bravery in Iraq and Afghanistan, catapulted to fame in 2020 when he claimed responsibility for an amphibious raid by a ragtag group of soldiers that had trained in clandestine camps in neighboring Colombia. He said he and others were acting to protect Venezuela’s democracy after Maduro’s 2018 re-election was boycotted by the opposition and condemned as undemocratic by the US and dozens of other countries.

Two days before the incursion, the Associated Press published an investigation detailing how Goudreau had been trying for months to raise funds for the harebrained idea from the Trump administration, Venezuela’s opposition and wealthy Americans looking to invest in Venezuela’s oil industry that Maduro should be removed. Juan Guaidó, the opposition leader at the time, was initially enthused by the coup idea, signing an agreement with Goudreau’s Melbourne, Florida-based startup, Silvercorp, to explore such an option. Yet little financial support arrived, and the rural homes along Colombia’s Caribbean coast that housed the would-be liberators suffered from a lack of food, weapons and other supplies.

Despite the setbacks, the coup plotters went forward in a comically tragic way in what became known as the Bay of Piglets. The group was easily mopped up by Venezuela’s security forces, which had already infiltrated the outfit. Two of Goudreau’s former Green Beret colleagues spent years in Venezuela’s prisons until a prisoner swap last year, which involved the release of jailed Americans for a Maduro ally held in the US on money-laundering charges.

Prosecutors in their 22-page indictment documented the ill-fated plot, citing text messages between the defendants about their effort to buy military-related equipment and export it to Colombia. The evidence traced a web of money transfers, international flights and large-scale purchases.

Earlier this year, another Goudreau partner, Cliver Alcalá, a retired three-star Venezuelan army general, was sentenced in Manhattan federal court to more than two decades for providing weapons to drug-funded rebels.

Had it succeeded there would have been no such characterisation of a “harebrained scheme” just as the imperialist world came close to swallowing the 2004 coup attempt on Equatorial Guinea (with investment participation from Mark Thatcher), had it not been thwarted by South African and Zimbabwean intelligence.

That took place with the full knowledge of then Labour Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and both British and American intelligence, none making any attempt to warn the government (EPSR No 1246 31-08-04) of this also very oil rich country.

Machado, constantly in and out of meetings with ultra-right (nazi-minded) US Congressmen and undoubtedly the CIA through all this, has been the next throw, with the entire Western world ignoring the Caracas bourgeoisie’s long record of treason, dirty dealing and skulduggery, in order pretend the whole thing to be just a “fight for freedom and prosperity” (in glaring contrast to the arrests it makes in “democratic countries” for merely voicing opposition or reporting the truth (as detailed above)).

Maduro’s government, correctly, was not about to let such a treasonous figure run. But the replacement candidate, serving as her “proxy”, has at least as dirty a record as local reports make clear:

The Venezuelan far-right former candidate for the presidential elections that were held on July 28, Edmundo González Urrutia, has declared himself the winner despite coming in second place. He has been recognized as the “president” of Venezuela by Washington and some of its vassal states as part of a plot reminiscent of the failed Guaidó project. In parallel, there is a broad campaign on mainstream media and social media to create an image of González as a “bird-loving old grandfather;” a career diplomat with a “democratic vocation” who is “fighting for democracy” against the “Maduro regime” in Venezuela. However, Salvadorans, especially ex-combatants of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) from the Salvadoran war era, remember him very differently.

During 1979-1985, Edmundo González served as the second-in-command of the Venezuelan Embassy in San Salvador, under ambassador Leopoldo Castillo. Both officials participated in the United States’ Plan Cóndor counter-insurgency project in El Salvador, the aim of the project being the destruction of the Salvadoran popular armed revolution.

According to former FMLN Commander Nidia Díaz, during the late 70s and early 80s, the conspiracies to capture, torture, disappear, and kill revolutionaries and their sympathizers were planned in the Venezuelan embassy in El Salvador and were directed by Leopoldo Castillo, whose closest collaborator was Edmundo González. “Castillo was named Matacuras [murderer of priests]—that is how he is known,” Díaz commented. “He was an agent of death and he persecuted Christians in the country. I do not doubt that he was involved in some way with the assassination of Saint Óscar Romero. We know that he was also involved with the assassination of the Maryknoll nuns in November 1982 as well as with the murders of many other priests.”

She added that while she was a prisoner of war, two officials from the Venezuelan embassy interrogated her. One of them was Castillo.

According to US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents declassified in February 2009, Castillo was mentioned as jointly responsible for the intelligence services that coordinated, financed, and gave the order for the execution of Operation Centauro, which consisted of a series of violent actions committed by the Salvadoran army and the Plan Cóndor death squads that were trained, armed, and financed by the US government led by Ronald Reagan to eliminate the Christian communities that were looking for a peaceful and negotiated solution to the war through the application of the principles of Liberation Theology.

During the period that Castillo and González were in charge of the Venezuelan embassy in El Salvador, the Salvadoran armed forces and the death squads killed 13,194 civilians, among them St. Óscar Arnulfo Romero, archbishop of the Catholic Church of El Salvador; four nuns of the Maryknoll order; and priests Rafael Palacios, Alirio Macias, Francisco Cosme, Jesús Cáceres, and Manuel Reyes.

Even after 1985, when Castillo no longer served as a diplomat, he still worked as an advisor to the US intelligence structure in El Salvador, called Pentagonito. It was during this period that he collaborated in the murders six Jesuit priests and two female household workers, namely, Ignacio Ellacuría, who was also the then rector of the University of Central America in San Salvador, Segundo Montes, Ignacio Martín-Baró, Juan Ramón Moreno, Amando López, Joaquin López, and Elba and Celina Ramos, in November 1989.

Another FMLN ex-combatant and former president of the Salvadoran Congress, Sigfrido Reyes, called Edmundo González “an accomplice of barbaric crimes.” “Edmundo González has this dark past,” said Reyes. “He is directly responsible for and a perpetrator of war crimes and crimes against humanity… Edmundo González’s hands are stained with blood.”

As for the reasons behind such involvement, Salvadoran historian Marvin Aguilar pointed out that it was not just those two diplomats but the entire Venezuelan State that collaborated with the United States’ Plan Cóndor to eliminate revolutions across Latin America. “The United States had its interests… and Carlos Andrés Pérez [then president of Venezuela] wanted international prestige, I think,” he remarked.

The historian added the Salvadoran and Venezuelan ultra-right forces collaborate to this day, albeit in a different form. “Today in El Salvador, there is a group of Venezuelans associated with the anti-Chavista right who work for the government of President Bukele,” he said, referring to a team of Venezuelans allied with the coup-plotter Juan Guaidó who serve as “advisors” to the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele. “It is a sort of shadow government. Thus, in one way or another, that connection exists.”

In May of this year, Venezuelan National Assembly Deputy Diosdado Cabello referred in detail to Edmundo González’s dark past in an episode of his TV program Con El Mazo Dando. The PSUV leader said at that time that he got the information from a letter sent to him by a former official of the Colombian Foreign Affairs Ministry, named María Catalina Restrepo Pinzón de Londoño. However, after the program was aired, Venezuelan extreme-right-aligned journalists and social media personalities launched a media campaign claiming that no such Colombian official existed and that González was never involved in the massacres committed in El Salvador during the war era. However, Salvadoran ex-combatants from that same era, as well as documents from US federal agencies, dismantle that propaganda.

It may be mentioned here that in the aforementioned CIA documents, Castillo and González are named together with Luis Posada Carriles, the infamous Cuban counter-revolutionary terrorist and CIA asset who was the mastermind of the Cubana Flight 455 bombing and numerous other acts of terrorism against the Cuban Revolution, the people of Cuba, and other countries of the Caribbean.

In 2008, a case was opened in a Spanish court by the US-based Center for Justice and Accountability and the Spanish Pro-Human Rights Association to bring the Salvadoran assassins and their superiors to justice. The case contemplates the massacres committed in El Salvador as crimes against humanity, and as such, they have no statute of limitations.

The Maduro government so far is showing sound firmness against the latest sophisticated CIA scam, which uses a stream of alleged “alternative” result tallies, “opinion polls” and “assessments” by stooge and reactionary “analysts” from the Venezuelan opposition and Western universities to lyingly declare this fascist opposition has won.

Correctly he says that he will stand firm against the toppling of the socialist and anti-imperialist government by reactionary moves like that seen in numerous judicial and electoral coups in Latin America as the US has tried to head off the so-called “pink tide” of progressive regimes, fixing elections from Peru and Ecuador to Argentina and Brazil, and installing demented fascists like Jair Bolsonaro in Brasilia (recently displaced but still fomenting coup plots), the near insane Javier Milei in Argentina and the pathetic Rolex collecting corruption of Dina Boluarte in Peru (following brutal suppression of left protests).

Lack of Marxist understanding remains an Achilles heel for Maduro’s halfway house leftism, open to endless such counter-revolutionary skulduggery for as long as it gives any credence at all to the lying bourgeois electoral racket (a cover for bourgeois dictatorship), which is always vulnerable to the manipulations and sabotage of the ruling class using all of its money, media power, influence and manipulation to fix the results, or failing that to denounce the outcome and organise colour revolutions or outright coups.

Only establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat gives some defence against this endless subversion and sabotage. The bourgeois will never give up trying even then, but at least in a workers state like Cuba the working class has clearly and definitively taken power and can use its own state forces to suppress the non-stop dirty dealing.

One further revealing aspect of this stunt is the way alleged “left” reformists in Latin America have all pitched in as this reactionary commentary says:

Statements this week by Lula, Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico’s president-elect, Claudia Sheinbaum, Chile’s president, Gabriel Boric, former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet and former Argentinian president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner are the most visible sign of a deep shift in the Latin American left, away from these ideological commitments.

To have even former fellow travellers, such as Lula and Kirchner, push back against Maduro’s election fraud lays bare the increasing gap between Latin America’s leftist democracies and “leftist” dictatorships.

[..]The leftist leaders’ statements also hint at a manifesto for Latin America’s new left, with democracy and social justice as cornerstones.

This unbelievable gobshyte “hints” only at total treachery, revealing sharply the real character of such class collaborating “leftism”, capitulating openly to the bourgeoisie as crisis deepens.

Lenin must be spinning in his mausoleum. Don Hoskins

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Discussion:

Far from being anything to do with “the revolution” as the lightminded Trot dilettantes in the newly rebranded RCP middle-class sect desperately claim, the deluded and self-interested petty-bourgeois student “pro-democracy” protests in Bangladesh, driven by the antagonisms and jealousies arising from capitalism’s deepening slump crisis, have just given cover to reimposed Western-backed military rule with the aim of isolating the Chinese workers’ state and further encircling it with hostile forces. World socialist revolution will come, but only through defeat of such imperialist intrigues and impositions

The return to Washington-backed military rule in Bangladesh, behind the cover of an imposed “interim government” installed in agreement with the leaders of the student movement that brought down Sheikh Hasina’s bourgeois-nationalist government following weeks of protests, is yet another nail in the coffin of deranged Trotskyist subjectivism.

Far from being a “heroic revolutionary tide”, as the superficial prats writing for the lyingly named “Revolutionary Communist” Party (RCP) declare, the outcome of the student protests that led to her fall has played right into the hands of US imperialism’s agenda of limiting the Chinese workers’ state’s influence in the region, preventing closer trading ties between it and Bangladesh via the BRICS, and encircling China with hostile forces.

Hasina’s support for the Palestinian struggle is no doubt a factor too. In June, she sent letters of approval and gratitude to the leaders of the four Western countries (including Ireland) that had declared their recognition of Palestine as a state.

Strengthening ties between Bangladesh and China were highlighted in a meeting between Hasina and Xi Jinping in Beijing on 10th July (during a three-day visit that coincided with the protests) in which numerous cooperation agreements were signed.

The US Department of State’s spokesperson can declare as “laughable” and “absolutely false” Hasina’s reported implication that Washington was behind the coup because she had resisted pressure to allow them to establish an airbase on Saint Martin’s Island for all he likes, but what is truly laughable is the idea that it would not want to surround China with as many military garrisons as it could get away with, and buy off, destabilise or overthrow as many countries amenable to developing positive trade relations with China as possible.

Bourgeois analysts in India have also been pointing out signs of US interference, as even the British right-wing Daily Express reports:

CLAIMS that the US was behind a recent coup in Bangladesh must be investigated by the United Nations, leading experts said last night.[]

Following her flight to India, close associates reported that Hasina had been blackmailed by Washington DC over possession of Saint Martin island, which the US is alleged to want to possess as part of its “Indo-Pacific Strategy” to contain China.[]

Other sources close to the deposed PM claim that in the January 7 polls if she allowed a foreign country to build an airbase in Bangladesh territory.”

Friends said “she chose not to compromise on the island’s sovereignty, highlighting the island’s strategic importance and the potential geopolitical influence it represents in the region.”

Accepting the terms would, they added, have “allowed the USA to exert influence over the Bay of Bengal.”

The claims were heavily disputed by the US and have divided opinion among experts.

“There were many rumours circulating in Dhaka about US Government pressures on the Bangladesh government well before recent events,” said economist Prof Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University last night.

“The US government is relentless in destabilising governments it does not like.

“Though there is a lack of decisive evidence, there is circumstantial evidence that the US meddled in this and my call is for an open UN investigation.”

Prof Sachs compared events in Bangladesh to those in Pakistan, which saw former PM Imran Khan imprisoned after refusing to shift Pakistan’s ““aggressively neutral position” regarding Russia and Ukraine.

In both cases, he said, Donald Lu, Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia and Central Asia, held crucial meetings with diplomats in to sway policy

“On May 17, the same Assistant Secretary Liu who played a lead role in toppling PM Khan, visited Dhaka to discuss the US Indo-Pacific Strategy among other topics,“ said Prof Sachs.

“Days later, Sheikh Hasina reportedly summoned the leaders of the 14 parties of her alliance to make the startling claim that a “country of white-skinned people” was trying to bring her down.”

The claims seem to be supported by the fact that Bangladesh had delayed signing two key military agreements that the US had been seeking since 2022.

US bases in Bangladesh would also increase pressure on neighbouring Myanmar’s anti-Western military-nationalist regime where nonstop CIA-influenced provocations have been raging, including recent drone attacks on Rohingya communities by the separatist Arakan Army, forcing around 200 civilians to flee to Bangladesh, amongst other atrocities.

What can’t be ruled out, either, is the negative impact the insoluble capitalist crisis driving all this turmoil (and now hurtling towards devastating slump catastrophe, ecological collapse and world war) has already had on US imperialism’s ability to bribe and intimidate the Third World.

The devastating impact the crisis has already had on Bangladesh’s sweatshop-enslaved garment workers, and impoverished farming and fishing communities is such that the new right-wing coup regime may still be pushed towards China anyway (as happened in the Philippines under the former presidency of the fascist thug Rodrigo Duterte who wavered continuously between China and the US whilst waging a murderous war against the working class under the cover of “fighting drug gangs”, killing tens of thousands in the process).

Neither side of the imperialist-corrupted bourgeoisie – the flaky and highly compromised bourgeois-nationalists behind Hasina’s Awami League, nor the out-and-out imperialist stooges of the military-created Bangladesh National Party – are about to give up the class privileges they receive as a reward for facilitating monopoly-capitalist super-exploitation of its resources.

However, the fact that Hasina’s liberation-struggle-legacy wing of the bourgeoisie has been pushed by the crisis to make a stand against the United States (no matter how feeble, half-hearted, tentative or nervous) is the key issue, though no support whatsoever should be given to such unreliable nationalism.

Any genuinely revolutionary Marxist-Leninist analysis has to pivot around the need to see imperialist meddling come a cropper in Bangladesh (and everywhere else no matter at whose hands, or by what means) because such imperialist defeats will create the best conditions possible to win the urban and rural proletariat over to the socialist revolutionary perspectives necessary to bring monopoly-capitalist super-exploitation misery to a permanent end.

This understanding is a million miles away from the “revolutionary” posturing of the Trotskyist dilettantes in the RCP, who head the working class in the polar opposite direction.

In a piece of juvenile histrionics from 26th July, the RCP ‘bravely’ denounced “the murderous Hasina regime” and her “loyalist lackeys” (i.e. the national-liberation struggle fighters who benefit from a civil service quota system), and even went so far as to ‘courageously’ call for “an all-out general strike” and declare “down with capitalism”.

But all this came without even mentioning the need for a socialist workers’ state, let alone spelling out the revolutionary means in which this can only be achieved, and the firm proletarian dictatorship necessary to defend it.

Deepening capitalist crisis pressures, including rising inflation, falling living standards, and increasing competition for university graduate jobs, including government jobs, drove the middle-class student unrest lauded uncritically by the RCP, but no socialist content appeared in any of their demands either.

Instead, the student protesters initially focused on objecting simply to a High Court ruling stating that the abolition of the quota system for government jobs by Hasina’s government in 2018 (after a capitulation to student protests then following attempts at compromise) was deemed illegal – and they continued to protest despite Hasina’s promises of reform.

This “positive reverse discrimination” system reserved specific proportions of government jobs for national-liberation struggle fighters and their descendants, women, members of disadvantaged minority communities and people with disabilities, and was a reformist measure introduced by the Awami League in 1972 to reward fighters in the liberation war and redress social and economic imbalances.

Such a crude and ultimately inadequate measure is clearly open to favouritism and other individual and bureaucratic acts of abuses, and will inevitably lead to suspicion, resentment and jealousy from those left out, particularly as the capitalist crisis intensifies divisive class antagonisms and competitiveness within society.

However, the student movement did not even attempt to go beyond the bounds of individual self-interest to make even the mildest of reformist proposals to replace this system with some other poverty-alleviation reforms, let alone spell out the need for socialist revolution as the only path to real, sustainable development for all.

There was nothing “socialist” about any of the students’ demands, and their ‘nine-point demand’ published on 25th July after the police moved to suppress the protests even included a sinister demand for a ban on party-based student politics (which would have the effect of outlawing “left-wing” parties on campuses – where would that leave the RCP’s student societies???).

Opposition by pro-quota forces in defence of the High Court ruling (against Hasina’s capitulatory abolition) is driven by the same capitalist-crisis pressures, and at least has the merit of wanting to defend and advance the conditions of urban and rural workers despite its reformism.

The leader of the Awami League’s own student movement, the Bangladesh Chhatra League at least spells out the self-centred nature of the middle-class anti-quota students – although his own petty-bourgeois nationalist outlook blocks him off from drawing revolutionary perspectives, and leaves him with a futile, reformist non-class perspective, and illusions about “inclusive solutions”, “an independent judiciary” and “people’s votes” being achievable within capitalism.

He also points to data that appears to show that far from reducing inequalities in the civil service, the abolition of the quota system approved of by the so-called ‘Students Against Discrimination’ actually resulted a fall in the numbers of women and people from disadvantaged minorities it employs:

Speaking at a press briefing at the Dhaka University’s Madhur Canteen today (11 July), BCL [Bangladesh Chhatra League – ed.] President Saddam Hussain* [*No connection to Iraq – ed] said the quota reform movement was escalating to a point where it felt like it was a conflict between the students and the general population.

“The nationwide movement for the abolition or reform of the quota system needs reconsideration. Despite being fully aware of the sensitivity of the quota issue, it is essential to understand that the protesters are not isolated from society and the nation.”

He said a balance must be struck to ensure no hardships are created for the general public centring the quota reform demands.

At the briefing, the BCL urged the protesting students to return to classes so as not to disrupt the lives of the general public.

Reading out a written statement, Hussain said bringing a logical and inclusive solution, alongside reforms, in the quota system was the most urgent need of the moment.

He said there was no need for any arbitrariness, haste or sudden decisions such as calling a blockade to realise demands.

Addressing the agitators, he said if the “so-called agitation is carried out by holding the people hostage” without understanding the basic issues of the state structure, the agitators should also remember the judiciary was independent and the executive branch was established by the people’s vote.

The BCL also presented some information referring to the relevance of the quota system.

According to the ruling body, while the quota was in place, more than 24% women were employed in the 36th, 37th and 38th BCS [annual Bangladesh Civil Service examinations; the 38th BCS was held in 2017 – ed.].

Once the quota was abolished, for the 40th, 41st and 43rd BCS, women employment fell to below 22% with the lowest in the last one – 17.05%.

Even in nearly 50 districts, the representation of women in government jobs other than BCS was zero, they claimed.

The BCL president said not a single person was recommended to the BCS police from 24 districts of the country in the 40th BCS and from 18 districts in the 41st BCS.

The same was true for the socially disadvantaged minorities, with recommendations falling from 179 persons between the 31st to 38th BCS to 24 in the 39th BCS and only two in the 40th and 41st BCS.

“Apart from their own demands and thoughts about securing the future, they cannot avoid the suffering of the common people in any way. The matter is going to such a level that it is a general public versus students situation.”

The RCP’s answer is to uselessly bleat that “the working people of Bangladesh should take the running of the country into their own hands” (without spelling out how workers are supposed to do this) and treacherously condemn “the international community” (ie imperialism) for “not moving a muscle”!!:

It is the internationalist duty of students and workers everywhere to shine a light on the crimes of Hasina’s regime, and to break the complicit conspiracy of silence of the international media.

We express our utter condemnation of this wall of silence by the media. The billionaire-owned press see Hasina as a loyal representative of their class. She has turned Bangladesh into a paradise of cheap labour for their class to exploit. From the blood of the Bangladeshi working class, they coin enormous profits every year. They therefore shamefully close their eyes to the shedding of further blood to maintain their loyal stooge.

We likewise express our utter condemnation of the so-called ‘international community’. They have not moved a muscle. This ‘community’ is one of plunderers and exploiters. Hasina is one of their own.

These rotten capitalist regimes sense a subterranean mood of revolutionary anger among the workers and youth of their own countries. Nothing strikes greater fear into their hearts than the prospect of the brave example of Bangladesh’s students being replicated at home.

That is true of the regimes in the United States, in Britain, in India, and even in Pakistan.

The Hasina regime tries to blame the old enemy of Pakistan and ‘shadowy actors’ manipulating the protests. They lie! The rotten ruling cliques in all these countries – be they friends or rivals of Hasina and her gang – fear the example of Bangladesh’s students!

Presumably this sick sect of light-minded petty-bourgeois idealists would have applauded US imperialism if they had obliterated Hasina’s home with a cruise missile rather than leave it up to students to ransack it, or saved the students the effort of burning down AL party offices by destroying them with drone strikes!!!

What else could calls “intervention” from the international “community” of Western imperialists and their stooges mean in the era of imperialist warmongering crisis that has already seen “rogue” nation after “rogue” nation destabilised, massacred, bombed and blitzed – see Pakistan, Serbia, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Syria, for example, or the arming of Zionism’s genocidal onslaught against the Palestinians and the Ukrainian nazis against Russia – and worse to come, potentially with nuclear weapons???

Once a counter-revolutionary momentum had been built up behind the students, and police attempts to quell the increasingly violent protests in response were such that they could be presented as nothing but arbitrary repression (when in fact their were injuries and deaths on both sides), their nine-point demand was replaced with a ‘one-point’ demand that “Hasina must go”, with no indication about what was supposed to replace her.

The only possible outcome could be military intervention, as has happened repeatedly in Bangladesh in the past.

A constitutional measure requiring the president to appoint an allegedly “non-partisan” caretaker government to organise a three-month transition period between the end of a government’s term of office and new elections was introduced by the pro-military Bangladesh Nationalist Party in 1996.

This provided cover for a military coup in 2006 when a brutal state of emergency was imposed that lasted for more than a year.

In an attempt to contain the military, Hasina abolished the convention in 2011.

She warned of the dangers of reinstating the measure in the lead up to elections in January 2024 in an interview with Time magazine:

“Under the BNP, elections were held in Bangladesh several times and every time was fraudulent and manipulated,” she says. “Now they are demanding a caretaker. And now they demand for democracy. But when there was a military ruler in this country, and every night there was a curfew, and the people had no right to speak, no right to vote, and suffered a lot, they didn’t want a caretaker government then.”

The military have just toppled her anyway, despite not having the “constitutional” cover to hide behind – only this time the new cabinet is labelled an “interim” rather than a “caretaker” government.

This takeover was carried out with the collusion of the students’ leaders, as this bourgeois piece shows:

The army chief, Gen Waker-Uz-Zaman, said the military would form an interim government after Hasina’s departure. Later on Tuesday evening, a 13-strong student delegation with two University of Dhaka professors went to Shahabuddin’s residence to meet Zaman and other military leaders. After almost two hours of discussions, Nahid Islam, one of the student leaders, emerged to tell waiting reporters that there had been an agreement between all parties that Nobel laureate Prof Muhammad Yunus would be chief adviser to the interim government and that talks would continue.

Washington-connected Muhammad Yunus was made chief adviser despite his recent conviction for breaking labour laws by failing to provide welfare funds for the employees of the “nonprofit” Grameen Telecom firm he founded. This conviction was dropped as soon as he was appointed.

The fact that he was also under trial for embezzlement, and had up to 200 other charges related to profiteering against him was no barrier to his appointment either.

His appointment is likely to be welcomed by local and Western middle-classes as his “development model” of providing microcredit to marginalised women-led enterprises so they can compete “fairly” in “free markets” taps into all sorts of petty-bourgeois delusions about owning small businesses.

Yunus’s microcredit banks have been encouraged and financed by pro-imperialist institutions such the World Bank since the 1990s as a sinister means of countering (correct) beliefs in centralised socialist planning as the only way forwards.

He even received a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his efforts (a long-standing reward for imperialism’s henchmen and stooges - such as Andrei Sakharov, David Trimble, Barack Obama, Henry Kissinger, Lech Walesa, Aung San Suu Ky, and the Dalai Lama).

His alleged “economic and social development from below” has been a disaster for the poor, and has lead to increased indebtedness, debt-collector intimidation and suicides for many:

Like many people who were born and raised abroad in families that had roots in Bangladesh, I admired Yunus as a teenager, not because he won the 2006 Nobel Prize, but because he had realised a dream common to many Bangladeshis living abroad: helping fellow countrymen out of poverty.

So when I first came to Bangladesh in 2008 as a journalist, Grameen was the story I wanted to pursue. With the help of a friend, I took up a loan to buy a camera, and together we travelled to villages to meet people who had taken up loans with the bank. We met women who were heavily indebted. They were having difficulties paying back the 20 per cent interest rate on their loans.

Many of them were illiterate and couldn’t keep tabs on how much they owed to the bank. Some were crying, frightened of the weekly meetings they had to attend, when Grameen debt collectors would come to pick up the money due. I was told that one woman had committed suicide she was allegedly so terrified that she wouldn’t be able to pay back her debt.

It was intimidating to witness they come in groups, all men, all asking for their money back from a group of poor and frightened women. In fact, in the four years that I’ve been working in Bangladesh I have only ever met male debt collectors, never women. Grameen bank boasts a 96 per cent repayment rate, far surpassing the average repayment rates on loans in more developed countries.[]

Yunus says credit is a human right. But debt is a heavy burden to carry especially if you are a poor women living in Bangladesh. So when Hasina calls Yunus “a blood sucker of the poor”, it is not just a political statement to rally support, but a statement that many people in Bangladesh understand intimately.

Twenty-two million people, mostly women, are indebted to the 600 microcredit lenders in Bangladesh that operate using Yunus’s model. Overlapping debt is now a serious concern in Bangladesh, as many take out multiple loans to repay their initial loan and so they cycle deeper into debt.

It is true that thanks to these loans, many have lifted themselves out of poverty but for so many others the vicious cycle of debt and poverty continues.

And yet the RCP merely describes Yunus as a man with a “dubious reputation”, which must be the understatement of the year!!!

The rest of the student-approved right-wing cabinet is just as bad, stuffed full of capitalists, bankers (including two more from the Grameen Bank), lawyers and Western aid agency endorsed and awarded NGO and “human rights” activists and journalists, as well as two former ranking generals.

Two token students were given positions in very minor roles (media and sport).

Some “revolution”!!!

And there are no plans to call elections any time soon, as one of the student leaders approvingly states:

[Nahid] Islam said one of the caretaker government’s main priorities was to hold a free and fair election, after the last election was boycotted by the opposition, and also investigate suspected corruption in the previous government.

Islam said Bangladesh would need electoral and constitutional reforms before any election, so it was not clear when the next vote would be held. He declined to give a specific timeline.

So much for being an “interim” government!

The above mentioned boycott of the January election by the opposition BNP had the appearance of a stunt to allow the bourgeois media to denounce Hasina’s victory in the election as a “fraud” and declare her to be a “dictator”.

In the course of analysing the global collapse in faith in the “parliamentary democracy” fraud, EPSR 1645 (28-07-24) mistakenly took a bourgeois press article alleging that Hasina had stitched up the January elections at face value, and used a follow-up July piece to suggest that the student protests were a consequence of this.

On closer analysis, and as new developments emerged, the situation proved to be more complex.

All bourgeois elections are rigged in some way or other to ensure that the bourgeoisie maintains its dictatorial power over the working class (or to ensure the primacy of a particular wing of the bourgeoisie) even in the most “democratic” of republics – but the context of growing US-imperialist pressure against Hasina is crucial in understanding January’s events and what has happened since.

In the lead up to the January elections, the police broke up garment workers’ wage protests, and hundreds were sacked by their employers. But although these protests ran alongside student protests, there is no indication that they were in any way linked.

This is not to rule out the likely possibility that isolated workers or groups of workers got stampeded into joining the students’ calls for “Hasina to go”, but the overriding character of the protests was one of petty bourgeois self-interest.

It is not true (as the RCP allege above) that there was “a complicit conspiracy of silence of the international media” either – most reported the student protests as some sort of “Gen-Z youth revolution” against “a brutal dictatorship” (just as they do in Myanmar) whilst deploying all the usual distancing techniques to give their reporting of unverified claims a veneer of objectivity (such as reporting quotes from anonymous “activists” or “analysts”, and using passive phrases like “widely documented as”, “it was seen by many as” or “were killed”).

The bourgeois media also gives the impression that the security forces were responsible for all of the 600 or so deaths that occurred during the protests, by ignoring or playing down reports that the opposition had responsibility for many them, with at least 44 police officers killed and 11 other state officials according to a police report (this has echoes of the 1989 Tiananmen “massacre” lies).

They also made little of reports that BNP supporters and others from the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh may have been involved in stirring up violent anti-AL and anti-Hindu hostilities.

The anti-communist BNP was a creation of its leader Khaleda Zia’s late husband, the military dictator Ziaur Rahman. He took power in 1977 after crushing a short-lived leftist junior officer’s coup against a previous US-approved military coup leader Khondaker Mostaq Ahmad.

This series of coups and counter-coups followed the brutal assassination of Sheikh Mujibar (Mujib) Rahman. Mujib was Hasina’s father. He led Bangladesh’s independence movement and became its first president in 1971. He was brutally assassinated in a military coup in 1975, along with his wife, three sons, two daughters-in-law and about 20 other relatives and supporters.

(The burning of Mujib’s memorial museum during the student protests, attempts to topple his statue, and attacks on AL supporters commemorating the anniversary of his assassination on 15th August are further indications of the reactionary atmosphere the student protests have stirred up, and the class sentiment driving them.)

The origins of the current upheavals lie in the vicious 1947 Partition of India when Louis Mountbatten (mandated by Clement Attlee’s pro-imperialist Labour government) hastily scuttled Britain’s ‘Raj’ colonial occupation with the cynical and vengeful aim of redirecting growing unrest into communal conflicts; keeping the Indian sub-continent in a state of permanent division and sectarian conflict by establishing a predominantly Muslim Pakistan and a Hindu majority India; and limiting the Soviet Union’s influence in the region.

East Bengal was placed under the control of Pakistan solely on religious grounds, dismissing the fact that the Bengalis had a distinct language, culture, and historical development from ‘West’ Pakistan, and was separated by 1,000 miles of Indian territory.

The Bengalis’ national aspirations grew in response to forced Islamisation by Pakistan, attempts to impose Urdu as the state language, gross economic discrimination, the brutal suppression of Bengali-language and pro-autonomy civil disobedience movements, and persecution of Bengali nationalists.

The Awami League emerged to lead the movement, and under Mujib’s leadership eventually transformed it into a revolutionary national-liberation struggle that won power in December 1971 (with India’s decisive military support) after Pakistan, working with the US president Richard Nixon, launched a genocidal war in March (“Operation Searchlight”) against the Bengalis, slaughtering up to 3 million people according to Bangladesh.

Although the US backed Pakistan during the independence war, Mujib appears to have been its first choice to lead Bangladesh after independence because his illusions in Western-style parliamentary “democracy” were seen as useful in heading off more pro-Soviet sentiments developing within the AL and the broader national-liberation movement.

As president, he established a “democratic-socialist” orientated bourgeois-nationalist government that enshrined socialism and secularism in the state constitution, took Bangladesh into the international Non-Aligned Movement, backed the Palestinians, and sent army medical units to Pan-Arab nationalist Gamal Nasser’s Egypt during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.

The AL implemented numerous state-capitalist nationalisation measures and established Bangladesh’s national oil and gas company.

Mujib was assassinated in 1975 within months of forming BaKSAL, a popular-front party of the Awami League, the revisionist Communist Party of Bangladesh and other “leftist” parties, and dissolving all other political parties.

Once in power, Ziaur Rahman’s military dictatorship gave Mujib’s assassins diplomatic jobs, and started to roll back the gains of the national-liberation revolution – by privatising state industries, decentralisation, and dropping land reform plans aimed at encouraging and strenghening agrarian cooperative societies.

Zia established the BNP to represent military interests after he won the presidential election in 1978.

Nationalist officers who had fought in the independence war became discontent as Zia promoted Pakistan-returned officers over liberation-struggle officers, and appointed a prime minister who had collaborated with the Pakistani army to oppose Bangladeshi’s independence.

Zia brutally suppressed those within the army who opposed him, which exacerbated the antagonisms. He was assassinated by a group of nationalist army officers in 1981 who also held Zia responsible for Bangladesh’s economic malaise. This rebellion was also suppressed.

There was a long period of direct brutal military rule until Zia’s daughter, Khalida, who had taken over leadership of the BNP, became president in 1991 following.

The BNP then sought to airbrush Mujib’s leadership of the independence struggle from history and elevate Zia as some sort of ‘founding father’.

This extended period of reaction, either under military rule or the BNP, ended in 1996 when Hasina’s AL came to power on the back of mass unrest.

The AL lost the 2001 election despite winning the popular vote. A further period of BNP or military reaction followed and lasted until 2008, when Hasina was returned again. She remained in office until she was toppled last month.

Jamaat-e-Islami, meanwhile, had played a reactionary role in opposing Bangladeshi independence, including their active participation in Pakistan’s the “Operation Searchlight” genocide in 1971.

Their rehabilitation was supported by the BNP, and came after Islam was made a state religion in 1988 by a later military presidency as part of a divide-and-rule strategy, which was followed by vicious acts of scapegoating anti-Hindu hatred in the the early 1990s, including riots and pogroms.

These outrages against Hindus were revived in 2013 when JeI supporters attacked hundreds of Hindu homes and scores of temples following the convictions of a number of its leaders, as well as two from the BNP, for independence-era collaboration and war crimes in a tribunal established by the AL.

Such Islamism can and has sometimes played a useful role for imperialism as in the well known backing of the feudal and backward anti-communist Mujahadeen in 1980s Afghanistan (long since “blown back” as a new problem for imperialism), and in Iran initially when it was used as a means of heading off any prospect for the spontaneous anti-Shah street revolt from developing into communism in 1979 – the West judging the “anti-Great Satan” posturing of the Ayatollahs to be annoying but safer (see EPSR Books Vol 2 Reestablish Bolshevism or issue 1079 06-03-01).

Fears of its potential to take a turn in a more overtly anti-imperialist direction as the deepening capitalist crisis sharpens international class divisions (e.g. revolt in Iraq and Afghanistan, the rise in anti-Western jihadism, and the Gaza struggle now being repressed by outright genocide) may also account for Washington’s hesitancies in how it responded to Hasina’s increased anti-US rhetoric.

Hindus now have every reason to be fearful – despite claims that India has exacerbated those fears by spreading disinformation (which cannot be ruled out given the violent anti-muslim hostilities stirred up in India by Narenda Modi’s now fascist use of Hindu nationalism); or claims that the recent targets were Hindu AL supporters but not Hindus in general (as suggested by Western-funded agencies advocating for Bangladesh to develop closer ties with CIA-backed militias in Myanmar – as if extra-judicial attacks on AL supporters are therefore legitimate - and how would they know anyway??!!):

Ever since former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned and fled to India, her supporters and associates have faced retaliatory attacks by mobs who have been met by little, if any, resistance from authorities. Members of the country’s Hindu minority feel the most vulnerable because they have traditionally backed the Awami League — seen as a secular party in the Muslim-majority nation — and because of a history of violence against them during previous upheavals.

In the week since Hasina was ousted on Aug 5, there have been at least 200 attacks against Hindus and other religious minorities across 52 districts, according to the Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council, a minority rights group that has been tracking incidents.

But experts caution it is hard to establish the extent of and motivations for the violence in this South Asian country of 170 million.

“There may be an element of minorities, particularly Hindus, being targeted due to their faith. But many Hindus had links to the Awami League, because historically it has been the party that protected minorities, so they may have been targeted for their political affiliations,” said Thomas Kean, a senior consultant on Bangladesh and Myanmar at the Crisis Group. []

The interim government put in place after Hasina’s ouster has condemned the attacks as “heinous” and said it was working with community leaders to ensure Hindus’ safety.

Hindus, who make up 8% of the population and are the largest minority group, “are shivering,” said Kajal Debnath, a vice president of the Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council. “They are closing their doors, they are not opening it without confirming who is knocking. Everybody (in the Hindu minority)… from the Dhaka capital to the remote villages are very scared.”

For many, the violence has evoked painful memories of Bangladesh’s 1971 war of independence against Pakistan during which Hindus were targeted. Hindus were also attacked during the rise of Islamic groups in the 1990s, which Hasina stamped out.

Hindus have held large protests in the past week drawing thousands, demanding protection and condemning the recent spate of attacks.

Munni Ghosh, a Hindu housewife in Dhaka, said that attacks have grown since Hasina fled. “The reason (is) because she used to support us,” she said.

According to the minority groups organization, the attacks have included vandalizing and looting of Hindu homes and businesses. A few temples have been damaged. But details remain scarce, and police — whose members were also killed during the recent violence — went on strike last week.

Some analysts say many of the attacks against Hindus are politically driven and reflect resentment against Hasina’s party.

Hindus have suffered, but most attacks have been “politically motivated because the Awami League has been targeted,” said Zillur Rahman, executive director of the Dhaka-based Center for Governance Studies.

One possible reason for the attacks on Hindus not escalating to all-out rampaging pogrom outrages today (as suggested in the piece) is because of fears of stirring up too much unrest against the military’s new interim government.

This would also expose the pretences about “restoring democracy and stability” and “protecting minorities” uses to justify toppling Hasina.

Such “concerns” are barely credible given that the newly appointed advisor for religious affairs is a muslim cleric whose party, Hefazat-e-Islami, wants to turn Bangladesh into an Islamic state governed by sharia law and has been accused of persecuting Hindus in the past.

Bourgeois reports on growing antagonisms between Hasina and US imperialism disprove the RCP’s simplistic characterisation of her as “loyal stooge”.

The Washington Post, for example, describes splits within the US administration prior to the January elections over how to deal with Hasina’s growing unreliability, and pressure it had received from India to scale down their own pressure on her (for its own local imperialist reasons):

In the months leading up to the January election, divisions emerged within the U.S. government over how to handle Bangladesh. Some in the U.S. State Department, including then-Ambassador Peter Haas and other embassy officials, argued for a tougher stance against Hasina, particularly since President Joe Biden had campaigned on a foreign policy plank of restoring democracy, people familiar with the matter said. Haas, who has since retired, declined to comment.

Other U.S. officials felt there was little to be gained from further alienating Hasina and risking the safety of U.S. diplomats, including Haas, who had received threats from Hasina’s followers.

Some White House officials also considered the downside of antagonizing India, which made a series of appeals to the U.S. that it moderate its pressure on Hasina, including when Indian Minister of External Affairs S. Jaishankar and Defense Minister Rajnath Singh met with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in November in New Delhi, according to the people familiar with the matter. Indian national security adviser Ajit Doval also played a key role in presenting the Indian case during a visit to Washington that autumn, one of those people said.[]

For India, the dramatic developments in Bangladesh have turned a spotlight on its decade-long, all-in bet on Hasina, even as she grew autocratic and unpopular. For the United States, the episode has highlighted a growing dilemma: While India is seen by the Biden administration as a crucial partner in countering China, India itself is increasingly viewed by its smaller neighbors in South Asia as a meddling, aggressively nationalist power under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Indian regional imperialism is also in a bind.

It has been blocking Bangladesh’s attempts to improve its economy by joining the BRICS trading alliance because it wants to undermine China’s growing global influence, but also it wanted Hasina to remain in power out of fear of growing destabilisation if she was toppled, in part due to the potential for unrest if the hated BNP is returned to power, but also out of fear of increased Islamist influence:

Aside from the United States, India had simultaneously warned other Western governments about the dangers of the opposition Bangladeshi Nationalist Party (BNP) returning to power. “It was intense,” recalled an official from a Western country allied with the United States. “They started briefing Western governments that Bangladesh could become the next Afghanistan, that the BNP could lead to instability, violence and terror.”

Indian officials say they have reason to feel burned by the Bangladeshi opposition. During the rule of Hasina’s rivals, the BNP, in the mid-2000s, militants smuggled weapons to attack northeast India and trained in camps inside Bangladesh with the help of Pakistani intelligence, Indian officials say. Indian and U.S. officials say this experience with BNP rule explained why India had been so adamant on keeping Hasina in power for 15 years.

In recent days, Indian officials have warned that the Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamist political party, could gain power, and Indian media have reported on a spike in attacks on Bangladesh’s Hindu minority population in the days since Hasina was deposed.

Hasina has been seen by US imperialism as increasingly unreliable at least as far back as 2021, as shown in this piece from the Diplomat:

Several Indian media outlets, including the Economic Times, the Print, and NDTV, have printed what is purportedly a speech that Bangladesh’s former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina planned to make - but which she was unable to deliver before hastily leaving the country on August 5.

It does not come as a surprise that in the undelivered speech, which Hasina recently discussed with her close associates in India, she made significant accusations against the United States, claiming that it orchestrated the plan to remove her from power.

“I resigned so that I did not have to see the procession of dead bodies. They wanted to come to power over the dead bodies of students, but I did not allow it. I resigned from [the] premiership,” Hasina was quoted as saying.

“I could have remained in power if I had surrendered the sovereignty of Saint Martin Island and allowed America to hold sway over the Bay of Bengal. I beseech to the people of my land, please do not be manipulated by radicals,” Hasina was reportedly set to say in her undelivered speech.

Her son, Sajeeb Wazed Joy, denied the accuracy of the Indian media reports, saying on X (formerly Twitter): “The recent resignation statement attributed to my mother published in a newspaper is completely false and fabricated.”

However, Joy himself has pointed the finger at unidentified foreign forces for forcing his mother from office, telling media that the protests were stoked “from beyond Bangladesh.” He did not provide evidence for the claim or specify which country he believed had been involved.

Notably, Hasina has long blamed the United States for attempting to unseat her. In April last year, while speaking in the Bangladesh Parliament, she went so far as to say, “The U.S. can overthrow the government in any country, particularly Muslim countries.”

She was speaking at a time when then-Foreign Minister of Bangladesh Dr. AK Abdul Momen was visiting Washington, D.C., which speaks volumes about the kind of relationship Hasina maintained with Washington in recent years.

Each time the United States opposed her government on any front, Hasina interpreted it as a sign of an attempt to oust her from power.

Even earlier, in November 2023, tensions between Bangladesh and the United States escalated, drawing international attention.

At that time, Hasina and the U.S. President Joe Biden were involved in a public dispute following large-scale protests in Bangladesh.

Opposition parties, clearly dissatisfied with the status quo, demanded Hasina’s resignation and the formation of a caretaker government to ensure fair elections in January. Hasina’s refusal to step down, naturally, led to a standoff.

The U.S. ambassador in Dhaka later met with Bangladesh’s chief election commissioner to emphasize the importance of transparent elections and to urge dialogue among all political parties.

Later, during a press conference, Hasina likened the ambassador’s call for dialogue with the opposition to a hypothetical scenario where Biden would sit down for talks with his political rival, former President Donald Trump.

But the starting point of the tension between Bangladesh and the United States – which now seems to have reached its peak – came even earlier, in 2021, when the world was still grappling with the coronavirus pandemic.

On December 10, 2021, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) and several of its former officials. The sanctions were a response to allegations of serious human rights abuses committed by the RAB, a specialized anti-crime and anti-terrorism unit in Bangladesh. The United States accused the unit of involvement in extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and other forms of violence.

This move did not go down well with Hasina’s government, which vehemently criticized the sanctions as interference in its internal affairs and unjustly targeted its security forces.

Just under two years later, in September 2023, the U.S. State Department warned that it would “impose visa restrictions on Bangladeshi individuals responsible for, or complicit in, undermining the democratic election process in Bangladesh,” including “members of law enforcement, the ruling party, and the political opposition.”

Explaining the visa restrictions, the State Department said, “The United States is committed to supporting free and fair elections in Bangladesh that are carried out in a peaceful manner.”

Again, Hasina hit back, denying there were any issues of concern with Bangladesh’s election process and questions why the United States would “suddenly want to impose visa restrictions.”

On May 21 of this year, the U.S. State Department enacted visa restrictions on former Bangladesh army chief Gen. (Retd) Aziz Ahmed, accusing him of “involvement in significant corruption” and “undermining… Bangladesh’s democratic institutions.” He became the first Bangladeshi national to be publicly sanctioned in this manner by the U.S. administration.[]

The conversation surrounding Saint Martin’s Island, located in the northeastern Bay of Bengal, is also nothing new.

In a press conference at Ganabhaban in January last year, Hasina claimed that her party, the Awami League, did not seek to come to power by selling any national resources. In contrast, she alleged that the opposition BNP wanted to gain power by promising to sell Saint Martin’s Island.

“The BNP came to power in 2001 by giving an undertaking to sell gas. Now they want to sell the country. They want to come to power by selling Saint Martin’s Island,” Hasina said.[]

U.S. rivals have taken careful note of the accusations emanating from Bangladesh. On December 15, 2023, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova predicted at a press briefing that if Sheikh Hasina were to come to power in the upcoming election, the United States would use all its resources to overthrow her government.

“Key industries may come under attack, as well as a number of officials who will be accused without evidence of obstructing the democratic will of citizens in the upcoming parliamentary elections on January 7, 2024,” Zakharova said.

The U.S. State Department refrained from responding to Russia’s allegations at the time, having previously denied any interference in Bangladesh’s internal affairs on several occasions.

Bangladesh’s then-Foreign Minister Momen also dismissed the possibility of an Arab Spring-like situation in Bangladesh, denouncing the remarks made by Zakharova.

“‘Friendship to all, malice to none’ is the foundation of the foreign policy of Bangladesh,” said Momen. “It is not our headache whoever says what. We don’t want to be dragged into the tension among superpowers. We want to go ahead with our balanced foreign policy.”

“I don’t really think there is such an opportunity,” Momen added.

This idea that Bangladesh can just keep its head down as capitalism’s inevitable economic slump crisis drags the world unstoppably into renewed inter-imperialist world-war barbarism is part of the problem.

The Russian spokeswoman correctly warned Hasina of potential US imperialist provocations after the elections (Russia has been helping Bangladesh develop nuclear power, and in October 2023 supplied the Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant with its first batch of uranium, and entered in an agreement on the management of spent fuel - another reason for US hostilities).

However, the analogy with the 2011 Arab Spring is false and plays into the hands of Trotskyist “rank-and-file” phony revolutionism.

The stunning Egyptian and Tunisian upheavals were earth-shattering spontaneous eruptions driven by the 2008-9 global financial collapse, and spread like wildfire across the Middle East and north Africa, including Yemen out of which the anti-Zionist Houthis rose to the forefront of regional anti-imperialist struggle in 2014.

It was only headed off by the confusion caused by deliberately provoked violent so-called “democracy” stunts, disruptions, and war devastations in Libya first, and then Syria, (bogusly dressed up as “more of the Arab Spring”) with the foul complicity of the Trots who reinforced the CIA’s muddying-of-the-water propaganda with their own bilious denunciations against easily scapegoated Muammar Gaddafi and later Bashar Al-Assad.

It took the slaughter of thousands of Muslim Brotherhood supporters; the imposition the General Fattah Al-Sisi’s military coup; brutal mass imprisonments and more killings of the military’s opposition; and the highly suspicious death in custody of the elected Islamic president Mohamed Morsi whilst on trial, to suppress the Arab Spring itself in Egypt (temporarily – and threatening to reignite the region again at any moment over Zionism’s genocidal assaults on the Palestinians and rising economic disaster at home).

Despite the “restoring democracy” smokescreen, Bangladesh’s new government has more in common with this counter-revolutionary restoration of Egypt’s generals than the Arab Spring (not that Hasina has anything to do with revolution either).

This reinstatement of military rule in Bangladesh has parallels with recent events in Indonesia where corrupt electoral stitch-ups between the out-going alleged “progressive Obama-lite new broom” president Joko (Jokowi) Widodo and military thowbacks from the long Suharto military dictatorship period from 1965 to 1998 have recently installed the fascist killer Prabowo Subianto into power.

As can be seen from reading between the lines in this bourgeois press piece below, the process was completely corrupt, and was brought about using bourgeois parliamentary “democracy” mechanisms:

After two failed attempts, Prabowo Subianto has finally clawed his way into Indonesia’s ultimate seat of power.

The ex-military general, accused of rights abuses and war crimes during the dark days of the Suharto regime, has triumphed in a modern-day democratic vote.

Gone were the inflammatory, nationalist comments of his previous presidential runs; in the 2024 election he sold himself as a cute grandpa on TikTok, flashing heart signs and doddering around with a viral dance.

It worked for younger voters - a generation poorly informed of the country’s past under a military dictatorship.

Some on voting day even told the BBC they wanted a strongman in office - someone to carry on the policies of the widely adored outgoing President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo.

But others fear that the return of a military general - someone who was the son-in-law of Dictator Suharto - spells a slide back into dark days.[]

The 72-year-old has a shocking human rights record according to both local and international rights observers.

He is most notorious for allegations he commanded a unit which abducted and tortured several democracy activists during the dying days of the Suharto regime in the late 1990s. Of the 23, some survived, one died and 13 remain missing.

He was fired from the army following this and went into self-exile in Jordan in the 2000s.

But he returned to Indonesia a few years later, building up his wealth in palm oil and mining before making the jump to politics.

It was a space he felt entitled to, some might say. Prabowo is a political blue blood, born into an elite family embedded in Indonesian politics.

His father was a renowned economist who held several trade and finance ministerships, and his grandfather formed the first state-owned bank in the country.

During his childhood he and his family lived in exile in Switzerland and England, after his father was accused of involvement with separatist groups in Sumatra.

When he returned to Indonesia in 1970, he enlisted in the military where he quickly rose up the ranks.

In the 1980s, he did several tours with a special forces unit fighting separatists in East Timor, now the country of Timor-Leste. Witnesses accuse him of committing atrocities both there and in Papua.

During this period he also moved into Suharto’s inner sanctum, marrying in 1983 one of the former dictator’s daughters, Siti Hediati Hariyadi. Their marriage lasted 15 years, ending around the same time of the regime’s collapse.

Prabowo at this time was commander of a special forces unit accused of the activists’ abductions. While he was sacked, charges were never brought against him.

He later admitted to the kidnapping of those who survived; but the families of the missing are still protesting for answers.

In the chaotic last days of Suharto, he also instigated race riots in the capital Jakarta, directing anger at the Chinese ethnic minority, critics say. He has always denied these allegations.

After Suharto’s fall, he fled to Jordan, keeping a low profile as Indonesia pulled itself into a democratic age in the new millennium.

The ex-military figure was banned from entering the US and Australia at this point, on a blacklist for his human rights record. That ban was lifted only in recent years.

Prabowo made his comeback shortly before the 2004 elections, starting his own party and then dealing with coalitions to get his foot on the ladder.

In 2014 and 2019, he went head-to-head against his bitter enemy Jokowi in fierce presidential races. He lost both times.

But after violent protests from his supporters in the wake of his loss in 2019 - 10 people died in riots - Jokowi made a deal, bringing him into his government and installing him as defence minister.

Prabowo has been pressed several times on his dark past. He denies most of the accusations and when he does admit to a crime - like the abductions - he falls back on the classic soldier defence: that he was only taking orders.

“It was my superiors who told me what to do,” he said during one presidential debate in 2014.

His rebranding for the 2024 vote was one part of the winning strategy.

But most crucially he received the backing of his former enemy, Jokowi, when the outgoing leader put his son on Prabowo’s ticket.

Indonesia’s Constitutional Court had to amend electoral rules in allowing the 36-year-old Gibran Rakabuming Raka to be the vice-presidential running mate for Prabowo. Previously, only those aged over 40 were eligible. Jokowi’s brother-in-law is the Chief Justice on the court and cast the deciding vote.

After getting away with manipulating bourgeois “democratic” processes to ensure that his eldest son was able to stand for election as Prabowo’s vice-president, Jokowi and Prabowo’s Gerinda party have been attempting to do the same for his youngest son, by trying to ease him into a deputy governor position in Central Java, only to be forced to to back down by mass protests (for now).

This gross in-your-face nepotism has echoes in the Suharto family dynasty:

President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo and his supporting political parties might have thought that they could do just about anything and get away with it. But clearly, they couldn’t.

In what could be the most tumultuous week for the country in the past five years, a nationwide protest erupted on Thursday as the House of Representatives was attempting to pass an amendment to the Regional Elections Law that would betray the very principle of the rule of law.

The political parties, almost all of which have aligned with the Onward Indonesia Coalition (KIM) that supports president-elect Prabowo Subianto, had pushed for the revision that would strengthen their dominance in the November regional elections and allow President Jokowi’s youngest son Kaesang Pangarep to contest a gubernatorial election.

They sought to overturn two Constitutional Court rulings that were issued to prevent political cartel practices by the KIM. The coalition, for one, had joined forces to block opposing tickets.

The KIM had also sought to nominate 29-year-old Kaesang as a deputy gubernatorial candidate in Central Java. The Constitutional Court ruling upheld the Regional Elections Law provision that sets the age limit for candidates at 30 years old.

The House’s amendment move resulted in civil disobedience. People from all walks of life, from students to professionals, organized themselves within hours and took to the streets to fight back against the ruling elites’ contempt of the court’s rulings, which are final and binding.

It was the largest wave of protests that the country has seen since the demonstrations against the new Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) Law in 2019.

In addition to venting their anger over the Regional Elections Law revision, on Thursday people also poured their deep-seated resentment of Jokowi, who has done everything within his power to solidify his political dynasty.

Many were caught off guard when Jokowi’s eldest son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka , who had previously been considered ineligible to run in the presidential election, became Prabowo’s running mate, and won the race.

It might have worsened on Thursday had Jokowi and his allies in the House insisted on betraying the people by bending the law to serve their own interests.

In a direct response to the protests, Gerindra, which was in charge of the House plenary session to pass the law revision in the absence of many politicians, including those from the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), withdrew the law revision.

Gerindra later also dropped its nomination of Kaesang and replaced him with Taj Yasin Maimoen of the United Development Party, the former deputy governor.

In an about-face, the House and the government said they would abide by the court’s rulings. We hope that they will keep their word.

There are further parallels with Bangladesh because the main opposition to Jokowi’s nepotistic endorsement of Prabowo as president, the bourgeois-nationalist PDI-P, is led by Megawati Sukarnoputri.

She is the daughter of Sukarno, the leader of the anti-imperialist struggle which overthrew Dutch imperialism’s 350 year-long rule in 1945. He went on to be Indonesia’s president until he was ousted in 1965 by a CIA/MI6-orchestrated military coup and slaughter of up to 2 million communists and their sympathisers.

Astonishingly, Jokowi was still in the PDI-P in April, but he was finally expelled for backing Prabowo. In return he replaced PDI-P ministers in the coalition cabinet with Prabowo loyalists.

This only exposes the limitations of the PDI-P’s opportunist nationalism and reformism for entering into a “grand coalition” stuffed full of military-linked figures in the first place, including members of Golkar, the party formed by the anti-communist butcher Suharto, and Gerinda.

Such rotten comprises with the military have been characteristic of the PDI-P since the “Reformasi” mass risings that brought down General Suharto’s blood-thirsty fascist dictatorship in 1998 – triggered by the great wave of currency collapses that swept across the region in the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which itself was a prelude to the world capitalist crisis of 2008-9.

At that time, after initial attempts to install a Suharto loyalist as president failed, the Washington-friendly blind Islamic mystic Abdurrahman Wahid (Gus Dur) was parachuted into the leadership position in 1999 (again, shades of Iran in 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini was parachuted in from France to head off communism after the spontaneous overthrow of the Shah).

Despite making serious moves restore diplomatic relations with “Israel” (which is deeply hated by Indonesia’s large muslim-majority population), he proved to be too unreliable when he attempted to reform the military; lift bans on Chinese scripts and books; suggested that Marxism should be allowed to be studied in universities; and apologised for the role his Islamic organisation, the Nahdlatul Ulama, played in the 1965 massacre.

He did not stay long. He was deposed in 2001 after 40,000 troops were stationed in Jakarta, and tanks placed with their turrets facing the presidential palace to prevent a meeting of the governing assembly from taking place.

He was replaced by Megawati (2002-2004) who gave military figures positions in her cabinet and space where they were able to rebuild up their influence, including the former general Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono who replaced her as president in the 2004 elections.

Similar deluded notions that the military can be “won over” or “contained” in Bangladesh led Hasina to appoint as army chief the general who, a few weeks later, toppled her:

Bangladesh has no regional adversary, yet it has maintained a relatively large military with more than 200,000 personnel. Since external defense is not a major responsibility, the military has long pursued political machinations. When not ruling directly, it has sought to wield political power through pliant civilian-led governments.

Hasina kept the military and Islamist militancy in check, until the army chief used the student-led uprising to engineer her ouster by letting mob violence go beyond the control of police and paramilitary forces. Hasina had appointed Zaman as the army chief just weeks before her downfall, taking comfort in the fact that the general was married to her cousin.

The deluded revisionist-influenced faith of Bangladesh’s and Indonesia’s nationalists in their ability to place the capitalist-state military under “democratic” control fails to learn the lessons of the 1965 mass slaughter in Indonesia, Bangladesh’s own history of repeated savage coups, the bloody consequences of Chile’s Allende-ism in 1973, the wholesale killing of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood supporters in 2013 and other similar disasters worldwide that led to the massacres of millions of communists and anti-imperialists by CIA-backed fascist generals as they seized power on behalf of monopoly-capitalist interests.

Such popular-front illusions have always led the working class into disaster, as the original Indonesian Communist Party, the PKI, did when it entered into a class-collaborative alliance with Sukarno’s nationalists in the ‘Guided Democracy’ popular front in 1957 and was massacred for its pains a few years later as mentioned.

There are echoes of that in the Communist Party of Bangladesh when it dissolved itself into Mujib’s BaKSAL “democratic socialist” party in 1975 only to see Mujib and his family promptly assassinated and the CPB outlawed soon after.

The roots of such anti-revolutionary idiocies lie in the theoretical confusions caused by Stalin’s revisionist retreat from a correct revolutionary perspective on world developments as the only means to defeat imperialist reaction, and was reflected in the poplular-front policy which was already in train in China in 1927, and Spain in 1936.

The consequent bureaucratic complacency, and slide into opportunist delusions which imply that real progress towards socialism can be made though such popular front confusion became the pattern ever since, most notably in Indonesia, and Chile’s Allende-ism [see EPSR 1644 for archive cuttings on popular front disasters].

The Trotskyist RCP’s demented anti-communism and petty bourgeois “perfect revolution” fantasies lead it to present the Bangladesh’s entire revolutionary national-liberation struggle period of 1971 to 1975 off as nothing but a disaster.

They even fail to see the irony in their denunciation of the CPB for mistakenly dissolving itself into BaKSAL, when they spent at least 30 years buried away inside the pro-imperialist Labour Party as Socialist Appeal, and for much longer before that in Militant.

They would likely have stayed and given Zionist-backed Keir Starmer a “left” cover had he not had them expelled in 2021.

Their rebranding earlier this year as the Revolutionary Communist Party, with much hammer-and-sickle red-flag waving and “Leninist” posturing, was just to cover up their crawl-arsing behind Labour/TUC opportunist class-collaborationism and reaction for so long.

Their ultra-“left” posturing over Bangladesh and its “youth” movement plays right into the hands capitalism’s divide-and-rule interests in Britain too, by creating splits and confusion within Bangladeshi and south Asian communities.

This can be seen in their intervention in the general election when they stood the bourgeois-media friendly Fiona Lali in a constituency with a large Bangladeshi population, thereby scuppering the chances of Helima Khan, a Workers’ Party of Britain candidate (of Bangladeshi origin), who has an admirable, and brave, personal history of standing up to and exposing Labour Party Zionism [see EPSR 1645].

Lali devoted weeks to stirring up British-Bangladeshi support for the students with frequent demagogic declarations on X/Twitter, and in speeches at “solidarity” rallies without even once warning of the potential for a military coup, let alone calling for imperialist defeat, and spelling out the need for a socialist revolution and proletarian dictatorship to end monopoly-imperialism’s crisis and slide to world war.

Now that the RCP stand exposed by the reactionary nature of the outcome, they are trying to cover their tracks by pinning the blame on the students for their “lack of clarity” (which the RCP has only compounded), and barmily pretending that the situation is now akin to something like the February 1917 Russian revolution’s dual power situation (“You couldn’t make it up” – except they did!!!).

Even now, they give dangerous credence to the idea that the military-installed interim government is legitimate by bravely declaring “No confidence in the Yunus government!” (just as they declare “No confidence in Starmer!” instead of calling for him and the entire Labour Party, along with the rest of capitalism, to be brought down), and disarmingly applauding the students for “forcing the military to the negotiating table”– as if the generals are somehow on the back foot:

Committees have been expanding across the country – especially, but not exclusively, among the students. In many places they have displaced the functions of the state.

The ruling class is suspended in midair. A kind of dual power exists.

But the revolution now faces new dangers – not only of conspiracies by the deposed Awami League, which continue, but of confusion as to the direction of travel.

It was clear last Monday that Hasina was forced to resign by others at the top of her regime. Right up until the last minute, she refused to go.

It was the pressure of the army generals that forced her out. The ruling class could see that they were clearly unable to maintain their rule by force alone. They had to give ground and sacrifice their figurehead.

With Hasina gone, the masses remained on the streets demanding that parliament be dissolved, which it was. The army was forced to the negotiating table.

The student coordinators were invited by the high command of the military to Bangabhaban (the presidential palace) on Tuesday to negotiate the composition of a transitional government. And shortly after midnight, they emerged with an agreement.

The main student coordinators agreed to lend their support to a new ‘interim government’ led by Dr. Muhammad Yunus.

Let us be clear: this was a grave error – we declare outright and immediately that we have absolutely no confidence in this government!

The students have shown immense courage. But there is a lack of clarity among the leadership about how to consolidate the revolution. The students achieved their ‘one-point programme’: i.e. that Hasina must go. But where next?

To the slaughterhouse if the lightminded RCP Trots have anything to do with it!

No doubt they will now present any workers’ protests that emerge out of nervousness over where this new coup regime is heading as “a step forwards in the revolution”.

What utter garbage!

This coup is all about suppressing “the revolution” – but world socialist revolution will come as a result of the lessons learnt by the Third World from such nonstop fascist-imperialist impositions, and from the revival of Leninism.

Study and build revolutionary Leninism. Phil Waincliffe

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