Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. V.I.Lenin
Economic and Philosophic Science Review
Subscriptions (£25 p.a.) and circulation P&P Bulletin Publications PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL [Post Office Registered.]  www.epsr.org  Contact@epsr.org.uk
No 1537 July 13th 2018                                                                                                              40p Fortnightly

Catastrophic failure of the capitalist world system, not the bluster and crudeness of Donald Trump, should be the focus of the protestors and demonstrators during his visit to London.

Of course, Trump’s aggressive ramping up of chauvinism and xenophobia, and infantile tantrums blaming “others” for America’s problems, are outright Nazism. 

He and his White House are fascist to the core and the focal point of an international drive to war which US imperialism is imposing as its only escape from the intractable and unsolvable breakdown of the private profit system.

It hopes to use its overwhelming might and power to bully the whole world into paying for the crisis, using its finance and trade power to impose its demands, and ruthlessly destroying country after country (by direct intervention or proxy).

Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria and now Yemen have already been reduced to rubble and unbelievable human suffering. 

The aim is to suppress international revolt and “warn” the rest of the world of the consequences if they don’t comply with US demands. 

That means everyone from the smallest Third World “rogue state” to the great monopoly rivals and trade competitors, like China and the German dominated European Union bloc. 

But to blame Trump as such for this is to miss both the real cause of the aggression and big power bullying, and to fool everyone about the solution.

Getting rid of Trump as the fake-“lefts” demand in shallow slogans like “Dump the Trump” will change nothing, even if they could explain how that might actually be done.

Worse still it fools the working class that fascism is something different which can “be stopped”.

The only way to “stop fascism” is to stop capitalism itself, through its class war defeat and total overthrow to establish working class power and build socialism.

It is the nature of capitalism itself which is fascist as most of the Third World, held down by endless tyrannical exploitation, already knows.

In the privileged rich countries it hides behind the pretence of “democracy and the rule of law” - a far more comfortable way to rule when possible in economic “boom” times.

Hoodwinking the masses that they “have a say”, is the greatest trick ever devised by the bourgeoisie, far more secure than outright repression.
 
But when inevitable crisis hits, the ruling class must increasingly shows its true face, using as much crude repression, censorship and violence as needed to impose the Slump burdens on the working class.

It will run all the way to military coup and brutal crackdown using torture, civilian butchery, concentration camps and death squad “disappearance” just as in Allende’s Chile in 1973, Indonesia in 1965 or Egypt in 2103 and of course under Hitler’s (elected) Nazism. 

Universal breakdown into vicious scapegoating, chauvinism and jingoistic hatred is being encouraged everywhere from Brexit to the rise of neo-Nazism in Germany, Holland, Austria, East Europe and Italy.

This has been seen before, in the run up to the 1914-18 Great War and its even more destructive and brutal second phase in 1939-45 both driven by the crisis breakdown of the capitalist system, saturated in “surplus capital” and overproduction, leading to Slump disaster (throughout the late 19th century first and then in the more obvious 1930s).

Only total war, to destroy the capital clogging the world production system and force rival powers to take the hit, “solved” things at a cost of tens of millions of lives (including the giant anti-Nazi Soviet sacrifices).

But such a solution could only be a temporary breathing space post-war, with the relentless accumulation of capital building up the surpluses all over again. Even by the 1960s the whole system was in trouble and it is now paralysed by the contradictions.
 
This greatest crisis of all has been stirring around for decades.  So too has the trade war and war “solution”.

The George W Bush White House and its New American Century war blitzing, torture and Guantánamo camp repression was not different in essence to Trump, whose crudeness is only an extension of the same belligerence and stupid hate bluster.

But its even more overt “America First” chauvinism, scapegoating vicious Nazism, trampling on democratic niceties and trade war bullying is needed because all that went before has failed. 

Far from pacifying the world again and re-establishing imperialist writ, the Bushite war path has stirred endless upheaval, “jihadism”, terrorist revolt, and outright revolutionary turmoil like the Arab Spring in Cairo.

And the economic crash has just worsened, erupting in the great global bank collapse of 2008, confirming all the warnings of revolutionary theory (see Karl Marx’s Capital) that unstoppable crisis collapse was the driving force of war and disintegration.

Its devastating impact came close to an “economic nuclear winter”.

Only demented, valueless QE dollar creation has held things together and even that “recovery” has meant devastation to millions of lives as austerity is imposed.

It will not last. Even bourgeois economists are clear that the dollar is stretched to its limit and its total failure a matter of time. When it goes, the world economic turmoil will be unprecedented and social turmoil too.
There is only one way out for mankind and that is the worldwide revolutionary struggle to end this entire outmoded, useless and historically bankrupt system of grotesque greed, ever greater inequality, and wasteful trampling across nature and the environment.

The obvious need is for a worldwide system of rational planned socialist cooperation serving human needs.

It can only be achieved by the overturn of capitalism by class war and the establishment of firmest workers control, suppressing the barbaric old bourgeois order, while a new society is built (and capitalism goes for good).

That demands the rebuilding of a Leninist party of scientific understanding and discipline to unite and educate the working class, and counter the endless brainwashing anti-communism which holds things back.

It will not be done by great swamp of fake-“lefts” and shallow single issue politics berating Trump for “racism” or “sexism” while condemning “terrorist” turmoil.

Neither the old Third International revisionism, still worshipping Stalin and ignoring the disastrous mistakes and crimes which eventually liquidated the triumph of the Soviet Union, nor the even worse Trotskyite anti-Soviet biliousness and sterility will do.

None make clear the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat; none want the great open polemical debate to rebuild scientific Marxism. Leninism is vital.

Letter: Fake-“left” fails to tackle grotesque CIA/Zionist propaganda on “left anti-semitism” - swallowing the nonsense that hostility to the Jewish freemasonry is caused by racism instead of its support for the unjustified colonial landtheft of “Israel”

The new Labour Party “code of conduct” proscribing any real criticism of international Zionism, and the Communist Party of Britain’s Morning Star outright censorship of discussion about the modern causes of “anti-semitism” – outrageously deemed anti-semitic itself (!!) - both underline how grovellingly treacherous “left” reformism and the worst revisionist “communist” remnants will become as the capitalist crisis deepens inexorably towards fascist breakdown.
The rest of the fake-“left” swamp of Trots and more ostensibly “Stalinist” revisionist “Marxists” are no better, effectively kowtowing to imperialist demonisation of any revolutionary support for the Palestinians and the Arab world around them and to the only possible solution to the stinking genocidal repression of this entire people, the defeat and revolutionary overturn of the “Israeli”/Jewish colonialist occupation of their country. 
Even the most posturingly “anti-Zionist” of these mountebanks refuse to say that the Jewish landtheft intruders have no “rights” at all to this territory, stolen over 70 years ago by gunpoint terror, massacres and butchering ethnic cleansing from the people living there for over one and a half millennia, and left to rot ever since as poverty stricken refugees in desperate exile camps, or under permanent terrorised oppression and concentration camp-like siege.
Their fanciful “one state solution” - to be gained, it is presumed, by “persuading” the Zionists to “move over a bit” to accommodate the Palestinians in a harmonious new “democracy” – which is never going to happen without all-out revolutionary war by the Arab world to overturn them - must still leave the Jewish occupiers with “right” to remain and to keep “some” of the property they have stolen, they all insist.
Alongside, universal capitulation (in practice) of these pseudo-“left” groups to the grotesque imperialist lie campaign over alleged “left anti-semitism” has become one of the defining marks of their opportunism, just as their capitulation to the imperialist “war on terror” has been already, with the whole swamp of fake-“leftism” going along with “condemnations” of terrorism and jihadism, denouncing the rising Third World rebellion against western tyrannical exploitation.
It is another side of their evasion of all of the increasingly urgent revolutionary questions facing mankind as Catastrophic crisis economic collapse degenerates ever further into trade war and its inexorable finale of all-out inter-imperialist world war.
The Zionist occupation monstrosity is right at the heart of developing Nazi aggression being whipped up by dominant US imperialism especially, as the crisis-wracked monopoly capitalist order festers in creeping paralysis and the “austerity” misery being imposed on the working class everywhere, and about to deepen dramatically once the artificial boost of endless Quantitative Easing credit finally destroys all semblance of “value” in the inflation-polluted dollar – the foundation of international trade.
Zionism is a spearhead tool for imperialist bullying and warmaking.
It is part of the threats, belligerence and Middle Eastern regional destruction which has become the norm, acclimatising the whole world once more to non-stop war horrors.
Along with the hate-filled chauvinism being fostered everywhere by rightwing “anti-terrorism” and scapegoating of foreigners, this is preparing the world for a return to all-out inter-imperialist war as the cutthroat trade conditions of the collapse reach boiling point (as they are already nearing - see front story).
The campaign of political intimidation and insane accusations of “anti-semitism” being flung out in all directions, are part and parcel of imperialism’s desperate growing censorship and repression of class war understanding, playing on liberal guilt and fake-“left” moralising single-issue PCism to silence any clear understanding of this colonialist monstrosity and the deepening support of the masses worldwide for the struggle against it and all who support it. 
The great pretence in this internationally coordinated propaganda onslaught by Western intelligence agencies and the Jewish freemasonry throughout the imperialist countries, is to suggest that the ever-growing hatred and hostility to “Israel” and the Jewish diaspora has got “nothing to do” with the brutality and fascist barbarism which for seventy years has kept roughly eight million Palestinians in refugeehood and dispossession, many of them in grotesquely inhuman conditions like those in the crowded and desperate Gaza strip, denied electricity, decent sanitation, education, medicines and medical equipment or much else that is basic to life, or in the “temporary” camps or townships in Jordan and the West Bank, also denied access to the most basic provisions of human life and decency, and all harried, terrorised  and persecuted daily by military and police bullying and brutality in even the “best of times”.
And it pretends it has “nothing to do” with a mass popular response to the routine large-scale butchery and blitzkrieg “collective” punishments which wipe out thousands of men women and children at a time and terrify, bereave and damage tens of thousands more, in hi-tech aerial attacks on the Palestinian enclaves, and particularly rebellious Gaza, or with the recent deliberate war-crime maiming and killing of thousands of unarmed Palestinian protestors, shot in cold blood week after week, with illegal dumb-dumb bullets designed to inflict agonising and permanently crippling wounds, all on a people living where most hospital resources have been previously bombed to destruction or starved of drugs and doctors by the blockade.  
Or “nothing to do” with the endless harassment and persecution of just the ordinary people in cities and farmers with the olive groves destroyed or made inaccessible, wells poisoned and land constantly stolen by fascist settler persecution.
Or with the still continuing barbarities of torture and prison camps which make Guantánamo look tame.
Or with endless continuing ethnic cleansing like this:  
Commuters speeding along the four-lane highway that connects Jerusalem to Jericho might not notice this tiny Bedouin village of fewer than 200 people tucked in the dip of two hills. Tents hoisted with chipped scrap-wood and sand-covered corrugated-iron shacks are home to once-nomadic families who settled after the Israeli army expelled them from the southern desert seven decades ago. Some residents work in nearby factories owned by Israeli settlers. Others herd sheep and goats on scorching rocky terrain.
But Khan al-Ahmar’s modest appearance belies its significance to many Palestinians as the keystone of their struggle for statehood – a community whose location is so strategic that, if they were removed, it might crumble hopes for a future country.
After years of resistance against Israeli demolition orders that say the makeshift village in the occupied West Bank is illegally built, last week brought what appeared to be final preparations for its destruction.
Security forces declared the area a closed military zone and blocked journalists and diplomats from entering. Bulldozers with military escorts rumbled in and began levelling the ground.
In the upper part of the village, Tahreer Abu Dahouk, a mother of four children all under 10, stood in her kitchen. A large blue plastic barrel held water, charred pots and pans hung on wooden hangers, and the roof was blackened by the soot from a fire pit. “We sleep afraid; we wake up afraid. They are serious,” she said as border police in grey uniforms patrolled outside.
On Wednesday, when Israeli forces first entered, they wounded 35 Palestinians and arrested others, according to the United Nations. One Israeli soldier was also reported injured. “It was war here,” said Abu Dahouk, who married into the village 14 years ago.
Outside her home is a small garden in the desert hills, a lone pomegranate tree bearing light pink fruit. “We are settled now,” she said. “We refuse to leave. Leave us alone. This is the best place for us.”
Khan al-Ahmar is one of several communities in the West Bank under threat. Since its people arrived decades ago as refugees, Israeli settlements built on occupied land – supported with water and electricity – have sprung up on the surrounding hilltops.
In contrast, the Jahalin tribe who live in Khan al-Ahmar are restricted on where they can roam with their livestock and Israeli authorities have not hooked up their homes to running water, electricity or a sewerage system. They have portable toilets, although opening their doors shows they are merely a closed box with a hole in the floor.
Homes have been ripped down in the past because their construction has been declared illegal while building permits are nearly impossible for Palestinians to obtain there.
Around 2km to the north is the Israeli settlement of Kfar Adumim, which has plans to extend closer to Khan al-Ahmar. On Thursday, settlers brought Israeli flags to a hilltop overlooking the village in a show of support for the demolition.
Others, a small group of people from Kfar Adumim, have gone against their neighbours and lobbied to allow the Bedouin to stay, saying the communities can coexist.
But the fight is bigger than that of two communities. The Palestinian government warns that removing the village is part of a broader push to annex the West Bank.
One of the few remaining Palestinian sites east of Jerusalem, its demise would contribute to the encircling of the holy city by Jewish settlements on one side, effectively blocking it off entirely from the West Bank. The move would isolate East Jerusalem, which Palestinians claim as their future capital.
Further Israeli settlement construction in the area, along a road leading to the Dead Sea, would divide the occupied Palestinian Territories in two, cutting the north from the south.

The demented and monstrous CIA/Jewish lobby campaign to label all criticism and condemnation of Zionist barbarity as “driven by anti-semitism”, is one of the most outrageous, offensive and black-is-white Big Lies in all history, borrowing (ironically) all the tricks of Joseph Goebbels but much more subtly done with modern media tools and heavily developed psyops manipulation (psychological war operations). 
Instead of the obvious causes of world anti-Zionist dismay it sneeringly alleges that there is a “real” agenda of hidden racism no different to the backwardness and vicious scapegoating blame-mongering of the 1930s, which simply uses worldwide revulsion against the atrocities and repression of the “Israel state” (in reality the colonialist entity maintained by Zionism on the lands and territory of the Palestinians) as “an excuse”.
This ludicrous upside-down pretence plays on liberal Western guilt for the mass depravities imposed by the capitalist system itself during the last great breakdown in the 1930s and  World War Two, in which millions of Jews were a convenient victim, among many others like the Roma gypsies (once more being scapegoated by rising fascist chauvinism), trade unionists, communists, homosexuals and the disabled, all used to  distract attention from the Depression and to whip-up hatred for the great war diversions to come.
And it further taps into the single-issue PC moralising of the fake-“left” which has now virtually abandoned all grasp of class war understanding by substituting the “super-reformism” of ever more convoluted and elaborate “identity” politics in its place (feminism, LBGT rights, anti-racism, environmentalism etc), a Politically Correct straitjacketing of all fake-“left” thought (such as it is) with fears of being labelled “racist” or “sexist”.
“Anti-racism”, “sexual rights” and most of all feminist reformism now runs as a thread through all their idealist notions of either “perfect” revolution, carried out by unsullied and “perfect” (PC abiding) people only (Trots) or “steady improvement and progress” step-by-step while using parliament and/or bourgeois nationalism, supplemented with social-pacifist “peace-struggles”, to keep the worst of imperialism “under control” (revisionism and Stalinism).
All these issues have long been demonstrated to a be a last-ditch defence for imperialism, used to garner support for the discredited Barack Obama warmongering administration for example, (trading off “gay marriage” to win votes for a second term even after it had carried out the Honduras and Paraguayan coups, the Nato blitzing of Libya, the continuing torture/blitzing in Afghanistan), and especially around the Palestinian issue where protests over the appalling suffering and repression of this people have been sabotaged by “gay” counter-demonstrations ignoring the hell on earth they live in because they are deemed insufficiently “right-on” about the “normality” of homosexuality (a highly contentious issue in itself, still needing to be resolved by society - see EPSR 1242 20-07-04).
At a deepest level of all this campaign deliberately leaves not only unanswered, but unasked and covered up, the most basic question of all, of how this land came to be in the hands of the Jews anyway, and with what justification.
It does that to hide, and prevent being understood, the reality that it was taken by violence backed by the 1948 imperialist diktat (through the stooge United Nations), which “legally gave” another people’s land to them in an act of brutal colonialist dispossession.
And this has been a permanent provocation ever since, being not only a monstrous and permanent land-thieving crime, but one carried out precisely in a period of history when the world had finally decided that such colonialism was an intolerable burden and was in the process of dismantling the old physical empires (albeit under duress and the anti-imperialist revolts which spread everywhere in the wake of the Second World War from Africa and Latin America to south and south-east Asia, including major outright communist revolutions).        
That cover-up also obscures the historical impossibility of this imperialist declared and handed-over “state” which can never be anything but an alien cuckoo presence in the Middle East, permanently obliged to smite and beat down the indigenous population of this territory and the Arab world around which supports them. 
None of those can ever lie down and accept their fate (as the three intifadas and continuing and maturing Palestinian and wider Middle East resistance indicate) and the revolt against it can only increase until either Palestine is restored in total, or its people are genocidally eliminated or reduced to a rump, permanently repressed and effectively enslaved. 
But instead of throwing this stinking conspiracy (funded and coordinated quite consciously and deliberately through the CIA and intelligence units working out of Zionist embassies and by the Jewish freemasonry everywhere) back in the faces of these Nazis, the Labourites and their hangers on have capitulated all down the line to this inversion of reality.
Not only do they fail to challenge it, but by taking up the allegations and “investigating” with special commissions and inquiries, and then by adopting “definitions” of “anti-semitism”, they give further credence to this campaign just when world anti-Zionist hostility is hugely on the rise, along with hatred and rebelliousness against the imperialism that it is completely intertwined with. 
Such demented nonsense has been around for decades in a low-key form but became a real coordinated campaign at the time of the 9/11 onslaught when US imperialism stepped up its own warmongering blitzing against the Middle East, borrowing many of the techniques of collective punishment, torture and massacre that Zionism has been using for virtually the entire span of “Israel’s” existence.
It has been escalated even more in the recent past as the imperialist war diversions in the Middle East to escape the great crisis collapse of its system, have continued and intensified - in turn multiplying hundreds fold the anti-imperialist hatred and rebelliousness, manifest in the great upsurges in insurgency, “terrorist” fightbacks, jihadism and ultimately the mass street revolts of 2011 in Tunisia and Egypt.
It finds a reflection in the class struggle everywhere, however confusedly, which is why the ruling class is now leaning so heavily on the class-collaborating Labourites to shut it down, accepting there is such “anti-semitism” on the “left” and that it needs to be “rooted out” or expelled.
And as can be expected the “left” Labourite Corbynite cover - desperately trying to keep the left-moving popular opinion  tied back to the hoodwinking Parliamentary “democracy” racket and away from revolutionary notions – has grovellingly complied, even formalising a “code” to ban criticism as this bourgeois ‘analysis’ sets out:

On and on, the Labour antisemitism saga goes. The latest twist in the tale occurred last week, when Labour’s NEC adopted a new code of conduct that intended to define antisemitism for the purposes of disciplinary cases brought before the national constitutional committee.
While the code is intended to help make the disciplinary process more efficient and transparent, it has itself been met with outrage and calls for its abandonment by Jewish communal organisations, and from the Jewish Labour Movement. Keir Starmer has also come out against it. Conversely, Palestinian activists and Jewish Voice for Labour have welcomed the new code as a step forward.
The reasons for both the rejection and the acceptance is that the code does not fully adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which is the one preferred by most UK Jewish communal bodies, by many other Jewish communities across the world, by the UK and other governments and by multiple public bodies. In refusing to adopt what is seen to be the Jewish community’s understanding of antisemitism, the Labour party is accused of going against the “MacPherson principles”, which maintain that minority communities get to define racism for themselves. Conversely, many pro-Palestinian activists see the IHRA as proscribing legitimate criticism of Israel and Zionism.
Yet Labour’s general secretary Jennie Formby argued in the Jewish News that the new code does indeed “include” the IHRA definition and, in addition, “supplements this with additional examples and guidance”, some of them from the IHRA.
It’s certainly true that significant sections of the code are drawn from the IHRA. It’s also true that the new code does attempt to give more detailed clarity on some issues. But the differences, while they might seem minor to those without a strong investment in this issue, are still significant. These differences concern the thorny question of where the line should be drawn between criticism of Israel and antisemitism.
One seemingly innocuous sentence explains: “In general terms, the expression of even contentious views in this area will not be treated as antisemitism unless accompanied by specific antisemitic content (such as the use of antisemitic tropes) or by other evidence of antisemitic intent.”
The reason why this is so contentious is twofold: First, it appears to imply that arguments against Israel and Zionism could not be antisemitic unless they are framed in particular forms of language. In theory, a call for all Jews to be expelled from a future Palestine would not fall foul of the definition if couched in calm, considered language. Second, bringing “intent” into judgments of antisemitism appears to go against standard anti-racist practice of judging people by what they say and do rather than what they think.
Another bone of contention is the exclusion or amendment of some of the examples of antisemitism given in the IHRA definition. One in particular is conspicuously absent: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, eg, by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavour.”
Instead, the Labour code states, amongst other things that: “The party is clear that the Jewish people have the same right to self-determination as any other people. To deny that right is to treat the Jewish people unequally and is therefore a form of antisemitism. That does not, of course, preclude considered debate and discourse about the nature or content of the right of peoples to self-determination.”
One area of consensus between the new code’s supporters and detractors is that its meaning can be clearly interpreted and applied. But there is ambiguity here too. The Labour code could be applied in a way that greatly restricted criticism of Jewish self-determination, so that it could only occur in highly abstract ways. Similarly, the IHRA code could be interpreted in a way that enabled criticism of Jewish self-determination if conducted in a similar fashion.
What the controversy around the new code reminds us is that codes, laws and regulations can only work if there is trust in the process and the people behind it. There is now so little trust across the majority of the Jewish community in the Labour party that there is absolutely no faith in its ability to apply the code in a way that will not absolve whole swathes of the party from antisemitism. Clearly the Labour party is trying to reconcile the demands of the mainstream Jewish community and those on the left who feel that accusations of antisemitism repress legitimate criticism of Israel and Zionism.

Staggeringly, as this says, even the Corbynite grovelling to Zionist self-righteousness is not enough for this reactionary Jewish lobby which wants any challenge at all about the “right” of Israel to exist to be completely banned – a prelude to outright state censorship.
But the “left”-Labourites know that world feeling in solidarity with the oppression of the eight million Palestinians will not let them go that far – and that it can only get away with setting “limits to legitimate” criticism (while continuing to make clear its support for “Israel”. 
The fallback position here is to accept the “right” to argue against Zionism and its barbaric expansionist settler aggression – part of the “left” pretence – but to declare that to question the existence of Israel and the “right of self-determination” is out of bounds.
The “minor objection” that the Palestinians’ “right of self-determination” must necessarily be trampled underfoot if that is to be the case, is ignored or disappeared thereby, exactly as Zionism wants.
Naturally the Marxist revolutionary understanding vanishes too, that only completely ending this foul occupation and allowing all Palestinians to return home, with full – and no exceptions - restitution of land and property, can solve this horror.
Labourism makes clear once more its completely bourgeois nature servicing imperialism.
The same acceptance of “Israel” as “here to stay” in various ways, is at the core of a much trickier capitulation to the anti-semitism propaganda by most of the fake-“lefts” most of whom declare themselves to be pro-Palestinian and “anti-Zionist”.
Some have even been expelled from Labour over the issue and campaign against its cravenness and support for “Israel” and the Jewish lobby within it.  
But they too capitulate to the demonisation of many Palestine supporters as being “anti-semitic” and essentially driven by “racist attitudes”, and thereby give a “left” cover to the same Zionist campaign trying to paint all anti-Jewish hostility as “racism”. 
Two points combine: that “anti-Zionism” is substantially different to “anti-semitism” and following from that, that hostility to the Jewish freemasonry in general is “anti-semitic” (and racist it is implied).
But that is no longer the case as the EPSR has explained: in the post-war period of “Israel’s” existence the difference between Zionism and Jewishness has almost  disappeared (see p54 EPSR Book vol 20 Occupied Palestine, Nazi Zionism, crisis and war):
Since the armed Jewish colonisation of Palestine began, what further use is the old distinction between “Jew” and “Zionist” since the number of Jews who do not believe in their right to a homeland in “Israel” are no longer worth counting as a significant international or domestic factor in politics.
All that the vast majority of “anti-Zionist” Jews want to do is separate themselves from the vicious Nazi-aggression tactics of the non-stop warmongering which has created their “Israeli national home” from the very beginning.
But an utterly negligible number come out to agitate for an end to the foul nonsense of an “Israel” altogether.
In which case “Jew” and “Zionist” are now completely interchangeable.

In other words, real Zionism is any and all support for “Israel”, including the most “liberal”, not simply opposition to Benjamin Netanyahu and the fascist settlers. 
The overwhelming part of mass hostility to the world Jewish freemasonry derives from the support of nearly all Jews for “Israel”, not from “hidden racism”.
Certainly there is a remnant of lumpen anti-semitism left in the world (and imperialism continues to try and confuse the picture by inflaming such backwardness particularly in East Europe or via secret and/or overt encouragement for some of the more off-the-wall rightwing groups) but it is a negligible factor.
And certainly the hostility among the world’s masses caused by the actions of “Israel”, does get generalised to all Jews, which is unfair and imprecise, and vulnerable to backward notions too (like the “world being run by a Jewish conspiracy” etc.) 
But that confusion would be a lot less if the Jewish freemasonry “community” were to agitate to end “Israel” as quoted above; and it would be clarified far more if a revolutionary scientific perspective was argued for.
Such is the fake–“left” cravenness that a fairly mild attempt to explore this point has been censored too, declared “anti-semitism” and removed by the CPB with a grovelling “apology”. It’s worth quoting:

HERE is one especially striking feature surrounding the recent demonstrations in London against apparent anti-semitism within Labour Party ranks and emerging in the population at large.
It is the total lack of censure by the three organisers of the London rallies, or by individuals from the mainstream British Jewish community they broadly represent, of the simultaneous and ongoing atrocities that were being committed by Israel at its border with Gaza.
There, on March 30, the territory’s Palestinians were staging their pre-announced “great march of return” series of protests calling for the return of ancestral lands occupied by Israel.
What they received in response from the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) on its side of the border fence was gratuitous and sustained lethal live fire and aerial tear gas attacks.
On March 26, four days before the ill-fated Gaza border confrontation had begun, a demonstration arranged jointly by the Board of Deputies of British Jews and Jewish Leadership Alliance was held outside Parliament in London.
The protesters were gathered together to denounce what they considered to be anti-semitic conduct by some of Labour’s members.
Among other associated issues in their sights, they had accused the party hierarchy of consistently turning a blind eye to the problem.
Another demonstration, this one apparently more noisy but with a similar agenda, took place in front of Labour headquarters in Westminster on April 8. It was organised by the Campaign Against Anti-semitism, a fairly new and seemingly aggressive pro-Israel pressure group.
The two London demonstrations were part of already ongoing campaigns to put pressure on the Labour Party and its leadership to stamp out anti-semitism within its ranks and take action against the perpetrators. These moves were to continue sporadically on a broader front over the following weeks.
While the anti-semitism campaigns progressed, the burgeoning toll of Palestinian dead and wounded in Gaza had really started to make the news. Yet this shameful event of six weeks’ duration may as well have not been taking place at all, if the lack of any kind of disapproval of it by mainstream British Jews and their leadership was anything to go by.
Their attention remained focused on Labour and, also, on what they believed to be rising anti-semitism in Britain itself. To have also censured Israel in any way for its ongoing and deadly onslaught on the people of Gaza was not on their agenda.
Akin, probably, to its counterparts elsewhere in the Jewish diaspora, Britain’s mainstream Jewish community has always given its unconditional support to Israel.
It was not until the atrocities at the hands of the IDF had all but ended, that representatives of the community decided to comment on the issue.
On Tuesday May 15, the final day of the Gaza Palestinians’ border protest — and only following Israel’s especially bloody assault on them the day before — statements from Jewish organisations and individuals finally began to emerge.
By this time the Israeli army had wantonly shot dead a total of around 117 Palestinian civilians, including women and children, and wounded many thousands more. Not a single Israeli soldier had been killed or wounded in this stunningly one-sided episode.
On that day, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the leadership of Britain’s “mainstream” Jewish community, said: “We are profoundly anguished at the violent scenes and loss of life at the Gaza border.”
The rest of its message was, as near as dammit, identical to the words that had come out of the mouths of Israeli government spokespersons.
Effectively, the board placed the blame for the large-scale Palestinian dead and wounded squarely on the shoulders of Hamas.
However, Mark Regev, erstwhile arch-spin doctor for the Israeli government and presently its ambassador to Britain, was on top form — and clinically colourful — in his response.
On May 15 he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We use live fire only in a very measured way, in a very surgical way and only when there is no alternative.”
On May 18, Sir Mick Davis, a former chair of the Jewish Leadership Council, was only obliquely critical of Israeli conduct in its handling of the protests in Gaza.
He reportedly questioned the lack of “empathy” on the part of Israel and its supporters for the “innocents” among the dead.
So hardly an unambiguous condemnation of the indiscriminate, mass killing and maiming of many thousands of protesting Palestinian civilians by the IDF in Gaza.
By contrast, on the same day, apparently more than 750 British Jews probably mainly — perhaps entirely — from worthy though sidelined minority groups who are critical of Israel were not impressed by the Board of Deputies announcement.
On May 18 they reportedly signed an open letter criticising the latter’s one-sided statement on IDF violence and the mass casualties suffered by Palestinian civilians as a result.
It was further reported that a group opposed to Israel’s aggressive policy towards the Palestinians had held a small demonstration in London to protest against Israel’s six-week offensive on Gaza civilians.
But, perhaps predictably, there seemed to be no reported statements of any kind from the various “friends of Israel” groups — parliamentary or otherwise — on the issue.
Nonetheless, there was a message from Downing Street on May 16 about this latest example of overwhelmingly deadly force on the thousands of unarmed Gaza citizens protesting for their legal rights to be reinstated.
It was that the government was “deeply saddened” by the casualties “during peaceful protests being exploited by extremists.”
And then, as if the rest of the world didn’t already guess, the news from Israel was that its political class and a majority of the population had supported the IDF’s premeditated lethal assault on demonstrating Palestinian civilians on the Gaza border.
Just as they had backed Israel’s far more bloody military offensive against Gaza in 2014, when a poll by Tel Aviv University showed that 95 per cent of Israeli Jews approved of the action.
Is it any wonder, then, that many have characterised Israel’s long history of tyranny towards its immeasurably weaker neighbour as a case of the once oppressed becoming the oppressor?
Similarly, it can be no accident that international polling over the years has consistently shown Israel to be among the most disapproved-of countries on the planet.
For example, the BBC World Service Annual Poll between 2013 and 2017 revealed that only Iran, North Korea and Pakistan had a lower approval rating than Israel.
Unfortunately, mainstream Jewish communities everywhere — and their supporters — appear unwilling to accept the connection between developing international anti-semitism (or anti-Israel sentiment) and Israel’s decades-long, yet still ongoing, acts of barbarism against Palestinians, and its illegal occupation and annexation of their land.
It could be because of their perpetual backing of a nation that cocks a snook at worldwide excoriation of its repeated military atrocities in Gaza, and seemingly endless UN resolutions opposed to its general conduct towards the Palestinians.
So surely the Jewish organisations and individuals who lately were protesting about growing anti-semitism in Britain must see that, as advocates of Israel’s historical and still unremitting brutality against Palestinians, they will inevitably be regarded by some other British nationals as being indirectly complicit in that country’s actions.
What is clear, though, no amount of protestations about the symptoms of rising anti-semitism or anti-Israel sentiment in Britain and elsewhere will end the problem until its root cause — Israel’s criminal behaviour — is dealt with.
Only a radical change to the UN security council voting system may bring that about. But that seems unlikely in even the unforeseeable future.
Although it is possible that, if the Palestinian Authority’s referral of Israel to the International Criminal Court goes anywhere, a verdict against Israel help the Palestinians’ cause.   
*********
The Morning Star published an article in Monday’s paper by John Elder entitled Rising anti-semitism cannot be tackled without addressing Israel’s crimes.
This article has been removed from the website as it crossed a line in attributing anti-semitism to the policies of the Israeli government and made demands on the “Jewish diaspora” and “Jewish community” as if these were responsible for Israeli policy or obliged to account for it.
The Morning Star deeply regrets publication of the article, which was submitted by an external contributor and which we failed to vet with the care necessary on a subject of such importance.
Our newspaper has a proud history of opposition to anti-semitism and strong historic links to the Jewish community forged during the fight against fascism in the 1930s and ‘40s.
We apologise for having fallen short of that legacy with the publication of Monday’s article and have reinforced editorial procedures and oversight to ensure this error is not repeated.

Such grovelling kow-towing to suppress reasonable debate makes Uriah Heap look principled even if the piece has its weaknesses.
Criticism that should be made is that it has no revolutionary perspective, accepts “Israel” as a state and demands that it be “dealt with”.
By whom? The international “community” of imperialism?? 
Only if the beserker Zionist fanatics should come into conflict with broader US imperialist crisis needs (not entirely ruled out as the EPSR has analysed in the past - see Book vol 20 ibid) and even then certainly not to favour the oppressed Palestinians and the Arab revolution.
The real answer of course is that only ever maturing Palestinian revolt and the world revolution it merges into can “deal” with “Israel” or imperialist degeneration into Third World War.
But leadership for that will not come from any of the ostensibly “left” groups, posturing as “anti-Zionists” and all equally avoiding the fundamental question of “Israel”.
The fake-“left” pretend-Marxist outriders, currently boosting Labourism themselves, can posture mightily against Zionism and seemingly in a revolutionary way, even calling for the “overthrow of the Zionist state” – but none make the full and unconditional return of the Palestinians to their own land and property the central issue. 
Just the opposite. Most of them declare that the Jews in Palestine should be “entitled” to stay on in any new state as Tony Greenstein does in WW. 
Which means they would be “entitled” to a “share of the land” of course since they would obviously need to live and eat etc. In other words, that part of Israel’s land theft gains would continue.
Others like WW guru figure Jack Conrad, go further and say that some elements of the Zionist colonising population should be entitled to continue on in an enclave  with “rights of self-determination”!  This is as craven as the barmy defeatist notion proposed by these frauds for settling the nationalist struggle in “Northern Ireland”, of offering the Orange bigot colonists a “three county” enclave, whose unfortunate nationalists presumably would be condemned forever to live their repressed and second-class intimated lives forever.      
The just-as-barmy Trot Socialist Fight group declares that the Zionists could have “some” of the land, presumably the Palestinians getting “some” (unspecified ) amount back, all this resulting from a divvying up by a new “unitary state authority”.
Socialist Workers Party Trots call too for a sharing caring  “single state” where Jews and Palestinians live together with “equal democratic rights.”
The revisionists are equally evasive on the core question. The RCG Fight Racism Fight Imperialism merely calls for “casting off the shackles of Zionism and Israeli siege of Gaza”, with no explanation of how this will happen, of the imperialist crisis context or of the nature of “Israel” save vague notions of “building solidarity with Palestinian resistance”.
The Stalinist Lalkar/Proletarian, despite some good past scholarship history of Zionism’s imperialist origins, defends much of the Jewish freemasonry as “not in the Zionist category” and declares that there can be “no peace without Jerusalem.”  
Palestine must be “restored to its historic borders where people of all religions or none can live in peace and equality.” More sharing harmony presumably.
But revolution??? 
Leninism urgently needs building. 
Alan Moss

E P S R BOX

Leaving the world to be run by the greed of the capitalist monopolies can never stop resulting in periodic crises where trade-war destruction MUST rule, and to which the only antidote is Revolution and a strong workers state, --- as these essentials of Marxist-Leninist SCIENCE explain.

Only the crisis events of collapsing imperialist rule interpreted in this Marxist-Leninist light will educate a mass workers party of leadership to do the necessary tasks.

The Revisionist retreat from the Soviet workers state because of crawling to shallow Western glitz and shame at their own past bureaucratic mistakes has only proved the soundness of Lenin's 'State & Revolution' science about a very long period of proletarian dictatorship being the only way for the world to see-off monopoly imperialist warmongering, now back with a vengeance.

***********

It is often said and written that the main point in Marx's teachings is the class struggle; but this is not true. And from this untruth very often springs the opportunist distortion of Marxism, its falsification in such a way as to make it acceptable to the bourgeoisie. For the doctrine of the class struggle was created not by Marx, but by the bourgeoisie before Marx, and generally speaking it is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Those who recognise only the class struggle are not yet Marxists;  they may be found to be still within the boundaries of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. To confine Marxism to the doctrine of the class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something which is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is what constitutes the most profound difference between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. And it is not surprising that when the history of Europe brought the working class face to face with this question as a practical issue, not only all the opportunists and reformists, but all the "Kautskyites" (people who vacillate between reformism and Marxism) proved to be miserable philistines and petty-bourgeois democrats who repudiate the dictatorship of the proletariat. V.I.Lenin

*********

"The last cause of all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as compared to the tendency of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as if only the absolute power of consumption of the entire society would be their limit." (Capital. Vol III. P568.)

*******

" For many a decade past", wrote Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, "the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crisis a great part, not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary...they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them."

***********
The conditions of bourgeois democracy very often compel us to take a certain stand on a multitude of small and petty reforms, but we must be able, or learn, to take such a position on these reforms. (in such a manner) that - to oversimplify the matter for the sake of clarity - five minutes of every half-hour speech are devoted to reforms and twenty-five minutes to the coming revolution. (Lenin Dec 1916: Principles involved in the war issue.)

Name ............................

Address.........................

Postcode........................

For a £25 annual subscription to receive EPSR by first class post
every Wednesday, write to (but send no money initially):
EPSR, PO Box 50, L0NDON, SW17 9NL

World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles
Cuba’s part in educational reform

Cuba has not been exempt from such demands, revolutionary for the era, such as university autonomy and faculty freedom. In 1922, the country’s oldest student organization, the Federation of University Students, was founded, with the leadership of Julio Antonio Mella, who was convinced that “the modern university must directly influence social life.”
Before and after Mella, others also saw knowledge as a right - including that acquired in universities - that should be within the reach of all.
Felix Varela (“The need to educate a people is like that of providing food, one that cannot be postponed”) and Enrique José Varona (Cuba cannot advance “without a few hundred engineers”) are among the figures who saw the importance of knowledge at the service of development.
Beginning in 1959, Cuban universities developed the characteristics that define them: a completely free of charge system of higher education, in which professionals are trained in a variety of fields, including science, technology, and innovation, while maintaining close ties to society.
Today Cuba has almost 1.5 million graduates, 50 higher education institutions, and 126 municipal branches.
Without the contributions of universities, strategic sectors copuld not exist for development and technological sovereignty, such as construction, informatics and communications, tourism, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and the sugar industry.
In the short and medium term, the country is intent upon reducing the length of degree plans to four years; improving teaching in under and postgraduate studies; and doubling the percentage of PhDs on faculties.
These are not utopian goals, but objectives well defined in the Ministry of Higher Education’s Strategic Plan, in accordance with priorities for updating Cuba’s economic and social model, and the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Much has been said about the Cordoba University Reform, given the 100th anniversary of this student movement and its notable influence in Latin America.

World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles
Venezuela government statement
Sanctions and blockade: aggression to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela
In the current economic war situation, the international financial system has been constraining the ability of multiple national (public and private) institutions to pay suppliers, beneficiaries, to receive payments, make transactions, manage investment portfolios, meet financial obligations - such as securities and bonds of debts payment - and / or gain access to international financing sources. The purpose of this persecution strategy is clear: collapsing the international trade and Venezuela financial relationship with the world, in order to ruin the national economy.
The following report drafted by the People’s Power Ministry for Foreign Relations of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, includes arguments and facts that demonstrate the existence -since 2014 - of a hostile and aggressive policy undertaken by the United States of North America (usa) towards Venezuela. This policy is expressed with particular intensity in the adoption of unilateral and coercive measures (sanctions) aiming at affecting the economic and political stability of the Venezuelan democracy, within a framework that intends the overthrowing of the constitutional government, taking the control of economic resources and Venezuela’s sovereignty, and it is part of the re-colonization strategy of Latin America and the Caribbean carried forward by Trump’s administration, through the reimposition of the Moroe Doctrine in the continent.

Regime change
Since the coming to power of the Bolivarian Revolution, with the election of Hugo Chávez as President in 1998, Venezuela is in the sights of U.S. interests in the continent and occupies a privileged place - as a priority target - in its strategy of global domination.
As of 2000, the U.S. defined a “regime change” policy towards Venezuela that implies the impossibility for the U.S. Empire to coexist with an original and people’s democracy like Venezuela’s; it also deems this model as a threat to its scheme of domination and control over the region in the 21st century with its vindication of sovereignty, independence and social justice.
This strategy, which led George W. Bush’s Administration to finance and support the failed coup d’etat of April 2002 against President Hugo Chávez, has undergone a period of acceleration since 2015, when President Barack Obama issued the Executive Order considering Venezuela as an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the U.S. national security and foreign policy.”
With the Executive Order 13692 of March 2015, extended since then by both Barack Obama and Donald Trump, the U.S. regimen legalized what was previously an unofficial policy, executed through financial, political, media, paramilitary and diplomatic covert operations, as Wikileaks and hundreds of declassified documents of the U.S. government have shown.
Trump’s Administration, influenced by powerful lobbies of Florida State and commercial interests like those of the oil company Exxon Mobil, among others, seeking to snatch the immense wealth and resources of Venezuela, has intensified its policy of hostility and has openly stated its intention to remove the legitimate Government of Venezuela from power by any possible method.
A few months ago, Donald Trump himself stated that he had all options open against Venezuela, including among these options, an oil embargo and an eventual military intervention.
In general, and considering its multiple forms, modalities and its growing and aggressive nature, the U.S. policy towards Venezuela in the last two decades, can be undoubtedly considered as a warmongering policy.
The U.S. has defined Venezuela as a “hemispheric enemy” and implements an undeclared war against our country. A war whose objective is the destruction of the Venezuelan democratic model, the annihilation of the people’s movement and the leadership on which the Bolivarian Revolution is based, and the retake and takeover of Venezuela’s immense natural wealth.
Sanctions: the escalation of the aggression
In this context, since 2017, the U.S. chose to punish Venezuela by applying unilateral and coercive measures (sanctions), particularly in the economic and financial field, as done against countries with which the U.S. Empire maintains a situation of conflict, such as Cuba, Russia, Iran, Syria, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Korea.
These unilateral, unfair and illegal measures, which have no grounds and violate Public International Law, have been presented by Trump’s administration as specific measures against individuals: Venezuelan Government officials, civilians and military staff, as well as against individuals or companies identified as politically or economically related to the Venezuelan Government. The administration argues that such measures have no negative effects on the Venezuelan population, and on the contrary, these are aimed at improving the country’s situation and accelerating its “return to democracy.” The measures include the following:
•Prohibition of entry into U.S. territory.
•Freezing and seizure of financial assets, accounts in the U.S. financial system and assets that such individuals may own in the United States.
•Prohibition of commercial or financial contact or relations with U.S. entities.
•Sanctions, initially imposed by the ofac, Office of Foreign Assets Control, agency of the Treasury Department, since the late 2017, are legitimized by special decrees of Trump’s administration.
In all cases, these sanctions have been extended to the relatives of the sanctioned individuals.
As of 2018, individual sanctions have been extended to include general aspects of the economic or financial management of the Venezuelan Government, such as:
Prohibition of individuals and entities of the U.S. financial sector to carry out operations with bonds of the sovereign debt of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, and in general, with any financial instrument issued or belonging to the Venezuelan Government, such as the bonds of the pdvsa company.
Prohibition of individuals and entities of the U.S. financial sector to carry out operations or transactions with the “Petro” crypto-coin, any crypto-currency or monetary instrument of this nature issued or endorsed by the Venezuelan Government.
General effects of sanctions
Based on the prerogatives provided for in Obama’s Executive Order, U.S. sanctions against Venezuela seriously disrupt its national life, especially the economic field, harshly affecting the Venezuelan people. This phenomenon, which has been called economic aggression or economic warfare, produces the following effects:   (p11)
• Interference of the country’s international trade, preventing it from having access to food, medicines and essential goods.
• Blocking of accounts, financial operations and transactions, thus preventing or hampering international payment transactions of the legitimate commitments of the Republic, as well as preventing collect operations from international clients of Venezuela.  
• Freezing or withholding of legitimate financial resources of Venezuela in banks and other financial entities.
• Delays in the management of buying and selling operations, affecting not only the Government and Venezuelan companies but also their foreign business partners.
These unilateral and coercive measures increase the level of aggression of the U.S. government against Venezuela and are prove of the U.S. involvement and interference in Venezuelan internal affairs, worsening the critical situation in which the relations between both States have been for several years.
Trump’s administration has generated an authentic escalation of tensions in the bilateral relation. It is worth noting that, even though Trump’s administration has not reached its midterm, four rounds of sanctions have already been issued against Venezuela.
The general objective of these sanctions is to hit Venezuelan economy, promote an international trade collapse, blocking and hindering Venezuela’s financial transactions, preventing the country from accessing to funding sources and sabotaging the purchase of food, medicines and essential goods; all this with the aim of causing an internal economic crisis which could be used as an excuse to undertake destabilizing actions in the political field.
Politically, these sanctions are issued at a time when Washington begins to recognize the failure of the internal opposition of Venezuela in its task to generate by itself the Government’s collapse.
With these sanctions against Venezuela, the U.S. is recognizing the inability of its internal allies to produce the “regime change” and assumes de facto the political leadership of the Venezuelan opposition. The failure of the violent strategy of “calle sin retorno” (continued demonstrations in the streets] or that of realizing a “Revolution of color” applied in 2017, is been settled in 2018 with a strategic plan to stifle Venezuelan economy, lead the country to a total ruin, push the population into massive migration or into internal civil conflict, and create the conditions for the so-called “humanitarian intervention”, reminiscence of the painful receipt applied to other nations.
The coercive and unilateral measures seek to prevent and hinder any dialogue initiative between the Government and the opposition, thus blocking the path towards constitutional, agreed and peaceful solutions to the Venezuelan situation. The U.S. sabotage to the dialogue process in Dominican Republic between 2017 and 2018, which allowed the beginning of the path towards the political normalization and an improvement of the economic situation, shows that the only policy acceptable to the U.S. administration is the unconstitutional and violent ousting of President Nicolas Maduro.
The U.S. is not seeking to “restore” democracy in Venezuela as they demagogically express in their public speech. The “economic warfare” scheme attempts to force a situation of chaos and violence, making the country ungovernable, thus delegitimizing the constitutional, democratic and electoral path, and provoking the “surrender of Chavismo.” This is what the U.S. calls a “transition” to the “return of democracy”.
From individual sanctions to economic blockade
The U.S. strategy consist in undertaking a global, integral and massive strategy of measures of economic and financial blockade and sabotage of the economy, along with a global plan of political and diplomatic isolation of the Venezuelan Government and a renewed media campaign of criminalization and symbolic destruction; making it appear like they are issuing “sanctions to specific persons”.
In the light of the terrible effects that these sanctions are causing to the entire Venezuelan population, it appears perverse to affirm that the U.S. regime is concerned about the well-being of the Venezuelans. By seizing hundreds of thousands of dollars of the Venezuelan people in foreign banks, banning transactions with the sovereign debt bonds of Venezuela, and unleashing a financial persecution against the accounts of the Republic in the world financial system, and specially preventing the access of food and medicines to the country, United States is demonstrating its contempt for the Venezuelan people.
The spokespersons of the U.S. regime have stated that United States shall use all its available resources to achieve its political objective of “overthrowing” the constitutional Government of Venezuela.
The cynical strategy of the aggression against Venezuela also has as essential element the promotion and encouragement of migration of a significant number of Venezuelan citizens to neighboring countries. This condition is fundamental to position the story of the “humanitarian crisis” in the international community, which should force an international intervention in Venezuela.
In this context, President Trump uses the OAS as a weapon to attack Venezuela, and humiliates all Latin American countries when he asks them to support a historical aggression against a people and a brotherly country. President Trump threatens with hundreds of thousands of deportations, insults the national demonym of Latin-Americans and offers walls to separate families, but he also demands the governments’ subordination to the policies of blockade and sanctions. It is the open and insolent resurrection of the “big stick” policy.
The measures of President Trump and his international allies against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela are producing pain and suffering to the Venezuelan people, as well as these measures are presented as actions to save the Venezuelan people from hardships caused by an alleged “dictatorship”.
It is about a cynical, grotesque, and brutal attitude that is impossible to hide for any unbiased observer and a new attack against the principles governing the coexistence among States. It is a crime against the Venezuelan people: a crime against humanity.
Internationalization of the aggression against Venezuela
The sanctions policy against Venezuela has been internationalized from Washington, through a ferocious lobby and pressure campaign against several countries and governments.
The U.S. has achieved that the European Union, the European Parliament, as well as a group of governments belonging to the so-called Lima group, build an international coalition to establish and promote sanctions, diplomatic isolation and political actions to destabilize Venezuelan democracy.
Thus, countries such as Canada joined the coercive and unilateral measures seeking to break the national economy, by imitating the Obama and Trump’s executive orders. Canada has established a domestic legislation to criminalize and punish Venezuela. In addition, the European Union has also adopted measures, under pressure from the European Parliament, and ad hoc decisions of some Latin American countries, which have bowed to Trump’s pressure in order to punish Venezuela and depose its legitimate Government
[Part 2 next issue lists the chronology of unilateral coercive commercial economic blockade and financial persecution]